This blog is a year old today.  Whoo!  Writing it has been an adventure I’m glad I committed to, a way of recording thoughts and feelings about creativity in general, about scriptwriting in particular, and examples of it in the form of films, tv programmes and comics.  Along the way, I’ve been introduced to people I wouldn’t have otherwise come across, whether as clients for my script doctoring services, or as commentators here who I’ve gone on to meet.  The feedback I’ve had is very positive, and I get a lot out of doing it, so for anyone who’s dismissive the bad news is that I’m planning to continue in the same vein in 2009.

Looking back at 2008, it’s been a year of real progress.  Early in the year I participated in a training where I had the opportunity to write a script for one of the UK’s biggest shows.  It didn’t work out that way, but I got a lot from the experience.  In the end, only 2 out of 14 of us had scripts that went through to be commissioned, and that’s a better record than the previous year, when noone at all was taken on.  So, even though I didn’t get through the doors, I had a good look through to see how things worked, and enjoyed and learned from that.

I’ve also had good feedback on my drug worker drama series, The Sharp End.  True, it’s yet to be bought, but I’ve had constructive feedback from a highly placed person at ITV and another senior figure at Talkback Thames.  In both cases, my feeling is that the door is open to future communication, and I’ve learned something from both sources about what they’re looking for, which will affect future projects and perhaps inflluence a new draft of The Sharp End.  Oh, and I’ve also put the package in to the BBC Writers Room, so will see what they make of it by the spring, hopefully.

Promoting The Sharp End also involved me pitching it at an event run by Stellar Network at Channel 4, which I enjoyed and felt I was pretty good at.  That in turn was one of the inspirations for me to sharpen my presentation skills by doing trainings with the very excellent Michael Breen.  No, he’s nothing to do with tv or even pitching, but he’s a polymath with a flair for making apparently complex skillsets attainable in fun ways, and his trainings are world class…certainly better than any I’ve had within the industry.

Another accomplishment was finally writing the treatment for a psychological thriller that’s been itching to be written for a few years now.  Only, it was too close to me for a while, and the events it picks up on were too raw in my experience to translate them into a story.  This year though, I’ve pretty much cracked it.  And there’s a production company who’ve waited very patiently for it all this time since I pitched it to them verbally who I hope share my belief that I’ve done the concept justice.  Sure, there’s loads of work to be done yet, but fundamentally I feel on top of what could be a very special script.

What has been a surprise is how many collaborations I’m involved with.  I can understand how that works for me, wanting to avoid the cabin fever that comes of spending too much time writing alone.  And with two artists I’m working with on animations for children, and another writer I’m developing a horror film with, I’ve found a thoroughly enjoyable way of making creativity a collaborative process.  That’s a pattern that’s set to continue with at least one other screen project, which will hopefully involve me travelling to Australia in a few months: why do things by halves when you can conspire with someone in another hemisphere?

Add script doctoring to the mix, and it’s been a rewarding year that’s taught me a great deal.  Every script doctoring project is different, and that’s the way it should be.  I’m less interested in pulling apart what’s there than seeing its potential and finding ways to let it shine.  And given the feedback I’ve been getting from some of the people I’ve worked with, that’s an unusual and valuable approach.  Put it this way: one client has come back to me four times now, and another wants me to write a screenplay for him, so I figure I’m doing something right.

It’s interesting, seeing how a project develops from initial concepts through to the writing of a treatment.  In this case, a horror film I’m co-writing with Scotty Clark.  The first pass of it, the notes we made as we spent a few afternoons drinking tea and coffee and eating Portugese egg pastries in Scotty’s living room, we nailed the events of the story and through that defined much of what our characters are about.

Now, I’m taking responsibility for drafting the treatment.  It’s a closer view, and there are areas that need more attention on further inspection.  The protagonist’s journey needs to be clarified, and that can only be done by highlighting aspects of his fall and rise.  Which in turn means digging deeper into his character, finding out what he says makes him tick, and looking underneath that to peer at what’s really going on.  There’s a difference between the way we portray ourselves in the world and what really motivates us, and it’s that stuff that needs to be explored.  Which doesn’t mean I’ve nailed it, but does mean we’re moving in the right direction.

