1. "A Charming Sentiment. Let's Go."There's still a sense that ambition is often a dirty word in British society. Write a sentence such as "Nobody could consider denying the ambition which marks Jonathan Ross and Tommy Lee Edward's "Turf"", and, if it's been expressed in a cynical context, the word "wankers" might as well be written afterwards in red ink. At best, in this sense, "ambition" can be a word that damns with faint praise, as in "At least you tried", and at worst, it's a way of sneering to show how somebody's got above themselves.
But ambition can be mistaken for achievement too, just as light can suggest heat even beyond the point when things are getting decidedly chilly. And if I mention that the prime virtue of "Turf" seems to me to be its ambition, and if I want to avoid seeming as if I'm sneering or patronising, which I do, I still don't want to suggest that Mr Ross's script for his first book is nearly strong enough to fulfil his aspirations. "Turf", for all the sense of serious purpose which is evident throughout it, for all that it's marked by a measure of competency with the story and considerable craftsmanship in its art, for all that it's printed professionally, distributed effectively and marketed quite brilliantly, is marked by failures of skill and judgement which illustrate how ambition without the appropriate application inevitably ends up undermining itself. Yes, "Turf" is indeed a massively - yes - ambitious work, with 23 different speaking parts in its first chapter alone, with at least four lead plots and a host of minor ones. It's informed by at least 4 key genres and the influences of comic-book traditions from Europe through America to Japan, and yet it has just 4 issues and 96 pages to deliver a unified and successful amalgam of these elements. And in struggling to do so much, to fulfil such ambition, the simple mechanics of the comic book form have in "Turf" been too often ill-considered and applied. And with time, this will become, I believe, as the hype diminishes and the currency of celebrity is inevitably devalued with its use, more and more obvious. "Turf" is ambitious, and its the result of what has obviously been exceptionally hard work. But Mr Ross's skills as a writer of comic books aren't as yet the equal of his ambition, and I worry that in the hype and applause which has accompanied "Turf"'s publication, that most important and informing of truths isn't registering sufficiently in the critical marketplace.
2. "He Will Do Whatever He Wishes To Do"
I. Where there have been critical reservations with "Turf", they've usually focused on the complexity of its plot and the density of the text on its pages. And while I share those concerns, I don't think that complicated narratives, substantial casts and apparently-McGregoresque blocks of script are of themselves the primary problem here. There's no doubt that the hugely ambitious task that Mr Ross has chosen to wrestle with in "Turf" would prove a daunting challenge to all but the most competent and experienced of writers, but it's not the scale so much as the detail of his work that has escaped his control. For Mr Ross reminds me of nothing so much as the gifted and ambitious student who embarks upon a higher-level course and produces an epic-length first essay. Such students are always difficult to advise, because their admirable aspirations and enthusiasms need to be allowed to remain undiminished while their lack of discipline is fundamentally attended to. And it is hard to explain why an essay shouldn't contain every fact a student has researched, every theory they've grasped, and every quote they've collected. How to get across that the value of an essay is concerned not with the weight of all that can be loaded into it, but rather with all that has been left out? For in precisely the same fashion as the comic book, the essay is an subtractive art. The writer starts off with the option of accessing every single relevant piece of data at hand, and then must edit all of that mass of information down to the least amount of essay that will answer the question effectively. Examiners don't care how long a student has spent studying, or much information they know, anymore than a patient at the doctors wants a four hour lecture on the digestive system before receiving a prescription for something to help with stomach acid. All a marker is looking for is a well-structured, easily-understandable piece that answers the question with brevity and relevancy.
II. In such a similar way to these afore-mentioned splendidly bright and enthusiastic students, Mr Ross has begun his career with an epic, with a tale so complex that its initial outing makes the first "Watchmen" or "Sandman" seem sparse in plot and wordage by comparison. And if Mr Ross had the skills to carry this complexity and transmute it effectively into a comic book form, then the worth of the job at hand, and the ambition behind it, would be equally beyond question. But instead, "Turf" is simply awash with mistakes of construction and execution. It's all promise and polish, but the nuts and bolts are often so sloppily put to use if they're there at all.
All of which begs the question; why didn't anybody inform Mr Ross that these mistakes were there, because they certainly are, and I can't believe that a man as bright and keen as Jonathan Ross would simply have ignored the weight of expert advice if offered to him.
