Attitude counts for a lot. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to tackle a 90 minute screenplay with only the vaguest of roadmaps to direct you from start to finish. And even more detailed plans can’t adequately prepare you for the reality of what it’s like to turn an intriguing concept into a fully developed script with its skeleton, musculature, neurology and the rest.

Not that it’ll be fully developed even at that point, but you need to make your brainchild appealing to the directors and producers you put it up for adoption with. You might have created this unique and special creature, but you want someone else to rear it, if only because it costs more money to turn a script into a film than any writer I’ve met has lying about the place.

So, attitude. Committing to the time it takes to nurture an idea from its first tentative beginnings through to an initial draft, and then rewrites based on hopefully intelligent feedback…it’s a lot to take on. And it requires patience. Tenacity. Flexibility — when someone tells you your protagonist is the wrong gender, or that the story should open with the climactic scene, it can take a lot to see what they’re getting at.

You’ll note that there’s an assumption here that you’ll be dealing with the industry. And that’s intentional — it’s all very well complaining about the crap they show at your local multiplex, but you have no business reckoning you’re better than that unless you get to grips with the industry side of things. Which again calls for attitude. The enthusiasm that gets you out there networking events hoping to meet people who not only like your ideas, but are demonstrably sane and have shown an ability to get projects off the ground. Dealing with whom calls for skills as well as attitudes: juggling emails and phone calls politely and efficiently, responding to feedback without preciousness, delivering successive drafts to deadline.

Think of the people you might come across, and how you’d deal with them. I’m incredibly lucky in that the producer I have most contact with is a stable and skilled woman who can juggle multiple projects while still making you feel valued. But some writer somewhere sometime soon will be dealing with none other than Liam Gallagher, who has decided in the wake of Oasis and his aventures in haute couture that his new project is to be a film based on the later days of The Beatles. Say what you like about Liam, but there’s no doubting he’s got attitude.

Attitude is what keeps you going when there’s been no response to the scripts you sent out three months ago and you’re finding it hard to work the mojo to get another one off the ground. Attitude allows you to put a distance between personal difficulties and the need to keep producing pages. Attitude is what helps you realise that a random comment provides critical insight into your story, and enables you to go back to that script with a fresh pair of eyes.

You can’t learn attitude on an MA course in screenwriting. You won’t get it by going on a McKee course. It’s something you’ve hopefully already got a smattering of, and can cultivate over time and through feedback into a thing of steel…when steel is what’s needed, as it is when gutting a script to make the same story work in 20 pages less. Attitude can be about fire, when you’re at a pitching meeting and willing people to hear what you’re actually saying right here right now, rather than rerunning last night’s drinks chat with a commissioner over in their heads. Attitude can be ballsy, when that first pitch doesn’t ignite interest, but leaves one of those listening asking ‘What else have you got..?’ when you’ve got nothing prepared but recognise the opportunity for what it is.

In assessing a script, how do you know what criteria to apply? Obviously a comedy should make you laugh, a thriller get the pulse racing, and a horror make you unwilling to put the lights out. But beyond that, what do you look for?

Some people will answer ’structure’ at that point, but I believe that’s a question of mistaken priorities. Thing being, that a satisfying structure is one that delivers a sequence of emotions in an effective manner. It follows then, that it might be more useful to concentrate on your emotional response to a script than trace its resemblance to a particular structural template.

OK, so emotions count. They’re what draws an audience into a cinema, after all. And the effective control of emotions within the film will determine how successful it is — it’s no accident that people have tears in their eyes in the climactic scenes of many movies. So, tracking your emotional response to a script can prove very useful — I’d say more so than picking up on McKeeisms like ‘the reversal of the reversal’ or whatnot.

Emotions come in a variety of flavours, and it can help to have some way of knowing what you’re looking for when you seek to pay attention to them in a script. At which point an ancient tool has new utility. Way back when, some people believed there were four elements rather than the hundred-odd found in the modern Periodic Table. Comparing them isn’t fair in fact: the latter is very much a function of a scientific worldview, whereas the classical take on elements is far removed from test tubes and microscopes.

As it goes, the elemental perspective isn’t limited to emotions. That’s within its remit, but so are other ways of understanding and interacting with the world. Air is associated with the intellect, with concepts and ideas. Any screenplay needs to be well aspected in air since a large part of the pull of a film is the idea behind it. The business of straplines is very much to do with air.

