#uber comic

Uber No. 18

Uber No. 18

Nope. Avatar own the rights to Uber. If they sold them or licensed them or something, only then. In a real way, at the moment, I can no more decide to publish Uber Invasion 18 than I can Uncanny X-men 21.

Okay, I’m just going to have a ramble on this one.

Well, “never satisfied” is an inescapable part of doing any art. Whatever you do, it’s never enough. So get used to that.

Research and Worldbuilding aren’t 1:1 things, it’s worth remembering. It’s also worth remembering there are many philosophies on this one, and much of what follows has exceptions.

At least in part to the Tolkien-derived fantasy sorts, there’s been a swing to “All worldbuilding is terrible. Just make it up as you go along” as a philosophy among the more credible writers. I have some time for that.

The problem with getting in love with the worldbuilding is that worldbuilding is simultaneously i) a lot of work ii) not actually writing a story iii) possibly actually causing you to write a worse story due to the amount of effort you’ll take to cram all your carefully wrought worldbuilding in, which inevitably distorts your story.

(I say “Inevitably.” That’s not true. Let’s say there’s a pressure there, and it can be seductive.)

Point ii) is the main one. Worldbuilding is, I suspect, best done with a sense of direction.

I was on a panel at NYCC a couple of years yet, with Marjorie Liu. She was talking about Monstress, and how hard it was for her to get started on it. She had so much of it, but no story. Fundamentally, she realised it was that her lead wasn’t there. She didn’t have a character. She had a middle-earth but no Frodo. You can’t do anything before you have a Frodo.

I visibly had a head-banging moment on the panel, as I realised that was the problem with the project I was then working on. I had an intricate setting I was very fond of, and a story structure to explore it, but there wasn’t a Frodo. I needed a Frodo.

(This was the project I put on the back burner when I had the idea for Spangly New Project.)

Point being, always be aware of why you’re doing it. Also be aware that with all the worldbuilding in the (er) world, you’ll set fire to some of it when writing the book. Some of the best bits of writing is when you’re exploring a setting, and the more you front load that before you really know what you want the setting to DO the more you’re doing work which you will either i) bin or ii) distract you from what your story is actually about. If you’re writing Fiction, keep your Frodo in mind.

(It’s also worth noting that while I’m implicitly talking about Fantasy/Sci-fi settings, worldbuilding is in all projects.)

Research is a different beast. Research is abstractly infinite. For a modern period, there’s more resources than any individual would be ever familiar with. Worse, there’s as much takes on it as evidence. You research any singular event in (say) World War II and you’ll have all these historians takes on it, plus whatever commentators outside it and so on. Whichever Truth you go with, some people will think it’s untrue.

(It’s different for hard facts, of course, but even then you’ll find that historically speaking, many facts are less hard than you’d hope.)

There is a school of writing which basically argues you should do no research and look up facts as and when you need them. I have some sympathy with it, and any writing will involve that. Hell, even something as ludicrously over-worked as THREE involved me looking up a bunch of stuff, not least as I forgot it. Also, Professor Hodkinson going “Er… no” a lot.

It’s also worth noting that excess research has many of the perils of excess worldbuilding. The more you know about a period, the more likely you are to be tempted to include it, for no reason at all, or hang your stories off things which someone simply won’t know or care about. I fall into this one a lot, I suspect, but I do try to mitigate it.

However, the “no research, just write” philosophy does cause its own problems, as exemplified by Mitchell and Webb.

If you’ve done no research and just look for facts you have no idea of anything, you can end up with the above. If you’ve got no idea what the questions you should be asking, you’re fucked.

(It’s also worth noting that the ability to edit the truth is also necessary in any complicated story. What is a fact worth defending? If you’re writing a military or spy book, or anything with a complicated chain of command, I guarantee that many dozens more people would be involved in any given decision. Almost everyone narrows that down, as to render a story vaguely comprehensible. Look at Uber, where we basically get a handful of high ranking people on each side. Everyone does that.)

My research is normally driven towards a single goal - getting a feel for a setting and finding my story. Often I have a core suspicion of what my story will be as I start (in fact, it can be hard to angle your research without it) but there’s a freedom to change that based on what you discover. In the case of the 455 special, I suspected I’d do a story about one of the two latter day sacks of Rome, but I didn’t know which. My research was, to some degree, about “auditioning” whether the gothic or the vandal sack would express what I was trying to express better.

(There is also the negative research - as in, finding that the story idea simply can’t be made to fit the period at all.)

When you’ve got the idea of what the story *is* would be the point I would suggest starting writing. The 1920s special has been problematic, for reasons I’ll probably go into in the issue notes, as while I had it conceptually nailed down to start with, the specific execution was elusive. I read enough until that clicked into space, and then I could abstractly start writing it (using research to fill the gaps). 

Really, the deadline is the greatest motivator. Research and Worldbuilding is also a form of procrastination. “Oh, I need to write something now. I better give it a shot” is as basic as it gets.

I don’t think an RPG has ever been brought up. I suspect it’s a tricky fit as written, as the Battleships tend to overwhelm everything, and there’s not really enough customisation for characters at the Tank-Man level.

(Or, in fact, any level. Powers are pretty locked down in Uber’s universe.)

If you move it towards something that tends to work as an RPG, you increasingly overlap with Godlike. I’m only aware of Godlike by reputation, but it strikes me as something which could be the basis of an Uber informed game. Of course, you could probably make a more experimental narrative RPG out of Uber, but that involves much more reaching.

I have had some conversations involving Uber as a wargame - the obvious problem is that it’s really just a hack on top of any classical WW2 tactical scale wargame, adding Tank Men. Battleships are really strategic weapons rather than tactical ones - I’m reminded of the anecdote of a 1950s Wargamers wryly suggesting they model tactical nuclear weapons by throwing a real hand-grenade at the table.