Please Don't Stop the Beat

Now where was I?

There are few things that bother me more than musical numbers in musicals that stop mid-song so characters can have a bunch of expository dialogue. It's such shoddy craftsmanship. The whole point of the musical should be that the story is told THROUGH SONG, not through dialogue that happens in-between verses of the song. I mean, sure, a line or two here or there isn't terrible. But when the whole momentum of a number grinds to a halt so characters can conversate? What's the point? Just write a play next time!

Perhaps the worst offender I can think of is in Hairspray, which was a massive hit that spawned a movie and a live TV production so probably nobody cares about this but me. If you've ever listened to the original Broadway cast recording of Hairspray then you know that the finale of the show, "You Can't Stop the Beat", is a certified banger. What you may not realize is that on the cast recording much of the dialogue expositing the ending of the show has been cut out. Watch a production of Hairspray, and when they get to "You Can't Stop the Beat" you'll be wondering why oh why they keep stopping the beat of the best song in the show so characters can talk. On Broadway, the actors are so smooth and fast that they get away with it. In your standard community or school production of Hairspray, these dialogue breaks draaaag oooon.

The cast of Hairspray at the National Theater in Washington, D.C., perform "You Can't Stop the Beat."

Another offender is a from a far LESS successful show: Be More Chill. Essentially a 21st century spin on Little Shop of Horrors, Be More Chill is about a teenager, Jeremy, who willingly ingests a top-secret super computer "from Japan" that manifests itself as a vision of Keanu Reeves that only he can see on the promise that the computer will modify his behavior so that he becomes more popular. Be More Chill would be a great show for high schools to do, with a really bright pop-electronica score, if only the script weren't excessively & needlessly vulgar. (The first line of the show really doesn't need to be, "I'm waiting for my porno to load." You just lost most of your would-be licensees right there.)

The cast of Be More Chill at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London performs the show's title song.

So just as Little Shop of Horrors is a Faustian legend, or a story about a man who makes a deal with the Devil, Be More Chill is as well. In Little Shop, it's the man-eating plant Audrey 2 that promises hapless Seymore Krelborn the world as long as he keeps feeding it, and in Be More Chill it's the SQUIP (Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor) that promises Jeremy everything he could ever want just so long as Jeremy does what he's told. In both cases, of course, it's a fool's bargain and in the end the Devil gets his due.

Jeremy Jordan sings with a plant in the Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors at the 
Westside Theatre in New York City.

Both shows feature a song where the devilish stand-in tempts the desperate fool. In Little Shop of Horrors that number is, of course, "Feed Me (Git It)", now one of the more recognizable songs in the history of musical theater thanks in large part to the excellent film adaptation of the stage musical. In Be More Chill that song is the title song, "Be More Chill". In both cases, the audience is treated to a sinisterly undertoned pop tune that raises the dramatic stakes and ups the tension. In both cases, the song is interrupted by dialogue. But in Little Shop, "Feed Me" is interrupted by a brief scene where Seymour's unrequited love, Audrey, is struck by her abusive dentist boyfriend while the vamping music builds to a rockabilly crescendo. During the number "Be More Chill" the music in the moment stops dead. The tune that had been reeling the audience in drops out entirely for Jeremy to deliver a faux-operatic tale of woe followed by a two minute slow jam where a couple of teen girls seductively offer Jeremey a ride home from the mall.

And I'm just sitting there pissed that they interrupted their good song with two bad ones.

All right, so at least they're still singing. I guess that wasn't my original point. And I've never written a musical so I guess maybe it's hard to write a good musical theater song or something, whatever, I don't know.

I guess, just... you know, when you've written one? Please stop interrupting it so your characters can do something else instead. Just sing the damn song and tell the damn story, and whatever you do?

Please don't stop the beat.

Have You Tried Not Worrying About It? (The Trouble With Time Travel)

We went back... to Back to the Future!

In this brave new world of quarantine-land, we as a species are looking for ways to kill time as we wait for our respective governments to solve this problem or, more realistically, for COVID-19 to get bored and go away. It is in that spirit that I turn to this post, and it is that same spirit that my 13 year-old daughter Gabby has decided she wants to watch the Back to the Future trilogy.

