#good writers recognise how good storytelling works in different mediums

[partywithponies]

Listen to me. If you want your media literacy to improve, you have to consume a variety of media. And I don't just mean a variety of genres or a variety of writers or a variety of target demographics (though absolutely those as well), I mean a variety of mediums. Read books. Watch TV. Watch films. Listen to radio plays. Watch theatre productions. Watch documentaries. Read comics and graphic novels. Goddammit read fanfic and watch youtube videos as well, just for the love of god have variety. Learn to recognise how different mediums convey themes and information in different ways. It's like food groups, you need a little bit of all of them to be healthy.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

okay so after i saw the announcement of a stranger things animated show, i looked into it just for more context and found out that this year, a stranger things stage show opens in london, and as a british theatre nerd, i may have fell down a rabbit hole.

to preface, i have not studied drama since i was 16. i did not pursue further it as much as i wish i had. i have, however, seen many many plays and musicals, both amateur and professional. i know at least a little more than the average person.

so if youre remotely interested in hearing amateur analysis of what we know of stranger things: the last shadow, welcome:

"take theatrical storytelling and stagecraft to a whole new dimension"

so in one article, i found this quote. i couldnt find who said it exactly, just someone associated with the play.

i'm hoping, this is just marketing; i really hope its just marketing. because this feels a bit insulting to uh, a lot of people who came before. such as augusto boal who founded theatre of the oppressed or konstantin stanislavski or bertolt brecht or antonin artaud who founded theatre of cruelty.

i mention artaud because im expecting some elements from theatre of cruelty. if you look up any artaud plays or theatre of cruelty plays on youtube, youll probably get why.

but anyway, as you might have gathered, this hasnt inspired confidence in me. and i already wasnt confident because it is very difficult to translate film or tv to theatre, and vice versa. look at phantom 2004. i dont believe the duffers would be able to do this; this isnt even a knock on their writing, i dont think most writers could do this without practice.

and so i went to their website to see who else was involved

now is probably a great time to mention how inaccessible their website is. in the background of their website, there are small flashing lights all over the screen. theres no warning for this.

it literally triggered a migraine in me and i had to take my strongest medication for it. fuck you website designer.

(also, just gonna mention it here, i do like the poster and some of the website design, ignoring the stupid lights, but i cannot find the artist ANYWHERE on the website, which as an artist, fuck you)

anyway, first thing i did was look at who is writing it, and im in two minds about it. there are four writers credited: kate trefry, duffer brother 1, duffer brother 2, and jack thorne.

if you recognise jack thornes name, its probably because he wrote the awful harry potter play.

HOWEVER, hes actually quite a competent writer like 90% of the time. his plays tend to get at least 3 out of 5 stars. looking through the reviews, his best regarded plays are bunny, hope, solid life of sugar water, and his adaptation of let the right one in

that last one is very promising because he drew both on the book and film in adaptation. jack thorne does know how to adapt media into different mediums. he has also won an adaption award for his adaption of a christmas carol. his adaptation of the film after life has also be commended for being a good adaption.

this is not to say his work isnt without criticism. i mean, he wrote cursed child. he also has been criticised for slow pacing, shallow writing and one of his more recent plays, sunday, apparently had a "hello fellow kids" vibe. he is now in his 40s afterall.

so a bit of a mixed bag, but a good sign in terms of it not being simply terrible due to lack of understanding of medium.

i also have to mention that jack thorne is disabled and is an advocate for disabled folks in the dramatic arts. when he wrote the solid life of sugar water, he dictated that one character should always be played by a deaf actor. he does also write many disabled stories. his impact is a net positive.

