MattBrady
07-29-2003, 09:32 AM
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<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 23</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
<b>The Rules</b>
First, a disclaimer: A lot of people disagree with me on this. A lot of people I like, and greatly respect, disagree with me on this. Joe Quesada, Denny O’Neil, and Brian Bendis are the first three who come to mind. This isn’t going to be one of those nice, uncontroversial columns, like the anti-war one or the <i>America’s Next Top Model</I> lovefest. You’ve been warned.
In 1995, a short book called <I>The Rules</I> became a surprise bestseller. A deliberate throwback to earlier, pre-feminist, women’s self-help books, this hard-as-nails tome promised surefire, can’t-fail tips on snagging and keeping a man. (Example: Rule Five -- Don’t Call Him and Rarely Return His Calls.) Some women swore by it and others castigated it as unenlightened game-playing. I’m sure it worked for some couples, but I will say this: It sure didn’t sound like a recipe for any relationship <b>I’d</b> want to be in.
Which brings us to Robert McKee.
Since the late 1980s, Robert McKee’s Story Seminar has travelled, carnie-like, from town to town, selling out its intensive three-day seats to prospective writers and assorted Hollywood hangers-on. In 1997, McKee boiled the seminar down to a book called, simply, <i>Story</I>, which became an immediate hardcover bestseller and has continued to sell steadily.
McKee’s teachings have become <I>The Rules</I> of Hollywood. Production assistants solemnly recite the flaws of a story, based solely on McKee’s principles. According to his website ( http://www.mckeestory.com ), graduates of the McKee course have won 19 Academy Awards, 110 Emmy Awards, 20 Writers’ Guild Awards, and 16 DGA Awards. They’ve written hit movie after hit movie, including <I>A Beautiful Mind, Bruce Almighty</I>, and <I>Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers</I>.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/mckeechart.jpg" width="400" height="415" align="right" border="0">And recently, McKee’s influence has spread to the comics field. Now, on balance, it’s great that the worlds of filmmaking and comics are drawing closer together. The more writers and artists you have switching back and forth between the fields, the more techniques and influences get stirred up, and the more work opportunities open up to talented people. (Britain’s always had more interaction between the various creative arts; the ‘80s-‘90s British Invasion of comics creators owed a lot to currents in British pop music, filmmaking, and prose writing.) That kind of cross-pollination is healthy for everyone.
That said: When you cross-pollinate, you’ve got to be critical, and not let the crap in with the good stuff. Expand the gene pool, don’t pollute it.
Robert McKee is a bunch of crap.
But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at <I>Story</I> itself, starting with the introduction. In setting up his program, McKee first lays out a few baffling principles (“<I>Story</I> is about the realities, not the mysteries of writing”). Then, to be sure you won’t think he’s just advocating films-by-the-numbers, he appeals to his audience:
“But my hope for you goes beyond competence and skill. I’m starved for great films. Over the last two decades I’ve seen good films and a few very good films, but rarely, rarely a film of staggering power and beauty. Maybe it’s me; maybe I’m jaded. But I don’t think so. Not yet. I still believe that art transforms life…I’ve written <I>Story</I> to empower your command of the craft, to free you to express an original vision of life, to lift your talent beyond convention to create films of distinctive substance, structure, and style.”
Okay. Does this sound like:
(a) a heartfelt appeal for better films
(b) a used-car salesman trying to close the deal
(c) an attempt to sucker would-be writers into taking a high-priced writing course, or
(d) both (b) and (c)?
The heart of the McKee program is the Three-Act Structure. This is the most often-quoted part of the plan, the structural template you’re most likely to hear producers (or anyone in Hollywood, really) trying to impose on a given script. In <I>Story</I>, McKee first defines an act as follows:
“An ACT is a series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene which causes a major reversal of values, more powerful in its impact than any previous sequence or scene.”
Uh, okay. McKee then posits that three acts -- three “reversals of values” -- are the minimum for a work of the length of a motion picture. (Comic books are different; most of them are only 22 pages, often barely enough for one or two acts given current pacing techniques -- which will be the subject of a future column.) He acknowledges that scripts can be written with more than three acts (a detail usually left out by his students), but cautions that this can lead to cliché, to artificial twists.