Earth is to do with practicalities, making things happen effectively. Which could be one way to describe the need for a script to be plotted well. More, it’s to do with the story — however unlikely — being grounded in some emotionally credible reality. The stuff that George Lucas got right in the first Star Wars trilogy, but messed up with the second.

Fire is connected with the intuitive aspects of storytelling. It’s there in symbol systems that work their way through a film that bring out aspects of its meaning without being so crass as to describe them. It’s to do with what drives characters when they’re facing overwhelming odds, just as caterpillars must be traumatised midway through their transition to being a butterfly.

Water is all about emotions. They have depth, can be reflected on, or splashed about in for the sheer thrill of it. It’s an element that’s represented literally in many films: John Boorman loves his waterfalls, and the Bourne series is not unique in having characters reborn in water — it happens in The Descent too, to name but one example.

All this has been going through my mind since it came to my attention that the script I’m writing at the moment lacks earthy aspects. And now I’ll be incorporating them, to ensure that the film ends on a note of emotional and practical credibility rather than whizzbang symbolism. The latter is necessary to provide a platform for the former.Without it, there’s a danger that the film could culminate in fireworks that don’t have an impact on the protagonist. That follow through is vital, ensures the whole functions as a mandala, a visual meditation tool which itself is a demonstration of elemental balance.

I’m heading towards smug at the moment, which is never a good thing. But I’ve come up with two play outlines and script samples for each in the past week, and I’m really happy with them. And whether or not the theatre people who asked for the ideas bite, I’m more than satisfied that I’ve come up with concepts worth developing further one day, as stage or radio pieces probably.

The two concepts are very different. One is concerned with terrorism and celebrity, and hopefully has a satirical element. The main development process involved taking note of John Truby’s take on raising the stakes in a drama (it’s far from original with Truby, but I dipped into his Anatomy of Story for a refresher), so the story gets more and more intense as it continues, each new piece of information threatening to topple the whole over. That was a fairly technical approach, and it worked well, and made me realise how close thrillers and farces are structurally. Both follow that pattern of the stakes being raised, and tension is the result: the big difference is that farces resolve that tension with humour.

The other idea I’d got started as a small fun one, drawing on a world that fans of Shameless and Withnail and I would enjoy. But it became increasingly dissatifying as I wondered how to turn that seed into a full script. I wanted more, but I didn’t know what I wanted more of. Except that I didn’t want to get stuck in a world of seedy characters having misadventures. For all sorts of reasons, many of which I can’t articulate, I wanted to do something bigger and stranger and other than that.

If you’re stuck in your thinking, put on someone else’s head. It’s something I’ve done quite a bit over the years, getting psyched up to come up with ideas by giving myself guidance from the imagined perspective of writers I admire for one reason or another. And somehow I knew that the writer I wanted to step into the shoes of for this project was Pete Milligan. I’ve written about my admiration for his comics work, which is effortlessly sophisticated and multi-layered and resonates with some fascinating influences, and I knew I wanted some of that for my play.

All very well, but how to go about that? I used to write myself notes as those other writers, and have even coached myself aloud as Alan Moore and others, but I’ve never tapped into my version of Pete Milligan before and those methods seemed redundant. I just waited, and then had an epiphany. Like you do. I realised that the protagonists of my story could transcend their seedy junkie beginnings, and become iconic English figures. And not just any English icons: they’d be St George and Boudicca, sharing a flat.

Quite how all this transpired, I couldn’t tell you. I know that ‘I’ didn’t come up with it. But when ‘I’ decided to write it influenced by Milligan, that’s the solution that came up, and I knew immediately it was the right one. Why St George? Well, it was his day on the 23rd, and something interests me about the fact that many people are kind of embarrassed by the English flag. It’s associated with football fans and the far right, and I think that’s sad. Not that I’m any kind of patriot, but I don’t see why this potent iconography should be tarnished. A bit of research turned up the fact that St George had a Roman father and Palestinian mother. Perfect: what could be more English than an immigrant, given that the nation’s history is one of successive waves of migrants?

Something about St George and Boudicca sharing a squalid flat and being visited by their drugs worker ignited all kinds of notions in me, and what’s resulted — in the plotting of it, and the brief extract I’ve written — is the nearest I’ve so far got to a state of the nation play. Blimey. Whether the theatre company are interested in that play, or the other one, I’m chuffed that I’ve come up with two strong ideas that have stretched me in good ways. And I’d like to thank the version of Pete Milligan that exists somewhere within me, for contributing to the process. Nice one Pete. Thanks also to Ms Chapple for valuable feedback.

