Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 248
From the Capital of Europe, I'm Told
DON’T REMEMBER LAST TIME I WAS COMFORTABLE
Greetings from Brussels. Final day of this European tour. If you’ve been waiting on an email, please be patient. I haven’t been physically comfortable in weeks and for whatever reason that slows down the speed of my replies. I can’t even read when I’m this tired. I just watch Youtube videos about guns. And I don’t even own a gun.
I need some quality sleep.
COMIC BOOK NEWS ROUNDUP
Just keeping up on things. James Tynion announced he’s got a production company or multimedia thing. I dunno. I have no handle on what any of that shit means. Hickman’s thing is arcane to me too. Happy for everyone doing whatever it is. TV is ok. Movies are fun. Comics are better so I tend to stick to those.
But maybe I should get in on this. I’m reaching out to the Saudi royal family for a loan.
RANDOM THOUGHTS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
Youtube videos about the failure of The Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League video game have me thinking about the nature of teamwork. I doubt I’ll ever play the game, so I can’t confirm or dispel all the negativity around it. But criticisms are wide ranging. From the UI to the loot mechanics to the story. Rough week for that game developer.
What’s relevant to me is how big these teams are and how each division believes they can only do ‘their’ job. And they’re right. They can’t control another office’s approach to a completely different facet of the game. The guy who writes the thing and the guy who designs the HUD and the guy who balances the combat are on the same team but have little to no shared oversight. So, when things go wrong, as they clearly have in the case of Suicide Squad, whole offices are forced to say “well, I did my job” while the thing crashes and burns.
A thing I love about creator-owned comics is that the buck stops with us. If “I do my job” and write a good story, but the artist falls short in some way- that is my failure completely. I did, in fact, not do my job. My job is to bring a great book to market. That’s also my artist partners’ job. There is no bloat. There are no supernumerary staff. No executive producers in our midst. It’s farm to table, so to speak.
Later in this newsletter I’ll talk about AI. Many believe corporate-funded art may be over as a result of the new technology, and the only way to win moving forward will be boutique experiences. I hope that’s not the case, as corporate patronage provides capital for BIG experiences. But, they may be right. Handcrafted may be the only safety net available. The ability to do self-directed work that is whole from its conception is NECESSARY. And that’s what a good comic is.
Never join anything bigger than a band.
Would you like to be physically sick? Here’s something to read.
It’s an investigation of some sort into the cancel mania that hit the tabletop roleplaying game scene. People given to mob mentality did what comes naturally and there was no one there to check them. There’s quite a bit of crossover with comics in that respect.
The most revealing aspect is that nobody has a solid rationale for their behavior. Lots of “I didn’t like his vibe so I ruined his life.” Lots of “I can’t explain but it felt right.” That is to say, mania.
One of the remarkable things about the Salem Witch Trials is what happened after. People who had accused their neighbors then had to attend church with their families. Had to trade services. Relied on each other in whatever small-community fashion was necessary.
And that’s where we may find ourselves in comics. Forgiveness, or at least letting go of grievances, is the only pathway to a calm mind. But…
There’s something scary about people who don’t check credentials or evidence. Something unnerving about someone so suggestable they’ll dedicate their mind’s resources to destroying people they’ve never met. The righteous sadist.
Related: Howard Chaykin’s newsletter this week.
OpenAI just threw their Sora program into beta or whatever bullshit they call this stage of the development process. Some people get to play around with it. And the results, I don’t think it’s controversial to say, are remarkable.
So much of our discussion of AI is poisoned by emotion and hyperbole. Artists and writers sound so, so dumb about the whole thing. It went from “lol, it never gets the hands right” to “it lacks soul” to ‘holy shit I’ve gotta get a job as a plumber now.” With zero self-awareness at any stop on that train of thought.
They’re correct, of course. Many will be best served to switch careers. If you’re 25 and just starting in a creative field, you have to seriously consider a pivot to something where you won’t be made redundant in five years time. But in this panic, we’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s not simply that you will be replaced by cheaper labor in the shape of machine learning. It’s much more dangerous than that.
AI is asbestos. It’s good at what it does, but the cost to human health is too high. It will be outlawed eventually, but only after we’ve decimated the service industry, manufacturing, logistics, and the arts. Once we’ve got truckers and concept artists alike dying en masse from ODs, suicide, and ‘lifestyle diseases’ we’ll right the ship. But what a price to pay.