All of this sounds okay on the surface. But how does it really help us when we sit down in front of a blank page? More on that in a moment…
McKee also loves diagrams, which, of course, make everything look scientific. In the chapter “The Substance of Story,” he presents one titled “The Three Levels of [Character] Conflict,” a dartboard-shaped mess with “Innermost Self” at the center, radiating out at top to “Inner Conflicts/Personal Conflicts/Extra-Personal Conflicts”; at right to “Body/Lovers/Physical Environment”; at left to “Mind/Family/Individuals in Society”; and at bottom to “Emotions/Friends/Social Institutions.”
Now, this isn’t as nonsensical as it might sound when pulled out of context. Like most of the book, it’s a way of dividing out the various elements of character and plot into component parts.
The problem is: So what? How does it enlighten us to have this information presented in such complicated terms? I can tell you I’ve organized my entertainment time into cathode ray tube absorption hours and mass-production papyrus scanning time, but it really doesn’t add anything to the concepts of watching TV and reading books.
And, more importantly: Do you really want all this rattling around in your brain while you’re writing? Writers -- real writers -- have stories to tell, and an instinctive sense of where they start and finish. They’re not thinking about pessimistic controlling ideas, the gap between expectation and result, or negation of the negation. They’ve got characters who come alive and move in a particular direction, external events that impinge on them without too much contrivance, and an instinctive sense of structure.
They’re not flipping to the handbook every time they get to the end of an “act.” They’re <b>writing</b>.
What McKee is doing here, is attempting to teach writing to people who aren’t writers, and who don’t want to go through the hard work of learning their craft by reading, observing the way people act, studying the way successful stories are structured, and making mistakes along the way. They want shortcuts, they want tricks. They want rules.
McKee’s rules seem complex, disguised as they are by jargon. But they’re actually very simple. And because they’re simple, they’re easy to enforce -- especially by Hollywood producers, most of whom have never written anything in their lives, and have no particular desire to, but <b>know</b> they could do it better than those damn writers, if they wanted to.
But fiction doesn’t work that way. Yes, there are useful tricks here. A writer needs a bag of tricks (what Stephen King, in his highly recommended <I>On Writing</I>, calls a toolbox), the bigger the better. McKee’s scene-by-scene analysis of <I>Casablanca</I> -- why it works, where it doesn’t -- is particularly fascinating.
I’d also say that, in comics, McKee’s guidelines are more useful to editors than writers. As an editor, sometimes you’re presented with a story or scene that just doesn’t work, and it can be useful to poke at it with various scalpels. Personally, I’ve always preferred a more instinctual approach to editorial work; I think it lets me judge each work more purely on its own merits, rather than trying to fit it into a template. But I can see the value of the other approach.
And every writer is his own editor at some point, of course. Sometimes you finish a story and something’s just mysteriously off: a scene that sounded fine in the outline just isn’t coming across with the weight, or the humor, it’s supposed to have, or a character just isn’t going where you need him to go in order to make the rest of the story work. At that point, it might be useful to step back and apply one of McKee’s tools as a diagnostic device.
But in writing, often the fun is in the “mistakes” -- the places where a story deviates from the expected structure. That’s where the human moments happen, the surprises, the parts you remember. You don’t remember the structure of <I>Taxi Driver</I>; you remember Robert DeNiro’s speech to himself in the mirror.
Sometimes, when you deviate from your planned structure, it just doesn’t work; then you’re better off going back to the outline. But when it does, you don’t want to throw it out just because the second act looks weak on paper. Sometimes the second act just doesn’t matter.
Now, I’m certainly not advocating writing purely on instinct. For myself, I always need a written outline or I get lost along the way, and the more complex the story, the more detailed the outline. It can also be very helpful to pattern an original work on a familiar template. <I>Chinatown</I> follows the basic outline of a traditional hardboiled detective story, and <I>Watchmen</I> is a superhero tale, complete with alien invasion and surprise villain. But both use their base-genres as launching pads for much more ambitious, weighty stories.