Then there’s tonal stuff.  We had discussed the antagonists and their particular response to the world they find themselves in, but now it seems that some details of our thinking could come across as relatively trite, almost comic.  Better to maintain their dignity, their character, by not exploring some of the elements we’d considered looking at when we were bouncing ideas around.  It’s the distinction between bad guys who do bad stuff, and those in Tarantino films that discuss Captain Caveman as they do — either choice can work, as long as you’re committed to its implications.  In this instance, I favour seeing the bad stuff without having the side issues we’d contemplated.  Like I said: tone.

What’s satisfying is the realisation that some of what we’ve come up with really works.  This is a horror film, and there are some concepts and images that I think we can safely say you won’t have seen on screen before, and which are truly unsettling.  We’ve gone the monster route, and chosen a pretty conventional monster, but you’ve not seen them like this before.  Of course, as with any decent horror the true monsters are human, and that comes into play too: I’m working on the climax of the story at this point, and it’s intentionally depressing, demonstrating that social and political power counts for more than anything else in the final analysis.  That blend of horror and social realism is an interesting one, and in our favour in the novelty stakes I feel.

There’s still a long way to go, but this project feels very promising.  It’s been a buzz to work on, and Scotty and I have another collaboration in the offing.  What Scotty will make of my take on the treatment, I have no idea.  I’m pleased with it, but there are nuances in the transition from notes to treatment that he may disagree with; character traits, the way some scenes are played, names.  So far our disagreements have been constructive, and I’m sure they’ll continue to be so.  If they result in the story being stronger, that’s fine.

Every choice you make precludes other ones.  You can’t wear boots and trainers at the same time.  Either are acceptable, and the question is which fits the purpose at that moment.  There are a wealth of possibilities contained within the choices available: what’s important is making a choice and sticking with it.  That’s the essence of the director’s job, and it’s why a host of highly skilled people dance around the director so they can be freed up to choose wisely.  What’s increasingly apparent is that the process begins with the choices made at the stage the story is planned, and continues from there.

Style, in one definition, is a function of what you can’t do. What happens, then, in an established show when you start trying to do the things you’ve avoided until now? Yesterday, that show was The Royle Family, and what raised the question was the avant garde decision to have the episode set in two locations, with time between scenes, rather than have an uninterrupted view of life in the Royle family living room.

Thankfully the upset was minimal, and the moves were, as they say in the trade, dramatically motivated, specifically by the desire of daughter Denise (co-writer and director Caroline Aherne) to have the family round for Christmas with her and divvy husband David. It worked just fine, but let’s hope this doesn’t set a precedent, or next thing you know the Royles will be venturing outside, and being script edited so that each piece of dialogue has to move the action on, and that just wouldn’t do.

The joy of The Royle Family is in naturalistic writing allied to performances that verge on the surreal, though they too are rooted in credible behaviour. Dad Jim Royle, as portrayed by Ricky Tomlinson, seems to be developing a real angry streak, mostly expressed non-verbally to his driving gloved brother-in-law David Sr, played by Tom Courtenay. The latter is a rhubarb wine making bastard who isn’t seen for a while because ‘he’s parallel parking the Mondeo’, and has come to terms with the fact that the men in his family come from a long line of bed wetters.

Denise wants Christmas to be like she sees it on Nigella, but lacking la Lawson’s pulchritude and lobster tongs tries to make do with a turkey the size of a labrador and starters of cup-a-soup for all. That would include Twiggy, fresh out of prison, where he’s had the chance to catch up with his son, and one of six people promised a turkey leg for dinner. Big it may be, but that turkey only has two legs. Having failed to defrost it even after putting it under the sunbed, Denise is left with a Christmas catastrophe that she tries to resolve by offering her guests crushed carrots and gravy. She got the recipe for the latter from her mother: take the cube out the foil, add hot water, and stir.