My wife Jaime and I have returned to a number of our favorite older movies while sheltering-in-place here in Brooklyn, NYC. I'm happy to report that Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Birdcage both hold up and you should revisit (or visit) them ASAP. Back to the Future also holds up.

And then there's Back to the Future Part II.

Yikes.

Back to the Future Part II is kind of a mess, and side note: all of the old-age make-up is horrifying. Everyone in the movie's version of 2015 looks like a Dark Crystal character or one of those creepy battery people from the old Duracell ad campaign.

Oh man.

Puppet-faces aside, though, I have to admit that by the end of our viewing? I was on board. By the time credits rolled on Part II I couldn't help but smile at the extremes to which the film had embraced time travel and all of the baggage that comes with it. By baggage I am referring, of course, to time paradoxes: the continuity-shattering realities of writing a story in which the chronological order of events no longer has any meaning.
Back to the Future takes place in two times (1985 and 1955) and establishes for itself a pretty straightforward time rule based on the well-known Grandfather paradox: if you go back in time to kill your grandfather then you'll never be born to go back in time and kill your grandfather. In the first film, protagonist Marty McFly is sent back in time 30 years to 1955, where he accidentally interferes in his parents meeting for the first time and has to remedy that over the course of one week lest he end up fading from existence. If he traveled back in time and kept his parents from falling in love, then how was he ever born to travel back in time? Grandfather paradox. Even this relatively simple plot leads to paradoxes on top of paradoxes. For example: if Marty keeps his parents from meeting then why did he slowly fade from existence over a week instead of instantly disappearing? The answer, obviously, is because storytelling. In stories, countdown timers are more interesting than abrupt endings.

This still owns, though.

Back to the Future Part II, though, makes the first film seem like a slow-moving period drama by comparison. Part II sends Marty and Doc through 1985, 2015, an alternate 1985, back to 1955 and the events of the first movie, and then to top if off Doc gets hit by lighting while in the DeLorean and ends up in 1885 (although we, the audience, won't get to join him there until Part III.) This second film in the trilogy is busy as all hell, and if you're not somebody who has already spent a chunk of your life thinking about time travel (for example, my wife) you're probably going to have trouble following along with the story.

The key to understanding fictional time travel, I've found, is to stop trying to understand it. This is very difficult for some of us in a canon-obsessed audience, particularly for those of us raised on comic books, where every story across a publisher's line of books has "happened" in the same universe and the events of one effects the events of another. Characters revisiting their past or visiting their future is simply too ripe a storytelling opportunity to avoid picking from time to time, and the simple truth is that unless the time travel rules of a particular fictional universe are established as being the linear rules of time travel (that is, what happens happened, and what happened happens, and time travelers can't change the future or past but simply observe it from a different point of view) then the moment characters are sent forwards or backwards in time narrative paradoxes are going to pop up. It is inevitable.

Back to the Future Part II contradicts itself in a number of ways. Marty and Doc have to change events in the past to travel forward to a new future, but when old Biff changes events in the past he then returns to a 2015 that seemingly hasn't changed to reflect the drastically different new future his actions created. This chapter in the series leans HARD into characters jumping around through the time stream to effect change, but those changes only seem to occur when appropriate for the narrative.

Which is, of course, the best way to do that if you're trying to tell a good story.

Time travel in fiction is the perfect example of a valuable rule of story consumption that I think we've come to forget in a post-MCU world: exposition makes bad storytelling, so sometimes you have to let go of the background minutiae and just enjoy a story for what it is. Contradictions are going to occur in fiction, almost always. If that's something that bothers you, the simplest solution to ensure that you're able to continue enjoying your stories, time travel or otherwise, is to stop thinking so much about them.

At least they never tried to explain how this thing works.

P.S. - My favorite use of time travel in fiction is in Douglas Adams' novel Mostly Harmless, part of the Hitchhiker's Guide series, in which the inevitable millions of time paradoxes generated by easily available commercial time travel have led the universe to the brink of collapse because nothing within it makes sense anymore. I just love the conceit of a series of books that leans hard into time travel while at the same time acknowledging that time travel is straight narrative nonsense.

