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WATCHMEN with Tade Thompson
221 Plays2 years ago
On this episode of Chronscast we're joined by award-winning SF author Tade Thompson to talk about WATCHMEN, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's comic-book masterpiece that skewers the superhero genre using its own architecture. Tade is the author of numerous novels, including the critically acclaimed sci-fi novel Rosewater, the first in his award winning WORMWOOD TRILOGY, Making Wolf, and most recently Far From the Heaven, and the Molly Southbourne series. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nommo Award, the Kitschies Golden Tentacle award, and the Julia Verlange award, and been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Shirley Jackson Prize.
We talk about how WATCHMEN reflects contemporary 1980s existential anxieties around the Cold War nuclear annihilation, and how it skewers the absurd braggadocio of the superhero genre. We dig down into the weeds of the book, picking apart the characters, their differing pathologies, and whether salvation lies in a masked figure. We ask how the genre can innovate from here, and why WATCHMEN endures. We also touch on the free spiritedness of Manga, writing fractured timelines as seen in Rosewater, and how the creation of narratives builds a psychological bridge between art and clinical practice.
The Judge gives us the second part of her talk on defamation, reminding us the usually the only winners of such altercations are the lawyers - so watch out! Elsewhere we hear Starship, Christine Wheelwright's excellent winning entry to the April 75-word writing challenge, and Superman has an axe to grind with Pine Marten Man... or is he just jealous?
Further Reading
You Better Watch Yourself
Superfolk
The Kryptonite Kid
Quack This Way
Where Are You Now, Batman?
Join SFF Chronicles for free
Join us next time when we'll be joined by Ed Wilson, literary agent and director of the Johnson & Alcock literary agency. Ed will walk with us through the labyrinth that is Mark Danielewski's mad millennial monster story House Of Leaves.
Index
[00:00:00] Tade Thompson Interview Part 1
[1:04:03] Voicemail 1
[1:05:10] The Judge's Corner
[1:18:03] Voicemail 2
[1:19:00] Writing Challenge Winner
[1:21:02] Voicemail 3
[1:22:00] Tade Thompson Interview Part 2
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Host Welcome
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to Kronscast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I'm Dan Jones. And I'm Christopher Bean.
Watchmen's Alternate History
00:00:26
Speaker
Today we're talking about Watchmen, Alan Moore and David Gibbons' comic book maxi series masterpiece, published monthly by DC in 1986 and as a single volume graphic novel in 1987. The book depicts an alternate history in which superheroes emerged in the 1940s and 60s,
00:00:43
Speaker
enabling the United States to win the Vietnam War and successfully cover up the Watergate scandal.
Impact of Watchmen on Superhero Genre
00:00:49
Speaker
In the 80s, nuclear war draws ever closer with an aggressive and expansionist Soviet Union set against this backdrop costumed crusaders having been outlawed are being bumped off one by one and those that remain attempt to pick up the pieces of their broken identities and solve the riddle.
00:01:05
Speaker
Watchmen reflects contemporary 1980s existential anxieties around the Cold War, nuclear annihilation, and skewers the braggadocio and psychological absurdity of the superhero genre so effectively that the scars arguably endure to this day. Structurally innovative and psychologically devastating, Watchmen is lauded as the high watermark of the genre alongside Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.
00:01:29
Speaker
It was listed in Time magazine's top 100 books of the 20th century and has been adapted for film by Zack Snyder in 2009 and for TV by HBO in 2019.
Guest Introduction: Tade Thompson
00:01:40
Speaker
And I'm delighted to say joining us to talk about Watchmen is Tade Thompson. Tade is the author of numerous novels, including the critically acclaimed sci-fi novel Rosewater, the first in his award-winning Wormwood trilogy.
00:01:53
Speaker
Making Wolf, and most recently Far From the Heaven, as well as the Molly Southborn series of novellas and several short stories. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the NoMo Award, the Kitchi's Golden Tentacle Award, and the Julia Valange Award, and has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Shirley Jackson Prize, among others. Many of his titles are currently in development for film and TV adaptation.
00:02:23
Speaker
Born in London to Yoruba parents, he lives and works on the south coast of England where he battles an addiction to books. Don't we all? Welcome Tade, it's lovely to have you. It's great to be here.
00:02:36
Speaker
Thank you so much for being here. I think we're going to be in for a really good episode. So there's so much in that biography there. I mean, if you want to develop a bit of an inferiority complex as an author, then just read your biography and that will do the trick.
Tade's Passion for Comics
00:02:52
Speaker
There's a lot going on there. What we'll do is we'll dip into some of that stuff a little bit later on in the chat. But for now, we're going to talk about Watchmen. So what drew you to pick Watchmen to talk about?
00:03:06
Speaker
I mean, why would I not? I mean, look, I'm a comics guy. I have been since I was like five. And I'm not one of those people who is ashamed of having read comics or superhero comics or that I continue to read them. I continue to consider them worthy of my time and to consider them a great art form. Looking at the list, there was literally no other choice for me.
00:03:33
Speaker
I come from comics, I would always, you know, if I can pick a graphic novel, I always will.
Subversion in Watchmen
00:03:39
Speaker
And apart from all of that, you know, it's Watchmen, it's Alan Lauren Dave Givens. You know, you really can't choose a better piece of work for anything. If you are someone who is interested in comics or just wanted to start reading comics, it would be a great place to start, or considerably the worst place to start, actually, because after this, it's all downhill.
00:04:03
Speaker
And it's not just, I mean, you could say it's all downhill after this, nothing touches the heights of what's from it, but it also subverts the genre so much that you're starting from a point that says, well, actually, this genre has got some pretty psychological defects going on in this genre.
Metatextual Aspects of Watchmen
00:04:23
Speaker
Definitely. I mean, the thing about a book like Watchmen is that it's got the text, it's got a lot of metatextual matters as well. It's got all the stuff that is implied, that has to do with the history of comics themselves, that has to do with the history of creators.
00:04:39
Speaker
You can read what went on any level. And obviously, I read it as a child, and I kind of kept reading it. And then as I grew, I kept picking up different things from it. In particular, much later, when I began writing seriously myself, I then began to see how much of a masterpiece this truly was. The storytelling is immaculate, the planning of the whole thing.
00:05:05
Speaker
I don't think anybody apart from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have seen the complete scripts. But what we do know is that some of the scripts for one episode were up to 100 pages long, which is completely unusual for a comic. Like, you know, comics can range from the Marvel method where, you know, the writer just tells the artist, okay, just this is the plot, go draw it. And then it comes back to the writer just put in the dialogue.
00:05:32
Speaker
to full scripts which you get in DC Comics where they have to actually script every page. And we have seen people who have written detailed scripts before, but multiple artists have always said that Alan Moore has the most detailed scripts that they have ever seen. And I don't think anybody has
00:05:48
Speaker
I don't think there's anybody who has more detailed scripts than he does. Well, I remember reading that Dave Gibbons said he had such detailed scripts for Watchmen that he didn't need to change. I think he changed one thing throughout the whole series and it was
00:06:05
Speaker
It was right towards the end where Rorschach is trying to get the drop on Ozymandias in the Antarctic station. And there's a panel where Ozymandias is monologuing, as the Incredibles would say, he's monologuing and Rorschach is trying to come up behind him. And Gibbon said, it's too wordy. And Rorschach, it's only going to take him three or four seconds, maybe even less, to get over. So there needs to be fewer words on the page and more went, fair enough. And apparently,
00:06:34
Speaker
That's the only change that Gibbons suggested to Moore and which was made. It seems to me that Watchmen is a piece of work that, more so than anything, certainly that came before and as much as anything that's come since, is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in that medium. You mentioned a great word earlier which was meta-textual.
00:07:00
Speaker
And it is one of those now when we when we talk about texts on these podcast episodes, we tend to talk about texts that are generally great are genuinely great even and they have layers of meaning and you can read them like you said you can read it as a child and you can get the sort of the top level the superficial action story.
00:07:22
Speaker
But then the more you read it, there's almost an infinite layer of depth that you can dive into. And the meta-textuality of Watchmen is there for all to see. The great example of that is the Tales of the Black Freighter story within a story, which is not necessarily a new device. I mean, it's been used in anything back to the Canterbury Tales and Hamlet and all sorts of things. But in the
00:07:51
Speaker
in the context of Watchmen. It's showcasing the medium in
00:07:58
Speaker
It's showcasing the possibilities of the medium in a way that nothing else does because of the duality of the tales of the Black Freighter. It's almost a triumvirate, actually, because you have the tales of the Black Freighter, the subplot of the young boy who's reading the tales of the Black Freighter interacting with the new stand vendor, and that reflecting the overarching plot of Ozymandis's plot to, well,
00:08:24
Speaker
Well, exactly. And one thing I should mention here, I really don't want to discuss the film at all.
Film Adaptation Omissions
00:08:31
Speaker
But one thing, one very particular thing that upset me about the film was that they stripped Tales of the Black Phryta from, you know, from being interwoven with the narrative. They surely did. Yes, they did. They took it out and they included it on the Blu-ray, I think. They included it on Blu-ray. It's still separate. It exists as an animation, but it's still separate. And to me,
00:08:54
Speaker
I just wonder if there is a world in which that film was made with Tales of the Black Fighter into woven in the proper way because it functions
00:09:06
Speaker
as a reflection of the main story itself. It functions as a reflection of the plot. It functions as what Osamandas himself at the end said it. He said he has dreams where he's swimming towards something hideous. And it's like when he's swimming towards the black fight itself. And he talks about riding on the bodies like
00:09:24
Speaker
In the very next panel, I started writing on the murders of other people to get to where he needs to go to. So there are so many layers in it. And of course, there's the idea that while it was going on, while the main story was going on, it was intercut with it in ways that the two stories reflected each other. And even the color, the colors used, in Tales of the Black Fighter, matched the colors on the outside of significant things like the radioactive fallout shelter.
00:09:53
Speaker
you know, the yellow of it was matched in some scenes of the Black Friday itself. So there's so much in there that to remove it, I think, was a cardinal sin, to remove tales of the Black Friday film. I saw it as a cardinal sin when the film came out. Well, we won't have too much of a go at Zack Snyder for that. I mean, it was knocking on three hours. It was knocking on three hours anyway. Yeah, it's true. And this is a very difficult issue. I imagine the studio probably had something to do with it.
00:10:19
Speaker
I don't think, you know, I mean, there were, you know, people have been saying was on film anyway. So, you know, I think it was a great effort. I have, you know, through no shade at Zack Snyder at all.
00:10:31
Speaker
He did something that was very faithful to the work. He did the best he could. And kudos to the guy for doing it. No shade. It's just that it would have been good. And I'm one of these people that, if they're told, okay, Watchmen is going to be a four-hour film, I would have gone to see it.
00:10:50
Speaker
Well, I mean, he did the Justice League remix, didn't he? Or remake, however you want to describe it. And that was four hours and people went to it on HBO Max and Sky Cinema in the UK. They went to it and they watched it. So I think that the genre has changed a little bit. People do have the audience. Sorry, they do have the patience and they will make the time to watch these great epics.
00:11:14
Speaker
Exactly. I suppose as well coming from your, your enjoyment so much of being artistic, you know, in terms of visual art, instead of just writing, that having that that removed, you were just talking about the, this section of the graphic novel, and how the colors and everything are, you know, linked into the coordinated. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're not really going to get that in a film, are you?
00:11:37
Speaker
No, you're not. I mean, there are ways it could have been done, but you're not going to get it. And again, I think that was one of Alan Moore's things, like, look, he considers this a comic. He considers the comic medium as its own thing, not a rehearsal for films. But, you know, and it's one of the reasons I think that they use the nine panel grid, which is a thing you do in comics, you know, and, you know, a lot of people don't talk about it anymore, but it used to be reviled because people used to think, oh, nine panel grids are boring.
00:12:07
Speaker
You know, but they fixed, you know, they use a nine panel grid so that the variations from the nine panel grids made you pay more attention. You know, Dave Gibbons did an amazing piece of work with this. It's not, you know, there's just so many things just, you know, there's so many subtle things in there that you
00:12:26
Speaker
you know, each time you really like, oh, I didn't notice that before I was, you know, I kind of flipped through it just, you know, just before before this. And I saw that in the background was a was one of Dali's paintings, you know, with the floppy clocks. And they were talking about time. And I hadn't noticed that until you know, so there is so much in there, you know, and nothing really should be ignored.