As ever, it’s Barbara (Sue Johnston) who comes out of the proceedings with her dignity intact. If we spent much more time with the Royles, you’d start to ask questions about the way the family ticks, but it’s best to sit back and enjoy these one offs as the family themselves do, aware of the rumbling subtexts but content to enjoy moments like Jim getting his banjo out for a good old Christmas singsong.

That sequence was just one of the ways The Royle Family felt more emotionally honest and less saccharine than Gavin & Stacey, which — last time I checked — had a combination karaoke and linedance to convey working class people enjoying themselves, a subject about which I made by feelings clear when it was raised in the dismal Sunshine. How about a 2009 armistice on any karaoke scenes, please?

There exists a fascination between writers about how their peers spend their time, as if comparison of several writers’ schedules would reveal some kind of optimum creative timetable. Combine that with the wealth of books on how to write and proliferation of degrees and MAs on screenwriting, and it’d seem we’re arriving at a Golden Age of Scriptwriting, when every question of how to create, to structure, to rewrite and to network for fun and profit is laid out for us. And then Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook between them concocted Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale, and blew all that airbrushed and posed nonsense out of the water by lifting the lid on what goes into making the BBC’s most popular show.

For that reason alone, for knocking all that neat theory into a cocked hat and instead revealing the chaos and uncertainty and anguish and chainsmoking at the heart of one of British tv’s biggest ever success stories, Davies and Cook deserve serious applause. It’s galling to come across teenagers talking about three act structure, and this substantial volume is a corrective rejoinder to the notion that the process of writing can be simply explained.

It’s reassuring to me that the heart of creativity remains mysterious. Oh, there are certain rituals one can perform to make one feel more in the mood to create; heuristics that can be used to manipulate all kinds of source material into the fundamentals of stories; truisms that can help bash concepts into shape.

And all of those are fantastic in convincing the creator that s/he has something worth creating. But there comes a point when you realise that there’s a distinction between those notions that are technically creative, and the ones you really want to commit heart and soul to. And that’s the truth: not all ideas are equal.

It may well be that someone else could work wonders with something you’ve come up with, but that you’re not — now at least — the person to do it justice. I knew there was a fine novel to be written about the cosmonauts who went up into space in the Soviet era and came down when the Berlin wall had crumbled…but knew that I wasn’t the one to write it. My psychological thriller though…I’ve mentioned it before but not gone into detail because I know this is one I can really do justice and wouldn’t want some bastard swiping the main conceit before I got the chance to realise it.

Those are my idiosyncrasies then, some of them. And Russell T. Davies takes us through hundreds of his own in this recounting of the emails he exchanged with Benjamin Cook while developing the fourth series of Who. Davies comes across variously as lazy, callous, uncaring, and more and you know what? Good for him. This book is an unpolished account of what it feels like to be at the top of your game, and confirms some truths that are never addressed in the rarified corridors of universities where screenwriting is studied.

Fact: creativity and procreativity are linked, and there really is a sense of horniness about coming up with ideas. Fact: you’ll go through all sorts of weird states of consciousness developing stories, dialoguing, coming up with character arcs and the like, so it’s no great surprise that you might find yourself chugging cigarettes in the small hours and peeling off your nicotine patches. Fact: the story really does come first if you’re at all true to yourself, and anything resembling human connections take second place while that story is being hatched.

Oh, you can try and build your life to hide these inconveniences from your loved ones, but if you’re at all true to your convictions — and like Russell T Davies, charged with bringing in a whole series as its chief architect — then please note that writing is an all-consuming passion. If you haven’t felt that, if you’re not prepared for the fact that this is a way of life and not just a means of occupying you on a full or part time basis, if you reckon it’s something you can just fit in around five aside matches and the day job, then in all likelihood writing isn’t for you. And anyone who doubts that — well, they’ve now got a kilo of densely written hardback by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook to brush aside.

