In this modern era of remakes, spinoffs, sequels, prequels and ‘based on the comic/book/videogame/breakfast cereal’, it’s easy to think that nobody has any original ideas anymore. In actual fact, reinterpretation and invention has been rife since ancient Roman times (and probably before!). That doesn’t mean we can’t create something fresh and new which isn’t just a rehash of what’s come before but it’s also worth mentioning that sometimes what’s gone before can actually inspire us to create what the next generation will be imitating, in years to come.

And so, with that in mind, this new reoccurring section will focus on some of the television programmes, films and books that have helped ignite the creative energies within me. First stop – the works of Kevin Smith.

In a review for my short online film, the Christmas Beard, one reviewer commented “Mall rats from england??? Jason Lee has nothing on you!” (which I took to mean that they enjoyed the film more than Mallrats). Although Mallrats is my least favourite of Kevin Smith’s films, I appreciated the accolade. After all, I had previously paid homage to Smith in the first Beard movie, in the line “All the top directors have beards – George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Kevin Smith… Jeremy Beadle”. This wasn’t just an idle reference. I do genuinely think Smith is fantastic – although more for his writing than direction.

I first encountered Smith’s work in the bizarre fantastical comedy, Dogma, which deals with fallen angels trying to get back into heaven. At the time, I had no idea that the characters of Jay and Silent Bob appeared in (almost) all of Smith’s films or that he had such an impressive back catalogue. I merely watched, and enjoyed, the film, before putting it to the back of my mind.

Later, whilst at University, a friend of mine got me interested in Smith. This came about through a poster of the, previously mentioned, Jay and Silent Bob, in his room, which prompted some questions and resulted in him showing me both Mallrats and some of the Clerks animated series. While I was a little disappointed in Mallrats (seeing it as a bit of a standard gross-out comedy), I was intrigued by the reappearance of the Jay and Silent Bob characters and the animated Clerks series enthralled me further, due to the brilliantly hilarious and clever second episode (which spoofs standard clip shows to devastating effect).

This initiation, of sorts, lead to me renting out Chasing Amy, then Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and finally Clerks (in retrospect, I should’ve rented Clerks before Strike Back). I found the interlinking use of the two stoner characters and the many back references in Strike Back hugely entertaining but the main thing that won me over was the clever and witty dialogue throughout all of the films.

Smith was a clerk, himself, before he hit the big time with Clerks – which was filmed on location at his workplace, with his own money and the help of his friends. It’s an inspirational story and one that has certainly made me determined to achieve similar heights, one day. But it’s not just Smith’s rise to fame that inspires. One of my favourite things about Smith’s films are their power to make me want to go and write, to go and make films, the second I’ve finished watching them. They send across the message that you too could go and make something brilliant, which people would want to watch, without having to have a horrendously large Hollywood budget or grossly overblown special fx.

Smith’s films tend to be minimalistic in scale, centring on small stories about everyday people, with the timescale sometimes limited to one day or a single location (the Quickstop in Clerks, for example, or the mall in Mallrats). They give the impression of a coherent universe in which multiple characters are living independent lives and put the emphasis on dialogue over action, character over plot. They are funny and edgy, without being offensive, and are still able to pack a punch dramatically when required.

For all these reasons, Kevin Smith is a true writer’s writer, and an inspiration to both me and hopeful indies everywhere. Snooch to the Nooch, sir. Snooch to the Nooch.

They say you paint for passion,
But your canvas is blank,
They say you paint for fun,
But your canvas is bare,
They say you paint for honour,
But the canvas stands empty,
They say you paint for pleasure,
But the brush is still dry. 

I say you paint for money,
And the colours are coming,
I say you paint for greed,
And the picture develops,
I say you paint for yourself,
And it hangs in the gallery.

“Portrait of a man”
How true.

[NOTE: While not a big poetry fan, I do write the occasional poem. If you get a kick out of this kind of stuff, let me know, and I’ll post some more at some point.]

“Dialogue”

“I don’t understand. How can you have a dialogue with no characters?”

“I’ll find a way.”

“And in a blog? Seriously? You think this is the kind of thing people want to read? Some stupid nonsensical babbling between two voices without any actual context?”