And writing often takes you places you don’t expect. Here’s a minor example: I’ve been working on this essay for quite a while -- longer than most of my columns. I knew I wanted to make a statement against the McKee method, which, to my mind, has been overpraised to a ridiculous degree. That was the starting point.
As I worked on the essay, various things happened. A former boss wrote me with some points to think about. A careful look at the <I>Story</I> book suggested some elements of value, which I wanted to be fair and point out. And, unexpectedly, the film <I>Adaptation</I> came out, dealing with several of these points from a different angle.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/adaptation.jpg" width="350" height="211" align="left" border="0"> <I>Adaptation</I> is an interesting exercise, as well as a hugely entertaining movie. It’s been discussed widely, but it seems to me what it says about the McKee method is this: It’s a defeat, but for some stories, a necessary one. Charlie Kaufman, the character and the screenwriter, is completely blocked on his heartfelt, meaningful screenplay, while his twin brother Donald chugs away happily on his commercial potboiler, consciously following the McKee rules. It’s only when Charlie accepts Donald’s help, and meets McKee in person, that he actually manages to finish his screenplay. He manages to tie various characters together in a way that completely violates the spirit of the rest of the piece and provides a pretty dull final half-hour to the film. But the alternative, the film tells us, is not to finish it at all. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the McKee method.
<I>Adaptation</I> was one of the many surprises I dealt with as I wrote this piece. It wasn’t in my original outline, but it wound up being a vital part of the essay (I hope). Maybe it’s even the part you’ll remember.
An essay, a critical work, isn’t the same thing as a story, of course. But both are narratives, and many of the same principles apply. A similar surprise cropped up in my upcoming Penny-Farthing miniseries <b>Para</b>. The central character spends the series on a quest to find out what happened to her father -- but neither she nor I knew the whole reason it was important to her, until the final issue. Then it all snapped into place, and cast the ending in a very different light than I’d originally planned.
Writing doesn’t happen by the numbers. No two writers I know work the same way, use the same system or the same routine. And I don’t want to live and work in a world where they all use the same color-chart to plot their stories.
As I say: People I respect swear by McKee. I admit right here: I don’t get it. All jargon aside, if you apply the three-act structure in all its details as an iron rule, you’re excluding a lot of terrific work. If, under criticism, you broaden its definition to prove that all good stories follow it (Act I: Setup, Act II: Conflict, Act III: Resolution), then you’ve generalized the definition to a point where it’s meaningless. At that point, it’s not a guide to writing or editing stories; it’s a fortune cookie. It’s a .sig at the end of your e-mail.
Let’s take back the night. Let’s reclaim story from STORY. Let’s turn to real writers for stories, and leave this cookie-cutter nonsense to the hacks. And no, this isn’t a call for creator ownership or self-publishing or any of the usual comics controversies. Inspired storytelling can appear in <b>Daredevil</b> or <b>Cerebus</b> or <b>Love & Rockets</b> or <b>Stray Bullets</b> or <b>Batman</b>.
But one thing’s for sure: You won’t find it by following <I>The Rules</I>.
**
Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999.
My current comics work: JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES #22, out next week, features a nice stand-alone story spotlighting Green Lantern and Hawkgirl; details and a great cover image <b>here</b> (http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc_display.html?cm_dc_itemCode=jladv22&month=August) . Within that issue, page 6, panels 3-4, and page 7, panel 1, form a complete story that follows the McKee rules absolutely. Check it out.
Next up is LONE, a new future-western series from Dark Horse/Rocket Comics in September, drawn by Jerome Opena, this year’s Russ Manning Award-winner for best newcomer. It’s likewise previewed <b>here</b> (http://www.rocketcomics.net/profile.html?SKU=12196) . More details on these and other new projects, including GIANT ROBOT WARRIORS, VAMPIRELLA, and PARA, <b>here</b> (http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/news/105884489322456.htm) and <b>here</b> (http://www.popimage.com/content/viewnews.cgi?newsid1058854264,10752,).
