EPISODE 724 JOMO, BABY
Kevin Feige Crazy Murder Wall
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
YOU KNOW YOU DID NOT GO TO COMIC-CON WHEN…
You wake up all weekend later than 4am unworried about whether you’re going to make it in time for your shift walking like a villain in a 1960s British spy movie able to move.
You can lift your luggage easily with some effort, but it's fine  what , it's all books, don't look at me like that at all.
You have no cool bags books pins Funko Pops Christmas presents scars to show off.
The return home is not filled with desperate attempts to calculate just how much you spent vs. how much you budgeted vs. how much you have left in your budget for the year a hundred podcasts you learned about over the weekend attempts to rewrite Another Hundred People as Another Egg McMuffin.
Because of this nasty flu I got last weekend I ended up missing San Diego Comic Con for the first time in a decade (minus the Dark Years, which if you're like me you don't even remember until someone says, Wait, why did you skip 2020 and 2021? BECAUSE IT SKIPPED ME, THAT'S WHY).
And…it was totally okay, actually. I would have loved to sit in on a whole bunch of the panels about comic figures of yore, and I would have enjoyed a day or two to simply wander the convention floor, taking it all in, but it was also kind of an unexpected relief to have these days that I had very over-planned suddenly open up, even if it's because of a very bad no good terrible cold.
It's a phenomenon that I've experienced before. And I was thinking it's like an answer to FOMO. Instead of Fear of Missing Out, here your fears come true and it turns out be this unexpected bit of wonderful, where suddenly you have time and space you didn't expect, and you can just breathe. Think of it as JOMO—the Joy of Missing Out.
I'm still envious of everyone who went. But I enjoyed my lost weekend, too, even coughing the whole time. Â
MARVEL ANNOUNCES EVERYTHING
I did try to keep up with Comic-Con news, and is it me or did Marvel announce so many project that it reads like a joke?
Here is what they announced this weekend:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania - Feb. 17, 2023
Secret Invasion (Disney+) - Spring 2023
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - May 5, 2023
Echo (Disney+) - Summer 2023
Loki Season 2 (Disney+) - Summer 2023
The Marvels - July 28, 2023
Blade - Nov. 3, 2023
Ironheart (Disney+) - Fall 2023
Agatha: Coven of Chaos (Disney+) - Winter 2023/24
Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+)Â - Spring 2024
Captain America: New World Order - May 3, 2024
Thunderbolts - July 18, 2024
Fantastic Four - Nov. 8, 2024
Avengers: The Kang Dynasty - May 2, 2025
Avengers: Secret Wars - November 7, 2025.
This is in addition to I am Groot and She-Hulk, which come out on Disney+ next month, and the many other projects they have previously said are in the works that are not on this list.
Seriously it's so detailed, I'm surprised it doesn't include who wins the election in 2024, when Covid actually ends or the date of the Rapture. Â
Also on this topic, this week in tweets you have to click to enjoy (but you really will):
FOR THE SAKE OF ALL MANKIND, PLEASE KILL DANNY STEVENS
About a month ago I finally hopped on board the For All Mankind rocket, which for the last two years has used an Uh-Oh, This is Eventually Going to be About Nazis Isn't It premise-- What if the Russians Got to the Moon First--and turned it into a really great story about NASA and astronauts and the future in space exploration that a lot of us have all dreamed of. (They're in the 1980s at this point and they've just arrived on Mars, and it all seems completely believable.)
The story has two glaring flaws. First, it loves to wait until its lead character Ed Baldwin is up in space, and then to give him just HORRIBLE not-at-all-space drama to deal with. I won't spoil what those events are, but they are pretty hard to take in at times.
The other thing is, over the last two seasons it has slowly turned the child of one of the astronauts into truly one of the worst characters on television, a violent, drug addicted stalker who is somehow preposterously second in charge on the first mission to Mars, and—shocker—is now causing incredible amounts of damage to pretty much everyone around him, and also their robot dogs. (#JusticeforPJ)
In my screenwriting blog I love to talk about characters like Danny Stevens, because things that don't work can teach you so much about writing (or at least teach me), and also because they are often tropes that reoccur. Like, for instance, while you might not know of Danny Stevens, I'll bet if you stop a second you can think of a character on some show you've watched that you thought was All Caps Terrible. And I'll bet the reason has some amount of parallel with Danny Stevens.