P.P.S. - My LEAST favorite use of time travel in fiction is in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the stage play sequel to the Harry Potter series. Cursed Child relies heavily on Back to the Future Part II style time-travel to drive its plot, when it was clearly established in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that time travel in the Harry Potter universe is linear in nature and grandfather paradoxes are NOT possible within it. Cursed Child ignores that rule in total, even though the same exact sort of magical talisman (the time turner) is used to time-travel in both the book and the play. Seriously, it's best not to think too hard about this stuff.

Who is the Joker?

First of all, I promise this is not becoming a comic book blog. It just so happens that the big movie people have been talking about right at the same moment I've begun this blog is Todd Phillips' Joker... right after I wrote a post about the X-Men. Yeah, okay, I know, I'm sorry: I do like muh superheroes. If you're either Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, then this might not be the blog for you.

Joaquin Phoenix is the most recent actor to take on the role of
the Clown Prince of Crime.

So did you see Joker? It's a masterpiece, I'm told. I mean, I saw it as well, and it was... fine. I saw it with my friend Ted. Ted and I have been friends since high school and we are now, er, older than that, and I am one-hundred percent certain that there is nobody in the world with whom I have seen more movies in my life than Ted. After the credits rolled on Joker and the lights came up (literally; Ted always sits through all the credits for every movie, and this, too, has been a thing since high school) Ted turned to me and said, "That was one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen." To which I replied, "Really?" Silence of the Lambs, I think, is more 'disturbing' than Joker. Seven is more disturbing. Pauly Shore's Bio-Dome is, in its way, more disturbing. Joker is violent, to be sure, but I'm not even sure if it's any more 'disturbing' than Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the film it takes large swaths of inspiration from.

This is all really just a prelude to what interests me about Joker, which is the Joker. As we approached this film's release, I said to anyone who asked me if I wanted to see it: "I wouldn't want to see a Batman movie without a villain; why would I want to see a Joker movie without a Batman?" The Joker, though, is the one Batman villain who can confidently carry a film by himself. As I said to one rabid Joker fan on Twitter the other day: people wouldn't exactly be lining up in the streets to see Penguin or Clayface or Killer Moth.

The Joker, the character, is often described as the yin to Batman's yang, except when a particular writer is going about telling a story about how similar the two characters are, as writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland did in the seminal graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, and Sean Murphy did more recently in the excellent graphic novel Batman: White Knight. Ironically, both of these tomes offer new variations of what I find most fascinating about the Joker, his origin story... or more accurately, his lack thereof.

Batman's origin story is easy and universally adapted across mediums: a young Bruce Wayne was present when his parents were gunned down by a criminal. Usually the gunning down takes place in a Gotham City back alley dubbed Crime Alley, and usually the Waynes have just exited the theater, very often (but not always) after seeing a Zorro movie. Over the years the identity of the killer of the Waynes has been revised for the purposes of a particular story (in comics lore a crook named Joe Chill killed the Waynes; in Tim Burton's film Batman it was Jack Napier, the mob enforcer who would eventually become the Joker.) But the core of Batman's motivation remains the same: he saw his parents die at the hands of a criminal and determined to wage war against the Gotham City underworld.

The Red Hood.

The Joker's origin story and alter-ego are, by contrast, extremely fluid. The character first appeared, fully-formed, in 1940's Batman #1 with many of his signatures already in place: his chalk-white skin, green hair, purple suit, and tendency to kill his victims with rictus-inducing "Joker venom." The Joker's creators, writer Bill Finger and artists Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, initially declined to present an origin story for the character, deciding that some of his allure came from the mystery of his past. It wasn't until 1951 that the first telling of the Joker's origin was told in Detective Comics #168. In this tale the Joker is a laboratory worker who dons a costumed identity, the Red Hood, to rob his employer of a million dollars. Stopped by Batman, the worker falls into a vat of chemical waste and emerges with bleached skin and green hair.

The Joker and his unnamed earlier self from
Batman: The Killing Joke.

1988's The Killing Joke expands on the 1951 tale, presenting the Joker as an unnamed engineer who tries stand-up comedy and fails miserably, only to fall in with criminals, be forced into the Red Hood identity to serve as a distraction so his partners can rob the diamond exchange next door to the chemical plant. To escape an approaching Batman, the failed comic jumps into a vat of chemicals that bleaches his skin and turns his hair green which, along with the recent death in a household accident of his wife and unborn child, drives him insane. One year later, in 1989, that origin was deviated upon yet again in Burton's Batman, where mob enforcer Jack Napier, played by Jack Nicholson, is double-crossed by his boss, falls into a vat of acid, and emerges a lunatic with bleached-white skin and a permanently disfigured rigor-mortis smile on his face.

