Tag Archives: Cool Things

Cool Things: Clockwork Century

Posted by natechen on

Our last episode of Steampunk Month (a spontaneously generated phenomenon now coming soon to headspace near you) is dedicated to Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series of novels. Like all steampunk novels, Priest’s story is set in a world with rather Victorian sensibilities and retro-futuristic technology. Like Whitechapel Gods, last week’s steampunk offering, the Clockwork Century takes place in a world that is pretty much like our own.

Unlike, Whitechapel Gods, the Clockwork Century focuses on events in North America. In the 1890s of this strange, parallel world the American Civil War (or War Between the States, or What Have You) continues to rage off and on through a series of armistices, truces and perpetual ill-will. Like all good sci-fi/fantasy authors, Priest doesn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to explain where the South is getting manpower from, or how a mostly agrarian economy managed to match an industrial powerhouse longer than a handful of years. I mean look, the British allied with the South, supplies, mercenaries, time to develop new technologies, Progress! Huzzah!

Not that the dynamics of a rapidly industrializing society at war are really what Clockwork Century is about. No, most of the action in the fist five novels or so (give or take the road trip aspects of Clementine and Dreadnaught and the jaunt to New Orleans in Ganymede) is centered on the west coast. Sure, the stories range far and wide, but everything actually hinges on the abandoned city of Seattle, in the territory of Washington (which, with the war still on back in the states, hasn’t had much luck in getting admitted to the Union.) There, way on the northern end of the West Coast, the aftereffects of Dr. Leviticus Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine are shaping up to redefine life as we know it. In a strange, subtle, very weird kind of way. You see, while I love a good steampunk story the Clockwork Century has one thing I really hate.

Zombies.

Or, if you’re a resident of Seattle or the surrounding area, rotters. Rotters is the name for people exposed to a strange gas that started leaking out of the ground after Dr. Blue’s test drive of the Boneshaker, who died and who haven’t quite stopped walking around yet. For reasons unknown, they bite people. Okay, honestly they bite people because that’s what zombies do, but if you think about it that only makes sense when we’re dealing with corpses animated by a malevolent force bent on killing, maiming and terrifying people. Rotters are not those kinds of zombies (that we know of.)

So normally I wouldn’t recommend a zombie story to you, just like I wouldn’t normally recommend Lovecraftian fiction to you. The Clockwork Century stands apart, however, because it gives its zombie narratives context and handles its characters with style.

The blight gas that creates rotters is the focus of much scrutiny to the scientists of the Clockwork Century. Deranged people with little sense and less restraint, known as chemists to most of the world, have discovered a way to distill blight gas into an addictive drug and are selling it for pleasure or as an alternative painkiller. It also turns you into a zombie if you take enough of it but, like all addictive drugs, that goes without saying. There is the interesting little problem of these particular zombies being able to reproduce by biting people.

And the fact that that makes no sense does not bug me. At all. >_<

BUT. By constraining the rotters to Seattle and a few other places where blight gas (or it’s distilled form) has been around more than is healthy Priest manages to avoid many of the annoying cliches of the zombie genre. There are still people in this world. Civilization carries on. In fact the old city of Seattle has sealed tunnels full of people (and empty of blight gas and rotters) working quietly to figure out what they’re going to do about their private little end of the world.

And the people in the North, the South, and the independent Republic of Texas (which apparently scrounged up enough good sense not to get involved in the war in this time line)? Well, they carry on, too. They just have to dodge the occasional zombie outbreak while they’re doing it. While an argument could be made that the Clockwork Century does not have the transportation infrastructure or population density to make a zombie apocalypse the danger it is to a modern world, I would tell people arguing such a thing to read at least up to Dreadnaught before making that judgement.

And now I’m going to stop talking about the zombie part of this series, because, while zombies are just a horrible train wreck of crap that has been foisted onto fiction to the detriment of us all, and while Priest does a halfway decent job managing not to make her zombies much more than set pieces and keeping the action focused elsewhere, the real charm of this series is not in the zombies or even the steampunkness, it’s in the way Priest handles the world as a whole.

