Okay, follow along with me here. It’s well-known that George Lucas was a big Kurosawa fan during his formative years as a film-maker, and that he cites ‘The Hidden Fortress’ by Kurosawa as a key inspiration for ‘Star Wars’. Some have even described Lucas’ movie as a science-fiction remake of ‘The Hidden Fortress’, much the same way as ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ is a Western remake of ‘Yojimbo’. Which leads me to wonder, what might have happened if Lucas had been inspired by a different Kurosawa film? What if it wasn’t ‘The Hidden Fortress’ that shaped the direction of his classic film?

The Seven Samurai: Tatooine moisture farmer Luke Skywalker stumbles upon information that his insignificant homeworld is about to become the crux in the Empire’s plan to destroy the Rebellion. Princess Leia of Alderaan, a key figure in the Rebellion, is coming to this distant world to exchange vital information with Rebel spies; little does she know that the Empire has already learned of her mission, and has set a trap for her with a hidden garrison of Imperial troops…a garrison led by the Emperor’s personal enforcer, Darth Vader. Skywalker longs to help the princess, but he’s only one man, and an untrained fighter at that; he needs help if he’s going to save her. So he recruits a rag-tag band to help him: An exiled Jedi Knight named Ben Kenobi, a smuggler with a heart of gold named Han Solo, a bestial Wookie named Chewbacca, a grizzled bounty hunter named Boba Fett, and a Rebel pilot named Wedge Antilles. The six of them rescue the princess from the initial ambush; and together, the seven of them retreat into the Tatooine desert, where they use Ben’s knowledge of the terrain to slowly winnow away the Empire’s advantage of numbers. In the end, although Ben and Boba die in battle, Leia succeeds in her mission and (possibly) begins the end of the Empire.

Yojimbo: In the distant galactic backwater of Mos Eisley, Ben Kenobi (a former Jedi Knight who fled to the Galactic Rim after the fall of his order) becomes embroiled in the middle of a war between rival gang lords Jabba the Hutt and Xizor. He hires himself out first to one, then the other, playing both sides against the middle while he secretly works to clean up “the most wretched hive of scum and villainy.” The end features him dueling against Jabba’s top enforcer, Boba Fett. (The scary thing is, this requires only minimal changes to fit into continuity…)

Rashomon: In the aftermath of the death of Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi at the hands of Sith Lord Darth Vader, we see differing interpretations of the event from Vader, Kenobi, Leia, and finally the droid duo of C-3P0 and R2-D2. In the end, though we see many versions of the final battle between the two, the truth remains elusive and unknowable.

The Lower Depths: Owen Lars and his wife, Beru, run a small flophouse on Tatooine for scoundrels down on their luck. Among them is Han Solo, a smuggler and thief, and Ben Kenobi, a mysterious wise old man with a troubled past. Han is having an affair with Beru, but his growing friendship with Beru’s nephew Luke makes him consider breaking it off. At the same time, his admiration for Ben makes him think about finding a better life. When he discovers that Owen and Beru beat Luke, he breaks into their house to defend his young friend, only to wind up inadvertently killing Owen. Beru claims that he did it to continue their affair, which ends his friendship with Luke, and Ben flees when Imperial stormtroopers come to arrest the smuggler. In the end, Beru is arrested as well, leaving Luke without guidance and support.

Ran: Emperor Palpatine’s ambitious plan for his succession backfires on him when he delegates power to three of his most senior advisors, Grand Moff Tarkin, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and his apprentice and “son” created through Jedi magic, Darth Vader. Vader questions the wisdom of splitting the Empire between so many ambitious men, and is disowned and banished along with his droids. But Vader is proven right when Tarkin and Thrawn go to war over the Empire, and both of them try to put the Emperor out of the way as a potential obstacle; with his Royal Guard slaughtered, the insane Palpatine is left to wander the countryside. There he is discovered by R2D2 and C3Po, two of Vader’s droids that have remained loyal to the Emperor. They take refuge in a peasant’s hut on the swamp world of Dagobah, only to find it occupied by Yoda, Palpatine’s old Jedi foe who he had ordered to be blinded.

