comics

I imagine my blog sounds a little like your friend who has just found a new girlfriend or boyfriend right now.  All going on and on about how great it is to find someone that understands you, how awesome it is to be getting someone touching your butt when you want it.  In my case, of course, I’ve spent the last month going on about my rekindled love affair with comics.

Fuck if I’m going to stop now, though.  Let’s talk about Gail Simone’s new Red Sonja.

The first arc of her new series, Queen of Plagues, has just wrapped up and is available here.  Having followed this series since it started, I was an immense fan from the get-go.  Red Sonja is a favorite heroine of mine: someone who makes absolutely no apologies for anything she does, someone who routinely forces the world to play by her rules, someone who faces a hard world and carves her own little piece of it out with a broadsword and a bad attitude.

All of this and more is on full display in Simone’s run.  Aided in no small part by the amazing artwork of Walter Geovani, there’s something hugely charismatic about the way she writes Sonja’s complete unwillingness to bend to a world that demands she does.  In all things does Red Sonja make her own rules: in fighting, in hunting, in copious, copious drinking…

And in sex.

That’s right.  It’s another blog post about sex.  I understand you might feel put off by this reveal.  Beyond just tricking you into thinking I was going to spend the whole time talking about Red Sonja, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about sex in fantasy fiction and a pervasive aversion to it by readers.  In fact, I seem to do it all the time, lately.  You could be forgiven for getting exasperated, throwing up your hands and saying “I don’t want to talk about this!”

But because you might have that reaction (and because the subject interests me greatly), I feel that we do need to keep talking about it.

And it’s not like I’m going to stop talking about Red Sonja now.  Because, actually, it’s in the most recent issue (#8) featuring a beastmaster and an awkward midnight courtship that a thought hit me that sparked this whole train of thought that led to this blog post.

I had read Red Sonja before.  She’s seen a lot of iterations.  And I liked the comics well enough.  How could I not?  “Angry woman in small clothes kills dudes with swords” constitutes maybe a quarter of the stuff I write.  But something about them always failed to connect with me.  Sonja seemed very…mythic, but not necessarily in the good way.  She was very distant and hard to relate to.  I guess that was the point.  Sonja has always been about being untouchable.

Simone did a lot of new things to change that and make Sonja more approachable.  And I want to emphasize that it was a lot of things (backstory, character interactions, alcoholism) that did that, so that you don’t get the impression that it was solely one thing that made Simone’s Sonja click with me.  But a big part of making that connection was a simple fact.

Red Sonja had a sex life.

Not in the sitcommy sense.  Sonja had desires.  Sonja had whims.  Sonja had agency.  Sonja got lonely.  Sonja got rejected.  Sonja got angry.

And I remembered how many times I’ve had those same feelings.  And it occurred to me that sexual identity is a much, much bigger part of a person than we probably even realized.

Sex scenes in fantasy get a bad rep.  “It’s too fetishistic!” people cry out.  “It’s too embarrassing!” people moan.  But above all else, whenever I have this conversation on twitter, the most common complaint is this.

“It adds nothing!”

And you know?  Technically, they are correct.  A sex scene adds nothing.

Because the sexual aspect is already there.

It’s ingrained in humanity.  It’s part of who we are.  It informs a lot of our decisions (for better or worse), it drives a lot of our thinking (often for worse).  And when we choose to ignore that aspect, we are not so much declining to add gratuity as we are leaving a gaping void where something should be.  And that kind of thing resonates with a reader more than we might care to admit.

“Ugh,” you might groan, “you’re just campaigning for more smut!”

Sure.  I like smut.

But that’s not the whole reason I’m speaking about this.  Inextricable to our inability to acknowledge the sexual aspect of a character seems to be the inability to acknowledge that sexuality is a vast and multifaceted thing.  I think (whether due to prejudices or past experiences), whenever someone thinks of “sex in fantasy,” someone thinks of some super gross fetish scene with lots of phallic imagery and synonyms for “dong” and “vag.”

