After I picked Marilyn up from work yesterday we went to the Blockbuster with our old movies and picked out some new ones. I noticed that they had just stocked "The Dresden Files," a series on Sci-Fi based on novels by Jim Butcher, about a modern-day wizard-for-hire. I knew that the books and show had a fan following in the gaming community, so I thought I'd check it out.

It was...meh. It wanted to be "Angel" about as badly as "Charmed" wanted to be "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and met with about the same degree of success, in my opinion. Which is to say, it didn't succeed. I wanted to like it, but it had internal consistency issues, hammy acting, characters acting out-of-character on occasion, really tired "hard-boiled private eye noir" cliches, and a few bouts of dialogue that were either cheese-laden or just outright amateurish attempts to be witty. It had potential, I think, but it just came off as "Harry Potter, Private Eye" without the innovation or charm. And I couldn't stop comparing it to "Angel." If you're going to make a genre television show, you do not want to be up against Joss Whedon for comparison.

But I can see myself making many of the same mistakes in my own work. That's the scary part for me. It's one thing to get the tropes of a genre down and to use them, to give your characters backgrounds and personalities, and to get multiple story threads and plot arcs going...but it's another thing entirely to give it life. To make it something that people enjoy, and want to come back to. I've got formulas up the wazoo, but I don't know if I can write something that will make the work stand out.

That makes a nice segway into the other thing I was going to mention. My Webcomics teacher has the nerve to force us to actually make a webcomic. The gall of the woman. We just put together our comics proposals last week, and this week we'll be making the final versions of the proposals and reserving space on a website to run our comics. So when I get mine up and running, I'll be sure to let you know where you can find it.

For added bemusement, my webcomic will feature comedy. Or an attempt at it.

Oh, I'm doomed.

Edit: Apparently, posters on IMDB say that the show is really nothing like the books; another case of Executive Meddling, perhaps...