When I talked about keeping the story in mind I mentioned Priest as a great example of juggling characters. Truly, the way she does it is a wonder. I can’t say too much about it, as the nature of some characters are spoilers, but suffice it to say that just because a character walks off the screen in one book and isn’t seen again in that title doesn’t mean they’re gone. In fact, minor characters frequently go on to sprout entire books of their own. Case in point: Book 5, The Inexplicables. Or, to give an even better example, the many trials and tribulations of Jeremiah Swakhammer. (Yes, he’s as awesome as the name implies.)

The sense you get is that the world itself is alive and growing, with a lot of small, mundane things happening off the screen that stack up and surprise us when the narrative takes us back to people we haven’t seen in a while. Sure, some of the things that are alive and growing their ranks are actually, technically undead but hey, that’s just the price you pay.

All in all, the Clockwork Century series is well titled. It doesn’t rest on the back of a character, it doesn’t focus on a particular conflict. It’s much more an adventure through a wild, unpredictable frontier. An Old West you’ve never seen before. A war that’s not in any history book. And yes, possibly the end of the world in slow, shambling motion. If you love world building or character driven fiction, it’s probably worth your time to check out.

A short story entitled Tanglefoot, set after Boneshaker, the first novel in the series, but containing no spoilers for that book or any other stories in the Clockwork Century, is available for free by following this link.

Cool Things: Whitechapel Gods

Posted by natechen on

Steampunk runs a wide gamut of themes, usually drawing inspiration from the likes of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells along with the pulp fiction that was famous for it’s prolific nature and low quality in the Victorian era. In many ways it is a retro genre, as much about evoking the feel of those days than about trying to tell a particular brand of story. So steampunk has a tendency to wander far afield. Where fantasy, mystery and science fiction are usually thought of as mostly separate genres, steampunk has a tendency to mix all three liberally.

But there’s one other genre that frequently, but not always makes its way into steampunk stories: Horror.

Not just any horror, either, but horror based on the madness-exploring works of H.P. Lovecraft. One such book is S.M. Peters Whitechapel Gods.

Before we dive into that, a brief explanation of Lovecraftian fiction, also known as cosmic horror. Cosmic horror is designed to induce fear through the idea that humanity is in the grips of uncaring and impersonal forces beyond the ability of men to understand or have any lasting effect on. These forces are usually personified as old and powerful aliens from the depths of space (hence the term ‘cosmic’), the most well-known being Cthulhu. Any attempt to come to grips with these forces, and in many cases even just seeing them, drives people mad. They leave readers with the impression that, with the exception of a few well trained experts who can hold insanity at bay, if only for a time, humanity has no choice but to accept eventual destruction. Their only choice is whether they will approach it in ignorance or insanity.

Cosmic horror tends to be popular among geeks (but not this one) and scientists (they’re not the same thing), but doesn’t enjoy much acceptance in the mainstream, which already has newspapers and MSNBC presenting much the same themes.

So wait, if I don’t enjoy cosmic horror much, why am I recommending Whitechapel Gods to you?

Well, mostly because it manages to dodge most of the failings of the cosmic genre while reveling in the trappings. For those of you that have never heard of it, Whitechapel is a part of London (which means that, unlike the other two steampunk stories I’ve mentioned, this Victorian era fantasy actually takes place in Victorian London!) However, unlike the real Whitechapel, the Whitechapel created by Peters is totally cut off from the rest of London, and England as a whole. Within its walls, Baron Atlas Hume rules with the aid of his steam powered robotic enforces, the Boiler Men and his majordomo, John Scared.

In addition to being the ruler, Baron Hume is the high priest of a dark cult that worships the horrific cosmic beings Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock, and assists them in the Great Work that will ultimately Destroy The Earth (okay, that last part is never actually said anywhere, but it’s implied.) Each of these strange, mechanical “gods” claims a priesthood from among the general populace, known as Black Cloaks (for Mama Engine) and Gold Cloaks (for Grandfather Clock).

Oh, and there might be some normal people running around trying to overthrow the Baron and his gods and restore Whitechapel to London proper.