A decade or so back, I heard an astonishing album, the debut from Godspeed You Black Emperor! It brought together elements from Morricone through to Black Sabbath to create haunting soundscapes suggestive of a world on its knees. It was, dare I say it, cinematic in conception, with lengthy tracks going through different sections, often accompanied by found sound recordings of street prophets or singing children.

Godspeed are on hiatus, but key member Efrim Menuck has another band in the form of Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra, who I experienced live last night. Comprising two violinists, a stand-up bass player, a drummer who plays occasional keyboards, and Efrim himself on guitar and vocals, they played no more than six pieces in their 90 minute set, each combining elements such as quiet/loud/quiet/loud dynamics, Efrim’s ragged voice set against more conventional backing vocals from the two women players, haunting guitar, and sections for strings alone.

The raw power and unusual instrumental mix got me thinking of what lessons could be learned from the show that could be applied to screenwriting, on the basis that there’s always something to learn if you set your mind to that task. And what I came up with reassured me, particularly about the rather unusual screenplay I’m currently working on. For instance, the band’s emphasis on emotional impact over technique and polish is refreshing when so much of what’s seen on screen is technically sound but souldead. They might use strings, but at heart they’re punks — itself suggesting that there’s nothing to stop you or I plundering the films of the past for tools that can help tell our stories now. Don’t be afraid of overt emotionalism, of saying something loud and directly — there are times when passion really will win through, especially if that passion is presented in a setting you’re less familiar with.

That last point bears investigating some more. Efrim’s singing is crude at best, but set against a quasi-classical backing the effect is electrical. That in turn points to the power of juxtaposing savagery with sophistication. And don’t be afraid of extended sequences. Something I’m conscious of with the screenplay I’m currently writing is that it has a rhythm unlike anything else I’ve written — something about it lends itself to long scenes. That’s an organic quality that helps bring out the nature of an unusual protagonist and his worldview, which are at the core of the experience of the film. Seeing the band strengthened my resolve to keep that flow, rather than be tempted to do conventional edits and slick transitions. Those work well for some projects, like some production helps a song become daytime radio-friendly, but they’re not the qualities that will make this particular film work, any more than forcing Paul Greengrass to use conventional photography rather than the handheld aesthetic he used for the Bourne films would have worked.

Coming out of the gig, I was behind a woman who complained to her friend that all of Silver Mount Zion’s songs were the same. Well, that’s one take on things. It’s like saying that all Led Zeppelin’s songs were the same, given they draw on a particular style of larger than life blues rock. What’s more the case is that both bands have a certain vocabulary that they use to express a fairly narrow range of emotions. Which is pretty much how genre works in film too: you know in advance, more often than not, what type of experience you’re in for on the basis of the trailer. If it floats your boat, you’ll be inclined to give the movie a chance at the cinema or a few months later on DVD.

There are some works that create their own genre however, and that’s a choice you can make in your own work. But be prepared to stand up for it, and defend it. One person whose perspective on film I tend to respect doesn’t seem to get the script I’m currently working on, but I now see that as a sign that I’m doing the right thing: they’re interested in developing projects that are too mainstream and cosy for my tastes. Clearly not the person to bring this one into being. And knowing that, I can find a more suitable team to go forward with, as Efrim has with Silver Mount Zion. Asked if they’d play a festival, he joked that they’d look odd standing between big corporate banners in the daylight. But at night, indoors, their music makes perfect sense.

Why do we need narrative to help us engage with games? Isn’t the interaction of players controlling pieces enough to provide engagement? Apparently not. The key is in the business already mentioned of ‘players controlling pieces’. Whether those pieces are on a chess board or in a science fiction online game, the key to it all is the player’s interaction with a symbol system. In the moment, symbols are not viewed as pieces of wood or collections of pixels — they are emblematic of ourselves, and our identification with them is what leads people to have real emotional experiences while engaged in play.

It’s the same when people follow football clubs. They get caught up in the action on the pitch, and off — newspapers are full of tales of footballers and even their partners, boardroom coups and bids for foreign players. Again, the whole experience is of immersion in a narrative, and even though the supporters are spectators than participants the emotional engagement is all-encompassing.