It doesn’t always have to be.  Sex is a weird thing (hence why I’m always kind of amused when people complain that sex scenes are embarrassing; of course they are, sex is an intimate, vulnerable act.  It’s bound to be weird) and, just as combat scenes are different depending on whose point of view it’s in, anything of a romantic nature will have different priorities based on the character.

Not everyone is a master of the Thousand Palms.  A lot of things go into the moments leading up to it.  Awkward propositions, frustrated rejections, sulking in a corner, saying things you didn’t mean to; these are things that all could happen and, when they do, they will happen different for each character.  Even people who identify as asexual have a struggle figuring out their own sexual identity and where they fit in with society (a good example of this is the character of Fiona from Michael Lee Lunsford’s Supernormal Step).

“Well, I agree,” some people might say, “sex scenes done well–”

And I’m going to stop you right there.  That’s such a noncriticism as to be totally worthless.  Of course, people enjoy a sex scene done well.  People enjoy anything done well, because it’s done well.  But what’s “well” for some is not well for all.  We need to accept that dealing with sexuality of characters is going to be done in the author’s voice, whether you like it or not.

I guess what I’m saying is that this is something about a character that needs to be acknowledge.  I’m not saying that every book needs to have a sex scene on every page or even one.  I’m saying it’s super weird that a lot of authors choose not to even acknowledge that this might be something people think about.

We’ve made a lot of strides in fantasy so far.  Orcs can be good.  Elves can be evil.  People are flawed.  Fantasy has embraced this idea.  We’ve not only come to expect that our heroes not be perfect, we demand it to the point that our hero can be an utter fucking bastard and still get cheers.

It strikes me as just incredibly weird that we can scoff at the idea of a hero showing a totally altruistic act, yet somehow still be perfectly okay pretending that people are not thinking about sex all the time.

I’m getting older.

And my brain is becoming less elastic.  I’m slowly becoming closed to new ideas, slowly becoming unable to process new information, slowly becoming unable to learn new things.  Eventually, my brain will harden entirely and I will be completely closed-off from an ever-changing world.  I will come to hate and fear youth, I will still be typing on Word docs when the rest of publishing is downloading streaming information directly into their brains, I will loathe people who do things differently than me and insist my way is best and I will be a great member of SFWA.

But for now, I am still pretty young (immortal, even, if my profile is any indication), and that means I am trying to learn new things.

So now I’m writing comics.

I’ve already raved about Rat Queens, but the truth is I’ve started becoming more and more interested in the art.  I’ve been intimidated from Marvel and DC since I was a kid, but I’m finding real gems in the smaller publishers.  Gems like Jim Zub’s Skullkickers or Gail Simone’s Red Sonja.  But whereas when I was a kid, I’d be concerned mostly about swords and metal bikinis, I’m finding myself looking deeper, at the nuts and bolts…and the metal bikinis, but still.

Suddenly, I’m interested in panel layout: how does one learn to think in panels?  How does one act creatively in such an enclosed space?  What needs to be told?  What needs to be said?  How do you make the minimal amount of information look as amazing as it possibly can?

Suddenly, I’m interested in dialogue: how do you make it happen without monologues?  How can you flex your character with such tiny space?  How can you communicate in 90% witty banter?

Suddenly, I’m interested in motion: how do you convey people moving without drowning in panels?  What are the critical parts of an action sequence that absolutely, positively must be shown?  How do you make it look as cool as possible?

With these questions in mind, I started writing something.

And found that it is fucking hard.

I use too many panels.  My dialogue is too lengthy.  I’m not conveying motion well.  I can’t capture dramatic essence in a single shot.  I’m too used to having too much room to do whatever I want.  I’m not used to having to focus my prose to a sniper point and pulling the trigger.