What sets Whitechapel Gods apart from most of cosmic fiction is that it makes humanity an active participant in the story and avoids sidelining its villains. One of the biggest problems of cosmic horror is the way it tries to present epic threats to the safety of humanity while the majority of humanity remains in ignorance of the threat. Cosmic horror implies that this makes humanity ignorant chumps, with the exception of the chosen handful who have the strength of will to look extinction in the face and realize they’re doomed.

On the other hand, in Whitechapel Gods humanity actively participates in either advancing or preventing the outcome of the story. First and foremost is Baron Hume, who lays the foundation for the altered Whitechapel of his own free will. Following in his footsteps come the armies of Cloaks who read his words and trust his gods. Behind them all lurks John Scared, who pursues his own twisted ends and opposing them is the very Crown of England and its agents, plus many of the common people of Whitechapel itself.

Since the typical Lovecraftian horror drives men insane just by being around, it’s really very hard to describe them in the pages of a book. Any title that tries and succeeds is likely to have a hard time finding a publisher. As a result, we tend to hear people talking about these things an awful lot, but they never do anything of note (except possibly being seen by one of the characters and thus driving them insane). There’s a whole lot of build up without a lot of payoff and the villains of cosmic horror wind up being not the entities the stories are about, but the humans who destroy themselves trying to understand them.

Whitechapel Gods presents us with entities that are much more active and thus, much more sinister. Just the presence of Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock causes a disease known as the clacks, a disease that slowly morphs parts of the victim’s body into machinery. Grandfather Clock can see through the faces of clocks and watches, and spies on the people of Whitechapel to keep them in line. Mama Engine will not let her priests die, no matter what happens to them. While not present in the way the other characters are, the cosmic horrors of Whitechapel Gods are just as present and just as horrible as the human villains of the book, putting them several steps ahead of most other Lovecraftian creatures.

Now if all there was to Whitechapel Gods were a great story of creepy aliens plotting to destroy the world from the heart of Victorian London I’m not sure the book would be worth recommending. But with the addition of a solidly written hero’s journey and a slew of surprising and well rendered human protagonists, Peters does an excellent job of giving you people to root for as well. With subtle questions about what it takes to be a leader in hard times woven throughout, the tale offers food for thought as well.

Many books show you humanity at its best. But if you like fiction that takes a stab at showing how humanity can show its best even in the face of things that should be beyond it, Whitechapel Gods is a title worth checking out.

Cool Things: Girl Genius

Posted by natechen on

And we’re back here with Steampunk month on Cool Things, bringing you another week of coal-fired goodness. This week’s theme: Steampunk Illustrated!

I can only be talking about Phil and Kaja Foglio’s amazing steampunk comic Girl Genius. Unlike many of the things I’ve been geeking about on this blog, Girl Genius is a genuine web-based property, meaning that by following the link I’ve provided you’ll be able to read the entire saga of Agatha Clay as she traverses Europa in a saga of adventure, romance and mad science.

Of course, your time is precious and you may not want to invest the kind of time necessary to get current on a story that has been updating regularly, three times a week, for over a decade. So what is it that sets Agatha’s tale apart from the rest?

For starters, there’s the sense of humor. Steampunk, being mostly rooted in the culture and moors of Victorian England, is not exactly known for it’s laugh-a-minute soundtrack. But Girl Genius spices up it’s Victorian setting and themes with excellent, vaudevillean banter, well timed comeuppances and hilarious sight gags that, odd as it may seem to say about a static medium, are executed with expert timing. The expressions of the characters alone is worth the price of admission, or at least the time invested.

The world of Girl Genius is exceptional too. Europa is very much a parallel to Europe of the past, but rather than being ruled by nations the continent is ruled by sparks, people with the touch of madness that makes them phenomenal mad scientists, among other things. Baron Klaus Wolfenbach is one of the most powerful sparks around, and he collects lesser sparks and channels their studies into avenues that are less likely than most to result in disaster or discomfort for the common man. The eponymous Girl Genius is Agatha Clay, one such spark who has to find her way in the increasingly treacherous world of the Baron and his son without loosing her life or her sanity. The inventions of the sparks are funny and original, and are beautifully illustrated in ways that are both impressive and whimsical.

