After taking a look at Jenna Jemma Salume’s absolutely gorgeous Dr. Strange villain redesigns, I was reminded, oddly enough, of Websnark’s post about Dan Didio’s response to that Batgirl fan (the story of which has been making its way around the internets lately). Not so much for the content (which is an excellent essay), but more because in its argument it makes the point that change of this sort is DC’s responsibility, rather than the fans’, in many ways.
Mostly, though, what it comes down to is this: when Dan Didio asks comic fans who say they want to see more female creators working at DC ‘who should I hire?” he’s effectively asking them to do part of his job for him. It’s not my job, as a comics fan, to scout out talent that should be working at DC. Sure, sometimes it’ll become obvious to fans that Indie Creator should – if they are so inclined – be working on a title at the Big Two. But all too often I won’t even know that creator’s name (or gender) offhand because I’ll read a brief work of genius and then forget to read more by them, because there’s only so many hours in the day that I can judge content. But judging content is basically what editors do, and I would expect DC to specifically keep an eye open for talent in the same way that Marvel does. Or in the way that any publishing company does, really. Talent scouting is part of the gig when you’re an editor working for a publishing company, and I would expect Dan Didio could name me a dozen female indie creators he’d like to see working for DC. And if he isn’t able to do that, he should be able to do that.
I mean, by the standard Didio presents, apparently the reason J.T. Krul has a job is because we all demanded it.
The problem with the Spectre is that he is shackled down by continuity.
This wasn’t how it used to be. It used to be that the Spectre was sort of awesome because you could do anything you wanted to do with him. Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson had him fight demon lords using whole planets as weapons and travel through time to fight pirate ghosts in a dozen reincarnations. Neal Adams kept that high adventure, but started telling stories where the Spectre fought more horrific evils. Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo had him straight-up murdering criminals in cruel ways and telling pure horror stories. Doug Moench made him an occult detective again. John Ostrander went to the Christian theology well, again and again. Not for nothing in The Books of Magic does John Constantine snark about how the Spectre’s power levels change all the time.
But it’s that Ostrander run that nailed things in. Prior to the Ostrander run, what the Spectre did and was – these were flexible and mutable things. He was a ghost. No, he was a spirit possessing a dead man. No, he was a spirit working in context with a dead man. No, he was all of that at the same time. However, Ostrander’s take – that the Spectre was God’s Angel of Vengeance possessing a dead human as its avatar – has become the standard.
The problem is that Ostrander’s Spectre worked wonderfully for Ostrander because Ostrander wanted to write a specific set of stories about human belief and the inherent problems that the idea of a vengeful God poses with Christian dogma. That was great when he was playing off in his own corner of the DC Universe and just letting everybody else do their thing. It’s not so great when his rules for the Spectre have become unbending canon because the Ostrander Spectre is ridiculously powerful and becomes an obstacle or menace rather than a character when used by writers not as skilled as Ostrander, which is to say most people.
And this is disappointing because there’s no reason one should feel constrained to keep doing with the Spectre what Ostrander did. After all, one of Ostrander’s plot points was that the Spectre replaced Eclipso as the Angel of Vengeance, which is a reminder that God is basically arbitrary from a mortal standpoint. You can take that as far as you want. Any writer working on a Spectre comic should feel completely empowered to do anything they want to the Spectre and just say “well, because God did it.” Hell, bring back Percival Popp the Super-Cop if you like. All that should be a Spectre writer’s goal is to avoid doing rehashed Ostrander stories, because you can’t really improve on them.
(And although I like Crispus Allen as a character, the Spectre looks stupid with a goatee.)
…is very, very good. I am not sure if it is the best of the “Avengers Generation” of Marvel movies, but I am quite sure that it is my favourite, because Joe Johnston did exactly what I wanted him to do in making a Captain America movie, which was basically take the tone of the old Republic serials, pump up the action and drama, and update it into a modern, adult film which kids can still enjoy. The fact that it ends on a melancholy note (and if you know Captain America at all, you know that his origin story has to end that way) gives it a tone that no other superhero movie really has had over the last decade.
Of note: Chris Evans is a magnificent Captain America, and I think that is high praise because we generally recognize that of all the Marvel characters, Cap is probably the hardest to play: it’s very easy to turn his idealism into self-righteousness or priggishness and make him unlikeable (I’m looking at you, Mark Millar), but Evans simply emphasizes Cap’s basic decency, which is the core of the character, and the overriding theme of Cap in the movie is “a weak but noble man becomes strong,” which is what Cap’s theme should be. The supporting cast is likewise excellent: Hugo Weaving is a predictably fantastic Red Skull, Tommy Lee Jones’ colonel gets all the good lines, the Howling Commandos don’t get much screen time but are all good (special bonuses: Neal McDonough as Dum Dum Dugan and Kenneth Choi playing Jim Morita, which was unexpected but appreciated), Dominic Cooper’s Howard Stark is a clever 40s-influenced riff on RDJ’s Tony Stark, and Stanley Tucci’s Erskine gives the film heart and purpose. The only weak link is Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, who is not bad but not on par with everybody else.
