Right now, I’m watching Masterchef. Once again, a group of hopefuls assemble to impress the hosts. The first challenge is to create a dish from the ingredients provided. While they do so, they’re interviewed about their hopes and passions, to enable the audience to build up a relationship with the contenders. The judges agree on a couple of cooks as being clear winners, a couple more as being hopeless, and quibble over who of the remaining two will go through to the next round of three contestants.

Thrust into a professional kitchen during lunchtime service, the three are put through an ordeal there before having to come back to the studio and cook the presenters a kickass meal of their own devising. And the very best of those contestants gets to progress further. It’s like this every episode until we get through to play-offs, and a victor is declared. Simple as that: yet millions of people tune in to see amateur chefs juggle different combinations of meat, fish, and veg to win over the show’s hosts.

Weird, that I complained in my last piece about the familiarity of Crazy Heart, and am now celebrating just the same when it appears on the small screen. I know already that when Masterchef finishes I’ll switch to see Gordon Ramsey belittling American restauraunteurs in the process of helping them reinvent their offerings to the public. And I can tell you now how the show will go. Gordon will turn up, order food that he barely touches. He will use his reputation to ensure the restaurant is full for an evening service which will fall apart due to the higher numbers and bring tensions to a head among the team. And after threatening to walk out on the biggest bunch of clowns he has set sight on, Gordon will get to the root of the personal issues involved in the eaterie’s failure, and resolve them in time for the restaurant to get a makeover of its interior and its menu, which will be served triumphantly to a full house.

Thing being, humans like the familiar. Note that we have a seven day week, rather than an endless succession of new days. Those seven days are broken down into 24 hours, and those hours need to be filled with something. Which breaks down into paying for tv, and watching it.

The trick is to balance repetition with difference. Use the same structure to deliver different stories, however similar they are to ones we’ve already seen. You know The Bill will always get their man, and now the show runs after nine that maybe scenes and language will be spicier than before. The Doctor will continue to save Earth, whether he’s wearing David Tennant’s face or Tom Baker’s scarf. Scooby Doo and the gang will forever investigate supernatural mysteries, only to find out that the source of the scare is a greedy landowner or possessive janitor. And so on.

Better than that, having watched these adventures once, we go back and re-experience them — sometimes in the company of hundred of others, in the case of Star Trek conventions. And can even buy them on DVD to ensure we can always get that same hit of House whenever we want. The more I think of it, the less sense this need for repetition makes. But then I look at my Amazon wishlist, and see the number of box sets for shows I’m already familiar with, and start to relive the moment when I first caught Robbie Coltrane as Cracker, or reminisce about The Water Margin…

Which is a shame. Written and directed by Scott Cooper from a novel by Thomas Cobb, Crazy Heart is a film that stands foursquare in the tradition of the music biopic, even if in this case its subject is fictional. Bridges plays Bad Blake, a grizzled country singer with a drink problem and a troubled past. If it pains me to write those words, it pained me even more to watch the highly expensive resources devoted to this stereotypical story do nothing other than exactly what you’d expect them to.

So, Bad Blake starts off playing at a fleapit venue, and uses his reputation to secure free booze, and sleeps with a woman who associates Bad with her own heyday way back when. Then he does the same again. You could rinse and repeat indefinitely, but of course we’re in need of an Inciting Incident, which comes in the form of a journalist half his age: Ms Gyllenhall. In my eyes, her performance is stronger than that of Jeff’s, which is to say she gleans more interesting results from unpromising source material. She’s a single mum, a bit in awe of Bad’s wayward talent (that he wastes), while she has no pride in her own writing.

Anyway, after he crashes his stock car she comes to visit him in hospital, and…

Hang on, the stock car business didn’t happen. It was one of the scenes I made up to invigorate what was happening on screen: something that could have happened and would have been more adventurous than what does unfold. Did I mention Jeff and Maggie get it together? That she’s won over by his old school charm despite knowing he’s been married four times and has a first name that’s a bit of a signifier? What about her ability to melt his heart so that he’s inspired to write songs for the first time in years? And that it all goes horribly wrong in a bittersweet way, so the two bruised romantics are once again left on their own?

Well, that’s how it all hangs together. There is, naturally, a redemptive element to all this. In my fantasy version, Bridges realises his problems are down to adopting a corrosive masculine archetype, and aided by ecstasy tablets in a San Francisco leather bar, discovers an empowering new identity, and rerecords his greatest hits with a new manlove angle. But no, instead he goes to Alcoholics Anonymous, where I have a horrible idea this project was conceived in the first place.

