"The Only Good Editor, er, Dalek": "I Know Nothing" No 7b

continued and concluded from yesterday;

6.

Comics, we're constantly told, are limited in the effects they can achieve only by the imagination and skill of the creators involved in making them. Scenes on film which might require a fortune in costs and months upon months of painstaking work to achieve can, or so the argument most commonly goes, be created on the page in a few hours of hard work. No special effects budget, no cripplingly expensive suite of mainframe computers, no real-world models, whinging artistes or arguments about 3-D or not 3-D; the comic book creator can do it all, and in an attic or a shed too.


It's a lovely conceit, of course, and it sounds convincing, but it isn't actually true. The fact that the production of a side of A4 showing a vast battle in space is considerably cheaper than a few seconds of film illustrating the same doesn't mean that comics are capable of matching movies blow-for-blow in what they can achieve, any more than the reverse is true. Films, for example, and here I'm stating the blindingly obvious just to make a point and potter onwards, move. In fact, despite the strange assumption on the part of so many who should know better that film and comics are incredibly similar mediums, they are indeed so utterly different in what they can achieve that it's always, always, a terrible mistake to try to transfer the strengths of one form to another without a great deal of forethought, and then some greater measure of reflection, and then, nine times out of ten, a decision to abandon the whole enterprise as a waste of time. (*1) And an illustration of this very category of "terrible mistake" can be found on the first two pages of "The Only Good Dalek", in which the aftermath of great punch-up in space is presented to the reader. (You can see as much of that double-page spread as my scanner could access directly below this panel.)

*1:- I know, a great many of the outstanding breakthroughs in comic story-telling have come from the study of and adaption of the techniques of film-making. But them's the one out of ten times when the creators involved, from Eisner to Ellis, Hitch and Millar, understood what they were doing and did it well.


Whatever else, it's a damn odd choice for a tale-opening scene, for it's hard to grasp what it's actually doing there when a huge range of alternative shots might function better in its place. For while it might explain that the Daleks and mankind are at war out there in the great beyond, it doesn't establish anything of an informing or touching importance for the coming 126 pages that couldn't have been expressed in a single panel and a dozen words instead. Furthermore, for reasons we'll soon discuss, the art as represented on the pages of this relatively small book could never hope to compete directly with the scenes of Daleks at war in space that most British readers, at least, will have experienced on TV, and quite possibly on DVD too. And so, "The Only Good Dalek", this most promising of new ventures, begins with an unimpressive flashback to an event which isn't in itself important to the coming narrative, but which is without question an inferior, rather than even a different, experience to the TV show. For if a reader knows what the Daleks are, they've seen far more spectacular and indeed frightening scenes than this. And if the reader is ignorant of Skaro's little pepperpot stormtroopers, this passive scene set counter-productively after a space battle has actually been concluded, after all the uncertainty and drama has been in essence drained from the scenario, isn't going to transmit anything of the fear and menace that the Dalek's are meant to inspire.

Why then open with this double page spread? Why did all those various members of the redactie choose to sign off on this most important of scenes, the very pages that casual browsers will come across first as they try to decide whether to read, or indeed buy, this book?


*2:- The screencaps were lifted from http://doctorwho.sonicbiro.co.uk/. My thanks to there.

7.

There's really only three options open to the creators of a comic book licensed property based on a TV show such as Dr Who when it comes to the form and content of the story they choose to tell, and the redactie must have been aware to one degree or another that their responsibility was to decide the degree to which the "The Only Good Dalek" was designed to;

1. duplicate the kind of scene familiar from TV, or;
2. create the kind of scene familiar from TV while presenting it in a different style and/or to a different effect, or;
3. produce the kind of scene which hasn't, or perhaps even couldn't, be shown in the TV series.

Of course, the best comic book licensed properties attend to all three options, but the worst case scenario is always one which focuses to an unwise degree on (1) rather than the other two more appropriate gameplans; simply largely duplicating what the TV has already shown is a losing proposition from beginning to end. And how odd it is, therefore, that the redactie have placed this product in the invidious position of competing directly with the visuals of the TV show from the very start. How very perplexing it is that those responsible for guiding this graphic novel from conception to publication should allow such an expensive item as this to open with a largely irrelevant, uninformative and unengaging scene which merely emphasises how just some of the consumer's £12.99 might be better spent on a cheaper three-episode DVD containing, for example, "Journey's End", or "Victory Of The Daleks".

8.

