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If you're looking to understand and study character, I'd highly recommend entering the savage world of UK Channel 4's Come Dine With Me.
For the non-Brits: Come Dine With Me is a reality TV show in which four or five (depending on the season) people from a town or city each host a dinner party for the others over the course of a week. Each of the guests then gives the night's host a mark out of ten, based on their three course meal and sometimes (again, depending on the season) entertainment.
The show comes up more frequently in conversation with UK writers than you might expect. Partly because, well, it's daytime TV and we're all freelancers. But there's more to it than that.
The show at its core is about hospitality.
The contestants go into each other's homes, with all the underlying uncomfortableness that entails. The nuances and idiosyncrasies of what each considers normal or acceptable behavior in their own or other people's spaces becomes literally judged. And there is always a gap there. We all live by a marginally different set of standards. We're all a bit fucking odd.
Some episodes show people at their best. Warm and inviting, seeing past their differences. Willing to laugh at themselves and endure burned main courses without complaint because they find each other's company a joy.
Many episodes are not that.
Some contestants will bend over backwards to try and keep things jovial, but many also arrive ready to shit-stir. As the week wears on and guests refuse to play ball with their hosts' meticulously planned perfect evening, the veneer of civility often slips. It can all get a little Duncan and Macbeth.
They are hosting each other while in competition with each other, and the contradictions of that can escalate towards unhinged acts. Particularly as there's almost inevitably alcohol involved. Banter shifts to bullying, people's homes and lifestyles are snubbed, and sometimes a snake shits on the dinner table.
Hospitality, how we treat our guests and how they treat us, is civilization in microcosm. Particularly when there's something at stake. In this show, what's at stake is a thousand quid- and a chance to not be immortalized on national TV as a total knobhead- and people already end up at other's throats. Civilization begins to break down over the dauphinoise potatoes. God has truly abandoned us.
It would be remiss of me to bring up Come Dine With Me without linking to one of the most beautifully uncomfortable climaxes to a reality TV episode, so here's that.
New York Comic Con is somehow insidiously this weekend, and it's been eating my whole email inbox. My first convention in almost two years, so I'm steeling myself. If you're there, I'll be signing at table A-32 each day of the con at these times:
I look forward to meeting you. I should have a healthy stack of my DC and Image tpbs at the table if you're looking for any of those.
I'll also be on the Gotham City panel on Thursday evening, 5:15pm in room 406.3. Which promises to be fun.
Conventions as a creator are a bit of a maelstrom. You're there for work- to meet fans, hawk books, and take meetings- but they're also the few events each year where a glut of your peers are all under the same roof. And in the same pubs.
This job can be something of a lonely job, and this year I moved 3000 miles across an ocean, so I suspect I'll have a lot of catching up will ensue, and a few late nights.
I foresee a Monday sat on the couch with Come Dine With Me reruns.
Nightwing 119 is on shelves next week. Look at all the pretty covers.
The beginning of a new era for Dick Grayson, as the power vacuum in Bludhaven causes the city to shift, allowing ugly things to crawl up from the dark. The support we've had for the series has been rather overwhelming, so looking forward to seeing what people make of the direction we've taken the original Boy Wonder in.
But this week: DESTRO #5. The finale of Andrei Bressan and my violent sojourn through the Energon Universe, leading straight into Joshua Williamson and Tom Reilly's GI Joe #1.
Really pleased with how this squares the circle of Destro's story. One or two final surprises from our guy in this one, too. I'll try and write a little more of a wrap up for the whole series next time.
I've been trying to buckle down on work before the chaos of the con begins, so this newsletter IS A LIE...
In that I wrote it last week, aware that friends were going to start arriving on Friday, and I was unlikely to have time to sit down and write to you between then and today. I've spent said week working rather brutal hours to make up the slack that the con will inevitably cause. I am zombie.
I'm currently finishing up Batman: Dark Patterns #8, which has been a finicky one. Looking at the plot of the maxi-series as a whole, we're still somewhat in the mid-point of the story. And it's also the mid-point of the third 3 issue arc. Mid-points are the belly of the beast. The dark night of the soul for your character. So in this one, Batman is going through Some Stuff.
This issue has required a fair bit of research, so I've been digging out the forensics books again. One thing that I always try not to lose when writing in a universe like DC's is the idea that bullets and punches and falls actually matter. Bodies are fragile. Breakable. Every gunshot should feel like a lethal threat. We could have called this book Batman: Ouch.
That's it from me for the week. See you on the other side of NYCC, on Nightwing Eve...
This has been thedeadairchannel. A transmission from the desk of Dan Watters. Please do subscribe.
