Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
If there’s one thing that I wish I could do as a “comics journalist” (although, now that I’m on io9, I wonder if I still earn that title or if I’m “journalist who occasionally writes about comics”) it’s write the definitive Chris Claremont BDSM story. Everyone has heard the rumors and innuendo – and if you haven’t, I’ll point you to Google and wish you good luck – but there’s no denying that there are some interesting and unusual recurring themes throughout Claremont’s writing and especially his original 16-year run on the X-Men that suggest some familiarity with S&M and control and submission and all of that kind of thing. It’s something that he’d doubtless never agree to, but I’ve often wished that someone was able to sit down and just talk to him about it without any sensationalism (Claremont is Fetish Pervert Corrupting All Of Us When We Were Children!) or judgment or whatever, just to… well, get to the bottom of it. No pun intended.
Of course, maybe I’m just saying that because I’m convinced that he did terrible things to my libido when he turned Madelyne into the Goblin Queen during Inferno and I want some kind of payback.
(A side note: One of the reasons Morrison’s NewXMen run felt so faithful to Claremont’s was that it, too, seemed to acknowledge a certain transgressive nature in its treatment of the Scott/Emma relationship, and the idea that, by being “naughty” outside of his marriage to Jean, Scott could be “himself” in a way he couldn’t be with Jean. But it was an interesting – and very Morrisonian – take on Claremont’s “I am evil and it’s so freeing!” idea, because it ended up (a) sticking, and (b) not being part of an evil mind control plan, but a genuine emotional need that ended happily – or, at least, as happily as these things end in superhero comics.)
(Originally published July 16, 2009 at iamgraememcmillan.com before it got retrofitted as a work site. I’d still love to do this, one day. Also amusing: Despite the writing I do for Newsarama and Comics Alliance and Robot 6, I’m now firmly in the “journalist who occasionally writes about comics” mindset; I’m pretty sure that happened at io9.)
Lookit me at #2 for the day:
Seriously, these Time Entertainment pieces are some of the most… frustrating, fulfilling things I’ve written in the longest time, but seeing them be so warmly received on the site is such an amazing feeling you can’t believe. It’s like the opposite of writing for the Comics Internet, I’m telling you.
(The story is here.)
I have trouble admitting to myself (and others) that I’m a professional writer. On some level, I know that I make my living from putting one word in front of another and doing it until I make sentences and then making enough sentences until there are paragraphs, posts, essays and thoughts, but on another, I still don’t feel like a professional writer. There’s part of my head that thinks “Well, you’re only a blogger, and that’s different. It’s not like you’re a novelist or playwright or a real writer like that.”
(Our next door neighbor, having seen me sitting at my laptop typing many many times, asked Kate if I was working on a novel. “He seems to always be working,” he apparently said, and I am. I had to bite back the response that it feels like a professional blogger seems like more work than writing a novel, sometimes. All those ideas, all that brevity! On an unending daily basis!)
I have trouble remembering when writing became my “thing”; I went to art school for years because drawing was my thing, and the only writing I did was to support that, whether it was stories to illustrate or essays or whatever. But somewhere along the line, making images became less fun and more exhausting, more competitive, and I was always surrounded by people who could do what I could do much better, and so I retreated into words: My final MA show was a book, which I had illustrated, yes, but which was about the words as much as the way it looked. Self-expression through language.
From there, writing was a hobby, a way of blowing off steam, I guess; an all-encompassing way, sometimes, but still. When I started writing for other people – at first, the audience I realized I had, then for Brian (My first paid writing gig!), for Matt, for others – it became this responsibility, scary in its expectation. But by the time Annalee and io9 came around, I’d gotten over that (Well, for the most part), and the idea of making a living as a writer seemed like a dream come true.
It still does, I should add; doing what I do for a living is amazing to me, even now, more than a year into it. But, for some reason, I still feel that there is a distance to go before I become a professional writer.
(Originally published July 12, 2009 at iamgraememcmillan.com before it got retrofitted as a work site. This is very funny to go back and re-read now, considering that it’s three years later and I am far more jaded about being a writer by this point, even though I now write for Time.)