Years ago, I did some occasional work updating mailing lists on behalf of the council. It was pretty dumb stuff, checking addresses and names and things of that nature. Only, every now and then you’d have the opportunity to play. Someone would write in indignantly asking why their CBE hadn’t been included in their details, clearly needing affirmation of their status even on junk mail about local arts events; and I’d duly ensure that the letters CSE would follow their name. Equally, people with cool names would arbitrarily be awarded knighthoods etc, just because. It was irresponsible and unaccountable, and a whole lot of fun for a minimum wage gig.

Looked at another way, that was another example of me being a prankster, and it’s that spirit that drives The Yes Men, whose work in ‘identity correction’ is chronicled in a documentary feature. I watched with fascination, partly because I’ve got a concept for a documentary bubbling away, also because I’m interested in the overlap between reality and fiction, a space that The Yes Men explore for fun and not-for-profit.

Their targets are various, pretty much stemming from a generic leftist perspective about globalisation. But where the conventional left is joyless, The Yes Men are clowns and satirists. Which brings us back to the notion of ‘identity correction’: the Yes Men set up websites that could easily be mistaken for those of bodies such as the World Trade Organisation, and as a result end up with invitations to participate in various global fora.

They duly attend, making monstrous pronouncements about the return of slavery or the utility of recycling human waste into food, and their hugely exaggerated right wing rhetoric is rarely rumbled by the people they share panel time with. Even when addressing a forum on the future of fabrics dressed in a shiny gold exercise suit with a three foot inflatable techno-phallus containing a screen to monitor workers, thus allowing managers to spend their leisure time more productively, they’re pretty much granted the solemnity you’d expect of apparent representatives of the WTO.

I found the whole film hugely inspiring — the Yes Men themselves come across as amiably amused rather than zealots with an answer for everything, and their stance seems a thoroughly reasonable one to take. The film gave me plenty of inspiration for my own documentary concept, and I’m wondering how it may shape a drama I’m contemplating that may well have a satirical element.

There’s a breed of commentator I come across from time to time who wonder what the point of Media Studies is, and what will happen to all the young people who take it up as a degree. I can understand that concern to a point, but one aspect of The Yes Men is that it shows what a gang of media-savvy collaborators can do when they put their minds to it. The same spirit is part of what made The KLF so special, and I’d like to think I could create work that sits alongside their output for combining popularity, intelligence, and sheer what-the-fuck quality.

It’s just abut Christmas, so the soaps are getting ready for juicy festive storylines to pull the punters in by their millions. I checked out EastEnders and Coronation Street this evening, to see the pieces being lined up.

The big EastEnders news is that Janine is back. Last seen despatching her hapless husband Barry, she’s reappeared under the name Judith, to get hitched to an alarmingly old man at a Jewish ceremony. That was enough for Pat to send her sergeants, Ricky and Billy, to somehow thwart the marriage before it started. Which kind of happened, but only when Pat herself appeared.

As ever with stories involving Ricky and Billy, there’s an element of comedy capers involved, which doesn’t always dovetail neatly with the powerful emotions between Pat and Janine. Lest we forget, Pat was the stepmother to Barry the human hamster, so has every reason to be aggrieved with Janine for offing him. This will form a central strand of whatever happens on Albert Square over the festive season, though there’s also business concerning Phil Mitchell, about to become a dad once again, and his slimy father-in-law, that’s simmering.

Coronation Street’s Christmas guest is Ken Barlow’s wastrel son Peter, who hasn’t sussed that turning up to your toddler son’s school reeking of whiskey is not the way forward. Peter blames Ken for being the worst dad ever, which is a bit rich on a street that’s also given us Les Battersby as a role model for errant fathers.

When Peter wasn’t making himself unpopular at the Rover’s Return, Carla was apologising to Michelle there for her capacity to have a bloke die on her then have a fling with his brother, satnavs being more prevalent than moral compasses in Wetherfield. There was some unconvincing business about Rosie Webster selling her story to a journalist too; I’m unsure how much the problem is Rosie’s acting, and how much the improbability of what we’re expected to believe of her since she left home.

