I can only describe this movie as the bastard offspring of Monty Python and Louis Buñuel, and it really is a tragedy has yet to be released in the United States. The story follows Vladimir Mashkov, a Moscow construction foreman, who, along with a despondent Georgian music student, stumbles onto a deranged homeless man who insists he's from another galaxy.

Then things get really weird.

The two earthlings find themselves transported to the mysterious, backwards galaxy of Kin Dza Dza, where matchsticks are worth hundreds of times their weight in gold, where all the water has been sucked up and turned into spaceship fuel, where all anybody knows how to say is "Koo".

Koo!

It surprises me this film got past the Soviet censors. The entire thing is a biting satire of the Soviet Union, where thuggish "Ecilops" (that's "police" backwards) can zoom out of the sky at any moment to steal all of your stuff, where artists are – literally, now – forced to perform in cages, and where the high and mighty masters of the universe will turn you into a plant or stuff you into a metal box just for trying to escape your miserable existence.

I repeat: Koo!

But Kin Dza Dza is more than satire, it's a beautiful movie, beautifully photographed, with beautiful set design, despite the fact the entire thing was probably made for close to $50 (I don't know what that comes to in rubles). Everything, from the writing to the acting, is just about as close to perfect as you can get this side of Tenture.

Very highly recommended. Again, you can see the whole thing right here.

And, in completely unrelated news, Queen Sonja #9 came out last Wednesday, the next-to-last, a.k.a. "penultimate", issue of my first Sonja story arc. More good, clean family fun from Yours Truly and the folks at Dynamite Entertainment. I just got my comps of this issue, and the cover looks even better on paper! You can get this issue, and the four that came before it, from my good friends at tfaw.com.

Koo!

Thank God I didn't start the engine, thank God my wife is so patient with me. That's all I can say. We finally got the car back today, followed by a minor orgy of pent-up errands.

Lots more exciting stuff going on, too. First of all, we finally, finally found vegetarian marshmallows (no gelatin). Until today, it had been ten long, long years since I'd tasted the forbidden, fluffy fruit that is marshmallow.

As if that weren't enough, The Sword, the bestest doom metal band in the whole world, released their third studio album, Warp Riders. Haven't given it a full listen yet, but my first impression is it's a lot more studio-ified than the first two. Not necessarily a bad thing.

If you haven't heard The Sword before, I cannot recommend their first album, Age of Winters, highly enough. Their second, Gods of the Earth, is magnificent, but Age of Winters is utterly perfect. Warp Riders is a concept album – normally "concept album" makes me cringe, but in the case of The Sword, it's exactly what I wanted.

And a new series I'm writing, an adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars series, is coming out in October. The comics Internet has been all ablaze over this for the past few weeks; here are some articles and interviews with moi:

comicbookresources.com
newsarama.com
more comicbookresources

I'm ashamed to say I'd never read these novels before Dynamite tapped me to write this – but I was really blown away by how fun and readable and epic the stories are. We're really gonna do this adaptation the right way, we're going to mess with the original stories as little as possible. The first two issues will be an original prelude concocted by moi, that's it.

Really looking forward to October.

Emily, Joe’s assistant, has been working very closely (and patiently) with me on the revisions. She sent me this great piece about how to create a convincing, interesting bad guy.

I totally agree with everything Scott, the author of the piece, says. At the same time, I wonder if his “big five” for creating villains can’t be boiled down to three. I'm doing this at my own risk, given Scott's long list of writing credits, but it’s never stopped me before. So here goes, my unholy trinity, the Three Ss of Good Bad Guys:

Seductive

I don’t mean “Cassanova” seductive by this, although that’s certainly a possibility. Rather, the reader has to be enticed by the bad guy’s point of view. In the first Star Wars movie, practically the first thing Darth Vader does is strangle that rebel trooper who refuses to tell him what he wants to know. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that to an annoying bank clerk or flight attendant? You can't, but Darth Vader can.

Maybe that’s why people like rock stars and basketball players so much: they get to live the life, do everything us normal people can't do. But all that liberty comes with a lot of jealousy and resentment, too. When Tiger Woods or Darth Vader or Axl Rose get ground beneath the heel of Fate there’s a savage satisfaction, a “told you so”.

But the seduction has to go even deeper than that. There’s a certain amount of validity to how a villain views the world. The Joker confronting Batman with “You’re just like me! Why bother saving Gotham, you hate it just as much as I do!” is a cliché, but hey: he’s got a point. He's right, in a way. The Joker is seductive that way.

Bad guys never think they’re the bad guys. In their minds, they are right, they are the heroes. Hitler and Stalin believed they were doing the world a favor, after all. Even a psychopath or serial killer thinks what they do is natural and normal – people are prey animals, it’s just the law of the jungle.

