not that I have time for this-
-but I stumbled across the memory of "Condorman" today and it turns out that "Condorman" is one of the many movies where there is a comic book creator protagonist in the film."Protagonist" would be the last word I would ever slap onto any of the comic book creators I know, but it's rife in the popular culture - just off the top of my head there's the movies "The Hand", "Condorman", "Cool World", "Monkeybone", the tevee shows "The Bob Newhart Show", "Too close for Comfort" and I know that "The Cell", the book by Stephen King's got one in there - anybody else? Lets see if we can assemble a database of this crap - there's just too many to ignore, aren't thre?
What is it about my job that makes writers want to put it into their OWN fiction? I just sit around all day a freaked-out puddle of stress and nerves, getting fatter and less able to make decisions.
posted by Scott Koblish @ 12:52 PM
3 Comments:
There's also "How to Murder Your Wife," "Chasing Amy," and the upcoming "Kavelier & Clay" adaptation.
I think something we have in common is that our consciousness(es?) rests on our rational, our "model-building" functions. In the technical fields, the go-to people tend to be people whose consciousness rests on their perceptions, where picking up the industry jargon is more second nature to them and their unconscious builds models intuitively. At least in my case, not being able to cache a huge plan in my head of what's going on means what I'm able to do isn't on the tip of my tongue, and I have to maybe labor to portray myself as something other than an idiot if the value of what I do isn't readily apparent. Computers are like genies in that they don't give you what you want, but they give you what you ask for. If you ask me for display changes for your web page, and your requests are vague enough, I can spend an hour doing detective work on the 5 minutes I need to do what you want, and I look bad on job performance reviews. I overhear our support people talk to people trying to linearly describe the 2-dimensional images they have in their heads -- what's urgent in a picture often doesn't jump out from a verbal description of the same from your average college graduate.
Getting pictures and words to compliment each other in comics is more challenging than simply working with writing or illustration, but that doesn't stop cartoonists from getting ranked at the bottom of the creative fields.
The relevance of my model-building-consciousness observation is that more-consciously-rational people are more prone to detachments from reality, and catching up in forming a model of reality with integrity makes people like us late bloomers (me perhaps being a more extreme example than you). Greatness is founded on dissent, on disobedience from convention, and a fidelity to reality is required to depart from for your revolution to infiltrate the public consciousness.
I guess my point is, whatever it is that's making you nervous might be something good for your creativity. We form models of reality that hold water later than most people, and when we do we catch up, if we don't let getting down stop us (which I'm guessing is what happens to most rational people that drive them to settle down as bourgeois).
Yeah. I'm uncertain of what drives me, but it won't stop - even when it endangers my well being, as it is currently.
I'll take blooming late to never at all, although I'm beginning to suspect the whole enterprise of "bloom" - it seems more like a marketing angle the way it's applied to art. (His art really took off here, but not here, and he peaked here)
Well, look at Orson Wells. Citizen Kane assembled pretty much the entire vocabulary of filmmaking as it was known at that time, and it was downhill for him after that. In contrast to this was Will, who assembled and mastered the vocabulary of comics pretty much as we know it today, then worked for the Man over the next 25 years, then entering his 60s started to show everyone what it really meant to rock out on comics.
That guy that does Achewood, it's so good I hate him, and he'll tell you comics never interested him until he started Achewood, and his comics vocabulary still shows it. Will either felt free to discard much of what he employed in the Spirit, or he hid it.
I think people see guys like us and think we think too much, but what we need to find isn't to think nothing, but to find the right things to think. Maybe what you need to think is that you need to hold your nose until your kid packs up and leaves for college, and then your unconscious will have formed the foundation for a huge creative pay-off, kind of like when you wake up with a really good idea you never would have thought of if you just continued to grind your gears. Vonnegut said his kids will tell you they were raised by a car salesman. You've got time, and a publication history for the time you've used so far. Your options are to simply find your pay-offs where you can in the meantime, or to tear yourself apart over a model of what you're supposed to be doing with who-knows-what-fidelity to reality.
(caveat: I may need to say all of this way more than anyone needs to hear it.)
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