00:12:49
Speaker
I think it's chapter five called Fearful Symmetry. There's a panel where Ozymandias is tackling the assassin whom he
00:13:00
Speaker
he arranged, he hired the assassin to attack himself. And there's a two page spread and on the left hand page, there's a trio of panels. And on the right hand side, there's a trio of panels. And then there's a centerpiece in the middle. And if you look at the images on either side, they're symmetrical with each other. It's very, very, there's a lot there. And when we talk about
00:13:28
Speaker
writing, whether it's comics or whether it's novels or whether it's something else, a question that comes up a lot is, do the authors mean to put all of these little things in there? And I'm always of the opinion that yes,
00:13:41
Speaker
They do mean to put these things in there. And then there are other things that the reader picks out that the author didn't intend. I think Watchmen is a prime example of that. It's so rich on its own terms that the reader can then bombard it with his or her own connections and extrapolations, and then it makes the work grow anew.
00:14:02
Speaker
Well, exactly. And if you're writing something as large as Watchman, a narrative that large, there will be the intentional things. And we do know, we know Alan Law's intentionality that he is very intentional in almost everything he does. Even the things that are not intentional would have come from the subconscious. So if you've got your conscious mind is soaked in a particular narrative,
00:14:26
Speaker
your subconscious will be working on it as well. So there will be things in there that even if they're not consciously intentional, they will be subconsciously intentional and they will match a lot of the other things. And of course, apart from that is what the readers will then project onto it. You know, so it, you know,
00:14:42
Speaker
All of those things enhance each other. And, you know, does it matter if you intend it or not? It's what we see. That's what we see. Yeah. What we see that's important. And of course, you know, depending on where you fall along the path, this line, whether you feel that the author is dead or the author is not dead, you know, whatever your preferences will affect how how you interpret it and how you say, well,
00:15:03
Speaker
This was, you know, you say this is serendipity or this is intended. It doesn't matter. The important thing is the effect on you, the reader, you know, to non-Russian matters. That might be a question for Theophilus Arachidan. This is true, you know, if he exists. If he exists, yeah. But yeah, you know, so there, I think
00:15:28
Speaker
A person who is a creator or aspiring creator or whatever, they would really do well to read Watchmen because the layering, the foreshadowing, there's just so much of it that it's a masterclass. If you could read one and dissect one work, this really should be it.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree. Well, let's dig down a little bit into the weeds and think about what Watchmen is essentially about. Now, Chris gave the the overview of Watchmen in the intro. It starts off ostensibly as a murder mystery and costumed crusaders being bumped off one by one. And Rorschach, who looks like a Rorschach ink blot, he wears a mask to that effect, is taking on the role of the sort of what at first looks like the 1940s
00:16:20
Speaker
uh private private idea you know private dick um with a with the fedora hat and the raincoat and the collar turned up and you think that it's going down this kind of noirish route but then it it takes a bit of a left turn and it's the really that the the theme that that comes out of the book more than anything to me and which i think is extrapolated quite well in the tv show but we'll maybe leave that to one side for now is about the danger of
00:16:50
Speaker
of pushing your own ideologies almost past breaking point until they be pushing your beliefs past breaking point and to which point at which point they become a sort of the toxic ideology and you become the very thing that you're trying to fight protect others or fight against and there's a line and there's a line um
00:17:11
Speaker
Well, the line that Moore uses was from Juvenal, the Roman philosopher, wasn't it? Who watches the watch? You're going to have to forgive me. I can't remember the Latin, but it was who watches the watch.
00:17:24
Speaker
Here we go. There we go. See, that's why we've got you on. That's why we have these high quality guests on. There you go. So, who watches The Watchman? And the answer is given by the JFK quote earlier in the novel, which is, we are the watchman on the wall of freedom.
00:17:47
Speaker
So we are the watcher of ourselves. We have to watch ourselves because we're all inclined. And it reminds me of the quote from Alexander Scholz-Nitzheim, which is the famous one about the line between human evil is down the center of every human heart. So you have to watch it. You have to watch which side you're going to fall on. And almost, not quite, but all of the characters in Watchmen seem to be pushing past that line.
00:18:15
Speaker
they fall prey to their own ideologies. I mean, let's talk about Ozymandias because you mentioned him swimming towards the black freighter and his own soul.
Centrality of the Comedian in Watchmen
00:18:27
Speaker
I actually think that I think the comedian is the key to the whole thing. I think that starting with the murder of the comedian, I think conceptualizing it as a murder mystery is actually the key for understanding the whole narrative in, you know,
00:18:43
Speaker
it's one way of reading it to then be able to extract all the things that are necessary. Because at its heart, this book is, person gets murdered, murder gets sold by the end of the book, right? So basically, and when you have your murder mystery, you've got that person who is killed, you've got the person who did the killing, and then you've got the why. So what we need to know, and it starts as a classic one, it starts with a dead body, so murder mystery, right?
00:19:12
Speaker
Who killed the comedian and why? Those are the two things you need to know from who killed the victim and why is what you need to know by the end. Those are the promises you make that you have to fulfill by the end of a murder mystery narrative. What I would say is that because someone's been killed, one of the first things they want to do is, you know, who are the person's known associates, all right?
00:19:35
Speaker
you know, who is this person who is dead? Because the idea is that whoever has killed this person will be someone who knows the person. So either the person who knows the person hired someone to do it or did it themselves. So which is why they talk about, okay, non-associates basically is where you first can go. And that's what leads us into, you know, first the minute men, then crime busters. I'd like to read something that was said about the comedian.
00:20:01
Speaker
If you if I made please do mark them out. Okay, so And it's one of my favorite parts of the whole narrative So the first part, you know and both of them strangely both of them. It's actually with Dr. Manhattan and So this is this is Dr. Manhattan on the comedian he says as I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition that
00:20:28
Speaker
I also realized that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding. Blake's different. He understands perfectly, and he doesn't care. Now, the next thing is the same context. It's in Vietnam as well. This is Dr. Manhattan and the comedian talking. Now, I'm going to try and do the voices just to distinguish them. Excellent. You sound bitter.
00:20:58
Speaker
You're a strange man, Blake. You have strange attitudes to life and war. Strange? Listen, once you figure out what a joke everything is, being the comedian is the only thing that makes sense. The charred villages, the boys with necklaces of human ears, these are part of the joke. Hey, I never said it was a good joke. I'm just playing along with the gag. All right?
00:21:26
Speaker
I think it's very important to note that both Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan actually considered the comedian to be one of the person who got it, who understood what happened. Dr. Manhattan very clearly says the comedian understands what's going on here.
00:21:46
Speaker
Ozymandias took out the comedian because the comedian had understood everything. The comedian understood everything and realized, oh shit, what am I going to do with myself? You know, it scared even him. All right.
00:22:01
Speaker
But make no mistake about it, the comedian knew what was going on. Now, I'd like to reference, if I can, one work outside this, which is the killing joke, right? Yes, please do. So the killing joke is Alamo's take on Batman, the Batman Joker relationship. And here's one thing that a Joker says, because I actually think the comedian is the Joker in a way, right? But here's what the Joker said. He said, it's all a joke.
00:22:29
Speaker
everything anybody ever valued or struggled for. It's all a monstrous, demented gag. So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing? And Batman says, because I've heard it before and it wasn't funny the first time. It's important to note that when Joker is saying this, this is the only time he faces the reader directly.
00:22:53
Speaker
It's like he's not talking to Batman, he's actually talking to you who is reading this. And these sentiments actually echo almost exactly what the comedian is saying. And what it is, is look, the whole thing, this stuff is a joke. It's not a funny joke, but it actually is a joke. And it speaks to what you were saying about ideology, because it brings us to Rorschach.
Rorschach's Role in Watchmen
00:23:17
Speaker
If the comedian gets that, it's a joke. And Dr. Manhattan realizes that it's all nonsense. He realizes that as well. Rorschach, on the other hand, represents the opposite of that, where he has his principles. Even when they explain the whole thing to Rorschach and say, well, we can't tell anybody this. What does he say? He says, joking, of course. You're joking, right? Like, of course we're going to tell everybody this.
00:23:45
Speaker
It might be a time to go into where Rorschach comes from. Well, it's worth mentioning, yes. I mean, you say Rorschach has his principles, but I think it's worth mentioning that Rorschach is, well, let's describe him. He's a foul-smelling, bigoted Manichaean. So his principles are, well, as his face suggests, they're completely black and white. There is no compromise. There is no nuance. There is no shade of grey.
00:24:14
Speaker
with raw shark and that's what gets him killed in the end and that's also what leads him to lead him to the truth as well because he's unwilling to compromise on the truth but he is in his own way it's slightly different way he is just as nihilistic as the comedian and he understands the nihilism it was the he he heard the story about the sexual assault and rape of I forget the I forget the the woman's name
00:24:44
Speaker
But it was a real story. No, no, no, no. It was Kitty Genovese. Yes, Kitty Genovese. Yes. Which was a real story, I believe. Yeah, it was a real story. Although it was a fake story. Not that she didn't get killed. She did. But the idea that people were watching on people watched from true. Yeah, that part of the story wasn't true because again, I researched that myself. It's like, wow, this is hard. It's horrible if it actually happened.
00:25:11
Speaker
But subsequent, you know, if you go back and check the story was embellished to add, yes, absolutely. But it makes for a good origin story, I suppose, for Rorschach. But he he's yeah, he has his own nihilistic. Well, can we can we do it in the world? But yes, he does have principles, but they're principles that are worth following all the time.
00:25:37
Speaker
Well, this is true, but can we go metatextual? Because again, yeah, you're right. Because in the end, he says, look, even if the world burns down, we'll still, you know, he's not going to compromise no matter what happens. But I think it's worth going a little bit metatextual to talk about where Rorschach comes from, right? Rorschach actually comes from, Rorschach and actually all the superheroes in, you know, in Watchmen come from the old Carlton heroes. Now, the Carlton, and Rorschach is based
00:26:06
Speaker
you know, at least a little bit on a character called Mr. A or answer the question, right? So Mr. A and the question both, you know, they both had their DNA inside Rorschach. Both of those heroes were actually created by Steve Ditko or as the, you know, the writer artist, you know, one of the people who created Spider-Man, co-creator got strained and the like. But the key thing about Steve Ditko is that he,
00:26:31
Speaker
Again, he is a character like Roshak where he does not compromise on his principles at all, even if it means he's not going to get any money. He famously left Spider-Man after an argument with Stan Lee and refused to associate himself with Spider-Man. He didn't even talk about it. He refused to even grant interviews about it.
00:26:50
Speaker
He didn't, you know, even after a time when Stan Lee actually in writing acknowledged that, okay, yes, Steve Ditko and Stan, you know, was a co-creator of Spider-Man, he still wouldn't, he wouldn't come out and talk until he died. He was very, he was extremely principled. I mean, you know, to his own detriment. And his DNA is inside, you know, is definitely in Russia. You know, the DNA of his creations, Mr. A and the question, even, especially the question, the question has a mask that is black.
00:27:20
Speaker
The question's mask is just white. It's just a white sheet, just like that, blank. And both of those characters were uncompromising in that sense.
00:27:30
Speaker
Carton is an interesting company themselves. Not to go too far down the rabbit hole, but they had some ties to pornography. They were the only comic company at the time. They had all the distribution, production, publication in-house. Nobody else was doing that. The rumor is that because they were producing pornography on the side, that the comics were just a sideline to give. It was the shop window.
00:27:58
Speaker
Apparently at night they would just be rolling out girly mags all night long and in the daytime they'd be making comics so yeah. Well that's that's quite a nice metaphor for the superhero isn't it? The Clark Kent by Days you know superhero by night.
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, exactly. And one of the things about Roshak is this, he's not just that individual who has those principles and who thinks, you know, who was quite right wing. One of the things that it seems that more is saying is that, well, actually, the whole idea of superheroes is kind of right wing. And if you, one of the key problems or one of the key incidents in the narrative
00:28:41
Speaker
is when Captain Metropolis decided, let's form the gangbusters again. So there are two groups, there are two superhero groups in this narrative. One of them is the Minutemen and the other was gangbusters, right? It's interesting that there was actually no group called Watchmen, there was none, you know, and they didn't refer to themselves as Watchmen or anything.
00:29:04
Speaker
you know, at least not in the text. Now Minutemen disbanded, obviously. You know, they started and they disbanded and that was that. So one of the older superheroes, Captain Metropolis decides, let's call the gang back together again. And one of the things that I noticed, because he then drew up a chart of all the societal problems that he felt superheroes need to gang together and deal with, all right? It's interesting that two of the things he had there was campus violence and promiscuity.
00:29:34
Speaker
This guy thought that they needed superheroes to deal with promiscuity.
