THE SEASON IS THE REASON

And so this is Christmas ...

Time again to decorate trees, give and receive gifts and watch the MY SO-CALLED LIFE Christmas episode (see last year's blog). Merry Christmas to all! I've included a few pics of our iconic modern heroes celebrating the holidays.

I saw a sign on a local church that said JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON. But a lot of people who aren't Christians still honor the holidays. Christmas is really a secular holiday, and not because any atheists or agnostics have declared a "war on Christmas;" Christmas hasn't changed into a secular holiday ~ it always was. There are two big advantages in seeing it that way.

First, it is a celebration of a very real, non-mythological event, the Winter Solstice. It's the day (December 21 actually) that the Earth's orbit takes it farthest from the Sun. The Solstice has been celebrated since the dawn of time, not because it's the beginning of Winter or the coldest day of the year, but because it marks the end of our retreat from the Sun and the beginning of the end of the dark and cold. So that sign of the church is wrong: the season is the reason for the season; always has been and always will.

Second, we have a set of perfectly good secular myths in Santa Claus, Ebenezer Scrooge, the Grinch, Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, Frosty, Rudolph and all the rest. As I've said before, the best thing about these stories is that we love them, but we know they are not true. We don't hate, fight or discriminate over them. For a wonderful Christmas fable, watch

http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/video/video.php?cid=649555532&pid

=rh_moRFkNbYWprfmrcp5ld_adlfWxdRH

What Christmas means to most people, I think, is the spirit of sharing, of common humanity. We have that in common with the ancient pagans who huddled together in caves awaiting the end of Winter, and with everyone else. The seasons, represented by the Solstice, still affect us all and may so even more if environmental warnings are true. The caring, giving and sense of community are what's important about Christmas, certainly not whether you beleive in a holy man allegedly born this time of year. To divide over which myth to beleive in dishonors our distant ancestors and our brotherhood with each other. As Danielle complains in "So-Called Angels,"

"Why are we talking about religion? It's Christmas!"

The Sunshine Makers

People (well, geeks) have been comparing last night's election results to the explosion of the Death Star or the defeat of Sauron or Voldemort. I just found this cartoon online. My sister and I used to watch this on tv and go around singing the Sunshine song. It brings back a lot of nostalgia, but it also reflects how I feel about Obama's election. Hope this cheers you! Don't make me have to pour a bottle of sunshine down your throat!

Born on Krypton

Remember what I was saying about popular fiction becoming a new mythology? This guy realizes that our mythic heroes resonate with more people than even the country's major religion. A masterful way of connecting with everyday people that his opponents only wish they could acheive with their "Joe Six Pack" talk.

Origins of Dr Horrible

The blog's been on an unofficial hiatus. I've been off my sleep schedule and no energy for the last few weeks. Apologies to my loyal readers (both of them)...

Last time I talked about Joss Whedon's online musical DR HORRIBLE'S SING-A-LONG BLOG (still recommended).

Since then I've realized that there seem to be some references to comic book and literary figures in that story.

The ones that stand out the most (at least to a comic book geek like me) are Captain Marvel and his arch enemy Dr Sivana. Dr Sivana appeared in the earliest Captain Marvel stories in 1940 and continued to plague him throughout his career into the 50s. The physical resemblance is true in all respects but one. Sivana is short and wears a white lab coat and thick, bottle-bottom glasses. Dr Horrible at least seems shorter than his heroic nemesis Captain Hammer, wears a white lab coat - though unlike Sivana he sometimes wears normal clothes - and the goggles on top of his head are counterparts of Sivana's glasses.

Comic book characters wear costumes for reader identification. Even non-superheroes tend to apparently own one suit of clothes, like Archie, Dennis the Menace and Charlie Brown. Clark Kent usually wears the same blue suit. Costumes are coded to define characters: the white lab coat tells us that Drs Horrible and Sivana are mad scientists.

The one physical aspect where Horrible and Sivana differ is that Sivana was grotesquely ugly: misshapen bald head, bad teeth, crooked nose, stunted body. Sivana was the villain of the piece, not a leading man like Dr Horrible, and ugly is a comic book code for evil. The message was not that ugly is evil, but the opposite, evil is ugly. DICK TRACY's creator Chester Gould said that he drew villains like The Brow and Flattop ugly to reflect the ugliness of crime.

While Dr Horrible is obviously a supervillain name - I doubt he was christened "Billy Horrible" - Sivana was the character's real name. Sivana was like Superman's enemy Luthor, another lab-coated mad scientist, although they appeared nearly simultaneously in early 1940. The motif

was an evil genius with a sinister, foreign-sounding name.

