Nonsense and Sensibility

One day I asked for suggestions for a specific kind of webcomic I wanted to read. The requirement was that it had to be set in a world lacking any sort of internal logic. Anything could happen. The first and only suggestion that came forth was The Property of Hate, by Sarah Jolley. Right away I noticed the influences from The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and perhaps Mary Poppins -- though I suppose the latter is just my American eyes referencing British things through a narrow lens. From what I've heard, Jolley has said she considers the comic Rice Boy an influence too. The world in that story is rather fantastical as well.

I think there's a possible misstep in The Property of Hate though, and it occurs in the early pages. At one point the apparent viewpoint character named Hero wishes to go home; It is implied however that whatever life she had before was not real. From that realization, Hero goes on in her travels with a companion. After reading this segment I assumed there would be a point in the adventure where this revelation would be teased out further and eventually unfurl as something deeper. Hundreds of pages later, nothing seems to have come of it. What I thought was the beginning of a narrative pull may very well have been just the rational part of my brain taking over. Heck, the title phrase "the property of hate" apparently has no context as of this writing.

To reiterate, I was deliberately seeking a nonsensical story. My goal was to take an existing webcomic continuity and fold it into my own, as a form of fan art. As I implied in my drawing in The Stick Prelude, my own interpretation of the world of The Property of Hate is that it is actually part of a virtual zoo of sentient computer programs. The reason why all the characters look unrelated to each other is that they aren't -- they are individual A.I. culled together from various sources and stored inside a vast network of mainframes. The collectors are powerful beings able to reach across time, space and into other dimensions to grab whatever they want. Why do the beings collect A.I. and slap them together into a zoo? Well, why does anyone collect anything?

This all raised an ethical question regarding the remixing of another person's story. Is it right to apply meaning to a work when the whole point of that work is that it has no meaning? While it may have made The Property of Hate more entertaining for me to do so, it may have cheapened the world that Jolley created. One possible parallel to this is the sequels to the film The Matrix. Like Jolley's work, the first film in The Matrix trilogy takes a page or two out of Wonderland: it even goes so far as to directly reference things like the rabbit hole. The movie then ends with the main character Neo literally saying that anything is possible. The sequels on the other hand stumble when they apply specific background information and rules that don't cohere well.

In the first Matrix film, the Oracle is introduced as an enigmatic entity taking the form of an elderly woman -- "someone's grandmother" the audio commentary specifies. The question of who or what the Oracle actually is was untouched. In the sequels, she and Neo have a discussion breaking down how it all supposedly works. The air of mystery from the first film is dispelled, replaced by explanations of sentient digital life forms. Programs like the Oracle were created for specific purposes in "the machine world", but exiled themselves into the virtual world of the Matrix to avoid deletion. This revelation leads to Neo questioning how he can trust her at all. The answer she gives basically amounts to "I don't know, but you can choose to believe me if you want. Whichever." It appears that being vague was the more entertaining option.

In an apparent attempt to offset problems like this in The Matrix sequels, the filmmakers introduced a slew of characters, settings, and unusual instances that raised new, unanswered questions. Yet these newer elements don't seem like they were meant to be answerable, whereas most of the things in the first film did seem that way. This ultimately lends to the conclusion that the first Matrix film was simply a better movie. I wonder if I'm doing the same thing with The Property of Hate. Am I adding a bottom floor to something that is better off not having one? Perhaps the rabbit hole is supposed to go on forever. Or maybe if you think about things too much, things will cease to make sense regardless.

A Shared Universe

With all the new comic book-based movies coming out, I've chatted with peers about my own opinions regarding the Marvel Studios effect. Specifically I'm talking about the idea of a series of films that share continuity, while not actually being direct sequels to each other. Some people believe this is just a ploy to set up crossover films down the line and rake in cash. That might be the motivation from the producers' point of view, but I just happen to like mashups in general. I prefer the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) over Marvel Comics because, at the moment, there seems to be a certain level of quality control in the films. The comics have been around much longer, and characters have been stretched thin and rebooted a bunch of times. It makes it difficult for me to invest in the comic stories the same way that I have in the MCU.

Trailers tend to lie, so I may have to withhold my judgement of stuff like Batman v. Superman. I will say that the trailer seems really crunched in: there are a lot characters and setup for a Justice League movie, when the film should really just focus on, y'know, Batman against Superman. Unlike the MCU, the DC films seem keen on plowing ahead without establishing characters in separate films beforehand. The original Thor, Hulk and Captain America films perhaps don't hold up as well on their own, but they at least let the title characters breathe. Inserting the origin of one character into a film about another character isn't as effective as having two separate origin stories that funnel into a third. Peanut butter and chocolate may taste great together, but the novelty comes from the fact that peanut butter and chocolate were already individual things to begin with.

In general, I love the idea of a shared universe in which individual entries have to adhere to or expand on what already exists. It's a bit mind boggling to think that Pixar has to write a whole new world from scratch for each non-sequel movie, for example. Does each Pixar story have to take half a film to explain how the inanimate or non-sentient entities are now talking characters? Or would it be easier to establish an overarching force that set all the films into motion? I'd like to think the latter would allow more screen time to develop the characters and plot of the individual movies. There's even a wacky theory that all Pixar movies are indeed interconnected. While the supposed connections are humorous, they fail to serve a narrative function the way the MCU does.