Sometimes, a game’s narrative can spill over into other areas of the lives of players. There was a case the other year of a German man who travelled all the way to Britain to kill another participant in an online game. And real world fortunes change hands for virtual artefacts in World of Warcraft.

None of this should be surprising, really. Babies respond positively to a balloon with an upturned line drawn on it, interpreting it as a smile. Our relationship with story is hardwired. So, for those of us engaged with creating games, how do we take advantage of that tendency?

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools in the writer’s arsenal to provide assistance for this kind of thinking. One classic example is The Hero’s Journey — I know of a writer who gained a position with a computer games company based primarily on his knowledge of this story template, popularised by Chris Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey and derived from the pioneering work of Joseph Campbell.

The Hero’s Journey is a valuable skeleton that can be built up in all sorts of ways according to your intentions. The basic idea of a protagonist who is called to act against an enemy, but can’t tackle that antagonist until they’ve found their inner hero, and then returns to their community changed, is a powerful archetype. And no wonder: it’s distilled from the study of hundreds, maybe thousands, of mythical tales from cultures worldwide.

It’s all about execution. The Hero’s Journey is too often applied clunkily, with stereotypically ‘wise’ mentors imparting wisdom to their youthful charges. But it doesn’t have to be like that. As with any tool, it can be used to create work of quality — or crassness. That said, how about exploring alternative ways of creating story for your game? Vladimir Propp studied Russian folklore and came up with a list of 31 elements that a story could contain. It doesn’t have to use all of them, but the typology is worth looking at, and imaginatively applied could bring fresh life to a concept that you’re tiring of.

Given that gaming is bigger than film these days, it makes sense for developers to pay more attention to story than has traditionally been the case. People complain that Hollywood films are more like games, and at the same time games increasingly resemble films. It’s already the case in terms of design — now narrative has to catch up. And that’s nothing to do with technology and investment, and all to do with attitude and willingness to think in new ways — while making the most of age-old paradigms too. Sure, there are issues to do with interactivity that make games and film fundamentally different, but there’s every reason to believe that games can work with our innate desire to be excited by and involved with story.

Marshall McLuhan was famous for fifteen minutes way back when for trumpeting ‘the medium is the message’, and he had a point, even if no two people can agree precisely what it was. Right now I’m thinking of business models to support an online project, the collaboration with Andy Tudor that I mentioned recently, and like McLuhan in that it involves thinking about the nature of media, and in particular how to create a commercially viable project in the online age.

Getting the model right is important, and what’s interesting with the online scene is there’s no definitive ‘how to’ that will produce the cashflow you’re looking for. Well, that’s true with offline work too — the mainstream comics model is one based on revenues raised from monthly publication. But in recent years that trend has been joined by another, for collecting serialised works under one cover. So you can buy an anthology of Daredevil issues for instance. And that in turn has led to a change in the way that writers conceive of their work: many now ‘write for the trade (paperback)’, which allows them more time to develop a story that works in 120 or so pages with rising and falling arcs and all that stuff you read about in McKee, rather than being five cliffhangers followed by a concluding issue.

The serialise-and-anthologise model works because the costs of producing the comic are covered by the audience that buys monthly comics, meaning the profits from the collection are gravy, and increasingly part of the money that creators make for their work. But that’s only one way to do it. As book publishers have entered the graphic novel field, it’s become common for writers and artists to be given advances for the work they’re going to do.

Warren Ellis is a canny thinker about the economics of the comics business. Interested in creating work that’s experimental by mainstream standards, he collaborated with publisher Avatar to create the Apparat line of comics. The first wave of Apparat were single-issue sized, and the downside of that is they tend to exist in a shop only so long before they’re removed from the shelves. So, next time round, the Apparat titles — one of which is reviewed here, and others of which I may well cover in time to come — were done as 48 page ‘graphic novellas’. Never mind the nomenclature: what it means is that these slim volumes are on the shelves long term, not restricted to the ‘this month’s titles’ selection but filed alongside Watchmen and Persepolis and the other anthologised collections and original graphic novels. Meaning you can buy Frankenstein’s Womb or other graphic novellas at your convenience rather than having to get it in a particular short calendar period, and that Avatar, Ellis, and his artists can benefit from the shelf life of their brainchild. Smart thinking.

