So actually getting somewhere on Elsewhere is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it really feels great to write this stuff again. It’s from the heart, not me trying to plot my way through some overly intricate storyline, and the way some of these scenes have just flowed have been really cathartic.
On the other hand, the place in my heart it’s coming from is one that’s got a hole or two in it. And when I dig into my memories to crib from the wonderful people I’ve known, it’s just a reminder of how much I miss them. In a sense, I’m getting to revisit those I lost, or at least alternate versions of them.
I’m reminded of one of the surprisingly deep moments of the show Red Dwarf. In the season four episode “Dimension Jump,” the crew is visited by a parallel-universe Arnold Rimmer who isn’t the useless, cringy disaster the mainline Rimmer is. Seeing a version of himself that’s successful drives Rimmer bananas, and when he expresses this frustration to Lister, Lister tells him that “Ace” told him about the alternate-version Lister, who’s doing so much better than him, as well.
But instead of being jealous, Lister looks at it with pride, knowing that some version of him on some other plane of existence got it right, and maybe somehow him getting it all wrong paid for the other guy’s success. His losses balance out his counterpart’s gains on the cosmic scales.
So maybe there’s a version of me out there somewhere who didn’t fuck it all up, and this story is kind of my way of communing with him a bit. Here’s to you, Better Murph.
(It also doesn’t help that when you write a love story—if you really, really do it right—you kind of have to fall in love a bit yourself, and that’s always bittersweet.)
Well, enough maudlin shit. I got some interesting news today; it turns out that someone’s resurrected Heavy Metal Magazine. Originally Metal Hurlant, the publication was the platonic ideal of genre for me. They’d give creators a really short page count and so they’d have to drop readers into whatever vivid world they invented with little to no preparation, and the result was some of the most stylish visual storytelling I can remember.
You occasionally find that spirit still alive in productions, but it’s few and far between. There have been great animated projects like Scavengers Reign and Love, Death and Robots that have approximated it, but the best example I can think of is Arcane, which inexplicably turned a League of Legends license into the best visual storytelling in decades. It’s very much an every-frame-a-painting series; they spent hundreds of millions on it and it shows, unfortunately they also lost their shirts in the process. They effortlessly skewer gender tropes left and right, the show features one of the most compelling explorations of mental health and illness I can remember in recent media, and the series features a segment or two that rival Pixar’s Up for sheer emotional devastation. It’s not perfect by any means; the creators have one major-league blind spot in terms of representation in the series, the fanservice is laid on a little thick at times, and the storyline gets a little busy at times, but it’s better than it has any right to be and I’d recommend the first season to anyone. Frankly, watch the first three eps—it’s designed to be viewed in three-episode chapters—and it will hook you hard.
And it’s a fucking cartoon based on one of the worst video games on the planet.
So, hearing that Heavy Metal was back today gave me some hope for more great storytelling. Hopefully it’s not just some weak-sauce cash grab that’s a shadow of its former self, right? They wouldn’t bring back such an iconic brand just to ruin it, would they?
Shane?
Shane?
Come back, Shane!
(Hope springs eternal.)