(Subtitle: this is not about facebook)
In response to the many breathless odes to social networking tools (and who can compete with news ways to play Scrabble), we offer our hazy recollections highlights of 2007. And apparently you can make friends online now.
Perhaps 2007 could best be summed up by the fact that a piece of gaming jargon, the term “w00t”, became Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Well done to those enthusiastic “Fark” forum readers who must have spent days voting for the word on Merriam-Webster’s website.
As usual, the most interesting social networking developments were ignored by the mainstream media. Micro-blogging, open identity management, and Twitter promised us genuinely different ways of interacting, communicating, and expressing ourselves online. Except when the servers stopped working.
But perhaps more on that later. For now, let’s revisit some notable events in the “traditional” memeosphere.
It’s always tricky summing up a year of Television – US networks in particular follow their own seasonal logic. So a calendar year of television is full of endings and beginnings, or of cliff-hangers and cancellations. But nevertheless, I can pick out a few key moments that summed up the year. As always, the list will be unrelentingly geeky.
The year began with a — mostly — unjustly neglected gem from two of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s better writers: The Harry Dresden Files, a Rockford-esque mystery series about a private eye who happens to be a real wizard. The series was based on Jim Butcher’s successful novels but never quite found its own identity and was cancelled at the end of its 13 week run. But there were flashes of quality: the episode with the reluctant female werewolf — buoyed by the guest star’s chemistry with series lead Paul Blackthorne — was smoking hot. And you gotta admire a hero who’s wizard’s staff is disguised as an ice hockey stick.
Doctor Who returned with a much improved third season, anchored by the return of the Master (embodied by Sir Derek Jacobi and then Life on Mars‘s John Simm), the emotionally devastating “Human Nature”, and Steven “Press Gang” Moffat’s “Blink”, a tale of evil statues that seemed designed to make every child and impressionable adult who saw it lose all bladder control in sheer terror.
Dexter built on the surprising success of its first season with a new storyline that further blurred the lines between psychopathy, sexual repression, drug addiction and domestic bliss as Dexter Morgan became entangled with an insane English pyromaniac/painter/love interest and his, erm, “body of work” was discovered by divers off the Florida coast. Juggling a suspicious mother-in-law, a vengeful co-worker, the drug dealer who killed his mother, and a questing FBI agent — played by the excellent Keith Carradine — has never looked so… difficult.
Heroes’s second series wasn’t as successful as Dexter’s — truncated by the WGA strike to 11 episodes, and saddled with new characters who didn’t really gel — but it finished with a bang, and the belated arrival of Kristen Bell (fresh off Veronica Mars) as a sparky and snarky villain/hero gave the proceedings a healthy kick in the rear.
It’s entirely possible that, 100 years from now, 2007 will be remembered as the year Alan Moore’s not-quite-a-followup to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Black Dossier was finally released. Unfortunately, although we’ve got it, we haven’t read it yet. Stay tuned.
2007 might also be the year when the mainstream super-hero comic universes of Marvel and DC finally disappeared up their own arses, with the culmination of two ill-conceived, Earth-shattering, cross-over story-lines: DC’s Identity Crisis/52, and Marvel’s Civil War. The best that could be said of Civil War was that turning Tony “Iron Man” Stark from a charming drunk in power armour into a hero-killing fascist was at least stupidly original. I can only hope that the Iron Man movie, starring Robert Downey Jr, will wash away some of the unpleasantness. By unceremoniously shoving Batwoman out of the closest, 52 also started a largely bland and predictable discussion about queerness in comics. A notable (albeit indirect) outcome of this was the launch of the link blog Comic Gays.
The fringier areas of super-hero comics were more promising. Warren Ellis’s NEXTWAVE: Agents of HATE reached a truly whacked out apotheosis of Elvis MODOKs, red dinosaurs in dinner suits, and vast amounts of face kicking. Atomic Robo showed there was a lot of life remaining in the “art-deco robot beats up supernatural villains” genre.
Also, on the super-hero front, Girl Wonder launched Project Girl Wonder to promote the role of Stephanie Brown, a Robin character in the Batman series with ceremony. The Project seeks to rectify that. Another project started in 2007 is the Fangirl Project, documenting all forms of awesome fangirldom everywhere.
There have been many Buffy comic books, but Buffy Season 8 (just released in trade) is the first to offer a direct continuation of the television series. Scripted by Joss Whedon himself, and sporting an art style noticeably more faithful to the visual style of the show than some previous offerings, B8 really does feel like the real thing. And that’s not entirely a good thing, as there were at least one or two characters being revisited that I could do with never seeing again. But there are joys, too. Whedon’s scripting is as sharp as ever, and Xander and Willow in particular feel more like themselves than they ever did in the last three years of the series.
Though it was actually released in 2006, Wii Sport will undoubtedly be remembered as the game of 2007. A simplistic simulation of sports such as tennis and bowling, Wii Sports broke through via its inventive and deceptively easy to use interface, that took full advantage of the Wii console’s motion-sensitive control system. The game seems to promise that the world of full haptic and sensory immersion predicted by cyberpunk SF is nearly here. Meanwhile, writing this post is agony as I’m suffering from Wii shoulder, a far sexier disease than text-messaging thumb.
The Golden Compass film was finally released after all the fanfare about the inclusion (and intentional omission) of criticisms of the Catholic Church, once again drawing attention to the incredible (and truly frightening) lobby power of the Christian Right in the US. Even dropping most of the anti-religion angle failed to stop the condemnation. Appeasement never works. On the plus side, armored bears…
Another hideous Walden Media-approved adaptation of a fine children’s classic slipped into cinemas: Susan Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” was carefully filleted of its celtic pagan imagery and British boy hero, replaced by generic portentiousness and a loathsome American moppet star. We can’t quite wish that everyone involved would die horribly because Christopher Ecclestone was in it. What was he thinking?
Another notable film release was Persepolis, adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel.This was a highlight, not just because the film was beautifully animated but because of all the subsequent Satrapi interviews and she sure gives great copy. Witness her observation to the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t like “graphic novel.” It’s a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad”.
Offline, independent media has faced many trials in 2008. The Queer Zine Archive Project reached an impressive milestone of 200 digitised zine listings, before experiencing some technical difficulties which has taken the archive offline. Hopefully this is only a temporary glitch and they are set to return in late January.
After 13 years (and 80 issues!) Punk Planet also succumbed to the fall of Independent Press Association, which declared bankruptcy last January.
It was not quite all doom and gloom for print magazines, with the launch of Make/Shift magazine and yet another relaunch of Radar magazine.
The MSM celebrated the rebirth of the feminist magazine, with the Guardian citing 6 new UK-based feminist magazines launched in 2007. Some such as Uplift magazine have since made the shift to online publishing only while others such as KnockBack admit they are not as feminist as these articles claimed. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/jul/13/pressandpublishing.genderissues.
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