It is The Killing Joke, however, that offered the true key element of Joker's origin story. In it, the tale of his own origin is told through flashbacks by the Clown Prince himself, and in true unreliable narrator style he admits of his pre-Joker days, "Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... if I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" This piece of dialogue, much like The Killing Joke in its entirety, builds upon the foundation of origin uncertainty established by the character's creators way back in 1940. 

Heath Ledger with an Oscar posthumously for his portrayal
of the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

The Joker remains the ultimate multiple choice character. Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, has played the Joker in voice-over performance for almost 30 years in various mediums, and many die-hard Batman fans consider his to be the definitive performative version of the character. Heath Ledger played the Joker to great critical acclaim in Christopher Nolan's 2008 film The Dark Knight, written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan. The Dark Knight is my personal favorite Joker story, because of all the origins the character has ever had this is arguably the most ambiguous. This version of the Joker does not have bleached skin; instead, he greases his hair and paints his face white. What he has are scars on his face, extending his smile up past its natural limits, and three times in the film he asks other characters if they want to know how he got them... but each time, the story is different. And when then-Detective Gordon captures the Joker midway through the film and the mayor of Gotham asks what the police have on him, Gordon replies, "Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name. No other alias."

Jared Leto also played the Joker once.

A reformed Joker, with Harley Quinn at
his side, looms over the Caped Crusader
in Sean Murphy's Batman: White Knight.

Batman: White Knight is a 2018 limited series comic book that tells the tale of a reformed Joker. In White Knight, writer/artist Sean Murphy is purposefully working from a potpourri of elements gathered from the vast history of Batman interpretations over the previous 80 years of storytelling, best exemplified in a key story moment when several of the characters in the tale each drive one of Batman's many collected Batmobiles: the one from the early comic book years, the one from 1960's Adam West series, from Burton's Batman, from Batman: The Animated Series, from the Dark Knight trilogy, etc., etc. That gathering of diverse elements is present as well in the series' depiction of the Joker, who is given a definitive backstory for this standalone, non-canon story. White Knight's Joker is Jack Napier (as in Burton's Batman), a failed stand-up comic turned minor crook (as in The Killing Joke), who puts on make-up (as does Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight) and turns to crime alongside a lover/accomplice named Harley Quinn (invented in the 90's for Batman: The Animated Series.) White Knight even contradicts Joker's origins within its own pages: although it is heavily implied that Napier put on make-up to become the Joker, later in the story Napier reverts to the chalk-faced Joker persona spontaneously and instantaneously. 

This brings us back full circle to the most recent retelling of his origin, as featured in Todd Phillips' Joker. In this version of the story, Joaquin Phoenix in an excellent performance portrays Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill man who is driven slowly but surely by an uncaring system into the psychotic clown-faced criminal identity of the Joker. In this telling, the Joker's face is not white. In this telling, the Joker wears make-up. In this telling, Arthur has a stint as a failed stand-up comic and the resulting public derision does more than any vat of chemicals does to turn him into the Joker. And in this telling, Joker is revealed halfway through to be, as he always is, the most unreliable of narrators, a notion that is reinforced in the final shots of the film which place Arthur into a ephemeral version of Arkham Asylum.

But it is the third-to-last shot of the film that, really, is the most important moment of all in both the film Joker and in the existence of the Joker as a character. Arthur-slash-Joker sits in Arkham, chuckling to himself, prompting his therapist to ask him, "What's so funny?" For no more than a second, we flash back into Crime Alley, where a young Bruce Wayne stands between the bodies of his parents, slowly looking up to face the camera.

Emperor Joker

Hold onto that thought. I'd like to reference one final story: the year 2000 saw the release of the comic-book crossover Emperor Joker, a DC Universe-spanning event that, through some very comic-booky shenanigans, saw the Joker obtain near-omnipotent Infinity Gauntlet-level powers, free to shape, create, and destroy reality as he saw fit. In the end of the story, Joker's downfall is that, while he has the power to destroy all of reality, that would mean destroying Batman, as well: and in a rare moment of clarity, he realizes that this is something he cannot do, for without the Batman, the Joker would not exist.

