"Pray tell, is this a Vice news article with my ugly mug plastered all over the cover photo!?” Yes, somehow my image was used for a Vice article about the band 'The Misfits.'"
Two thousand and four was a momentous time for sketch comedy. Anyone old enough at that time with even a slight pulse or sense of humor knew the Chappelle Show must be on their weekly viewing schedule. There was one sketch that still makes me chuckle; “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories.” In particular it was Charlie’s tale of Prince challenging him to a game of basketball that stands out in my mind. The reason for it coming to mind these days is not because of Charlie Murphy’s hilarious retelling of the story, or seeing Dave Chappelle run basketball plays in the iconic purple Prince outfit; instead it reminds me how far journalistic standards have sunk in a relatively short amount of time.
When Chappelle was interviewed on the Tonight Show about the Prince sketch in 2014 a real-life Prince single was presented to Dave entitled “Breakfast Can Wait,” which was a not so subtle reference to the Chappelle Show sketch. As for the cover image on the single...indeed, it was of Dave Chappelle dressed as Prince serving pancakes from the original sketch.
As Chappelle aptly states in the interview: “that’s a Prince judo move right there,” because Prince used the momentum of Chappelle’s humor against himself.
Using inspiration from Prince I would like to pull a Judo move of my own. I also want to stress these are my personal opinions, because nowadays what used to be referred to as an Op-Ed piece has turned into solid facts.
In the fall of 2018, a friend sent a text. It wasn’t the usual random, disturbing GIF (pronounced GIF not JIF), or plans for happy hour. No, this was something different. This time it was a link. Upon clicking the link an image was displayed that gave me a jolt of bewilderment, and I thought, “pray tell, is this a Vice news article with my ugly mug plastered all over the cover photo!?” Yes, somehow my image was used for a Vice article about the band “The Misfits.”
Author Dave Arnold is an unsuspecting model in a Vice article that used an image of him from the internet
I’m the blonde guy with the stupid grin on his face.
Up until the point of seeing that article I had spent a lifetime happily anonymous, minus my minimalistic presence on social media. I never imagined that an innocent picture with the member of a quasi-famous band would appear over a decade later in a major news outlet’s article. Nobody is safe from the watchful eye of the internet. Like Herpes, our electronic past lies in wait to haunt our present. Granted this was a benign photo of me and some friends posing with Jerry Only of the Misfits, and it by no means skyrocketed me into the spotlight, but it rubbed me the wrong way.
In my anger and annoyance, I looked up the referenced link of the photo only to find a Flickr account a friend had created over a decade ago. The photo had sat dormant for years, until the time was ripe for a desperate enough columnist to pluck it from the ether and insert it into their article. Nothing could be done to challenge the unauthorized use of my personage; the Flickr legal jargon stated the photo fell under the free use terms of their agreement. That’s legalese for “sorry but we reserve the right to treat you like a sock puppet because you glanced over the terms of use and agreed to its stipulations sheerly out of exhaustion from the length of the document.”
The most egregious problem is not the unauthorized use of my image, rather the complete lack of effort used to blend together an article with a random internet image, and chum it off the side of main stream media’s click bait vessel. Besides, the picture doesn’t even go with the entire conceit of the article; that being a Misfits fan will cost loads of money because it requires buying a lot of the bands merchandise. Nobody in the picture is wearing any Misfits paraphernalia, except for the band member Jerry Only. If anything, the picture should be used in an article about the embarrassment of wearing a Redskins shirt in public.
"I never imagined that an innocent picture with the member of a quasi-famous band would appear over a decade later in a major news outlet’s article."
I hope to do a better job of mashing a column together from borrowed pieces of the internet than Vice did. I used to enjoy Vice, because it seemed to be the only news organization producing substantive news about the world. For example, they had the only journalist reporting behind ISIS territory when that situation was in full swing in 2014. They allowed journalists to practice real journalism by going out into the world to investigate salient issues, and then report those stories relatively unfiltered. Those stories are now lost in Vice’s pursuit to compete with the other major networks and fractured viewership of the internet. Today Vice seems more like CNN for stoners rather than an edgy, hard hitting upstart to the news world, but I’m digressing. The point of this article is not to pick apart a poorly written Vice column. I already knew journalism was in trouble before I read the Vice article, it merely reaffirmed my belief.
