Nick Bryan

Nick Bryan

Ultimate Spider-Man – A Potentially Pre-Emptive Eulogy

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Last week, the Ultimate Spider-Man comic seemed to come to an end. It’s hard to be certain, as Marvel Comics are being very cagey about the future of their publishing line, but based on some heartfelt words from series writer Brian Michael Bendis on his Tumblr, it looks like we’ve reached the end of that book in its current form.

The character may carry on, but sounds like either he’ll no longer be written by Bendis or the set-up will be radically changed. Either way, I was inspired to produce some words, as this was a comic that meant a lot to me over the years.

Peter The Animal-Themed Villain Slayer?

The Ultimate line from Marvel began in the early 2000s (originally under the title Ground Zero Comics, thankfully changed before 9/11), re-imagining their main characters as debuting in the present day, rather than the mid-20th century. It revised origins, streamlined continuity, tweaked premises to suit modern audiences, and was wildly successful for a while. Many Ultimate changes were adapted into the recent mega-hit Marvel movies.

However, eventually, the Ultimate line grew its own complex continuity, the regular Marvel line offered a more competitive alternative and many of the books struggled. The big exception: Ultimate Spider-Man, initially by indie crime comics writer Brian Michael Bendis and experienced superhero artist Mark Bagley.

It’s just not a great haircut.

At the heart of Ultimate Spidey, and perhaps the reason it lasted such a long time when the others lost their way, was the idea of Spider-Man as a teenage character. Peter Parker re-envisaged as a modern angry, moping nerd, cursed with a terrible floppy haircut and left forever young like Bart Simpson.

If this series had a firm influence outside old Spider-Man comics, it was teen adventure dramas like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, as Spider-Man struggled with his moral obligations, supervillain battles and web of complex teenage feelings. He swung neatly from soap to action to genuinely funny comedy sequences. There was Gwen and Mary Jane, Norman and Harry Osborn, a terrifying Doctor Octopus and even a non-alien Venom. Good times.

I Was A Late-Teen Spider-Fan

I was a late-teenage Spider-Man fan while this started coming out, so I suppose there’s an obvious appeal there. But as someone who loved the sci-fi/soap opera/jokes combo of Spider-Man more than any other superhero, I thought this really captured the spirit of the character for me, distilling it into a pure form without many distractions. After all, Spidey is the forerunner of all teen relatable superheroes, and it was weird that there hadn’t really been many comics where he lived in that genre – sneaking out of school to fight the Rhino and trying to make it back in time for his date.

I also felt the length of the run did a lot for it. Obviously, not every comic book run should go on forever. Still, the feeling of a world developing, characters coming and going, all with Bendis as a unifying creative voice even after the original artist left, gave the series a feeling of authorial ownership and consistency you don’t get from many superhero comics.

I don’t want to ignore the artists – Mark Bagley cemented himself as not just a definitive Spidey artist here, but one who can convey lengthy conversations just as well as superhero action.

The subsequent artists – primarily Stuart Immonen, David Lafuente, Sara Pichelli and David Marquez – were all top-notch too, continuing in the tradition of exciting, dynamic art that flowed through the action. They made the superhero action look like it had real weight rather than abstract gesturing, while still selling all the emotional beats.

And I haven’t even talked yet about the other major thing Ultimate Peter Parker got that the regular one probably never will: an ending.

Even-Ultimater Spider-Man

Lovely Miles Morales costume.

I cried when Ultimate Peter Parker died, I’m not ashamed to admit it. Series original artist Mark Bagley came back to draw that last storyline and gave him exactly the sacrifice you’d want. Seriously, if you’d been reading all along, it was a brutal, sad pay-off. Even though he might now be back from the dead, it doesn’t deaden the impact of that issue for me.

Plus it meant Ultimate Spider-Man could innovate yet again by giving us the all-new version: Miles Morales. An young biracial teenager inspired by Peter Parker’s death and just happening to acquire similar-but-not-identical spidery powers, Miles donned a redesigned Spider-Man costume and picked up where Parker left off.

Paving the way for many more diverse superhero replacements in recent years, Miles kept up the bold Spidey tradition of likability and humour in the face of horrible suffering. With Bendis still on-board as writer, he’s kept the tone consistent, continuing the Ultimate Spidey tradition of making old tropes seem new and exciting. The inspired part, I think, was yanking away the Parker-era safety net of recognising characters/stories from the original universe, but keeping the tone intact.