00:29:42
Speaker
All right. And that's not, I mean, that's just, it's not mentioned in the discussion. It's just there on the chart. All right. Like, and this is one of the things I talk about layers. It's not even addressed in the, you know, in the text itself. It's just there. Like these are the things, this guy, and I went through reading all of them and, and, you know, and this is another place where comedian becomes one of the, in fact, the most important character in the whole thing, because as this guy is saying this, comedian says bullshit.
00:30:12
Speaker
He says, these are not the problems of society. Because this is not going to work. Beating up criminals is not going to work. And to me, again, that's Alan Moore's way of saying that. Look, you are beating up petty criminals. It's not going to change society. It doesn't change anything. But this is what superheroes do. They fight. They are the face of it. They don't do anything.
00:30:33
Speaker
But the key, you know, one of the reasons that's the key incident of the whole book is that that's where the whole plot was hatched. Because one of the things you see there, and it's interesting that it was nameless, there are two important, well, there are many important things that happen in that scene, but there are two, the two most important things in terms of this book are one,
00:30:52
Speaker
He disrespects Ozymandias. And Ozymandias is vain and does not forget things. He disrespects Ozymandias. That's one. And two, he sets fire to the chart. And when he sets fire to the chart, Ozymandias then goes and looks at the chart, the charred chart. And you can see he's thinking, maybe if the world is burning, I can solve everything.
00:31:17
Speaker
And you can see it there. And one of the things, one of the job staff positions of that particular panel is this. At the top of the scene, Captain Metropolis said, but someone has to save the world. And there in the foreground is Ozymandias looking at the chart, the burnt chart. And I believe those, you know, in this scene are the two things that led to the death of the comedian in the beginning. One, he insulted Ozymandias.
00:31:45
Speaker
So, asimandias wanted to get back at the comedian, but two, he started plotting the, you know, he started his plot and the comedian had figured it out, therefore he had to eliminate the comedian. Those are the two reasons the comedian died. You know, and all of it, to me, originates from this particular scene. I love that. You know, I'd not, I've read the book, I've read it.
00:32:07
Speaker
multiple times and I've not, I didn't actually pay attention to what was on that whiteboard or what was on that blackboard at the time, that piece of paper. So that just, I love that. It's really cool. Yeah. So promiscuity drugs.
00:32:31
Speaker
unrest, anti-war demonstrations. It's not even war, it's anti-war demonstrations. Can you get more right wing? That raises an interesting question then, doesn't it? The superhero genre has become
00:32:53
Speaker
the absolute middle of the centre of the mainstream of popular culture over the last 20 years, especially since the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has got legs and it's run, the superhero genre has just absolutely ploughed its own furrow right through the centre of mainstream culture.
00:33:13
Speaker
It's already been subverted and it's been, you know, psychologically, it's been taken to pieces already by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen by saying, look, this stuff is, it's absurd and it's weird and it's strange and yet it's still, people still come back to it and look at it on a superficial level, the colours, the heroes, the action.
00:33:36
Speaker
And there is something underneath it which isn't quite right. One criticism that comes from the Canadian writer, Mark Stein, who's a conservative himself, says the problem with superheroes is that when everything's super, no one can be a hero, implying that
00:33:55
Speaker
Humanity, when everything is about superheroes, everything is outsourced, your problems are all outsourced to an extraordinary cabal of individuals who are in some way elevated above Joe Public on the street. And Joe Public on the street, it's no longer his place to sort out the problems that are in front of him.
00:34:19
Speaker
I had an extensive debate with someone about this about three or four years ago. And my argument was that Superman isn't brave. That was my argument. If you're Superman and you're more powerful than anybody else on the planet and you are unlikely to ever die, then going out and fighting crime doesn't make you brave.
00:34:43
Speaker
Bravely should be measured by the danger you put yourself in to achieve a goal. It shouldn't be measured by the actual thing you achieve. So going out and fighting someone who you are literally holding back, because that's what Superman does most of the time, the people he's fighting. He holds back most of the time. When he's fighting markers and petty thieves. Yeah, you have to go back. This is not brave.
00:35:11
Speaker
It reminds me of the critique that David Carradine's character in Kill Bill
00:35:20
Speaker
gives of Superman and Clark Kent. And he says, Clark Kent, what is he like? He's a nobody. He's shy. He's a klutz. He's bumbling. He's no good around women. And why does Superman choose Clark Kent as his alter ego to blend in? But I'm not sure, you know, I was thinking about that. And I'm not sure it's a very good critique. I don't think it's correct. I think it's more like, although
00:35:48
Speaker
I've often seen Clark Kenton's Superman cosplaying as human.
00:35:55
Speaker
But to say that is a bit cynical because, again, Kalkine really loves his parents. He does see himself as human. So it's not necessarily a critique. It's just what he has to do so that he's not suspected. In other words, he has to be a bumbling human so that it will be so far from anybody's minds that it could possibly become Kalkine, especially since they're of the same height. They have the same color hair and all of that. So in order to remove this character he's created,
00:36:26
Speaker
He would have to be a complete
Superheroes in Popular Culture
00:36:29
Speaker
dweeb. To me, that's what he did. An interesting thing about Superman, I think Superman is a valid character to talk about here because he is like the epitome of everything that a superhero is supposed to be about. But another approach or another thought about Superman
00:36:48
Speaker
is that he, being the archetypal superhero, he's sort of got himself in order. So when we were talking about the line between good and evil and making sure you're not pushing past your beliefs into something that's more toxic and more ideological and more potentially murderous, whether you're left-wing or right-wing, it doesn't really matter.
00:37:09
Speaker
But Superman has got himself perfectly in order. He knows when to be Clark, and he knows when to be Superman. He knows when to put on the cape, but he knows when to put it away. And he's got those two aspects of his personality seem to be perfectly balanced, and that's why he's always held up. That's why he's like the Christ figure, I suppose, of the superhero genre, because he's
00:37:32
Speaker
His personality is split into those different parts, but he's got them organized perfectly and he's able to... I mean, he's not without his weakness, which is, you know, it's like Christ in the desert. He doesn't say what he's being tempted by, but we know he was tempted by something in the desert, and kryptonite pretty much serves the same sort of purpose. It's sort of a symbolic weakness. And people always say, oh, it's quite convenient that he's got a weakness called kryptonite. We'll see. Yeah, that's the point.
00:38:02
Speaker
It's supposed to stand for any sort of weakness. But yeah, he has got this, he's sort of perfectly fitted out as Superman. And he's got he's got other things going on, like he's got two sets of parents, which you always see in mythological heroes.
00:38:17
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, so, but Superman is here and Watchman cuts that completely out. He cut it, undercuts it, or it shows what happens if the Superman character is imbalanced. So, I mean, we mentioned, you mentioned the comedian, Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach and Ozymandias, and those are the four characters I believe that are the key in Watchman, because they're the four characters who are unable
00:38:44
Speaker
to put down the cape or put down the mask for one reason or another, they keep the mask on. The comedian is kept on as an employee of the state to go and brutalise anti-war demonstrators or go into Vietnam and kill people. Dr. Manhattan is physically unable to put down the mask because he's transformed, but within transforming himself into a God-type superhero,
00:39:10
Speaker
He loses an intrinsic part of his humanity, so he can't put down the mask. Rorschach, he can take the mask off literally, the police confiscate it off of him when he's arrested, but he can't put down the mask because his personality has inalterably changed. He has become Rorschach, whether or not he's got the...
00:39:32
Speaker
He doesn't call it his mask, it's his face. It's his face, yeah, exactly. So that's his identity. The Rorschach mask is his identity. And Ozymandias, again, this is all after the keen act is passed, I should say. So after the keen act, which is a fictitious act passed in the world of Watchmen, where superheroes are outlawed for one reason or another, but comedian, Manhattan, Rorschach, and Ozymandias keep their personalities, their superhero personalities, either
00:40:01
Speaker
legitimately or illegitimately after the act is passed and they're the ones with the personality disorders and once you can't split them. I think about Ozymandias in that context. So Ozymandias, first of all, there's one thing about Ozymandias. He stopped being a superhero before the keen act was passed.
00:40:19
Speaker
And you get the idea that he probably anticipated that this is where it was going. But what does he do? He becomes a paper tiger. In other words, he creates the character of Ozymandias as merchandise, which is exactly what happens to superheroes, which is actually one of the places where we're at right now in pop culture. He merchandises himself. That's what he does. And he just funnels it into a fortune, basically. So he becomes this
00:40:47
Speaker
mythic he turns himself into a myth all right and capitalizes on that while he continues his plans underneath that you know that's what Osman Deas does you know and you're right the commedia and so all of them in some way or the other they transform Osman Deas goes you know he continues his plans in fact from the point of this meeting this meeting about crime busters of and the burn chart from that point on he decides i'm going to go on the ground to do the things i need to do
00:41:15
Speaker
I'm not gonna do the super hearing gig anymore because the comedian was actually right. The comedian simply turns himself into a government agent. Manhattan is still working for the government and then he decides to just leave. Like, okay, you know what? I'm tired of you human beings, all right? I'm just, you know, that's it, I'm tired of you human beings and all of that. And Rocha actor says, ha ha, I'm gonna do what I'm doing. Whether you like it or not, I'm still gonna do this thing.
00:41:45
Speaker
Exactly. Those four, they're doomed because they keep their persona long after it's supposed to be healthy, long after it's doing anything good for them or others or society as a whole. They're doomed themselves in various ways. It's important to have a bit of a contrast against those. We haven't mentioned these guys yet, but there's Nite Owl.
00:42:07
Speaker
and Silk Spectre and those two as well that's Dan Dryberg and Laurie Blake on Laurie and Jupiter.
00:42:15
Speaker
And those two, they're the ones who successfully managed to hang up their capes. And that's why they get some semblance of a happy ending because their personality seems to be more better organized than the rest of them. So they try to live normal lives, let's put it this way. They try to live normal lives, even though Rorschach takes digs at, you gave up, I didn't, and all of that.
00:42:45
Speaker
is a really bleak character, but I actually think he's the funniest character. I think he's funnier than the comedian. I love the way that he keeps breaking down Dan Dryberg's door. He keeps getting the locksmith back to fix it and then he breaks it again. Even the fact that he breaks into Moloch's apartment and he's like,
00:43:06
Speaker
I'm not doing anything, I didn't do anything wrong. He says some of your drink labels, your drugs, they're not packed or something like that. You won't let anything go. Or when he was in prison.
00:43:20
Speaker
and those puns he kept delivering to the people who were coming in to kill him. Yeah, fat chance, small world. And I always remember that the comedian said, I didn't say it was a funny joke. The comedian never was funny, and he knew it. And he said it. He said it. He said, look, I didn't say it was a funny gag. It's just a joke. It's just not a funny joke.
00:43:41
Speaker
You know, so yeah, Roshak was probably the funniest guy there, even when they're talking about Roshak. They're like, oh, there was this guy who had a fetish about being beaten up by a police, by a superhero. And he kept saying, oh, beats me, beats me, beats me, punish me and everything. And he tried it on Roshak and Roshak drops him down an elevator shaft. You know, like, you know, he's, you know, he is both the joke and the straight man, you know, Roshak is, you know, which is, you know, which is quite rich for a character, if you look at it that way.
00:44:09
Speaker
It is. They served as the only real people who had a conscience. Because most of the others we talked about, like you said, their pathologies made them rigid in doing things in one way, regardless of the cost. Comedian didn't care about people.
00:44:34
Speaker
He didn't. Rorschach was like, look, he's just a mission and everything else is secondary. So he would trample over anybody who prevents his mission. Ozymandias was more like, well, I know what I'm trying to do. So he's more like a greater good kind of person. I will kill as many as I need to kill if there's a greater good. And Manhattan just doesn't see humans as relevant. So those were all the people who were not, they had really checked out of humanity, so to speak.
00:45:04
Speaker
But, you know, Dreyberg was still, even when they were still doing, you know, the minutes men or, you know, when he, you know, he was still the person saying, look, how can you do this thing? Or we can do some good or whatever, you know, so he's slightly naive. You know, he's, it's interesting that he's modeled after the Blue Beetle character.