In fact, every character, no matter how minor or incidental, believes they are the star of the story. You must write absolutely everyone that way. Scott Allie, the venerable Dark Horse Comics editor, told me that once and I never forgot it. No one should be there just for the convenience of the main characters... at least not in their minds!

A great example of this is the gay hotel clerk in Eyes Wide Shut, who hits on Tom Cruise throughout his entire scene. In the mind of the hotel clerk, the information he’s giving isn’t important – what’s important is hooking up with Tom Cruise. How boring would that scene have been if the clerk had just been an exposition-spewing android?

Sympathetic or...

There are basically two kinds of villains, sympathetic and scary. Most villains, the vast majority, are of the sympathetic genus. Darth Vader and Magneto are perfect examples.

If your villain is sympathetic, there has to be something about him that makes him the way he is, something that makes him legitimately, honest-to-Christ tragic. It can never be as simple as “he wasn’t held enough as a baby”. And it should never be an excuse for why he’s so darn bad. But it should make him understandable, and he should have a chance to redeem himself, even if he doesn't take it.

The bad guy doesn’t need to be sympathetic at first. In fact, he probably shouldn’t be. But, as the story progresses, the reader will learn more about him, and when the story’s over the reader will walk away a wiser and a sadder person.

...Scary?

All villains should be scary, of course, but I mean something more specific – a bad guy who’s bad just because. He wasn’t dropped on his head as a kid, he had loving parents, but he turned into a douchebag anyway. Examples are Michael Corleone or Hannibal Lecter. There’s no reason why they are the way they are, and there’s nothing scarier than that.

Scary villains are the easiest and the hardest to write, in my opinion. On the one hand, you have Claw from Inspector Gadget or Sauron from Lord of the Rings. They’re cardboard cut-outs. No explanation needed. Michael Corelone, on the other hand...

There are always more exceptions than rules, of course, but there are worse places to start than with The Three Ss or Scott's Five Points.

I’m back! I’m back. After five days at the San Diego Comic-con and another four in Los Angeles, I’m home. The main purpose of my trip was the short novel I'm working on for Radical Comics, Oblivion.

The story’s about a two-person team, a man and a woman, who monitor and repair drones scouring the surface of the Earth for the remnants of an alien invasion that destroyed our planet 30 years ago. More than that, I dare not say!

Oblivion is the brain child of Joseph Kosinski, the chap who's directing the upcoming TRON: Legacy movie. I finished the first draft just before getting on the plane for my little California adventure – nearly 30,000 words in three weeks.

It's no secret Joe wants to do Oblivion as a film. He's looking for a home for it right now with the studios, and I wish him all the success in the world. I hope the work I've put into it has aided him in his quest. The story's come to mean a lot to me personally.

Regardless of the writing, the book is going to look beautiful – Andrée Wallin, a fantastic concept artist (and a fellow Swede!) is doing over 40 full-page illustrations for it.

The finished product will be somewhere between a comic and straight prose, presented in a cool "widescreen" format. I think it will be like reading a movie.

We had free give-away ashcans at San Diego, just a little taste of the story. Joe and I signed a ton (maybe literally). I forgot to pick one up for myself, which is entirely typical of me, but it's an unbelievable honor to have some of my prose out there in the world for people to read.

So thanks, Joe, and thanks Barry (Barry's the sick genius behind Radical) for picking me. Now that the story’s nearing completion, I know I was the right person to write it. I have a feeling people are going to respond to it once we get it out into the world.

Thursday, July 22nd
10:30 – 11:30 :: Radical Comics, booth 3735
12:00 – 1:00 :: Dark Horse Comics, booth 2615
2:00 – 3:00 :: Radical Comics panel*, room 32AB
*Followed by a press conference, just like before an MMA card, minus the impending violence!
Friday, July 23rd
11:00 – 12:00 :: Radical Comics, booth 3735

Saturday, July 24th
1:00 – 2:00 :: Radical Comics*, booth 3735
*With Joseph Kosinski, director of TRON: Legacy.

Sunday, July 25th
3:00 – 4:00 :: Dynamite Comics panel, room 32AB

I'm working on a short illustrated science fiction novel, Oblivion, with Joseph Kosinski through Radical. Joe and his assistant par excellence Emily have been fantastic to work with, and I'm really excited to present Oblivion to the world. We'll have a preview ready at San Diego, so stop by the Radical booth, pick one up, and say "hi". It will be nice to see you!

Here's Radical's complete signing schedule – Oblivion is just one of lots of exciting things going on with them.

clicky-clicky!