But most endearing are the characters, from the somewhat shy Agatha to her dim but enthusiastic Jaeger sidekicks, the brooding Baron and his brash son, even Agatha’s small, clockwork robots show more personality than you will find in many titles from DC or Marvel. Whether you’re looking for someone to root for or root against, Girl Genius has what you want.

And on top of all that you can add:

Check it out. You might find you like it.

Cool Things: The Kingdom of Jackals

Posted by natechen on

What do you get when you combine satire, comedy, steampunk-sci-fi and a grouchy old steamboat captain?

Why the Kingdom of Jackals, author Stephen Hunt’s crazy, tongue-in-cheek romp through adventure, human nature and Science! The Kingdom is a far cry from many steampunk stories in the themes it chooses to look at. While many steampunk stories are obsessed with Progress or Science!, Jackelian stories are a different beast. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of steam powered robots, airships, scientific societies and more to tickle your neo-Victorian sensibilities, but they’re not the focus in Jackals. Rather, Hunt turns these things into subtle (or not so subtle) metaphors for modern culture.

Some struggles in human history are timeless, and by setting them in a place that never existed he manages to both show us the extreme forms of some historical and sociological themes and let us enjoy watching fun, engaging characters deal with them using gratuitous quantities of coal powered, pressure gauge studded, improbable technologies.

Jackals is full of weird but entertaining ideas. It’s the Republic with a King. The state religion is the Circlist Church, which worships reason and math and views the word “faith” as blasphemy. Groundquakes periodically send huge sections of the ground floating into the air unless worldsingers can calm the pressure in the tectonic plates. And that’s just day to day living, before the evil cults, chosen wielders of ancient, thinking weapons, lost civilizations, alien invasions and displaced nobility is taken into account.

As I said last Friday, Hunt makes excellent use of his characters in these novels. There’s nothing exactly like a main character in the series. Although some characters, such as Molly Templar and Jethro Daunt, are the focus of more than one book, the closest thing to a central character is actually Commodore Jared Black, the only character to make an appearance in all six novels to date. While never a central character in any of the stories he manages to be consistently among the most surprising, engaging, human and personable. Among the wild tales of aspiring authors, outlaws, famous detectives and belittled archaeologists, Jared manages to be the voice of the Everyman – and that while harboring some impressive secrets for himself.

Steampunk is many things to many people. It is commentary on the Victorian era, a time of unprecedented progress and struggle. It is a reflection on the relationship between knowledge, reason and the human soul. And it is a great excuse for huge quantities of gratuitous cogs, gears and pressure dials. If you want all that, with a healthy dose of thought provoking ideas for today, then the Kingdom of Jackals might be a place to think amount visiting…

Cool Things: Potter’s Field

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“There’s a cemetery on Hart Island at the western end of Long Island Sound. Unidentified corpses are buried here under plain stone markers at the rate of around 125 a week…” 

-Jordan Halpert, Potter’s Field 

Kind of chilling, isn’t it? In the city of New York, 125 people die nameless and friendless every week. That’s about 500 a month. 6,500 a year.

Who are they? How did they die? Does anyone really care about them?

I’m not sure how accurate that statistic is, but by opening his comic noir tour de force Potter’s Field with it, Mark Waid manages to ensure that he has our attention from minute one. After all, who want’s to die nameless and forgotten? The least dignity we could be offered is a tombstone with a name on it. Yet to the people of the Hart Island cemetery, the only indication of who they might be is a cold, impersonal number.

But there is a man. A man who hates that fact, who cannot stand to just walk away from those empty stones. So he walks the length and breadth of the city, piecing together the clues no one else has the time or the resources to find, and finding the names for these people and recording them in stone for all to see.

Like the people he serves, this man has no name to give to others, so they call him John Doe. To us, and to the people who help him, he is as much an enigma as the corpses he names. He seems to have no family, no friends, no history at all. And yet, there must be something that drives him to live alone, in abandoned buildings, eating canned food and sleeping on cots. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the real mystery is – John or the people of in the potter’s field.

Or perhaps, as his name suggests, John Doe is just another one of the nameless dead who hasn’t given up on moving around just yet.