(hes also frank skinners brother-in-law which is fun)

now, the other three writers have never written for stage, which uh, yeah, no, that does the opposite of inspiring courage in me. it is a very different process than writing for films or tv, and none of them have any writing credits for stage work.

on the poster, kate trefry is credited as the main writer which could go either way. shes not written much for screen. she has at least written stranger things episodes so shes not going into it blind.

honestly, i just hope they use jack thorne and his expertise more than they need to. hes the wise old man in their group and i really hope they listen to him and dont just try and do it all themselves.

now onto the director: stephen daldry. ive never seen his work live, but when i was studying drama, i really wanted to.

to give you an idea as to why, when david hare was working on via dolorosa, he had daldry as a co-director and when daldry responded no to hare asking if something was over the top, hare said "your top is situated some hundred yards above everyone else. ive seen your productions."

do you get why i want to see one of his productions asdfdesd his work tends to be very expressionistic and vivid. his directing style has been described as consistent stylised helming. hes won a lot of awards and he tends to get 4/5 stars at the very least on his works.

hes also helped to adapt the billy elliot movie (which is both fantastic and directed by him) to stage and it was fantastic.

hes also gay <3

the set designer is miriam buether. ive never seen any of her work live so i cant speak for the atmosphere it creates, but her setwork looks fine. shes versatile and doesnt need to go over the top with spectacle for her sets to look good.

in particular, i really enjoy her sets for earthquakes in london. the colour work there is *chef's kiss*

unfortunately, theyve kept it all very under wraps as to the tone the stageshow is going to take so i dont know how either buethers set design of daldrys directing is going to translate.

by combining them, i would expect a very expressionistic, very brightly coloured show, which, theres some cognitive dissonance round the corner.

also the premise is about young!hopper, young!joyce, young!bob and henry creel, with some kind of mystery. id expect a more naturalistic approach with this premise, but daldry isnt exactly known for that. so im in two minds.

however, one of his best regarded shows is his adaption of an inspector calls. ive only seen a naturalistic version of that and it very much reads naturalistic. daldrys was the opposite, even going as far as swapping out the fancy dinner hall for the blitz. so if anyone is gonna make it work, it would be daldry.

in terms of light design, thats jon clark. once again, ive never seen any of his work in person so im going off of photos but oh my fucking god i love his work with shadows. hes won many awards and he fucking deserves them.

sound design is the same. ive never heard a paul arditti sound design show in person and bootlegs dont have the best audio. hes award-winning, however, so it seems like thats in good hands.

one thing i was very interested about was how they were going to translate the upside down and the monsters. the show relies on cgi which obviously, you cant really do cgi on a stage; it would just look kinda shit.

their solution seems to be hiring two illusion designers.

i couldnt find much on the first, chris fisher. hes a member of the magic circle and hes done a lot of work so he seems accomplished.

the second one, im honestly kind of excited about. the second is jamie harrison who is the co-artistic director for a company called vox motus WHO ARE SO FUCKING COOL.

there is no mention of his partner in vox motus, candice edmunds, but that could mean nothing.

instead of trying to explain what vox motus do, im just gonna copy two quotes from their website:

"ours is a theatre of story-telling visuals, transformational design, magic, comedy, music, physical performance, puppetry, multi-media and most importantly thrills."

"we are drawn to stories that explore extremes of behaviour and taboos in the contemporary world: often unbelievable true tales that delve into the bizarre, glorious, exhilarating and macabre."

look up their stuff, its so fucking cool. there is also definitely some elements of artaud in their work. it gives me a lot of confidence for the show being enjoyable even if the writing is bad, because spectacle can go a long way.

i genuinely kinda want to go see this show now because i really want to see their work, and id get a chance to see a daldry play.

so like a tl/dr for this part: im not confident in the writing but i dont necessarily think itll be bad. i think the worst itll be is sufficient and mediocre, if they listen to jack thorne. i do have a lot of confident in the visual aspects and spectacle; even if the writing is shit, it will look good.

now im going to be an annoying disabled person and point out some accessibility stuff:

as i mentioned before, the website has small flashing lights all over the background. theres no warning for this. it triggered a migraine for me which was the best three options considering they could have also triggered visual disturbances in my eyes (aka seeing things that arent there due to my iih) or epileptic symptoms due to brain damage.

