Doctors are getting younger these days

So, I just found this blog by accident while looking for something Doctor Who related and realized it was mine. Obviously, it's been a while.

Time does speed up the older you get, and events fly at you out of nowhere. I was never this surprised by the world when I was younger. Childlike wonder is a misnomer. I think the world is more awe-striking when you're moving through it quickly, than when you're a kid and you're moving through time like soup. When you can do things to the world as well as the world doing things to you, or at least, just seems to be happening all around you while you're in a cosy little bubble.

An example of the shocks the world brings: suddenly, Doctor Who is younger than me. I like the look of him, though. Looks alien, in a very English way. And Morrissey's America song's been put out of date (does he have something to say to America, now that the President is one of the "nevers"?)

Oh, and I've woken up in a world in which women aren't funny, according to Germaine Greer. My instinct is to respond with a list of funny women (because all the theoretical argument is dull and pointless in the way of all generalisations), but actually, I don't think I need to make one - or rather, I can't. Where do you start and stop? So many funny women.

So I'll just leave it at two words: Just William. Though I should probably add "by Richmal Crompton". And maybe "who is a girl by the way." She's even funnier than PG Wodehouse. I posted her definition of political parties (according to William Brown) as a comment on the Germaine Greer thingie. Well, I say her definition, but it was my memory of it. I'd like to look it up. Hmm.... can't remember which Just William book it was in though.

Lolodysseus

Odysseus, having cheated the cyclops of his precious flock, decides to celebrate in kitty pidgin.

Gordon Ramsey language

Another motivator

Hai Ecclestone, I can be intents too

Babylon 5 Doctor

This scene reminded me of the end of season 1 of Babylon 5. Only shite.

Romantic Doctor

Michelangelo's Doctor

I am in ur fridge, eeting ur foodz

Click on the image to see it properly. I'm wondering if anyone's done formal-register macros yet?





(in other words, i am in ur fridge, eatin ur foodz lol!)

Doctor Gums-who

Two slightly different versions of the same cartoon. Trying to decide which works better. Do we need to see the Doctor's smug face, or is the TARDIS smug enough on its own?

I can resist everything except blasphemy

Bible stories are my myths. I think I'll always come back to them, scavenging. There's no more irritating and compelling character than Jesus.

This doodle doesn't say anything about that whole psychodrama however. It's just what my hands did when they should've been editing.

Veronica Mars/Doctor Who mashup macro

Andmoar

Moar loldoctors

History's unsent telegrams

More memes that I like. From Somethingawful.com

Loldoctor

I've finally worked out how to make my own lolthings, after fumbling around in paint. Here are my Doctor Who macros. Let me show you them.

"You have the attention span of a crackbaby"

The commentary to Bad Girls says that they cut a line of Buffy's dialogue, because it went too far. She was originally going to tell Faith: "You have the attention span of a crackbaby". Or something very similiar.

Good line, shame to lose it to the censors, I thought.

But then again, if Buffy had more of that kind of gags, it might lose its light, springy humanity. The show makes jokes about dark, nasty things, but it tends to stick to fantastical and exaggerated sick humour. So, jokes about people getting killed by giant snot monsters from space, or "extreme dead guy(s)" stuffed into lockers after being killed by vampires. Real, personalised death doesn't tend to be mocked in the same way - no one cracks jokes about Joyce's dead body. Buffy's deaths are only funny when she's undead again - "Over my dead body. The kind that doesn't come back."

Hmm...I'm now hunting for examples of jokes like the crack baby one that did make it through, and what effect they had on the tone of the show...

Translations: to and from comics

"The problem is that if comics are always seen in terms of cinema, then ultimately they can only be a film that doesn't move and doesn't have a soundtrack"

"I met with Terry Gilliam to talk about the Watchmen film, and he said "How would you make a film of Watchmen?" And I said, "Well, frankly, Terry, if anyone had bothered to consult me before this point, I would have said 'I wouldn't.""

- Both Alan Moore, interview with mustard magazine (which, incidentally, is very good. Picked it up at random in a comics shop...it's sort of a Private Eye for geeks).


"It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language." - Brian Friel, "Translations"

------------------------

I've been reading the new Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics - the season 8 ones - and thinking about the process of turning a TV show or film into a comic book (and vice versa).

How easy is it to "translate" a comic into another medium? The language of comics and the language of TV and film have a lot in common, but they're not the same. Perhaps like UK and US English, comics and other visual narratives...divided by a common language?

Or perhaps it's more a case of being divided by people's perceptions, with comics as the helpless, handbagged doggie in the special relationship.

The idea that a film based on a comic book has to be "comic-booky" - in the pejorative sense of dumb/schlocky - is fairly well entrenched in the hive brain of the popular imagination. Reading online reactions to the Buffy season 8 comics*, a lot of the comments complain that this continuation of the story isn't as "real" as the tv incarnation, that it's a poor substitute.

I'll put aside the idea that everyone who doesn't love comics and recognise their true glory needs drowning in a sack to wonder.... Maybe it's natural, to love something most in the medium you found it in first? Or maybe something is inevitably lost in translation, especially when you're writing for an audience who you know wants you to recreate the original feeling of the story as it appeared in the first medium.

The first two issues of the comic - The Long Way Home parts 1 and 2 - have a lot of charm, and some interesting, you-can-only-do-that-in-comics narrative moments, but there are a couple of problems.

Firstly, when you're used to a single unit of Buffy being one episode, they feel very thin. The action of one issue only amounts to a fraction of an episode. Not sure exactly how large a fraction, though I'm sure someone's worked it out. Will find and post another time. Perhaps the only solution to that is waiting however long it takes for the trade paperback to come out, to avoid the frustration of a fragmented narrative.

Secondly, there's the issue of the humour. A lot of the comedy on Buffy-the-tv-show was based on intonation, on vocal nuances and on facial reactions. While facial expressions can be used for great comic effect in a comic (ok, wishing those meanings didn't have the same word right now, makes things tricky), a comics artist can't replicate the experience of seeing an actor's face change.

And yet, the comics are still laugh-out-loud funny in places, so perhaps the humour will just be a bit hit and miss until the writers and artists perfect the transition to a new medium?

Re the Alan Moore quote at the top, the one about Watchmen, I don't agree that Watchmen is unfilmable. I just think that it would need to be approached carefully so that the essence of the story could be taken and transformed into something new by making it into a film.

I reckon the best way to do it justice would be via an unfaithful adaptation, or rather, to be faithful to the spirit by playing fast and loose with the form. The way the comic plays with time and space and perception could be expressed on film without seeming silly or over the top - think Stalker. Like nudity, if it was done tasteful-like, I think there's a good film in Watchmen.

I can see why people - Alan Moore in particular - would be sceptical about comic-book-to-film adaptations, given that I can't think of any good ones off the top of my head. Hmm... maybe Spiderman? I rather liked Batman Returns, but I was 12...

But, whether or not any good ones have been made so far, that doesn't mean it's not possible, if the adapters show respect both to the origin medium and the medium they're working in.

Rather a big "if" for Hollywood, but I'm still praying for Halo Jones the movie.



*These ones - http://www.darkhorse.com/profile/profile.php?sku=14-111 -which Joss Whedon has indicated are meant to be just as much a part of the Buffy canon as the shows.