Ellis scored again with another Avatar project, the online comic Freakangels. A serial produced in weekly installments of several pages like the 2000AD comics Ellis was familiar with in his youth, this collaboration with artist Paul Duffield is a big hit online, and has also spawned successful anthologies. And it may be that the concept of the story was geared to the audience that Ellis and Avatar have cultivated: Ellis’s online presence attracts a significant number of young people into alternative lifestyles, and the Freakangels themselves are the ultimate outsiders, misunderstood even by their peers. That comment, by the way, is by no means a criticism: what sense would it have made for Ellis to launch into a comic about the Lakeland poets in their twilight years? It’s easier to write with constraints than utterly free of them, and creating work for an identified audience is one constraint that makes a great deal of sense.

It’s not just Ellis that Andy and I have been learning from — the recent piece on Alex de Campi and Christine Larsen’s Valentine has prompted us to think of what’s possible as well. And those are just two examples of the way that the digital scene is changing the way that forward thinking creators conceive of developing profitable properties.

Bloody marvellous. Like scientists haven’t got enough useful things to be doing, they’re now encroaching on the territory occupied by filmmakers. Physics professor Sidney Percowitz of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, is behind a plan that is all about allowing Hollywood creators just one departure from scientific thinking. After that, it’s a slippery slope — and there are real world penalties for shoddy thinking in blockbusters, reckons Percowitz:

“I am not offended if they make one big scientific blunder in a given film. You can have things move faster than the speed of light if you want. But after that I would like things developed in a coherent way.”

“If you violate that you are in trouble. The chances are that the public will pick it up and that is what matters to Hollywood. The Core did not make money because people understood the science was so out to lunch,” he added.

(quotes from today’s Guardian)

Right, so The Core was a box office failure because of poorly thought out science? And not because it was a shockingly dull concept with poor execution? If anything, it would have been more likely to succeed had the science been worse, and those venturing to the planet’s centre encountered dinosaurs and women in fur bikinis, as is traditional for the genre.

Anyway, let’s give this concept some thinking through. Call it a thought experiment. Superhero films are in a mess, for a start. Superman might be able to fly, but if that’s all he can do he’s not going to be of much use against stray dogs, never mind laser-toting alien warriors. Or maybe superheroes should live with the consequences of their difference: Wolverine can have claws, but they rust, and he’s suffering from metal poisoning, and because he’s got just the one power so much for a healing factor to sort out his resistance as adamantium particles clog his arteries. Hmm, not much fun now is it, bub?

And where do we even begin with The Matrix? There’s the business of suspending pretty much the entire human population in a virtual reality, for one thing. What kind of computing power would be needed to make that happen? More importantly, the story is essentially a Gnostic allegory about how people live in a half-life identified with the trinkets dangled in front of them rather than anything of real consequence. Is Percowitz going to ban films that use science as a metaphor unless the metaphor confirms to scientific facts as known?

Besides, what happens when science changes? Which it does. Right now, there are scientists talking about parallel dimensions and suggesting that the universe is best understood as a hologram of which individual consciousness is but a fractal. Man. So does that make Sliders and Quantum Leap ok, despite being a bit pony?

And what of Dumbo’s ears? Did they really aid his flight? Doubtful, but the pachyderm’s zest for achievement has inspired generations of kids to find the courage to make their dreams come true. Best put a stop to that then, if fundamental physical laws are contravened.

All of which is to say that science and stories utilise different forms of logic. And that Prof Percowitz has precious little idea of what a symbol is unless it’s one used in science papers. * sigh * Is it really necessary to overhaul Terminator films to keep diehard rationalists happy at the expense of an audience captivated by a cautionary tale about what happens when machines take over from man? I think not.

If anything, let’s celebrate the extent to which the creative imagination fuels scientific progress. Real life researchers have been inspired by growing up in front of Star Trek. Einstein’s methodology for coming up with the theory of relativity was pretty whacked out, consisting of Albert imagining what would happen if he himself were to travel at light speed, and formulated in part through thought experiments involving steam trains. There’s an interesting ongoing dialogue between science and the creative arts, but it helps neither camp for one to police the activities of the other.

So, I’ve been writing a novel. Did 5000 and some words on the first chapter a couple of weekends ago, and now I’m working on the second. Which comes as a surprise, me being a screenwriter and all. Only, it was not always thus. Many years ago, I started out by writing prose, and the first short story I came up with was a runner up for the 1991 Bridport Festival prize. I’ve written a few more short stories too, one of which was published in an anthology by Route Press. I’m particularly proud of that because my contribution straddles the photos of naked people in the centre of the book, which means I stand a greater chance of being encountered by the casual reader than many of the other stories.