In the near-term, AI will suck corporate patronage from the arts. This should scare those of us who work under the umbrella of ‘pop-culture.’ No, 55-year-old comic art icons who make $200k in mostly unreported cash doing commissions at conventions, you do not need to worry. You can continue to make fun of AI and say it will never be capable of doing what you do. But if you live long enough, you’ll see it come to pass. And for the generic house style hack doing sub-20k sales Big Two books? You do need to worry.
Spielberg = No Worries
Guy Who Directs Honda Commercials = Big Worries
It will come for the next generation of Spielbergs, however. Major talents who demand major pay will someday see the corporate purses close.
But, again, all this is cherrypicked panic that doesn’t account for the enormity of the AI problem. It is not automation. Automation is a small thing, by comparison. When people say things like “this is how it always is, new tech outmodes some careers. Nothing to be done about it” they are suffering some type of inverse gambler’s fallacy. The outcome in this case is not reliant on past outcomes. It does not adhere to “well, it’s always been like this” rationale. BECAUSE NOTHING DOES. The day the Permian-Triassic period started, some megafauna was remarking to his friend, “you know, extinction events are always like this. Some species die. It is what it is.”
It's all good until it isn’t. It’s all the same until it’s not.
I’ve always advocated for taking the fire down from the mountain. Knowledge cannot be kept from curious minds. Wanna understand nuclear weapons? You should have the schematics.
But watching us wander into so much human misery under the familiar “this will revolutionize medicine and save lives” and “if we don’t do it, China will” post-hoc rationalizations, is just too draining. I feel like I’m watching a kid run into traffic from a CCTV monitor.
People are hateful of the Sackler family, for its perceived role in the opioid crisis. And everyone knows there will not be any meaningful recompense. Likewise, the Skynet board of directors won’t be punished in 20 years. And I think that makes it extra hard to swallow.
What type of honesty would you like from celebrities, brand representatives, corporate stooges, etc? This is on my mind as Dakota Johnson shits her way through promotion of the film Madame Web. She does not care about the movie and does not care about trying to sell it. And some people love that about her.
I’m torn.
I find it endlessly funny that she’s essentially looking at her watch while she gives interviews and can’t seem to say anything substantial about the movie. It’s fun and she’s charming in a disaffected way. But if I was a studio paying her to do these things, I imagine I’d be angry. And if I think about the fact that her career is the product of an old school Hollywood nepotism and she’s never needed the money… well, the whole thing is capable of leaving a sour taste.
Don’t let me advocate too hard for studio executives here. It’s rare I’d take their side. Maybe never. But I am increasingly concerned that nobody cares about doing a good job. That everything is a meme. Life, it seems, is for the lolz.
Nobody would accuse me of being painfully earnest, but I care certainly. I think there must be a distinction between these two ideas. Can earnestness be lame? Sure. But is striving to do a superior job ever uncool? Only if you’re a fucking loser.
“Who cares? It’s a piece of shit movie in a shit genre for a shit studio.”
I mean, someone somewhere in the process prolly shoulda cared a little. If the point is merely to ‘win’ by getting corporate money and the outcome is irrelevant… you can still strive just for the sake of it.
And I get it. I’ve had jobs where the job was not to do a good job. There was no reward for doing something superlative, so it’s easy to fall into “well, they wanted shit, so I guess I did what I was paid to do.” And I think we see this rather acutely on some of the Big Two titles. Actually, lemme be honest here, I don’t think we see it, I know we do. The guys working those gigs will say it quite loudly when editors aren’t in earshot. There’s simply no upside to doing great work, it seems to many.
Better to shoot for a meme movie or meme comic or meme life and MAYBE be remembered for a time than do something great and feel passed over when no one cares.
Damn.
I just bummed myself out.
PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO SLEEP
Goodnight! Do for self!
I worked at Bethesda when we were putting out Fallout 76 and just about anyone with eyes could tell you it needed to cook for like 2 more years. But the people at the top, the ones who don't play games, saw a deadline and money and matched the two. Apparently 76 is fine now, and it would've been much more popular if you got the goodwill from the consumers out the gate by not dropping an absolute turd for $60. I say this because after what feels like 3 years of continuous leaks from the Suicide Squad game, I can only imagine those devs are feeling the exact same way. They see the issues THEY KNOW are issues, being complained about before the public should even be able to see them, and are powerless to change it.
That being said, I gotta ask - would you prefer to work on an absolute bomb that is joked about (like Fallout 76), or something that comes out and people instantly forget / or didn't even know existed, like Rage 2? I have the misfortune of having worked on both.