FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RENO, Nev. – The World Science Fiction Convention will return to Texas for the first time since 1997 after voting results announced Aug. 20 at Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, awarded the right to host the international conference to the Texas in 2013 bid.
LoneStarCon 3-–the 71st World Science Fiction Convention-–will be held Aug. 29-Sept. 2, 2013, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. The Mariott Rivercenter and Mariott Riverwalk will serve as the host hotels.
The guests of honor list for LoneStarCon 3 includes Ellen Datlow, James Gunn, Norman Spinrad, Darrel K. Sweet and Willie Siros, with Paul Cornell serving as toastmaster and featuring special guests Leslie Fish and Joe R. Lansdale.
Founded in 1939, the World Science Fiction Convention is one of the largest international gatherings of authors, artists, editors, publishers and fans of science fiction and fantasy entertainment. The annual Hugo Awards, the leading award for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy, are voted on by Worldcon membership and presented during the convention.
LoneStarCon 3 is sponsored by ALAMO, Inc., (Alamo Literary Arts Maintenance Organization), a 501(c)3 organization. Membership for LoneStarCon 3 may be purchased at www.LoneStarCon3.org. In addition to individual memberships, LoneStarCon 3 will also offer a family rate. For more information about LoneStarCon 3, memberships or hotel information, visit www.LoneStarCon3.org.
About the Guests of Honor
Paul Cornell is a writer of science fiction and fantasy in prose, television and comics, and is the only person to have been a Hugo Award nominee for all three media. He’s written Action Comics for DC Comics and Doctor Who for the BBC. His novels are Something More and British Summertime. His forthcoming novel, an urban fantasy, will be published by Tor in 2012.
Ellen Datlow has edited science fiction, fantasy and horror short fiction for three decades. She served as fiction editor of Omni magazine and SCI Fiction, and has edited many anthologies for adults, young adults and children. She has won multiple Locus, Hugo, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Awards. She was the recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award for “outstanding contribution to the genre.”
Leslie Fish is one of the best-known authors of filk songs including “Banned from Argo,” a comic song parodying Star Trek which has spawned more than 80 variants since first performed.
James Gunn is a science fiction author, editor, scholar and anthologist. His most significant writings include fiction from the 1960s and 70s and his scholarly Road to Science Fiction collections. Gunn is a founding director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He won a Hugo Award for non-fiction in 1983 and was honored in 2007 as a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of more than 30 books and is known to his fans as Champion Joe, Mojo Storyteller. His is known for his horror stories, the Hap and Leonard mystery/thriller series and the theatrical film Bubba Ho-Tep. Lansdale’s many awards include 16 Bram Stoker Aawards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy Award and the American Mystery Award.
Willie Siros was instrumental in starting the long-running Austin science fiction convention, Armadillocon, serving as chair of the first three editions. Siros also contributed to the founding of the Fandom Association of Central Texas, the original LoneStarCon (the 1985 North American Science Fiction Convention) and Adventures In Crime & Space Books. He is a former para-librarian at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center where he developed its speculative fiction collection.
Norman Spinrad is the author of more than 20 novels, including Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream, Child of Fortune, Pictures at 11, Greenhouse Summer and The Druid King. He has also published approximately 60 short stories collected in a dozen volumes. Spinrad has written teleplays, including the classic Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine.” He is a long time literary critic, occasional film critic and songwriter, and perpetual political analyst.
Darrell K. Sweet is an artist most famous for providing the cover art for the fantasy epic saga The Wheel of Time. He is also the illustrator for the well-known Xanth series by Piers Anthony, the Saga of Recluce series by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and the Runelords series by David Farland. He is also the original cover artist for Stephen R. Donaldson’s series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
In the Panopticon, no one can hear you reboot
As the streets of the UK erupted last week, I happened to be reading an old blue Penguin I picked up on a trip there earlier this summer, a history of another period of English tumult—the seventeenth century.
The 1600s were of course the period of English revolution. A couple of revolutions, actually, political revolutions fueled by broader cultural currents, especially the religious fervor of the Reformation and its idea that our relationship with our deity needn't be mediated by other men, and the new wealth and change represented by the discovery and colonization of the New World. The 17th century always seems to express some of the essential dichotomies of English political culture, incubating a class radicalism that actually achieves the killing of the King, only to put the monarchy back in a short generation later. And reading about political agitators being banned to the Tower has a particular resonance when Cameron seems to want to do the same with Twitter, right after he kills the BlackBerry messenger.