Vader discovers what happened to Palpatine and gathers an army to find him; this is viewed as an attempt at conquest by Tarkin and Thrawn, who send their own armies to stop him. In the final battle, the three armies weaken each other to the point where the Rebel Alliance is able to overthrow them; it’s revealed, in the end, that this was the ultimate goal of Tarkin’s wife, Mon Mothma. Tarkin kills Mothma, but is himself killed when Rebel ships blow up his Star Destroyer. Vader finds Palpatine, but is killed by Boba Fett, an assassin sent after him by Tarkin before his death. Overcome with grief, Palpatine dies, marking the end of the Empire. The film ends with a shot of Yoda, blind and alone on Dagobah, the only survivor of the film’s events.

(And by the way, before anyone thinks to comment on it, yes, I know ‘Ran’ came out after the trilogy was finished. If I can postulate an alternate universe where Lucas based ‘Star Wars’ on other movies, I can postulate one where he did it a decade later.)

There’s a comic book project I’ve been wanting to write for a while now, and since a) there aren’t any spoilers involved, and b) I’ll probably never get to write it anyway, I thought I’d share it with everyone. It’s based on a fairly obscure, but interesting piece of comics trivia: In Uncanny X-Men #165, during the Brood saga, Kitty Pryde is described as 14 for the first time. Her birthday, we’re told, passed while she was in space. (So Lockheed? Officially the Coolest Birthday Present Ever.)

Then, in Excalibur #15, we see her celebrating her 15th birthday in the company of Saturnyne. (Who she thinks is Courtney Ross at the time. God, it’s hard explaining Chris Claremont comics.) These two comics were both written by the same author, so there’s no question of continuity mistakes or differences in authorial intent. The span of X-books from January 1983 to late July 1990 are fully intended to take place over roughly one 365-day span of time.

And since this occurred during one of the most crossover-rich periods in comics history, we have plenty of mutual data points to tie the other Marvel books into a cohesive timeline. “January 1983” doesn’t necessarily translate across every title to the exact same moment in Marvel Time, but we know that Secret Wars happened within that span. So Johnny and Alicia started their relationship during that year, Tony Stark lost his company and had his bout with alcoholism, the Hulk turned intelligent, and Spider-Man got his black costume.

Likewise, Secret Wars II happened in that year. Which places Xavier’s mugging and subsequent exile to space, the Hulk’s exile to the dimensional crossroads, Power Pack’s…um, almost their entire career, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Thor’s turning into a frog (in fact, the whole Simonson run was during that year), the founding of the West Coast Avengers, Tony Stark’s retaking his company from Stane and Stane’s subsequent suicide, the end of the Dire Wraith Wars, Cyclops’ marriage and leaving of the X-Men, the entire freaking existence of the Beyonder in the Marvel Universe, Kristoff’s becoming Doom and Doom’s war against Kristoff, the return of Jean Grey and the founding of X-Factor…deep breath…all in that year too.

Oh, and the Mutant Massacre hit in that year, and the Fall of the Mutants (which means that by extension, the Armor Wars saga, Captain America being defrocked and replaced by Super-Patriot, and then returning to the role as Super-Patriot became USAgent also all hit in that year…oh, and the deaths of the X-Men and their subsequent resurrection and relocation to Australia…) And Inferno hit in that year, so that meant that Johnny and Alicia’s marriage, the Thing becoming leader of the FF, Quicksilver’s descent into and return from mental illness, the entire career of the Hobgoblin, the first appearance of Venom, the death of Kraven the Hunter, Ms Marvel becoming the She-Thing, the Hulk’s career as a Vegas enforcer, the Thing’s career as a pro wrestler, the Masters of Evil’s assault on Avengers’ Mansion, the Avengers disbanding and subsequent reformation as a team consisting of Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, Gilgamesh, Thor and Cap, the Avengers’ relocation to Hydrobase, Daredevil’s secret identity being discovered by the Kingpin, Storm losing and regaining her powers, the destruction of the X-Mansion, the temporary transformation of New York into a demonic netherworld…and although we can’t be sure, since Excalibur didn’t participate in that particular crossover, it also looks like Acts of Vengeance happened around then. So that adds the founding of the New Warriors, the destruction of Hydrobase…

Basically, it was a busy freaking year. 🙂 (You may feel free to contribute further momentous events in the comments section, but I think you get the idea.) The plan for the series I want to write borrows from DC’s “52”; only instead of telling a “missing” year of continuity in real time, this 52-issue weekly series would go back and retell that 365-day span of Marvel Time in real time. The reverse of decompression, it would try to convey to the readers the sheer chaos that exists in the Marvel Universe, and what it feels like to live in a world moving that fast. A year where snow fell in summer, where gods and more-than-gods walked the earth, a year where Iron Man quit and Captain America got fired, a year of destruction and creation and joy and sorrow…Marvel. One Year.