00:45:24
Speaker
You know the story of how The Watchman came to be. Alan Moore said, okay, look, so these... Out of the old Carlton characters, you mean, the ones you mentioned earlier. Yeah, DC had just bought the Carlton characters. So Alan Moore went to... Yeah, wasn't Carlton supposed to be going under and DC... Yeah, DC bought their IPs. So
00:45:48
Speaker
alamar comes along and says hey look i've got this story i want to tell can i use this character to tell the story and like so what's the story so he tells them the stories like you want to kill these characters that we just bought no
00:46:00
Speaker
So he then made slightly altered versions of them to kill instead. I mean that makes sense because he's created a series of characters that are that they therefore represent the sort of sort of archetypal different types of superhero don't they say he doesn't need to use established characters because this Rorschach is representative of what you said Mr A and the question he's representative of that type of night owl is sort of an avatar for Batman isn't it yeah.
00:46:28
Speaker
The thing about Nitell is that he's slightly naive. He's a rich guy, but slightly naive and dressing as a man. You can say that Batman is slightly like that, but also slightly like Rorschach. Because again, Batman is another person who's like, okay, well, I'm also going to be, I'm going to stick to this and crime car pay and all of that.
00:46:51
Speaker
He still, he maintained, I'm at night out now, he maintained his innocence pretty much all the way through. And that is probably why narrative justice would be for him to survive with his innocence and with himself intact at the end of the whole thing. You know? With Laurie. Yeah, with Laurie, yes, exactly. Because she's in the same position, isn't she? She is. You know, she, her, I mean, look, she's not without sin.
00:47:20
Speaker
Like when, because remember that, again, it's interesting how I keep going back to this, if you go back to the meeting of the crime busters that Captain Metropolis did, in the splash page, when they started that, everybody is looking at Captain Metropolis who's talking, Dr. Manhattan is looking at Laurie, and Dr. Manhattan is not with Laurie at that time, right?
00:47:47
Speaker
He's actually, you know, so because what happened is Dr. Manhattan- She was still, yeah, she was 16 or so at the time. She was still very young, wasn't she? Yes. Yes. So he, you know, so, and she knew as well. And she was also looking at him. So you could see that, you know, and of course James later died of cancer. I think she also, she was one of the people who got cancer and she was one of the ones that they were trying to tell the story of. Well, actually you are giving these people cancer.
00:48:14
Speaker
by being with him and so on that made him leave Earth. That was part of the whole psyops thing that made him leave Earth in the end. So Laurie wasn't entirely innocent, so that was part of her story. But yeah, I think it was just that they both end up in the end. I don't think
00:48:35
Speaker
One thing I don't understand is why Dr. Manhattan killed Rorschach. I mean, I understand why Rorschach had to die. I just don't understand why Dr. Manhattan killed him because he would have died anyway. He's in the ice, he's in an icy tundra. There was nowhere to go. The Archie, the Owls thing was dead. That speeder would not have taken Rorschach anyway. There's nowhere to go, he would have died. He didn't need to be killed.
00:49:04
Speaker
Maybe he wasn't willing to take the risk and underestimate Rorschach's commitment to getting back to civilization. I never thought that, but in the end, he still... Manhattan says that. So here's the thing. He says it in the end. He says, you needn't consider Rorschach. I highly doubt that he'll reach civilization. There is no... He couldn't have done it. It seemed like an unnecessary cruelty to kill Rorschach, except if it wasn't a cruelty.
00:49:35
Speaker
Well, Roshak himself wanted to die. Roshak actually understood that he could not live, that nobody would allow him to live one. But that concept was so painful for him because he was crying, right? He was crying. So the concept of having to compromise was too much for him. Even though Roshak was not stupid, he realized that, OK, look, yeah, this situation requires compromise, but I can't do it. And he was so locked in to his way of living that the only thing he could possibly do is die.
00:50:04
Speaker
And that's why he was telling Dr. Manhattan to kill him. And possibly that was a faster and more merciful way for him to die, that for him to freeze to death slowly somewhere. That's the only thing I could think of. Because otherwise I'm like, why did he kill him? There's no reason to accept, to somehow alleviate his suffering. It seems a strange instance of mercy on the part of Dr. Manhattan, if that's the case.
00:50:31
Speaker
Yeah, but who can understand? But again, that's one of the points of the whole thing. If you're at the level of Dr. Manhattan, who can understand? You can't understand such a being. You can't fully understand their motivations or anything. I don't think it was necessarily narrative justice for Roshak, but I think it was just that his journal survived.
00:50:54
Speaker
Yes, well, I mean, we said we want to talk about the film, but maybe we spent just a couple of minutes. I don't know if you've seen it, the HBO adaptation. I have seen it. Because that depends on the Royal Shark Journal being published. And it's interesting, at the end, it's a small
00:51:14
Speaker
again, but we always talk about, you know, full disclosure, we always include spoilers in our discussion, because then we can have the richer discussion. At the end, Royal Sharks Journal, which contains the truth and nothing but the truth about Adrian Veidt or Ozymandias' plan to decimate part of New York City and bring about world peace. It's going to be published, we assume it's going to be published in this right wing magazine called New Frontiersman.
00:51:38
Speaker
We assume it's going to be published and expose Ozymandis, Adrian Veidt, for what he's done. But we don't know. I mean, it's in a slightly weird and wacky magazine and we get an excerpt from the magazine earlier in Watchmen in one of the pros excerpts. So it's kind of weird and wacky and you're not sure. I mean, it's almost it's very prescient Alan Moore in what he was writing because it's almost like a precursor to the idea of fake news. Although, you know, we should caveat that with the
00:52:07
Speaker
Sorry. It's like if that journal had landed on Alex Jones's desk. Okay. All right. Look, there's so many things that people believe now that you would have thought, what? Vaccines? This is an issue now? Like you would think that some things are settled. You would think some things are fringe. And that's what he says. He says, get the crackpot file. All right. Yeah.
00:52:36
Speaker
We've seen that this can actually mobilize people to so many things. There's so many political, actual mobilizations that are based on a lot of those belief systems. Now, even if you take it, let's put aside as to whether those things are true or not. The fact of the matter is that there is a segment of society, an active segment of society,
00:52:57
Speaker
who believe them and are willing to take action based on them. Well, this is what happens in the HBO. I should say something about the HBO adaptation. It came out in 2019. It's marvelous. In my opinion, I think it's marvelous. I think it's very, very, very clever. I would caveat that with I think it's a very spectacular piece of fan fiction. I think that's... I need to caveat that. So here's the thing. Here's the thing, right?
00:53:25
Speaker
I think it was extremely smart what they did. There is no point trying to tackle the book again because it would be too polarizing no matter what.
HBO Adaptation of Watchmen
00:53:36
Speaker
I think sidestepping the events of the book was great. I think that was a good thing.
00:53:42
Speaker
The approach they took was, okay, what is a post-watchman world like? What happened after this disaster? I love, absolutely love the fact that they brought back the vagina monster, right? Which should probably explain that. I mean, there may be a few people who have not read Watchmen and thinking, what? Okay.
00:54:05
Speaker
Adrian's plan, Adrian Velt's plan, Ozymandias' great plan is, you know, so after this meeting, he realizes that you can't solve society's problems by beating up migrants. That's not going to work. So he realizes that, and of course, what the comedian says is that the world is going to go up in flames, we're going to throw nukes at each other, there's going to be nuclear war, which was a very, very serious possible outcome for Earth in the 80s. It was possible.
00:54:31
Speaker
Still, it actually still is possible. It is, but in the 80s, the existential threat in the 80s, it was much higher. And there was a lot of literature and a lot of films and TV programmes that reflected that angst. And it was in a very different way to any worries about it today.
00:54:49
Speaker
Yeah, so as the Mandias decides, I'm going to create a threat so big, so fantastic that it will unite the governments of the world together and they will forget their petty differences. So what does he do? One, he hires writers. Two, he hires artists. Three, he hires people to use teleportation technology. And four, he hires geneticists. So what he does is he gets the artists to design a monster.
00:55:19
Speaker
right, to design something that taps into primal horrors. He gets the brain of a psychic and he gets that brain cloned again and again specifically. Now he says something about teleportation because Dr. Manhattan does it. So he observes Dr. Manhattan, he takes readings and he realizes that you can teleport
00:55:43
Speaker
on living matter, but if the thing is alive, that most of the time they die, you eat it afterwards, after teleporting there. So, put all these things together and what do you get? He creates a gigantic monster, and if you look at the image of it, it is literally a pudenda. It's a vagina, it's a, you know, there's an anus there, and then it's got all the tentacles and everything. So, he teleports this monster into the heart.
00:56:13
Speaker
of New York. And of course, it dies. And when it dies, it has a psychic discharge. And that discharge, as well as apart from the actual impact, the discharge causes millions to die in New York. Right? That's, you know, so it's commonly called the vagina master.
00:56:30
Speaker
Yeah. All the space squid if you're being a bit more family friendly. Yeah, the space squid if you want to. It looks nothing like a squid. There you go. So we should probably mention here that in the Watchmen film, they didn't do the squid monster. What they did instead was they put a bomb there that was releasing radiation that is like Dr. Manhattan's radiation.
00:56:54
Speaker
It was a Tachyon blast, wasn't it? Something like that. Yeah, which doesn't actually make sense, but there you go.
00:57:03
Speaker
So yeah, but in the Watchmen TV series, they brought back the monster. They brought back the tentacle monster, which I actually thought was more faithful in a sense. I like what they did with it. I like that, yes. I think that the Watchmen TV series was better reflective of problems that we have right now, even though it was still done in that retro-futuristic way. In other words, the technology was just slightly off.
00:57:28
Speaker
It was old and yet new at the same time. Well, I think they were very clever because in the world of the Watchmen, in the graphic novel, there are electric vehicles, there are particular pieces of technology which have been enabled because of the Dr. Manhattan phenomenon, i.e. the superhero who can control quantum mechanics and particles, etc. So the TV show is an evolution of those technologies, so it continues this alternate timeline. So I think the world building
00:57:57
Speaker
was very good, I thought the themes in it were very good. I fear that we may not have time to dive into the TV show fully, that probably warrants its own episode, in fact, maybe in the future. Let's come back and talk about... Because it's worth a chat, definitely. I thought it was a wonderful TV show.
00:58:18
Speaker
Yeah, and of course, just a quick, you know, like, things people didn't know about about race in America, because, you know, I knew those things. But a lot of people, it was the first time a lot of people were hearing about those incidents. The Tulsa Massacre. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I can see the point entirely. It was the first time I'd heard of that, you know, that there was there was this
00:58:38
Speaker
Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And it was completely destroyed. Before we take a break, because we've been talking for an hour now, which is fantastic. I know, I know. I've got one more question before we take a break. The Watchmen were so innovative. I wonder
00:59:01
Speaker
How does the genre innovate from here? We've just talked about the HBO series, which was innovative in its own way, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and to a lesser extent, the DC Extended Universe, which is kind of attempting to copy it, that was innovative in the way that it enabled audiences to come back to see a very long serialised
00:59:28
Speaker
a group of movies telling an overarching story. So that was kind of innovative. I just wonder what, you're such a comic books guy, I wonder what you think is the next stage in the evolution of comics, especially considering that they've been skewered so well by their own genre in things like Watchmen. Well, this is a very long answer though. I mean, first thing you need to understand is that after Watchmen came out,
00:59:55
Speaker
Creators misunderstood the part of Watchmen that was great. And what it did is it ushered in the grim and gritty 90s, right?
Post-Watchmen Comics and Manga
01:00:05
Speaker
Because of it, it was all about dark, grim, gritty realism. You know, realism in skateboards, because they thought, OK, we'll make the violence more. We'll just try and make things more grounded, and that means add more violence that makes it more adult. They kind of missed the thing that made Watchmen
01:00:23
Speaker
adult, and they kind of missed the whole point. Part of the point was that after Watchmen, should you really be writing superhero narratives at all? Because this is one of the questions that you really want to ask yourself, after something like Watchmen, how could you write another superhero story? Because it has effectively, between Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, they had effectively deconstructed the entire superhero genre.
01:00:52
Speaker
But, so let's just say, let's leave what I call the grim 90s, you know, so they kind of, it swerved the wrong way and then it kind of self corrected as you would expect. But then it was just more, it was kind of more of the same. So the problem is,
01:01:13
Speaker
where comics are right now. They're not, superhero comics, especially American superhero comics, aren't actually doing that well if we're staying with text, right? They're not actually doing that well. Manga is actually what's selling best right now, all right? That's actually what's selling best. That's what people are reading. That's what young people are reading. And it's very easy to see, it's very easy to see why. That energy, the frankness, all right?