For there's absolutely nothing wrong with "Turf" that a strong and able editor couldn't have put right at the beginning of the project. And there's nothing wrong with it now that a retrospective purge of indulgence and a considerable tightening of practise wouldn't correct. But, sadly, because I do admire its authors' ambition, as things stand, "Turf" isn't so much a comic book as an illustrated proposal for one, drawing off the first draft notes of a promising, and yet inexperienced, neophyte writer.
III. In order to see if I can support such a contention, I thought I'd touch upon just a few, and apparently low-level, technical problems evident in "Turf", problems which no comic book professional should have allowed to slip through their grasp onto the page. None of then, when considered in isolation, are enough to sink the execution of "Turf", and some will seem so minor as to be pointless to refer to. But in combination, these criticisms may indicate that Mr Ross has a fair good way to go before his ambitions of being a comic book creator of excellence can be fulfilled.
Because most if not all lovers of comic books have their own epic adventures just waiting for a big-name professional artist to draw and a substantial bank-account to fund. Being in possession of an epic adventure is, therefore, no more a mark of an able comic book writer than having a fierce and admirable drive to make it in the four-colour industry. All that counts, in the end, is whether those dreams and stories, and all that ambition, appear on the page in a form which serves the job at hand, that tells the story as efficiently and effectively as possible. And the manner in which professional writers do that is to take what they've imagined and process it through the application of one individual and often-commonly unnoticed technique after another. Writing isn't a single skill; it's the accumulation of a great host of tricks founded in practical experience and study through thousands of hours of thought and application. And if I point out a set of poor storytelling choices made consistently by Mr Ross through "Turf", then it must surely indicate that the time hadn't yet come for his comic book to be published, because the writer himself hasn't yet mastered the basics of his new craft.
Or perhaps, the problem is less with Mr Ross and more in that there surely was a point some months ago, when an editor, or some comic book professional acting in that capacity, needed to have stepped in and pointed out what's what, and where it goes, and where it doesn't too. And perhaps, nobody did.
3. "Well, I guess If You Just Look ... "I. Above you'll note a scan of the first page of "Turf". As a teaser for the book as a whole, it's somewhat prosaic, and certainly overcrowded and claustrophobic with captions and balloons, but it does serves as a usefully quiet contrast to the two-page bloodfest which will follow. However, in the very first panel, Mr Ross presents us with redundant narration, with information that's neither informative or enhancing or even interesting: "From outside, it looks to just like any other day ... But inside ... ". Yet all these words do is compel the reader to process them; beyond that, they tell us nothing about the story at all. Of course the reader will find something out-of-the-ordinary in the scene to come, for that's what a story is. It'd be a shock if the interior of the Biltmore Hotel didn't contain anything of interest, because that would mean that the scene was quite dramatically irrelevant. (It's as if Mr Ross had written "If you're thinking of giving up after one panel, don't, because things are more interesting just a little along." And later, a panel showing the Earth from orbit is labelled "outer space": this is not a one-off problem.) Unfortunately, to compound the problem, the second panel is similarly redundant. It literally serves no function in the narrative at all. It's a perfectly serviceable shot of the street-level front of the Hotel, but it tells us nothing at all that's relevant to the story. It sets up no character or action, displays no obviously relevant information, nor does it even noticeably increase the atmosphere of the piece. Considering how very cramped the rest of the page is, that second exterior shot should never been allowed to reach the page of the script which arrived in Mr Edward's hands.
That is, I would remind you, if I might, the first two panels of the book.
II. The five-panel sequence which closes the page is regretfully static and uninteresting, a cardinal sin on the first page of a new book. But far more importantly than that, the scene is so often cramped with huge clumps of text that the reader is quite thrown out of a story that's barely begun: there's so much to read and so little to see that the text in effect separates from the art, forcing the reader to make a deliberate effort to stop and read the word balloons in isolation from the usual pleasures of comic book reading. (These aren't even talking heads: they're semi-talking heads, and though the page is actually light on dialogue compared to some later pages, it's still loaded with words.) In fact, reading much of "Turf" is like sitting in a crowded cinema behind a very fat man wearing a very big hat; we may be able to "hear" everything, but it's damn hard to see what's going on, and quite frankly the effort is so unrewarding that apathy soon hits home.
That last row of panels on the page is especially challenging to engage with, because it's impossible to work out what the body language of the characters is expressing. Is "Susie" charming "Petey", or seducing him, or convincing him, or bullying him? Her expression in 1:3 seems quite passive when compared to the dialogue, and appears questioning rather than playful as the words seem to determine in 1:4: without seeing how she's physically relating to Petey in those panels, all the words in the world won't capture our attention or add depth to the situation. And the truth is that a series of panels showing Susie circling Petey, brushing against him, almost threatening him with an air of sexual playfulness and sharp intelligence, a Hepburnesque performance, would have carried a great deal more meaning than what's written and shown here.