Anyone interested in reading that?

Fellow MGK contributor Matthew Johnson posted a couple of weeks ago about his undeniably unfilmable (but interesting) idea for a Doctor Who story, and the comments section turned towards everyone else’s idea for a Doctor Who story they probably couldn’t do. Which, in my case, has perhaps less to do with the story idea and more to do with the fact that I can’t really see the producers of Doctor Who accepting an unsolicited pitch from a novice screenwriter based on his blog post about the idea, but I’ve accepted a long time ago that I have no idea how to break into television. (Television studios, I can do. But that’s another story.)

My idea comes from noticing the pattern that the series has established over its first five seasons in its “Doctor Who meets a famous creative person” episodes (‘The Unquiet Dead’, ‘The Shakespeare Code’, ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’, ‘Vincent and the Doctor’.) The creative person runs afoul of a menace that is peculiarly fitted to their creative endeavors, with a Doctor Who twist (Dickens meets alien “ghosts”, Shakespeare fights evil witches from another dimension, Agatha Christie wanders into a murder mystery that involves space wasps, and Vincent van Gogh discovers aliens that, due to his unique perception, only he can see.) The menace brings the creative person to a personal low, even as the Doctor finds himself unable to thwart it; he succeeds by using praise to bring out the creative person’s unique gifts, allowing them to defeat the menace in a way the Doctor can’t. Finally, the Doctor reveals a hidden truth to the creative person: Their gifts are unique and their works will endure throughout eternity.

Naturally, I had to subvert the formula. 🙂

In this story, the Doctor and Amy wind up in England, in 1844. The politician and author Edward Bulwer-Lytton is at a personal low, having been forced out of Parliament, separated from his wife, and dealt with the death of his mother…and he’s not handling it well. In fact, he’s having a nervous breakdown, hearing voices that tell him to excavate a massive hole on his estate.

The Doctor finds this highly suspicious. Not because he thinks Edward is insane, but because the TARDIS is picking up high-end telepathic broadcasts that suggest he very much isn’t. He insinuates himself into Edward’s company in order to find out just what’s at the bottom of the hole, and isn’t surprised to find that it’s an alien race. The Vrilya, as they are called, came through from another dimension that was losing its cohesion, and when they escaped, well…beggars can’t be choosers. A portal to a maze of subterranean caverns, with no way up to the surface, still beat a world where the laws of physics were breaking down.

The Vrilya are angelic, intensely powerful, and bring with them a miracle substance that is the pinnacle of their technology, called “vril”. They plan to offer Edward, and by extension Britain, the substance in exchange for a path for the rest of their species to come through. With the prospect of all his shames and failures erased, Edward is sorely tempted.

But the Doctor realizes that vril is more dangerous than it appears. Its energies are actually the cause of the destabilization of the Vrilya’s home universe, and if they begin using vril in large quantities on Earth the way they did back home, well…”unmitigated disaster” barely begins to describe it. The Vrilya don’t take well to what they see as a death sentence for their people (they see life without the miracle of vril as a fate worse than death) and use their powers to banish the Doctor to their universe.

But the Doctor makes contact with Edward through the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits (the ones that let him instantly understand any language.) He convinces Edward that his mind is receptive to the Vrilya, but that link works both ways–he needs to open himself up completely to the Vrilya, let them see the fullness of the human condition as expressed through the mind of one of its most celebrated authors. Startled back to normality by the Doctor’s praise, Edward does so…and unexpectedly, the Vrilya flee back to their home dimension. The Doctor pops out as they pop back in, relieved to be back. “Where did they go?” asks Amy, who really hasn’t had much to do in this episode. “Oh, probably off to try again somewhere else. Anywhere the portals can open. Anywhere that’s not here.”

