TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE October/03 - The 80s really hated the 70s.
Which 80s action classic thinks the government doesn’t treat people as human?
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2022 -- bounce.
Stealing ideas.
I’ve been teaching creative writing for the past 4 weeks and I’ve been proselytising the truth that there are no original ideas - just the best ones you can mash up, steal, tweak, personalise, and write your damn best.
I know this, I believe it, but students continually try to shy away from it, hoping they can find the absolute best, most unique, original, perfect story idea.
I realised I need to get better at proving to them that all stories are just stolen in some way. The best ones are just the ones that are done the best.
I realised this the other morning as I was watching SEVERANCE - and what an absolutely baller show that is. This show has had me 100% hooked since the first episode, though it’s an admittedly weird and slow start. But the more the season unravels things, the more it all connects, and the more I’m just insanely invested. It’s a brilliant show on so many fronts - the scripts, the acting from every single person on screen, the design, all the way down to the lens work [once I saw the moment the lens or focus or something changed in an elevator scene I was all in on the genius minutiae of this show].
So what’s the idea of SEVERANCE, and where did they steal it from?
Well, the show is about people who walk into work and suddenly forget the outside world, and so when they leave work they forget they’ve been there all day. They essentially become two people - an innie who is at work their entire existence, and an outie who only lives outside of work and never knows what those hours are spent doing.
It’s a great premise, and it’s completely ripped from one of the greatest comedies of all time - OFFICE SPACE
In the film, the main character asks if he could be hypnotised so his brain would switch off from the fact he’s been at work all day, and that he’d just think he’d been fishing all day.
It’s a funny line, but it begs the question - if something like that would be done, would his body just mindlessly and unconsciously go to work and exist and do the job, or would he have a complete brain shift and turn up, chat with people, do his job, be like a real person, but not be remembered by the after work guy who would only remember some fake fishing?
It’s a stretch, I know, but this is the central question that SEVERANCE is also asking - if there were two versions of you based around work, how the hell would that work?
Now, OFFICE SPACE uses this to just make the main character, Peter, relax about work and go in and not give a damn anymore; he is not split in two, and then hilarity ensues. In SEVERANCE, Adam Scott’s character, and everyone else down there, is completely cerebrally split, and from there things go weird, and dark, and amazing.
So it makes me want to get students to take an existing idea and consider it through a different genre lens - or take a question that a film/story is asking and consider a different answer to it.
To successfully do this, I think I’ll need more examples. More basic story premise & core question examples:
What would you do if you could time travel one time? ←I’m just thinking any time travel story, but trying to keep the story concise [could maybe go up to 2-3 times, if the story could use it wisely and tightly] but I’m also somewhere in the zone of BACK TO THE FUTURE where time travel is hard, or 11/22/63 where it keeps sending you back to the same moment
What would you do if you were given a superpower? ←Anything from GREEN LANTERN being brought his ring to the short story THE CAPE to SPIDER-MAN being bitten by a radioactive spider
What would you do if your next door neighbour stopped leaving the house? ←I’m thinking REAR WINDOW and WHAT LIES BENEATH
What would you do if you went to the moon and there was no way home? ←I’m thinking THE MARTIAN but even just stuff like CASTAWAY
What would you do if you were going to war tomorrow and you had one night left in your hometown? ← I’m thinking stuff like AMERICAN GRAFFITI and DAZED & CONFUSED and THE WANDERERS
What would you do if you found a bag full of cash? ←I’m thinking MILLIONS
What would you do if you went hiking and a friend broke their leg? ←I’m thinking about 127 HOURS
What would you do if you saw a vampire feeding on someone? ←I’m thinking INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, or FRIGHT NIGHT or any vampire story
What would you do if a ghost of someone you knew suddenly appeared in your life? ←I’m thinking AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, but also GHOST
What if you woke up tomorrow and there were no humans around? ←I’m thinking about post-apocalyptic stuff here, but also the dream in VANILLA SKY
What if you suddenly woke up in another time [the past or the future]? ←I’m almost thinking QUANTUM LEAP, but it’s also got me thinking about POV characters in general
What if you were caving and you could not find your way out? ←THE DESCENT is the one that sticks in my head here
What if a shark killed some people at your local beach? ←I’m definitely not trying to think about JAWS 3D
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The Postmortem on A FISTFUL OF PAIN
I’m already a die-hard ComixLaunch podcast fan - it’s the place where Tyler James, the publisher of ComixTribe and the founder/runner of the ComixLaunch Program talks through his knowledge of how Kickstarter and Comics go so well together. He does interviews, group sessions, deep dives, and it’s constantly fascinating.
I say this as someone who has now personally run 9 successful online crowdfunding campaigns, and also been party to another like 5 or 6 campaigns, and near everything I learnt and successfully applied comes from Tyler. Plus, the guy is good people and I like keeping up with how he’s going, which he also puts into each episode of the show.