Potter’s Field is the polar opposite of the last Mark Waid titles I mentioned. Where Irredeemable and Incorruptible are quite possibly the greatest superhero titles ever written, Potter’s Field is a tribute to the mortal man. John’s not superhuman in anything but his ambition. He scrabbles about for clues, risks his life every time he crosses with the criminal underworld and very nearly becomes a real John Doe on more than one occasion.

But, as Greg Rucka says in his introduction to the first collection, he still shows us Waid’s favorite kind of struggle. That of a man who stands on the side of what’s Right , opposing what is Wrong. The fact that he does it without spandex, superpowers or a second thought from the press and public only makes him more of a hero, not less of one.

And it gives one new hope in the potential of funnybooks to tell stories. For that alone it’s worth your time. Pick up your copy now and maybe someday you’ll be able to show it to your children one day, and say, “This is one of the titles that started the revolution. This is what made comics a force in our culture.” And really, how cool is that?

Cool Things: October Daye

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With a main character named October Daye, you just know a series is going to bring a slightly different perspective to things. Of course, whether you’re going to enjoy that perspective or not is a matter of taste, but I highly encourage you to give it a shot anyway.

Seanan McGuire‘s excellent urban fantasy series is an exploration of modern day faerie. October, or Toby to her friends, is a changeling, the daughter of a faerie woman and a human man. To most of the supernatural community changelings are outsiders, the addition of mortal blood to their faerie nature dooms them to outlive most of their mortal friends, but the fact that they still age and die makes them an uncomfortable reminder of mortality to the ageless fae. Worse, if they choose to live their lives as part of faerie they are expected to maintain the masquerade that the fae are gone, so they cannot live honestly with their human friends.

It’s a hard life that Toby and her friends must face, and she hasn’t had it any easier than others. It’s true that she was taken in by an honest to goodness Duke, and made a knight in his court, but even there she’s not entirely respected or treated fairly. And then the Duke’s twin brother conspires against him, kidnaps his wife and child and turns Toby into a goldfish for fourteen years.

No, Toby doesn’t have an easy life at all. But when she finally gets over being a fish (which apparently takes longer than recovering from being a newt) her trials aren’t over. In fact, they’re just beginning. In spite of the things she’s already suffered in Duke Sylvester Torquille’s service Toby keeps finding herself entangled in the politics of the Faerie Court. Between murders, conspiracies and confronting her own doppelgänger, it’s a wonder she can find time for anything else at all. But she keeps it up, if for no other reason than to save the children. Really, one of these days they’ll just stay put with their parents, but in the mean time the faeries of San Francisco continue to rely on Sir Daye to track their kids down when they turn up missing.

The two greatest selling points of Toby’s adventures are their pacing and their solid grounding in the rich legend of the British Isles. All the books maintain a breakneck pace that introduces Toby to clever and dangerous problems. As the only trained private investigator the Faerie Court has to draw on (they’re a very old fashioned people in some respects), it’s only natural that she wind up involved, even if the people who hire her don’t always care for her much.

McGuire does an excellent job evoking the feel of British myth, even in a story set in Southern California. While it’s hardly faithful to any one particular interpretation of the  myth that actually serves as a strength, allowing McGuire to add, subtract and improvise the stories to suit her own needs.

Oh, and every book’s title is taken from a Shakespeare quote. How great is that?

If you’re into urban fantasy, I highly suggest checking it out.

Cool Things: “Chinese” New Year

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According to the Chinese Zodiac, the new year begins on February 10th, 2013. Like all great Chinese traditions, this has pretty much ignored any contradictory Western traditions, such as our having our own calendar that’s used pretty much world wide. There will still be huge celebrations in may places across Asia as the Year of the Snake officially begins.

As the child of mixed heritage (is that politically correct?) I’ve always had an interesting relationship with the Chinese New Year. It’s not a holiday my immediate family had any special traditions for, beyond occasionally visiting relatives. On the other hand, to my father’s side of the family it was frequently a time to touch base, enjoy good food and company and generally do everything that Americans generally associate with Christmas (including gift giving!) On the third hand, I could typically mention it to my friends and get nothing more than a blank look.