“And my works, Doctor?” Edward asks. “Will they endure? Will I be remembered, in ages hence?” The Doctor smiles thinly, and assures Edward that the name Bulwer-Lytton will be famous for centuries to come. But unlike Vincent, he decides not to give him a ride in the TARDIS to show him exactly how…

Somewhere in the Doctor Who production offices, deep within the BBC Wales complex (if there is such a place — go with me here) there is surely a list of “Stories Not to Pitch Us.” Nearly all serials have a list like this, consisting of stories ideas that are unsuitable because they change the lead character too much, because they hurt the franchise, or just because you don’t seriously think you’re the first freelancer to pitch that, do you? The following story idea is undoubtedly on that list:

It begins, as so many Doctor Who stories do, with the TARDIS arriving on a future Earth where everything seems calm and orderly… too calm and orderly, at least to the Doctor (“Never trust a utopia,” he’ll say to whatever fetching young lady is his companion at the time.) A bit of investigation reveals that this peace and order is, indeed, artificial, but it’s not achieved by force: instead all war, violence and conflict are defused before they even begin by a mysterious, unseen figure only ever referred to as “He” or “Him.” The Doctor can sense that time manipulation is afoot, and begins to suspect that this is the work of Daleks, or the Master, or even a lost Time Lord who somehow survived the Time War. Until he finds a little asteroid in the middle of nowhere where time literally stands still and finds the machine that is constantly making all those little alterations to history, to maintain “His” utopia —

— and finds it’s the TARDIS. His TARDIS. And it’s screaming, because it’s being made to violate time in ways it was never made to do — and to end history itself, grinding it down into the stasis of enforced peace.

Now He makes his appearance — he’s been watching the Doctor for some time, of course — and reveals that he is a future incarnation of the Doctor. It’s not clear whether he’s the last regeneration or whether he somehow extended his lifespan beyond the normal limit for Time Lords, but one thing is clear: he’s on his last go-round. (We’ll call him “Doctor Thirteen” for convenience; if this were a two-parter, that would be a good title for the second episode.) He explains how he saved the Earth, and the universe, again and again, and still it needed saving; how his allies died, and he got older and older, but his enemies just kept coming back.

Now the Doctor is given a choice: he can leave, and let things run their course until he winds up here again, or Doctor Thirteen will use his bastardized TARDIS to make him relive all the agonizing steps between them almost instantaneously. And the Doctor runs, but it’s no use because Doctor Thirteen is older and cannier than he is, and knows all his tricks, and in the end the Doctor is caught once more. The Doctor’s fetching young companion rescues him, of course, but it’s too late: in just a few minutes he’s experienced everything that brought Doctor Thirteen to where he is — the last defender of the Earth, all alone.

Except that our Doctor isn’t alone: though his companion couldn’t save him in time, the fact that she was there for him makes him realize that the only way he’ll ever run out of allies is if he turns humans into something not fit to be his companions. Together he and his companion fight Doctor Thirteen and defeat him, and Doctor Thirteen begs him not to destroy everthing he’s built, to have pity — after all, he was the Doctor once. But the Doctor turns back from the door to his TARDIS, shakes his head and says “Not you. You were never me.”

So the buzz around the internets is that Gore Verbinski will be remaking The Lone Ranger, with Johnny Depp playing Tonto. Let us leave aside the fact that despite Depp being generally pretty cool he is still bleach for the purposes of whitewashing a character, because every other site talking about this seems to have forgotten that Johnny Depp, despite some purported Cherokee ancestry, is still basically a white guy.

No, let us instead discuss the merits of a Lone Ranger remake, which has not received entirely kind press from the movie blogging community, mostly because the Lone Ranger seems sort of corny. Which is ridiculous, of course, because the guy has the finale of the William Tell Overture – one of the most exciting bits of classical music ever – as his theme, and no trailer with a lot of explosions and horse ridin’ and shootin’ set to the William Tell Overture is going to be boring.

If they asked me to write it, I’d go to the Mask of Zorro well and make it generational. Have the original Lone Ranger emerge out of the Bleeding Kansas period – Texas Rangers were known to occasionally cross into Kansas, and the possibility that a group of Texas Rangers could have been involved in something horrific involving escaped slaves – or at least allowed it to happen – and disillusion the Lone Ranger so much so that he would abandon his unit and become, well, the Lone Ranger? That seems entirely reasonable.