See you in two weeks…
**
<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 23</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
<b>The Rules</b>
First, a disclaimer: A lot of people disagree with me on this. A lot of people I like, and greatly respect, disagree with me on this. Joe Quesada, Denny O’Neil, and Brian Bendis are the first three who come to mind. This isn’t going to be one of those nice, uncontroversial columns, like the anti-war one or the <i>America’s Next Top Model</I> lovefest. You’ve been warned.
In 1995, a short book called <I>The Rules</I> became a surprise bestseller. A deliberate throwback to earlier, pre-feminist, women’s self-help books, this hard-as-nails tome promised surefire, can’t-fail tips on snagging and keeping a man. (Example: Rule Five -- Don’t Call Him and Rarely Return His Calls.) Some women swore by it and others castigated it as unenlightened game-playing. I’m sure it worked for some couples, but I will say this: It sure didn’t sound like a recipe for any relationship <b>I’d</b> want to be in.
Which brings us to Robert McKee.
Since the late 1980s, Robert McKee’s Story Seminar has travelled, carnie-like, from town to town, selling out its intensive three-day seats to prospective writers and assorted Hollywood hangers-on. In 1997, McKee boiled the seminar down to a book called, simply, <i>Story</I>, which became an immediate hardcover bestseller and has continued to sell steadily.
McKee’s teachings have become <I>The Rules</I> of Hollywood. Production assistants solemnly recite the flaws of a story, based solely on McKee’s principles. According to his website ( http://www.mckeestory.com ), graduates of the McKee course have won 19 Academy Awards, 110 Emmy Awards, 20 Writers’ Guild Awards, and 16 DGA Awards. They’ve written hit movie after hit movie, including <I>A Beautiful Mind, Bruce Almighty</I>, and <I>Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers</I>.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/mckeechart.jpg" width="400" height="415" align="right" border="0">And recently, McKee’s influence has spread to the comics field. Now, on balance, it’s great that the worlds of filmmaking and comics are drawing closer together. The more writers and artists you have switching back and forth between the fields, the more techniques and influences get stirred up, and the more work opportunities open up to talented people. (Britain’s always had more interaction between the various creative arts; the ‘80s-‘90s British Invasion of comics creators owed a lot to currents in British pop music, filmmaking, and prose writing.) That kind of cross-pollination is healthy for everyone.
That said: When you cross-pollinate, you’ve got to be critical, and not let the crap in with the good stuff. Expand the gene pool, don’t pollute it.
Robert McKee is a bunch of crap.
But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at <I>Story</I> itself, starting with the introduction. In setting up his program, McKee first lays out a few baffling principles (“<I>Story</I> is about the realities, not the mysteries of writing”). Then, to be sure you won’t think he’s just advocating films-by-the-numbers, he appeals to his audience:
“But my hope for you goes beyond competence and skill. I’m starved for great films. Over the last two decades I’ve seen good films and a few very good films, but rarely, rarely a film of staggering power and beauty. Maybe it’s me; maybe I’m jaded. But I don’t think so. Not yet. I still believe that art transforms life…I’ve written <I>Story</I> to empower your command of the craft, to free you to express an original vision of life, to lift your talent beyond convention to create films of distinctive substance, structure, and style.”
Okay. Does this sound like:
(a) a heartfelt appeal for better films
(b) a used-car salesman trying to close the deal
(c) an attempt to sucker would-be writers into taking a high-priced writing course, or
(d) both (b) and (c)?
The heart of the McKee program is the Three-Act Structure. This is the most often-quoted part of the plan, the structural template you’re most likely to hear producers (or anyone in Hollywood, really) trying to impose on a given script. In <I>Story</I>, McKee first defines an act as follows:
“An ACT is a series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene which causes a major reversal of values, more powerful in its impact than any previous sequence or scene.”
Uh, okay. McKee then posits that three acts -- three “reversals of values” -- are the minimum for a work of the length of a motion picture. (Comic books are different; most of them are only 22 pages, often barely enough for one or two acts given current pacing techniques -- which will be the subject of a future column.) He acknowledges that scripts can be written with more than three acts (a detail usually left out by his students), but cautions that this can lead to cliché, to artificial twists.