“Sure, why not? Have you seen the kind of stuff that’s out there on the internet? Someone’s got to be reading all that tripe. Doesn’t hurt to add to it.”

“Yes. Yes, it does.”

“Well, okay. Maybe a little. So what?”

“So don’t do it.”

“Fine.”

“You’re really not going to do it?”

“Um…”

“What?”

“I’m not going to do it again.”

“YOU MEAN YOU ALREADY WROTE IT?!”

“Sort of… I mean, you’ll laugh when I tell you this.”

“Yes?”

“This is it.”

“Damn it! I thought it was odd that I couldn’t remember my name, age or anything about myself.”

“Yeah, kind of a kick in the teeth, really. Sorry.”

“Well, at least, it’s not about nothing anymore.”

“What is it about then?”

“Uhhhh….”

“Yeah?”

“Crap!”

“In a nutshell.”

Let the good times roll.

1. Trying to shoehorn the Tutorial into the game’s narrative

Don’t, alright? If your character is supposed to be the world’s foremost expert on weaponry and close-range combat, then he or she probably doesn’t need a refresher course. Even if you have been retired for yay-many years… I mean, there’s a reason the Sinister Organisation have dragged you out of retirement, and it isn’t to make you learn all the shit you already know.

Solution: The tutorial should always be optional, e.g. Half-Life, Civilization IV.

2. Releasing a demo which is the first x minutes of the game

This goes almost hand-in-hand with Offense #1, as demos that pull this kind of shit more often than not stick the entire sodding tutorial in at the same time. The first few minutes of a game is never Grade A material. In story-driven games it’s usually expository rubbish, and the player is only going to have to suffer through it all over again if they choose to purchase the full game, which may cause them to question the value of the product they’ve just bought.

Solution: Either draw on later areas of the game for the demo (e.g. demos for Simon the Sorcerer, Heavenly Sword) or come up with some exclusive content especially made for the demo (e.g. demos for ATR: All Terrain Racing, Mashed).

3. Breaking the fourth wall over and over and over and over and over

If an NPC is telling me how to Z-lock on an object, if an expository character is giving me details on how to use the controller during “mission-critical” exposition, if a signpost reminds me that I can save at any time by pressing Start and selecting “Save Game”, then you’re Doing It Wrong. How can I immerse myself in your game when your characters aren’t even immersed themselves?

Solution: Either have unobtrusive messages appear on-screen (e.g. Grand Theft Auto 3, The Sims), or keep instructional gubbins in the manual (e.g. The Settlers).

4. Sacrificing gameplay for the story

This incorporates a number of offenses. Invisible barriers, for instance - if you don’t want your character to go off in one direction, don’t give them that direction. The same counts for knee-high fences and easily scalable trees that your uber-athletic character is somehow unable to traverse. It also includes sti8cking in ridiculously long cutscenes that give a shitload of exposition and push the story along but don’t do anything for the gamer - if the player hasn’t had to press a button on the controller in more than two minutes, your cutscene is too long.

Solution: Make your barriers convincing, or remove them. Alternatively write a novel instead, as videogames are not an ideal storytelling medium.

5. Sacrificing story for the gameplay

Developers have a horrible habit of building a game engine or coming up with some really cool Proof Of Concept stuff and then, when they decide they want to build a full-scale game out of it, trying to shoehorn a really shitty story in there. Take Gears of War, for instance. I really like the play mechanics of the game, but the plot is the most trite, generic, cliched mess of a scifi-war story I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. If it were a novel, it’d be a trashy paperback published for a pittance and sold in airport book stores for $5. If it were a movie (and in a couple of years it will be, a New Line Cinema snatched up the rights last year) it’s be a straight to DVD affair so bad it’d make Starship Troopers 2 look positively glowing in comparison.

The reason Offenses 4 and 5 happen is because game developers are not, at their core, storytellers. They’re programmers and idea men, and more often than not these are the sort of people who come up with a story that they think sounds cool but in reality is a load of bollocks. Even when they bring in writers who have supposed experience at writing these sort of stories, they can only write about what they have to work with. If what they have to work with is “shitty generic aliens invade Earth with their shitty generic beetle faces and shitty generic weaponry” then their writing isn’t exactly going to glow.