the theatre itself does have wheelchair access at the side of the building it also has accessible toilets. there is no onsite parking which does make it more difficult for wheelchair users.

they have said they will present captioned, audio-described and british sign language performances, but the dates are not yet set. they instruct you to keep checking . im a little intrigued about this and a little concerned considering its currently may 9th and it opens 17th november.

if you need accessible tickets, you need to have atg access membership. this is a third party company. to have this, you have to show paperwork or documents to prove that you're disabled which is often not possible for many disabled folks. i dont have a written diagnosis for anything besides my adhd diagnosis because i was diagnosed in person or over the phone. luckily, i receive pip so i qualify but its a ridiculous standard.

in the faq, theres a question about being aware of any potential trigger warnings; the answer to this is copy and pasted from the question above which asked about age rating and parental guidance, apart from them adding that there will be flashing lights in the show.

and finally some extra details:

there is a £3.80 transaction charge on top of ticket purchases

you cannot book over the phone

they are all e-tickets

currently, you cannot buy group tickets or student tickets, and you can only purchase a max of 6 tickets.

they are planning a weekly-lottery for late-release tickets, and this will be announced closer to the first show

there is not a confirmed runtime

they have no current plans to move the show outside of london

the age rating is 12+. this means under 16s must be accompanied by adults and under 5s are just not allowed in. not entirely sure how it works if youre age 6 to 11.

the most common ticket price i saw was starting at £45 (about $57). the second most common was starting at £75 (about $95).

there were some tickets starting at £20 (about $25).

i might actually buy a ticket and see it. i would have to save for it but i could do it and then tell you if its shit or not lmao

[elisaenglish]

The Power of Cautionary Questions: Neil Gaiman on Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Why We Read, and How Speculative Storytelling Enlarges Our Humanity

“Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories… from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human.”

“The important thing,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in contemplating the cultural role of speculative fiction and the task of its writer, “is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.”In doing so, she argued, imaginative storytelling can intercept the inertia of oppressive institutions, perilous social mores, and other stagnations of progress that contract our scope of the possible.

Hardly any work of imaginative storytelling has stood as more enduring and full-bodied a testament to this ideal than Ray Bradbury’s 1953 masterwork Fahrenheit 451 — a love letter to books and to the people who care about them and, perhaps above all, to the very capacity for caring. This capacity was the animating force of Bradbury’s uncommon genius, and it finds a contemporary counterpart and kindred spirit in Neil Gaiman — a writer of firm conviction and porous curiosity, an idealist amid our morass of cynicism, writing to remind us over and over again who we are and who we can be if we commit to wresting goodness out of our imperfect humanity.

The abiding splendor and significance of the ideas and ideals at the heart of Bradbury’s classic is what Gaiman explores in a beautiful piece titled “Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, and What Science Fiction Is and Does,” originally written as an introduction to a sixtieth-anniversary edition of the book and now included in his altogether magnificent The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (public library) — a collection of Gaiman’s essays, speeches, reviews, and various meditations on life, literature, and the life and love of literature.

Gaiman begins at the beginning — the elemental impulse to imagine, to record these imaginings, and to share them with others:

“Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it’s good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.) The reasons for writing about the day after tomorrow, and all the tomorrows that follow it, are as many and as varied as the people writing.”

With an eye to the Bradbury classic’s cultural role as “a book of warning” and “a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted,” Gaiman offers a taxonomy of the three types of speculative questions that frame our scope of alternative possibilities:

“There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet (you can call it science fiction or speculative fiction; you can call it anything you wish) and they are simple phrases:

What if… ? If only… If this goes on…

“What if… ?” gives us change, a departure from our lives. (What if aliens landed tomorrow and gave us everything we wanted, but at a price?)

“If only…” lets us explore the glories and dangers of tomorrow. (If only dogs could talk. If only I was invisible.)