Now, if the Lone Ranger gets his start in northern Texas and Kansas, that means he’s not very far off from the historic stomping grounds of several of the Apache tribes. So let’s say Tonto is an Apache. The Apache were, frankly, some of the baddest asses of the southwest native tribes of the time – a lot of other tribes thought, not unfairly, that they were kind of crazy. And they didn’t like anybody.

So why the Lone Ranger/Tonto partnership? Well, in Apache legend, there’s a pair of heroes/demigods/myths (their exact status is unclear) named Child-Born-of-Water and Killer-of-Enemies. These two always work as a pair. Were the Lone Ranger – not yet the Lone Ranger yet, not really – to stumble into an Apache camp, half-dead from exhaustion and thirst, in such a way as to resemble many of the legends surrounding the beginning/birth/genesis of Child-Born-of-Water, perhaps the medicine men of the camp would suggest that he not be killed off in the usual way but watched closely, to make sure this was indeed a child of Usen. Sticking Tonto – antisocial even among his own, but with the Power that very few Apache have, to leave no tracks and know men’s thoughts – with him to make sure he didn’t die of eating the wrong snake. Eventually sending the two of them off together to defeat the enemies of mankind, as the legends demand that Child-Born-of-Water and Killer-of-Enemies do. And thus begins a partnership that lasts twenty years.

Twenty years later, with the Ranger and Tonto in their late forties, it’s a new era: the peak of the Wild West, and not coincidentally the sunset of the Apache nations. Mangas Coloradas was killed in 1863. Cochise is jailed in 1872, dies in 1874. His son Taza dies in 1876. Geronimo lasts until 1886, but by the 1870s he’s reduced to small-scale guerilla raids and escaping from the whites on a regular basis.

This is when the Lone Ranger dies, in the course of protecting innocents (as you might expect). Tonto tries to go home, but by this point there’s not really any home left for him to which he might return. And one of those people is a young man whose family was murdered by a rail baron relentlessly expanding west, who only wants revenge – but, as Tonto sees, for a second time a white man satisfies the legends of Child-Born-of-Water’s birth…

See? You’d go see that.

Interior, Gambit’s bedroom. The room is lit by candlelight, with a bottle of champagne chilling on ice in a bucket on the bedside table. The bed is freshly made with silk sheets. A stereo is playing in the corner (if we can show the lyrics, it’s Barry White.)

Enter Gambit and Rogue.

ROGUE: There’s just no point, Remy. I know you love me, but my powers are my curse, we both know that. The second ah touch you, ah’ll steal your mind and your powers.

GAMBIT: So you keep saying, ma petite chere…but I’m a gambler, non? I’m willing to press my luck, especially when the rewards…

He leans in.

GAMBIT: …are worth the risk.

Rogue pulls away, but not too far.

ROGUE: Ah, ah can’t, ah can’t risk it…

GAMBIT: You’re not the one taking the risk, amie. I am…

He leans in again, and this time his lips make contact.

GAMBIT: Definitely worth it.

Rogue’s eyes widen in shock. Speechless, she allows Gambit to lead her to the bed. He sits down and pulls her down to him. They kiss again, more passionately and longer this time.

ROGUE: Ah don’t believe it!

GAMBIT: Neither do I, chere. You never expected a man to kiss you but you still wore flavored lip gloss.

Rogue giggles, and the two of them clinch together in a longer, more fevered embrace. Gambit pulls Rogue’s gloves off and takes her hand in his, and then reaches out to undress her further…

Suddenly, the stereo stops.

GAMBIT: Merde!

He leaps to his feet.

ROGUE: What’s the problem, sugah? It’s probably just the end of the CD, and…say, did you hear something?

GAMBIT (fumbling with the stereo player): No! No, ma petite chere fille amie, it’s probably just, um, the pounding of your heart.

ROGUE: No, it sounds like it’s coming from under the bed.

GAMBIT: What? Ahahahahaha! Oh, that’s rich. There’s nobody under the bed!

ROGUE: Who said anything about a person?

GAMBIT: Nobody! You’re just imagining crazy talk, that’s all. Worrying about nothing. Now let me–

ROGUE: That was a thump. Ah distinctly heard a thump.