Solution: Come up with an idea and just make a fucking game out of it. Don’t try to shoehorn a story in, just make the game fun. I mean, come on. Tetris didn’t have a story.

6. Genre-straddling and Sequelitis

Time was, you could come up with a game idea, knock together a Proof Of Concept and have it published, all in time for tea. Now if you come up with an idea you write a Design Document. You run it by various people and even on the off-chance that they like it you’re not on track yet. The Marketing Department, in all their glory, have to look at it and if they can’t find one iota of a concept in there that they can somehow market to some pre-determined hypothetical number of imaginary people then the game doesn’t happen. It’s as simple as that. I find it hard to imagine that a game as fun as Boom Blox, for instance, would have even made it out of EA’s doors were it not for Steven Spielberg’s name appearing on the cover. No, these days the Big Studios seem to be all about making Carbon-Copy FPS titles and sequels to already established brands. There’s no room for innovation, no breathing space for fresh ideas. The industry has become this incestuous mess of developers copying ideas off of other developers who have in turn copied their idea off of another developer who…. well, you get the picture. As everyone knows, if there isn’t enough variety in the genepool then the species dies out.

Solution: Start funding the development of unique, different titles.

7. Bitchfighting

On the rare occasion that a company doesn’t commit Offense 6 and a new idea is born, other companies are keen to jump on the bandwagon and milk that cow for all its worth. Guitar Hero developers Harmonix left the brand after Guitar Hero: Rock the 80s, and went off to develop Rock Band with MTV Games and EA. The problem is that when Activision knocked out Guitar Hero III on every system going (developed by a company who have made little else but Tony Hawk games for the past decade), the guitar for the PS3 version wasn’t compatible with the PS3 version of Rock Band. Harmonix wrote a patch, but Activision cock-blocked its release, basically saying “If you want to use our controller, you have to pay us royalties! MUahahaha!” In theory this is a sensible argument until you realise that cock-blockery like this doesn’t help to build the music-rhythm genre, but instead serves to make it more diluted.

The way Harmonix want to do it, you can use any guitar controller to play any guitar-themed game. The way Activision want to do it, you have to own a separate guitar controller for each game put out by a different company. With Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero IV and Konami’s Rock Revolution on the way, that’s a theoretical three guitars you’ll have to own. Consider that each of these games will also incorporate a proprietary drum-kit, and that each of these drumkits varies radically in design, and that’s a lot of fake plastic instruments.

Solution: Work together to sustain the genre you”ve created. Fighting like this only causes problems and will ultimately lead to consumers abandoning such a genre for fear of having Too Many Fucking Guitar Controllers.

8. Bullshitting about product (a.k.a. “Peter Molyneux Syndrome”)

This includes putting out screenshots that look far too good to be actual in-game footage (a.k.a “bullshot“), heavily promoting or playing up a feature of your game-in-progress that will never make it into the game, or trying to spin the news about your decision to exclude a feature to make it seem credible. In Peter Molyneux’s defense, he’s not intentionally out to piss people off - he’s just enthusiastic about his projects and it’s a shame that they seldom live up to his grand expectations. But Sony, though? They told us that the controller for the PS3 could have Tilt functionality or Rumble, but not both - the rumble would interfere with the Tilt, they said. A year later and bam! We have the DualShock3, a PlayStation 3 controller which features (gasp!) both Tilt and Rumble! What an age we live in. They also said that Microsoft’s tiered business model for the Xbox 360 - namely, putting out vastly differing “Core” and “Pro” models - wouldn’t work, and then they did the same thing themselves several years later. Tch.

Solution: Stop being such a bunch of Goddamn liars.

9. Knowingly putting out an unfinished or defective product

Oh man, where do I begin? How about citing any number of games published by Electronic Arts, who seem unwilling or, perhaps, unable to actually finish their games on time? Or how about Microsoft, with their fabled 33% failure rate on the Xbox 360? I could mention Nintendo’s glaring omission of a backlight on the first iteration of the Game Boy Advance, which is a bit of a curious exclusion when you consider that the Japanese were treated to a model of the Game Boy Pocket which featured just such a backlight not three years prior.