The dismal scientist of the Interregnum was Thomas Hobbes, the first articulator of social contract theory--considering government as the implementation of a social bargain among its citizens to maintain order. Hobbes arrived at his theory through the reverse extrapolation that led him to conceive of a root state of nature in which an essentially self-interested population of human selves ruthlessly competes for the available resources, resulting in a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The theory, as modified by Locke, strongly informs all contemporary constitutional conceptions of republican government. But you know all that from school.
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What would Hobbes do with the revolutions of today's world against the order established by our twentieth century sovereigns? The events of this year thus far have me thinking a lot about whether the current moment of Network Culture represents the base state of a newer nature: the realm of our Network selves, the chaotic new frontier that has not yet been subjugated to the order and dominion of the State, whose initially unbounded freedom we love and seem to be actively (if not quite consciously) importing into the institutional and socio-political fabric of consensus reality. Bruce Sterling captured the emerging situation pretty well in his February 2010 talk on "Atemporality for the Creative Artist," grimly diagnosing the not-yet-evenly-distributed disharmony of a coming decade of Gothic High Tech as the old institutions collapse before their replacements have emerged:
History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you do is go to the operating system, without even thinking of it as a conscious choice.
Then there is the colossally huge, searchable, public domain, which is now at your fingertips. There are methods to track where the eyeballs of the users are going. There are intellectual property problems in revenue, which interferes with scholarship as much as it aids it. There is a practice of ‘ragpicking’ with digital material - of loops, tracks, sampling. There are search engines, which are becoming major intellectual and public political actors. There is ‘collective intelligence’. Or, if you don’t want to dignify it with that term, you can just call it ‘internet meme ooze’. But it’s all over the place, just termite mounds of poorly organized and extremely potent knowledge, quantifiable, interchangeable data with newly networked relations. We cannot get rid of this stuff. It is our new burden, it is there as a fact on the ground, it is a fait accompli.
There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor.
This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent.
It means the end of post-modernism. It means the end of the New World Order, which is about civilizing the entire planet, stopping all the land wars, repressing the terrorism. It means the end of the Washington Consensus of the nineteen nineties. It means the end of the WTO. It means the end of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’; it ended. And it’s moving in a completely different and unexpected direction.
The idea that history ended, and that the market sorts that out, and that the Pentagon bombs it if that doesn’t work - it’s gone. The situation now is one of growing disorder. A failed state, a potentially failed globe, a collapsed WTO, a collapsed Copenhagen, financial collapses, lifeboat economics, transition to nowhere. Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don’t match the territory, and that’s why we are upset.
Now, a new master narrative could arise on paper. That would be easy. On paper, if it were just a matter of paper, we could do it. But to do that via the Internet is about as likely as the Internet becoming a single state-controlled television channel. Because a single historical narrative is a paper narrative.
I don’t think we are going to get one. We could conceivably get a new ideology or a new business model that is able to seize control of the course of events and reinstate some clear path to progress, that gets a democratic consensus behind it. I don’t think that’s likely. At least not for ten years. I could be wrong, but it’s not on the near-term radar.
What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency rescue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a world of ‘Gothic High-Tech’ and ‘Favela Chic’ (as I’ve called it), a crooked networked bazaar of history and futurity, rather than a cathedral of history, and a utopia of futurity.
That’s just the situation on the ground. I don’t want to belabor this point. I don’t want to go on and on about the fact that this is a new historical situation. If you don’t get it by now, you will be forced to get it; you will have no other choice.
That kind of sounds a lot like 2011, to my ears.
Think about the Gothic High Tech through the prism of Abraham Bosse's frontispiece from Leviathan (the picture up at the top of this post), with Hobbes's idea of the 17th century sovereign comprised of the people. Now watch the headless Multitudes that represent the new popular movements of 2011, like the creatures from deep fathoms just beginning to swim around near the surface. Isn't the Network itself looking like the real 21st century sovereign? It's starting to feel like the indigenous peoples of Network Culture (we) are on the verge of a very rare opportunity and responsibility: to rewrite their own social contracts from scratch. Which sounds very cool, but also very scary and disruptive (like, there is no food in cyberspace, and the current products of the social contract do a pretty good job of keeping me from getting killed by people who would like to take my shit).