So, the novel. It all started last year when I woke up from a dream about a successful book I’d written, and knowing the core situation of that story. Then, a few weeks ago, I was on a train and knew in a flash that I wanted to write novels. Not only that, but I realised who the protagonist of the book I’d dreamed of writing should be — a prose incarnation of a larger than life friend who influenced me in good ways, and who died a few months ago. I also realised that the book in question would be the second one I wrote. Reason being, there’s one that’s more pressing for me to write. Never mind why, save to say it’s the right time for me to be working on this book, and it’ll stand me in good stead for the next one.

This novel writing lark is very different from screenwriting. I’ve intentionally chosen a style that makes it easy for me to write fairly quickly, by dipping into the narrator’s head and indulging myself in all that kind of associative thought that’s pretty much verbotten in developing film scripts. Writing this blog is a big help: I’ve got used to producing a 600-700 word chunk in 40 minutes or less. That realisation goes a long way when you’re tackling something considerably bigger than a screenplay.

I’ve also given myself a break by not having a plot intensive story. Stuff happens, sure. But it doesn’t need wall charts and index cards to keep track of. And, I’m dipping into the same set of experiences that are at the heart of the screenplay I’m also writing — which is a much trickier beast to tame. I’m creating it piece by piece, facing and hopefully conquering challenges I’ve never taken on before, and though progress is slow it’s very rewarding. Where the screenplay is a psychological drama with thriller elements, the novel is a darkly comic satire. Same ingredients — very different dishes.

I’m figuring this is subject matter I never need go near again in my life when these two projects are done with. They relate to periods of mental instability I experienced some years ago, which though traumatic at the time were ultimately regenerative in their effects on me. And that’s part of what I want to get across: there’s enough bleak material out there about people suffering, and I have no intention of adding to the pile. Not without turning that torment into something useful, anyway.

All of which risks making my novel and screenplay sound terribly pompous endeavours, concerned with correcting misconceptions about mental health. Eek: I’d run a mile if I thought I was doing anything along those lines. No, I want to tell entertaining stories influenced by personal experience that I’m confident a mainstream audience will find fascinating: sorrowful pablum is not on the agenda. Promise.

And after that? Well, the second novel is a science fiction satire. No mental trauma at all, other than that which the protagonist inflicts on those who would oppress him. But that’s another story…

What draws audiences into a film, book, or play is engagement with the story it communicates. Everything else is secondary to that. Unless I’m engaged by story in some form, I’m out of there. Inventiveness about how that story is delivered is welcome, as long as it enhances that immersion in the story and doesn’t detract from it. Which is why the formal inventiveness of the graphic novel Asterios Polyp gets in the way of me liking it, where the creativity John Pham brings to the pages of Sublife makes me warm to his comics work all the more. Asterios Polyp’s creator David Mazzuchelli deconstructs the story he’s telling before your very eyes, drawing attention to the methods he’s using to get it across. Pham, conversely, uses experimental art techniques in the service of story, embracing cubist and other methods to get across the effect of travelling through space beyond light speed on the crew.

It all comes back to character. And that works for pretty much any narrative I’ve enjoyed as a film, comic, book or play. Character and plot need to advance together, or the effect is lost. I read a Jeffrey Archer novel once just to see what got so many people to buy the things. It was very well plotted, but there was zero sense of the characters as living beings. Stuff happened to them, some of it pretty grim, but they carried on regardless, remorsely making their way from one plot point to another like robots. At the other extreme, there’s Tarantino’s Death Proof, where his well known penchant for dialogue heavy writing runs away with him and there’s a disconnect between the verbose exchanges of the characters and the action of the film. They’re talking for the sake of it, which can be enjoyable, but without it being bound to story beats comes across as self indulgent.

Perhaps no surprise then, that some of my favourite stories are those which move the plot forward, have three dimensional characters, and good dialogue — and where the writer’s intelligence is firmly in the service of story. That’s very much the case with one of my favourite screenwriters, David Mamet. And it’s true in a different way for novelist Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher thrillers are masterclasses in creating apparently effortless stories. See also Carla Speed McNeil’s ‘aboriginal sf’ comic Finder, where every line — written or drawn — counts for something in depicting character and situation.