Danny is what you might call a Daemonius Ex Machina. Whereas a Deux Ex Machina figure is someone or something inserted in a text by a writer to solve a story problem that the writer can't find an organic solution for, the Daemonius Ex Machina is someone or something forcibly introduced into a story to Ruin Everything. In a sense it, too, is about solving a story problem, but here the problem is that things are going well.
And if that sounds sort of strange, it is—if you're true to your characters and their situation, there should definitely be big issues organic to them that they're struggling with. In the case of For All Mankind, the characters are on Mars, for God's sake. They're having trouble finding water. Plus, there are three different groups vying for everything,  two of them are currently forced to live together and one is actively undermining the other. So um, no lack of problems here.
In that situation, a guy stealing drugs from the med bay, somehow never getting caught and causing chaos is like a hat on a hat. In fact the surfeit of real problems highlights the artificiality of the character. In screenwriting as in home décor, really good stuff sometimes makes bad stuff stand out.
But the Danny Stevens Demon is even worse than that; in order for him to continue to exist and do his thing everything else has to get dumber: Everyone on the ship has to be too dumb to examine the drug supplies; the captain has to overlook repeated acts of insubordination; coworkers have to give him Very Important Responsibility despite the fact that he's clearly high. He basically becomes a Character Black Hole: The closer other characters get to it, the more their own ways of proceeding get warped, until they are eventually ripped to shreds (literally).
If you don't know For All Mankind, just do a Twitter search on Danny Stevens. He generates some real strong feelings.
THREE TWEETS
Check out his comments at the bottom. Is he the only person with a pool in his basement? Seriously, I need to know this.
At some point whose issue is this, really?
And lastly, a livestream of my parents’ dog when they are not around:
I BET IT'S GOOD THOUGH
Last week in IBIGT, I posted a great article from the Garbage Day newsletter.
Here's a gorgeous line from it, written by the great Allegra Rosenberg (rather than Ryan Broderick, to whom I attributed it):
The internet is a forest of inscriptions, so dense that we are far too caught up in infinite fractal brambles of things said and done to actually make any real choices, and/or to understand our situation insofar as we can affect it.Â
In other words, there's so much to see there we never get past the trying to keep up. (ARE YOU PICKING UP WHAT I'M LAYING DOWN HERE, KEVIN FEIGE?)
It's very similar to the experience of watching TV today (AND/OR FOLLOWING THE MCU), especially in the summer. I'd love to be able to write a letter to my 10-year-old self saying ‘Believe it or not, one day, you will have more TV to keep up with between June and August than the entire rest of the year,’ except he would never believe that, or that I am complaining about comic book movies.
At some point there’s so much it starts to feel like homework we have to get through before we’re allowed to live. And honestly, that’s probably part of the strategy behind something like the Feige Crazy Board of Dates. Put it on our minds so far ahead of time that These Things are Going to Be So Important and slowly they become so.
It’s another appeal to FOMO. And it’s straight up insane.
This week in IBIGT: Interviews with screenwriters who had to write sequels to massive hits, like Blade Runner, Batman, Magic Mike and John Wick. As always, I have no idea if it's any good, but at some point I really wanted to read it, and so here it is.
I Bet It's Good Though is proving to be a lot of fun for me. Hope you're enjoying it too.
I'm away next weekend on retreat, so no newsletter next Monday. But for those who come here interested or involved with that Catholic thing I did try to give you something a little spicy up top. I may break into my retreat on July 31st just to repost that. :)
See you in two weeks. Take care of yourself!
Okay so after I finished this I watched the trailer for Wakanda Forever and it was thrilling on a hundred different levels.
The shot of the crowd dancing in white…woof.
November 11th, Baby!