“If this goes on…�� is the most predictive of the three, although it doesn’t try to predict an actual future with all its messy confusion. Instead, “If this goes on…” fiction takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious and normally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that one thing, became bigger, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought and behaved. (If this goes on, all communication everywhere will be through text messages or computers, and direct speech between two people, without a machine, will be outlawed.)

It’s a cautionary question, and it lets us explore cautionary worlds.”

Therein, Gaiman argues, lies the greatest gift of the book — in raising cautionary questions about the present and its alternatives, rather than in predicting the future. He considers this broader role of all speculative fiction:

“People think, wrongly, that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t — or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it. Futures are huge things that come with many elements and a billion variables, and the human race has a habit of listening to predictions for what the future will bring and then doing something quite different.

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present. Taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place.”

This offering of alternative perspectives is as nourishing to culture as the difficult but necessary practice of alternative interpretations is to our inner lives and our psychological stability — lest we forget, our perilous pathology of self-criticism arises from an incapacity for such multiplicity of interpretation and it enslaves us in the same way that our cultural blinders do. Speculative fiction, Gaiman argues, grants us a liberation of vision — but only so long as we honor its most essential characteristic: the multiplicity of meanings to any one story. Half a century after Susan Sontag’s admonition against the tyranny of interpretation, he cautions:

“Listen.

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.

If they tell you that that is all the story is about, they are very definitely wrong.

Any story is about a host of things. It is about the author; it is about the world the author sees and deals with and lives in; it is about the words chosen and the way those words are deployed; it is about the story itself and what happens in the story; it is about the people in the story; it is polemic; it is opinion.

An author’s opinions of what a story is about are always valid and are always true: the author was there, after all, when the book was written. She came up with each word and knows why she used that word instead of another. But an author is a creature of her time, and even she cannot see everything that her book is about.”

Bradbury was only thirty-two when he began writing the short story that became Fahrenheit 451 and he wrote it on a rental typewriter in a university basement library. It was of its time — a time when the chills of the Cold War had just been stoked and the golden era of consumerism was gathering momentum and television was coming of age as a mass medium — but it is also, in its central cautionary question, timeless.

Gaiman considers that question:

“If this goes on…” thought Ray Bradbury, “nobody will read books anymore,” and the book began.

[…]

“What if… firemen burned down houses instead of saving them?” Bradbury thought, and now he had his way in to the story. He had a fireman named Guy Montag, who saved a book from the flames instead of burning it.

“If only… books could be saved,” he thought. If you destroy all the physical books, how can you still save them?

[…]

He called the Los Angeles fire department and asked them at what temperature paper burned. Fahrenheit 451, somebody told him. He had his title. It didn’t matter if it was true or not.

The book was published and acclaimed. People loved the book, and they argued about it. It was a novel about censorship, they said, about mind control, about humanity. About government control of our lives. About books.”

But the aboutness of the book, like the aboutness of any book, Gaiman reminds us, is porous and responsive and in constant dynamic interaction with the context of its time, its place, and the locus of circumstances in the reader’s life at the particular moment of reading it.

In a testament to Susan Sontag’s case for rereading as rebirth, Gaiman recounts the evolution of the Bradbury classic along the axis of his own life:

“I read Fahrenheit 451 as a boy: I did not understand Guy Montag, did not understand why he did what he did, but I understood the love of books that drove him. Books were the most important things in my life. The huge wall-screen televisions were as futuristic and implausible as the idea that people on the television would talk to me, that I could take part, if I had a script. It was never a favorite book: it was too dark, too bleak for that. But when I read a story called “Usher II” in The Silver Locusts (the UK title for The Martian Chronicles), I recognised the world of outlawed authors and imagination with a fierce sort of familiar joy.

When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people.

Rereading it as an adult I find myself marvelling at the book once more. It is all of those things, yes, but it is also a period piece… A young reader, finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.

But still, the heart of the book remains untouched, and the questions Bradbury raises remain as valid and important.”