Sales of the Ultimate initiative trailed off in recent years, and we’ve finally reached the point of winding it down. Bendis and Bagley are re-teaming for a finale story called Ultimate End, which should be heartwrenching. Still, they’ve all but confirmed that Miles Morales will stay around in some form – based on some news stories, he may even join the Avengers.

Nonetheless, part of me feels an overhanging sadness. As I’ve mentioned, the glorious tapestry of the Ultimate Spider-Man universe is a big selling point. Bendis built a world populated by likable and memorable characters, all the better to make us suffer when he starts swinging the hammer into them.

If we lose that, even if Miles Morales himself survives, I will feel something has been lost. What about his friendship with Ganke, dammit?

Yes, the character and what he represents are important, but the Ultimate Spider-Man series, supporting cast and style meant something to me too, and if this is the end, I’m sorry to see them go. But I got to read over 200 issues of this thing I like, with pretty much uniformly great art, so I suppose my suffering isn’t quite the worst in the world.

Since I’ve Found Serenity – Thoughts on first watching Firefly in 2015

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You can’t take the sky from me… *sob*

As mentioned on my Twitter, I’ve recently watched popular Joss Whedon-helmed TV show Firefly and movie follow-up Serenity for the first time ever. I have no real excuse for this – I believe I have lived with copies of the DVD for at least six years now.

For the unacquainted, Firefly is often described as a “space western”. It revolves around the ramshackle spaceship Serenity, whose crew are living under the radar for various reasons, surviving on snatched jobs from various employers. Thanks to this off-the-grid ethos, their missions mostly end up unsavoury – theft, smuggling or worse.

Firefly is perhaps even more famous as a great One That Got Away of the modern TV age – despite massive critical and fan love, it lasted one 14-episode season. Whedon had the movie follow-up Serenity to wrap up at least some major plot threads, but for the most part, it died young, its potential unfulfilled, everyone is very sad.

Anyway, despite its massive popularity, I’ve only just sat down and watched it. I don’t think it’s that significant whether I think Firefly is good (BRIEF REVIEW: it is very good – unless you hate the sci-fi genre or Whedon’s quips-and-sadness writing style, you will probably like it), but I am kinda interested how it looks to a modern TV viewer. Has it informed the landscape? Would it do better nowadays? Other talking points, probably?

And yes, I may mention a few spoilers, but now I’ve finally watched the thing, there’s officially no-one else left to care.

Shiny Shiny Arc Reactors

“22 episodes, we’ve been standing here…”

I watch a lot of genre TV at the moment, and they all have very long storylines. It used to just be the prestigious cable shows like The Wire but right now, I’d say almost every US drama show I follow is mostly focused on a long game, pushing a larger arc forward a few units each week. The case-of-the-week procedural stuff seems fairly out of fashion. Even Once Upon A Time, which ain’t mega-pretentious, definitely focuses on the long game.

This has been the case since around the age of Heroes/24/Lost, I’d say – pace sped up since then, as almost all those shows ended up being somewhat hamstrung by the slowness of their own plot, especially when they have 20+ episode seasons. And when modern genre TV does the Case O’The Week stuff, it generally does it kinda badly. I’ve started watching Arrow, Agents of SHIELD and Person Of Interest lately and all three start off with somewhat stilted attempts to do Case Of The Week.

Firefly arrived before long arcs became quite so standard, especially among 22-episode network shows. Watching in 2015, I was surprised how old-school the plotting was. I kinda expected something aggressively arc driven and ahead of its time, but no, it did a different caper every week and fully committed to it, allowing the subplots to advance in fractional chunks around the side.

Of course, this means when the show got cancelled painfully early, most of the subplots were barely even warmed up, but the individual missions were all fully developed and tense. Even though many episodes didn’t advance the mega-plot much/at all, we felt fully invested in what was happening because the weekly stories revealed new things about the characters.

Individual episodes took place in a connected universe, with characters recurring and stories having ramifications down the line (well, the ones they got the chance to show), but never at the cost of each episode feeling like a complete unit.

Which, in turn, just reminds you the problem with modern shows attempting Case Of The Week: they’ve clearly decided the audience only really cares about the ongoing plots. As a result, the Cases Of The Week are half-arsed and uninteresting, as disposable to the characters as they are to me, the poor viewer.