Similarly to this, don’t promise patches that ultimately never arrive. Worms developers Team 17 are perhaps the worst offenders on this front - we’re still waiting for a patch for Worms Forts: Under Siege, let alone fixes to the numerous glitches and bugs still present in the Xbox Live Arcade version of Worms.

Solution: Either finish the product on time or push back the release date. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

10. Fucking over Europe & Australia

It may surprise you to learn that one of the deciding factors in my move from the UK to the US was that game publishers actually give a shit about American gamers, while those in Europe tend to get the short end of the stick. Nintendo of Europe are the worst offenders here: To date Super Smash Bros Brawl still hasn’t been released in European territories despite having been released in the US back in March. It took them three fucking years to get Animal Crossing out on the Game Cube. And despite advertising the product in several magazines and pre-orders being made available on online retailers such as Play.com, WarioWare: Twisted! never received a European release at all. For shame.

Solution: Europe is a pretty big place, and there are a lot of consumers there. Try to remember this.

I know this may seem difficult to believe, given the relative invisibility of the disabled as characters in any form of media, but there’s plenty of us out here (I, myself, suffer from walking difficulties). If you take a stroll outside in your local village, town or city, you’re pretty likely to see at least one person out there with a disability. You might not even notice that the person in question has a disability if it’s a mild one or something that doesn’t show up under layers of clothing, but it’s still there.

And yet, the media says that nobody’s disabled. Think of any popular show on TV at the moment and I’m sure you’ll struggle to find any disabled character in the main cast. The same goes for films. The only representation the disabled tend to get is in those EXTREME DISABILITY type programs that tread a thin line between insightful modern documentary and crass Victorian freakshow (The Boy whose Brain Fell Out!). You could say that these documentaries at least showcase certain conditions, but in reality, the conditions being showcased are so rare (due to how extreme they are) that only a handful of people on the planet have them.

Of course, sometimes a disabled person will crop up in a sitcom or comedy film and the central, non-disabled, character will have a good chance to make fun of them. Because, y’know, they haven’t been through enough - just coping with the disability - they need to have people insult them as well. This is generally considered okay because the central character is a complete buffoon and we’re laughing AT that character’s rudeness, not the person with the disability. And no, this isn’t an excuse so able-bodied people can tell the same anti disability jokes that they were telling back in Virgil’s Aeneid. We’ve all moved on from that, now!

The problem extends further when it moves from simply pretending disabled people don’t exist to portraying them as completely unviable in the fictional world you’ve created. The modern Doctor Who, as much as I love it, is a prime example of this. Russsell T Davis, current showrunner, has said in interviews that one of the things he loves about Doctor Who is that the Doctor could pop up on any street corner and take anyone off for a series of wacky adventures in time and space, no matter who they are. However, in the show, practically every episode has one point where the Doctor and his companion have to run away from some sort of threat. In a recent episode (I think it was ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’), the Doctor and companion grinned away as they explained how a lot of running was involved in travelling with the Doctor.

Right… um, so what about if the companion was in a wheelchair? Or on crutches? Or missing a leg? Do you think they’d be able to undertake the level of running required for travelling with the Doctor? Because I’m struggling to see it. Which means that RTD’s comment that the Doctor could pick up anyone and whisk them away on the adventure of a lifetime is pure rubbish. If you’re disabled in a way that stops you from being able to run around the place all the time, you’re pretty much dead, no matter how clever you might be. Because in modern Doctor Who, the only way to escape certain death is to run away from it. Heck, the Doctor probably requires you to do some kind of fitness test before he even agrees to take you.

The sad thing is that the old series never felt like this. Most of the monsters trundled along at such a slow pace that any disabled kids watching at the time could probably imagine being able to escape from them, even despite their disability. Also, there was a lot more stealth involved - people hiding from the bad guys or using their intelligence to get themselves out of a mess - rather than just running away. Now, the first course of action when confronted with any problem is to run. Because if you can’t run, you can’t have any adventures at all. The Doctor will shrug his shoulders and pass you over, like a team captain on sports day.