GAMBIT: It was nothing! I mean, nobody! I mean–

Rogue gets up and kneels down next to the bed. She peers underneath the hanging bedspread.

ROGUE: Oh mah God! Is that Leech!?!

GAMBIT: I can explain, ma petite chere petite fille petite–

ROGUE: Did you tie him up down there?

GAMBIT: A little, maybe, but it was for us!

ROGUE: When were you going to let him go?

GAMBIT: Um. Depends. You gonna stay the night?

“Batman, Incorporated”, huh? Well, it sounds like an interesting idea, and Grant Morrison does have a pretty good track record in comics…but I think it might run afoul of the Five-Year Rule. What’s the Five-Year Rule, you might ask? Well, it’s actually more of a guideline than a rule. But roughly, it equates to, “The success or failure of any change to a comic book ‘status quo’ is roughly equivalent to the degree of recognition the book has from a fan who hasn’t picked it up in five years.”

To give some examples: I’m a fan of, say, Spider-Man. I haven’t read the series in a few years, and I decide to step into a comics store and browse the latest issue on the stands. I pick up a copy of “Amazing Spider-Man”…and Spider-Man is a Starbuck’s barista named Ben Reilly, with no sign of MJ, the Daily Bugle, Aunt May, or anything else they recognize. I shrug, and put that comic back on the shelves. Maybe I come back in another year, maybe I don’t.

Or I’m an X-Men fan. I’ve been away for a while, and I pick up an issue…the team is headquartered in San Francisco instead of the X-Mansion, and Cyclops is the team leader. But there are still characters and sub-plots I recognize, and the basic concept–mutants protecting humans from world that fears and hates them–remains more or less intact. I decide to pick up an issue for old time’s sake, and who knows? I might even get hooked again.

Or I’m a Hulk fan. I pick up an issue of the book, and the Hulk is red and smart and uses guns. I roll my eyes, since as an established comics fan I know that it’s probably just a gimmick and the real Hulk will come back soon.

But you get the basic idea. The further away the series gets from that mental snapshot the fan takes of “what the series is like”, the less chance that they’ll come back to it. Iron Man has machine-controlling powers due to a techno-virus called “Extremis”? Um, okay, we can kind of see it. Iron Man as a teenager from an alternate timeline who has to wear the armor to stay alive due to fatal injuries he sustained in battle with his future self? Check, please! The concept of a series has a lot less elasticity than writers, editors, and even established fans think. (Admit it, you all felt a subconscious feeling of relief when Bruce Wayne came back as Batman, didn’t you?)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m boring, and my column “eats”. 🙂 No, seriously, you’re wondering about the Silver Age. Surely, turning Green Lantern into a space cop and the Atom into a shrinking scientist and Hawkman into a different kind of space cop and the Flash into a different kind of scientist…that has to violate the Five-Year Rule, right? But the difference is, back then those characters didn’t have a fanbase to speak of. Comics were a different animal back then, one without a devoted group of long-term fans who would follow a series for years. The Silver Age revamps built their fanbase from scratch, something that comics have a lot more trouble doing these days without a newsstand distribution system. It’s something that comics companies might bear to keep in mind during their next reboot.

If I was to run a comic company, here’s how I’d do it. I’d start with a small staff of writers, a moderate-sized staff of artists, an editor (we’d have a small stable of launch titles, all of them family-friendly adventure stories, most of them super-hero comics) and an art director…and a few assistants for the latter two, for reasons which will become apparent. (And plenty of venture capital funding coming in, because you don’t expect this kind of company to turn a profit for a while.)

The art director is the key, because I’m going with the Archie route: We would have a house style, and all the artists at the company would be expected to conform rigidly to that house style. (Keep in mind that when I say, “the Archie route”, I don’t actually mean “looking like Archie”. I picture it as being something fairly timeless, a sort of Neal Adams/Jim Aparo hybrid. Something that you could still look at twenty years later and say, “Ooh, that’s nice.”) But the point is, we are not chasing big names here. If you come to my company expecting to be rich and famous, you’re coming to the wrong place.