Ah, the good old days.*

Now there’s this thing called Wikipedia, and it has a table that not only tells you when the Chinese New Year falls, but what the technical term for the Chinese Zodiac is and which of animal’s year we’re about to embark upon (for those wondering, mine is the Year of the Rat, something my sister has always found most appropriate). The Internet and other forms of media are becoming more aware of these and other, similar, cultural events and my own home town of Fort Wayne, Indiana even has a Chinese Association that will be honoring the holiday in grand style.

So what happens on Chinese New Year? Well, a lot of things.

Traditionally, you set if firecrackers and do other rituals to ward off evil spirits. In spite of their relative modernity, the Chinese are still rather superstitious and there’s a while string of activities to ensure good luck and ward against bad luck that are most effective if done on New Year’s Day. Whether they’re continued for their stated purpose, or just to give people a chance to dress up in gaudy clothing and do the Dragon Dance is anybody’s guess – and it probably varies from person to person.

It’s also a time of family. Partly because this was a time to go back to the ancestral home and honor your ancestors – and again, some people probably still do that. But in part because the act of going back to the ancestral home brought everyone back together at the same time. And let’s face it, no matter how tough things are between people, when you cram thirty or forty of them into one house relationships have got to improve somehow – unless there’s a homicide, which probably doesn’t help anything. But anything short of that only serves to build family solidarity.

These days it seems like it takes weeks of planning and a military logistics team for families to get together in any way, shape or form. Sometimes you need an excuse to convince people it’s worthwhile. So go ahead, celebrate Chinese New Year. Go out and eat, cram your entire family into one house and give each other great, huge wads of cash so you can all start the year of in prosperity. And who knows? Maybe next time you won’t need an excuse.

But if you should, my mother’s side of the family can trace its roots back to Germany, where they have this funny little tradition called Oktoberfest…

 

*This statement is intended to be sarcastic. In case you are one of those people who misses these kinds of things.

Cool Things: Calvin and Hobbes

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The other day I mentioned the wondrous sport of Calvinball to a guy just a few years younger than I am and got a blank reaction. It was depressing and enlightening at the same time. My family and I are big fans of Calvin and Hobbes, the classic comic strip by Bill Watterson, but it’s coming up on twenty years since the strip went out of print.

That’s kind of sobering. I know I wanted to learn to read so I didn’t have to bug my older sister to read Calvin and Hobbes to me when the newspaper came each day. Calvin and Hobbes was a classic comic strip rivaled only by Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and, just like Peanuts, it offered a lot of cool things crammed into three or four black and white panels a day. So if you’ve never heard of Calvin and Hobbes, sit down and I’ll enlighten you! If you’re already a fan, join me in a bit of wistful reminiscing.

The main characters of Watterson’s comic strip are the eponymous Calvin and Hobbes. No, it’s not a comic strip about philosophers and theologians, although Watterson did sometimes ponder the deeper questions in an effort to bring a little class to the mostly practical or even flat and uninteresting “funny” pages. But the wild, hyperactive six year old Calvin and the sardonic, laid back stuffed tiger Hobbes were named for philosophers and theologians, and from the beginning hinted at something different about this little comic.

Many things about Calvin and Hobbes made it cool. Calvin was a wild child and a firebrand, constantly raging at any and every problem in the world around him, no matter how small or trivial. He would assault them with vigor and imagination, displaying a vocabulary light-years beyond most children the age of six, making one wonder how he could consistently get such bad grades in school. In addition to his clever verbal rants, Calvin also approached problems with a great deal of creativity and well applied tools, such as his sled, red wagon and cardboard boxes.

Watterson fearlessly delved into Calvin’s imaginary worlds, showing us Calvin’s many alter egos and the real life circumstances that inspired his flights of fancy with equal whimsy and enthusiasm. He might appear as a dinosaur, a space faring explorer or a hard-boiled detective, inserting the people he knows into whatever role is appropriate at the time (although the school teacher, Ms. Wormwood, was almost always a monstrous space alien.)

