Storytellers have a difficult burden.  For every movie, book, episode or comic, they have to tell at least two stories.  The first is the simple mechanics of the story.  How does that band of theives steal that priceless artifact?  How does the detective solve the case?  How does Luke blow up the Deathstar?

The second story is the character’s emotional arc while going through the mechanics of the story.  The best writers will be able to intertwine the two, allowing the story to drive the character, and the character to advance the story.  Sometimes, however, the two get a little too intertwined.  That leads to ‘The Triumph of the Will.’

I think we’ve all seen this.  It can last for the length of a fight sequence, an act, or the entire story.  The hero goes up against the antagonist.  It’s an entirely one-sided battle.  The antagonist beats the hero down and down and down.

Then things turn around.  Sometimes, at the lowest point of the story, the antagonist says something that fills the hero with new resolve.  Sometimes the hero comes to a realization about his or her inner self.  And sometimes things just turn around.

Why?  Because the hero has to win, and there is no other way for the storyteller to let them do it.  There are, very occasionally, times when this is effective, but for the most part, all that tells me is that everything up to that point was filler.  If you don’t have the skills to fight someone, suddenly being determined doesn’t change a thing.  If you’re not smart enough to figure something out, being put in a high-pressure situation won’t make you smarter.  Thinking of lovers or children hasn’t saved a hell of a lot of people, and I don’t believe it will save the hero. 

The challenge of a story, and again, I acknowledge that it’s a huge challenge, is working a protagonist into an impossible situation and then finding an unexpected way out.  If all it takes is newfound grit, you might as well say ‘a wizard did it.’

Yes, he did. 

No, not like that.

Of course.

This panel is from a story in the Batman 80-Page Giant issue that came out on Wednesday.  In  it, Alfred picks up a hooker who looks to be in her late teens or early twenties.  He takes her out to a fancy party, while she’s still in her street wear.  People talk, Alfred makes a scene defending her, and they get kicked out.  He suggests they go up to a room.

There’s a panel in which the girl is in the bathroom, freshly showered and in a towel.  She’s looking at herself in the mirror saying, “You can do this,” while Alfred, visible through the open door but turned away from her, sits on the bed in the main bedroom.

Then she comes out in full snow gear (boots, pants, sweater, gloves, had, scarf), and he tells her she looks wonderful.  They go to the bus station, he tells her that he has had her criminal record erased and puts her on a bus headed for home.

The story should work, but it doesn’t.  Not quite.  And the reason it doesn’t is in that first panel.  There are plenty of comics that make it look like something morally questionable is happening, only to reveal the character’s noble intentions, but by leaning too hard on the double meanings, this story buries its own point.

The point is that Alfred is trying to do right by this girl.  He’s insisting that people treat her with respect and give her a chance to shed her past.  But that’s not really happening in the story. 

A respectful person doesn’t take a woman to a party when he knows that she’ll be ridiculed there.  Alfred can afford a dress for this girl, and has clearly shopped for her.  Still, instead of letting her wear something appropriate, he exposes her to ridicule.  Fighting for the girl’s honor doesn’t ring true after her deliberately brought her somewhere she’d feel self-conscious in inappropriate dress.

Then there’s the matter of Alfred sitting on a bed with the door open while a girl showers in the next room.  I can count on one hand the number of times Alfred has sat down in a chair on panel.  And I can’t imagine he wouldn’t close the door when a girl was changing in the next room.  But they need to make it look like something might happen, so they make him do something out of character.

Then there’s the last scene, in which Alfred announces that he spent the night with a prostitute.  This is a page after he told the girl that she didn’t have to worry about her old life catching up with her and she could have a ‘fresh start.’ 

The story follows the letter and not the spirit of this character’s code of conduct.  In going out of its way to portray Alfred as gentlemanly, it keeps him from being a gentleman.

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The problem with being a slobbering bat fanatic is no one believes you when you say the Batman story was the best part of the DC Universe Holiday special. 

I’m unbiased.  If you will remember, in last year’s issue, I favored the Aquaman story by Dan Didio, in which Arthur saves Mary (Yes, that Mary.) from pirates using a mind-controlled kraken.

The Bat-story was the best, hands down.  A wordless series of images, it was short, sweet, a little goofy, and simple.  When a story ends with Batman having milk and cookies, you know it’s a Christmas issue.

A contender for the top spot is a Superman story with one of the issue’s surprisingly frequent Hannukah stories.  You know it’s the holiday season when you see Superman fighting a snow Golem over tins of caramel corn.  Or maybe you don’t.  Who cares?  It’s a sweet story.