01:01:42
Speaker
The plainness of storytelling and by plain I don't mean I don't mean simplistic. I mean calling a spade a spade. All right. Not being constrained by
01:01:53
Speaker
what I like to call the new comics code. And the new comics code is like you have to avoid certain things and do certain things. Like manga is not restrained by any of that. So if they want to tell a story, if there's a character who's racist, the character is racist and unapologetically racist and says the things they do. If there could be a character who is, I think the comic that does
01:02:19
Speaker
Interestingly, there are two comics that are doing the most business. And I think one of them is something called Dog Man, which is a child's comic. And the second is something called One Piece, which has been going for decades. I think it's doing more business. One Piece is a manga, and it's doing more business than any of our superhero comics, and also our hero academia. The difference is that they don't mind saying what they're talking like normal people talk.
01:02:48
Speaker
Whereas our comics are talking like managed corporate people, if you know what I mean. If you draw a character who is very curvy, for example, you're possibly told the person is sexualized.
01:03:12
Speaker
But the problem is that there are curvy people in real life. People have different body shapes. Some people are curvy, some people are not, right?
01:03:22
Speaker
Manga don't make them, they just draw people the way they want to and nobody gives them any trouble, nobody gives them any trouble about it. So they're on risk and that's why they are full, the book shelves are full of manga. That probably raises an interesting thought to talk about writing more generally, maybe when we come back in the second half of the chat.
01:03:45
Speaker
Um, so yeah, I mean, maybe that is a good time to call, call it a break, but thanks. That was, that was a brilliant conversation about Watchmen. I really enjoyed it. So, um, we will return with, with today a little bit later in the show. Hello, SFF Chronicles. I was wondering if you could help me.
01:04:07
Speaker
I think the hydrantical transducer fire was left behind on the Strand Hill bus. I rang the bus company and they said to give you a call. I've been on the lookout for someone using an oblong block of gerontium to alter matter.
01:04:20
Speaker
What do you have now, Goldman? Not now, Seaboy. I'm on the phone. Very clever. That's a good idea to use the phone every now and then, so the mobile operators don't suspect we're superheroes. I'm a superhero, you mean. You're an assistant to a superhero. There's a big difference. And anyway, I'm ringing the Department of Science Fiction about the missing, hydrantical trans jokes of fire. You what, Goldman? The roundy thing you left on the Strandhill bus last night, you wished with it. These people may be our only hope of saving humanity. For what?
01:04:47
Speaker
From what do you think? From what do you think? If the hydrantical transduce fire fell into the wrong hands, it could spell the end of life inert. Oh fair enough, I leave it to it's own. Sorry about that SFF Chronicles. Have you anyone who could drop into the last unfound in Sligo to see if it's true? I'm after losing my boss pass and I don't really trust Seaboy to do it.
01:05:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Judge's Corner with me, Demoris Brown. Back in March I talked about defamation, what it is and why it's important for us as writers to know about it. This month I'll continue with that by looking at what we can do to avoid getting threatening letters from libel lawyers. I'll be referring to the concepts and cases I discussed in March though, so if you weren't able to listen to the talk when it came out, hurry over there now.
01:05:40
Speaker
As always, this will be a general guide only, and it's no substitute for getting specific legal advice on your particular case.
01:05:49
Speaker
There are two main ways in which we as authors might fall foul of a disgruntled potential litigant, and the first is where we use and name real-life people, companies or commodities in our work. Clearly, writers of memoirs or books with a factual basis are going to be most exposed to threats of legal proceedings, but it's also a risk for novelists if you're writing fiction which involves people who are still alive.
01:06:14
Speaker
This is what happened with the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit, where the chess player Nona Gaprindashvili is mentioned by name, with a character saying she had never faced men in her career, something that is demonstrably false and which she claims is libelous. Yet she made no legal claim against Walter Tevis, who wrote the 1983 novel on which the series is based, even though in his book he also name-checked her and had a character say, she's not up to the level of this tournament.
01:06:44
Speaker
In the papers filed with the court, her lawyers dealt with this apparent inconsistency.
01:06:51
Speaker
Tevis, writing fiction, was free to create a fictional tournament and decide in his fictional world that Gapprindashvili was not up to the level of competition he had created. Even that was misleading, in that at the time the novel was set, Gapprindashvili had already shown she was up to any elite level of chess competition. Yet Tevis was entitled to concoct a fictional world with his opinions embedded in it.
01:07:20
Speaker
And in the novel, it's expressly confirmed that she had met all these Russian grandmasters many times before. Tevis acknowledged its truth. Our Netflix told a specific untruth about her achievements. So the first step to ensure you don't libel a real person is to keep to the factual record and ensure that what you write is true and can be proved.
01:07:44
Speaker
If you engineer a situation that hasn't happened to that person in real life, then your world building should be consistent with reality and likelihood. And failing that, you should ensure it's a question of subjective opinion, not objective fact. That is, use terms like not as competent or not quite as attractive.
01:08:06
Speaker
But even with opinion, avoid language that might demean or ridicule the person. If it's at all possible, the comments might be construed as coming from you as the author rather than your unsavory characters. Remember the Julie Burchill article about Stephen Berkoff. Remember also that literal truth isn't enough of itself if the context implies something different, as has been highlighted again in the Vardy against Rooney case.
01:08:35
Speaker
saying that Joe Bloggs loves children might be unexceptionable. But if that remark is accompanied by comments about a notorious paedophile, the implication will be that Bloggs is also a sexual abuser of children, which will be defamatory. Keep well away from insinuation and innuendo, deliberate or otherwise. It's possible to be defamatory inadvertently through sheer negligence, so watch what you say and the context in which you say it.
01:09:04
Speaker
That also means being careful when ascribing motives to real people. Saying that Jane Smith did something can be easily proved. Saying why she did it is another matter. If the rationale you give the person is a kind or generous one, there's no harm done. But avoid anything morally questionable such as a thirst for revenge.
01:09:26
Speaker
Also a note in relation to the Netflix case is that Gapprindashvili's lawyers specifically point out that Netflix had no need to refer to her, since the writers could have created a fictional female chess player who had never faced men. And that, of course, is the easiest way to avoid trouble. Don't use a real person if you can achieve the same effect by inventing another character.
01:09:49
Speaker
These guidelines are true also for companies and commodities. If your novel includes the champagne lifestyle of some characters, by all means talk about their Gulfstream private jet or Cartier jewellery. It's not a problem if these characters happen to be evil oligarchs or kleptocrats, since the companies can't control who buys their products. But don't suggest the companies are in any way complicit in or condoning of your characters' illegalities.
01:10:18
Speaker
Similarly, you can have the private jet explode in mid-air through sabotage, but you can't imply the manufacturer is in any way at fault unless there is cogent evidence of their liability in real life. Basically, if what you say or imply in your novel would cause reasonable people to think less of a person or of a company or its goods, or if it damages them and their reputation, then you're heading for trouble.
01:10:46
Speaker
But what if you're not writing about people under their real names, but you are basing a character on someone real? Every novel carries a disclaimer, such as, the characters in this novel are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Some go further, asserting that the story itself, as well as the names and incidents are fabricated, and any resemblance to places, buildings and products is similarly unintended.
01:11:16
Speaker
But a disclaimer isn't enough if an unpleasant character is too clearly modelled on someone specific who is still alive.
01:11:25
Speaker
In my March talk, I dealt with two novels where this had happened. In the first case, there were 17 heads of comparison between Mrs. Safra and the novel's main character, including such things as being married four times, and her fourth husband being a billionaire Lebanese Jewish banker who is diagnosed with Parkinson's, becomes paranoid about security, and dies in a fire started by a nurse who is American and had previously been a Green Beret.
01:11:54
Speaker
not your average run-of-the-mill experiences. In the second case, there were two dozen specific similarities between Miss Stewart and the novel's main character, and in an interview, the lawyer who had acted for the publishers admitted that
01:12:10
Speaker
In addition to details borrowed from the divorce, there were similarities between their work histories, the names of their children, the circumstances of their first husband's deaths, and their upbringings in Atlanta. From the outset, the strongest element of Stewart's case was the number of similarities.
01:12:29
Speaker
In conversations after the verdict was handed down, several members of the jury did seem troubled by the fact that so many actual events from a person's life had been incorporated into a character.
01:12:43
Speaker
So if you're using someone as a basis for a character who acts in a possibly defamatory way, don't plunder that person's life story so the similarities mount up, nor use their highly personal characteristics such as prominent scars or birthmarks.
01:13:00
Speaker
And while it's the case that the more morally bankrupt you make the character, the more likely someone is to take offence, don't forget that defamatory might include things you personally don't consider offensive, such as getting drunk or committing adultery.
01:13:17
Speaker
Since the closer the character is to the real person, the greater risk you run of someone recognising him. So use the person only as a starting point, and consider changes not only as to name and appearance, but such things as ethnicity, personality, profession, location and life history, so as to disguise any connection between the two.
01:13:41
Speaker
In the Stewart case, the publishers lost. But though they were found to have libelled her, they paid nothing like the sum she wanted, and most especially not her legal costs. Their lawyer gave his view as to why.
01:13:57
Speaker
I think the jury genuinely believed the author when she explained that she had not written the character Susu in an effort to hurt Stewart. Heywood Smith and Vicki Stewart were once friends. Smith had no reason or motive to hurt Stewart. In rejecting Stewart's claim for the recovery of attorney fees, the jury was explicitly finding that the novel had not been written or published in bad faith.
01:14:22
Speaker
I think that conclusion also led to the jury's reasonably smaller damages award on the libel claim.
01:14:30
Speaker
In other words, if you're basing characters on real people, then, in the US at least, using a friend as a template might be easier to defend, or might result in reduced damages, since with an enemy it's easier to believe you might have had a motive to bring opprobrium or ridicule down on that person's head. Though of course if you do use a friend, you risk losing a valuable friendship, so it's not something to do lightly.
01:14:56
Speaker
If you really, really want to make someone you hate into the nasty piece of work who gets the deserved comeuppance in your novel, and you want to use his real name and characteristics so everyone knows it's him, then write the story and get it out of your system. But don't publish it until he dies.
01:15:15
Speaker
Though even that's not foolproof. In England and Wales, and I believe in the US and other Anglophone nations, the dead can't be liable. But it is possible to defame the dead in some countries. Russia is one, for instance. But even here in the UK, it's possible relatives or friends and colleagues of the dead might be able to bring an action if a slur is indirectly cast upon them. For instance, that they knew the dead person was a rapist but concealed his crimes.
01:15:45
Speaker
So that's another way of defaming someone inadvertently if you're using a real person in your work. But it's also possible to be caught out when inventing a character out of the whole cloth if that character happens by chance and very bad luck to resemble a real person. Superficial similarities aren't enough to give a basis for a defamation action, so just making your murderer a Yorkshire-born Londoner called John Smith won't be a problem.
01:16:13
Speaker
But if the murderer is John Amius Barrington Chumley-Smith, and as someone with that or a very similar name, who also happens, like your character, to be an eminent barrister born in and around Pontifract and now living in Knightsbridge, that's very different.
01:16:29
Speaker
To avoid such a risk, Google the names of your characters, especially the more unpleasant of them, and see what it throws up. Something like LinkedIn would be especially useful for checking if the characters are in the same profession, and make changes where necessary. And to prove you've taken reasonable steps to avoid libelling anyone accidentally, keep a record of what you found in your searches and the dates they were carried out, and repeat the exercise just before you publish.
01:17:01
Speaker
As a last protection, in the US at least, if you're determined to use someone who can be identified in your novel, then you can always try taking hyperbole to extremes and push the commentary into parody and satire, since opinion and satirical speech are protected by the First Amendment.
01:17:18
Speaker
And here, timidity is likely to be counterproductive, since the more outrageous something is, the more grotesque the parody, the less likely it will be seen by reasonable readers as describing real incidents or facts, and therefore the less likely it will be considered defamatory. Not something for the faint-hearted, though.
01:17:40
Speaker
But if, notwithstanding all you've done, in the very unlikely event that someone takes offence, deal with it speedily, to quote the claim in Nona Gapprindashvili's legal action again, Netflix could have responded in any number of inexpensive and morally honourable ways of making redress, but instead it responded with extraordinary hubris, dismissing Gapprindashvili's assertion of defamation by claiming that the false statement was innocuous.
01:18:09
Speaker
And I can't help thinking that such a response was almost guaranteed to make a bad situation worse. The claim goes on to say, a jury could also plausibly and reasonably infer actual malice from the stubborn and arrogant refusal of Netflix to correct the record, offer an apology, offer a retraction, or redub the voiceover in the pivotal scene once confronted with its egregious falsehood.
01:18:35
Speaker
So if you're in any way at fault, apologize, retract any inaccuracies and wrongful comments, and stop the whole action escalating. Otherwise, the only winners will be the lawyers. Hello, SFF Chronicles! I want to complain about a superhero.