Hobbes, part time stuffed animal full time tiger, was an interesting example of this. Calvin finds Hobbes in a “tiger trap” he dug outside his house. Neither of his parents see Hobbes before Calvin drags him in over one shoulder. To most of the cast, Hobbes looks like an ordinary stuffed animal, but to Calvin he’s a living, thinking anthropomorphic tiger who frequently displays more good sense than Calvin does. In one of the clever moves that gave Calvin and Hobbes it’s defining flavor, we’re never really told exactly what Hobbes is. While only Calvin sees him as anything other than a stuffed animal, we frequently see Calvin in situations he couldn’t realistically have gotten into without the help of someone else. And that stuffed tiger is the only other one around…

Calvin lives in a world with varying levels of definition. For example, his parents are never named, and most people he knows have either fist names or last names, never both. Character who threatened that ambiguity, like Calvin’s Uncle Max, were quickly removed. Calvin, it seems, has the potential to be any hyperactive child we meet. Perhaps a warning to those of us who have gotten older and forgotten the days when scientific progress did, indeed, go “boink”.

But to me, the seminal moments in Calvin and Hobbes were always when the Time Fractal Wickets were taken out and they’d play Calvinball. There rules were simple – make it up as you go along and never use the same rule twice. It was a mad, slap-dash sprint through a dozen different sports with the ultimate goal of having fun and pushing your creativity. Just watching them playing it made your creative juices flow better.

Through the course of it’s ten years of publishing (interspersed with sabbaticals by the author), Calvin and Hobbes  introduced us to all sorts of weird and wonderful things. The G.R.O.S.s. club, dedicated to the annoyance of Susie Derkins (the only major character with a first and last name!), dozens of different kinds of weird snowmen (some of which moved around on their own and propagated the species!), and the cardboard box Duplicators and Transmogrifiers. We went up and down hills, around rocks and trees and into bushes while being taken on kinetic meditations on politics, philosophy and human nature. And at the end, we watched our friends sail off into the snow, crisp and clean like a blank sheet of paper. I have no doubt their adventures there were and are just as great as the ones they shared with us.

Watterson was very critical of the relationship between comic artists, newspapers and syndicates, and he felt that as long as the medium remained constrained by their demands it wouldn’t grow and would most likely grow stagnant and die. Two years after the disappearance of Calvin and Hobbes, Pete Abrams started publishing Sluggy Freelance and Illiad joined in with User Friendly just a short time later. As two of the longest running webcomics in existence in many ways they mark the beginning of the end of syndicate/newspaper domination of comics. Fifteen years later, they continue to thrive. Many others have come and gone in that time and, while none have the whimsy or imagination of Calvin and Hobbes, maybe for Bill Watterson it’s enough to have a step in the right direction…

Cool Things: Columbo

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Lt. Frank Columbo, played by Peter Falk, was the police detective with no first name. He solved cases involving the cunning, educated and frequently wealthy people of the LA upper class. It’s been about ten years since the last mystery featuring the rumbled, occasionally mumbling, always absentminded police detective aired on ABC. Some people these days may never have heard about him, or be familiar with how his stories typically unfold.

When you sit down to the typical murder mystery you meet the protagonist, who is typically a detective of some sort, be it police officer or hired investigator, the victim (sometimes) and the suspects. The murder may have occurred already, or maybe you’re given some time to watch the characters in their natural environment. Regardless, a corpse turns up and we watch the detective and his associates gather clues, piece them together, interview suspects and eventually pin the crime on someone (usually).

The typical episode of Columbo, on the other hand, opens with the careful preparations of the murderer. We know who he is and we see most of what he does to commit his crime and create an alibi. For the most part we don’t see Columbo until ten or fifteen minutes into the show. Then he arrives on the scene, spends approximately fifteen seconds looking around and notices it. That one detail. The one thing the murderer didn’t think of, or forgot in their hurry. And from that moment, Columbo knows, just as well as we do, who will go to jail at the end of the story. He just needs to prove it.

What follows is a series of escelating confrontations between Columbo and his prime suspect. Columbo conducts seemingly wandering interviews where he’ll ask a series of seemingly trivial questions and usually gets distracted by something at least once, and then start to leave. As the murderer begins to relax he “remembers” to ask the most significant question of the scene. At first his strange anecdotes about family members, open eyed wonder at the accomplishments of his victims and suspects and absentmindedness (whether real or affected) puts the suspect at ease, but it eventually becomes clear that Columbo is getting close to the truth. The dance gets more complex as people begin using social connections against him, which Columbo frequently counters with his good reputation on the police force and high esteem in the eyes of his captain, allowing him to close the case and put his suspect in jail.