And that's why the only shot that matters in Joker is that one of Bruce Wayne and his fallen parents, and why the entire film arguably takes place in Arthur's head: the Joker has no true, honest, origin that "counts," because his entire purpose is to provide an equal and opposing force to the Batman. Every protagonist needs a great antagonist. It's one of the few truisms of storytelling: for drama there must be conflict, for conflict there must be a hero blocked by an opposing force. The Joker is Batman's opposition. He's a near-demonic force of nature through which any number of tales can be told. The one constant in his fictional biography is Batman, an agent of order and lawfulness. Joker truly does not need an origin, because he only exists to be the opposite of all that the Batman is. All we need to know about the Joker, honestly, is that for all the death, chaos, and destruction he gleefully leaves in his wake, Batman will always rise up in opposition to everything he stands for.

House of X, Powers of X, and Rubber Band Storytelling

I began reading Marvel comics in the early 1990's, drawn in not by the books themselves but by the series of Marvel Universe trading cards my 5th grade classmates were swapping around between classes. I gravitated immediately to Spider-Man books, and the white-hot stars of Marvel Comics of the day: the X-Men.

Anyway, I started reading weekly comics, yada yada yada, and in 2008 I stopped because they were giving me anxiety.

It wasn't the CONTENT that was stressing me out. Superhero stories have always been and remain an integral part of my own storytelling DNA. It was the NATURE of weekly comics that I no longer found appealing. In 2008, the year I began to phase out of reading comics week-to-week, Marvel published Secret Invasion, a universe-wide crossover tale that had been set up slowly over the course of several books beginning in 2005, when it was first intimated that shape-shifting aliens called Skrulls had been slowly infiltrating the Marvel Universe of superheroes for years and years, and some of the characters readers had loved forever had *gasp* actually been Skrulls all along!

A piece of Secret Invasion promotional art.

The lead-up to Secret Invasion was enthralling: hints and whispers dropped in among the many various monthly Marvel titles about which characters may or may not be Skrulls, a new line of comics introduced for no other purpose than to offer a retcon of Marvel history that included the subterfuge of the Skrulls. (Retcon is an abbreviation of the term retroactive continuity. It is the storytelling act of offering new information for the purpose or re-imagining or re-interpreting a previously established fictional history.)

The actual Secret Invasion miniseries, on the other hand, was a dud. In it, the following characters were revealed to have been Skrulls for an extended period of time: Hank Pym, Spider-Woman, Dum Dum Dugan, Edwin Jarvis, Elektra, Black Bolt, and a bunch of random S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.

In other words: nobody.

Secret Invasion had promised upheaval to the stories of the Marvel Universe. It also promised the conclusion to a years-long set-up. In the end, the promised upheaval was at best mild indigestion, and the "conclusion" was nothing more than ANOTHER cliffhanger that led into a bunch of new books that shifted characters around from one team to another. It was then that I really, really realized I was investing extensive amounts of time and money on stories that would never end about characters that could never change.

If you're a fan of comic books, you're thinking: well, duh. That's what comics are, and you know what? You're absolutely right. I suppose what I'm trying to say is: it's not you, comics. It's me.

The latest massive re-imagining and upheaval of a Marvel Comics property is happening right now in Marvel's line of X-Men books. Again, to be clear: I've been reading weekly comics only sporadically over the past decade, but the last one I read was an X-Men book, one that saw a time-displaced version of the original X-Men team brought into the "current day" Marvel Universe to interact with the older versions of themselves.

They have since been sent back from whence they came, of course.

So I'll grant you: I may not be entirely up-to-date on what's going on in the X-Men's world as the characters enter this new era, but I'm willing to bet that doesn't matter much, as all of the characters who are central to this new story are characters who were created twenty to thirty to fifty years ago.

