Silo and Brigand Doom and Dave D'Antiques

[Tweak72]

Think what you like but pretty much all writers including the ones I mentioned all say the same thing. The first thing any aspiring writer needs to do is become widely read. So that you become influenced by all that has gone before.

Um, I don't mean to be patronising, but do you know what plaigarism actually means?

Come on people you have read the same forewords and interviews as I have they ALL say "I was inspired by" this set of books or "I was reading" such and such author or "I thought why dont I do a modern version of that story".

And? Surely that's what fiction is - a creative response to the influences that have shaped your life, the people you've met, the places you've been to, the books you've read. I don't even see how someone would begin to write a book without any reference to or inspiration from any outside stimuli whatsoever, unless they'd lived all their life trapped in a metal box, fed through a tube. And then it wouldn't really be a book worth reading.

Even bloody Tolkien said where he got his ideas from.

Are you having a laugh now? How can you genuinely equate Tolkein's being inspired by old European myth cycles to craft one of the most important and original fantasy trilogies of all time to Mark Millar's contemptuous scene-for-scene ripping off of blockbuster films?

You can't seriously think that 'having an idea' equals plaigarism?!

Plagiarism is the use or close imitation of anothers ideas and passing them off as ones own work. Good enough for you?

And so my point is if you are going to have a go at Miller using the idea in Silo of some one having to deal with lots of broken glass and no shoes then you have to do the same with every other writer.
For example Pat Mills should be held to account for stealing the mostly unnamed and long dead people who wrote the poems that make up the Book of Invasions and large parts of Conan the Cimmerian (which was also "based on" a lot of "Celtic" mythos). Because the book of Invasions is what he based Slane on. Just because the people who first sang these tales all died centuries ago does not mean they didnt have large parts of ideas "closely imitated". And I do not for a minute believe that Mills never read Robert E. Howard's work. While I think Slane is awesome I can see that it is a "close imitation" of work that has gone before Mills has even said the book of invasions was a massive influence

And so Tolkien wanted to write his own epic legends as he was greatly influenced by stories such as Beowulf and was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford wrote papers on these storys and is quoted in these essays as saying "Beowulf is among my most valued sources," you can see if you know those tails how things like the battle of helms deep is such a close imitation of these tales.

If you are widely enough read you could pick any story by anyone and see how much of said story is infulenced by older work some would of course be more blatant then others but everyone who writes does it. And my point was (as much as I would like any one o be able to because for the most part he annoys me as well) don't slag Miller off for it because you will have to do the same for all the rest.

[M.I.K.]

I think with Slaine you could argue the case that it's more of an adaptation than a rip-off.

[Bouwel]

There are about 20 different primary plots:

http://www.tennscreen.com/plots.htm

and most stories will fit somewhere into one or more of these points. The real skill is in the way that the plot elements are handled. For example, Raymond Chandler has a wonderful way of explaining how his main charcter Philip Marlowe does the most mundane of tasks during the developement of a story.
The sequential art form is slightly different, of course, in that some parts of the narrative have to be carried by image alone (An aside: has anyone put together a list of common comic uses of art, such as the splash page? I'd be interested to read that).

I personally think that Silo is a good tale although what I know about real missile silo's jars with what is seen in the plot. It's my personal opinion that the writer did take the glass scene from Die Hard and add this as a plot element. If this were a film short and it had come out around the time that it did I am sure that some reviews would have a similar opinion. But this isn't plagiarism as the underlying story is different. Writing 'Barry Topper and the secret stone' and including many of the elements and segments of Rowlings work; that is plagiarism.

-Bouwel-

[Eric Plumrose]

I think as Jim may have implied, it has a lot to do with the writer's intent. As disdainful sometimes as he can be of their attitudes as he perceives them, Mills unlike Millar has never given me the impression from his stories nor from the interviews he's given that he has contempt for his readership's intelligence.

[Tweak72]

I think as Jim may have implied, it has a lot to do with the writer's intent. As disdainful sometimes as he can be of their attitudes as he perceives them, Mills unlike Millar has never given me the impression from his stories nor from the interviews he's given that he has contempt for his readership's intelligence.

... As long as they agree with him and his point of view of course. If not then are they (we?) not classed as some kind of shadowy deranged forces of fandom by Mills? Or was that a rant by another writer?

Bouwel, nice link and point BTW was exactly where I was going.

[Eric Plumrose]

... As long as they agree with him and his point of view of course. If not then are they (we?) not classed as some kind of shadowy deranged forces of fandom by Mills? Or was that a rant by another writer?

. . . Which is the exact knee-jerk reaction to Mills that only serves to foster the perception he seems to have of 2000 AD's readership, or at least elements of it.