01:19:03
Speaker
I don't know if Pine Martin man is one of yours, but he's been using my garden as a toilet. And it's not just my garden either. He's been doing his business in Tesco car park and the bus station. It's like the problem we had with the seagulls all over it.
01:19:15
Speaker
And the council did nothing that time either. I was onto them before you, and they were about as much use as a handbrake and a canoe. Do you know what the lady said to me? Give the dog warden a call. I mean, what's the dog warden going to do? Who are you talking to, Superman? I'm just letting the science fiction people know what Pym Martin, man, is really like.
01:19:34
Speaker
by Martin Mann, or that was deadly to where he rid the town of the scourge of the non-green lump-troll. No, no, no it wasn't. He's been marking his territory again. Ever since this rivalry with Night Owl kicked off, he's been befouling the entire town. Are you not just a little bit jealous, Superman? Of that smelly flute? No way! Well, he did save Townsville. Are you sure that? Are you sure it wasn't me? Befouling the town? No, uh, yes. I mean, saving, saving Townsville. I mean, he didn't even wash his hands.
01:20:07
Speaker
It's time to take a stroll down to the challenges. The April 75 word challenge was on the theme of pressure and the winner was Starship by Christine Wheelwright. My father nagged, bullied and pressured me until I went. But for years we found only lifeless rocks, worlds of fire, water and dust.
01:20:34
Speaker
Not so much as a blade of grass between my toes, nor a gulp of fresh breathable air. As I stared at the wall in my little cabin, I came to hate my father. When I returned, he was on his deathbed. I took his hand. It was wonderful, I said.
01:21:02
Speaker
Hello SSF Chronicles. I was wondering if you could do me a favor. My name is Drax the Destroyer and I've just been attacked by a muscly cyborg by the name of Tannos. Well not really attacked, more like borrowed 50 euro. Anyway, I was wondering if you had the number of someone who could time travel or if you could loan a 50 quid. See, it's like this. I was on a mission to save Ballon d'Or from the incredible splanche and I ran out of diesel. That meant myself and Astro Mutt were stuck out there with no way of getting back. And that was when we ran into Tannos and he loaned us the money to get home. Thing is,
01:21:32
Speaker
I forgot to give the money back. And now everyone is saying he's going around town with some sort of double-edged sword looking for it. All we want the time machine for is to travel into the future to see if he's forgotten about it. Actually, no,
Time Travel, Loans, and New Introductions
01:21:42
Speaker
wait. Is it possible to set the machine to transport myself and the dog back to this morning so we could pretend we didn't see Tannus earlier? Or wait, no. Hold on a second, that won't work. What? Would you loan us 50 quid and then myself in the mud can travel back to this morning and get home? Actually, forget about the time machine. Could you just give Tannus 50 quid and say it was from us? I'd pay it back tomorrow.
Significance of Manga in Education
01:22:04
Speaker
Welcome back to the Crohn's cast. Today we're talking to Tade Thompson. We've just finished our chat about the Watchmen, but something interesting came up, particularly for me, was the consideration of anime and manga, particularly manga with young people and how they're accessing literature in schools that I teach in, which is making sure that they have these kind of, perhaps not Watchmen, but they have a lot of
01:22:31
Speaker
a lot of graphic novels in the library for the kids so that they are getting some form of literacy other than reading day-to-day novels that the rest of us read.
Racism in Manga vs. Western Comics
01:22:43
Speaker
It was really interesting when you were saying they don't pull their punches if the characters are racist, they're racist. I remember a couple of years ago when I started to engage with it a bit more,
01:22:55
Speaker
There was some, my interest is in weird fiction and horror. And I was watching a weird fiction slash horror anime on YouTube. And there was some haunted school. And these were middle grade students talking just generally about the teacher being a lesbian and just completely irrelevant to the story. Just this almost random stuff that comes in. And to me, that would be,
01:23:23
Speaker
as a writer or somebody who's reading I'm thinking well how does this how does this inform the story it's or the plot it's not but it's informing the character so therefore it is and it's also giving a sense of cultural uh capital for those those characters and it's really strange because when you go to a lot of um
01:23:47
Speaker
When you hear a writing advice, that's the kind of stuff that they, you know, it's anathema. If it's not, if it doesn't serve the story, you know, really strongly, then you have to cut it out. But I think it's not just the fact of the honesty you were talking about. I think there's also this freedom to put those kind of things in there. Okay, so here's the thing. What you said is really interesting, and I agree with a lot of it. First of all,
01:24:16
Speaker
Which, you know, if you take two scenarios, okay, the scenario you've just described, where they are talking about the teacher and say, yo, yeah, she's a lesbian, she's this, and they kind of just continue talking, all right? To me, that's how it is generally approached to me in manga. As opposed to, if that were coming from a Western comic, for example, they would trumpet it to the high heavens that she's a lesbian, right?
01:24:43
Speaker
And if you think about those two approaches, which one is more accepting of it? The ones who don't trumpet and say, yeah, this is part of everyday life. In other words, being a lesbian or being black is just part of everyday life. You don't need to draw, you know, we're just talking about it as in this is normal. All right. That approach does a lot to just to normalize, you know, to, to,
Writing Advice and Storytelling Techniques
01:25:06
Speaker
It's reverse othering. It's more like, yes, this is our lives. This is what we do. And we're just gonna describe it as, you know, I just kind of go on there. The other part of it is this advice about writing and the idea that everything should serve plot or character. In other words, everything has to serve the story. Well, yeah, one of the things that also serve the story is ambience. Some details that you put into a narrative are there to provide a mood.
01:25:36
Speaker
a feeling, you know, they don't, you can ask yourself, why is this here? You may not be able to say, you know, why it's here, but it makes you feel in a particular way. Therefore, it should be part of it. And stripping it out does remove something. Right. Yeah. You know, in my opinion, anyway, you know, I agree. Yeah. And you follow the story. Yes, you can. But do you have that extra layer? No, you don't. Oh, it's really important because a lot of the time when you are talking about
01:26:06
Speaker
writing advice, mechanics. Well, you focus on the mechanics, so plot, character, world building. Mood and ambience are two words that don't come up very often, but I mean, that's the spark, isn't it, that sets a text apart. And there's no point... Okay, if you... I'm trying to think of a book that's a really good example of this. Something like A Hundred Years of Solitude.
01:26:35
Speaker
Okay, if you've ever read that, okay? Now, 100 years of solitude, you know, you can call it what you like, magical realism, whatever, but if you start reading it, it immediately starts going in several different directions, which is not, you know, there is some
01:26:50
Speaker
plot movement, but there are so many different interesting things going on. And even if you ask, what does this have to do with anything? Doesn't have anything to do with it, but it still adds to that plot. And reading that book is very propulsive. Even if the plot itself, you're like, where is this plot going? What's going on? It doesn't matter because you still end up with that feeling and the whole idea of a narrative
01:27:14
Speaker
is more about, okay, how do you feel after reading this thing? Does it impact you? Or is this something you're gonna forget? Are you gonna forget this in a few days? Stories that will come from, and you say, yes, I know I've read this, but I can't remember what the story was. Or are you going to remember that this is what happened because it's invested with feeling? And there are several elements that inform how you feel at the end of reading something, if it is intentional. Like we were talking about Alan Moore and they've given before. Like a lot of what they were doing was intentional.
01:27:44
Speaker
I think the problem with how we're taught creative writing is that they separate things in order to teach it, but they forget to synthesize them at the end to say, well, actually these are not separate things. You know, the idea that somehow plot and character are separate is, you know, is one thing, but all of this stuff is supposed to be synthesized into one. And none of these things are supposed to be rules. They are, let's put it this way, they are strong suggestions. And as long as you have a very good reason for
01:28:14
Speaker
disobeying them, and you're fine. Well, I suppose it's also about authenticity. If you are being authentic to yourself as a writer, then everything follows. When I'm reading a book, exactly what you said, I want to be immersed. If there is breaking rules or whatever, I don't care. For example, I'm trying to think as well.
Conventional Storytelling Examples
01:28:35
Speaker
So Jonathan Strange, there are loads of footnotes, and there's loads of stuff that happens. It doesn't need to be in there, but it brings so much
01:28:43
Speaker
You exist in another world, you're not just living a story, you're not just reading a story, you're living that story because there is so much stuff which you could, and that book is a brick, you could take out so much stuff, but it is an experience to read, House of Leaves is an experience to read. You have all this,
01:29:02
Speaker
this this pearl clutching and handbag clutching saying, Oh, you can't do that in your book. But yeah, I want to be I want to be immersed and sometimes tone and ambience, excessive use of certain things that are frowned upon in other genres, maybe. They were, again, a part of the problem is this whole division into genres thing, you know, but the books, you know, like, you know, Mr. Strange, you know, Jonathan Strange, and Mr. Norrell, for example, like,
01:29:29
Speaker
I can't imagine a book existing without the footnotes. I can't imagine a house of leaves. There's a part of the house of leaves where you actually have to turn the book around to read.
01:29:40
Speaker
You get to a part where it's in a spiral. So you have to get in your mind. We're actually going to be doing an episode on House of Leaves. I love that. A little bit later this season. So yeah, that'll be really interesting. I love that book intensely. It's so crazy, isn't it? It is a weird roller coaster ride of a book, which sounds a bit cliche, but it really is. Yeah. And the question is, why would you want to write something like everybody else? Because again, it becomes forgettable.
Belief and Authenticity in Writing
01:30:10
Speaker
So I think that there is, as the writer, if you can make yourself feel something when you're writing, you don't necessarily have to move yourself to tears, but if you can, and you generally can, when I'm writing a manuscript and you've written something, you can tell whether you've
01:30:29
Speaker
done it well. You can tell when you think, oh god, that's good. And there are other bits where, other times where you're writing and you're just, you're sort of coldly putting down words on the page and trying to get from A to B. I'm just trying to move the plot forward. There's nothing there that's making me feel, giving me the shivers or making me feel enthused. I'm just putting the words down in hopefully a meaningful manner and getting to the next, and then another day you'll be writing it.
01:30:54
Speaker
And it will be like inspiration is flowing through you and you'll feel it. And if you can feel it, then I believe that somebody else is going to feel it as well. I'm a big believer in having having faith in your own ability. That's not just not and shouldn't be faith where it's not warranted because there are a lot of people out there who probably still have to do the work. You still have to do the work. You still have to put in the hours. You have to put in the hours.
01:31:20
Speaker
you have to read other people's work, you have to read criticism, you have to understand why something works and something doesn't work. But I always say you have to believe in your own vision at the very least. I think that if you don't, I think how can you write something of any length if you don't have some belief that you have something to say?
01:31:41
Speaker
I think that's to me, if you don't have any belief that there's something you have to say, then that's the definition of
Intentionality in Storytelling
01:31:47
Speaker
a hack. And the way you can express that effectively, you know, that point you want to make for me is I talk about my aerial goes up when I'm downloading, but there's a concept called the flow. And it's this Polish, I can't say his surname.
01:32:05
Speaker
Oh, you know, thank you. And when you're surfing that wave, you're not even thinking about you're not breaking down. Oh, how do I write a story? You're just immersed authentically in writing. And I was I was interested to read your comments on on your, you said, Oh, sod it. This is what I'm writing. This is what the story is demanding of me as the writer. And
01:32:30
Speaker
you know, it sort of felt gave me a bit of permission, actually, make me feel like because, you know, I often find people saying, oh, you've done this, or you've done that, and not agreeing with them, but not knowing whether I feel, you know, that that's, that's permissible. And I think it's important for beginner writers and new authors to understand that if it's coming from a place of truth and authenticity, you can always edit it down afterwards and tidy up.
01:32:56
Speaker
Anybody who can read what you've written to the end doesn't care if you broke any rules while you wrote it. The first criticism I got when I wrote Rosewater before it was published was that you've written this in the first person. I hate first person books. There was some kind of maxim at the time that you shouldn't write science fiction books in the first person.
01:33:23
Speaker
When was it, was it 2017, Rosewater? 2016, so it was first, I first did with, it was with Apex, it was a small press, I had a small press version first, and then it was bought by Orbit, and then, you know, so that was 17, but initially it was 2016. And it comes from a short story that I first wrote in 2001, actually. The very first iteration of it was in 2001, it was a short story that I wrote, and then I
01:33:52
Speaker
it kind of expanded from there. So you belong to critique groups and all of that. And they're like, oh, you shouldn't write a science fiction story in first person. So what you find is this. Some of it is done in Kruger. Some of this is done in Kruger effect. You know some things and then you generalize it and think you know more than you actually know. Some of it is a need to
01:34:20
Speaker
police the rules or to police adherence to the rules. So he would say, well, you've done this. Well, you can't do that. The real question we should be asking is, does it work if it works? And then you can say, OK, fine. So did you know? Because again, this is this is one of the things
Writing 'Rosewater' and Fractured Timelines
01:34:38
Speaker
that happens. Like when you broke the rules, did you know you were breaking a rule and did you break the rule deliberately? In other words, is there intentionality or is this just a fluke? Can you reliably do this again?