There’s a J’onn Jones story that is full of good character moments and that focuses on the early years of the character in an interesting way.  However, given that it’s shot through with murder and misery, it’s a little out of place in a holiday special.

It’s followed by not one, but two stories in which soldiers on opposite sides of a war suspend their enmity and spend Christmas day being friendly with each other.  You know Christmas is special when even Sergeant Rock gets along with a German soldier.  Still, the stories are right after each other, and I wonder how that feels for the writers who came up with them.  It must be like wearing the same dress to the prom times fifty.

Still.  Batman punching Santas and eating cookies.  It really is a wonderful life.

LOOK AT THAT!  That is CaveBatman!  That is BatManderthal!  I love this and I can only hope he gets a ton of panel-time.  Look at those wings.  That’s better than Batman’s current costume.  I adore this.  Oh, please.  Oh, please have a whole series about this guy.

And I want a series about:

Bat-Pirate. 

I’ve been feeling the holiday blues, but this makes my eyes twinkle.

I keep buying one issue of Green Arrow and Black Canary and then dropping the book for the next few issues, and then picking it up again.

I have a fondness for Ollie.  I like Mia.  I liked Dinah better in Birds of Prey, but, what the hell.  You take what you can get.  And of course I like Roy, who is like Ollie but not quite as much of a jackass, except to Nightwing, who seems to bring out his jackassery.

But the book has been nothing but misery and more misery for years on end, now.  I want to see a happy superhero team having fun in Star City and it’s less and less likely that that’s ever going to happen.  And don’t even get me started on Cry for Justice.

Are there any books out there that you waffle on?  What makes you drop them?  What makes you pick them up again?

Jen Van Meter, the writer of “Spin Cycle,” the Cyclone and Power Girl story in the JSA: 80 Page Giant, has responded to my entry of last week. 

Hi, Esther. A friend forwarded me links to your post and to a couple other blogs that have picked up on your comments, and I feel compelled to reply because you’re right — I failed in what I was trying to accomplish with the “Spin Cycle” story, or, at the very least, I failed you and many of your respondents.

What I was asked by DC to supply was essentially a short story about one of the younger JSA characters walking through a door in the brownstone to find something unexpected, surreal, impossible (by the character’s standards) that, whether it “really happened” or not, could somehow have bearing on the way that character perceives her-/himself.

I’ve been interested in Cyclone since she was introduced because, unlike most teens in costume in the superhero worlds, she doesn’t seem particularly interested in conveying a fully-formed adult sexuality, nor is her chosen costume conventionally sexualized. I like her smarts, her sense of the theatrical, and I think she’s interesting because her insecurities seem very plausible and refreshingly commonplace. I wanted the story to be a series of experiences that in one way or another allay some of her anxieties about meriting a place in the JSA, and given that she was team leader at the time I was writing it, I wanted to use PG to stand in for the focus of those anxieties.

Because I was thinking about the story as being some whacked-out magical construct emerging somehow out of Maxine’s point of view, I wasn’t thinking about Power Girl–in the story–as herself but as something produced by how Maxine sees her, and in my reading of these characters Maxine had been seeing PG the way a new hire might see a CEO as explicably demanding, intimidating, and intense as, say, Oprah, Madonna and Secretary Clinton all rolled into one. I wanted Maxine to leave the story feeling more like a worthy peer and teammate.

So one thing led to another, and I found myself wanting Maxine to come upon PG doing something simple, ordinary, humanizing, and when I decided on laundry I started wondering what Maxine would think of Power Girl’s costume. There was nothing externally meta-textual going on for me, but I was indeed thinking that Maxine looks at super-heroics as at least one part theater; she’s got the theater background and knows that–in their world–there’re lots of reasons they’re not all running around in track suits and army/navy surplus. What I had in mind was that in “reading” the costume to this apparition of Power Girl, what Maxine is really doing is explaining to herself some of why she finds Power Girl so intimidating. I’m not pretending to be unaware of the conversations amongst fans and creators about the sexism that seems so deeply embedded in the genre, especially as it focuses on costuming; I am saying that what I was concerning myself with at the time was the notion that similar conversations might/must be ongoing in the world the characters occupy as well.

One other thing I do need to offer up for consideration, and I see this come up frequently in comic reviews and critiques: you ascribed intent to lecture to me but used the art as the focus of your argument. In the script, what I asked for was a shot of Power Girl, “a little surprised by the enthusiasm, perhaps thoughtful,” or something like that. I didn’t see what you have when I saw the inks; if I had done, I probably would have asked if there was time to redraw at least that panel, or, more likely, would have tried to make changes at the lettering stage to make the ideas behind the scene more plain.

