Thompson’s work draws me in because it gives me intimate access to otherwise unknowable people and events; I can see things firsthand which occurred 25 years before I was born. He makes the ultra-violent, one-percenter, outlaw biker subculture a palatable, prodable entity I can understand—at least as much as any bystander.  I can experience Barger, Tiny, even Thompson himself. I can see what they do in the wild, why they do these things, and what the effects are.

Thompson de-romanticizes the Hell’s Angels. Even at the time, after the initial panic had calmed, some groups began adopting them, thinking the Angels were tame revolutionaries. They invited the Angels to hip parties where the women were enamored of the their outlaw status and the men wanted to talk about isolation and alienation and all that heavy stuff that made the Angels tear off on massive, howling motorcycles to pillage the California countryside. The hipsters mostly gave that up after the Angels beat them up at a few demonstrations.

The Angels are a brutal menace—not Robin Hood or Marlon Brando or anyone you can predict or control. Life with the Angels is not an action movie: when somebody gets stomped, real ribs break; there are lasting consequences. But the Angels disregard all thought of the future, or the effects of their decisions. Their modus operandi is entirely hedonistic, moment-to-moment, though intense loyalty to the club presides. Most of them don’t keep steady jobs, they live for being Angels: for the runs, the binges, and the parties. They take the premise of “all for one, one for all” and extend it to barbarism. If you strike an Angel, all other Angels will come to his aid—whether he was right or not, whether he hit you first; regardless of provocation, once one Angel is offended, all Angels are offended. And they will hurt you in interesting new ways.

Thompson’s journalism—good journalism in general—also sheds light on the culture of the times. Each piece he writes—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, ditto on the Campaign trail ’72, The Great Shark Hunt—each of these is about more than the subject at hand. He speaks about small things in a way we can extrapolate to larger statements about our culture, and about people in general. His treatment of the Hell’s Angels is no different. They’re a prototype, he says. The Hell’s Angels aren’t an anomaly, they’re the future.

One of the ideas, which I’ve also heard from Neil Gaiman, is: the format of the script isn’t so important; any way to communicate what you need to communicate to the artist is fine, so long as the artist knows what you’re talking about. The script is a stepping stone; the storytelling is the crucial point—and the artist is just as much a part of that as the writer. The script is to direct the artist: since he’s executing it, he needs to know where the writer is going.

Moore wrote a lot about experimentation. You can’t know when some seemingly harebrained idea will pan out and lead you to undiscovered shores. Take risks.

The biggest idea, the one that made me think the hardest and spurs me to create better comics, to aspire to the full potential of comics (rah rah). It seems stupid-simple once you think about it for a minute. The revelation is: you can turn the pages of a comic.

I.e. you can turn back to previous pages and experience the same page again, with a different interpretation, with the added revelation of the pages which follow. The writer and artist can bury things which pop upon rereading. I think it was Chris Ware—I don’t remember where exactly—who drew a page where you could start reading in several places and cycle through the same panel. On each reading, that central panel changed meanings a bit—a different facet was evident each time. This technique is unique to comics. It’s technically possible in film: you could rewind; or a novel, you could still turn the pages back, but in either of those media, you’re sacrificing the basic premise in order to re-view any given section.

Comics generally have panels filled with pictures and text (which is an array of pictures, really). These combine with other choices (do you want a gutter? if so, what color, what size… what sorts of panels do you want? what shape/size/border?) to create something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s fluid, and extensible, and can fold in on itself. Each panel is self-contained, and thus timeless. Read in succession, panels take on time, like beats in a measure. Watchmen has a relentless tick-tock rhythm which pulses, unstoppable, on and on—and it felt this way because Moore used a 9-panel grid throughout almost the entire book. Comics can play with time the way film can’t. It’s all happening inside the reader’s head, so in some ways each reading is unique. The artist, with the letterer, can control the reader’s eye in ways impossible or difficult in other media.

Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics is worthwhile reading for anyone thinking of writing a comic. Not so you can get the mechanics—for that, read a script and compare it to the finished book, and read Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. Read Moore’s book to better understand the fundamentals of writing comics, and to open your mind to what comics can be.

More than musically expounding on the glory of ultra-villainous horses, they tried something bold while top-heavy studios are lamenting their own obsolescence. Whedon explains his reasoning on the Dr. Horrible site:

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

Punk rock!  Reminds me of the stirring exhortation Ralph Bakshi gave at Comicon (not that I was there…) in response to a question about how to weather scary changes in animation (my paraphrase).  Skip to :40 if you don’t want “going up the elevator” footage. (video thanks to ASIFA). After hearing that, I wanted to go out and write a movie, and hey–I have Flash, maybe animate it myself too. So if anybody wants to make a movie, let me know. I have other stories to write in the meantime.

I am inspired. Seeing people make things like this, for relatively cheap, makes me want to go out and do likewise. In the ever-inspiring words of Captain Hammer, the arch-nemesis of Dr. Horrible (who has a doctorate in horribleness), “It’s not enough to bash it heads, you have to bash in minds.”