Choke On The Gorram Comic Timing

Funnier than they look.

It was never established as a plot point that gaseous Comic Timing was regularly pumped through the vents of the spaceship Serenity, but I think we all know the truth. Joss Whedon was a major practitioner of using heavy comedy in your dramatic show to get the people to like your cast (even the evil ones). After his success in both Firefly and Buffy/Angel, along with Aaron Sorkin’s on West Wing, it’s become fairly common.

Still, much like the Case Of The Week plots, there’s a way of doing this stuff well. Yes, everyone on Serenity was suspiciously good at delivering and selling a joke, but all in their own way. Mal’s world-weary captain jokes were never the same as Zoe’s dead-dryness as Jayne’s unaware buffoonery as Wash’s genuinely upbeat quips as… etc.

Thanks to the wide influence, I can’t deny some of the Firefly dialogue felt a little overfamiliar, possibly not through much fault of its own. Between characters like Felicity on Arrow, Whedon’s own work elsewhere and, yes, the way his syntax has influenced the offhand writing style of a whole geek generation, it feels obvious and standard when it probably shouldn’t.

Still, it’s genuinely funny for the most part, and (this is crucial when doing banter) conveys the character relationships, rather than making everyone look like the same brand of chattering arsehole.

The Fireflying Dead

“If I come back on telly, will the season 8 comics stay canon?”

With the modern TV trend of reviving shows from the 90s or early 2000s, part of me wonders how long before someone considers digging Firefly up and inflating its liquefying body. It clearly has some kind of audience, people still talk about it with wild love and passion.

That Con Man fundraiser starring two of the main actors has made more money than most people will earn in a decade. 24, X Files and Heroes are on their way back, clearly executive nostalgia for that era of TV exists. Could it happen?

I suspect the answer is probably no, mainly because all the shows I just mentioned were genuine cultural phenomena on a bigger scale. Making new Firefly would probably be expensive due to the large cast and fancy spaceship set/CGI and without anywhere near as a good a return guarantee. Doesn’t help that the one follow-up they already did (the Serenity movie) apparently didn’t perform that well.

Although if we’re talking Whedon exhumations, in the current climate, wouldn’t be surprised to discover someone is trying to arrange a Buffy revival. Like, an actual return with original cast/writers rather than the rumoured and baffling Buffy-without-Whedon project. I’m sure some kind of conversation may have happened, wouldn’t necessarily stake my family farm on it ever materalising though.

Breaking Mal

Did Firefly influence this maniac?

One last thing Firefly might have been ahead of its time at – the crew of Serenity weren’t necessarily the heroes of the wider story. It sugarcoated that pill for sure, by making them mega-likable (see previous re: humour) and Serenity kinda homely in a tumbledown way, but they were often doing ‘bad’ things and making morally dubious decisions. They may not have been villains, but they were often anti-heroes.

Nowadays, of course, cult TV has been a nest of dickbags for a while. We’ve been all about likeable, sympathetic criminals in Breaking Bad, Dexter and Weeds. Rick of The Walking Dead is only ever one inconvenient testicle itch from decapitating everyone. Even Arrow (of Arrow fame) spent his entire first season slaughtering people in huge numbers before settling into a more gentle Batman-esque position.

It’s reached the extent that the new Flash show seems like it’s doing something weirdly new and groundbreaking just by starring an untortured nice bloke who wants to help people out.

Still, Firefly’s cult status hasn’t brought back spaceship sci-fi or the Westerns onto TV in any meaningful way. One quickly-cancelled show can only do so much.

Anyway, this has gone from a few quick thoughts to something approximately the length of my Philosophy dissertation. If there’s anything to be gained from this, it’s that Firefly is still a fascinating, unique and thought-provoking experience and if you haven’t watched it, it’s worth a go.

Now, maybe time for me to finally give Veronica Mars a shot.

Thirty-One Year Check-Up – Comics, Hobson & Choi III, Life

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Today is my thirty-first birthday, and after making a giant messy fuss of my thirtieth, I feel like this might end up being a quiet one. Still, it’s been a while since I blogged about what I’m up to in a broader sense, so I figured this was as good a time as any for a check-in.

So, where is the third Hobson & Choi book at? What else am I working on? How am I feeling, y’know, deep down? Some of those questions answered in the following words.