I’d tell you to just check out the whole podcast, but he’s closing in on 400 episodes, so I might as well send you somewhere specific. You ready?
Successfully? Look at me pretending I’m modest - we smashed every ComixTribe record for their comic launches - most money, most backers, most Australians in one book, most midnight yacht fight sequences in one OGN, etc.
It was a blast being on the ground floor for all of the campaign, and a lot of the numbers I’d already nerdily eaten up as the book continued to sell and sell, but hearing Tyler wrap it all up together really gave me some positive things to think about - and one is how awesome this newsletter and its readers are. Y’see, Tyler generates specific links to be shared that can be tracked, and the link he gave me was one I shared here all the time - and that link was one of the most successful links - in clicks, pledges, and money - for the whole campaign. That means a whole mess of Homeopape readers got their sleeves up and helped me bring this book to life. That’s pretty awesome, so thank you!
And for those who dig a nerdy graph - Tyler does mention Kicktraq, and I’ve also been tracking my campaigns on that site since forever ago, and I find it’s always interesting to see just how much of an uptick your campaigns can get in those final days, and why the middle of the campaign is called the Dead Zone. Enjoy/
The next step is to look at your own campaign against other campaigns you’ve run - or other campaigns you wish to emulate or stack up against. It can be really helpful to work out what you did to launch strong, or end strong, or build little bump days along the way.
As Tyler also says - what you can measure, you can manage - and I do believe it.
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Thinking about genre films.
I have to put together a list of flicks in certain genres [post-apocalyptic and fantasy] for students to study and eventually present about, so I whipped these together and I think there’s some real gold in here to be mined!
If you find yourself with time and the inclination to try something new, I vouch for most of everything on both these lists:
I need the students to watch a film and consider its meaning, as well as view it through a specific lens.
One of the examples I’ve already used was watching ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK with the students as an example of a post-apocalyptic-type flick that isn’t all scorched earth, but things are obviously pretty sideways. So we watched the film, the kids thought it was fairly janky, very old school, but they were paying attention the whole time. John Carpenter still works.
Now, the easiest lens to lay over this flick is a feminist one, because the film is pretty trash on all its women. They serve little purpose in the plot, except as exposition dumps, and easy victims to raise the stakes. And there are only 3 women on screen in total that we could count. Now considering New York is a SuperMax prison, maybe it was only ever meant to be just dudes, but there are clearly some women around [we saw 3] and one of them gets to be one of the main crew gathering around Snake Plissken, but she’s played by Adrienne Barbeau who was Carpenter’s wife at the time, and even still her character doesn’t do all that much and in the end dies a fairly pointless death.
From here I could tangent in two ways - we can see that women are treated as far less equal in this story, but we can also flip that feminist lens onto the men in the story. There are some negative male stereotypes shown in the film - aggressive, possessive, duplicitous, etc - but the main thing that shows is that there isn’t a lot of genuine camaraderie amongst the men, each is out for themselves. There are no true bonds of brotherhood, which is interesting, but I’d actually push it further and consider what these characters represent.
To do this, I’d need to look at the film through a Marxist Lens - which considers the class values shown within a film. I found it interesting how all of the main men get nicknames instead of using their real names. Snake, Brains, Cabbie, the Duke of New York - and they all represent different classes of society: intellectuals, the invisible working class, criminal. Snake could represent the working class, being used by the system to do their dirty work to keep things moving, he could represent veterans, as he’s a survivor of World War III; he definitely seems to represent someone who is sick of the upper class, represented through Police Commissioner Bob Hauk and President John Harker, neither who get snappy nicknames, but instead are afforded official titles.
Which got me to thinking about nicknames, especially as Carpenter might have been viewing them in 1976 when he first wrote this screenplay - he was post-Watergate, he was hating the upper class, and I wonder if the nicknames were a throwback to the Vietnam War [the war the US botched in the worst ways] and how the soldiers there really leaned heavily into using nicknames, and whether those monikers gave them some distance from the terrible atrocities of that war, both macro and micro in scale.
Is Escape From New York a story about reclaiming our sins and our right to be human after the elite ruling class of America uses the common people as cannon fodder in an unjust war and the only result is ruining the people of America who exist in those working class layers?
The film opens with Snake Plissken, Kurt Russell in peak bad ass form, telling Hauk to call him ‘Snake’ but by the end of the film, when Hauk wants to connect with Snake and bring him into the police force, Russell gets his best Eastwood voice on and says “Call me Plissken.” Now, I’ve always just thought this was a bad ass line, it’s him sticking it to the man, it’s him being oppositional to Hauk, who we hate because he trapped Snake into this mission with poison, it’s a great moment. But is it also Snake reclaiming his humanity, distancing himself from the soldier and the criminal called Snake and reasserting that he is also a man, and dammit that man deserves respect, not to be either shunned, ignored, or used as a tool. He’s not just one weapon amongst many in the working classes to be used against the other working classes by those in power who never get their own hands dirty, unless it’s to benefit them and to then be discarded - the moment the President is saved and then has zero time for Snake is the moment this system as shown at its worst.