Sure, every one of these popular movements we are watching in 2011 is different, reflecting unique histories, social conditions, and tactical moments. But it can't be a coincidence that David Cameron, Bashar Al-Assad and Hu Jintao all share one executive tenet: that limiting access to the Network is an essential ingredient to their personal conceptions of law and order (i.e., maintaining the power of the establishments, and failing nation states, they represent). The Network increasingly embodies a school of awakening Leviathans around the world (and, as the Network slowly cracks away at language barriers, a global one). As the cyber-mediated mob develops its self-awareness, it starts to act more like a sentient, directed Multitude. The US wants to give would-be rebels in oppressive societies Network access in a briefcase—but may not have fully parsed what the consequences will be of ubiquitous open Network access at home. Zeus's next baby is coming straight out of his head, and this time it's a litter of infinite avatars.
We don't know what the terms of the new social contract that emerges from this chaos will be. But one can venture a few thoughts:
- The Network will be the more important polity than the nation state (another 17th century idea that emerged from the chaos of the Reformation). Network Culture thinks about borders like it thinks about firewalls.
- The social contract of Network Culture will look more like an operating system than a constitution.
- As a polity, Network Culture has an inherent preference for direct democracy. A society of ubiquitous networking, in which people vote for their favorite products and television contest winners quite effectively though naturally occurring systems, will rapidly challenge the republican filters of constitutional democracy, in which popular ideas about how the society should operate are mediated through sclerotic representatives from the power elite whose upgrade schedule is more horseback courier than iPhone. Is it heresy to suggest last week's debt ceiling "debate" and this week's Bachmann Perry Overdrive make the Federalist Papers look like the user's manual for a 1960s television?
- The most important right of Network Culture must be freedom of speech. Free and open self-expression is the best fertilizer and preservative of other freedoms and virtues in any human social network. Network access, I suppose, becomes a necessary predicate to freedom of speech, right after electricity and running water.
- Secrets—state, trade, personal—will be essentially non-existent, or the most precious things there are.
- Politics will operate much more like capitalism, the most effective socially evolved network on the planet, and the one that (together with the nation state's war machine) created the Network. But its currency will be something more like reputation than money. And in parallel, the institutional agglomerations of Capital will atomize, as the anachronism of the long-term employment contract is replaced by project-based collaboration and episodic generation of wealth, in a society where specialization is only helpful in groups of at least three.
- If you've ever been run down by an Internet mob, you know that protections for minority dissent will be the most important countermeasure, and the thing that will probably be the hardest to figure out. Mob rule in a world without privacy? We are going to end up with plenty of Network hermits, 21st century analogs to the Irish monks the Vikings found living in the caves of early medieval Iceland.
Friday, August 5, 2011
The Lincoln Steffens Show
Over lunch the other day, as the latest manufactured crisis of our Coke v. Pepsi political culture reached its crescendo, a colleague and I got to talking about friends of ours who were in the business of developing new reality television programming. I wondered when the format might get used for more political material, citing the example of the BBC's recent exploration of author Terry Pratchett's advocacy for the elective suicide movement. For example, how about a reality show focused on what it is like to be poor in America? Follow our protagonist around as he desperately tries to get his power bill paid so he doesn't get disconnected…
Great idea, suggested my colleague, but serious political material would be tough to pull off when the key ingredient of a reality show is that it feature extreme examples of contemporary Narcissism. I was not persuaded that Narcissism and the political are mutually exclusive, but I did buy the idea that an earnest, 70s-style journalism-as-reform approach might have trouble permeating the genre.
How about a reality show that features an underground revolutionary cell seeking to overthrow the government? The Fox television series 24 did a wonderful alternate reality version of that, with various plot threads about well-groomed twentysomething American terror cells living in nice oceanfront apartments, looking every bit like the neighbors of the kids on Friends until they got the call from the Network and retrieved the arsenal from their closet. I suppose one could follow an existing American terror cell, like some Animal Liberation Front folks or a loco Idaho Panhandle separatist outfit, but it would be even better—more in the spirit of reality television—if the revolutionary movement were actually created by the producers to make "reality" fit the pitch. It would be cast with cosmetically enhanced all-American Narcissi who espouse no ideology other than the idea of how much the status quo sucks, and how cool it is to be a revolutionary, like Robert DeNiro's plumber in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. They'd be like the Teen Titan versions of the Tea Party, hot left-wing analogues of Palin and Bachmann and Edwards and Barry O, American Ches with Connecticut-made AK-47s, exceptional dentistry, and social media as their Granma, living among us until they get the alert from their radical smart mob. After all, isn't that what CNN has become in 2011? A reality-based narrative in which we all vicariously experience the revolutions we wish we could have.