Effectively, stories are a kind of trance, and I don’t like to see that trance interrupted. Not unless it’s done within the context of the artwork itself, rather than to remind you that it is indeed a confection. Yawn: that stuff has very low appeal to me. That said, I do find some metafictions appealing. It’s all about the spirit in which it’s done. Cartoon characters have been finding out that they’re animated since the birth of the medium, in playful ways. But somehow my hackles rise when presented with a Jasper fforde book — there’s an overwhelming smugness about the enterprise that seems to be about a clever chappie telling me what books he’s read. Compare with the delicious experience of Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts, which is postmodern and all the rest of it, but keeps you engaged with the story and characters throughout — a sheer delight.

What is it about story that entices? Well, let’s go back to that notion of trance. We go in and out of trances throughout the day: you could argue that each mood is its own trance, shaping your consciousness and consequent behaviour. Sometimes those trances are accidental, a function of identifying with the situation we’re caught up in — stuck in traffic, waiting in a queue, fantasising about someone we find attractive. And the story trance is one in which we have the opportunity to empathise with someone who’s like us, in some ways, but isn’t us. Who is up against obstacles that are in all likelihood on a mightier scale than the ones in our own lives. And who surmounts those obstacles — in most stories — and in the process tells us something about our emotions, raises questions about morality, points to inner truths. Which, if we’re looking at 90 minutes or so of film, or 250 pages of a book, is a lot to ask. But explains why so many of us relish the experience of story, whatever form it’s presented in.

Back in the day, DC Thomson’s comics were free of the names of those who wrote and drew the stories they contained. Children would be confused by the information, so the editors said, and be drawn out of the tales they were reading. More to the point, it meant that the writers and artists were anonymous, making it harder for them to build up a fanbase and use that as leverage to ask for more money, or be talent spotted by rival publishers.

This resentment of the people who wrote and drew the comics that the publishers made money from is a typical attitude of the industry, even today. Marvel and DC like to hook their readers onto characters, and the fact that they and the people chronicling their adventures are largely interchangeable means that creative talents can be switched from one title to another without much impact on sales. And as a system, it works. Particularly if you’re the publisher.

In the sixties, all that started to change when fans started to organise, and wrote to and hung out with the people who created their favourite comics. In turn, some of those fans went on to become a new generation of talent in the seventies working for those same publishers — often with not much more ambition than to follow in the footsteps of those they’d admired. Pop will indeed eat itself.

Fast forward to the 1980s. A band called Pop Will Eat Itself celebrated a comics writer whose capabilities were well in advance of his predecessors. Alan Moore knows the score, said the Poppies. Like them, he was a working class product of pop culture, who referenced high and low art in his work. (One of the Poppies, Clint Mansell, has gone on to become a celebrated film composer, collaborating with the Kronos Quartet for the soundtrack of Requiem for a Dream. Alan Moore’s recent work includes The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which imagines a world based on myriad fictional sources from Camus to Ian Fleming.)

Moore was, and arguably is, most known for Watchmen, his seminal collaboration with artist David Gibbons. It is a work of singular impressiveness, perhaps genius. There sure as hell wasn’t anything like it in comics before the 12 issue series appeared. And it’s appeared ever since, in a number of graphic novel editions, including the superduper paving slab sized one that I invested in the other year. Watchmen is also a truly lousy film, one which Moore had nothing to do with. And he’s taken that stand further, relinquishing his financial rights to the work he created for DC and passing it on to his artists, to give him more time to concentrate on projects that truly matter to him: Jerusalem, an epic novel charting the history of the world as seen from Northampton, and the internationally distributed fanzine Dodgem Logic.

And now DC are planning spin-offs of Watchmen. Prequels and sequels, but you can bet nothing else that equals the brilliance of the original. And DC know that. Which is why led by Paul Levitz they never made such a crass move. Now under Dan DiDio, that’s precisely what they’re doing. Making DiDio even more of a numpty than Simon Cowell, who believes the world wants and needs his banal music, and the preening wannabes who perform it.

Make no mistake: like the film Watchmen, anything that appears bearing that branding is going to be karaoke. Remember that phrase means ‘empty voice’. And sure as hell the comics shit out of DC’s sphincter will bear no more relationship to Alan Moore’s Watchmen than an Oasis tribute band does to The Beatles at their height. But people will buy them, and some of them will enjoy what they read, for the same reason that millions eat at McDonalds when actual burgers are available elsewhere. All of which is a reminder that, for the majority of publishers, the lowest common denominator is what it’s about — even if at least some of the creators signed up to them aspire to writing and drawing work of lasting worth.