Reboots suck!

Reboots suck!

Hello GTS fans, readers, sympathizers and fellow weirdoes… Funky spice is coming to the end of it’s 3rd act and I think its time for me to touch base with you once again about what is coming up. Beginning with a little something about how the creative writing process goes.

First of all, I never believed in the “blank page syndrome” If you have no idea to start with, why torture yourself into writing a story in the first place? The real challenges are hooking the reader episode after episode, making sure there is always something new to get them interested in reading more and eagerly anticipating the next installment. But bigger even a challenge is concluding a story or a major story arc in an exciting and sensible way.

We all have examples of stories, movies and TV series that “jumped the shark” at some point, hoping to create excitement but ultimately simply going overboard and not making sense anymore. Others go the way of lateral expansion and simply lose their momentum as characters settle down, have kids and such… Whenever I do either of those things, I’m really disappointed in my work because I feel like its just plain lazy.

Examples abound, even some otherwise good movies do it: Star trek “into darkness” did it with the USS Vengeance. The writers, seeking to make obvious that Kirk was being challenged in a space battle where he was out gunned, brought into the story a BIGGER SHIP. Now in a perfectly fine movie, this is an example of laziness. And ultimately it was not necessary, Kirk was facing his mentor and a father figure of sorts (Admiral Pike) the admiral had the whole fleet at his disposal he could have showed up with two ships just as powerful as the Enterprise and the challenge would have been the same. Instead the writers broke the mood by simply going bigger. The Enterprise took a decade to build and the fleet was still recovering from the previous movie’s events but that guy managed to get a hidden project going, build a bigger ship in record time, hidden where the Earth’s radars should have seen it… non-sense, lazy… now that these plans exist, will the Enterprise still be the flagship in the next installment? How do you justify that? When you can build a bigger ship in less than half the time…

Such “going bigger” mistakes are even harder to recover from in TV series and comics because you have to plan much further ahead to keep your continuity going. And yet there comes a time where you hit another challenge: concluding. Often, a series will lose momentum and the production will give it one last good effort to push it towards a conclusion. In some cases, it results in a great build up with an ultimately week conclusion… Or you get a great conclusion after a weak final season. Pick your examples, (House MD, Lost, Dexter, Breaking Bad…) Conclusions are the true BEASTS writers have to defeat. As I’m writing this blog, I’m wrestling with two of them (The Colonial Trilogy and Funky Spice) In the case of FS19, I kept the best for last… or so I think, ultimately it will be for you all to judge but that sort of forced me to pace FS18 in a less than exciting manor. The Colonial trilogy’s ending will probably be more balanced with the overall tone of the previous two installments but will lack many of the “fetish” themes many of you readers expect from such stories. Sorry about that, but it does tie in with the Starship bloopers continuity and the Funky Spice conclusion.

Once both stories are concluded, big decisions will have to be made. What will 2014 be like at Bloopers Studios? What will happen of the Characters? Take Jennifer, as she hits the 11’ mark, it becomes obvious that her life would become exponentially complicated if she was to grow some more, as illustrated by Quadzilla’s own size related issues. In a 20 pages FAP comic, that would not be a problem… At the end all the women are huge and that’s the end of it. In a persistent world, it just doesn’t make sense. Besides, to include GTS elements I could always use the 27’ tall Quadzilla, right? So there is really no point, story wise, to have two of them for the long run. So what I’m going to do is the dreaded REBOOT.

I blame Microsoft. Movie studios now reboot everything and Microsoft got the public used to simply rebooting when things get buggy. As we speak Warner’s is rebooting Fantastic Four and Sony pictures rebooted Spiderman mere minutes after ending the previous storyline… New origin stories… New love interests, sometimes a new setting either contemporary or with a retro vibe. My feeling is that it’s the wrong way to go. Marvel did great bringing back The HULK without going through the origin story, they simply re-cast… twice. DC is trying to pull the same trick with Batman, casting Ben Affleck into a seasoned Batman without getting him his own origin movie to start with. Or you can simply remake, re-do the same movie with a different visual environment, a different director but… I can’t really do that; I won’t be hiring someone else to write Funky Spice for me.

So I’ll go the Marvel way, sort of. A new cast (Jay and Jen will look different but they will be there… They might have different love interests or careers), a new setting that still fits within the shared universe of Funky Spice and Starship Bloopers but no in depth origin story because the readers already know the characters, sort of like people know what The HULK is… Visually, they characters will be less cartoonish (aka no manga styled faces) everything else, you’ll know in 2014!

For the time being, you can get my curent and back issues from: (Including the latest issue of Funky Spice)

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