Of course, the perfect Narcissists to star in the next generation reality show are the ones who created their own illusory documentary narrative long before Survivor and The Bachelor: the American politicians who love nothing more than to engage in on-camera histrionics designed to manipulate the emotions of the general public around a largely illusory conflict between two political parties who represent a fiction of meaningful ideological difference. The drama of the debt ceiling debate really brought that home this week—the gravity of the revelation that the debate was occurring because the economy has *stopped growing*, and the sense that the national political dialogue was becoming more like American Idol than Meet the Press.
Is it possible that the way to make American politics more effective in navigating our way through the chaotic disruption of the early 21st century is to make it operate *more* like reality TV? Watching the blowhards of the 112th Congress play national leaders on the ever-scrolling news feed, products of what J.G. Ballard observed as "politics conducted as a branch of advertising," I feel like it is fair to question whether the basic operation of our Constitutional structure has started to jump the shark.
Why can't we vote like it's 1994? Perhaps I'm the only one who remembers all the utopian excitement at the birth of the Web about the Network's potential as an instrument to realize a more authentically participatory democracy that uses the Network as a means to connect government more directly to the immediate will of the People. The Ford Foundation once had a whole group dedicated to funding experiments in that direction. All of that thinking seems to have been discarded with the hanging chads of November 2000, and the ensuing conspiratorial Luddite freakouts about the idea of software-based election fraud. But you have to wonder, in the style of a Newt Gingrich alt history counterfactual: if the Founders had the Internet, do you think they might have empowered a more distributed, popular referendum-based polity? If that scares you in the way California Constitutional referenda scare us all, how much worse could it be than being governed by our current philosopher kings: Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi? I will check back with you after the carnival sideshow that the 2012 Republican primaries promise to be.
The 20th century revelation that probably had the most lasting cultural impact was Freud's—that people are governed by primitive animal natures and appetitive drives that are often more powerful than reason. Freud's insights were cynically employed on the this side of the Atlantic through his nephew Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, who overthrew the 19th century convention of fact-based advertising in favor of subtextual appeals to the baser natures. Consider his invention of the focus group, in which psychoanalytic group therapy is applied to the experience of a product, which led to a stunt designed to reposition cigarettes as totems of female sexual empowerment (see the BBC/Adam Curtis documentary, The Century of the Self). Reality television is all about putting the forces on display as vividly as possible, in the context of a superimposed narrative.
Doesn't the public debate about something like the debt ceiling want to be conducted like an American Idol contest, in which the myriad different possible approaches to a pressing political issue are filtered through public votes in a Network-based communal medium—politics practiced as the ultimate Facebook wall, and the ultimate decision rendered by the big vote of the millions of viewer/voters? Fox and MSNBC are already becoming the real architects of our politics. I speculate that media will evolve in the age of Network Culture to more directly marry the will of the People to the actions of our political leaders, in a form that will be more like Simon Cowell's Citizen Kane than any of us can imagine. Just ask Ed Miliband, who is trying so hard not to be a contestant. Julian Assange is a better model for the 21st century Lincoln Steffens than Bob Woodward.
The idea seems objectively horrific, because we are so well conditioned to think any sort of rule by the masses is an opportunity for their Freudian manipulation by psychotic, juvenile Narcissists acting out their issues with armies and secret police. But I think we underestimate the power of the Network to also provide the tools that police that. The Network abhors monolithic movements and media, instead providing the deepest possible markets for every idea or thing. And the Network enables the People to conduct surveillance on power, as we have seen in 2011 with regime change enabled by Wikileaks and Arabic dating sites. The 20th Century was the Century of the Self, and we know what that looked like. The Century of the Network is already manifesting new mediated iterations of community that transcend geography and even language. Can't that lead to a better politics? Surely the answer is yes, though not without plenty of crises and failures along the way.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Two Moons
Nature News online and print and television media report a new theory that the early Earth had two moons, and the small one pancaked into Luna, accounting for the remarkably rough texture of the far side compared to the near side. My eye was caught by a riff at the end of the article in the Houston Chronicle (from Associated Press with the byline of Seth Borenstein): The moon plays a big role in literature and song. And poet Todd Davis, a professor of literature at Penn State University, said this idea of two moons – one essentially swallowing the other – will capture the literary imagination. It long since did that in science fiction and fantasy. How many short stories, novels and comic books have put a second small moon in the sky to show that a world is Earth-but-not, or Earthlike-with-differences, or Earth-of-prehistoric-humanity-and something-eventually-happened-to-the-little-moon?
