The Real Problem With Stories (Last War in Albion Part 10: Starblazer, Aristotle)

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s action-packed work for Starblazer evoked both the legacy of pulp magazines and the steady rise in popularity of the “fantastic” genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including superheroes. This, in turn, raised the question of genre fusion, and what genre means in the first place…

"She's realized the real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death." - Neil Gaiman, Sandman #6

So in the late 1970s, as this tide began in film with things like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alien, major filmmakers in the genre like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott were inspired by the pulp fiction of their childhoods - 1950s America for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and late 40s/early 50s Britain for Ridley Scott. All of this took place in the context of other historical shifts, of course, but it was the trend that Moore and Morrison were swept up in, and, eventually, came to find themselves appearing to steer. Film and serialized print, after all, had always been bedfellows. Film adapted popular serialized print stories and genres - the films that were popular in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were still action-adventure stories derived from the pulps, but they were war stories and westerns that lacked sci-fi/fantasy elements.

But the lines between these pulp genres often blur, much as the line between superheroes and the pulps blurs. Starblazer was the sci-fi/fantasy sister title to the straight war digest Commando, also published by DC Thomson. The American comics industry of the 40s-60s had superheroes, but also had westerns, crime comics, horror, and other genres. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote sci-fi when he did the Barsoom stories, but more straight adventure when he did Tarzan. Grant Morrison can feature a noirish private eye in what is essentially a Flash Gordon story. Eagle ran Dan Dare alongside stories of the French Foreign Legion. Adventure stories taken from the pulps have always been a subset of film, and sci-fi/fantasy has always been a subset of adventure stories. It is both crucial and obvious to point out that the pulps and film are, however, very different media. Further, it is important to point out that they have very different narrative forms. 

This is best explained in terms of ancient Greece.

Virtually all thought about narrative structure is a reaction to Aristotle’s Poetics, and, to a lesser extent, his Rhetoric. Some works restate or expand upon the Poetics, others fly in the face of it, but there is little that has been said about narrative structure over the past two-and-a-third millennia that has not been substantially engaged with Aristotle. Even today any guide to screenwriting or novel writing that one purchases will be, essentially, a collection of self-help tips wrapped around an explanation of Aristotelean plot structure. Much of this stems from the fact that Aristotle was the first person to codify some very important things. For instance, Aristotle proclaims that “a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.” This may sound terribly obvious, but that is in most regards the point; Aristotle in essence codified the basic idea of a plot structure that is taken for granted today.

Aristotelean plotting, summarized briefly, and incorporating several developments postdating Aristotle himself, works thusly: a plot should follow a single action, albeit a complex action in which a character goes through several moments of “recognition and reversal” in which they learn something and, accordingly, have their fate reversed. Events at the beginning of the story should make events at the end likely, while events at the end should justify the inclusion of events at the beginning, a rule succinctly restated by Anton Chekov, who orders writers to “remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.” Equally important are the dramatic unities, which require that the action take place over one continuous period of time and in one place. These rules have loosened since Aristotle’s time - proper Aristotlean narrative ought take place in one room, with no breaks in time at all, whereas more contemporary treatments treat unity of time and place as injunctions not to include events that aren’t part of the single action that the plot is about.

The point, within Aristotle, is to engender a catharsis of pity and fear that occurs when the audience sees a well-depicted imitation of a noble human life brought down by his own flaws and imperfections. Crucial to this structure is the act of imitation, or mimesis, which is where Aristotle begins the Poetics. For Aristotle what defines narrative is the fact that it is an imitation of human action, stemming from the fact that man “is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitations learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.” By watching an imitation of a tragic downfall, in Aristotle, we are able to engage with the emotions of pity and fear in a cathartic, cleansing way that produces a spiritually validating feeling that is poorly captured by Aristotle’s prose, which is, in practice, merely the adapted lecture notes taken by his students at the Lyceum.

All of this sounds very sensible, but it’s important to note that Aristotelean plot structure applies to the specific genre of tragedy. Aristotle spends much of the start of the Poetics meticulously differentiating tragedy from other genres such as comedy and the epic. Aristotle clearly has detailed views on how both comedy and the epic function, but these views are not expressed within the Poetics, and, more importantly, are not expressed in any surviving work of Aristotle’s, although his views on comedy are widely believed to survive in a manuscript called the Tractatus Coislinianus. Epics, however, are trickier. Aristotle is largely dismissive of the epic, saying that “epic poets were succeeded by Tragedians, since the drama was a larger and higher form of art.” The difference, as Aristotle explains it, is that while “Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun… the Epic action has no limits of time.” Another way of framing this is that the epic has multiple plots as opposed to tragedy’s single-minded focus. This, in turn, comes close to his remarks elsewhere in the Poetics, where he proclaims that “of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot episodic in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence.” 

Aristotle’s value judgment regarding tragedy and epics has, perhaps improbably, survived the 2335 years since Aristotle’s death. Proper and literary fiction works according to broadly Aristotelean lines, with tight unity of plot that builds to a definitive ending. The sort of fiction that just goes on and on, meanwhile, is largely frowned upon, or, at least, would be if self-proclaimed paragons of taste paid enough attention to it to frown. But it hasn’t gone away in the least - the narrative structure of the pulps is visually based on the epic. In many ways the core difference between the epic and tragedy - a genre that should really be broadened to “literary” fiction in general - is the issue of endings. Literary fiction is written towards a moment of eventual resolution that will satisfy what Aristotle describes as “the instinct for harmony and rhythm,” whereas epics (now more usually referred to as pulps) are written for serialization, building not towards an ending but towards the periodic punctuation of the cliffhanger. 