Sadly, what has been written in the word balloons for these scenes is again full of redundancies. The information that the text needs to convey can be boiled down to the following;
- Petey's manager says that the room contains a crime scene that mustn't be disturbed until the police arrive
- Susie isn't a crime reporter, but she knows about the Don Bava's gang meeting in the room and wants to find out what's happened.
- There's someone attacking the gangs, with the Delancey Gang having disappeared.
And maybe if the text didn't require so much attention,what with that strange mixture of so many words and yet so little information, the reader might not be inspired, if that's the word, to wonder why there's nobody else there, why no other mobsters have arrived to check out what's happened, or why such a major and horrifi crime scene has been left for a single bellboy to guard, or how Susie even knows about the situation at all, or even whether "Petey" will returns as a major player in "Turf" later on, given that so much of a crowded scene has been given to his rather-dense face? (He doesn't appear in the rest of the book at all.)
III: And that's the story of just the first page. I fully understand that a counter-argument could easily be proffered stating that another reader saw no problem with all this and enjoyed it, but the key matter of whether Mr Ross wants his ambition to include earning the status of a top-rank creator or not stands separate to the enjoyment or this fan or that. Because if he does hold to such ambition, irrelevant panels, redundant captions, repetitious and plodding dialogue, and practically art-free cramped scenes won't do.
Who did edit this first page?
4. "Aw. Tell It To The Boss."
I. There's a point where any more detailed examples in a review of these matters becomes redundant, for in its telling and unquiet way, that first page illustrates what I'm trying to express here perfectly. But I've got pages and pages of notes concerning "Turf", and I'm so reluctant to admit that information will serve no-one's best interest to reel off: it's hard to let go of what seem to be good ideas, even when the writer is just a blogger. Oh, I fully intended to discuss the first panel of page 18, which contained a stupefying 100 words, or the second one after it, which managed an astonishing 113, all of which were marked again by repetition and irrelevancy, while panels 18:2 and 18:4 carried such 6 words. And I wanted to discuss how Mr Ross enjoyed the joke about the Mayor referring to his Mob-supplied prostitutes as "nieces" so much that he mentioned it 4 times in 5 panels, and I thought it'd be enlightening to talk about the awkward and many info-dumps concerning prohibition scattered through the book's beginning.
But the point has been made, I suppose, and whether it's a fair and accurate one or not won't be further proved by saying it all over again.
Although I have. I did all that research.
But, what's present of the writing in the pages following that first one is usually no more technically competent than discussed above. Oh, those pages can be full of imagination, and, yes, ambition, and a promising hybridisation of a whole host of familiar genres and well-loved movies and comic books too. But it's all promising components rather than excellent achievement.
II. Are there no good things about "Turf"? Well, of course there are. The splendidly macabre panels by Tommy Lee Edwards above are proof that Mr Ross's work can result in very effective results. For Mr Ross is a terrific fan, and an obviously bright fan too who's read exceptionally widely. He's thought regularly and deeply about what he's experienced in his reading and he's synthesised his own individual response to it. The very act of fusing together a hybrid of vampire, gangster, historical and science fiction produces sparks and pleasing juxtapositions; the vampire assault on the gangsters in the Biltmore is a splendid idea, for example. And in the mass of information displayed, and often dumped, on the page, there are intriguing snippets which deserve to be developed into pithy short stories, such as four-panel summary of the fate of Hancock family on page 5.
No, the problem doesn't lie in Mr Ross's ambition, or in the quality of his imagination. The fault lies in the manner in which he's executed his responsibilities as a writer of comics. What was awkward should at least have been competent. What was competent should have been excellent. After all, the potential is there. The potential is obvious.
5. "I'll Write The Story ... "
In his afterword to the first issue of "Turf", which we discussed in the last piece here on TooBusythinkingAboutMyComics, Mark Millar discusses how Mr Ross's work is in the tradition of the word-heavy scripts of Don McGregor and Alan Moore. This application of a more text-concentrated tradition is, we're told, a deliberate choice by Mr Ross. But writing lots of words doesn't of itself mean that Mr Ross is located in that tradition at all. Mr Moore, and to a lesser but still considerable degree, Mr McGregor, knew how to control the text they were using. It may have been a control that still wasn't appreciated by some word-traumatised readers, but what they wrote was characterised far more by their skill with expressing their meaning than it was by the simple freedom to add a large number of letters to each page. Where the vast majority of Mr Ross's words in "Turf" are exposition, and often clumsy and unnecessary exposition too, his supposed forefathers used their skills to a different effect. Consider, for example, the first few captions of Alan Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson";
"It's raining in Washington tonight. Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalks with leopard spots. Downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the fire-escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or boy kings."