It is now the year 2020 and journalistic standards continue to sink, largely due to a massive lack of objectivity inherent to the modern business of news. Reporting standards for most major news organizations now consists of low quality, biased and sensationalistic content that is hastily cobbled together in the pursuit of clicks and views. Worse yet is the unabashed corporate propaganda being passed off as news. If there is any doubt this is true, please read William Arkin’s leaked resignation letter to NBC from 2019.
Arkin is a renowned journalist with decades of experience, particularly in the national security sector. In his resignation letter he aptly points out that news media cannot keep up with the world, largely because of a national security apparatus that ballooned out of control alongside the rise of social media. Arkin wrote, “I feel like I’ve failed to convey this larger truth about the hopelessness of our way of doing things, especially disheartened to watch NBC and much of the rest of the news media somehow become a defender of Washington and the system.” Journalists are supposed to guide us to the truth and sniff out corruption and bias, but what happens when we can no longer turn to the news for the truth or trust its intentions?
Even coma patients in the last three years know how incessant the term “fake news” was and continues to be used. We all know that president Trump has blamed the media for organizing witch hunts, or concocting information to fit their narrative against him, while he has equally perpetrated the same offenses. The clash between Trump and the media has played out in a childish tit for tat name-calling game that resulted in a flood of erroneous or meaningless news, while real stories go unreported, but this type of reporting has become standard across the board. Real information is now lost in a sea of twenty-four-hour television hucksters, pervasive online click bait, and erroneous stories emerging from the depths of the internet with no known provenance.
It's become a carnival side-show, where greasy yes men emerge from corporate shadows to deliver political agendas poorly disguised as objective reasoning, and fringe onlookers attempt to convince everyone the game is flat or that pizza is really a gate. All the while the average person is left exhausted to the point of either accepting the carney’s little ruse or giving up and walking away. The result is a fractured landscape where individuals find their corner of the internet or television and stay there.
There is no one simple cause, but a major factor for the exponential degradation of journalism is an economic one spurred on by the spread of “free” information through the internet. The democratization of information at the click of a button is one of the human race’s greatest achievements, but also had the unintended consequence of shuttering most businesses that could be made digital and couldn’t compete with the low-low cost of free, journalism included.
"The clash between Trump and the media has played out in a childish tit for tat name-calling game that resulted in a flood of erroneous or meaningless news, while real stories go unreported."
The moral hazard created by the internet’s open accessibility is that we are collectively filling cyberspace with so much nonsense, such as low-quality news articles, that we now require the assistance of artificial intelligence to sift through the endless stream of data. For instance, if someone is getting their news exclusively from Google news searches, they are allowing Google’s algorithms to decide what they read. The same is true for Facebook, or any other social media platform one chooses to preoccupy their time. In hindsight it seems inevitable that large corporations will continue to take control over the flow of information, because unbiased journalism was always in danger from large corporate entities.
In 1983 Ben Bagdikian wrote “The Media Monopoly,” which rang the alarm on the tightening grip conglomerates had over the flow of mass media. The book was periodically updated to report on the status of mass media until the early 2000s. I remember reading it in the late 90’s and was disheartened to find that when Bagdikian first wrote the book in 1983 around 50 corporations controlled mass media, but by the late 90’s it was down to around 5-7. Since the internet was not on the general public’s radar through the 80’s and most of the 90’s mass media back then was consumed the old-fashioned way; through print, television, and radio. Media could easily be controlled by large corporations because of how high the barrier to entry is in owning a piece of one, two, or all three of those mediums. I was preparing for a future where fear mongering would be delivered on television by Mickey Mouse, but the internet exploded in the early 2000s giving me hope for the future. The Internet opened the floodgates of information, but over time it became derailed onto the current path.