I’ve taken three drafts of the first six pages of my script.  Each time I show them to my friend, who knows comics much better than I do, she points out some crucial flaw that I’ve overlooked.  So I go back; I tweak, I cut, I maim.  Then I come back with something neater, cleaner and tighter than I did before.

And I have new flaws.

To take a gander at it, I am pretty bad at writing comics.  I’ve been venting my frustrations daily on twitter and to anyone who will listen.  It got to the point where I thought it’d be more effective to write down a blog post about it.  So here it is.

Writing comics is hard.  Maybe the hardest creative endeavor I’ve ever done.

And that’s actually really, really, really fucking good.

It occurs to me that people are probably going through with novels what I am going through with comics: the frustration, the ire, the way you can force and force and try and try and study and study and things just don’t.  Get.  Easier.  It occurs to me that there are people who probably stare at the words they’ve written and think to themselves that it’s bound to have flaws, so why bother.  It occurs to me that there are people out there who are probably thinking of giving up.

And it’s for them that I want to say the following.

If it’s hard, you’re doing it right.

I’ve said that on every panel of every convention I’ve ever been at where the subject of how to write has even been hinted at.  Writing is hard work.  It has to be hard work.

People love talking about the business side of writing (because, as most writers have the business sense of a dumb baby, it is new and mysterious to us), but this is still a goddamn art.  We are still making art, not “product.”  We are still creating, not “producing.”  We are still pouring joy, hate, fear, love into something and shoving it out into peoples’ faces, not going down a checklist.

Because it’s a creative endeavor, the only way you’re going to get better at it is by failing.  And because it’s a creative endeavor, the only way to fail is by spending a lot of time and energy on something and then figuring out that it won’t work.  That’s just the nature of the art.  We have to build something up and then hurl cannonballs at it and see how long it takes to fall down.

But each time you build it back up, it’s a little sturdier.  Each time you make it fall down, the places in which the structure gives out are more apparent.  Each time it collapses, there’s more of it left for you to work with.

The only way to make it work and not feel hopeless about it is to see the truth in failure.

It’s a sham of an artist that flinches from failure because it’s impossible to grow without studying the ashes of what you just burnt down.  How did it fail?  What sentences wavered?  What parts of the character were too meaningless?  Where did it become sterile?  Where did you flinch?

Even this blog post is a failure on my behalf.  The advice I’m giving here is both so specific and so general that it won’t make sense to anyone else.  You’ll find our own way to look at things and your own way to figure out how to make it work.  You’ll figure out how your rhythm and your schedule works.  You might even come to refer to your book as product and start decrying about how my advice doesn’t conform to your situation, ergo my entire point is flawed.

At which point, your pedantry will overwhelm me and I will likely punch you.

So, if you want, you can take this as advice about whether or not writing is for you.  If you want, you can tear this blog post apart and see what parts work for you and what parts do not.  If you want, you can ignore it entirely and go read something someone else wrote.

In the end, maybe this whole blog post was, like any creative endeavor, for the artist first and the audience second.

Because it just doesn’t seem real to me unless I write it down.

I love Rat Queens.

That’s not the line I wanted to open with for this particular blog post.

I wanted to tell you I was going to come to here to tell you what an important comic Rat Queens, written by Kurtis J. Wiebe and drawn by Johnny Rocwell, was.  I wanted to illustrate in no uncertain terms just how many daring leaps this story has taken and just how important that is to the growth of fantasy as a genre.  I wanted to tell you all about how this was a comic that so thoroughly rejects the baggage of fantasy tropes while so vigorously embracing their delight that it simply demands to be read.

I wanted to tell you this in a very studious, academic manner that lent itself to thoroughly serious discussion.

As you can guess, I failed at that.

 

Rat Queens is awesome.  Simply, unabashedly, vigorously, humanly, tenderly, bad-assingly awesome.