Earlier in 2019, Marvel Comics cancelled all of their X-Men books and re-launched the line with two titles designed to set up the all-new status quo of the X-Men: House of X and Powers of X (written by Jonathan Hickman with art by Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva, and Martin Garcia). The X-Men were created in 1963, and the long, convoluted, massive story spun out of that initial team has always been, at its core, about the plight of mutants: people born with superpowers that manifest around the time they hit puberty. The X-Men have long been trotted out as a thinly veiled metaphor for the civil rights movement, and their struggles as metaphors for the obstacles faced by most any of society's many marginalized groups. At the core of the series is the lifelong struggle between Charles "Professor X" Xavier and Erik "Magneto" Lehnsherr. Professor X, the leader of the X-Men, strives for peace between mutants and humans; he is often represented in analysis as the series stand-in for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Magneto, leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants, believes in mutant domination over humans and is supposedly a (very broadly painted) stand-in for Malcolm X.

The covers to House of X #1 and Powers of X #1, respectively.

Whether or not these comparisons were intentional on the part of series creator and Marvel impresario Stan Lee is the subject of some debate, but nevertheless: the comparisons persist.

House of X and Powers of X ran for 6 issues apiece, 12 issues total, and they concluded just this past week. They set up a new world for Professor X, Magneto, and the entire X-Men mythos. There are a lot of details involved in the story they tell that would be awfully confusing to anyone who is not a long-time fan of the franchise and familiar with dozens and dozens of supporting characters, but to sum up: the telepathic Professor X has teamed up with Magneto (not for the first time) and summoned every mutant in the world to Krakoa, a living island in the Pacific Ocean, for the purpose of forming a sovereign mutant nation from which mutants can assume their rightful place as the planet's dominant species.

That is a vast oversimplification of a fascinating and gorgeously rendered (but very convoluted) science fiction story that involves the massive retconning and super-powering of a longtime X-Men supporting character, four concurrent storylines running across four time periods spread over 1,000 years, at least 10 alternate timelines worth of history, the death of several key mutants followed by their immediate resurrection, and the burying of the hatchet among enemies and friendly rivals alike for the good of a unified mutantkind.

It also asks us to accept that the X-Men have, without pause, given up on Xavier's decades-long dream of co-existence with humanity and embraced voluntary mutant isolationism and eventual mutant dominance over humans.

Obviously, there isn't a chance in hell that any of this is going to be permanent.

Comic books run on an engine of rubber-band storytelling. Marvel Comics and DC Comics, the industry's giants, are both stuck in an endless cycle. They must allow their characters to do what characters in stories must do: grow and change. This works, in the short term. Superheroes, though, are template characters. They are broad, mythological, good vs. evil, white hat/black hat characters. The most popular ones are the most popular ones for the simple reason that they are who they are, and while the audience wants the characters they love to grow and develop and change as all characters do, there is only so far that a publisher can walk a character away from the thesis statement at the core of that character's being. Change a popular character too much for too long and the audience will rebel; superhero fans want simultaneously for the characters they love to evolve over time but also to forever remain the same. 

If Spider-Man ever stopped believing that with great power comes great responsibility, that would be a betrayal of the core tenet of who that character has been since 1962. His fans like Spider-Man largely BECAUSE of that belief. If you take it away from him, you change what the character has been fundamentally, at its core, for almost 60 years. Batman must always believe that criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot, or he is no longer Batman. Superman can die, but you'd better believe he has to come back to life and continue to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

Similarly, there is only so long that Marvel is going to be able to get away with a Professor X who does not believe in the peaceful co-existence of humans and mutants.

This is the rubber band storytelling at the core of comic book superheroes. As far away as a creative team may move a legacy character away from who they have always been, eventually the character will snap back to the baseline. These are characters, certainly, but they are also symbols of specific beliefs and philosophies. Captain America was created in 1941 to punch comic book Nazis. A recent storyline "revealed" that Captain America has actually always been a sleeper agent of the evil organization Hydra; essentially, he had been retconned into always having secretly been a Nazi. People were outraged, which would have been justifiable had that story remained the permanent status quo for Captain America. It did not, of course. The whole "Cap was always a Hydra agent" thing was revealed to be a nefarious super villain plot and Captain America has since snapped back to being the selfless patriot and soldier that he has always been.

The X-Men's new status quo as established in House of X and Powers of X opens up a world of storytelling possibilities, all of which promise to be explored in the six, count 'em SIX, new ongoing monthly titles spinning out of HoX/PoX because, you know... comic books. It's a business, man. No matter your taste, Marvel's got you covered. Among the six titles, there's a traditional X-Men superhero book, a magic book, a pirate book, a space book, a mystery book, and an action-adventure book, all starring characters X-Men fans know and love. Sometimes twice. (Wolverine will be featured in at least three Dawn of X titles.)