Sunday, July 31, 2011
The movie version
Today's Sunday NYT Magazine has a pretty good rant by Alex Pappademas, "The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes," about why comic book movies almost universally suck. Pappademas contends the problem is the way the narrative orthodoxy of fan culture constrains any auteur factor that might otherwise rejuvenate the material:
As a fan of comics, I understand why fans want comic-book-movie directors to act like respectful stewards, but as a fan of movies, I want to see these movies directed by megalomaniac geniuses who’d rather fly to Cannes in coach than crowd-source one iota of their vision. Maybe then we’d get superhero movies that honor comics’ tradition of inventiveness, instead of D.O.A. brand-extensions like “Green Lantern,” a glorified video-game cut-scene of a movie in which Ryan Reynolds once again plays a jerk who learns to be less jerky.
I’m not suggesting that Marvel give “Thor 2” to somebody like Lars von Trier, much as I’d love to see what that guy would do with Norse mythology and a nine-figure budget. But since the whole reason Hollywood keeps making superhero movies is that they (theoretically) come presold to an audience that buys opening-weekend tickets no matter what, why not turn over these huge canvases to filmmakers who want to splatter them with similarly huge ideas?
Pappademas is right to cite fan culture as culprit, but I doubt that liberating the filmmakers from the fans would really do the trick (not to suggest I wouldn't dig Tarantino's Luke Cage, or Cronenberg's Dr. Strange, or Godard's The Watcher). I remember walking out of the theater after screening the Favreau/Downey Iron Man, baffled by how the experience of finally getting a perfect cinematic realization of a comic I always enjoyed left me feeling completely empty, the film unable to imprint any real lasting impact on my brain.
I grew up reading comics, and enduring the persistent adolescent disappointment of live action versions that failed through technological insufficiencies that rendered all SFX as juvenile self-parody. The 1970s Spider Man "scaling" walls in the style of Adam West's Laugh-In, Bill Bixby's ennui-drunk bus stop drifter Bruce Banner, J.D. Salinger's son as a low-budget Captain America, Alec Baldwin's post-pulp Shadow, Roger Corman's Fantastic Four, Billy Zane's Ghost Who Walks.
All of that accumulated frustration, when finally met by perfect realizations of the comic fantasy as real world, only resulted in a deeper sort of frustration. Part of the cause may be the brain numb from visually processing all of that CGI—the mind sees the wires even if sub-cognitively. But I think the bigger, root reason is that successful cinematic depictions of superheroes obliterate the narrative negative space of the original comic form, and thereby deprive the mind of the imaginative lebensraum that is the real source of wonder.
Comic book superheroes are not meant to be real. They are meant to exist in pen-and-ink, occupying panels, sometimes straddling the white void between the panels. The semiotic vernacular of superheroes is an indigenous product of the form, one which works best operating within the form's inherent abstractions and opportunities for the mind to do the work of closure between the page and the things it doesn't show. Considering comic book movies of any sort through the analytical prism articulated so definitively by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, this conclusion seems compelled.
In his NYT riff, Pappademas is on to something when, after considering all the failures of crowd-bound superhero movies to generate a satisfying experience, he looks in the margins of fandom and finds the far more interesting way that Network Culture deals with film versions of our favorite comics—it *imagines* them:
If that’s too much of a risk, why not give them to craftsmen who understand that not every movie based on a superhero comic needs to operate in a genre called “superhero”? A few years ago, the film-geek Web site Chud.com posted a hoax review of a lost masterpiece from Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah: a stripped-down and brutal take on Batman that abandoned every aspect of the mythos except the vigilantism and the car. Only the fact that this movie never existed keeps it from being my favorite superhero film of all time.