So what made Columbo cool?

Well, a lot of things. Probably the biggest was his incredible ability to challenge those who thought they were his betters with humor, humility and grace. He never claims to be a man of great learning, and he’s frequently impressed with the many worthwhile accomplishments of the people he must eventually send to jail. He takes the time to learn from them and learn about them. And he does it all with a friendly demeanor.

Not that he’s harmless. Far from it. Columbo’s adversaries quickly come to dread his constant appearances, asking just a few more questions in the hope that they can help him sort out those nagging little details that he can’t get quite straight. The same years of experience that let him spot a single out of place detail in a busy murder scene help him sift through the details of a death and find the parts of the story that don’t line up quite right. And the same mind that goes to great lengths to learn more about the people he meets goes to great lengths to learn more about the murders he’s come to unravel.

Underneath his friendliness and strange habits is a cop who knows a great deal about how the world works, who has the cunning to set traps and force people to give up more and more evidence he can use and who won’t let the fact that a person is likable or even pitiable stop him from reminding them of the importance of justice.

Yet in contrast to the many hard-boiled detectives, Columbo remains friendly, good natured and pleasant. He’s mastered his job, it hasn’t mastered him.

Peter Falk was a great actor, and Columbo is one of his best loved characters. If you’ve never had the pleasure of watching them at work, I highly suggest you check them out.

Cool Things: Fables

Posted by natechen on

There’s a lot of takes on the Urban Fantasy genre, but one of the best and longest running is undoubtedly Bill Willingham’s Fables. Created and based on the enduring legends of Europe and the Middle East (and possibly even farther, more exotic places), Fables asks a simple question: What if all the characters we once knew and loved from the storybooks of our youth had to leave their simple, low tech, magical worlds and move to New York City?

I know it’s a question that has kept many of you awake at nights.

Well apparently Bill Willingahm has struggled with it too, because on a fairly unremarkable day over a decade ago the first volume of Fables was published, and a new benchmark for quality in the comics industry was set. In Fables, the story takes first place, as you might expect from a series that takes its name from a form of narrative. Further, while the story introduces many new elements to what happened after familiar stories ended, Willingham never changes the familiar narratives and, when dealing with the less familiar stories gives the reader enough to understand the story without causing clutter.

In this way Willingham sidesteps two of the most frustrating barriers to entry in modern American comic books, their tendency to stretch franchises out ad naseum, with no regard for where they ultimately intend to go with their characters, and their tendency to rely heavily on backstory established three to five decades ago which can be difficult if not impossible for new readers to find. There are other ways Fables is a nice change from the norm. No one character is constantly at the center of the story, and so they can’t become tiresome or require constant reinvention to keep them interesting. Neither is there constant narration to expound on the things that should be told to us by the artwork or dialog. While many comics forget they are visual media, Fables never does.

However, Fables also remembers that it’s there to tell a story. Willingham keeps things moving with drive and zest, moving quickly from establishing his setting to showing the dynamics of the Fable community, to exploring the threat from the Adversary, all while also managing to make stories very personal and character driven. While the bulk of the story takes place in New York in the modern day, he also gives us glimpses into the histories of his characters and the worlds they came from, as well as the extraordinary circumstances that brought them all to the world of refuge they now call home.

One of the most charming points of Fables is Willingham’s clear love for the forgotten stories. No Fable is sure why, but their life stories somehow became known to the people of the world they live in, passed from person to person until the details became blurred. And curiously enough fame translates to increased vitality and strength, making some Fables very difficult to kill. But it’s often the Fables without any fame, who you might not even have thought of when writing a story about storybooks, who step forward and surprise you. Little Boy Blue, the Frog Prince and even Snow’s mostly forgotten sister, Rose Red step forward and show us what their made of and, frequently, prove to be more personable, likeable and relatable than their better known costars.

If you like magic in the modern world, if you like clever writing and great characters, or if you just love a good story that’s written for the sake of good story, I suggest giving Fables a go.