My webcomic is currently developing an expanding universe. Each progressing story arc is leading to a huge Avengers-style mashup. This started off mainly as a homage to the concept of shared continuity in general. The more I researched outside webcomics to incorporate into my own, the more amused I was at how well the respective mythologies fit together. The whole idea of a backstory is really just to establish the rules of the world in a way that doesn't interfere with the immediate narrative. I personally would love a slew of webcomics that all pulled from one central toolbox, yet spawned their own stories. The next best thing for me is to just write my own narratives that mash together existing webcomic characters unofficially.

I guess this also ties into my love of mashups and remixes in music. I enjoy re-producing, not simply as a way of celebrating the original artist(s), but rather to present a "what-if" scenario. In an alternate universe where all art is blended together, would Taylor Swift mix seamlessly with Jay-Z? Or what if the Funky Drummer was hired in every studio to record his immortal riff, regardless of genre? Questions like this are why I fire up my workstation.

Live. Die. Remix.

If you visited this blog from my main site, you've noticed I do quite a few different things. I run an online radio show, and make music videos to help get that music out there. I push out remixes, arrangements, cover versions, and sample-based music. For fun and exercise I also record original songwriting, which has mostly been localized to a specific compos; the music I do there is kept separate from my other outlets. Years before settling into music, I did a little bit of fan fiction. Like most fan fiction, the stuff I wrote is not very good. In a sense I've also done visual fan art by way of crossovers in my webcomic, in which the outside artist was merely emulated and not actually participating in my strips.

Along the way I've become part of various remix-based communities. Early on, I shared my self-hosted music files on message forums like the ones on OverClocked ReMix. Branching out from that, I focused on on putting things out through SoundCloud and YouTube. My albums are on BandCamp, and my webcomic is published through Tumblr. I've gained peers who do the kind of stuff I do, and we've kept in contact and met up in person. I avidly look out for remix-related events, and have gained acquaintances there. Most of the remixing events I attend happen online; in-person events happen less often and are usually simple meet-and-greets or festivals.

Where does copyright fit into all this output and sharing? I think about copyright the way I think about pickpocketers: it affects me more after the fact, when someone takes action against me. So it might linger in the back of my head when I'm working on a remix, the way a recent mugging might, but I don't think it influences the creative output itself. In an example of my own sample-based work, I'll take a short clip, maybe just a brief vocal from an existing recording, then loop it, add drums from some other recording, and blend them to make a beat. On top of that I might layer in some new chords or a bassline, and the result is a new song, remix, or mashup. A lot of it depends on context. If I had to clear a remix idea with the copyright holder before I even started working on it, I'd hardly remix anything. I mix and match before I even decide what I want to do, so asking beforehand would just limit my palette.

As far as actually selling remixed work, it's definitely a murky grey area. If someone is selling remixes, that person should at least try to contact the original authors. A while back I was asked if my "Finality" re-arrangement could be used for a student project with a possible cash incentive, and it made me take pause. The composer of that piece is Masato Nakamura, whom I assume is rarely, if ever, contacted for permission on anything. Ethics is another thing that depends on context. I definitely do not believe that a remix or sample-based work is plagiarism. If you're making something out of something, it's different than simply taking an existing work and renaming it as your own work, or making it look like it has no past iterations. The remixers I consider my friends tend to have the same values I do regarding this. After all, I follow and enjoy their work. It would be weird if my friends were straight-up plagiarizing.

Probably the most egregious thing a remixer can do is not credit the remix sources. In mashups, sometimes it's easier to publish a track as "Jon Doe - My New Mashup" rather than listing the 23 different source tracks to make that one mashup. It's not that they're hiding anything or taking credit for other people's recordings; sometimes it's just cumbersome to list all of that. That's an example of good intention. Bad intention is plagiarism, where the artist claims he recorded everything himself, or is hiding stuff deliberately. I recall there being a minor kerfuffle on Wikipedia regarding an album entry of Girl Talk: He neglected to make a definitive list of samples for his liner notes, which led to an ongoing edit war regarding a user-generated list on the wiki page. Another musical act I've been a longtime fan of also neglected to mention a bunch of samples in their albums, and it's made my hobby of Wikipedia editing feel like a chore.

Websites have recently worked to meet copyright holders halfway in an attempt to please everyone. YouTube in particular has licenses that in some cases can cover the copyrighted material, and allows content creators to generate revenue with cover versions. Loudr is another example of a site essentially including a lawyering service to clear covers versions. Sample-based remixes can be sold legally through Legitmix, provided the sources are available through iTunes. It wasn't too long ago when putting up anything even remotely resembling copyrighted material on YouTube led to rapid removal, regardless of intention from the uploader. Things have changed a bit since then. Depending on who you ask, we're either moving into an new age of creativity, or a mindless pit of regurgitation. Either way, it's an interesting time to remix.