As you may have read, about 50 of the 1,400 newspapers that carry Doonesbury have asked to run alternative strips this week while the comic takes on the spate of laws that would require women to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds before obtaining abortions. It’s too bad they’re being timid, because the arc as a whole is terrific: ferocious and funny all at once. “Will it hurt?” asks the patient about to undergo the ultrasound. “Well, it’s not comfortable, honey,” the nurse tells her. “But Texas feels you should have thought of that.”

It’s a worthwhile reminder of the standards male creators should set for themselves when trying to write about women’s issues—and frankly, women in general. The fact that Gary Trudeau’s done amazing work over the years with characters like Joanie Caucus, Lacey Davenport, Alex Doonesbury, Kim Rosenthal, and Melissa Wheeler is the reason he can speak with authority on the subject now. The strip has consistently expanded its scope on women’s issues, and I thought it was particularly brave to explore the consequences of Melissa’s command rape, when it could have been interpreted as a pivot away from B.D.’s loss of his leg. Trudeau treated what both Melissa and B.D. were suffering as equally legitimate pain, and he made treating Melissa with respect a major part of B.D.’s recovery, expanding his world in the process. Trudeau isn’t just parachuting in to abortion because the topic is trendy, he’s not the equivalent of an all-dude panel discussing women’s health. He’s a genuine ally, and a powerful one.

Vulture has a blockbuster read on what went wrong in the campaign to market John Carter, and this strikes me as particularly illuminating:

Stanton (who also nixed all mentions of his Pixar work in the teaser for fear that people would think this film was for little kids) was working from the belief that John Carter was still as universally iconic a figure to people as Dracula, Luke Skywalker, or Tarzan. “It was my Harry Potter,” he said during an interview at Google last week that was streamed live on YouTube. “All I ever wanted when I read that book was to believe it.” He believed that audiences would gasp in delight at John Carter’s very appearance in much the same way that a Batman teaser might only need to flash the Bat Signal. As such, he felt that the very first John Carter trailer needed only to intrigue, not explicate. “To him, it was the most important sci-fi movie of all time,” recounts one Disney marketing insider present for the pitched battles. “He could see no idea in which someone didn’t know who John Carter of Mars was. But it’s not Frankenstein; it’s not Sherlock Holmes. Nobody cares. People don’t say, ‘I know what I’ll be for Halloween! I’ll be John Carter!’”

Carney fought strenuously with Stanton — insiders describe arguments that ended with the brash department head almost reduced to tears — and urged him to rethink this vision and tell a more personal story of the man, but he won every battle: Because of his outsized animated successes, Disney gave him final approval on everything. “They throw petals at his feet,” says our insider. And then the respectful trailer did nothing for the buzz. Adds a former Disney distribution exec, “You only get one shot at making a first impression … And that first trailer, it never jumped off, never did anything to catch that wave of anticipation that all new movies crave. That’s what so critical for a movie like this.”

Ultimately, if you want to make movies in the commercial system, with all the support systems and resources that entails, you probably have to acknowledge the basic realities of that system: among them, that not everyone in the universe feels the same way as you about your source material. It’s one thing if you’re tweaking Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to make a difficult book adaptable. It’s another if you’re absolutely deluded about the market penetration of the book you want to adapt, and of what parts of it will seem fresh and powerful to your audience. I absolutely support the idea that we should have greater innovation in commercial film. But there’s a difference between that and belittling the people around you who are trying to make your movie a success and maximizing the financial risk your employer is taking on you in pursuit of a private vision you’re not willing to examine with any sort of clarity.

By far one of the best things I did at SXSW was stop by a conversation yesterday morning between Mark Mothersbaugh and BMI Records’ Doreen Ringer Ross. Of course, I’ve listened to Devo, and it’s very difficult to imagine what movie scores of the last two decades would be like if Mothersbaugh hadn’t gotten into the soundtracking business. But I didn’t really have a sense of Mothersbaugh’s history and inspirations, so it was fascinating to hear him talk about both that and the role that technology’s played in guiding his work.

Among other things, I didn’t know that Devo started in the wake of the shootings at Kent State, where Mothersbaugh was studying in the art department at the time. “They shot kids who were protesting. We were trying to explain what was going on around us,” he said. “If protesting was obselete, what worked? We looked at Madison Avenue and how they got people to buy things happily. Their techniques were scary and impressive and usually involved subversion.”

In terms of what Devo and Mothersbaugh actually went on to create separately and collectively, it was clear that the emergence of new technologies and the knowledge or lack thereof that Mothersbaugh had of technology have played significant roles in opening up new directions for their work. The rise of the laserdisc, for example, made the band realize “it had music and visuals on one disc and we wanted to make content for that” format, Mothersbaugh said. And he explained how he came to pay such careful attention to movie soundtracks: “My favorite films, I would put my answering machine up by the television…I’d have a couple of 90 minute cassette tapes so I could tape my favorite movies and listen to them again. I only had the soundtrack, I didn’t have the visuals. And I think that made me really pay attention to the soundtrack.”

When he started scoring Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Mothersbaugh said he was essentially ignorant of the conventions that governed such work. “An engineer called and said ‘I like your music, but why don’t you have time cue on your tapes?’” Mothersbaugh recalled. “And I said, what’s that? Second year I learned about time code and the made it so much easier.”

And he said that scoring video games required thinking about music in many more dimensions—and assuming a much different user experience:

Movies, you see it once, maybe twice. If you’re a kid, you see it 6 times…Video games can go on hundreds of hours, it can consume someone’s life…You’ll record maybe just bass lines that are legato and it’s the beginning of a game, and Homer Simpson’s running around looking for things to eat and as he gets more things, it gets more frantic, and more sections come in…Whenever someone meets a goal, or goes down an alley, or explodes an alien’s head, the tone of the music changes…You get more time because of the gestation process. And they need the music earlier than they do in films, so you’re involved earlier in the process.

It’s refreshing to hear that kind of thoughtfulness, and that eagerness to expand into new forms and new kinds of experiences. And there’s something fun about hearing Mothersbaugh discuss everything from scoring the Rugrats to dealing with the fact that Wes Anderson is finicky: “He didn’t like bass sounds. He didn’t like brass.” There’s no particular division there between adult and kid stuff, between movies that nod towards art and whipsmart cartoons, which makes sense: all of them are yearning towards a kind of loony joy.

I’ll have a recap up tomorrow morning after I get home from Texas. Thanks for bearing with me. Much to share and tell in the days ahead.