Smiles, Everyone — Smiles!
Perspective is Everything
Here’s what you get in every episode of Into the Storymaze: writing insights or a work-in-progress; something creative I’m digging; a highlight from my comics-writing credits; plus a quote that’s got me thinking — both about right now and what’s next.
Twisty Little Passages
There wasn’t a lot to smile about. Not from where I was standing.
Leaning up against the post outside one of a zillion local CVS drug stores, crumpling the prescription receipt in my hand. That wasn’t the problem — a common antibiotic, a couple of bucks. One of the few things our screwed up healthcare system in these “great again” United States makes semi-affordable. If’n (and its a big if’n) you’ve got coverage to begin with.
I was lucky enough, in that case. Even so, that wouldn’t help with the other side of those meds. They were to hold off any infection that might want to take root from the thousands of bucks worth of emergency dental work I’d just had — and thousands more I was still facing.
Years of trusting a certified quack with a drill had left me with a false sense of confidence about my chompers. And when I finally wised up, my new dentist went pale with shock when he saw the toothy Chernobyl that had been set in motion. I turned several shades whiter when I saw the bill.
Back to where I was standing… looking out across the parking lot, bemoaning my very existence. How dare there be a sun in the sky? Who’s that mom think she is, smiling at her little boy? What’s got that brat so happy he’s skipping along without a care in the world?
Skipping along — on no legs.
Lemme tell you — never turn down a piping hot mug of perspective.
Skippy was rocking his prosthetics while I was wasting time kicking myself. Instead of kicking myself into gear.
Instead of finding a real story, I settled for #shallow — woe oh woe is me.
The story I needed took a bit more to navigate. But it was there for me, inside the Storymaze.
Yes, the name of this very newsletter! Mere coincidence? Who's to say? Let's go with it's my perspective on the richness of storytelling, as a delight — and a discipline.
There’s a Storymaze to any situation, be it a personal achievement or the challenge facing a business or that random collection of notes about to show you the way to a crazy new set of characters and adventures. The idea is not to rush for the exit, but to travel inward. The treasure lies at the center. Getting there is how we discover the detail, the surprise around each turn that engages an audience — and that makes a tale worth telling.
I didn’t exactly skip away from CVS that day — I still had a Lexus worth of dental that I had to figure out how to pay for! But in adjusting my viewpoint, I decided to give up the simple joys of self-pity, to get cracking on a story of self-worth.
What’s got you smiling?
Treasure Seekers
We're all looking for inspiration — in life, for the projects we want to create. I know I am. There's tricks, mindsets, places to go and people to be with. The Art of Noticing lays out over 100 ways in which "no tools required" observing — through sensing, connecting, exploring, or even just reconsidering what it means to be alone — can set you in a new direction.
Flip open any page and have at it. Some will be easy, some will be a challenge, some may get you scratching your head. I've seen criticisms that certain prompts are too obscure. What does it mean to "Look like a futurist"? But to me that's part of fun… what do *you* make of it? Take it chill. Notice what's around. See where it takes you. (If had a copy in that post-dental parking lot, my focus would have been a lot brighter a lot sooner!) For a taste, check out the author’s own newsletter: https://robwalker.substack.com/
The Comics Labyrinth
A Daredevil “digital press kit”? Follow the maze below for all the techno deets!
The real crossover for me between comics and digital was in seeing some artists, especially Pepe Moreno (Batman: Digital Justice), embrace what could be done. Their studios were like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, glowing monitors and alien tech and beta software, offered up from graphics and animation companies looking for a blessing from a “real artist.”
Mike Saenz (Shatter, the first comic created totally on a computer) was another advocate and evangelist, bringing a “new” beige all in one Mac, plopping it down on Archie Goodwin’s desk, and showing us a crude-now (but amazing-then) animation of Iron Man flying up along a building. (In fact, it was a simple loop of a building background repeating a vertical slide, with a static IM in the foreground. No matter — it dug a hook deep into my neurons.)
I wanted in, and began experimenting with my own crude mad computer science. I bought hundreds (thousands — gak!) worth of animation and “multimedia” software I hadn’t a clue what to do with, and limited resources to figure out how to crack the literal code. (No YouTube tutorial vids then, my friends.)