Listen: there is nothing wrong with Crazy Heart. It’s beautifully acted, and tugs at the heartstrings just so from time to time. But it’s utterly predictable, doing nothing new or interesting with the raw ingredients it’s constructed from. Which may explain why it was so heavily tipped for Oscar glory, but does nothing for me as a viewer or a writer. I’m not looking for novelty at every turn, and the pursuit of it can be tiresome in the extreme — but Crazy Heart is so safe that it misses the chance to do something special, something that might just be beautiful.

A couple of paragraphs back I toyed with the idea of a gay element to the film, and it’s interesting that three of the most remarkable films of recent years — Far From Heaven, Brokeback Mountain and Milk — have effectively been quality mainstream movies with a gay angle. Now, maybe that in turn is old hat — and I look forward to the day when gay relationships are depicted on a regular basis by actors happy to take such roles — but surely there has to be some new angle to a story about a broken down country singer who has problems with drink and women. Please?

Graham’s stance was captured in his suggestion that there are “opportunities for the industrious writer who is able to diversify”, reiterating that statement by saying that the twin themes of the new era are diversification and independence. Writers are often being offered advances a quarter of what was the case a few years ago, and Amazon sells 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical ones, where the same titles are compared. Online drama Kate Modern attracted 66 million hits thanks to its link with social networking site Bebo, and was only pulled when one of its partners, AOL, got greedy. This is a new world, and there are no set rules it operates by. Graham’s strategy, very much echoing the themes of my own thinking recently, is to adapt and find ways to capitalise on three or more of the income streams available to writers, if they’re so inclined.

And that last part is the contentious bit, where some people are concerned. More than I’ve experienced it before, there seemed to be two camps at the conference. On the one hand, those keen to support themselves through the monies available to them through writing. On the other, those whose hearts are in serving the community. And some of what’s been said about this apparent dichotomy is pretty ugly — one participant commented thus on Twitter: “Every time I hear the word ‘monetize’ in a conversation about community creativity I hear the word ‘cuntify’.” Nice.

This simplistic dualism doesn’t take all kinds of things into account. Like, as with people such as myself, many of those aspiring to support themselves through creativity have already been active in community arts of one sort or another. I’ve been there, done that, with — among other projects — a theatre company aiming to do work about learning difficulties in schools. And found that what we wanted to do was a no-goer commercially speaking, since Nottingham Council’s theatre-in-education team offered subsidised rates that we couldn’t compete with. So we didn’t: we did our shows for some years, to much acclaim, and with support from charities that barely covered our costs. When it came to divvying up the monies in the bank account when it all came to an end, we each had around £100.

So: when you dismiss writers wanting to make money, you’re dismissing people who may well have done more than their bit for community arts and education. Also, remember that advocates of arts in the community are the ones looking for jobs in same. I’ve encountered no end of writers in residence, creators working with marginalised groups, facilitators, drama therapists and so forth, and I believe that’s a perfectly good way to be spending your time. But not everyone has the networking and workshopping skills needed to get such work, or the desire to acquire them. Some people just want to write, and earn money for it. And that’s fine, too.

I’ve got a foot in both camps here, and I suspect that’s the way it’ll remain. Even with the potentially lucrative multiplatform work I’m planning there’s a utopian element in terms of the story content that I want to inspire kids with as I in turn was inspired by the characters whose adventures I followed. And if that works out, I intend to give money to charities from the profits generated.

Suggesting that writers are either moneygrabbing or community-minded is reductionist bullshit, and it makes me sad to hear people talking in such terms. Especially when the future is going to be challenging for us all, and we can help one another to prosper.

First, there are the people you trust to offer something like objective feedback on your writing. Maybe friends, possibly family, in an ideal world other writers, but certainly people who can offer useful criticism. That’s the stage I’m at having circulated the first couple of chapters of the novel I’m writing to some female friends. I’ve been particular about choosing women, and women who are intelligent readers — and in one case a writer — because those chapters are narrated by two sisters, and I felt confident that female readers would pick up any failings in my ability to inhabit the skin of those characters.

Fortunately, the feedback is very positive. As one friend commented, “I hope to fuck it’s published because I NEED to read the lot!”. What it lacks in specificity it makes up for with attitude. And I’m hoping to get more detailed comments from my writer pal tomorrow.

So, there’s the feedback you can ask for that’s useful when engrossed in a project, especially at those points when you’re unsure whether it’s utterly brilliant or entirely fatuous. And that feedback can help guide your writing and revising process until you’ve got a draft you’re happy to send out into the world. Which is when the other kind of feedback comes in.

Sooner or later, as a scriptwriter, you need to engage with the industry. The exception is for street performers, but if so you’ll be exposed to the direct opinion of an audience, which either sticks round and puts money in your hat, or departs in favour of the half price fridges advertised in the window behind you. For most of us though, we’re faced with the business of sending scripts out to production companies, broadcasters, theatres, and so forth. And what counts at this point is anything other than a generic rebuff, which is why I was pleased to receive a letter in today’s post from a production company I rate highly:

“Thank you for sending us your script. I have now read and discussed it with the rest of the development department.