I haven’t completely lost faith in journalism because I know there are real journalist in the world with the intent of uncovering truth rather than profit, but as a society we must place value on their work and give it support. Unfortunately, the internet holds the promise of infinite knowledge at the click of a button, but it is also wielded by a vast array of profit seekers, nut-jobs, and propaganda mongers the average person must sift through to find truth. What I hope anyone reading this can do is find objective truth through an open mind and their own critical thinking skills. That is the only defense any individual has against the tyranny of ignorance or the misguidance of propaganda.
"For me, creating characters is all about the heart."
So, you’re ready to turn that awesome idea you’ve been developing into a comic book or graphic novel. Speaking from experience, there is nothing quite like getting a shiny new copy of your book and flipping through the finished pages. The good news is that today’s technology has made publishing your own work easier than ever. One thing that has not changed is the process of creating a story with a beginning, middle, and end that also carries emotional weight with overarching themes. Over the course of the next few installments of Workstation 101, I will be sharing my workflow for making comics as well as process and sketchbook pages.
For me, creating characters is all about heart. What makes a person tick? What kinds of baggage do people carry around with them on a daily basis? Those are the wrinkles that make characters so interesting to read about. The books and movies we love are all about people. Yes, we enjoy large- scale battles, duels, and hyperkinetic chases, but when all is said and done, we are drawn to those stories because we fall in love with and care about the characters.
Sometimes, it begins with some art. Maybe I’ve got an interesting looking character in my sketchbook that I think would be perfect for one of my stories. Perhaps, there’s a name or ability that I can’t stop thinking about. Regardless, I keep an extensive list of questions that must be answered for each of my creations, which normally results in four to five notebook pages per character. It doesn’t matter if she’s a hero, villain, supervisor, comedic sidekick, or sniveling henchman. I have to know this fictional person intimately even if there are bits and pieces of this information that never explicitly show up in a story.
What is the character’s favorite food? How does she like to dress? What’s her best childhood memory? Her worst? What are her religious beliefs, aspirations, and fears? Who are her parents and what is the nature of her relationship with them? You need to dig into every aspect of your character’s existence, including things such as her occupation, education level and skills. The goal here is to make this person as real as possible so that when you place them in situations and conversations with other characters, you’re able to write believable dialogue and logical reactions.
Keep in mind that if you are writing comics, you will be collaborating with an artist unless you are drawing your own books. Part of your job as a comic book writer is to make sure that your artist has adequate descriptions in order to execute your vision. Of course, there should be enough of a partnership that the artist is able to flex creatively on the page. After I’ve figured out who the character is, I start working out their physical description. This includes features such as height, weight, skin tone, hairstyle, scars, tattoos, and style of dress. If you’re working in the superhero genre, make sure you are clear in your description of the character’s costume or uniform. It will definitely make your artist’s job easier.
Since I am an artist and I design my own characters, let’s talk about visuals for a moment. I prefer to create what are known as turnarounds for each character that will appear in my books, so I am able to draw them from any angle the story requires. I also do some headshots and busts just to study a character’s emotions and expressions.
Character headshots by Gene E. Willoughby, II
Creating characters has always been my favorite part of the story process. I spent most of my free time as a kid doing this and probably frustrated more than a couple of teachers as I was discovering my love of creating comics. Even now when I’m daydreaming, I’m most likely thinking up new ideas for a hero or villain. There’s a unique rush that comes from taking the reigns off the imagination and letting it flood the page until it coalesces into the bits and pieces that will fit best into the story you want to tell. So, go ahead, grab that notebook and start building your world along with the wonderfully interesting people who live in it.
This is part 2 in a series of articles on the topic of comic book development. Find all articles in the series linked below:
For centuries, historians believed the great Renaissance master was just another Starving Artist, struggling to make ends meet. Michelangelo himself embraced this image, living frugally and often complaining about money. He once wrote in a poem that his art had left him poor, old and working as a servant of others.