Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Click here to read John’s description of what a Storytelling Engine IS, anyways. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Silver Surfer

(or “Before and After”)

The nice thing about writing this week’s column, on the Silver Surfer, is that Steve Englehart basically wrote it already and was even nice enough to ensure that it got collected in ‘The Essential Silver Surfer’, Volume Two, for me to read. Since I’m a shameless plagarist, I’m going to cannibalize it, summarize it, add a few token thoughts of my own, and then pass the whole thing off as original work! (Note to self: Delete opening paragraph before passing whole thing off as original work.)
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Click here to read John’s description of what a Storytelling Engine IS, anyways. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Fantastic Four

(or “The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing”)

It’s the subject of a lot of good-natured debate among comics fans and creators (and a lot of not-so-good-natured debate as well); how much of the credit should Stan Lee get for the Fantastic Four and how much should go to Jack Kirby?

Myself, I beg the question. Comics is an inherently collaborative medium, and to assign credit to either gentleman neglects the contribution of the other. Kirby did his best work with Stan Lee, and Lee did his best work with Jack Kirby. (Although you could make an argument for Steve Ditko, as well.) But there’s one area you can definitively give credit to Stan Lee for, and it happens to be the area that we’re looking at this week, and the Fantastic Four happens to be the best example of it, so let’s take a moment and look at dialogue.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Click here to read John’s description of what a Storytelling Engine IS, anyways. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Challengers of the Unknown

(or “The Dry Run”)

It’s interesting to read ‘Challengers of the Unknown’, some fifty years since its initial debut (in fact, the anniversary of the series came at the beginning of the year) and look at the early work of one Jack “King” Kirby. This was some six years prior to his fruitful collaboration with writer Stan Lee, and their subsequent fame as chroniclers of the Fantastic Four (and the X-Men, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, et cetera, et cetera et cetera.) The Challengers were co-written by Dave Wood, and it’s worth recapping their origin, if for no other reason than it doesn’t take very long.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Power Man and Iron Fist

(or “No, You Got Your Martial Artist In My Blaxploitation Comic!”)

As we’ve looked at a variety of different storytelling engines over the last several weeks in this series, we’ve come to be a bit familiar with some of them. (Or, at least, I hope you have. I have no doubt that I care about this stuff more than many of the members of my audience.) Thus, when I bring up the two storytelling engines that comprised the ‘Power Man’ and ‘Iron Fist’ stati quo, I feel reasonably confident that regular readers of this column will recognize them. But I bring them up because I think that they both received a treatment that is virtually unprecedented in comics….

they got mooshed together.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Superman Family

(or “Driving The White Elephant”)

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal, ever got his own comic series. Or that it ran…222 issues? Can that even be right? Jimmy Olsen, the nerdy little geek with the bow-tie and freckles, the poster child for “Why DC Got Its Butt Kicked By Marvel” and the target of endless post-Crisis revamps to attempt to shake the stench of lameness away from him, was the headliner for a series that ran longer than ‘X-Factor’? How can this even be? We have to look at the storytelling engine here. Something must be wrong.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: The Hulk

(or “Engine Elasticity”)

Everyone knows how the storytelling engine of the Incredible Hulk goes. There’s Bruce Banner, brilliant-but-timid scientist, who’s being chased by the hot-tempered, obsessive General Thunderbolt Ross. When Banner gets angry, he changes into the Hulk, a big, green, dumb guy with unbelievable strength, who smashes everything around him in a rage. (Which is, natch, why Ross is chasing him.) Meanwhile, Banner searches for a cure to his condition so he can reunite with his beloved Betty…who happens to be Thunderbolt Ross’s daughter, in a classic case of divided loyalties.

Unsurprisingly, that storytelling engine doesn’t actually show up as much as you’d think when you sit down and read the Hulk. Why? Because it’s a terrible storytelling engine, that’s why.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Spider-Man, Part Three

(or “Is It Just Me, Or Does My Life Seem Twice As Hectic Lately?”)

(or “It’s Called ‘The Night Gwen Stacy Died’”)So as we discussed last time, the Amazing Spider-Man (and indeed, comics in general) took on a major change with the death of Gwen Stacy–there’d always been an element of soap-opera to them, particularly the Marvel books, but from then on, that element became more pronounced. Changes to the status quo bound readers to the books more tightly, even as they made writers’ jobs more difficult. With changes in status quo, it became more important to remember the “position” of the main character, his/her supporting cast, the major villains, et cetera…because this new breed of comic brought with it a new, more engaged reader who paid extremely close attention to the continuing changes, sometimes (heck, often) moreso than the writer, and they made their displeasure known when someone screwed up.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Spider-Man, Part Two

(or “It’s Called ‘The Night Gwen Stacy Died’”)

When we left our intrepid hero at the end of Part One, Spider-Man had settled into a comfortable routine that, like a rollercoaster, provided the illusion of wild movement without ever actually needing to leave its rails. Peter Parker had a job (that sometimes left him with plenty of free money, sometimes broke), a girlfriend in the form of Gwen Stacy (with an on-again/off-again relationship due to his secret life), an aunt (whose health sometimes worsened, sometimes improved), and friends in Mary Jane, Harry Osborn, and Flash Thompson (with whom he got along sometimes well, sometimes badly.) Those various relationships went up and down, but never really changed drastically.