“We thought your idea had the potential to be an interesting and thought provoking series. Although I’m afraid that given our large development slate currently we don’t think it is the right project for us.”

Which, admittedly, isn’t as positive as “we enclose a six figure cheque and an invitation to our hotel at Cannes” but, you know, ain’t shabby either. Rather more encouraging was the response I got from an actor looking for a play suitable to stage this year, whose response to Breaking In — available as a sample script on this very site, folks — was “I love it, it’s on our short list and my personal fave…I was wondering, did you have any other one act plays?”.

You will note, as I did, that the enthusiasm of the response varies according to the financial rewards of the medium: I’ll be able to pay for a slap-up meal on the proceeds of the play, whereas I’d be looking to clear my mortgage with the tv project. So it goes.

Feedback, as the saying goes, is the breakfast of champions. The more perspectives on your work you can glean, the more you can learn from them, and the better that will shape your words so that a potential purchaser will squee when they see them. (‘Squee’ is a technical term, yes.) And one strategy I found useful in my earlier days — and still do — was to always be waiting to hear back about at least one project in addition to the one you’ve just heard about. Meaning, you’ve got an incentive to keep producing work and looking forward to good news rather than brooding on feedback that didn’t tell you what you wanted. Right now, I’m waiting to hear back from a radio producer, Big Finish (who put out a call for Dr Who ideas a while back), and a local audio drama project. Wish me luck — I know I do.

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.

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.

And now we have Solomon Kane the movie. Which is a good romp, but sadly does all the obvious things with the source material without adding any particular flair. Pity — but if you’re after a bit of b-movie hokum, you’ll find Solomon Kane thoroughly enjoyable.

Problem is, it’s all a bit formulaic. You’ll have seen bits and pieces of this before, and though the execution is credible it’s lacking the sort of pizzazz that took, say, Evil Dead or the Indiana Jones films to the next level of quality and enjoyment. The state of play is established in the pre-title sequence, set in North Africa, in which Kane is revealed to be a badass fighter whose leadership style boils down to killing his own men before the enemy gets the chance. Some supernatural gubbins goes down, and next thing you know our (anti) hero is being holllered at in a death metal voice by one of Satan’s lackeys, promising that Solomon will be relieved of his soul for his temerity. Only, said lackey doesn’t bank on SK leaping out of the window of the tower where all this is going down, and being swept away by a river. Lackey bellows after SK that his soul is still forfeit, etc.

Anyway, Solomon makes it back to England, where he declares himself a man of peace. And having been expelled by some kindly monks concerned about what diabolical torment they’re due for sheltering the former swordsman, he sets off on foot to find his destiny. Which turns up pronto in the form of Pete Postlethwaite and family, Postlethwaite’s craggy face being ideal for a weatherbeaten pilgrim without recourse to prosthetics.

There are baddies afoot, too, and the family run afoul of them. Refugees from a goth metal promo, the dark warriors are a-collecting slaves, and Postlethwaite’s family will complete the set. Only, they hadn’t banked on Kane being there to protect them — he tries the Mo Mowlam negotiating thing first, but lacking her fright wig has to resort to violence after all of fifty seconds. Which of course condemns him even more surely to lose his soul.

Anyway, you get the gist. Kane sets out to avenge Postlethwaite, who in his dying breath promises that the warrior will be redeemed if he can save his daughter Meredith. And that sets the direction for the rest of the film. All of which is more or less capably executed, but painted sketchily and without some of the connective tissue between scenes that would have made it flow better and engaged the audience more with what’s at stake.

More on the latter point: genre stories often rush the bits where there’s potential for the audience to really get caught up in a character’s plight. Result being, instead of authentic feelings being generated, you get a shorthand version of all that: tropes rather than emotions. See also: James Bond films, where it’s taken as long as the new Casino Royale for the audience to be convinced that Jimmy really does feel something for his lady of the day.

There’s another trap that the film falls into: the belief that the end of the film needs a fight with something that looks like a level boss from a computer game. Really, all this achieves is a lot of expenditure on CGI. See also Hellboy: the clockwork Nazi was infinitely more interesting than the big badass monster. Yawn. And this even after writer-director Michael J. Bassett went to the trouble of establishing a formulaic but workable connection to the evil in the story with Kane’s family: instead of capitalising on that, it devolves into Star Trek: Next Generation style parent/child wibble. Shame.