The most central of these questions is also the most abiding: Why do we need books at all? It’s a question to which some of humanity’s most luminous minds have provided spirited answers over the millennia. For Galileo, books were a way of having superhuman powers; for Kafka, “the axe for the frozen sea within us”; for Carl Sagan, “proof that humans are capable of working magic”; for James Baldwin, a way to change our destiny; for Rebecca Solnit, the planting of seeds from which enormous possibility can blossom; for Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, our ultimate frontier of freedom. “Reading,” E.B. White wrote as he peered into the future of reading shortly before Bradbury wrote his masterpiece, “is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.” Bradbury himself considered reading the key to democracy.

Gaiman contributes his own answer, straddling the political and the poetic:

“Why do we need the things in books? The poems, the essays, the stories? Authors disagree. Authors are human and fallible and foolish. Stories are lies after all, tales of people who never existed and the things that never actually happened to them. Why should we read them? Why should we care?

The teller and the tale are very different. We must not forget that.

Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”

In another short piece from the book, titled “Credo,” Gaiman builds on this foundational truth:

“I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.

I believe that you can set your own ideas against ideas you dislike. That you should be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, offend, insult, rage, mock, sing, dramatise, and deny.

I do not believe that burning, murdering, exploding people, smashing their heads with rocks (to let the bad ideas out), drowning them or even defeating them will work to contain ideas you do not like. Ideas spring up where you do not expect them, like weeds, and are as difficult to control.

I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas.”

The View from the Cheap Seats is a tremendous read in its totality — an electrifying packet of that “fierce sort of familiar joy” full of Gaiman’s beautifully articulated beliefs about such centralities of the human experience as art, gender, fear, and community, alongside his reflections on and homages to friends, heroes, and kindred spirits like Terry Pratchett, Charles Vess, Douglas Adams, and Tori Amos.

Even the book’s dedication to Gaiman’s newborn son radiates his genial genius:

“For Ash, who is new, for when he is grown.

These were some of the things your father loved and said and cared about and believed, a long time ago.”

Complement this particular portion with Bradbury on the importance of love in creative work and the secret of a fulfilling vocation, then revisit Gaiman on how stories last, the psychological pillars of the creative life, why fairy tales captivate us, his eight rules of writing, and his advice to aspiring writers.

Source: Maria Popova, brainpickings.org (31st May 2016)

[izzitoovey-blog]

SCRIBERS HIVE - LIVE BRIEF

‘Scribers Hive’ is part of the company called ‘YouPress’, which is an association providing young people opportunities to communicate their talents. 

Scribers Hive however, more specifies in ‘writers, storytellers and changemakers’. Their staff came to KSA in need for some assistance to create a new brand identity and improve their web design. We were put into small groups to help achieve different perspectives to the brief; my group consists of 4 people. 

Here is our re-written brief explaining what our impression of what Scribershive wants us to achieve: 

Here are some annotations of what we think works well with their website and what could be improved:

These features are supposed to be helpful to the user but are in many cases used in the wrong place or do not include enough information for the user to have an easy experience navigating the site. 

Where it says ‘submit art work’, this does not make sense as it is not purely just art work that is submitted to Sribershive, so an alternative work needs to be used to accommodate all mediums. 

This login section needs significant changes. The twitter link does not work when clicked on, the layout is very simple and not engaging for a creative audience. Maybe the shape of the logo could be the backdrop for the whole page to give it some sort of uniformly visual compared to the rest of the website. 

Competitors - ‘Medium’ is a great platform to compare to the likes of SH in terms of what we could do to make the site look more slick and interactive. Here are some annotations of what we thought was good about this homepage and why. 

LOGO WORK: 

The existing Scribershive logo looks overcrowded. These are some of the criticisms I have towards it:

- The ‘SH’ is too large, it doesn't fit well with the hexagonal shape and the sketchy writing style doesn't give it a strong visual identity. 

- If you shrink this logo down very small, it is not very recognisable at all which indicates it isn't a strong logo. 