This is true even when they are not serialized - Starblazer, after all, clearly uses the structure of the epic within a given issue, offering a largely episodic plot in which various adventures take place, building to a conclusion that is determined more by the page number than by any sense of narrative progression. There’s no inherent reason why “The Last Man on Earth” has to reach Earth proper when it does, as opposed to adding another two or three planets to Gaunt’s arrival on Earth, nor, for that matter, is there a reason one or more events of the story couldn’t be excised. The plot is fundamentally just a series of encounters strung together, and the point of the encounters is less to build towards the eventual resolution and more to fulfill what Grant Morrison has described as the only note he ever got from DC Thomson: “more space combat.” 

This gets at the limitations of the epic/pulp format - they are by and large suitable for storytelling based around what Aristotle calls spectacle, but rather lacking in most other regards. They’re fantastic if what you want is space combat (or some other form of exciting action and spectacle), but visibly lacking in character depth or in complex plotting. Ultimately the virtue of any major pulp hero is that they are usable to tell a lot of stories with exciting events, not that any one of these stories is particularly emotionally moving. This is not a problem as such - clearly epic/pulp genres have been getting along for more than two thousand years without having to assimilate completely to tragedy’s structure. But it remains a fundamental divide between two types of storytelling. And this divide carries with it a wealth of value judgments, with the epic/pulp structure being a lower, coarser genre for mass appeal, while the literary/tragic structure being more refined. 

For the most part, comics are a medium that is, in practice, naturally inclined towards pulp genres. In many ways the War is fought over that inclination, and, more to the point, over a desire to reverse and resist that inclination, writing stories that are on the one hand using genre iconography associated with the pulps, but that are structured like literary fiction, and, ideally, that are widely recognized as literary fiction. The techniques developed in the course of the War were not the first such techniques - George Lucas’s wedding of space opera iconography to the “hero’s journey” structure developed by Joseph Campbell in Star Wars accomplished the same goal. But a byproduct of the War was a massive profusion in techniques to accomplish literary-structured fiction with pulp iconography within visual media, many of which led to enormously successful films mostly (though not entirely) featuring American superheroes. Inasmuch as the War can be explained simply as the product of developments in what might be broadly described as “aesthetic technology,” the development of these techniques serves to explain it. 

But in 1979 the set of techniques needed to do this were not in place yet, and Grant Morrison found himself in a comics industry that was mainly based on doing the most generic pulp stories imaginable. Following the 1981 cancellation of Captain Clyde and the 1980 collapse of Near Myths, Morrison essentially departed comics until 1985, turning in the occasional Starblazer script for spare cash. Nominally this was to pursue a career in music, but it must be said that Morrison cannot have looked at his output since 1978 and seen anything with a serious chance of providing a steady income, nor, for that matter, a sense of creative satisfaction. Particularly stinging must have been his dismissal from Captain Clyde, given that The Govan Press had, in 1976, run a feature on Morrison’s interest in comics with the endearingly bad pun of a title “He’s Quick on the Draw - That’s Grant” that eagerly showed off some of his work (both original characters and an illustration of Marvel’s Iron Fist) and proclaimed that “you’d be excused for thinking that the characters featured here had been dreamed up by a top comic strip writer. And had been drawn by a professional cartoonist. But they are, in fact, the brainchild and the work of a local, 16-year-old artist.” The brief feature goes on to eagerly declare that “a lad with a great future is Grant Morrison.” And just five years later they were firing him, his superhero strip for them having been deemed an overly expensive failure at six quid a week. 

For all his later bluster about this early stage of his comics career, it has to be said that Morrison’s early attempts in the industry were not successful, and that failure must have stung. Certainly it’s easy to see why his firing from Captain Clyde would disturb his previous rock solid confidence expressed to that very paper that “I’m hoping to take up art as a career. If that doesn’t come off I’ve nothing else in mind.” A break from comics to follow another passion makes perfect sense in the context. It’s clear that Morrison did not pay much attention to the larger comics industry during his four year sabbatical, seemingly buying only Dez Skinn’s Warrior anthology, where he encountered a revival of Marvelman that did much of what he had attempted for The Govan Press. This failure was not, clearly, for lack of ideas - Morrison’s work, in fact, amounts to a near-miss version of Bryan Talbot’s successful The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, a near-miss of Marvelman, and some perfectly competent single issues tailored to a specific market, albeit not one that paid enough to make a living.

But Grant Morrison is not a writer of near-misses and the merely competent. The depth of Morrison’s skill may not be obvious in his earliest material, but his ambition is. The conditions necessary for his ambitions to be realized were simply not yet present in the British comics industry of 1979, nor even of 1981. But everything began to change on March 31^st, 1979 when Spotlight Publication’s national music weekly, Sounds published the first installment of Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock n’ Roll. Less than five months later, on the 25^th of August, 1979 the local Northampton paper the Northants Post began a weekly comic strip entitled Maxwell the Magic Cat. Sounds was paying £35 a week, while the Nohants Post paid £10, making a combined weekly of £45 a week - £2.50 greater than the unemployment benefits Alan Moore had previously been drawing, and officially marking the beginning of his career as a full-time comics writer. [continued]

NEXT TIME: The British music magazine scene, the American Comix scene, and a history of talking cats as Alan Moore takes his first steps into the comics industry, meets his wife, and becomes a French child murderer. It’s Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion: Roscoe Moscow, The Stars My Degradation, and Maxwell the Magic Cat.