Do I like the vast and very gendered disparity in costuming in conventional superhero comics? No. Do I love superhero comics despite the many flaws of the genre? Absolutely. Having chosen to write superhero comics for hire on occasion, must I work with what’s available to me? Sure. Did I imagine that I could say something about Cyclone by giving some thought to how she might see, or want to see, one of the costumes most emblematic of the problem at hand? Yeah, I did. Clearly, I misstepped.

I wish I had caught how the scene could be taken while I was working on the script. I would have done something about it.

No obscenities, no intimations of rage, and no snotty rhetorical questions (which is more than you can say about my original entry).  Very classy.

And here is a link to the original post.  (Jen Van Meter’s comment currently the third from the bottom.  You can also see my response, and a special guest appearance by Jimmy Palmiotti.)

I guess this was a surprise to exactly no one.  A few months ago I would have been ranting and raving at the news.  It seemed to me that the show was just beginning to hit its stride at the end of season one.

Epitaph One and the first episode of season two were fantastic, both mixing inventive stories with deep looks at all of the characters.  I thought that, after the first episodes that pretty much looked like movies of the week, the show was done throwing us episodic stories in which Something Randomly Goes Wrong.

Then we saw an episode where Echo subs in for a mother and gets wiped but still retains her maternal instinct enough to stumble around with a knife.  And a show with a serial killer who ends up in Echo’s body.  That was enough.  I love the show, but not enough to have to sit through six by-the-numbers episodes to get into the main story for each season. 

Goodbye, Dollhouse.  I’m glad I watched you long enough for my love for you to sputter out.  May the next Joss Whedon project end up on HBO.

So, according to Gail Simone, Achilles is gay.  My reactions are as follows:

1.  But Zeus put him in charge of Amazon Island because he wanted the Amazons to lay down their weapons and become wives and mothers.  Is this one of those Greek irony deals, where the gods act like extreme bastards, but in an amusing way?  Telling the Amazons you want them knocked up, and then giving them a gay guy to get the job done, that’s just mean.

2.  And also damn.  I liked how he was in sympathy with the Amazons even as he tried to follow Zeus’s orders.  It would have been interesting if he had developed an actual relationship with one of the Amazons, instead of a marriage of state.

3.  But I suppose there aren’t that many gay guys in DC.

4.  There’s pretty much just him and Obsidian and Creo-

5.  Oh my god, there’s also Creote.

6.  Who is also a Simone creation.

7.  Oh please, Gail.  Give me Creote and Achilles as a couple for Christmas.  I’ve been so good all year long.

8.  For some definitions of good.

Wow, I’ve never read about many female characters giving her a hard time in the comics . . . oh.  Oh.  That was meta.  The ‘most women’ comment.  The character looking out at us from the panel.  This is a little speech given to the women who, for some crazy reason, criticize Peej’s uniform.

You know, I think I’ve heard a similar speech.  It was about how Peej was proud of her body, and if men decided to degrade themselves by looking at her, then that was their business.  And I’ve heard the speech about how she had the ‘S’ and ripped it off, and that patch of fabric would stay absent until she found a symbol that represented her.

And I heard the justification about how Canary’s outfit was in tribute to her mother, even when that means she’s in panties and a jacket in the First Wave books.  And I’ve heard the one about Poison Ivy being a plant and therefore unconcerned about human modesty.  Oh, and I’ve heard the one about Supergirl being invulnerable and therefore not needing pants.  There are a few about how Huntress wanted to show off the fact that she was shot, and she lived, and that’s why she fought in a bikini.  And then there’s the one about Batman and Superman . . . oh.  Wait.  There aren’t that many excuses for how  Batman and Superman dress because, golly, for some reason, the male heroes in this mostly male-controlled medium put their fucking clothes on when they’re going to fight someone.

Are you kidding me?  I’m getting an ‘I choose my choice’ speech from a fictional character?  Feminist fans are getting a slap because they won’t accept one bullshit excuse after another for why male heroes are mostly fully-clothed and female heroes mostly walk around in their underwear?

Let me make this clear:  No matter how many times you have the female characters talk about how they decided on their outfits, they are still fictional characters.  These aren’t women who have decided on what they want to wear for reasons of their own.  These are characters who are dressed as playboy bunnies because a bunch of creators decided to dress them that way for fun and profit.

Jen Van Meter; I don’t know what you were trying to do here, but you failed.