- Maybe ‘SH’ doesn't need to be included in the logo but have a symbol that reflects it? (A bee, a hive, a pen etc)

Here are some of my experimentations with how the logo could be redesigned. I like the idea of keeping the hexagon shape but portraying it in a different manner. 

Here are a couple of alternative test ideas for the SH logo, including the idea of a bee and or a hive. The site is for young adults though and these logos don't convey a sense of maturity as much as something more simple could. 

This is why we decided to go with just a symbol for the logo, the colours are slightly dulled down giving it a more mature identity, while still maintaining the original shapes that SH has. 

I really like this logo, it is simple but effective and it is recognisable at a smaller scale. 

We still have a few weeks to complete our final visuals to present to the staff at ScribersHive. 

[shepgeek]

To Boldly Go

When the great film trilogies are listed, the back-to-back run of Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home are rarely mentioned.  For starters any franchise from the 1980s, where roman numerals were thrown about merrily, will bear suspicion of artistic scepticism. Indeed, it wasn’t until JJ Abrams’ reboot that the idea would even be considered that any film from this franchise might be taken seriously as a piece of cinema rather than a routine trip for Paramount to milk their cash cow. Star Trek was considered niche entertainment for nerds with occasional nostalgic crossover appeal; something to be acknowledged as popular to a degree but rarely held up as anything like the best of what the medium has to offer. In these three films, however, there can be found huge creativity, bold authorial choices, and a keen sense of storytelling momentum based around a compelling and hugely resonant central theme. Within the genre, the films could hardly be more different from each other: Wrath of Khan is a peerless adventure, blending themes of obsession and revenge with adventure and duty, heavily inspired by the swashbuckling tales of 18th century naval adventures. The Voyage Home, on the other hand, is a prime example of the 1980s fish-out-of-water comedy subgenre. Bridging them is the film considered the least of the three but, whilst it is perhaps the most conservative in terms of scale, the propensity for The Search for Spock to be dismissed as “an odd numbered one” masks the moments where it comprehensively masters what the entire franchise was all about. With its operatic brio and earnest embrace of famous science fiction tropes, director Leonard Nimoy’s The Search for Spock is an underrated film in an underrated trilogy and, 35 years on, hiding within it is a 20-minute sequence which, for this writer, remains the defining moment within the entire franchise.

Within the film it is quickly established that the crew have a chance to do right by their fallen comrade, but have been ordered in no uncertain terms to keep away from his resting place. For Kirk, permission is not a luxury he has ever particularly sought and, from the moment he growls “The word is no: I am therefore going anyway”, the film releases the melancholy of its mournful opening act. Sporting a magnificently implausible leather collar, not enough is made of just how good Shatner is in these films. His impudent charisma led us to genuine heartbreak in the previous chapter and he sustains Kirk’s unimpeachable authority with effortless ease. We can see our hero struggling, failing, learning but never yielding, but to see his plan through he needs his crew, leading to why the scene that follows soars: it is the definitive instance of the Enterprise crew working as one. The dramatic stakes are unusually low in this film: there is no universe to save this time, just one man. The gentle inversion of Spock’s “needs of the many” axiom is honest and maybe a little unsubtle but certainly compelling, and a theme throughout the film of what we do for those who matter the most to us is precisely what elevates this franchise above its peers. Those who dismiss Star Trek as frivolous miss this central pull: each crew is always based around this core camaraderie, an ensemble of characters whose loyalty inspires. The Search for Spock is dramatically least compelling of the trilogy but emotionally the most resonant.