In a twisted way Drs Sivana and Horrible's relationship with their heroic enemies is similar. From Sivana's point of view Captain Marvel was just an overgrown bully ("the Big Red Cheese") picking on Sivana and breaking all his toys. Dr Horrible feels the same about his arch-Captain, although in Hammer's case he is a bully. Dr Horrible's motives were good but bent, at least at first. He saw the wrongness in society and thought he could change the world for the better by ruling it. Sivana declared himself "Rightful Ruler of the Universe" by virtue of his genius, but he never had any inclinations to save society.

DHS-A-LB is an example of Joss Whedon's turning a stereotype on its ear. In BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER it was the blonde girl killing the monsters, in FIREFLY/SERENITY it was "bad guys" as heroes. Now we have the villain who wants to right wrongs versus the hero who only cares about himself.

The "benevolent villain" concept is rare but it has been used before. I don't mean rogue heroes like Robin Hood, Zorro or The Saint, but as far back as Jules Verne, whose Robur the Conquerer wanted to be Master of the World because he thought he could do a better job of it, and Captain Nemo who sank Navy ships to end wars. Their flaw was that they were ruthless about it and megalomanical enough to think they could save the world singlehanded.

Another similarity worth noting is that at one time Sivana was a member of The Monster Society of Evil - not a far cry from Dr Horrible's Evil League of Evil. Both groups had non-human leaders, the ELE's Bad Horse and the MSE's "bad worm," Mr Mind.

Dr Horrible's sidekick Moist is a parody of the type of character, seen most commonly in X-MEN, with a realatively obscure super power and a one-word code name. In place of flamboyant names like Wonderman or Mr Terrific and standard powers like strength or flying we have characters like Marrow, who uses bits of her bones as weapons, or Skin, with extra folds of stretchable skin. Moist with his ability to "make things damp," sounds more at home in the Legion of Substitute Heroes, heroes with powers too ineffectual for the Legion of Super Heroes - with Stone Boy (turns to stone but can't move) and Polar Boy (makes things chilly).

Captain Hammer is the archetypal superhero. He fits the mold of Superman the way he was originally conceived in the 30s: super-strong, possibly super-fast and invulnerable. We see no direct evidence of the last two, nor of flying. But the original Superman didn't fly, he leaped ("over a tall building in a single bound") and wasn't completely invulnerable ("nothing less than a bursting artillery shell can penetrate his skin.") Of couse the biggest difference is that Superman and Captain Marvel were nice guys. Captain Hammer is a jerk.

It's not that there are elements of older stories in DHS-A-LB that matters. STAR WARS borrowed heavily from old movie serials, Japanese Samurai movies and World War II dogfight movies but it was still a unique vision. So is DR HORRIBLE. There are no new stories. Genius isn't in inventing new ideas, its in building on and re-inventing the basics.

If you haven't seen it yet, it's still at Hulu.com or at http://www.drhorrible.com/

Nothing Serious This Week

“Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want … ? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want.” ~ Ayn Rand

... Just a link to a fun new web series. Look quick, because Act I is up now, Acts II and III are going up July 17 and 19, and it's only up till the 20th. Although I'm sure it will be back in some other form. This is what happens when a storytelling genius like Joss Whedon turns his talents toward evil.

I'm heading for I-Tunes to download a copy!

Then I'm headed for California for a two week vacation with my daughter!

UPDATE! The DHSAB site has crashed due to even higher volume of traffic than expected. It's being moved to a new server and should be available soon at

http://www.drhorrible.com/

What Have You Done Lately?

“It's choice--not chance--that determines your destiny.” ~ Jean Nidetch

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” ~ J.K. Rowling

“There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it's easy.” ~ Unknown

"If you ask people what they've always wanted to do, most people haven't done it. That breaks my heart.” ~ Angelina Jolie


First: The book with my short story, "A Voice for Ivy" is now available for purchase or download from Wildcat Books at http://stores.lulu.com/wildcatbooks . LEGENDS OF THE GOLDEN AGE VOL I has comics reprints about two characters from the Golden Age of Comics, the early 1940s. Daredevil and the Black Terror are now in the public domain, so its legal to publish new stories with them. I tried to write some fight scenes in the style of the old comics, but I can't seem to resist adding some sort of a social issue to what I write. Daredevil was mute, so I figured a theme about Freedom of Speech was nicely ironic. I made it more so by having the hero faced with supporting free speech for someone whose cause he disagrees with.