I swear, I didn’t Photoshop this in any way. For those who may not know, Brian Michael Bendis is one of (if not the) most successful, senior, writers at Marvel Comics and works as part of the publisher’s Creative Committee shaping Marvel Studios’ movie output. He likes saying things to make people upset online.
There comes a point in everyone’s life, I’m convinced, where they fall victim to their own self-mythologizing. Or, at least, start their own self-mythologizing, which is practically the same thing as far as I’m concerned; that time in life when you become convinced that everything is exactly right, that your life is full of fascinating things happening and interesting people and that this is the moment that you’ll always remember and that other people would want to know about.
This may, of course, just be my own rationalization for having done it coming into play; my personal self-mythology begins around 1995 and ends about three years later, spanning the end of my art school experience (as a student, at least; the dark lost years of teaching followed, thereby firmly ending a period I’d like to remember). I’m not necessarily sure why I was convinced at the time that those were going to be the Best Days Of My Life – they weren’t, by the way, and I’m still unsure that I’ve found those particular days yet – but I was, and because of that, every day was lived in some strange mix of expectation of the amazing and constant feeling that I should try and remember everything for posterity… both of which held me back, ironically, from actually doing that much worth remembering years later. Instead, I lived a familiar routine of friends and relationships that were almost certainly doomed from the start, of studying during the day and going to the same clubs at night with the same people and listening to the same music week after week.
To put it like that makes it sound more depressing, more mundane than it was – definitely more than it seemed at the time. But when I think back at everything that was happening, and how caught up in it all, I wonder whether the reason I was so convinced that everything that was happening was so special was because I was trying to make it come true by believing hard enough.
(Originally posted July 6, 2009 at iamgraememcmillan.com before it got retrofitted as a work site.)
But this is, for me, also about the adjustment away from the weekly and daily deadlines I’ve been on for the last twenty years. Now I actually have a little bit of time to do something other than write scripts. Not that’s made me a better blogger, oddly enough — I was more productive on warrenellis.com when I was writing eight things at once than I am now. Funny how that’s worked out. Presumbly a result of a mind being overclocked in pursuit of getting all the words out now now now now.
That’s Warren Ellis, from his latest MACHINE VISION (It’s all in caps, apparently) email newsletter, quoted because… Well, because it’s a Friday afternoon and it’s been a long week (I didn’t have the holiday Monday that regular folk did; freelancer, you see), and because I am all too familiar with the mindset of getting all the words out now now now now. It’s something I’ve been struggling with, recently, the problem of (a) meeting deadlines, (b) writing a lot of stuff without it all becoming mush – I’ve really had problems with that this week, and feel like I screwed up at least a couple of times – and most importantly for me, (c) stopping afterwards. What I’ve found myself doing is being trapped in this loop of just feeling constant… anxiety isn’t the right word, but as if my brain is a train that refuses to stop, even though I want to get off. It takes too long to calm down, which is a problem.
Weirdly enough, I’ve discovered that Star Trek novels work; they do something that somebody smart enough to know these things once told me: They give your brain enough to distract it, but not enough to actually tax it, so you get to decelerate and, if you’re lucky, stop every now and again.
Plus, now I can tell you all about the Thallonian Empire and what happened to the crew of Deep Space 9 after the series finished, which is something.
Classic X-Men feels like it was the first comic that I actually tried to collect, as opposed to just pick up and keep track of (The second was DC’s Justice League/Justice League International). I was there for the first issue! I could get in on the ground floor! I remember my excitement as I picked up the first issue – the first couple of issues, I think, I’m pretty sure the first two were out by the time I managed to get up to the city and buy them – and thought “Now I’ll be able to catch up on everything!” There’s something so amazingly nostalgic for me, looking at the above cover, now. I was 11 years old, and this was stupidly exciting for me.
No joke, it’s kind of a thrill to look at the sidebar on Time Magazine’s Entertainment blog and see your story at #6 of the top 10 stories, especially considering I’ve only been writing there for three weeks.
(The story is here, by the way.)