This is made worse in Doctor Who by the fact that if disabled people are portrayed, then it’s frequently in the role of villain. In Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, the villain is a madman who - completely handicapped and infirm - decides to create the Cybermen so he can beat his illness and take over the world. This wonderfully hits two blows against the disabled at once - 1. They’re evil, 2. Despite 1, they can’t actually achieve anything till they become fully mobile (in a Cyberman suit). Max from Voyage of the Damned is a bit similar to this. And of course, the old series had Davros as well as a host of other villains who were either - 1. In some kind of wheelchair substitute, 2. Had some kind of scar, facial deformity or eyepatch. The message to non-disabled kids? Don’t trust people who look different from you - they’re probably planning to commit mass genocide!

The fact of the matter is we should be past all this. Society has moved forwards in a lot of ways over the years and yet, TV and film studios are still viewing the disabled as either non-existant or the bogeyman. And, well, if you present that kind of perspective in the media, then that’s the kind of attitude people will absorb as they grow up. The able bodied will believe that the disabled are freaks who can quite happily be ridiculed and the disabled will have to suffer this abuse, as well as the fact that society doesn’t think they’re worthy of anything other than disgust or… at best, pity.

So let’s change that from here on out and have some normal disabled people in fiction across all mediums. Have a deaf character in a sitcom without the emphasis being on the fact they’re deaf, have a romantic drama where the lead has cerebral palsy and doesn’t patronisingly end up with someone with a similar disability… and finally, at long last, put someone who CAN’T run in the TARDIS.

Enjoyable, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Another day, another webcomic. But what makes this one any different from the plethora of other comics out there and how exactly do I approach the issue of comic writing? To find out, we have to go back to the beginning.

When I was just a kid, I drew the odd comic. I say the odd comic because they were um… probably quite odd. I mean, kids are odd, aren’t they? I’m sure my sense of humour hadn’t developed to the razor-sharp levels that it’s reached today (notice that issue pun earlier? that’s pure gold, right there). But anyway, even when I was young, I dreamt of having my own comic. Not that I could draw well enough to achieve that or anything.. it was just one of those childish dreams that you have when you’re younger and then forget about over the years, as the bitter pill of reality slides down your throat before finally, inevitably, blocking your wind pipe.

Well, actually, that’s a lie.

It’s a lie because this dream didn’t quite die. In fact, it just lay dormant for a while until I was finally drawninto the world of webcomics by none other than SupSuper (who would eventually go on to construct the websites for Rooms, It Makes No Sense and most recently, Turnus). The idea of making a webcomic nagged at me and I decided to give it a go, finding an artist to complement my writing.

Sadly, this wasn’t without its problems and, after about a year of trying to get Rooms on the web, I got it online only for my artist to quit on me within a month. Lovely.

I’ve talked before about how my art is fairly weak (although it certainly improved over my three years of doing Rooms) but what is worth noting is that the weakness in my art also effected my writing. The reason for this is that when there’s someone else drawing your words, you can take your imagination as far as you want. Need Character B to enter the scene riding a unicorn? Sure, the artist can do that. Think that an overhead view of the city would give your story a sense of scale? Not a problem.

But when your art is limited, it is a problem. Want to show your hero fighting for his life against a wild koala? Uhhh… well, you could try to draw it but it’d look pretty crappy and probably detract from the story. Needless to say, I did push myself and try and draw some tough stuff over the course of those three years but I didn’t really have enough time to learn how to become sufficiently good at art to tell the stories the way I wanted to. After all, I’m not an artist - I’m a writer.

So yeah, a lot of Roomsfeatured ‘talking head’ style dialogue to move the story along and as such it became more focused on character driven stuff than grand sci-fi style story arcs. Which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing, it’s just that sometimes you need to tell those grand stories for the characters to evolve. Having 90% of the action happen off screen isn’t really going to be that satisfying for anyone.

So how do I write a comic? Well, it depends on the artist and the format. Rooms was the typical four panel strip format which meant that, although I had large scale story arcs planned, it had a lot of freedom to change direction if I changed my mind about how a certain plot was going. On the other hand, the four panel strip format does limit your writing, as does a M-W-F schedule. You have to keep things compact and try to keep dialogue within those four boxes. Not an easy task and it works better for strips like It Makes No Sense where you’re just trying to tell quick-fire jokes and not an elaborate multi-stranded narrative.

