Writing to Amuse Myself

It’s sort of a tradition in speculative fiction especially, and even more especially in comic books to toss in homages, injokes and just plain nods to other works. I guess some people do it to show how clever they are or how big a fan they are, but for me, at least, it’s because I’m a huge damn nerd and it amuses me.

Hopefully, it amuses you, the reader as well, but the reason it’s there is entirely selfish. And in that spirit, this blog entry is just as selfish; I want to talk about some of my favorite meta moments thus far in the series. As always, I hope this amuses you too.

It starts under the cut:

Now, this may come as a shock to many of you, especially those of you reading my online webserial about a comic book universe, or even those who read the webcomic I wrote for about characters in a roleplaying game, but I’m a geek. Big, big geek.

Okay, that’s not shocking at all. But what may mildly interest you is that I’m sort of a music geek too. I only really started seriously listening to music in college and honestly, even to this day, I’m not much of a seeker of the indy. I’m the sellout that listens to what Clearchannel puts out on the rock and R&B stations and likes it.

Why am I talking about this? Because this is where one of my favorite gags to use in the writing of the series comes from. See, I often find it cute or funny to sing song lyrics in an entirely different style (for example, I’ve been known to sing an operatic version of Holiday by Greenday while driving), but even better, I like when I get the chance to use song lyrics as prose for a given situation. I’ve greeted more than one friend with “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.” So when I write Descendants, I tend to do the same. Which leads to my first category of favorite injokes:

Song Lyrics in Text
This is one of the injokes people tend not to catch, even when they’re familiar with the songs. My favorites are:

• All Saints and Spirits — the awakening of the inugami contains a line from Hurt by NIN (covered excellently by Johnny Cash)
• 4 Part I — Cyn quotes Malady place wherein a character quotes Sympathy for the Devil.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys — Is actually an inversion (and screwed up on my part) of the title of the Bowling for Soup song Girl All the Bad Guys Want.
• The Beach Episode — Ian awakens with Once in a Lifetime by the Talking heads on his mind.
• Greenday gets a nod in Mystic Spiral Part 2 with Morganna simply saying ‘Platypus’ (Referencing the song Platypus (I Hate You)) to which Nightshade finishes the reference.

I have several others in mind for later. In particular, Short Skirt, Long Jacket by Cake will be used in several descriptions in Issue #31: Daughters, Sisters, Mothers. There isn’t enough love for Cake, seriously.

Aside from that, a lot of my friends’ and my own mannerisms and ‘catch phrases’ sometimes bleed into the book. You see this a lot with Cyn in bored mode, as she channels basically every female my age that I know. Some of my favorite moments ripped form real life:

Real Life Moments

• Occasionally (and before I edit [yes, I actually do some editing] it happens much, much more often), a character will repsond to some news by stopping short and going “Wait, what?” I do this. All. The Time.
• Another Vaal special is the occasional use of ’shiny’ as a word for cool. No, it’s not a Firefly reference, as I was using it before a certain Kaywinnit Lee Frye ever burst on the scene. This is a difference; Firefly shiny is ‘good’, Descendants shiny is ‘cool’.
• At one point, Warrick mentions a recurring nightmare where he’s on a superteam with a rather odd cast of characters. This is a reference to an X-men: Academy X game we play, in which Warrick is my character.
• The earlier dream sequence in which Tink transforms into liquid metal, which the tentacles approve of is also a reference to the game in which Warrick is romantically involved with actual X-canon character Mercury.
• Cyn, as mentioned earlier, channels a lot of my friends when she’s bored. Most notably, the playing with the rubber ball like a cat and the heart to heart talk on a bench with a stack of burritos between the two characters actually happened.
• One of my friends insists that Juniper’s Cloudcookoolander tendencies are based on her. Upon review, they just may be, though it wasn’t intentional as Juniper is based in part on Mutsumi Otohime from the anime Love Hina.

With all this stuff that you, gentle reader, could not possibly have known, it’s hard to imagine that I did manage to sneak some actual homages and nods to other works into the series, ain’t it? But I did and I’m pretty proud of some of them. The first major group of these are in the form of named characters and location. Dollars to donuts you caught some of them, but maybe you didn’t catch some of my favs:

Names Dropping

• Ian Smythe. ‘Ian’ for Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassice Park, Smythe for Spiderman villain Alistair Smythe.
• Alexis Keyes. ‘Alexis’ because if I ever have a daughter, this will be her name. ‘Keyes’ and an ‘a’ name in honor of R&B artist Alicia Keyes.
• Legacy of One featured a sequence taking place in the DeFillippes Museum, names after one of the creators of New Mutants vol2, which became New X-men: Academy X.
• The Westmoreland Building, featured as sort of Mayfield’s answer to the Sears Tower is named for the dorm where I played many an RPG and celebrated at least one birthday in (despite not living there. Ever.) while in college.
• The Dornez Hotel, featured in Another Kind of Homecoming is named for badass butler Walter Dornez from the anime Hellsing.
• Prometheus’s real name, Jonathan Edward Tyler, is a refernce to a Louie Anderson joke I remember from that cartoon her had when I was a kid, about how all bullies had all first names.

Aside from name drops, there are some stylistic references and homages that I liked a lot:

Straight Homages

• Morganna’s… her…her unique… speech pattern. Is-is-is lovingly copied from Jeff Goldblum’s standard delivery.
• Speaking Morganna, the motes she surrounds herself with are also having unique speech patterns. These are being referenced from the Siamese cats from the movie-thing Lady and the Tramp.
• The Whitecoat, despite several people drawing parallels between him and Harry Dresden, in stead started life as a Spiderman homage; wallcrawling, super strong everydude who gets by by being a wiseacre and who gets no respect. Once I did the one shot though, I got a lot more feeling for him as his own character.
• Dr. Powerless/Perilous/Paralou, the unfortunate baddie at the beginning of Ace Agenda is an homage to supervillain homages, particularly Dr. Drakken and Professor Dementor from Disney’s Kim Possible.
• Lucian, the Ape Knight (named after the Pope at the time Geoffery of Monmoth was penning The AMtter of Britain) is a big ol’ hug to the entire Silver Age of Comics.
• And finally, Rehenimaru as seen in A Magitech Crisis is, in fact, meant to invoke the idea of a slightly more anthromorphic xenomorph from the Alien franchise in her demon form.

So there you have it, a run down of some of my favorites (plus some I added to pad the list) I hope you enjoyed reading this, and hope you enjoy keeping your eyes peeled for more!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 12:19 am and is filed under Meta, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.