The crew plot to steal back their battered starship in what becomes, atypically for the franchise, a set piece. This segment has the feel of a caper to it and eschews visual fireworks for a steady and patient escalation of the stakes and an intensifying focus on the faces of the actors to build the drama: we know what this crew is risking here and we become desperate for them to succeed. On paper what follows is simply some light levels of banter, a few sweaty brows and the Enterprise reversing out of a garage and yet it is imbued with such an epic scale for these characters that it swells the heart. The heist itself has a giddy sense of fun to it, of propulsive excitement: composer James Horner uses an eclectic percussive string instrument (a cimbalom) to set this feeling, but it builds slowly and steadily. The choice to gradually intensify the scope throughout a longer set piece was not out of character for the time and, one suspects, borne from budgetary restrictions, but certainly it would be unimaginable to find such patience in a modern blockbuster, and even the most recent and honest tribute Star Trek Beyond overflows with startling visuals during its own action beats.

The pace of the escape is determined in part by the choices made by previous directors Robert Wise and Nicholas Meyer, as Trek had already decided that, instead of the buzzing, kinetic spitfire battles of the Star Wars films, these ships of the line would be enormous stately galleons. Harder to manoeuvre, they add an epic scale to even the smallest of lines: “One quarter impulse power” is followed soon after by an “Aye Sir”: this is, after all, the finest crew in the fleet. There are other advantages as ILM’s gorgeous models have aged exceptionally well, bringing a physicality that later CGI struggles to recapture, whilst the elegant iconography of the famous ship is amplified by Nimoy’s of framing it from differing scales.

As the heist develops it allows the crew to quietly shine. Long reconciled to be left supporting the core leads from the side-lines, Nimoy recognised that the whole film would greatly benefit from using his castmates to add shading around the edges, and he spends snippets of time on the Enterprise crew, implying in his director commentary that he had to defend this choice, one assumes, to Shatner. Whilst Kirk remains his old gung-ho self (only a single punch of a security guard is needed) Nimoy gives Sulu, donning what appears to be a cape, a moment of nonchalant badassery, notably showing us Kirk’s reaction of impressed surprise. The message is simple- nobody messes with our heroes and McCoy repeats this to Uhura in a similarly authoritative beat moments later. The caper crackles with its own history and our heroes (and the script) are visibly enjoying themselves here: McCoy’s smile as his friends break him from his jail is magical, whilst the dialogue is peppered with jokes and callbacks to the Kobayashi Maru, or Spock’s revenge on McCoy “for all those arguments he lost”. The final flourish is the addition of an antagonist: the film sets up the USS Excelsior as a new and improved Federation prototype (an idea which is immediately offensive) and their priggish, pompous captain is instantly hissable. Nimoy knew better than anyone that TV sets were awash with talented actors who had more depth to be exploited, casting Taxi’s Christopher Lloyd as his villain and using Hillstreet Blues actor James Sikking here. Sikking does an incredible job with a small part, immediately making Captain Styles a startlingly slappable presence. After being bruisingly insensitive to Scotty (writer Harve Bennet’s lists Scotty’s reply as his favourite line in the film), when we see Styles aboard his titanic ship he is blithely filing his nails and taking a no-look grab of what appears to be a redundant space cane. Styles is not the only example of how the storytelling detail and colour in this section, with a janitor looking on agog as the Enterprise makes her exit, building a sense of scale, opportunistic adventure and disbelief that Kirk, the Federation’s greatest hero, was going rogue. Styles’ final decision, calling out Kirk (by name, not rank) gives the scene’s final punchline a pleasing rush of schadenfreude.

 The final ingredient to this section cannot be overestimated as James Horner’s score develops cues from his Wrath of Khan score (namely Battle in Mutara Nebula & Genesis Countdown- two of the finest cues in 20th century film composition) to lend colossal weight to the enormity of these actions for our heroes. A 91-piece orchestra escalates his two primary themes to a gloriously triumphant conclusion, as Horner deploys the French horns blasting at the limits of their range, a joyous trademark of that composer and an enormous final flourish as the Enterprise finally clears her docks.

Throughout this short set piece, we see Star Trek in a perfect microcosm. Everything that it remains most loved for is perfectly conveyed in this sequence by the script, the direction, the performances, the editing and the composition via an emotional core of considerable heft. When Kirk smiles to say “May the wind be at our backs” and Alexander Courage’s famous fanfare salutes them back, the loyalty and camaraderie of this family is cemented.