Surely an atemporal invention of an imaginary Peckinpah Batman is the right angle of attack for carrying on these narratives in the age of Gothic High Tech? (Not that having Mickey Rourke as a loco Russian with a nuclear bullwhip is a bad thing.) Coming soon: Terrence Malick's 1973 High Evolutionary, John Woo's 1983 Cantonese Nick Fury and J.D. Salinger's Bucky Barnes, AWOL in 'Nam with Alice Cooper and the Beav.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Rocketeer revisited
I'm a sucker for the swash-buckling, cliffhanger adventures of the 1930s pulp adventure heroes. I deeply love the movies Raiders of the Lost Ark and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and enjoyed the short-lived TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey so much that I wrote up a springboard to relaunch it as an ongoing comic book series in the early years of our new century. Lest you think that was a product of wishful thinking and ill-advised fan fiction, I actually got as far as discussing licensing with Universal before the comic publisher got cold feet and backed out (for the record, Universal wasn't even sure if they still owned the rights. Most of the people I spoke with hadn't even heard of the series. Can I pick a hot property, or what?). But The Rocketeer? Wowness!
For those of you unfamiliar with The Rocketeer, let me explain. No, there is no time. Let me sum up: Cliff Secord, a Gee Bee racing pilot in 1938 discovers a stolen rocket pack designed by Doc Freakin' Savage that allows a man to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. With the aid of his airplane mechanic buddy Peavy, he debuts an air show stunt act as the Rocketeer to make enough money to keep his bombshell "art model" girlfriend Betty happy, but soon runs afoul of mobsters and Nazi agents who want to steal the rocket pack. Oh, the Feds and Doc Savage (along with Savage's assistant Monk and Ham) want the rocket pack, too. Cliff, headstrong and passionate, doesn't always make the wisest of choices. Mayhem ensues. And that's just the first story arc. The second, "Cliff's New York Adventure," follows up immediately on the first with Cliff chasing his now-estranged girlfriend to New York City, where he runs into that other great pulp character, the Shadow, who enlists Cliff's help in thwarting a serial killer. That's just aces in my book. Stevens was careful never to name or overtly identify any of these trademarked characters, but the homage is clear enough to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the genre. In 1991 a well-regarded movie version was put out by Disney, which combined elements of both storylines to craft a more cohesive plot. The "Betty" character was changed to "Jenny" and her overt sexuality toned down, while Cliff was somewhat less of a lunkhead in the film, but other than that, the spirit of the film is remarkably faithful to the comic, evidence of Stevens' close involvement with the project (one thing that surprised me is that there is not Neville Sinclair/Errol Flynn analogue in the comics. I'd heard the Errol Flynn connection for years, obviously from people who'd never actually read Stevens' original).
I can't recall when I actually became aware of the existence of Dave Stevens' Rocketeer. I was aware of the character in comic form before the movie adaptation came out in 1991. I almost certainly did not know about it prior to the fall of 1988, when I arrived at college and discovered my first dedicated comic book retailer. Up until then, I'd lived in a very small town and hadn't seen comics with any regularity until the local grocery store started carrying Marvel and DC on the magazine racks in 1987 (I know the date well, because I still have Silver Surfer no. 1 in my long boxes--oh, that Ben Grimm!). Somewhere along the line, I came across The Rocketeer and got all giddy. I can't recall if it was in the back pages of Starslayer or a later incarnation. I just remember the designs and artwork were killer, and I'd never seen anything like it. I also never owned anything like it either. For some reason or other, I never managed to acquire a single issue of The Rocketeer in comic form, with the exception of the Peter David/Russ Heath movie adaptation, which doesn't really count. Area comic shops didn't have it in their back issue bins. When Wizard World came to Texas in November of 2003, I made the long trip up to Dallas (along with Mark Finn) with the intent to buy every single comic book that ever featured Dave Stevens' inspired creation. I went home empty-handed. There were plenty of Cerebus collections, but no Rocketeer anything. I turned to Ebay and discovered the joys of being sniped constantly or watching back issues go for outrageous sums. For a comic I was ostensibly a big fan of, I was having a hell of a time getting my hands on any. At some point, I gave up and forgot about it.
