Saturday, November 23, 2024

IV: Fantasy

Some time ago I confessed that I didn't particularly like comic books. What I like is superheroes. I grok that Heartstopper is marvellous, but I don't generally read YA romantic fiction when it's written in words, so I am not likely to read it when it happens to be told in words and pictures. However marvellously.

Here is a much worse confession.

I don't particularly like fantasy.

Please read the next paragraph before throwing your computer out of the window.

Tolkien created a new thing. We can see him creating it, right there on the page, as part of a dialogue with his friends in the pub: the fantasy novel. There had been fantasy stories before, obviously. And there had been novels about wizards and magic, not all of them necessarily for children. And there had been modern prose romances -- that line that goes from William Morris to ER Eddison via Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell. But a long prose work about dragons and goblins, told in the narrative voice of a naturalistic novel was something new and strange. As if Enid Blyton had developed Toytown in the style and on the scale of Middlemarch and turned Big Ears into a tragic hero.

Which might, as I always say at this point, have been awesome.

Tolkien didn't have a novelistic model in mind when he began creating his, if you insist, legendarium. Or he wouldn't have written "know then aforetimes that in the days of Inwe" on the one hand or "this for their hearts uplifting did Halog sing them as the frowning fortress clasped then and nethermost night in its net caught them" on the other.

I don't think the pictures we see in our head when we read Lord of the Rings are necessarily the pictures that Tolkien wanted us to see. The Pauline Baynes map illustrations he partially endorsed; and that Jimmy Cauty poster that everyone had on their wall in the 1970s are a long way from Peter Jackson and even further from World of Warcraft. Tolkien never quite told us what a balrog looked like. He didn't describe orcs, but I think he probably imagined them as rough, grotesque, humans; not piggy faced Games Workshop miniatures or dark skinned CGI ogrons. Lord of the Rings begat Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeons & Dragons begat Games Workshop and Games Workshop begat genre fantasy and genre fantasy begat Peter Jackson and Peter Jackson begat the Rings of Power and there is now a Consensus Fantasy Universe which these kinds of stories happen in.

I spent a lot of time playing Dungeons & Derivatives and feel quite at home in Consensus Fantasy Land. But if all you see in Lord of the Rings are ugly orcs and beautiful elves and funny dwarves and talking trees and grey wizards and dark lords on dark thrones in lands where there are very probably some shadows, you are only seeing about 12% of what Tolkien actually does.

I once said that I liked Dickens, apart from the Dickensian parts. I am quite tempted to add that I like Tolkien apart from the Tolkienesque bits: at any rate, the Tolkienesque bits are not the bits I like the most. It's the operatic dialogue and the mock epic scenes which I return to over and over again. This will I take as a weregild of my father. Through the fate of Arda is bound up in it, you will think me generous. Master of doom by doom mastered. Nevertheless they will still have need of wood.

And the little character moments too. Sam sulking because the farmer gave Frodo a slap when he was little. Pippin wanting to quit smoking because he misses Theoden. The rabbit stew. Silly songs in the bath-tub. There are no Games Workshop box sets recreating those scenes.

So am I, after all, a gate keeper? Am I saying that if you go to Tolkien to get your fix of orcs and wizards but have not the slightest interest in variant reading of the Lay of Lethien then you are a Dyson Airblade? [*]



Rings of Power

Season 1 Reviews


Season 2 Reviews

Season 1 Reviews (Book)


Season 2 Reviews (Book) (Available Soon)

Complete Reviews Season 1 - 7 (Available Jan 2035)

3 comments:

  1. Some time ago I confessed that I didn't particularly like comic books. What I like is superheroes.

    Are you quite sure? Cerebus and Sandman don't really strike me as superheroic… Indeed, Micronauts' cape content seems cursory at best and you seemed to like it more when it was being cod-Star Wars than when it was being cod-Superman. Though I agree that "liking comics" as a proposition says about as much as "liking television" or "liking books"; very few people actually like everything under that umbrella…

    Personally I am a child of Franco-Belgian comics first and foremost — Tintin, Spirou, Asterix, etc., and the lesser-known Achille Talon (Walter Melon) from whom I derive my screen name — Carl Barks-style Duck comics secondarily, and Sandman-type American weird-fantasy comics a somewhat distant third. With various webcomics falling somewhere on that gradient. I suppose I like adventure comics just so long as no skin-tight spandex is involved.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If we pressed the point, we would probably find that what I mean by 'like superheroes' is 'like Marvel', or, I suppose 'like Lee and Kirby". I think this could be an interesting side-line on the "canon" question. There is a kind of Great Tradition of comic books which starts with Superman and Batman and goes through Stan Lee's 60s revival and into your Kilravens and Deathlocks and Howards the Duck in the 70s and 80s. A lot of things which don't have capes and masks are part of that trajectory: Micronauts (a good example) is very much a homage to Lee and Kirby. (The Fantastic Four don't fit into the superhero genre particularly well, although they are clearly superheroes.) When I was being gatekeepery, I would certainly have argued that Sandman was very much part of that "tradition" and you had no bussiness like Sandman if you didn't know your way around Doctor Strange. Asterix and Tintin (and the Bash Street Kids and Dan Dare) were outside that tradition.

      Cerebus is a special case; but I would point out that it started out very much part of the Marvel "tradition". Sim wasn't interested in Bob Howard's Conan: it was distinctly the comic book Conan, as mediated through Stan Lee's representative on Earth, Roy Thomas, that he was parodying. Of course he rapidly went off in all sorts of directions. But it was people who knew their Justice Society from their Justice League and cared about Frank Miller who formed his audience, at least at the beginning.

      Delete
    2. Mmh. Fair enough. Still, the edges are blurry, as they always are with these things. Bone is Cerebus's more presentable first-cousin, I'm inclined to say, but it also wears its debt to Carl Barks's Ducks on its sleeve, just as the Franco-Belgians do. In turn the post-1980s British takeover of the American model was, I think, very much influenced by what was happening across the Channel; there's a lot of Edgar P. Jacobs, and even a bit of Hergé, in Dave Gibbons.

      Something also occurred to me as being of relevance to your point about Sandman-gatekeeping, which it may interest you to learn; which is this. Faction Paradox, you may or may not know, is in many ways to Who as Sandman was to the DC mythology. It has its own broody fantasy tone and aesthetic, in which the pulpier sci-fi of the parent canon eventually feel out of place; after the first volume it becomes ludicrous to imagine that the Earth watched over by the Endless with its realistic serial killers and domestic drama has hundreds of spandex-clad heroes and villains running about as an item of public news. The Netflix series excised them completely for copyright reasons and nobody cared. And it is just as tonally difficult to imagine The Invasion of Time happening on the FP version of Gallifrey, let alone The Day of the Doctor. Yet just as Sandman's core elements like Destiny, Cain & Abel are woven of old bits-and-bobs of Deep Lore, so too does FP do things like anchor huge points of lore on the particulars of not only The Deadly Assassin but, say, Shada.

      I say all this because the prevailing form of snobbery in FP fandom is a refusal to lean into the Who connection; to say that the classiest way to engage with FP is if you haven't ever seen a minute of Who, and are liable to stare blank-eyed if someone reminds you that the Great Houses are "really" the Time Lords. Even if you know, you're expected to try and pretend you don't (outside of discussion of specific arcane points). It makes an interesting contrast. Gatekeeping of a converse, yet ultimately equivalent sort.

      Delete

Comments from SK are automatically deleted, unread, so please don't waste your time.