Then Gerry Conway took over.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented. Including this one, Storytelling Engines: House of Mystery, that we missed a week or so ago.

Storytelling Engines: Spider-Man, Part One

(or “The Big Bang Theory”)

When looking at Stan Lee’s original run on ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ (approximately issues 1-110, or the first five volumes of ‘The Essential Spider-Man’), it’s downright amazing (no pun intended) just how much imagination Lee and his co-writer and artist, Steve Ditko, packed into a relatively short number of issues. The first volume of ‘The Essential Spider-Man’ contains the first appearances not just of Spidey himself, but of the Chameleon, the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, the Sandman, the Lizard, Electro, the Enforcers, Mysterio, the Green Goblin, Kraven the Hunter, and the Scorpion. That’s pretty much every A-list Spider-Man villain ever created (notable exceptions being the Kingpin and Venom) and the vast majority of his B-list opponents. Lee and Ditko wrote and drew those first thirty-eight issues in a mad rush of inspiration and innovation that almost single-handedly put Marvel Comics on the map.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented. Including this one, Storytelling Engines: Marvel Horror, that we missed a week or so ago.

Storytelling Engines: Marvel Team-Up

(or “This Is A Bit, Right?”)

Looking at Marvel’s venerable title, ‘Marvel Team-Up’, from the perspective of the ‘Storytelling Engines’ series is almost a bit cruel on the face of it. After all, the concept of this series of columns is to ask, “What ways does this particular set of ideas, characters, and settings make it easier for a writer to come up with new story ideas?” If you look at ‘Marvel Team-Up’ from that perspective, it’s a nightmare that should send any writer screaming for the hills.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented. Including this one, Storytelling Engines: Marvel Horror, that we missed a week or so ago.

Storytelling Engines: Ms. Marvel

(or “Life After Death”)

On the surface, there’s not a whole lot to distinguish Ms. Marvel from Spider-Woman and She-Hulk, whom we’ve looked at in previous entries; Ms. Marvel is another female character pretty much created as a quickie spin-off from an established male character (in this case, Captain Marvel…you have to wonder if this has ever traveled in the opposite direction. Wonder Woman didn’t spawn a Wonder Man…was there ever an original female character who got a “male spin-off”?) Ms. Marvel also had a new writer come on board after the first few issues and tweak a concept that was rushed into production. These are nothing new to longtime comics readers. But what is interesting is exactly who that new writer was–a young man named Chris Claremont, working in the Marvel offices on a lot of Marvel’s second-tier titles like ‘Ms. Marvel’, ‘Iron Fist’, ‘Spider-Woman’, and ‘X-Men’.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Tomb of Dracula

(or “Good, Bad…I’m The Guy With The Fangs”)

Let’s start this out with a little mental exercise, a little game of “Let’s Pretend.” Let’s pretend you’re Marv Wolfman, and you’ve just been handed the writing assignment to ‘Tomb of Dracula’. The series has only been around for six issues, and it’s already had three different writing teams; Gerry Conway has set up a team of Fearless Vampire Hunters (descendants of the principals from the novel ‘Dracula’, primarily), but you’ve already spotted the problem with centering the book around Fearless Vampire Hunters that hunt Dracula. Namely, it’s doomed; they can’t win, because as soon as they do, the book ends. (You’re probably also figuring out how the book’s gone through three writers in six issues.) So what do you do?
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Phantom Stranger

(or “That Grinding Noise? I Think It’s Your Protagonists”)

Both the Phantom Stranger and Doctor Thirteen, the two characters featured in ‘DC Showcase Presents: The Phantom Stranger’, have a long history in comics, originally popping up in the 1950s when horror comics were all the rage. Luckily, neither one was too horrific, allowing them to get a new lease on life after the Comics Code killed off EC and the horror boom. They were revived in the 1960s, teamed up in a single comic (but tellingly, the Phantom Stranger got top billing.)

Each character had a good central concept for a storytelling engine.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Teen Titans

(or “The Inevitable Idea”)

Sometimes in the world of comics, a series is born not out of inspiration, but out of tradition. Team books tend to be the most susceptible to this “inevitable idea”; once you have a number of individual super-heroes, the logical next step is to put together a book where they team up. And if each of those super-heroes has kid sidekicks, well…then the logical next step is to do a book centered around those sidekicks. ‘Teen Titans’, which we’re examining today, started from that inevitable idea.
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Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Godzilla

(or “The One-Armed Lizard”)

When Marvel acquired the rights to produce a comic book based on legendary Japanese monster Godzilla (or, for purists, Gojira), they made a very unusual decision in their development of the comic. Or, at least, it was unusual by the standards of most publishers.
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