Enter IDW Publishing. Before Stevens' untimely death in 2008, the wheels were set in motion for a collected omnibus publication of all of Stevens' Rocketeer stories from the previous two decades. The Rocketeer: The Complete Deluxe Adventures is a magnificent book. I can't stress that enough. It's also quite costly at $75 retail (a non-deluxe edition, The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures, can be had for around $20). I also feel obligated to point out there's the Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer Artist's Edition available for the bargain price of $250 (although it was initially offered by IDW for $100), which reproduces Stevens' page layouts with pencil marks, liquid paper and all the artistic detritus that comes with producing a comic. I'm not that hard-core. But what does the deluxe edition bring to the table that the other doesn't? Lots. First of all, it's got a gorgeous, full-color slipcase, as seen two images up, and is oversized with lush, lush, lush artwork. Both of Stevens' completed Rocketeer adventures: The Rocketeer and The Rocketeer: Cliff's New York Adventure simply pop off the page with all-new coloring by Laura Martin. Every single page could be framed as a work of art. I'm telling you, it's that good.
This book is a trove for Stevens fans. As you can see above, there are a generous number of page breakdowns along with Stevens' original, hand-written scripts on yellow legal pad. You don't get more authentic than this. While entire scripts aren't reprinted, and his breakdowns only give a hint to his fluid creative process, they're valuable reference material for aspiring comic writers as well as artists on how one particularly gifted creator made his magic. There's also a nice section on the legendary Bettie Page, the 50s pin-up icon who was the direct inspiration for Cliff Secord's girlfriend "Betty" in the comic. I don't know if any Rocketeer fans are unaware of the story by this point, but The Rocketeer helped revived mainstream interest in Page, eventually prompting Stevens to track her down and discover the former model (living in modest conditions) was not receiving any compensation from all the businesses profiting from her likeness. Stevens took on the role of her financial guardian of sorts, and Page was able to live out her life in relative comfort. It's a nice story, and reaffirms that people can do nice things for each other because it's the right thing to do. I also learned that B-movie "Scream Queen" Brinke Stevens (who also happens to be Dave Stevens' ex-wife) modeled for the iconic Betty photo session splash in the initial storyline's run. Learn something new every day.
There's a host of pencil sketches, designs and memorabilia ideas packed into the book that makes me want to cry, they're so beautiful. There's one sketch for an unproduced metal sign Stevens worked up that I'd love to have hanging in my office. But the most distressing thing about the collection is how damn few Rocketeer stories ever got published. It seems like there should be a lot more, since Stevens first published his masterwork in 1982 and a pretty good movie adaptation came out in 1991. But Stevens only completed two storylines that together barely fill the number of pages we've come to expect for a "graphic novel." And even so, "Cliff's New York Adventure" is open ended, with Cliff and Betty's relationship issues unresolved and Cliff still on the East Coast with the ownership issues of the rocket pack unresolved. Stevens' gleeful obsession with pulp-era characters--populating his two Rocketeer stories with unnamed versions of Doc Savage and the Shadow--is a clear precursor to Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--so it's no surprise that his next proposed storyline picks up directly after "New York Adventure" ends, finding Cliff in New Jersey and involved with another character that first appeared in 1938, Superman. And not just any Superman, but the Superman of 1938, as Siegel and Schuster created him, literally "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound." As if that's not enough to get any comic geek's heart pumping, Stevens sets the epic team-up on Halloween, 1938. Yeah, Orson Wells' Mercury Theatre broadcast of "War of the Worlds." Except that the alien invasion is real, and the Rocketeer and Superman have to team up to save the Earth. And defeat a giant robot as well. Naturally, DC Comics turned the story down and it remains unpublished to this day. Philistines!
But there is always hope. IDW Publishing has brought back the character with The Rocketeer Adventures, a mini-series anthology backed by an all-star lineup of talent. The collected volume is due out in November, and I can't wait to see what extra goodies are packed in there. Hopefully, this new mini-series will beget another, and perhaps even an ongoing. In a perfect world, we will never have to go so long between Rocketeer stories ever again, even if Dave Stevens is no longer around to share them with us.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
No fear of the past, either
Behold, No Fear of the Future boldly jumps into the Facebook fray, a mere half decade after this social networking site came to dominate the interwebs. Tremble at our foresight and cutting-edge initiative! "Like" us if you dare!
Coming soon: Our very own MySpace page!
Coming soon: Our very own MySpace page!
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