Although an episode of Dr Who on TV and a graphic novel of the last Gallifreyan are very different beasts, the fundamental principles of storytelling that inform the matter of how to capture an audience's attention and move them in either medium remain remarkably similar. It's something of a mystery, therefore, why Justin Richards, the writer of "The Only Good Dalek", should have chosen in this tale to ignore most if not all of the great strengths of Dr Who since Russell T Davies returned it to the TV screens in 2005. It's surely axiomatic, for example, that the creators of the good Doctor's adventures over the last 6 years have focused on personal relations, on characterisation and the emotional truth of events to the individuals involved, in order to both ground and drive their scripts. From the very first few moments of "Rose", this Dr Who has been a story of a very old and often very damaged man trying to do his best in the company of folks less knowledgeable and able than he himself is. And for all that his adventures are spiced up by aliens and spaceships, vampire fish and fire-demons, the appeal of his stories has always been based in how they've revealed the feelings of the people involved in them. But the reader will search in vain in "The Only Good Dalek" for a single scene which grounds the events of this skirmish with the Daleks in any emotional truth at all. Perhaps, to take but one of many examples, that redundant first scene might have counted for something, might have been interesting and even perhaps moving, if it'd been a backdrop upon which human affairs were being played out against.


But it wasn't. The story as a whole is quite devoid of anything but the most predicable expressions of emotion, of little if anything but the most stereotypical gestures associated with stock characters such as the "noble self-sacrificing warrior" or the "self-obsessed and heedless scientist". Even the physical and personal traits associated with the key roles of the Doctor and Amy are absent from most of the text. Indeed, these are generic "Doctor" and "companion" figures, quite interchangeable with any other shallow reading of those roles in the series long history, as if this story was written without any clear idea of what Matt Smith and Karen Gillan's parts would involve, and published as if these things didn't really matter anyway. There's nothing to match the Doctor's declaration of his own failings at the end of "The Beast Below", for example, or his single-minded determination to wipe out his most fearsome enemy in "Victory Of The Daleks". In fact, the conclusion of this tale has Mr Richard's Doctor shift from being a thin shadow of Matt Smith's incarnation to a direct contradiction of it, for he has the Doctor effectively helping to provide the human resistance to the Daleks with information which won't actually help them in their struggle. That doesn't matter, he informs the flat shadow-take of Amy that shuffles along beside him, because he's given those humans hope that the useless information might help them in the future. Emotionally, this supposedly rousing climax makes no sense at all, since it reduces the Doctor to a cosmic cheerleader giving desperate future humans useless aid all in the name of keeping their chins up. It's pablum from him, and pablum from Mr Richards too, and it doesn't make emotional sense at all.


For if there's nothing rousing, or moving, or indeed even familiar beyond the stereotypical about the characters at the heart of this tale, and there really isn;t, then all there remains is plot. And plot we have reams of, as if the 128 pages of this book had to be filled with movement. Movement down corridors of grey steel. Movement in forests of grey petrified wood. Movement through corridors lasered out of grey-blue ice. Everyone's forever racing here to be chased by unfamiliar and generic monsters, and then racing there for some more plot and monsters, and then it's all repeated until all the pages are used up. And in truth, this isn't an eleventh Doctor story at all. It's a tale completely suited to lying in the out-box of any producer of Dr Who in the seventies or eighties who didn't need another shallow, impersonal chase-epic to fill out a season's episodes.

9.

More puzzling perhaps than either the lack of apparent editorship or the absence of character and emotion in "The Last Dalek" is the art produced by the estimable Mike Collins, an artist whose work for Doctor Who Monthly is constantly characterised by an exuberant style, a precise command of form, and an attention to the business of story-telling which has lifted many a script he's illustrated from "merely pleasing" to "moving". And yet here his work is at best average, and on the whole seems to havebeen produced either under the most appalling pressure of deadlines or according to an editorial fiat that had decided that vague, sloppy and sketchy artwork was the obvious way to go for such a prestigious project. Consider again, if you would, the scan above of the opening double-page splash. Where is the eye supposed to come to rest in this picture? There are at least four vanishing points present here, which reflects some grasp of the logic of outer space, but does nothing for the reader trying to make sense of what's happening. The eye, it appears, should finally come to rest on the red Dalek at the left of the right-hand page, though why that should be escapes me. There's no point to looking there; the Dalek is passive beyond a sparkle that could be a reflection or a gun-blast, and if it's a shot, we're not even shown who's being shot at. In truth, there's no story present in the art, no logical progression of events guiding the eye from left to right. There's a body floating upside-down in the shadows to the left, but it's disconnected from what's going on around it even as it draws the eye off uselessly to the lefthand side of the page. But to look there is to be held there, for there's nothing to take the eye anywhere else. And to the far right of the page, where we would expect an enigma of some sort to catch our attention and encourage us to turn the page over, why, there's nothing at all. Nothing.

