From: djdaneh@pbhyc.PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc
Subject: Re: Why does PAD *stay* on the net?
Date: 21 Dec 92 18:37:44 GMT
Reply-To: djdaneh@PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA

In article <72089@cup.portal.com> Peter_A_David@cup.portal.com writes:

>I stay on the net because I'm interested in what people have to say.
>And because if people miss the point of something I've tried to do,
>I can take that as an indication of what I should be doing to try and
>improve as a writer--something that I will be endeavoring to do until
>about ten minutes after I'm dead.

An admirable attitude.

Well, then, Peter ol' sock, as someone who's been following your career with 
medium avidity for a few years now, let me toss in my two cents.

(Medium avidity?  Yeh.  Sorry, but even your presence on an X-book couldn't keep
me with it more than a few issues, largely because I'm an X-addict who doesn't 
want to pick up the habit again.  On the other hand, your work on HULK keeps 
me regularly violating what would otherwise be an absolute ban on Marvel books, 
so go figure.)

[Edited in after completing the following:  This was done off the cuff, and
without access to my collection, so if it's a bit scattered and lacks the
sort of details -- like issue numbers -- that make a good formal critique,
please forgive me.  I think what I'm trying to say comes across.]

I've definitely seen improvement since I began reading your stuff, oh, around
the time KNIGHT LIFE came out.  Unfortunately, most of your improvement has been
in the areas where you're already strongest.

You really don't need to concentrate on dialog too much in the near future.
With the possible exceptions of Gaiman and Sim, you're doing the best dialog in 
the business today.

Your characters ain't Alan Moore, but they're adequate and beyond for mainstream
funnybooks.  When I talk about the HULK, the first thing that comes to my mind 
is "this used to be the single most intrinsically *boring* character in comics 
-- duller than Oatmeal King by a good country mile -- a book that I wouldn't 
have read if Marvel were sending it to me for free."  You took that, and made it
something that I not only read but look forward to.

(Well:  actually, that's one of my current rules.  If I realize that I'm not
looking forward to a book anymore, I drop it.  By this rule, I find, a lot of
the more expensive "high-brow" books are going for bye-byes while the SUPERMAN
quartet stays on.  Weird, huh? -- No, because the S-books are remembering what a
lot of the more "ahtistic" creators have forgotten:  that comical books are
intended, first and foremost, to _entertain_.)

Anyway.

I was doing the strong points, right?  Obviously buttering you up for the bad 
news -- well, may as well hit one more strong point, first, which is, unlike 
most mainstream CBs, your comics are frequently _about_ something.  The "Rick's 
Friend with AIDS issue" of HULK was, imio, the best example of this to date
(though I may have missed something somewhere).  It managed to get all the
essential points across -- at least what _I_ perceive _you_ perceiving as the
essential points, which is to say, reasonable and unreasonable emotional and
social responses to the discovery that someone you care about has AIDS (or,
indeed, any other nasty disease; but AIDS has the strongest metaphorical punch
these days, having replaced cancer which replaced polio which replaced
tuberculosis/"consumption" which replaced...and on back to "which replaced
leprosy" for the honor, and quite possibly something before that that we don't
know about), and some basic factual material about how the disease does and,
more importantly, doesn't spread.  You did it strongly, with punches unpulled, 
but without driving your point home with a sledgehammer.  Bravo, in retrospect.

Then there's the question of prose style.  Not really relevant in funnybooks,
where (except for the occasional caption) it's pretty much identical to dialog,
upon which I have already made sufficient positive comment.  But in the novels
(most recently Q-IN-LAW, haven't read IMZADI yet), it's somewhere between 
adequate and quite nice.  Almost never makes the reader (or at least me, and
I'm almost hypersensitive to prose style) wake up from the "fictive dream,"
and occasionally comes up with those little treasured sentences that one rolls
around on one's tongue for the rest of the day.

Okay, that's the buttering.

Where I think you most need to concentrate in the next year or so is in --
God help us -- _plot_.  I need to add quickly that I'm hypersensitive to plot
issues, because I realize that it's my _own_ weakest area, so you can take this
with whatever size salt crystal best suits your taste.  

More specifically, I'm talking about plotting on the very largest level, the
level most closely related to "what the story's about."  Particularly in the
comic book work, there's frequently a degree of perfunctoriness to the large-
scale plotting that makes it predictable.  I am rarely surprised by the larger
scale turns of plot in a PAD story.

Now, the _smaller_ scale -- the individual incidents -- are as fresh and as
unexpected as could be desired.  You regularly toss off weird twists like
killing a vampire with a bat (I laughed my ass off!).

But the large scale stuff... well, here's what I mean.  Somewhere around three
years ago, I found myself saying to the only other comic reader I see in person
regularly "He's going to 'cure' the Hulk.  Somebody, and it's probably Doc 
Samson, is going to psychoanalyze him in exactly one issue, and integrate the
personalities."

I was quite disappointed when that actually happened, particularly since I
simply _don't_ believe in psychotherapy that works that quickly, even in a
crisis situation; and since you've clearly read up on MPD to write what you've
done about Bruce/Hulk's background, and even _that_ issue, you also clearly know
that MPD is a particularly intractible "disease."  

Well, and maybe you're constrained by the limits of comics.  Twelve or twenty-
four issues of Doc S. asking Bruce about his mother probably would have sent
your sales through the cellar. . . but there were other ways around it.  You
might have put the therapy in the background for a couple of years (Bruce in
the chair in between adventures, etc.); or you might have given some sense of
time a'passing, though that might have fouled up synchronization with the other
Marvel books for that year's mandatory crossovers.  I don't know.

Yet and on the other hand -- since you _did_ decide to do that, the smaller
incidents of the issue were exactly right.  Even your hat trick (literally) with
the Ringmaster to "excuse" the crash course psychotherapy worked, as well as 
anything could have, to moderate the blow of twenty-four hour therapy for MPD.

Likewise with the recent HULK four-parter.  [Get the feeling I'm concentrating
on TIH?  I guess I am, because it's what you've done most of and so it provides
all sorts of good examples.]  Sigh.  The _little_ surprises were all there --
the Thunderbolt Ross zombie... uh, pardon me, I mean "zuvembie"... is an 
excellent example.  But and contrariwise, the big-scale stuff was, well,
predictable.  Marlo dies:  Rick's going to go looking for a cure, and we all
know something bad will come of it.  The Leader shows up and promises to fix
her for him.  Yawwwn.  We're going to get her back in a way that's worse than
keeping her dead.

Do you see what I'm saying?  I don't know if it's you, or if it's because of
the limitations of the medium you're working in, but how things are going to
turn out is -- inevitably? -- predictable, while _how_ we get there is --
usually -- surprising and pleasant.  I suspect that it _is_, to a large
degree, a matter of the medium, since your TREK novels have the same problem,
but your "independent" novels are *much* less so.  [I was almost going to say
"your real novels," but that would be stupid; you are one of about three people
who actually writes real novels while writing TREK.  John Ford comes to mind,
too...]

Happy Channukah, Merry Christmas, Glorious Kwanzaa, and a Grand New Year, to
you and to all other RACketeers who've made it this far.


		When you're stuffing yourself at the Christmas parties,
		don't be surprised when I tell you to take a running jump.
		You're missing the point I'm sure does not need making:
		the Christmas spirit is not what you drink.
			--Ian Anderson

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, Net.Roach
My opinions do NOT represent Pacific Bell,
Professional Development, or anyone else.
But I'm willing to share.