My only other note is to avoid seeing it in 3D – unlike Thor, where the 3D was unnecessary but not really an issue, Captain America is less enjoyable in 3D – not because of the 3D itself, which is again unnecessary but not bad or anything, but because wearing the glasses dims the movie. In Thor, which was loaded with bright colours and lots of light, this wasn’t so much an issue, but in Captain America, where Joe Johnston is again working with the lush, dark colour palette he’s used so often for his period work, it makes the film look drab when it is not that thing. So go 2D for this one.
The trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man has once again rung the bell and the internet is debating whether or not we truly, truly need another Spider-Man movie:
Now, ASM will come out a mere five years after Spider-Man 3came out. This has been deemed a short stretch of time, but it’s only four years shorter than the stretch between Batman and Robin and Batman Begins, and nobody seemed to mind then. Is the timeframe really the difference? Is it the fact that Spider-Man 3 only sort of sucked, while Batman and Robin is really, really terrible (despite Chris Sims and David Uzimeri’s noble efforts to reclaim it as the spiritual heir of the Adam West Batman)? Is it the stark difference in tone between the Nolan Batman and the Schumacher Batman, whereas Andrew Garfield seems to be working the same Peter Parker mold that Tobey Maguire did, right down to being somebody trying to play a teenager while actually being in their late twenties?
I actually think that last one has some merit to it, because the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy has its strong points, but its overriding failure is that Spider-Man doesn’t wisecrack, mostly because Tobey Maguire is not the sort of person you imagine quipping in battle. Like, at all. He’s so achingly sincere. If Spider-Man spent the trailer making fun of baddies while beating them up, I’m sure comic fans would be jizzing in their pants over the new Spider-franchise. That having been said, I’m not entirely convinced that what works on the page for Spider-Man will work in a film: in a comic you can see Spidey’s thoughts and in a movie you have to rely on the actor portraying him to give you a sense of Peter’s inner self behind the lines. Also see Brian Michael Bendis’ probably correct assertion that Spider-Man’s constant running commentary drives everybody else around him insane and I can see where it might actually turn off audiences. But who knows?
But I digress, because what I really wanted to say is that a filmic reboot isn’t the same thing as a comic book reboot. James Bond was effectively rebooted every time a new actor played Bond, regardless of Desmond Llewellyn always being present as Q (or, nowadays, Judi Dench always being M) because there is no greater continuity to Bond films beyond “Bond is a badass, repeat” when it comes time for a new Bond. And this is sensible, because Connery’s Bond isn’t Moore’s Bond isn’t Brosnan’s Bond isn’t Craig’s Bond – they each have their own distinct style of playing the character and each man’s Bond has his own quirks and works in his own filmic universe. Moore is Bond in a wackier world than Connery is Bond, who is Bond in a far more romantic world than the one where Craig is Bond.
Indeed, if we go back to Batman again, one of the failures of the first franchise was the belief that Batman, like Bond, could be played by different actors while maintaining essentially the same narrative strands for the character, which is one of the reasons Batman Forever is so achingly bad: Kilmer isn’t Keaton. (But only one of them.) For the same reason I think that the current Batman producers made the right call by not finding a new actor to play the Joker in the Batman films but are staying away from it. An actor in a role is not unlike a new writer on a comic book: he uses his tools to tell the story of the character in the way he sees fit, with the help of his artistic collaborators (other actors/director/writer vs. artist/editor/letterer). Just as Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol isn’t anything like Arnold Drake’s Doom Patrol (or, if you like, Dan Slott and Roger Stern’s respective runs on Amazing Spider-Man, which have tonal similarities but are often wildly different), so, even with the obvious similarities, will Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man be nothing like Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man. And that’s why the reboot is a good idea.
EDIT TO ADD: In comments, Entertained Organizer writes:
It’s safe to assume that most actor/director pairings aren’t making it past three movies, so does that mean until the end of time every fourth movie in a superhero franchise needs to be the origin again?
Not necessarily, but complaining that the same story gets told over and over again doesn’t seem to be a criticism of, say, productions of Hamlet. Why, then, should it apply to the origin story of Spider-Man?
YES I JUST COMPARED STAN LEE TO SHAKESPEARE! AND DID SO NON-IRONICALLY!
My first encounter with Signalman came in an issue of Justice League of America I read when I was about five – specifically a two-parter where he was part of the Ultra-Humanite’s Secret Society of Super-Villains. (This was one of the periodic JLA/JSA teamups which were so awesome at the time and which modern-day comics writers try to duplicate, not understanding that once the JLA and JSA are basically neighbours the idea of the JLA/JSA teamup loses a lot of its cachet.) In this story, he beat up Batman. Batman. (In the same issue the Monocle beat up Hawkman, which was awesome.) And the way Signalman beat Batman was brilliant: he hypnotized a crowd of innocents and let them beat up Batman, using Batman’s unwillingness to harm innocents against him in a sort of Bronze Age-version of Bane using Batman’s own dedication against him. Clearly this was a major player!