Through a Marxist lens, we can see Escape From New York is a film actively hating on the government and the police state, and hoping that people can be seen as worthwhile. For something that is also openly and awesomely just a massive early 80s action/sci fi flick, it’s also something loaded with politics, because it’s hard not to write about the world around you, and to then do so with your values and attitudes leaking through.
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A little writing update.
Not been scripting on the latest project as I await notes on the latest script in, which is for #2 - have already scripted #3, but want to hold off on #4 at all just in case notes on #2 alter the trajectory a few degrees and I don’t want to write ahead and be wildly off course.
Have pitched one graphic novella idea to a publisher we all know and love. Will wait and see.
Another publisher I dig has asked to see some stuff, so am assembling some stuff. I’m currently sitting on two pitches I really like for minis. There’s also an old pitch, with an artist attached, that I’m always hoping to resurrect. As is one OGN pitch that’s loose, but forever lives in my heart, so I’m holding out hope for a place to land it.
An artist I’ve worked with a few times has hit me up with an idea and I’m noodling it about slowly. This is mostly ink in a notebook - actually the back of an old notebook for our [previous collaboration :] - I need to crunch this more, work out my angle, and get back to him soon.
And we are finalising all of the A FISTFUL OF PAIN stuff to send to print soon.
So, busy, but it just feels like bobbing around in the ocean, there are rises and falls. I’m not in the thick of a cross-channel marathon or anything. Which is kinda nice, because I’m also marking 40 short stories, and prepping for the final term of teaching, and hoping to enjoy the sunshine as it slowly creeps out more.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
The sunshine, too :]
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
SEVERANCE - I really cannot speak highly enough of this show, it’s on Apple+ - do you find yourself stating where stuff is streaming now when you discuss it? I do it because I know it’s a question I ask, so it’s information I want to give. If a show is awesome, but it’s on a streaming platform I don’t have, or will refuse to get, then that is always a sad moment.
Anyway, this show! I mentioned it above - office workers can only remember being at work, and when they leave they change personality and do not remember being at work. From there, we are introduced to a new member of this small 4 person office, and slowly things start to unravel. It’s a good commentary on office work and our rights and how mindless cubefarm work is, but it’s also a slamming indictment of the use of new tech and the abuse of megacorps and the question of what makes a person. It is very very Philip K. Dick and I am very very here for it.
As each episode went on, I found myself loving the show more and more. A new aspect of a character would be unveiled, or a new element of the workplace would come into view, and slowly a very large image would lay out in front of you and I was faced with questions about plot, but also questions about reality. Yes, very PKD.
Every single actor is impressive, from the big names you know like John Turturro and Christopher Walken to the people I’ve never seen before, like Britt Lower and Tramell Tillman. The writing spirals and delights in equal measure as we discover more facts and slowly come to care more about everyone - whether we love them, hate them, or just understand their complexity more.
But it’s the mythology they are building that fascinates me. There is so much to dig out of this show, and every time something weird happens you know it’s not random so you have to slow yourself down and consider what it is linking to - like the dancers, or the small items anyone ever holds in their hands. I’d link this show to LOST in the way it’s playing with big ideas and themes and at the moment the viewer is only seeing a fraction of what’s actually at stake so far.
There are a lot of shows I dig, but this is a show that’s got me actively really excited to think about it a lot, and to want to then go off and create my own mindbending stuff, too.
THE WALKING DEAD: ALL OUT WAR - I’ve read the first TWD trade a solid dozen times in my life, maybe more - it was the first comic to get me back into comics, so it’s been around a long time, and I’d often do a reread before the next trade dropped, up until maybe trade 9 or so. As such, the events at the start of this story that go right into the prison were fairly well embedded into my brain. But the ‘All Out War’ storyline, which runs from issue 115 and the next 11 issues, was something I only read one time, and after the birth of my second kid, so I remember liking it, but could not for the life of me remember what exactly happened. Rereading up to the end of this arc was a delight recently as I was on the edge of my seat watching this brutal war unfold between two large factions of people. It’s a shame that there’s so much action, bullets, death, but it’s mostly just to all of the background characters. The stakes feel less intense just because of the convenience at times, but overall the comic has done a good enough job of proving that no one is safe that I’ll give them a pass into this storyline. I have about another 10 issues to read before I hit the point where I originally dropped off, and then I’ll be reading completely new territory. I’m very excited.
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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?
I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, IDW, Mad Cave, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.
I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.
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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
Took the family for a feed on the other side of town - went into a small record store [one that smells exactly like an old record should] and found this beauty for a single note purchase!
A damn fine design on that cover - shame about the flick in general, not a disaster, but not as good as this thing :]