The covers of the #1 issues in Marvel's new Dawn of X initiative.

In the end, it honestly doesn't matter that the events of these stories aren't going to be permanent. Ongoing superhero comics use familiar characters to tell interesting new stories, and House of X, Powers of X, and Dawn of X all certainly do that. Truth told, it is the familiarity of the legacy characters that ultimately draws readers in to superhero comics. There is a comfort in knowing that, whatever meat grinder creative teams may put them through over any given story arc, Spider-Man will always be Spider-Man, Batman will always be Batman, and the X-Men will always be the X-Men.

Although one question does bear asking: no matter how far they stretch the rubber band, how difficult can any writer possibly make the lives of make-believe eternally young super-powered supermodels? No wonder comics began to stress me out in my late twenties: Batman was created in 1939 and he's somehow still just 36 years old and just keeps getting richer.

Seriously: it ISN'T you, comic books. It's definitely me.

The Second Person

Choose Your Own Adventure books could go down some weird, weird paths.

I've used the language of video games more than once to illustrate points about literature. Take, for example, the basic literary element of point-of-view. First person point-of-view is when the narration of a story refers to the main character as "I", and third person point-of-view is when the narration of a story refers to the main character as "he" or "she" or some other non-gendered pronoun. Video games are also described in terms of being in either first or third person. A first person game puts you directly into the head of the avatar, and you see the world through their eyes. A third person game puts you outside of the avatar you're controlling, often directly over their shoulder.

Lesser known, and even lesser used in literature, is SECOND person point-of-view. A story told in second person is one where the narration refers to the main character as "you." The most famous application of second person POV may be in old school Choose Your Own Adventure stories, the ones that start with passages such as, "You wake up in an abandoned mine shaft. After dusting off dirt, debris, and spiders, you look around. To your left, the shaft heads towards a light. To you right: darkness. Which way will you go?" The text then offers the reader an option: "To go left, turn to page 28. To go right, turn to page 33," and the rest of the story unfolds in this manner, inviting the reader to go back and re-read the book many times over, experiencing a different story each time. The virtual world in the pages of the books is laid out by the author, and you, the reader, get to decide how you experience that world.

I'm wondering if you're starting to see the connection.

It is a connection that clicked for me when I was playing a video game that 1.) I've been playing recently, 3.) I'm way too late to the party on, and D.) is awesome. The game in question: Portal 2, a game about being trapped in an abandoned laboratory and solving environmental puzzles by using a gun that fires reality-bending teleportation portals onto walls. Portal 2 features arguably the greatest character in video game history. No, not the player avatar. The player avatar is a silent protagonist named Chell about whom very little is known. She's importantly unimportant, though, so we'll come back to her in just a bit. I'm speaking of GLaDOS, the wickedly scripted and voiced AI character who runs the dead lab where Chell is imprisoned. GLaDOS is delightfully insane, and her history and past are really at the heart of the world of Portal. In the first game in the series, she is the clear-cut antagonist; in the second, she could still be called such (although more shades of grey reveal themselves as that story unfolds.) As you, the player, in the person of Chell, puzzles your way through Aperture Labs, GLaDOS taunts you and leads you astray, all the time referring to you, as "you".

Portal 2

That alone doesn't mean, "Hey! Video games are all told in the second person!" First person games are so characterized because they ask the player to control a character into whose head the game's "camera" has been directly placed, and Portal 2 is very much a first-person game in that regard. And Portal games aren't necessarily Choose Your Own Adventure books; they're actually pretty linear in their progression as you solve their room-based puzzles in a pre-determined sequence. Portal and Portal 2 both, however, present a story told through the characters in front of you and the world around you. Much of the game's lore is delivered through environmental clues, graffiti tucked away in out-of-the-way corners and on television monitors that come to life in the background of the areas you explore, and it is entirely up to you how much of that part of the story you experience. The series' main character, Chell, is a cipher. Her character appearance is set, but she's a blank slate for you to write on, a vessel through which you experience the game's adventure. She is literally a shell. That's right. Chell is a shell. Valve isn't being subtle here, just as they neglected subtlety in their hit game Half-Life, where protagonist Gordan Freeman is a free man.