All of which emphasises why A Single Man is set in 1962, at a time when homosexuality really was the love that daren’t speak its name, and lives could be blighted by the suspicion of it. Colin Firth has never been better than he is here as George Falconer, an English professor at a middling college whose male lover has just died. Only, who can he open up to about his feelings? Does he even have access to them himself, having constructed a life that scrupulously avoids any kind of emotional connection? It’s more than a conundrum, it’s a desperately lonely position he inhabits, one that’s hard for most people — even, I suspect, many modern gay people — to identify with.

We follow George as he goes about his business, an affable if somewhat distant man. He’s polite to his neighbours, flirtatious with the departmental secretaries, tangentially addresses issues around gayness with his students. And he even has a female confidante, and ex lover, in the form of the divine Julianne Moore as fellow English pal Charlie, who delights in her femininity and wonders what would have happened if she and George had been an item long term. Only Charlie doesn’t ‘get’ George any more than anyone else, George included.

The friend I saw the film with said she found the pace of the film slow, but when we discussed it realised that the story is packed with incident. As well as the business already alluded to, George has a close encounter with a Spanish James Dean wannabe, skirts round picking a guy up at a bar, and brings back one of his students home with him. Also, he has a groovy dance with Charlie that serves the same purpose as a sex scene would in most films, showing the two characters becoming closer through physical intimacy. Oh, and he puts a loaded gun in his mouth, and takes quite a while working out how to shoot himself in such a way that he causes minimum bother to his cleaner.

In other words, there’s plenty happening. But part of Tom Ford’s remarkable skill as director in this, his first film, is the way he segues from one scene to another in a very natural way. There’s an ease to it all, and that ease also encompasses the flashbacks and fantasy sequences within the story. Between the confidence of the direction and the strength of the performances, this really is a remarkable film.

As well as directing, Tom Ford co-produced and co-wrote the script with David Scearce, an adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood story. For the most part it’s a very capable script, though there were a few moments when it seemed too on the nose. Those nasal beats are few and far between, and maybe only perceptible to a curmudgeon such as myself.

Kudos too for music which complements the mood of the story to perfection: Abel Korzeniowski provided the bulk of the original score, and there’s skilful use made of period albums for good measure. In all, it’s as truly beautiful film and one that will stay with me for some time. And while it’s probably not fair to think about it in the light of my friend’s crass colleagues and the way they abused their power in a social context, it inevitably makes me wonder just how society has moved on from the era depicted here.

“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.

Fascinated by the possible futures that science presents, Ellis has a particular interest in the space programme. That obsession combines with his rabblerousing tendencies in the Vertigo graphic novel Orbiter, a collaboration with artist Colleen Doran published in 2003. The date is important: Orbiter was written just before the space shuttle Columbia was lost, and seven crew with it. Orbiter was always intended to have a propagandist element: that tragic coincidence gives it an added significance, making the graphic novel a clarion call for the resumption of manned space flight.

The story is simple at heart. A space shuttle believed lost returns after ten years. But of its original crew, only one person remains. And at first sight he seems to be crazy. On top of which, there’s the business of the shuttle’s transformation. What set out as a creation of metal and circuitry has returned with a layer of flesh covering it, and dust from the surface of Mars. And the more the scientists examining the shuttle come across, the less relation its journey has with the laws of physics as they’re accepted.

It’s time to think weird, then. To explore alternative ways of thinking that will help explain what’s happened to the shuttle and its crew. There’s a danger at this point of Ellis losing his readers in semi-digested technobabble, but I managed to keep up with it well enough for it to seem sort of feasible. What wasn’t so convincing was the psychologist managing to connect with the pilot — we’re told that she’s clever, but I wasn’t dazzled by their interaction. The ending was a bit abrupt for my tastes, too, though I can see exactly why Ellis brought things to a halt at that point.

That’s a minor quibble though — overall Orbiter is a successful story. Colleen Doran’s contributions are an important part of that impact — she’s as much a NASA geek as Ellis, making this a script she was destined to draw. Apparently it’s helped her career, too: many editors were blinded by her gender and she was often given supposedly female-friendly material to draw. No more: this hard edged science fiction tale opened the eyes of many in the industry.

Seven years since it was published, Orbiter seems just as timely. Obama’s suspension of America’s space programme gives Ellis and Doran’s creation a new relevance. And I’d like to see more work in comic form that has a didactic purpose: the medium is underutilised at this point, and it would be good to see a graphic novel as powerful in its effect as the 1960s television play Cathy Come Home, which led to the formation of the homeless charity Shelter.

Warren Ellis is sometimes criticised for his appropriation of science in comics stories. But that makes a pleasant change in an industry where one of the main genres — superhero stories — is known primarily for cannibalising previous superhero stories, as a result making many continuing titles near-impenetrable to outsiders. Given the choice between more variations on the theme of Shiny Thong Man and stories which draw on politics, science, or other influences, I know which I’m more interested in. And if Ellis’s continued success riles the more conservative contingent of the comics reading audience, then so much the better.