A glimpse at its story should be easy enough to tell why I like it so much.  An adventuring party of an Elf Wizard, a Dwarf Warrior, a Human Cleric and a Smidgen (Halfling) Rogue have to deal with the troubles of being adventurers.  Said troubles include living large off of ill-gotten gains, causing fistfights, having sex with orcs and being general nuisances to society, oft-looked-down-upon by the authorities and probably loathed by one or more supernatural powers.

The characters are so amazingly vivid.  Hannah is a Wizard dealing with living up to the legacy of her parents and her people, Violet is a Dwarf who has rejected her society outright, Dee is a Cleric who doubts that the god she gets her powers from even exists and Betty is just so goddamn tender and good-natured it hurts.

They fight orcs.  They love orcs.  They fight assassins.  They drink a lot.  They fight wars.  They have complex relationships.  And every issue comes with a drink recipe at the end.

I can’t talk about what an important comic this is in a studiously distant fashion.  It’s too fucking good for that.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t talk about what an important comic Rat Queens is in three easy steps.

1. It Features Women

This comic’s main protagonists are all female.  This is kind of the most simple and the most complex thing about Rat Queens.

On the one hand, it’s pretty simple.  I’ve ranted before how I have a hard time believing any fantasy story that doesn’t feature women in a major role; it simply doesn’t reflect my reality and I find it dreadfully boring.  The fact that we have four major protagonists and each of them is a woman is great.  The world feels more authentic to me because we’re not pretending women wouldn’t be as greedy, conniving, violent or short-tempered as dudes in the same position.

And yet…it’s so very complex because the fact that they’re women is both the biggest deal and not a big deal at all.  The characters are never doubted based on their gender.  They are never rebelling against a gender stereotype.  There is never a point of them being so exceptional because they’re women.  They’re defying everything about fantasy tropes, but they’re doing it just by virtue of existing.  They love, they fight, they bicker, they form relationships and break them, they get drunk, they loot shit, they burn things alive, they murder giant troll women in badass battles while arrows fall like rain around them because that’s what they do.

Rat Queens proves that you don’t need some trauma or rape story to explain why a woman can be strong.  Some women just are.

2. It’s Influenced, but Not by Tolkien

I mean, insofar as it’s not a story that is intently mindful of the authors who have come before it.  It’s not a comic that is very concerned with considering what literary devices will be subverted, whether or not it pays homage to what came before, or how this reflects upon the edifices erected by Tolkien and Howard.  This is a comic that, like its protagonists, is concerned chiefly with itself and what it’s doing.

But the influences are pretty important because this is a comic that’s influenced by things that it’s very taboo (in the fantasy story world, anyway) to be influenced by: Dungeons and Dragons, youth culture, glorified self-destructive behavior and…well…humanity.  There are no cold-blooded paragons of virtue, no sinister shadows who do wicked things just because, no poignant reflections upon the state of the world.  There are people who are doing what people who had access to a lot of wealth and power like adventurers would really do, there are people who display what young people under the weight of prophecy and cultural stigma really do, there are people who reject what’s come before and deal with it.

And that brings me to number three.

3. It Was Made For Me

And you, too, I think, if you’ve ever read a book review where the reviewer praises the author for “paying homage/respect/tribute” to the books that have come before and wanted to vomit.

I can only really comment from a genre literature standpoint, but Rat Queens does so much of what I’ve desperately wanted to do and embodies so many things that I think are artistically virtuous that I can’t help but like it.  Rejection is seen as something beautiful here.  Striking it out on your own is commendable.  Making mistakes and having problems is seen as an inherent part of being a person.  Giving the finger to what other people want you to do is a necessary part of life and planting your feet, taking a shot and saying “tonight, I will have sex with an orc” is among the very highest honors you can do.

It is a fantasy story that wholly embraces youth and vigor and it’s just so goddamn great.  Betty is awesome.  More of that, please.

You can find Rat Queens in any comic store, but I get it off of Comixology.  Their first volume, Sass and Sorcery, is out now.  Get it.