Another great example of choosing-your-own adventure gaming occurs in medieval fantasy game Skyrim, one of the most successful single-player video games of all time. In Skyrim you choose your race, your gender, your facial features, the literal and figurative paths you take, the disciplines you learn, the factions in the in-game world you're going to team up with, which ones you'll oppose, and which ones you'll avoid altogether... everything. You do all of this without your player avatar ever saying a word. Everything is a variable, and the world responds to and is shaped by your choices and actions. The game tends to get buggy for that very reason (it needs to be a remarkably malleable piece of programming to try and predict for everything the player may choose to do), but that's the price developer Bethesda Softworks was willing to  pay for developing an open-everything game. Spoiler warning: it totally worked out for them.

Skyrim

And then there's Nintendo, the granddaddy of gaming. Storytelling that presents you, the player, with a world and then steps back to allow you to react to it... that's a storytelling style Nintendo has embraced for a long time. Think of Nintendo's hit franchise, The Legend of Zelda, and its protagonist, Link. Just as Chell is an empty shell that the player is invited to inhabit in order to experience her story, Link is the graphical avatar standing in as the link between the player and his world. Both Chell and Link are silent and seemingly emotionless, and this is so for a very particular reason: both Valve and Nintendo are asking you to react to the game worlds around these avatars with your OWN thoughts, feelings, and responses, not with pre-scripted ones voice-acted for you in cut scenes.

Portal 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are both games that allow gamers to take control of a silent avatar and explore a meticulously detailed and designed world. When I'm playing Portal or Portal 2 and I stumble across some cryptic graffiti left behind in a cranny warning me not to trust GLaDOS, it's far more effective for the game to sit back and let me respond emotionally and intellectually to this narrative turn as opposed to cutting away to a scene that rips me out of Chell's head and shows me a character I've been role-playing as reacting to the scenario in a way I never would. Same goes for Breath of the Wild. There's two forms of storytelling in Breath of the Wild. There are traditional cut scenes that have been criticized and discussed and which sometimes feel awkward and out-of-character and out of place... and then there's the atmospheric storytelling that unfolds over the course of hundreds of hours of gameplay across the massive, history-laden, go-anywhere kingdom of Hyrule. I don't know about you, but I find exploring a field full of petrified enemies in front of a rotting barricade a far more compelling narrative experience than a cut scene where a bird in a smock makes snide comments to me.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

It stands to reason, when you think about it, that the ideal storytelling in an interactive medium would be interactive, rather than a series of cinematic scenes that rip control away from the player just as the most interesting parts of the story begin to happen. So flesh out your virtual worlds, game developers, as richly as you can, and when you drop me into it, don't signpost me to death. Don't dictate to me how your game should make me think, feel, and react. Just let me run loose and tell me, "You can go left or you can go right. Which way will you go?"

What is Storytalking?

Storytalking is a blog about storytelling.

To be clear: it is not a blog where stories will be told. It is a blog wherein we will discuss how humans tell stories, stories in all of their varied forms.

My name is Tom Hoefner. I’m a playwright, a teacher, a theater director, a novelist... a husband, a father, a brother, a son, a friend... a carbon-based lifeform, an American citizen, a lapsed Catholic, a basic white guy, a 40 year-old, a cat owner, a stay-at-home dad... and yes, I'm also a storyteller.

And I’m also a fan. Of stuff. Lots of stuff. Primarily, stuff through which stories are told: theater, comic books, video games, professional wrestling, professional sports, movies, music, television, books, etc., etc., all of which are but a few of the mediums that human beings, over the course of our existence on this planet, have adapted into mediums for storytelling.

We, as a species, need stories. Like oxygen, water, and nourishment. Stories feed the mind. We live an existence of chaos and disorder, of illogic and poor reasoning. Things happen in this world, good things, bad things, every-thing... and we are obsessed, as a species, with figuring out, “why?” even though the answer to that question is so very often, “why not?”

Our answer to a world where meaning is hidden and disorder reigns, has been for eons to create alternate realities where life has purpose and events unfold in a clear, cause-and-response, neat and orderly fashion.

We tell stories.

And this blog is a place where we’re going to talk about them.