So, which show to watch over Christmas? The Janine story has more meat than the return of Peter Barlow, but in other respects I’m more into Coronation Street on present form. The Street has always blended humour into stories more comfortably than its Walford rival, and the stories often seem less contrived. Being a glutton at this time of the year though, I’m likely to watch and enjoy both shows to see what slings and arrows get chucked about while I tuck into a better class of leftovers than I’d normally have access to. Besides, one possible plan for 2009 involves applying to the BBC Writers Academy, so the more au fait with EastEnders I am, the better.

Interesting timing, putting a series rooted in Christian theology on just before Christmas. I’ve caught all but one episode of the six part Apparitions, and overall have been highly impressed by the commitment to treating questions of faith seriously. And why not? At a time when the more extreme beliefs of some Muslims and atheists are grabbing the headlines, having drama that treads in such waters is only appropriate.

The crux of the series is contained in a line that one of protagonist Father Jacob’s sidekicks quotes back at him: “Faith is nothing if it isn’t tested.” And with this being a show about exorcism, what we get to see is some very tricksy arguments being brought to life by priests and people possessed by demons.

In this last episode, it was Father Jacob himself that needed an exorcism, unable as he was to wear a crucifix or read scripture, making this an interesting twist on the old logical problem ‘who cuts the barber’s hair?’. Problem being that the Church’s Chief Exorcist, the only man who could do the job, had turned away from God when he lost his family in World War Two. The resolution to this conundrum was a miracle in which the exorcist’s father spoke to him through Father Jacob, and that set the path for the resolution of the story.

The bigger picture of the series is all about belief systems. The Church is depicted as a place of political shenanigans rather than spirituality, with Father Jacob being an aberration to modern Catholicism just as much as he is to the psychologist determined to demonstrate that he’s delusional. Interesting that the series ended with a confrontation between Father Jacob and the psychologist, whose beliefs blinded her to the reality that the wounds she wrongly supposed Jacob had inflicted on himself had healed.

It’s heartening to see intelligent drama posing big questions, and for the most part Apparitions is a series I rate highly. I wasn’t convinced by some of the directorial choices made in this last episode, but the issue they’re up against is how to bring issues of philosophy alive for an audience that reasonably enough wants to be entertained as well as provoked by its viewing choices.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in a second series. Perhaps the issue with the psychologist suggests there’s as much room in exploring secularism and relativism as there is in faith. And it would be interesting to see how Father Jacob functions when confronted by social evils rather than those with a supernatural slant. Or is there room for a tv drama that dares suggest supernatural elements to stories inspired by the likes of the Baby P case, or the shootings of young boys on sinkhole estates? The very fact that I’m wary of such a suggestion is evidence that there’s potent material there for someone willing to tackle it with the intelligence and maturity that Apparitions has displayed.

If you haven’t come across Francois Truffaut’s interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, you can be forgiven for not reading them. I’ve been aware of them for a while, but only recently invested in a copy of the big fat book that contains the interviews, and features the name of both directors blazing down the cover. I’m less than half way through the book, a weighty collection from Simon and Schuster, and I’m already wishing I’d read it a decade ago.

At the time of the interviews, Truffaut’s purpose was to give Hitchcock’s work the credibility he thought it deserved. This isn’t the sort of misstep that the French made in celebrating Jerry Lewis or Johnny Hallyday. Rather, it’s the appropriate response from a master filmmaker who recognises the genius of another.

Which begs the question of why Hitchcock’s brilliance is so easily overlooked. The key is that he did things in plain sight, his mastery of visual storytelling so refined that audiences had no idea of the sophistication of the choices the director made in bringing his films to life.

How did Hitchcock develop such flair? Part of the answer lies in the fact that he decided early in life that he would work in film, and did exactly that. He wrote a screenplay to find out how it was done, and it secured him employment writing titles for silent movies.

That experience showed him the same raw material could be handled as comedy or drama according to the success of what happened during filming. Initial intentions mattered nothing to the reality of what was actually shot, and if the footage looked funny then damnit that’s what the film would become, with the titles emphasising humour.