01:34:50
Speaker
or was this just by chance? It's important to know if you've done it by chance because I think one of the things I've learned the most is about intentionality of narrative over the years. When I was starting, I was doing things and I was only writing with what I call brute force. I was writing from having read a lot, so I was getting it right sometimes and sometimes not getting it right, but I didn't know
01:35:16
Speaker
When I was getting it right or when I wasn't, because I wasn't using certain tools intentionally, what then happens later is you learn that, OK, actually, this is how you get this kind of feeling from someone who's writing it. If you want a section to move faster, these are the things you can do to the text. You can have more white space on the page so that that page, that section, that chapter moves faster. If you want to slow it down a bit,
01:35:43
Speaker
which you should do sometimes, this is what you need to do, but you need to slow it down, but also make it interesting so that they don't slow it down and throw the book across the room. So those things, which are parts of the nuances of what you're doing, the kind of nuances of pacing and all of that, you learn, you pick them up as you go along and you learn to intentionally deploy them as opposed to randomly doing something. And of course, if you randomly do something, there is a chance that it will just work by chats, but you won't be able to do it again, because you don't know what you did that worked.
01:36:14
Speaker
I think, well, that certainly sounds like the rosewater that I read, that you were trying a lot of different things with that book. It's a very good book. I liked it a lot. The timeline is fractured to such an extreme degree that there's quite a lot of effort that the reader needs to put in to try and draw all of the different strands together because it's ostensibly
01:36:39
Speaker
It seems to be there are three three timelines in rose water. A quick price of rose water is that it's an alien invasion story or it's a post alien invasion story set in the fictitious city of rose water in Nigeria. A circular dome sprouts up
01:36:56
Speaker
And is it once a year? All the sick people in the vicinity gather around the dome and they are miraculously healed. And sometimes the healing goes a bit wrong, i.e. the dead rise from the grave. And there is a government agent called Caro who is undertaking a job for the state to investigate some funny goings on in the xenosphere, which is a kind of collective consciousness.
01:37:22
Speaker
around the city and that the timeline is extremely fractured. So I think that's an example. I'm writing a manuscript at the moment which has a fractured timeline but not to the extent of rosewater which is almost chopped up into ribbons, chopped up into shreds. So how did you approach doing something that is that broken up?
01:37:44
Speaker
because it's not as if you did part one 2056, part two 2032, part three 2066 or whatever it was. I mean there is a logic to it but how did you approach that? So one of the things so part of the problem and again this is why I talk about deliberately breaking certain rules. So one of the problems of using the first thing people will tell you about using a first person narrative is that you all get one point of view and one point of view
01:38:13
Speaker
there's the idea that that could be unreliable, right? So the first thing I decided that I would do was, okay, I'm going to tell the story of this guy at two different stages of his life. In that way, it becomes two characters, not one, because he's, you know, young car is a different guy from older car. That way, I made it more interesting, rather than telling it from one point of view, I'm now telling it from two points of
01:38:43
Speaker
Right. So that is one, that's one way I kind of got around the problem of you're telling it from one character's point of view and it can get, you know, it's not as interesting as if you, if you have several people. The second thing is by making him essentially psychic, I was able to look into the heads of other people. So it then gave an illusion, you know, it's, you really, you know, this is the first person narrative. However, he can know the intentions of other people.
01:39:09
Speaker
And that actually made it more omniscient. It wasn't omniscient, but it was more omniscient. It's a more literal type of head hopping, isn't it? Yes, exactly. So he's literally head hopping. But he has a reason to do that. Now, the other thing that I'm trying to remember, because some of my literary heroes are people like Walter Mosley,
01:39:35
Speaker
you know, Hunter S. Thompson, no relation. But I think the key thing about it is that, and I forgot who said this now, but the key to writing is you write it all down and you take out the boring bit. And I forgot who said it. It might be Walter Mosley, but I can't remember. No, it's Elmo Leonard.
01:39:55
Speaker
Emma Leonard said that. You take out the boring bits. So I then, because initially I'd actually written to about 40,000 pages and I discarded the initial draft entirely because I'm like, no, this isn't how to write this. I had to actually come back and say, how else will I do this then?
01:40:14
Speaker
when I realized that, okay, I like certain parts of the narrative and I don't like other parts, which are essential, but they're boring. So what I did is I cut out everything that I felt was boring. I sliced it up that way. And then I arranged them in such a way that they were all interesting together, even though they were from different timelines. So what I did is I moved everything interesting from the different timelines and removed what was boring about
01:40:39
Speaker
And then I laid them all out in such a way that it would be interesting, interesting, interesting, interesting all
Psychiatry and Storytelling
01:40:44
Speaker
the way through like that. That's what I did. That was the whole point of it. And the other thing that I did that was intentional was to try and mimic how people normally have conversations about things that happened in the past. They tend to jump from time to time. We don't talk like a marvel. We don't talk like, okay, so this problem started in 1963 when blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not how we talk. What we do is we say,
01:41:09
Speaker
Let me tell you what happened, you know, what happened today. I went to this. You remember this guy? You remember like in 1992, I told you about this guy that I meant that we did this. Well, that guy, you know, we jump around in time when we're talking, right? So why can't we do that when we're writing, too? That's what that was. That was. So those were the reasons it's chopped up. Those are the reasons that there are two parts of Caro. There's young and old Caro and all of that. And that's the reason he's a psychic so that we can tell what other people are thinking.
01:41:39
Speaker
It's a kind of beta switch. It's a first person, but I'm kind of cheating.
01:41:44
Speaker
What I thought was interesting is I read an interview, I think you're talking about Rosewater and the idea that you had a conversation with your brother and a conversation with his thief. And that was up till then, it had just been a concept until you had a character. And that made me think of, especially on the website that we have this, you know, the chronicles website, there are a lot of members who really, really have a lot of love for old fashioned science fiction, or old fashioned in inverted commas. But
01:42:15
Speaker
Arthur C. Clarke has zero character development. Yeah, they're all dead. They're all dead. It's, it's just this happened, this happened because it's a concept. And science fiction now has moved. And I think there's this sort of bifurcation in the fans of those who like who just want sort of concepts. Yeah, concepts really. And I don't really know, you know, I can't really make comparisons on hard sci fi and
01:42:42
Speaker
space opera really because I'm not really an expert on that. But I can tell if it walks like a duck, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's people who want something a bit more, like what's the middle ground? Is it David Niven? Not David Niven.
01:42:58
Speaker
That would be a good idea. It would be splendid. Like Ringworld being perhaps conceptual and having to a certain extent characters, they're still thinly drawn compared to the kind of stuff you're talking about.
01:43:18
Speaker
And also then you get into the thing now where people like, and this also goes back to your earlier point about having diversity for the sake of it. Now you have an angry old guard who don't like neurodivergent or non-wide. They don't like overt, diverse mentions. Yeah.
01:43:40
Speaker
And I think it's important to have that just for the sake of it, rather than this character. We need this because A, tick box, or B, it pushes an agenda forward. No, if it's going to be normalized, then, you know, it's going to be... So basically, the word says it. It's science fiction, okay? So you have to have some kind of science. It doesn't matter how hand-wavy it is. It doesn't even have to be...
01:44:07
Speaker
a science that actually still exists. In other words, it can be steampunk. It can be something that was a theory that is no longer valid. You could tell a story at a time when different things were believed. That's no problem. But there has to be some kind of science. But there also has to be some kind of fiction. And fiction is about people. I feel that stories have to have people. Stories have to be about people.
01:44:35
Speaker
And even people, I can stretch the concept of people to a sentient gas cloud that is stuck in the Earth cloud or whatever. I can stretch what I mean by people, something sentient that we can project on.
01:44:51
Speaker
Well, it's a comment that's very similar to one that was made by one of our previous guests on Kronskast, which is Jo Zebedee. She said exactly the same thing. She's a science fiction writer, a fantasy writer. She said, essentially, these stories have to be about people, and I write about people. And one of her books, Inish Karag, conceptually, is actually very similar to Rosewater.
01:45:14
Speaker
It's an alien invasion story, or post alien invasion story, and set in, you know, not your usual location. It's set in Northern Ireland. So there are a couple of similarities there, but the point remains that we are writing about people. And I wanted to ask you a question. It's quite a reasonable segue into this question, because outside of writing, you're a psychiatrist, aren't you? So I wondered, how do you, I mean, you're,
01:45:44
Speaker
fully immersed in the world of books and the world of narrative, the world of myth. How strong is the bridge between a clinical profession such as psychiatry and the world of narrative, which in its own way
01:45:59
Speaker
is telling a truth that is even at a higher degree of reality than what you would encounter in the scientific, clinical environment. So where's the bridge and how do you make that work? Well, everything in psychiatry is about people as well. And understanding people requires communication, requires
01:46:26
Speaker
the person who has a problem to communicate it to you, it requires you to understand that, it requires you to say what you think it is and for you to propose some kind of plan. It might be an interim plan, it might be a long-term plan, but you simply find here's what we're going to do. All of it is storytelling, all of it, not some, all of it, because the person will always, the person will always come with a story of here's what's happening to me, here's what I think it is. They will come with their story. You have to then,
01:46:56
Speaker
ask questions of them, their family members, of everybody around them. And then you have to be able to make it into a story that is actually a lot more coherent, that has very clear cause and effect. Because you have to come up with some kind of hypothesis or explanation saying, here's what you experience. This is what you've told me you experienced. This is why I think you have experienced these things. And this is what I think we should do about it. Right? It is all narrative. All of it is. If you cannot
01:47:26
Speaker
tell that story back in a way that makes sense to the person you're talking to. You will fail. The person will nod and nod and nod and they will not follow the plan you give them because they don't believe you. The idea of, you know, you don't, people don't believe you because of who you are anymore. There's no the idea of this, okay, well, I am the doctor and I am telling you what was wrong with you. And he goes, yes, doctor, and you're going to do it. That doesn't happen.
01:47:53
Speaker
What happens is people even believe what you're saying, or they don't. And what they're believing is a narrative. And part of that narrative is, OK, this is who you are, and these are your qualifications. And you have listened to what I've said, and this is how you make sense of everything that I've said. My narrative back to the person has to include everything the person experiences. Because if I give an explanation that doesn't include what they've experienced, they'll think, OK, well, actually, you haven't listened to me, or you haven't understood what's going on.
01:48:23
Speaker
My explanation has to be a coherent narrative that includes the person's experience.
01:48:29
Speaker
I like the idea that everything is explained or everything can be explained through narrative. I'm a big believer in that. I studied psychoanalysis in my masters at university, along with literature. And I read Jung and Freud and Lacan and people like that. And I like the idea that you can deconstruct experience into narratives and you have a sort of a meta-textual, the meta myth
01:48:56
Speaker
i.e. the hero with a thousand faces as explained by Joseph Campbell. So is there a sort of meta myth that you can apply to people who you see in your clinical practice in terms of narrative structure? So the way that the hero with a thousand faces, the mythological hero is
01:49:22
Speaker
is in a normal setting or a peaceful setting and then is disrupted by something and has to be guided through into the underworld where he or she has to slay a few dragons or kill a few monsters and then return to the surface but is changed in a way that he or she can then change the surface world.
01:49:42
Speaker
So, I mean, that's a very, very quick simplification of it. But you take my point that there is a sort of a meta-narrative underneath most of the more complicated singular narratives that we encounter in popular culture, in books, etc. Can you do the same thing, psychiatrically, in your clinical practice? Well, for one thing, everybody is the hero of their own story. Of course. Everybody is, not some, but everybody.
01:50:13
Speaker
I don't want to use that meta narrative thing for one reason, because I have very strong feelings about Joseph Campbell. I think it's the, I think, I think it's, I think was very, he was very selective.
01:50:31
Speaker
in his use of sources, Joseph Campbell. I think what's elective in his use of sources to support a perspective that he had. I think, you know, but that's a whole different digression that, you know, I don't know if we will have time for. But everybody is the hero of their own narrative and they have to know where they are in their own narrative. If you do not engage with that narrative, you have failed.