 It ends as Kirk takes his Captain’s chair; unwavering, resolute and with his crew at his back as the bridge lighting shifts, purposefully.

“Aye Sir.

Warp Speed.”

[thisiscomics]

I’m not really an expert on the Wildstorm universe, which was essentially Jim Lee’s section of Image Comics when it was founded, before becoming a DC Comics imprint and then eventually being shut down (which led to Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics ceasing to be, as he could work with DC at one step removed via the imprint, but not directly with the publisher), with many of the original Wildstorm characters being folded into the DC Universe as part of The New 52 reboot.

Most of my experience of it has been connected to writers, starting with Warren Ellis on The Authority (and then back to his run on Stormwatch), then Joe Casey on Wildcats and Wildcats Version 3.0 (and then back to Alan Moore and James Robinson writing WildC.A.T.S.), and probably a few others here and there. And so I recognise a lot of the players here, but I’m buying this for the creative team, just like before, not out of any loyalty to the characters.

Thus I can’t judge what the reaction would be from someone who is fan of the Wildstorm universe, but I enjoy the fact that, unlike any DC Universe Rebirth story, this isn’t about previous continuity and picking and choosing what is canon. Ellis has made clear in promotional interviews that this is a clean slate, and then the first nine panel page clearly symbolises this for anyone that remembers the characters.

Here, you can see red markings on the character’s face, very similar to the original character design of Zealot. As she washes blood from her hands, and the scene around her becomes clearer, she calls in a report, confirming that she is Zealot (or that’s her call sign at least). In the last two panels, the markings on her face are being wiped off as well, confirming it was just more blood, albeit in coincidental splatter pattern. And just like that, the slate is wiped clean and we are in a new universe where we can see familiar pieces being moved across a completely different board, presumably selected either because of Ellis’s fondness for the character (which I imagine is the case with Angie Spica, The Authority’s Engineer) or because they suit his themes, whatever they turn out to be. ‘The Future’ is certainly likely to be a part of it, given his constant interest in that subject, and- as seen in Wildcats Version 3.0- the Halo Corporation is a good creation with which to explore that.

Conspiracy theory and extraterrestrials are referenced in the promo materials, and are another popular Ellis subject as well as ingredients in the original concept (where the backdrop was a centuries old war between two alien races), making the decision to allow the whole Wildstorm universe to be started over by this particular writer a very appropriate one (aside from his general lack of interests in superheroes, but I think it’s safe to DC knew about that. It’s hardly a secret, so they must have accepted they were unlikely to get primary coloured morality lessons or a return to the ridiculously excessive 90s costumes of the characters’ early days).

It’s doubtful that The Wild Storm will reach the commercial heights of The Authority, given the current state of the market and the story being told, but it feels likely to be another tour de force in story telling across its 24 issues. The Authority had a great, long-lasting, impact on the form- widescreen, decompression, etc. all became buzzwords following its success, although they were rarely used with anything like the skill of Ellis, all too often used because they looked cool rather than being useful storytelling tools, resulting in some very hollow stories that thought they understood what made the Ellis book popular.

This comic has a completely different set of storytelling skills in play- there’s probably more panels in this first issue than there is in a story arc of The Authority!- showing that the creative team know how to use the form to tell the story they want to tell, rather than be beholden to some sort of ‘Wildstorm style’. Ellis is not a writer to just revisit his greatest hits when he can challenge himself and the medium, thus where The Authority was widescreen, The Wild Storm is claustrophobic, a markedly different creature, despite the shared roots of both titles, because the form needs to reflect the thematic concerns to create a successful story. Although The Wild Storm has only begun, and there is more to come in terms of related titles, I think it safe to say that this is likely to be a (at least creatively) very successful relaunch.

From The Wild Storm 1, by Warren Ellis, Jon Davis-Hunt & Ivan Plascencia