All of this sounds okay on the surface. But how does it really help us when we sit down in front of a blank page? More on that in a moment…
McKee also loves diagrams, which, of course, make everything look scientific. In the chapter “The Substance of Story,” he presents one titled “The Three Levels of [Character] Conflict,” a dartboard-shaped mess with “Innermost Self” at the center, radiating out at top to “Inner Conflicts/Personal Conflicts/Extra-Personal Conflicts”; at right to “Body/Lovers/Physical Environment”; at left to “Mind/Family/Individuals in Society”; and at bottom to “Emotions/Friends/Social Institutions.”
Now, this isn’t as nonsensical as it might sound when pulled out of context. Like most of the book, it’s a way of dividing out the various elements of character and plot into component parts.
The problem is: So what? How does it enlighten us to have this information presented in such complicated terms? I can tell you I’ve organized my entertainment time into cathode ray tube absorption hours and mass-production papyrus scanning time, but it really doesn’t add anything to the concepts of watching TV and reading books.
And, more importantly: Do you really want all this rattling around in your brain while you’re writing? Writers -- real writers -- have stories to tell, and an instinctive sense of where they start and finish. They’re not thinking about pessimistic controlling ideas, the gap between expectation and result, or negation of the negation. They’ve got characters who come alive and move in a particular direction, external events that impinge on them without too much contrivance, and an instinctive sense of structure.
They’re not flipping to the handbook every time they get to the end of an “act.” They’re <b>writing</b>.
What McKee is doing here, is attempting to teach writing to people who aren’t writers, and who don’t want to go through the hard work of learning their craft by reading, observing the way people act, studying the way successful stories are structured, and making mistakes along the way. They want shortcuts, they want tricks. They want rules.
McKee’s rules seem complex, disguised as they are by jargon. But they’re actually very simple. And because they’re simple, they’re easy to enforce -- especially by Hollywood producers, most of whom have never written anything in their lives, and have no particular desire to, but <b>know</b> they could do it better than those damn writers, if they wanted to.
But fiction doesn’t work that way. Yes, there are useful tricks here. A writer needs a bag of tricks (what Stephen King, in his highly recommended <I>On Writing</I>, calls a toolbox), the bigger the better. McKee’s scene-by-scene analysis of <I>Casablanca</I> -- why it works, where it doesn’t -- is particularly fascinating.
I’d also say that, in comics, McKee’s guidelines are more useful to editors than writers. As an editor, sometimes you’re presented with a story or scene that just doesn’t work, and it can be useful to poke at it with various scalpels. Personally, I’ve always preferred a more instinctual approach to editorial work; I think it lets me judge each work more purely on its own merits, rather than trying to fit it into a template. But I can see the value of the other approach.
And every writer is his own editor at some point, of course. Sometimes you finish a story and something’s just mysteriously off: a scene that sounded fine in the outline just isn’t coming across with the weight, or the humor, it’s supposed to have, or a character just isn’t going where you need him to go in order to make the rest of the story work. At that point, it might be useful to step back and apply one of McKee’s tools as a diagnostic device.
But in writing, often the fun is in the “mistakes” -- the places where a story deviates from the expected structure. That’s where the human moments happen, the surprises, the parts you remember. You don’t remember the structure of <I>Taxi Driver</I>; you remember Robert DeNiro’s speech to himself in the mirror.
Sometimes, when you deviate from your planned structure, it just doesn’t work; then you’re better off going back to the outline. But when it does, you don’t want to throw it out just because the second act looks weak on paper. Sometimes the second act just doesn’t matter.
Now, I’m certainly not advocating writing purely on instinct. For myself, I always need a written outline or I get lost along the way, and the more complex the story, the more detailed the outline. It can also be very helpful to pattern an original work on a familiar template. <I>Chinatown</I> follows the basic outline of a traditional hardboiled detective story, and <I>Watchmen</I> is a superhero tale, complete with alien invasion and surprise villain. But both use their base-genres as launching pads for much more ambitious, weighty stories.
