It’s 2019. The year that a young Tetsuo starts suffering blinding headaches in Neo-Tokyo, a fellow named Roy Batty leads a group of replicants out of the off-world colonies, Ewan McGregor and ScarJo try and escape and island, and a wrongly convicted police helicopter pilot starts running for his life in a reality game show.
In our branch of the Multiverse, life continues on its regular path. When I last wrote this column, I was struggling with getting some of those creative juices flowing. I also mentioned that I was working on a number of projects. My resolution this year is to keep the world updated about what I’m doing in the hope that it will motivate productivity.
So here’s what I’m working on so far this year:
88 Miles Per Hour
It’s a working title, but I’m working with a publisher I know to edit a volume on one of my film series of all time: Back to the Future. I’ve assembled an amazing group of international authors to talk about everything from the films themselves to the TV series, the comic books, and the video games. They touch on issues of ethics, gender, science, and myth-making. I’m contributing at least one piece on the history of time travel cinema, something I’ve spoken about in the past (at Sydney’s MCA and on ABC Overnights) and written about here. I can’t wait to start sharing it with you.
A total wanker in London
It’s been over 30 years since the original Hellblazer comics hit the stands, and John Constantine continues to populate our pages and screens to this day. I’m contributing a piece to another edited volume on the character, specifically The Hellblazer: Rebirth run by writer Simon Oliver. It’s a nice change of pace to be writing for someone else’s book rather than creating my own. If there’s a lesson I’ve learned then it’s that writing is a vocation, and sometimes your project chooses you.
Stop! Do Not Read This Book!
This book is going to be about YOU. Possibly my most ambitious project to date, I do no expect this to get done in 2019, even if it is way more topical than my usual historical perspective. It started as a PhD proposal, but I didn’t have the time to fit it in my work/life balance. So I went ahead and wrote the 340-page Moving Target: The History and Evolution of Green Arrow instead. There’s writer logic for you.
The intention of Stop! Do Not Read This Book! is to explore the complex relationship between readers and comics over the last 80 or 90 years. Comics have writers and artists and publishers, but it’s the very act of us reading that gives them life. It’s real tree falling in the woods kind of thinking.
I initially explored this idea for a short piece over at Sequart, but I soon found the concept of Multiverses and reader interaction fascinating. We are in a very real way changing the way that comic book heroes are consumed by switching our interests to films and games, cosplaying, writing fan fiction, and positively influencing those worlds. On the flip-side, there’s ComicsGate: a group who feels that “forced diversity” is ruining comics, so much so that there have been reports of threatened violence against creators and retailers, including some of the subjects of the movement leaving social media from constant harassment.
Make no mistake: my book intends to be about those of us who love comics and engage with the text and creators in meaningful and universe-changing ways. It’s Umberto Eco meets Scott McCloud by way of Grant Morrison and Julius Schwartz. There: the nerdiest elevator pitch ever.
Other things
There was another project I was working on prior to commencing this one. It was going to be a biography of Mort Weisinger, creator of Green Arrow and Aquaman and the Superman editor for decades. I even went so far as to write the first two chapters. He’s a fascinating dude: founded one of the first literary agencies for sci-fi writers, entered comics near their birth, became a notoriously temperamental editor at DC Comics for decades, was behind most of the ‘weird’ Superman stories of the 1950s and 1960s, became story editor for the Adventures of Superman television series, and wrote a novel about the lives of pageant contestants (!). Fascinating story with absolute no commercial legs.
I may still write it up in some form (even as a magazine piece), but here’s one thing I learned from the experience. It’s okay to abandon a project if it isn’t working out, or at least put it to one side for a while. Keep writing and sometimes this stuff works itself out.