[Tweak72]

LOL.

In all seriousness I, like many, have always thought that Miller is a bit of a w@nker. But I cannot in really fault him that much as he has not done anything any other writer has done.
Yes, he has often done it with all the subtlety of atomic explosion.
Yes, he has often done it with the same reverence and respect for the history of what ever he is written about as a Sheep rapist back stage at a One man and his dog show. (unlike say Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis who have while having a reputation for giving things a real twisted egde have re written several old style comic books and done an excellent job).
And yes, he does seem to come across as an egomaniac in interviews but as Warren Ellis has said "he is playing the game"

[Jim_Campbell]

But I cannot in really fault him that much as he has not done anything any other writer has done.

Balls, Tweak. I get the impression that you're arguing this point for the toss of it, but you really are stretching it a bit thin.

It's one thing -- as already mentioned -- to be open to a wide range of influences and to bring those influences to whatever project you're working on, and no bad thing at that. It's quite another to just rip chunks out of other people's work and shoe-horn them into your own.

You simply can't draw a direct equivalence between, say, Morrison looking at Jan Svankmajer's work and saying to himself "Let's see if I can't find some way to get some of this surrealism and menace into Doom Patrol" and Millar lifting one of cinema's greatest reveals wholesale to use as a cheap cliffhanger which you then throw away in subsequent episodes.

Well, all right, you can, but you'd be wrong.

Cheers

Jim

[JayzusB.Christ]

I always saw Silo as Millar's own attempt at his mate Grant Morrison's idea of 'sampled' comics. He just wasn't as good at it. But I quite liked Silo regardless.
I never used to think he was a wanker, I just thought he did shit Dredds. The Robo Hunters I actually didn't mind, not being able to remember the real ones at the time (and I've just put on my armour and raised my riot shield).
Since I read the Alan Grant interview in the Megazine, though, I do think Millar is a wanker now.

[SmallBlueThing]

Having never seen Die Hard (and still unlikely to ever do so) and not being a fan of The Shining at all, I utterly loved Silo. It's still up in the top twenty or so Thrills I list to myself in the dead of night inbetween the bouts of crying and frantic, guilty onanism.

Dave D'Antiques inspired a whole ream of correspondance back in the days of pen-pallage, when I was at university. My friend and I used to send letters back and forth with increasingly obscene addressee names. Inspired by a reading of Silo one night, he received one a few days later addressed to "Mr A N'Alantiques" (Mr Anal Antics). Oh we did laugh.

But yes, loved his work. It even made Brigand Doom readable.

Steev

[lborl]

Tangential I know, but this looks as good a place as any to register something that's vaguely bothered me for a while: two of Alan Moore's Future Shocks seem to have been lifted almost wholesale from jokes in THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. Namely, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN SPACE! (= Golgafrinchan B-Ark) and THE HYPER-HISTORIC HEADBANG! (= the reported antics of Disaster Area).

Also, Moore's THE TIME MACHINE (in which a man 'travels through time' by having his life flash before his eyes prior to the moment of his death) is *quite* similar to Douglas Adams' unrealised concept of basing a Hitchhikers' novel around Arthur Dent needing to remember something terribly important, so jumping off the highest place he can so that his life will flash before his eyes enabling him to 'travel through time' (it was in that DON'T PANIC book by Neil Gaiman, my copy of which I have lost).

But Alan Moore is still great. And I quite liked SILO. Tangent ends

[TordelBack]

All true lborl, and you were good enough not to bring non-Adams steals such as DR & Quinch into proceedings too.  Moore has made a career of grabbing other people's characters and stories and making them his own - however, he's so bloody good at it that his versions are often better than the originals (although Adams himself was of course brilliant), or where his borrowings are more honest, build upon or develop aspects of the source material.

[Leigh S]

The first two are quite similar, but they do do something with the concepts - the third, well if it was unused, you can hardly say he stole it, surely?  And of course, therein lies the nature of this kind of thing - some of it might be appropriated, and some of it might just be coincidence.  

Of course, Moore also has the Stephen King sentient cars thing in his future Shocks hall of shame too, as well as one of the Abelard Snazz's being a lift of something or other?   I seem to recall that the intros to the old titan books had Moore addressing this very subject.

[Bouwel]

Was it Moore that wrote the Future Shock which had a man traveling backwards in time from his death to his birth?
I'm sure that when I read that all those years ago I was positive that I had read the premise as a short story. Time may have blurred things for me though.

-Bouwel-

[JayzusB.Christ]

i remember a Grant Morrison Future Shock, about a letter that somehow ended up in space and caused a war, that shamelessly ripped  off the Hitch Hiker's Guide almost word-for-word. Still, he hasn't done too badly out of it