01:50:59
Speaker
Because, you know, and again, you will see people come out, you know, people come out of a clinic with different ideas of what they've just experienced, you know, people come out saying, okay, good, this, you know, this was positive, and I'm going to come back and all of that. And so you'll come out and say, ask someone who's listening to me, and all the negative things you've heard about psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychology, that's where a lot of those come from, the inability to engage with a person's own story. Because
01:51:24
Speaker
I have to have several different narratives to use. One is the narrative that I have with the patient, but the other narrative is a narrative I'm going to use with my colleagues, which requires a different kind of language. It requires jargon. It requires succinct
01:51:39
Speaker
you know, statements about this is what this is and this is what I am doing. Not only because I have to talk to other professionals, but I have to justify what I've done in case I forget. So 10 years later, if I'm asked what do you do with this mission, I can read the notes and say, okay, this is what happened, this happened, this happened. So that's a different narrative, right? If you don't, you know, and of course, the way we understand people and the way we understand people's experience, the phenomenology of a person's experience is through adjectives.
01:52:09
Speaker
And we don't always have a shared language. And that is a very key problem, not just in clinical practice, but even in everyday interaction with other people. We think we're speaking the same language, but frequently we are not. We are not. So it's important to try to bridge the gap, to narrow that gap between people's languages and to avoid
01:52:32
Speaker
Well, at least especially in practice to avoid the jargon when you're talking to patients and say, well, look, don't tell me what the
Complex Characters in Storytelling
01:52:38
Speaker
summary of it is. Tell me what happened. And I even went, you know, even when I'm dealing with, say, junior doctors or students, I like forget the jargon. Use everyday words to tell me what happened here. We will get to the jargon later. But primarily what I need to understand is
01:52:55
Speaker
What has happened here? What do you believe has happened here? What is the story? That's really what needs to be understood. And so both of these things affect each other. They affect each other tremendously. If I'm reading a book, I can immediately tell you if this person's motivation is ridiculous. I can tell you immediately.
01:53:16
Speaker
Because I'm like, no, people don't do that. In an idealized world, yes, maybe that's what would happen. But that's not actually what people will do. And the fact of the matter, I mean, one of the criticisms, for example, about Rosewater, that I sometimes come across as like, well, the caro is not a very good guy. I'm like, yes, yes, that's my design. He isn't a good guy. And that he's sexist. Yes, he is sexist. And he gets punished for it all the way through.
01:53:46
Speaker
that's not the point. The point is there are sexist people in this world. You can't assume that because you're reading a book, you're going to get the idealized human being. People are complicated. Karo is certainly a complicated guy. There is a lot of conflict going on in him, sometimes literally. Yes, sometimes literally. In actual fact, people are never just what they tell you they are, and people are not perfect. Even people that
01:54:11
Speaker
Everybody agrees are good people. They've got their dark side. They've got their shadows. You can't, nobody comes pristine. Nobody is there in this life pristine. There is no, there's no such person, right? And if you're reading a book, the whole idea is that you're going to get into the mind of a person, you know, the characters, you're going to know the ins and outs of them. Because if you don't have a rich character, to me, you don't have a book or rather I'm not interested in it. I want to know a person's flaws on the dark side and everything.
Reader Interpretation and Authenticity
01:54:40
Speaker
And what kind of things do they think? Well, I think as an author, if you're serious about writing people, then you've got a duty to actually expose the flaws and the chinks in people's armour. Because reading books and watching movies and reading comics, it's a way of
01:54:59
Speaker
of simulating what might happen if you choose a certain, make a certain decision or take a certain path in your life. It's almost like a simulation of that. And then you can take away from it, oh, well, I better not do that in my life. Or something that you can filter through your own experiences. I'm reading Molly Southbourne at the moment.
01:55:28
Speaker
I'm only about a quarter of the way in but the relationship with blood or the theme of blood and especially the part where she I was shocked when she self-harm well not self-harm sorry when she does it to herself for the first time yeah I was that that then started to contextualize for me in terms of wider
01:55:45
Speaker
the wider themes of maybe that are about in terms of self-harming and all this kind of stuff. So that character, you wouldn't, not everybody's going to get that from reading that text. But for me, at that point, that's what I got. And I think it's finding that balance where it's authentic, not just for you as a writer, but also authentically received by the reader. Well, exactly. And that's one key thing about writing is that you can't, you know,
Engaging the Audience
01:56:12
Speaker
A difference between as people become more professional is that the professional realizes that someone is going to read this. There's a book called Quack This Way, which is, it's an interview between David Foster Wallace and a guy called Gardner, and he's talking about writing. And he says, the very first thing that people need to realize that they don't seem to realize is that nobody cares about you, right? Like your mother cares about your writing,
01:56:41
Speaker
and your friends care about your writing, but the audience of people who don't know you, they don't care about you. So you have a responsibility to make them care about what you're writing. And that's one thing that, because he taught people, he had students, so he's like, that's one thing that he tries to let students know as soon as they get into his class, like, look, sorry, nobody cares about you.
01:57:03
Speaker
you have to grab them with your words and make them care. But before that, you're just a name. They don't have to read what you've written, unlike your mother. They don't have to read your words, and they don't have to be complimentary. So you have to make them care with what you've written. You have to assume that what you've written is all that is available to grab the reader by. So you have to write with the intention of being read.
01:57:27
Speaker
Or don't publish. It's as simple as that. If you don't care what people think about what you've written, then there's no point publishing. But if you're publishing, then it means you are aware that somebody else is going to read what you've written. Then you need to keep it in mind that a brain other than yours has to comprehend what's been written. I think that's a great point.
Adapting 'Making Wolf' for TV
01:57:50
Speaker
I wanted to ask you about Making Wolf because I heard on the grapevine that the rights have been bought by Sky in the UK and that there is an adaptation in the pipeline. Can you tell us a little bit about that or tell us about Making Wolf the novel? And if people are going to expect to see it on TV, then yeah, tell us a little bit about that and what's happening. All right. So Making Wolf is Making Wolf is a crime novel.
01:58:18
Speaker
It was a way that I tried to, I tried to, I guess, sublimate some of my experiences that I had in Nigeria, you know, when I first got there and all of that. So I tried to condense the weirdness that I saw in Nigeria into a crime novel. Now, nobody, nobody understands.
01:58:38
Speaker
how many weird things that you can see when you go there. It's just, you just have to be there to understand what I'm talking about. So, but I needed, you know, I needed to, I mean, one day I was, there was a guy in a bathtub in a bus stop, okay? Like, he was sitting in a bathtub and washing himself at a bus stop, all right? And there's just no explanation for that. Like, okay.
01:59:04
Speaker
Right. And everybody, the thing is like, but nobody was staring at him either. Like everybody was kind of, there's this thing. The guy needed a bath, clearly. Yeah. There's this thing, there's this thing like is that the oddest thing could be happening. And then nobody was, they're like, yeah, fine. Just another day. All right. Must be Tuesday. You know, so I needed to somehow purge all of those experiences. So I wrote, I wrote this crime novel about this guy who's a security guy.
01:59:31
Speaker
in Tesco in London. And his auntie dies, his aunt who brought him up dies, so he goes back for the funeral. And when he gets there, of course, what you have to do, he can't tell them it's a security guy because you have to beat yourself up. So he says, oh, I'm a detective, I'm a homicide detective. Unfortunately for him, there's a murder that has happened. And I say, OK, good, right, you're going to help us solve this murder because you're a homicide detective. And he gets stuck trying to solve this murder. You know, that's basically the premise of the thing.
02:00:02
Speaker
And, you know, I mean, again, it did well. It was my first novel, you know, well, the first novel I published anyway. It did well. That's how I won the Golden Tentacle Award. So it got optioned.
02:00:19
Speaker
and Sky was going to make it. Actually, they still might, but Covid did a lot of things. It's a complicated story, but Covid derailed a lot of projects. And it got derailed by Covid, although it is still kind of in there.
02:00:40
Speaker
What can I say? They're still paying me. It's very difficult to complain when people are giving you thousands of pounds. They're paying me. I've written the script. I've written the teleplay for the first episode.
02:01:00
Speaker
certain actors are interested, but COVID did a lot of things, a lot of plans, a lot of things happened. So initially, for example, the person who was in charge of drama in Sky changed to another person. And of course, when the head of drama changes, they come with their own... They want their own ideas, yeah. Yeah, they want to put their own stamp on the slate. So it's complicated, but I'm happy because they're paying me.
02:01:25
Speaker
There's a question. You said you were writing the screenplays for Making Wolf as well, so you're adapting your own work. How have you found the process of adapting your own novel into a screenplay? It's a TV series, isn't it? So it's a mini-series, presumably. Yeah. What I can say is this.
02:01:43
Speaker
It's a good thing I started writing novels first because I really love writing screenplays. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize how much I would love doing it. I really love writing screenplays.
02:01:55
Speaker
I love the formats. I love the problem. And the problem is trying to bring something that is mental and making it all visual. And the good thing, the good thing about my life experience is that reading comics helps because comics are a visual medium. And what you have to do when you're writing a screenplay is you have to make everything visual. You can't, or you can use a voiceover for thoughts, but that's seen as a cop-out. You have to make your storytelling visual. All right.
02:02:23
Speaker
And I think the experience of, because again, I started, my writing experience, I started by writing my own comics, writing and drawing my own comics. That was, you know, so I was already thinking in a visual way from a very young age. That kind of helped me a lot and helped me with the idea that, okay, here's this scene that's very interior. How do I make it, how do I make it something that the camera can see? And the thing I like about Screenplays is, you know, the camera is unforgiving. It picks up everything. So if you don't do it right, it will be visible.
02:02:50
Speaker
I like the challenge of doing that. It's a great intellectual challenge.
Closing Remarks and Future Plans
02:02:54
Speaker
And what I did to train myself is I actually adapted a few other things for practice first before going to Making Wolf. So I just picked up a novella here and there, some things that I liked, and I just wrote scripts on them just to practice doing it. And then I read books and screenplays, books, especially, in fact, one thing I learned from was Gone Girl. So I read Gone Girl.
02:03:19
Speaker
And I read the screenplay for Gone Girl, just to be able to see. Because, you know, Flynn, who wrote the book, actually adapted the screenplay as well. So I kind of did that. I checked a number of books like that. So I essentially trained myself and then I did it. And it was fine. You know, I didn't find a problem at all. Some of the things that could not be made visual, I just changed them.
02:03:42
Speaker
And the good thing is that it's my book, so I don't care if I change them. I know what is essential to the character, and I know what I can lose and what I can't lose. So it worked out pretty well. I enjoyed it immensely.
02:03:56
Speaker
Brilliant. Well, I've enjoyed this conversation immensely. It's been absolutely brilliant. We've touched on so many things and two hours almost has flown by and really has. We spoke with one of our other guests, Stephen Palmer.
02:04:15
Speaker
He was holding thought about social media and Twitter and about the dangers of modern technology. But I have to say when we were using a medium such as this to connect remotely and talk
02:04:29
Speaker
not in tweets, I know you're not on Twitter anymore, you used to be, and we can use this technology to really dig down into something for two hours and get a little bit closer with each other on a number of things because we're able to talk properly, and then we can send this conversation out to all the people listening. It's absolutely fabulous.
02:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, I didn't even realise to, you know, like, to me, it's not been two hours. It's like, yeah, we're just talking and probably could go on for another two hours. I mean, we've already mentioned two or three things where we said, oh, yeah, we should talk about that too. We should talk about the the the Watchmen TV show and another. Well, we should absolutely do that because that deserves its own conversation.
02:05:10
Speaker
Well, I'll hold you to that because maybe in season two, we'll get you back and we'll talk about the HBO TV series, Watchmen, because that's its own world. That would be great. Okay, Tade, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. It's been a real joy. We've learned a lot. We've talked a lot. There's loads there to unpack. It's been great fun having you on. So thanks ever so much and we'll see you soon. The pleasure is all mine. I really love being here.
02:05:38
Speaker
Good, look forward to seeing you again soon. Bye bye.
02:05:46
Speaker
This episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean, and our special guest Tadde Thompson. Additional content was provided by Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton, Jay Starloper, John Kaliri, and Christine Wheelwright. Special thanks to Brian Turner and the staff at Crohn's, and don't forget to sign up for free to the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community at sffchronicles.com.
02:06:13
Speaker
Join us next month when we'll be joined by the literary agent Ed Wilson from the Johnson and Alcock Agency, and we'll wend our way through the labyrinth that is Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.
02:07:32
Speaker
You're the one.