The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by dotsomething:

Xyz's comment has already been addressed a number of times, but it can't be said enough:

There is a vast gulf between Frank Miller's work in that image, and the work of a long list of comic book artists who draw people ultra-comic-book-attractive AND with realistic proportions (look at almost any image by Greg Land or Butch Guice, both the men and the women).

rhandir:

When I said "fanfiction presents a special problem" I meant in the intellectual, "this is a neat situation" sense. I shouldn't mix senses in the same post. Oops.

As soon as I posted, I realized that's what you meant. My bad. You raised a really interesting point.

People who are used to fixed categories of how things should be don't respond well to multiple adaptations of the same story.

As I said upthread, I can be a purist, so I can see how people get locked into "there can be only one" version of anything. But I do believe in reading being a participatory process.

What *really* I don't understand is how a society that shells out money for movie remakes (King Kong, Poseidon, Ocean's 11) doesn't understand why fanfiction is all just part of the story reading/telling/absorbing process?

(Side note: that Jim Gordon comic sounds interesting, I love Jim Gordon-centered stories. Hope you find it).

If your first exposure to, say, Batman is the sixties tv show, then that can become your framework for interpreting what's good about the premise. The essential "batman-ness" has become fixed in a particular way, which leads to bafflement when you see the movie Batman Begins. Suddenly your understanding of "why people like this stuff" doesn't work. It's not camp, its...something else.

This may be true, and maybe I've been in that mindset myself. However, my first exposure to Batman was "Superfriends" and the 60's TV series. Batman: The Animated series gradually opened my eyes to another way to portray the character. B:TAS led me to some of the comics. The comics led to more comics. And then more comics, until the character completely shifted in my view from funny and campy to a dramatic, complex character. And that 60's TV show still makes me laugh, I enjoy it even as I feel incredibly sympathy for him as a dramatic character in the comics.

I'm not saying that one portrayal couldn't damage the character's rep. But Batman's part of modern mythology. There are literally an infinite number of stories that could be told about him, and an infinite number of Elseworlds and approaches and tones for those stories, whether they've got the DC logo stamped on them or it's fanfiction done for no compensation and read by a few people.

Fanfiction presents a special problem: trufans produce it, because they love the world-work so much, but at the same time they are multiplying the possible ways of understanding it.

I just don't see a down side to that. I'm a bit of a purist, ironically, so I believe is going to the source material for reference as much as possible. "Canon" matters to me a great deal. Yet starting with canon as a starting point, it's then possible to explore off in all directions.

Of course, canon gets very sticky when you're talking about comic book characters. Multiple corporate sanctioned versions can be considered "canonical" in Batman's case and everyone has a different opinion, as you said, on the "true Batman-ness." But again, I don't see this as a problem, it's just how it is and part of the process of reading stories as a culture.

AliceB: using comic books as an example

(Sorry, a lot of posts popped up while I was composing my earlier comment about dilution)

That's a good example, except that it's a hazard of comics as a medium, isn't it? By the nature of their publishing style, characters get so many writers and retoolings over the decades they keep getting reinvented. That's not necessarily a bad thing, except that it makes comics so cyclical that characters that are readable this decade may not be the next even though they have the same name and costume.

I agree that single-creator books are a different situation.

But I still think it should be the creator's choice about whether it should be published--and as I have said before, the nature of distribution these days is such that putting in on the web can be the equivalent of a publication

I think the original creator's wishes do have to be respected. If a creator says outright "please don't write fanfic based on my characters," then I think people need to follow that. A lot of creators don't mind, don't care, or take it as the highest form of flattery. This has more to do with consideration and respect than copyright laws. (fanfiction dot net will not archive works if the author has issued a public statement to please stop doing fanfic.) But that's a separate issue from whether fanfic is intrinsically bad for the original work. I tend to think the original works can stand on their own feet sturdily. The bad fanfic is just so much noise, and the good only adds to the dialogue.

Because of today's ease of distribution, it's everywhere, and it dilutes what the creator of the original work has done.

Don't mean to pile on here (like Patrick, I'm curious to hear how it dilutes). But I think it's the opposite of dilution. Rather than diluting the original product, fanfiction enhances and intensifies it. One function of fanfic is to analyze characters and offer reactions to what they've said or done. Good, insightful fanfic has made me love and understand the original characters more. It's brought characters to my attention I might otherwise overlooked, or shed light on some aspect of a relationship that I didn't quite grasp. It's multiple conversations going on at once, one between the original writer and the reader, and another between the fanfic authors and the reader. The reader comes away with a lot of intellectual riches. There's no down side, unless the reader is reading bad fanfic, and why would anyone want to do that? (Fanfic, like everything else, has good, bad, and awful. The ninety percent of everything is crap rule.)

Thanks for posting about this. That's absolutely beautiful. I'm even more blown away by the fact that those were actual balls.

My guess is it was a stunt frog, one of the shots where they just let a small controlled drop (same with the dog). All of these shots were carefully set up and planned, yet the camera captured spontaneous moments because there's no controlling 25,000 superballs or how a frog jumps. The camera found the randomness.

Yes, and according to MSNBC.com, the Democrats have "hijacked" the Senate.
So much for a "liberal media."

At least they led with it.

ABC News has has led with the flu all day and still is as of my check of a few seconds ago, with the closed session under "more top headlines." The NY Times put the flu above the closed session.

The Washington Post leads with "Senate GOP Angered by Rare Closed Session"

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