mal

scott pilgrim vol 3 has been pushed back to january. i was really looking forward to having it by friday, along with all the christmas presents i ordered that will be arriving by then. although the news that the movie rights have been optioned, obtained, and given to the director of shaun of the dead, has a great deal of potential.

there’s trailers up for mi:3 and pirates 2, although i haven’t watched either yet. or the x3 teaser even. maybe i ought to spend more time on the internets.

google earth is amazing.

i know i say this all the time, but i’m so ready to start doing comics right now it’s ridiculous. i’ve (finally) figured out a format, a frequency, and a basic design. the only real trouble now is deciding which of my three plus epics to start first. and lets not forget the half a dozen side projects.

i think the best plan is to start in on the comic version of the first gary dirin story. it’ll be a good starter, and a good jumping off point to longevity. that will alternate between two interrelated sagas set in 1019 and 2999. and both of those will make reference to other sagas that i had been planning to write, but am instead going to use as fuel for my second season theory.

simply put, the first season of most shows is a completely extraneous mass of character introduction and plot setup, which leads into the real meat of the story in the second season and onward. you can skip entire seasons into a series and not even miss out, because most of what happened in the first season will be referenced repeatedly throughout the second.

this is caused by most shows fumbling their way along at first as they get a handle on the characters and the kinds of things they want to do, and is symptomatic of most tv writers not thinking long term. shows that kick ass right out of the gate, without requiring significant fumbling time, generally have started out with a very strong set of well developed characters (sg-1, farscape), a firmly plotted story arc (babylon 5), or a mix of the two (firefly, 24, galactica). style helps as well, as in the cast of lost.

the second season theory is most blatant is shows that don’t have a strong start, where there’s so little to recommend the early seasons vs the later ones, that you wonder why it didn’t get cancelled. other shows can start strong and then drop off, getting progressively weaker as the writers lose the knife-edge focus they had in the beginning. without a strong cast to rise above weak long-term plotting, or a strong plot to rise above weak weekly scripting or neglible plot progression, the show fails.

tolkien put the second season theory to the best use; he went to the trouble of working out everything contained in the silmarillion, so that his fantasy world would have some depth to it. there are epics contained in that book worthy of a number of other trilogies, but tolkien never developed them that finely. he mostly wanted his hobbits and men and orcs to have some common history to talk about.

to that end, i could write six epic sagas, but i’d be better off writing three, and referencing the three unwritten ones. you can tell a surprising amount of a story with a few flashbacks and well placed lines of dialogue, and the rest of any good show is the characters. this is the heart of the second season theory, which is that you don’t need an entire first season to get a grasp on the characters and the situation, not if they’re well written. good characters can tell you just as much about themselves in one episode as 22, and telling 44 stories about them instead of 22 isn’t always for the best.

what more writers ought to do is write the first season worth of scripts, never film any of them, and just skip to the second season. work in all the important bits of the first seasons story and characters, but mostly use it as background.

anyways. gary dirin: 1924, bitches. watch this space for more details, once i can get together with scott and he has time to implement my ideas in html form.