Immersion in silent cinema also taught Hitch how to convey everything about a story with images alone. It formed the foundation of his style, using sound to contrast with image and not merely repeat the same message. Time and again in his films, simple dialogue scenes are alive because the camera’s point of view reveals aspects of character not unveiled by obvious chatter. Add to that an appreciation of visual metaphor and montage learned from the likes of Eisenstein, and you’ve got in Hitchcock an all-rounder who could use pictures to tell any story he wanted.

It was Hitch’s choices of material that made him unpopular with the highbrow set. Attracted by thrillers that allowed audiences to experience strong emotions as they empathised with innocent heroes whose lives were in jeapordy, Hitchcock’s populism precluded him from being favoured by reviewers more in tune with literary source material. As such, Hitch was sneered at by people who had no idea what he could do with pictures, since the content of those pictures so often involved guns and chase scenes.

The book is a delight to read, two fascinating men talking about an artform they love. I’ll be interested to see what the two of them have to say about Hitch’s biggest successes, and his less appealing films: I recently saw and was repelled by Frenzy, finding it hard to imagine how it came from the same man that brought us Rear Window. A more sophisticated response may be that I allowed the technical flair of the latter to blind me to its ugly aspects, and that these are more apparent in the artless Frenzy. No matter: those kind of paradoxes bedevil every artist I’m interested in, and with a batting average as striking as Hitchcock’s, a few faltering steps late on can be forgiven.

If you get a book token this Christmas, then you really can’t invest £15 more sensibly than in Hitchcock, by Truffaut. It really is a remarkable piece of work, that’ll give you insight into the craft of film that’s as valid now as it was when the book was constructed in August 1962, at which point Hitchcock was also editing The Birds: his 48th film. Regardless of what you think you might know about Hitchcock at this point, ask yourself if you’re so clued up about the processes of filmmaking that you can’t learn something from a man who made 53.

Of course, being a script doctor myself doesn’t mean my own writing comes out fully-formed and perfect first time.  I’d be disturbed if it did: a big part of the process, and my enjoyment of it, is rewriting.  And today I was lucky enough to catch up with Laura Smith, fresh from directing a run of Hollyoaks, who offered some valuable feedback on a couple of projects.

I listen to Laura.  Well, I listen to lots of people.  But where Laura is concerned, I listen and take note when she’s talking film because she has such acuity around structure, and a wealth of experience as a filmmaker: she was fresh from a meeting with the Film Council regarding a feature project she’s attached to. 

First, Laura talked about a treatment with a military setting, and suggested a change of protagonist.  My responses made it clear that I was right in staying with the protagonist I’d got in mind, and that Laura had correctly clarified a key issue for him: the practical and emotional difficulties he has trying to leave the army.  Plus, she was able to direct me to a support group for people trying to do exactly that, since — small world — it had come up as an issue in a project Laura had devised.

Next, we went through my psychological thriller.  And here Laura was sharp on how to get to meat of the story quicker, and everything she said made sense.  And by suggesting that the protagonist meet a key supporting character earlier, it presents more opportunity for their relationship to develop before things get all unfortunate (hey, this is a thriller, after all…). 

That feedback helped me reshape the treatment in my head and I’m now itching to get on with a rewrite.  On a more positive note, Laura found the treatment highly imaginative and loves the ending, which I’m particularly proud of and was interested in her response to.

After that, Laura guided me into new territory by talking me through how I could develop, or co-develop, a slate of features to take forward with interested partners.  It’s a concept that makes increasing sense to me, though there is the little matter of the funding necessary to make it happen. But there’s a certain amount I can do on my own before external input is needed, and I have potential allies with access to more money than can be found in my bank account.  Nothing definite, but nothing is in this world, and as punts go film is a more interesting one than other forms of gambling.

Increasingly, I am a collaborator in projects rather than their sole creator.  There are a variety of reasons for that, not least that one of my greatest pleasures is working with creative people.  I’m not precious, and I’m happy to share, so collaboration comes easily to me.  Which is just as well, given how many people need to be on board for a film to make it out to its audiences. 

So, given that ‘plays well with others’ is on my report card, I might as well capitalise on it and see what alliances I can develop.  At the very least, I know I’ll be more clued up than the hopeless alleged producer my friend Matt met up with the other day. 