Comics Of Future Now

The biggest new news, as posted on social media yesterday, is that I received a print copy of my first published comics work: a story in The Gathering: Noir from the good folk at GrayHaven Comics. You can see my hand modelling the comics in the nearby picture, and I can confirm it is a lovely, well put-together object with attractive cover art. For more details on this comic and a single solitary panel of art preview from my actual story, see this post from last month.

In previously unspoken news, I also have another short comic story approved and assigned to an artist with an entirely different indie set-up. More details on that when it happens, although we’re probably talking 2016.

Would be nice to advance the comics thing further, but currently all my spare creative-project funds are going into H&C books. If the comics internet has taught me one thing, it’s that asking artists to work for free is not a good look. Speaking of Hobson & Choi…

H&C3 – No wolves, no recruitment agencies

The third Hobson & Choi book, Trapped In The Bargain Basement, is currently being read out loud by me, sitting alone in my house. As discussed in this old post, that’s a dull process but always ends up being worthwhile. I’ve cut 3000 words of needless burble this time, and not even finished yet.

It should be off to an editor in the next two or three weeks, and hopefully out to you, the reading audience, in the latter half of this year. I’m hoping late summer/early autumn, but should probably be a little vague, for reasons I’ll get onto in a minute.

If you want to make me feel good on my birthday, feel free hit the Hobson & Choi homepage and buy one of the books (the first one is very cheap on digital). If you’ve already purchased and read, you can leave a review on Amazon/Goodreads/your own site or tell your friends/social media followers/blog readers/whoever about H&C. All pretty crucial to the whole authoring game.If you’ve already done all that: thanks, I love you, you’re fine.

Thirty-One Life

Alright, I’ll talk a bit about the birthday as well. My feelings about life and the passing of time haven’t changed much since last year’s 30th-marking blog post, to be honest. All is alright. In addition to the self-publishing, I have my urban fantasy novel finally out with agents and we’ll see how that goes.

(I considered blogging about that as it happens, but I’ve yet to come up with amazing new perspectives as I haven’t done much beyond send a few emails. So I figured I’d just not bang on about it, lest I sound like I’m complaining about “literary gatekeepers” or whatever the angry people say.)

It looks like I might be moving back south of the river some time this year. I like Walthamstow a lot, but there’s something weirdly homely about the Peckham/New Cross/Brixton region. And yes, the inevitable disruption involved in moving house is why I’m hedging my predictions for H&C3 release dates.

That’s probably enough from me to keep you going into April. Now, I’m off to hack out another quick chapter on my tentative sci-fi project that probably won’t see the light of day until 2016. Work doesn’t stop for a mere 31st birthday.

How To Be Number One! (In the Dark Comedy category on Amazon US!)

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News that social media followers probably already know! For around a day, dawn to dusk on Thursday 12th March 2015, my self-published crime epic The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf was the most popularest, bestest book in the Dark Comedy category on Amazon US. If you don’t believe me, here’s a screenshot.

BEHOLD THE ORANGE STRIPE OF VALID LITERATURE

Now, much as I’d love to pretend this was an entirely natural spurt of love for me, I did require some advertising to achieve this. For anyone who wants a tiny wee glimpse into the inner workings of the self-publishing DIY promotion world, harnessing the resources available to reach the very top of a fairly uncompetitive Amazon category, this is your moment.

Quite cool, as the bulk of my existing readers are in the United Kingdom, so sales across the Atlantic had been quite modest until now. This is an important step in breaking America. If Doctor Who and Sherlock can do it, then so can Hobson & Choi!

As you can see, I also placed in some more challenging crime-related categories

Also, I was in the mid-80s of the overall humour (or “humor”) category on the site, which I was quite pleased with.

Anyway – long story short, I advertised the book with Fussy Librarian on Tuesday 10th (costing $7) and Ereader News Today on Wednesday 11th (costing $35), and by the morning of Thursday 12th, I was atop my category, so mission accomplished.

If you’re wondering how many book sales this requires, it’s about 85. So for my total $42 investment, that’s about two books per dollar. Not bad, although due to the first book in the series being a cheap hook-them-in deal, I didn’t quite make my initial investment back.

I found the people to advertise with by lurking for a while in the Writer’s Cafe section of KBoards. Although actually posting isn’t mandatory, a lot of people do share their experience, particularly of different promoters. There’s even a spreadsheet here if you just want a big list.