Hypercard was a magic piece of Apple software that came bundled with every Mac. It’s goal was to democratize making — well, almost anything you could think of. It was something of a gateway drug to understanding how different bits on the screen could be made to interact with each other, and with you. Every “card” in a “stack” could include different digi-elements: graphics, text, small bits of animation, and you could link them together with simple interactive commands.
Press the button, play the animation, move from card 1 to card 5. Pretty standard Powerpoint or Keynote stuff today, but then — it was easier to map the pyramids. Another one was Supercard, supposedly Hypercard on steroids. But with manuals written in some kind of circuitous WTF (before WTF was WTF) I could never make my primate brain make the connections past installing that one across a grueling set of 15 kerchunk-kerchunk eject/insert floppy disk swaps.
In contrast, Hyperstudio was a precious, charming, friendly little gem. Designed for the education market and students, it did much of the Hypercard magic but with a ton of built-in, drag and drop features. Seeing the end result quicker was definite jazz, and an encouragement to want to build more of these kinds of digital toys. AOL was all the rage then, and in the overpriced forums the downloads started to feature “digital press kits”: multimedia combinations of promotional images and jerky animations, pushing personalities, movies, albums. Sign me up!
Naturally, to build my version of same, I’d of course settle on one of the most challenging interfaces imaginable: the 800 pound gorilla of digital media dev at the time, a hefty program called Macromedia Director. (With a hefty price tag to match — there’s a reason I’d have to take out a bank loan to pay off my credit card bills!) With some weird well of assets (none of which quite looked like what they were supposed to be), and a “timeline” that was kind of like a video editor (but not really), it was a mad, mixed bag of computer power, tiny little boxes full o’ numbers and whatever you could make of the icons.
Making it worthwhile was my mad scheme for a Daredevil “digital press kit” to promote the soon to be released “Fall From Grace” storyline that was going to shake up the character. (And, we hoped, the sales.) Despite my own attempts to open eyes to the wonders of a 28.8 baud modem, Marvel’s internal promotions at the time were playing catch up to the interwebs, so this was all on me.
I scanned the art (badly), rendered 3D images (crudely), created janky sound effects, conjured godawful gradients, and sent many, many notes to the Macromedia tech guys wondering, “Why doesn’t this work like the manual says it should? (“Hey, thanks for finding ANOTHER bug for us!”)
The end result, captured in the video above, was a somewhat self-running animated intro to the storyline. Laughably kludgerrific up against today’s simplest implementation of “Hello, World”, for the time it felt like I’d invented an FTL drive. (I even got notes from Macromedia, to the effect, “Hey, we didn’t know Director could do that!” Ah, my coulda-been career as a programmer…)
It deftly combined Scott McDaniel’s art, articles I’d written for print publications on the character and the storyline, bios on the entire creative team, and even an easter egg or two. (I think one of the drop down menus gave you an option to “Engage Hypersenses.”) And all crammed down so it would fit onto a 1.44 mb floppy, so it could be passed out like a hi-tech biz calling card.
Sadly, demonstrating the ethereal nature of rapidly advancing software, it’s now impossible to run said software on any of today’s computers. Fortunately, thanks to writer/editor/colorist/pal Greg Wright, I was able to do a video capture a while back, before (before, before) I upgraded, which lacks the interactivity — but captures most of the effect. (There’s one omission, a headline that overlays the group of character faces toward the beginning… too late to remedy that now!) I especially love the call-to-action, “Look under books, new and used.” LOL. A sister one for Elektra may be unearthed from the labyrinth at a future time…
Web of Intrigue
“I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.” — Lewis H. Lapham
Amazing Times
How’d we end up here together? Maybe a detour off the dark web! But I’m hoping it’s because you subscribed to this share-out of projects I’m working on plus things that have me jazzed. I’m D.G. Chichester. Which sounds very pretentious, and tweed jacket and pipe — so feel free to just call me “Dan”, and have a go at the last name as Chai (like the tea) Chester (just like it looks). I earned my word-cred writing comic book titles like Daredevil, Terror Inc., Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, along with all manner of digital widgets and websites in the world wide web of advertising. I keep my storytelling cred by trying new things — this is one of ‘em. I like weird and sometimes creepy tales, so if things here bend that way — now you know why!
Folks seem to like the comic book adventures I’ve written, so if you haven’t checked one out — please do. Many are now available in fab collected editions.
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