Another book I worked on is also being published in paper form, although it has been available online http://scifi-world-eng.info/ for a few years. NEBULAR is a future history of the human race in space by a German group, and I help with the translations to English. Basically I try to turn the literal translations into something more like the way real people talk, and make the action flow more smoothly to American readers.

To more important things...

I just saw the movie WANTED with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, two of my favorite actors. The plot involves people born with special abilities to focus their minds so that they can curve bullets in flight and perform impossible fighting manuvers. They form a group of assassins, but assassins who kill people who will commit some great evil.

I was expecting a fast-moving action flick with little or no message, but I was wrong. The message, as delivered by Morgan Freeman's character Sloan, is key to this blog's whole thread about why myths, folklore and fiction are necessary. In fact, it's part of the message that I never addressed and one I need to apply to myself as well.

Stories like King Arthur, Cinderella, Tarzan, Superman, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer all have, as I've said, one thing in common. They tell us what we need to hear, that we may seem to be drab everyday mortals, we are all more than we know. We can seize the sword in the stone, inspire true love, leap over tall buildings, work magic, slay the evil Empire, dragons and vampires with the power we have hidden within us.

What I didn't say is, we have to decide to do so.

Sloan tells Wesley, "It is a choice, Wesley, that each of us must face: to remain ordinary, pathetic, beat-down, coasting through a miserable existence, like sheep herded by fate, or you can take control of your own destiny and join us, releasing the caged wolf you have inside."

Stories aren't meant only to be lulling, reassuring daydreams that we flee into after a hard day's reality. Fantasy stories are called "escape reading," but that's not the reason why. They aren't an alternative to real life, they are the key to unlocking the magic in us. We have the power to actually escape from mundane life but we have to choose to use it.

We have to choose our destiny.

As Wesley (excuse his French) puts in in the end:

"Six weeks ago I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you. Who am I now? Account manager? Assassin? Just another tool who was mind fucked into killing his father. I am all of these. I am none of these. Who am I now? This is not me fulfilling my destiny. This not me following in my fathers footsteps. This is definitely not me saving the world... This is me taking control, from Sloan, from the fraternity, from Janis, billing reports, ergonomic keyboards, from cheating girlfriends and sack of shit best friends. This is me taking back control of my life. What the fuck have you done lately?"

All that Matters

"In the greater scheme, in the bigger picture, nothing we do matters. There's no grand plan, no big win.

"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Because that's all there is." ~Angel

Joss Whedon wrote that, and he is a genius.

I try to write this blog with non-geeks in mind so, Joss Whedon ... he's the creator/writer of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, FIREFLY and its movie spinoff SERENITY, and the upcoming tv series DOLLHOUSE. ANGEL's title character is a vampire with a soul (the dark, broody guy in the image up there). Through Angel's words Joss Whedon has managed to capture a philosophy that I've always had trouble explaining.

Several years ago there was an article in a newspaper about creationism vs evolution. The author's point was that anyone who didn't believe that we were created by a superior being could not possibly be a good or moral person because he had no authority to tell him good from bad. I took offense to this, of course, and replied with a letter to the editor saying that I'd rather be an ape who has improved himself than an angel who'd fallen.

This came up again when a young woman posted to the Witchvox site http://www.witchvox.com/ that she couldn't understand why pagans and atheists wouldn't accept that there was a loving, parental god who set down guidelines for good and evil and punished us when we strayed. I responded with my humanist view that we are perfectly capable of deciding right and wrong for ourselves. It took pages and, of course, she wasn't convinced.

But that's my take. It's reflected in the bottom line of the Witches' Rede, "an it harm none, do what thou will." The usual comeback is that letting people decide right and wrong for themselves leads to sociopaths, Nazis and serial killers. That is nonsense. Human beings know perfectly well what's right and wrong. Those that don't use that knowledge don't care or have a personality disorder.

The humanist concept is not popular because it is a scary one. It means that you are responsible for what you do, not Original Sin or the Devil or aliens, and you have to do what you know is right without a big parent watching over you. You have to do what's right even without punishment or rewards. Even when you know you can't win. Another ANGEL line says:

"Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. - It's harsh, and cruel. - But that's why there's us. Champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world was what it should be, to show it what it can be."

If my spiritual philosophy is "there is great Mystery in the universe and we are all part of it," then "all that matters is what we do" is my moral philosophy.