And writing often takes you places you don’t expect. Here’s a minor example: I’ve been working on this essay for quite a while -- longer than most of my columns. I knew I wanted to make a statement against the McKee method, which, to my mind, has been overpraised to a ridiculous degree. That was the starting point.
As I worked on the essay, various things happened. A former boss wrote me with some points to think about. A careful look at the <I>Story</I> book suggested some elements of value, which I wanted to be fair and point out. And, unexpectedly, the film <I>Adaptation</I> came out, dealing with several of these points from a different angle.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/adaptation.jpg" width="350" height="211" align="left" border="0"> <I>Adaptation</I> is an interesting exercise, as well as a hugely entertaining movie. It’s been discussed widely, but it seems to me what it says about the McKee method is this: It’s a defeat, but for some stories, a necessary one. Charlie Kaufman, the character and the screenwriter, is completely blocked on his heartfelt, meaningful screenplay, while his twin brother Donald chugs away happily on his commercial potboiler, consciously following the McKee rules. It’s only when Charlie accepts Donald’s help, and meets McKee in person, that he actually manages to finish his screenplay. He manages to tie various characters together in a way that completely violates the spirit of the rest of the piece and provides a pretty dull final half-hour to the film. But the alternative, the film tells us, is not to finish it at all. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the McKee method.
<I>Adaptation</I> was one of the many surprises I dealt with as I wrote this piece. It wasn’t in my original outline, but it wound up being a vital part of the essay (I hope). Maybe it’s even the part you’ll remember.
An essay, a critical work, isn’t the same thing as a story, of course. But both are narratives, and many of the same principles apply. A similar surprise cropped up in my upcoming Penny-Farthing miniseries <b>Para</b>. The central character spends the series on a quest to find out what happened to her father -- but neither she nor I knew the whole reason it was important to her, until the final issue. Then it all snapped into place, and cast the ending in a very different light than I’d originally planned.
Writing doesn’t happen by the numbers. No two writers I know work the same way, use the same system or the same routine. And I don’t want to live and work in a world where they all use the same color-chart to plot their stories.
As I say: People I respect swear by McKee. I admit right here: I don’t get it. All jargon aside, if you apply the three-act structure in all its details as an iron rule, you’re excluding a lot of terrific work. If, under criticism, you broaden its definition to prove that all good stories follow it (Act I: Setup, Act II: Conflict, Act III: Resolution), then you’ve generalized the definition to a point where it’s meaningless. At that point, it’s not a guide to writing or editing stories; it’s a fortune cookie. It’s a .sig at the end of your e-mail.
Let’s take back the night. Let’s reclaim story from STORY. Let’s turn to real writers for stories, and leave this cookie-cutter nonsense to the hacks. And no, this isn’t a call for creator ownership or self-publishing or any of the usual comics controversies. Inspired storytelling can appear in <b>Daredevil</b> or <b>Cerebus</b> or <b>Love & Rockets</b> or <b>Stray Bullets</b> or <b>Batman</b>.
But one thing’s for sure: You won’t find it by following <I>The Rules</I>.
**
Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999.
My current comics work: JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES #22, out next week, features a nice stand-alone story spotlighting Green Lantern and Hawkgirl; details and a great cover image <b>here</b> (http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc_display.html?cm_dc_itemCode=jladv22&month=August) . Within that issue, page 6, panels 3-4, and page 7, panel 1, form a complete story that follows the McKee rules absolutely. Check it out.
Next up is LONE, a new future-western series from Dark Horse/Rocket Comics in September, drawn by Jerome Opena, this year’s Russ Manning Award-winner for best newcomer. It’s likewise previewed <b>here</b> (http://www.rocketcomics.net/profile.html?SKU=12196) . More details on these and other new projects, including GIANT ROBOT WARRIORS, VAMPIRELLA, and PARA, <b>here</b> (http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/news/105884489322456.htm) and <b>here</b> (http://www.popimage.com/content/viewnews.cgi?newsid1058854264,10752,).
See you in two weeks…
**