Moore isn't just explaining backstory here. In fact, he's not doing that at all. Instead, his words run in parallel with the art to create a far richer and moving reading experience. While the art shows the reader that we're in Washington DC, and displays to us a wealthy man drinking wine behind the glass of a sterile executive office, the text discusses a world in which the relationship between humans and plants is a very complex and rather intimidatingly scary one indeed. In the sterile office, the wine-drinking man thinks he's safe from nature, but out in the urban world, everyday folks still serve the needs of their plants and perhaps almost worship them without knowing that they do. That tension between the sterility and apparent control of the corporate world and the irrational and complex ecosphere beyond it, and its ability to flourish where it's almost been forgotten, sets up the whole marvellous story of how Alec Holland discovers he's not Alec Holland at all.
And if the cry is that Mr Ross isn't Alan Moore and shouldn't be expected to be, I'd agree, to a degree, but I'd also ask why Mr Ross, with all the love for and knowledge of comics that he has, hasn't studied the "Anatomy Lesson" and its many compatriots in the un-decompressed tradition in order to decipher how techniques of using a significant mass of text works. Or if he has, and there's no doubt that he's read the comic many times, why isn't that knowledge reflected to a far greater degree in the practise on the pages of "Turf"? For if the reason for those text-heavy panels is that "Turf" had so much backstory that it had to be constantly dumped onto the page, then the question arises again: where was the editor to point out that any story that needs so much info-dumping either requires a great many more pages or a thorough re-write?
Mark Millar tells us that "A great reader doesn't always make a great writer.", which is surely true, and some of that is because of talent, but Mr Ross undoubtedly has that. No, the problem here seems to be that all that reading, of itself, doesn't reveal the secrets of how to write an excellent comic book. That takes study, and somebody to teach, and a huge body of experience. But this was Mr Ross's first script, or so we're told, and nobody should have a first script presented as such to the world without greater attention having been paid to the detail of its construction.
Hire a crusty old bastich from the old school of comic book writing, Mr Ross. Not to write for you, but to do what traditional editors do; edit. School for many children can be hell, but this would be in a way a school for adults, wouldn't it. where you'd be learning even more about the form you so obviously love? And that really isn't school at all, is it?
6. "I Say Move It"
Mr Ross has done nobody any harm with his work on "Turf", let alone himself in many senses. His book has sold very well and gained a great deal of positive attention. It's an often smart book full of interesting ideas, and the worst that can be said of it is that it's OK in parts when it could have been so very much more.
But if nobody else has been harmed in the making of this book, might I suggest that Mr Ross has been? Because he's so loved, and so powerful, and so influential, and so in control of his own product, he seems to have the freedom to do whatever he so wanted. And I can only conclude that he either ignored the advice of the professionals he sought out for advice, or that they didn't advise him in the detail and to the precision that his work desperately needs; the result is that the product falls very short indeed of his ambition. Does Mr Ross genuinely want to be a great writer of comic books? Well, of course he does, which means that he has to learn to actually write comic books, to master the fine and numerous details and the slog of the craft. Until then, all the praise of his friends, and sales of his book, and the easy-ride offered by the media, and the sale of the property to a film company, and all the blah-blah-blah of our celebrity culture, which we touched in yesterday's blog too, may perhaps only reinforce the bad habits of his threadbare technique, for why would he ever change?
And, yes, I know that the above reads like a sketch from Monty Python: what will "Turf" bring Jonathan Ross except wealth, adulation, media attention and a film deal? But then, with the exception of the film deal, Mr Ross has all that anyway. He doesn't need what he already has. And what he wants, I truly believe, is to fulfil his ambitions. Not to write one comic book, or two, but to write great comic books, one after another. And he could do it, too, if he wanted to, I'm sure. He could certainly have a damn good tilt at that damn great windmill, anyway. For all that my opinion counts for nothing, a fact I'm keenly aware of everytime my fingers hit this keyboard, I really do believe that.
Ambition is nothing to be sneered at. I admire ambition. But ambition isn't excellence, and all the hard work in the world won't help if it's directed at writing, for example, a self-pleasing excess of words rather than the most appropriate ones.
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