Turnus, on the other hand, is issue (or case) based, in the same way that Ben’s Jump Leads is. This means you have to write each story beforehand as one big block. This allows you the freedom of making sure you tell a good self-contained story and don’t drift aimlessly but also has the downside of meaning you can’t really change things as you go along (well you can, but not to as large an extent).

When writing for an artist, I always try and keep the artist in mind as it’s a collaborative process not a master-slave thing. In the case of Turnus, I let phillby rewrite the start of the first issue based on what I’d written as he had a very set idea of how he wanted it to begin. This wasn’t a problem as it’s his comic too and the intro is still faithful to the story and characters (plus it’s going to lead round to my script soon enough) but if you think it’s dragging at all, you know who to blame ;).

Anyway, I’ve got more to say on all this but I’ve been waffling on for a while now so I’ll continue this in a later post (which will also allow me to comment on some of the plot developments in Turnus/Jump Leads as they unfold).

Thanks for reading!

The script for second issue of Jump Leads went through a number of forms. Originally the story was about a space station with no power slowly descending into a sun. It wasn’t great stuff - Meaney and Llewellyn attempt to use power from the Flurry to restore power to the station and failed miserably, and it ends with the station crashing into the surface of the sun… which turns out to be a wormhole to a distant part of the galaxy. Meaney and Llewellyn then hop back into the Flurry without asking that all-important question, “What happens to the station next?”

It didn’t work for a great number of reasons, although elements of that original idea coincidentally made their way into two third-season Doctor Who episodes (the “crash into the sun” part was a core element of the story for “42” while the concept of using the main mode of transportation to restore power to a failing space thing popped up in “Utopia“). Putting a lot of the smaller problems aside for one moment, the big problem was the ending. It didn’t work. It was lazy and unsatisfactory and even though I’d finished that script and done two re-writes the story just felt wrong. So I did something I seldom do with completed scripts - I scrapped it, and started again.

Elements from that story, originally called “Some Like It Hot”, found their way into what became the second issue, “It Came From Space!“. The station’s crew - Tudyk, Anderson and Lloyd - remained pretty much as is, with the addition of over-zealous security officer Newman. Some other ideas found their way over quite nicely as well - Llewellyn deciding to abandon them after he writes off their scenario as a No Win carried over quite nicely, and the dialogue in the scene from “It Came From Space!” carried over quite well with some minor modifications.

Once again, though, I hit trouble with the ending. Meaney and Llewellyn get kitted up and storm their way to Command, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted them to find when they got there. I decided it’d be fun to have Tudyk talking to the alien casually, but why…? The axiom of “write what you know” came to mind, and one of the things I know about is historical re-enactment. Back in England, long before my Dad immigrated to the US, he was part of a Medieval re-enactment group. They’d go to all sorts of places - castles, parks, even zoos, and re-enact historic battles. My Dad tells me he gave it up when he moved to the US because American re-enactment groups choreograph everything, whereas in the UK it was all sort of done “on the night” as it were. He still has the suit of armour, though. Might even have some swords too.

This became the inspiration for that ending. I was happy with it. It made me smile, and I saw it as a very nice way to sort of throw a stick in the spokes of the cliché I found my characters stuck in (a scene deleted from the online version of the story has Llewellyn commenting that Anderson and Lloyd would probably start a romance as a result of the stressful circumstances). But even though I was satisfied with the ending, I began to worry - would potential readers find it equally satisfying? Would it be seen as a nice twist on an old classic, or as a lazy, half-written conclusion to a story that wasn’t going anywhere particularly unique?

I worried about this right up up to JjAR posting the relevant pages, and even past that. I’ve spent much of the past two weeks Googling for feedback. Turns out I didn’t have to - a number of people have emailed me to say that they loved this twist. One email from a gent named Tim described it as, “one of the freshest takes on an SF cliché I’ve read in a long time.” Both the story and JjAR’s typically incredible artwork have been almost unanimously praised, with only one real complaint so far - that coming from grumpy, ne’er-do-well Web Gorilla, SupSuper.

The last page of Issue #2 went up on Tuesday, and the full unabridged script is now online as an exclusive download for SoulGeek members. It’s been a long story (certainly longer than I would’ve liked but that’s my own fault) but now we can move on to something new and exciting - Issue #3, written by the esteemed Euan Mumford. Look forward to it.