Q&A

Sometimes I get random questions through certain means. Here are several of them, and answers. (Sorry for the late post – Blogger error.)

What are your most valuable Doctor Who related possessions in terms of (a) monetary value, and (b) sentimental value?

No idea on A. I know at one point it was a copy of So Vile a Sin, but I’ve not checked the secondary market on that in ages, and I don’t collect for monetary value anyway, so it’s not even something I’d know off-hand.

Sentimentally, my sister gave me a framed picture of herself beside the Earl’s Court Police Box with an inscription reading “come along, Pond.”

Woody Allen?

I think the opening of Dylan Farrow’s piece, in which she asks “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?” before transitioning into her story, is a piece of brilliant, brutal writing that makes me have no desire to answer the question.

As always, I believe the victim. And while there are moments of sublime genius in his career, there’s nothing in it that makes me the slightest bit troubled in just believing the victim and deciding I have no interest in him.

Have you read the Sirens of Titan? After reading it I’d say it was a huge influence on both Steven Moffat and Douglas Adams.

For like three years I picked up Sirens of Titan at any book sale I went to. Because I kept forgetting I owned it – I would just scoop up Vonnegut books (many of which I never finished, but oh well), and kept forgetting that was one I already owned, until I had like five copies. Which was ridiculous, and I promptly proceeded to find excuses to give the book to people, usually by telling exactly this story.

And then I overshot and gave away my fifth copy, and haven’t owned it since, and so have never actually read it.

When you write a Pop Between Realities entry on a television series, how much of said series do you typically watch to prepare?

It depends, really. The sort of standard approach is first episode or two and 1-3 later episodes, plus considerable use of secondary sources to make sure there’s no big changes I’m missing. For The Thick of It it was, I think, the first three episodes plus one from each subsequent season.

How do you feel about the truism that every good story has the main character go through some kind of change?

I think that almost any sentence beginning “every good story” is false. Waiting for Godot, for obvious reasons, strikes me as an obvious example of falsehood. Though even there, there’s a clear character arc, even if the movement is consciously infinitesimal in size.

Which is to say, as good a piece of universalizing advice as exists.

What would a potential narrative collapse in football look like?

Oh, thank you. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to link this.

Dresden Codak? (This is not so much a question as an assignment. Aaron Diaz deserves a spot by J. H. Williams III on your list of best comic artists.) (Feeling overworked? Delegate this stuff to your followers.)

Eh. I mean, it looks good and appears well-written from the bits I just spent twenty minutes trawling, though it’s not something I have the time to archive dive through. Diaz is indeed a phenomenal artist – certainly better than most of those working for the big four.

But Williams challenges the basic notions of comics storytelling to a big and compelling extent. The notion of what a page is and what movement across the page signifies simply doesn’t mean the same thing under Williams’s pen as it does in other people. Add to that his chameleon style that can seemingly effortlessly quote and reflect any number of other styles while blending them into his own breathtakingly intricate work.

Which is to say that when I put Williams on my list of best comic artists, I’m not putting him in amidst the other great artists working now. I am saying that he goes on a list with Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Chris Ware, and Winsor McCay. He is a once in a generation talent.

If you could have done Day Of The Doctor during The Wilderness Years section of TARDIS Eruditorum after The Gallifrey Chronicles and other Eighth Doctor stuff but before Rose, would you have?

Nope. It’s an Eleventh Doctor story. The only reason I have done out of order stories on that basic principle is to highlight the differences between what is remembered nostalgically and the original – so The Two Doctors and Time Crash. Without a Hurt era to contrast with, Day of the Doctor isn’t really about that. It’s about the Eleventh Doctor era, and takes pains not to alter how we have to read much of anything that’s gone before.

I’d totally have done Night of the Doctor though.

Do you think geeks and fanboys have way too much influence over the pop culture? I know I asked something similar before, but I can’t get rid of this feeling.

In many ways I think geeks and fanboys have less actual influence. The idea that fans were actually the normal, paying audience died over the course of the 90s when people realized you couldn’t actually make money on things like Babylon 5. These days geeks and fanboys are part of the plan, but only part of it – essentially a promotional stage. You court them to get buzz, and break up with them when you need to actually hit it big.