Now, how exactly was this product supposed to appeal to either regular comic book readers or those ignorant or uneasy about the language of sequential art? Because the former will be alienated by the lack of even basic components of the process of telling a story in the comic book form, while the latter are likely to be both baffled and bored.


Even stranger yet than the design is the style that Mr Collins has adopted for his work here. The clean lines and skilled tale-telling of his usual work are here replaced by a disjointed, scratchy finish which often lacks for any informing detail at all, as we'll discuss in a moment. The impression given by the above pages, for example, is so amateuresque that it's as if the reader was being presented with a Lettraset transfer pack from the sixties completed by a child and left in a drawer for 40 years. It's such a mystifying choice by an artist as fine as Mr Collins undoubtedly is, to present these scenes so reminiscent of the TV series in a fashion which can neither match the original nor throw any kind of different spin upon it.

9.

There's so much that could be discussed and decried from the pages of "The Only Good Dalek", and having gathered a small notepad full of criticisms and having written a draft of two of this blog entry too, I'm deeply tempted to talk about all of them. I've a page or two of paragraphs on the first 5 page scene in the book, for example, where we're presented with a petrified forest we never truly see, and which has no emotional effect upon our travellers at all. (I never worked out if it was important to the plot either.) There are, however, several different species of monster there, drawn so indistinctly and without detail that I honestly couldn't describe the one labelled a "Vagra plant" if my life depended upon. Indeed, there's a scene of a man turning into such a "Vagra plant" on page 6, or so the Doctor is made to tell us, and I have no idea what's happening or whether I should be scared or not. In truth, it just looks as if a character we know nothing about is being covered with play-foam, and perhaps he is, because the Doctor and Amy just aren't affected by his death in the slightest.

But there's no need to go on and on any further, because the truth is that the deep and fatal structural flaws in this graphic novel are explicit from that very first double page splash, and any editor, let alone a redactie, should have spotted that from the off and asked everyone to down tools until, shall we say in a politely formal way, the product had been recalibrated and made fit for purpose. Without emotion, surprises and or even two-dimensional characters, and with but barely functioning art, "The Only Dead Dalek" is exactly what this new line of graphic novels shouldn't have been. For whatever reasons, this is a not a product to launch a new line onto the market with unless the Dr Who graphic novels were never intended for anyone beyond a very young and undiscriminating audience of dedicated hardcore fans.

And given that the TV show has managed to consistently show respect for both younger and older fans, it would stagger me to discover that BBC Books had knowingly released a product which alienated the more seasoned reader while shortchanging their less experienced brethren, who surely deserve better.


The mind reels trying to comprehend how any of this can have been allowed to be. There are exceedingly experienced and competent professional who creatied this book. That's Mike Collins on the art, for heaven's sake. And there's that string of editors too, who presumably are actually editors who understand what a comic book is and how it functions, its language and purpose, who grasp that a graphic novel isn't just a string of over-familiar plot events strung out across tens and tens of pages and fronted by pale shadows of wellknown characters in order to drag the punters in.

For yesterday, we were discussing how desperately comic books need to make inroads back into the wider culture, so that more and more people might become familiar with the language of comics and with the habit of consuming them. And this, this is exactly what the industry didn't need. For none of us who love the sequential arts can benefit from the wider public's prejudices being reinforced, from the message going out that comics are a shadow of other artforms, that they're shallow in characterisation, hollow in meaning, perfunctory in plot and story, and expensive to boot.

And the question really is this: how did all those editors, and all these professionals, with all their undoubted good intentions and abilities, produce this, a barely-competent bore?


10.

Sometimes I feel that more than anything else in the world of sequential art, comics need a great many more very fine editors. Not just five or ten that everybody could name and enthuse over, but dozens of them. Really fine, competent, knowledgeable editors, with the power to do their job and a sense of mission in their nostrils. Not to change the world, or even to convert the heathen, but just to help ensure that things make sense on the page, that the language of comics is being used rather than ignored or flouted, and that the comics which are produced touch their audience with something more remarkable than ennui when and if they're read.

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