Imagine my disappointment years later when I did some checking up and found out that Signalman was a Golden Age chump of a bad guy who wasn’t anywhere near as awesome-looking when George Perez wasn’t drawing him and who was basically a lesser equivalent of the Riddler, except worse because the Riddler’s riddles were usually at least reasonably difficult whereas Signalman’s were just stupid. And let’s be honest, at least the Riddler has a sense of style: he wears nice suits. Signalman wears fugly red-and-yellow tights, with diagonally striped underwears, and a cowled cape with “signals” all over it.
And Signalman finally figured out that warning Batman ahead of time that you were going to commit a crime was stupid, what did he do? He adopted a new identity: the Blue Bowman. And then he tried to beat Green Arrow at super-archery. What the hell, Signalman. What the hell.
A rating earned mostly by the time George Perez drew him and he was briefly kind of awesome.
So over the July 4 weekend I finally got around to seeing X-Men: First Class, and…ugh. I know that movie’s a critical hit and all, but it just left me…angry, I guess, that I’d wasted my time. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I hated the movie for the same reason I don’t really like the X-Men in the first place.
I’ve never been able to get into the X-Men. I can dig just about all the other classic Marvel guys–The Fantastic Four, Captain America, Spider-Man, you name it–but by and large my impression of the X-Men is a lot like my impression of First Class–too many characters running around in an overwrought, self-important morality play. (I liked the original 2000 movie, and I remember thinking this was because it avoided the usual X-Men bullshit.) The theme that mutant/human relations serves as a metaphor for real-world civil rights issues is a good one, but it’s trotted out all too often to justify stories where mutants just worry about their personal problems, or sit around being douchebags.
X-Men: First Class suffers from an abundance of douchebags. The movie presents three choices for the mutants–they can follow Professor X and seek peaceful coexistence with humans, they can follow Sebastian Shaw and use their abilities to live like kings, or they can follow Magneto and attack the humans before the humans hit them first. This is a great start for a story, but the movie fell apart for me when I realized I don’t really want any of these three guys to win because they’re all racists. I mean, setting aside the various obnoxious things they do to their fellow mutants, each of them clearly sees normal humans as an inferior race–Shaw treats them like lackeys and beasts of burden; Magneto treats them like irrational savages hellbent on a race war; and Xavier treats them like children who won’t understand tolerance until he talks down to them about it. This is especially problematic when the movie hinges upon Xavier and Magneto as the heroes. The end result is a three-way conflict of equally unappealing ideologies, the likes of which have not been seen since the WCW vs. NWO-Hollywood vs. NWO-Wolfpac feud of 1998.
There are advantages to making Xavier more irritating and Magneto more sympathetic. It certainly makes both of them deeper, more realistic characters. But there’s a reason fiction tends to prefer stark Manichaeism over shades of gray–people don’t want to hold their nose and back the lesser evil, they want to find a clear favorite to root for. Admittedly, in the real world, we’re always supporting one dickhead to better oppose some bigger dickhead, but in the real world we have to. If I don’t like the state of immigration politics in the US, my only choices are to live with it or try to do something about it. If I don’t like the state of mutant civil rights in the Marvel Universe, I have a third option–I can stop buying X-Men crap and it all goes away. So you can see where I think Marvel has a clear incentive to give me a mutant activist I can truly get behind.
What would help such a character win people over is if he would actually accomplish a goal. Pop quiz, when was the last time the X-Men unequivocally won anything? My first thought was the time they beat Norman Osborn in that Dark Avengers crossover, but when I say “beat” I actually mean they fled American soil rather than fight a lost cause. That’s usually how it goes–they blunder into a storyline and consider it a success if they escape with their lives. Restoring the status quo is a typical and acceptable goal for most superheroes, but that’s because most superheroes prefer the status quo. The X-Men are opposed to the status quo (“world that hates and fears them,” remember?) so every story where they don’t make the world better is sort of a failure for them. What are the X-Men comics doing these days? I guess Wolverine and Cyclops are fighting over who gets to lead the X-Men. What difference does it make? I’m sure it’ll be appealing if you’re into the personal relationship between Scott and Logan, but that’s the selling point of a soap opera, not a superhero story. A superhero story is about getting stuff done; the X-Men tend to just mope about how stuff is hard.
Some people, when stranded on a desert island, might use a pair of sticks rubbed together to create fire. Others might focus the sun through their spectacles. The resourceful might use flint and steel.
Needless to say, all of these methods are completely superfluous if you are Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.