In the bit of social greasing that occurs before the actual substance of the meeting, she revealed that all she’d done this year was fail to raise money for one project, and then ummed and aahed her way through an unsuccessful attempt to get Matt on board for another venture.  What’s more, she didn’t even buy him a drink or lunch.  This is not the way to get people on board, I think we can agree.

Once upon a time, Marvel Comics didn’t just have a roster of superheroes in its titles.  Back in the seventies, there were comics set in space, or featuring monsters, martial arts, or the adventures of a misanthropic duck.  Sure, all pretty much rooted in pulp traditions, but at least there was a broader remit than getting across the difficulties a typical Marvel superhero had battling bad guys and studying to be an architect and always futzing when it came to trying to impress that redhead. 

These days, comics sales are low.  And it’s a fault of the industry mainstream to a large extent.  Open stores that sell comics to comics readers, which is what’s been happening since the eighties, and pretty soon you end up producing comics that only people who read the damn things want to buy.  And with that audience ageing, where’s the new generation of readers going to come from if they weren’t able to buy comics at their local newsagent as kids?

Faced with this dilemma, Marvel and DC have pretty much opted to bury their heads in the sand and do minor variations on what they’ve always done, leaving it to enterprising manga publishers to capture the hearts and minds of younger readers with English language versions of their Japanese titles.  Along the way, (some) American comics have without a doubt become better written, and better pay for artists means they can spend more time on quality art than churning out pages as older generations had to.

Where has all this led us?  To Marvel’s revival of a 1970s martial arts hero called Iron Fist.  This time round, he’s written by Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction.  Brubaker is a known quantity, and I’ve praised his work on Sleeper, Criminal and Captain America here before now.  Fraction…well, I picked up his acclaimed Casanova, and wasn’t blown away.  It’s very clever, no doubting that, but its influences are more than apparent and the story doesn’t transcend them to provide an emotional hit. 

I picked up Iron Fist because quite a few commentators were saying it was the best comic Marvel was publishing.  Hmm.  Well, it’s very good in some respects, but is it that good?  It all depends on what your benchmark is.  And a frightening number of comics readers have very narrow horizons indeed.  Iron Fist delivers a capably executed tale of a martial arts dynasty that spans centuries and touches on all kinds of pulp notions in the process.  Hidden cities?  Check.  Deadly babes?  We got ‘em.  Pulse-pounding action sequences?  You bet.    

To me, Iron Fist is what an average comic should be like.  I enjoyed it, from the arcane backstory to the art by a team headed by David Aja, with a bunch of guest artists including one of my all time favourites, Howard Chaykin.  It’s solidly entertaining genre fare, and there’ll always be a place in my heart for that.  But in no way is it something special: put it alongside Chaykin’s American Flagg, Mignola’s Hellboy, and pretty much anything Darwyn Cooke turns his hand to and you’ll realise the difference.  Only, the audience that praises Iron Fist to the skies is pretty much the same one that venerates Kevin Smith and Star Wars and really has no sense of scale or heritage about these things.

It’s the same with music: I grew up with The Waterboys, and hearing The Levellers some years later couldn’t help but draw comparisons that left the latter lacking.  But if you’re 17 and haven’t heard any Waterboys, then The Levellers will fill a similar space.  Same with The Cult and Led Zeppelin: no way can Astbury and crew touch the heights of Page and Plant, but until you educate your ears, you can be forgiven for rating the facsimile over the original.

By all means read and enjoy Iron Fist: I’ve had a lot of fun with the two collections I bought.  But whatever you do, please don’t mistake creators who are fanboys for pulp adventure with the best the medium has to offer.  Use Iron Fist as a springboard for checking out the work of cartoonists Will Eisner and Frank Miller, or filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone.  That way, you’ll start to develop an appreciation for where this kind of thing comes from, what it can do at its height, and what you might be able to do yourself one day if presented with the opportunity that Brubaker, Fraction and Aja were handed to revive a trademark.