Obviously, the long-term dream is for the book to either sell itself or make a huge profit on advertising. More short-term, it’d be pretty sweet if some of the 85 people who bought the first book just now leave a review and/or pick up the second one.

So yup, this is the ultimate plan. Promote first book, hope it fires through to later books. Ereader News Today is one of the biggest and most reliable promotions, it seems, so future efforts may not be quite as huge.So, in case anyone was interested, that was my achievement this week. We’re still at #12 in Dark Comedy as of this writing, so that’s nice. If you want to help me achieve pleasure via numbers, feel free to buy the Hobson & Choi darkly comic crime books, but no pressure. I blog for love.

“No-one else dies tonight!” – Nick Bryan’s Ongoing Commitment To Making Fewer Mistakes

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It’s been a while since I wrote about writing – in fact, it’s been a while since I wrote a blog which didn’t hinge around the Buy my work! message. So, since it’s late on a Sunday and I’m feeling too tired from last night’s drinking to do any hard labour, I thought I’d break things up on the blog by talking about my current writing obsession: not fucking up.

A couple of months back, I finished drafting a fantasy novel which ended up having the bulk of its middle act and about half its third erased – not after the first draft (which is kinda acceptable) but after I’d finished a beta-readable draft and thought things were going okay.

More recently than that, I went back to the third and final major Hobson & Choi webserial storyline, ready to punch it up for eventual book release. Rather than just chopping and changing a few scenes, adding chapters to flesh stuff out and punching up the writing – as per the first two books – I ended up deleting much of the final third of the story and starting over.

(So yes, H&C serial readers, it might be worth buying the third book, as not only will you get a new bonus story, but also a large chunk of the main storyline entirely reimagined. The new timeline will be used for the books going forward, while the original serial events drift off into non-canon limbo.)

Having been editing these various projects solidly for the best part of six months, my insistent feeling that this level of trashing material must never happen again is getting prohibitive. Don’t get me wrong – it’s obviously quite positive that I’m able to recognise these problems, plan changes and execute them, rather than getting hung up on killing my darlings or whatever. But the more often it happens, the more I start thinking… surely eventually I’ll be able to avert it earlier, right? Eventually I will live in a creative utopia where first drafts sing and dance perfectly in the pasture?

During breaks from editing, I’ve started laying down early scenes for something entirely new, and find myself semi-paralysed by the knowledge that I might eventually have to delete a load of it. Like when Spider-Man feels guilty about not saving someone and makes some weird vow that no-one else will ever die again, I suspect a commitment to total perfection isn’t sustainable.

All that happens is this: you write six-thousand word planning documents, hoping that if you prepare enough, the odds of needing to ditch and rewrite shrink a bit. And then you put off ever starting the first draft, because if you think about a project long enough, there’s always some small problem you can’t quite solve.

Realistically, the metaphorical Green Goblin (I just like comics, okay?) of me fucking up is still going to be out there no matter how much I plan and I’ve just lost the knack of fear-free first drafting after so many months editing.

Regardless of all this introspection, the fact is: once I get the third H&C done, I’ m going to have to get back to scribbling new stuff somehow, as I will simply run out of things to edit. Well, unless I pull out one of my abandoned novels from my early twenties and try to rewrite that instead of doing anything new, but… no, let’s not give me ideas.

Comic story by me now buyable! “The Case Study” in The Gathering Noir!

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So busy talking about the oft-mentioned Hobson & Choi books around here, I kinda missed the fact that my first comics work came out! This is a four-page story called The Case Study in The Gathering: Noir anthology from Grayhaven Comics. I’m moving noir desperation away from the mafia and on to a whole new group of men in suits – corporate executives.

If you want a print copy, they can be ordered directly from the Grayhaven website – no news on a digital edition yet, but I’ll let you know if it happens.

I’ve seen the four pages and am pretty thrilled with how it came out. For a first attempt at actual fully-realised comic scripting, I seem to have put across my thoughts fairly well.

Of course, comics are a collaborative medium, so other people played a major role in that success – primarily excellent artist Patrick “Podge” Daly, who did a great job of interpreting the script into a proper comic, and Marc Lombardi who edited the whole anthology, lettered my individual story and generally made the whole process flow nicely. Thanks, guys. If/when I do comics again, I’d be delighted to see either of you involved.

I’ll add a single-panel sample of Podge’s art below, just because I think it deserves to be seen – if you like it, do pick up a copy.