Which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t have credits. On the company website, and on the inside front cover of every book, it would say, “(Insert Title Here) was produced by:” and it would proceed to list the writers, artists, editors, and art director that made the book possible. You would be able to say to your family, “Yes, I work in comics.” But you wouldn’t, y’know, be able to say, “I do all the work around here. Give me a raise.” This is not a place for rock stars. (Actually, you would, in a sense. Artists would be paid an hourly wage, but they would also get completion bonuses for every page they did that passed the art director’s approval. So the faster you draw, the more money you make.) To make up for the fact that I’m treating it like a job and not like a creative opportunity, you get the sorts of things you get in a job–hourly wages, health and dental, 401K, et cetera. This is a career for people who want a career.

The books themselves would be done assembly-line style. The writers break down the plot into pages, and each page breakdown is circulated to the pencilers to draw. They, in turn, pass the finished pages to the inkers, then back to the writers for dialoguing, then to the letterers, and then to the colorists. (Every step goes through an editor/assistant/art director/assistant, as well, just to make sure it all comes out nice.) Once the story is finished (all stories are thirty pages long, and entirely self-contained. No multi-parters, no exceptions) it goes up on the website, which is advertiser-supported free content. Anyone who wants to read the comic can do so there.

Or, if they don’t like that, they can read the magazine. It’d come out monthly, and be 120 pages long (90 pages of story, thirty pages of ads, contains three different titles.) This would be sold on newsstands, alongside magazines like Shonen Jump. For those who only wanted to follow one title in dead-tree format, there would be semi-annual anthologies, printed in manga-style digests, and cheap black-and-white “Reader’s Editions” that would be collected in eighteen-issue chunks. Oh, and the occasional hardcover “Best Of”. And, once there’s enough backlog material out there, cheap reprint editions that collect a few random stories together and can fit in supermarket checkout lanes, a la the Archie reprints you see everywhere.

So there’s my idea of the ideal super-hero comic book company. No big stars, heavy emphasis on the characters instead of the creators, self-contained family-friendly stories, and lots of reprinting. In short, the Archie model applied to super-heroes. So who wants to be the first to tell me I’m crazy?

One of the things writers don’t talk about much is the loss of your babies. Not actual babies, mind you. That would be terrible.1 No, what I’m talking about is the experience of coming up with a really great idea, filing it away in your Idea Box to be used later, and then watching, haplessly, as somebody else uses it.

My favorite example of this happening to me is probably Demonic. Demonic was an idea that I had and then fleshed out, a serial narrative – could be television, could be comics, could be short stories or novels. It was always on the back end of my “to-do” list: a story about a demon who, for reasons of his own, had decided that Armageddon was kind of a bad bag and that wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have one?

Not a new idea, of course. Good Omens did it first. But I figured I had enough of a spin on it that my take was fresh: Darius, my demon, was an antihero rather than a lovable misfit like Gaiman/Pratchett’s Crowley. He wasn’t saving the Earth because he loved it, he was averting Armageddon because it offended his sense of pride. He didn’t bring along humans for companionship; he brought them along because he needed them to do very specific things for his Plan (always, always the capital P).2 It was distinct enough that it was its own story, a sort of “what if the Doctor was really kind of a bad person but still the protagonist” idea. I rather liked it. Plus I got to have the end of the world happen in Indianapolis, because you can justify anything in a story like this and why not?

Of course, then Eric Kripke came along and created Supernatural, which has way more in common with Demonic than Good Omens did; more political intrigue among the ranks of Heaven and Hell, more brutal in tone than Omens was, and oh yes it’s another story about averting Biblical Armadeggon and maybe you can do two of them but you can’t do three, not with that many similarities. I watched with that odd combination of delight and nausea as ideas I had also occurred to the writing staff of the show: the crossroads demons, the Croatoan plague3 and hellhounds had all been on my list, among other things.

So now Demonic gets shoved into the “scavenge” box, which is my mental box of ideas other people have also had but might have something I can use later. One thing I think I’ll eventually use somewhere else is my idea for Uriel, the archangel of Death. See, of late the Death pendulum has swung back towards Death generally being an unpleasant sort of anthropomorphic concept, as Neil Gaiman’s Death has faded into the background and meaner, more sadistic Deaths have taken the forefront. Supernatural’s Death is really kind of a prick, killing off an entire restaurant of people just to have a meet-and-greet, and he just piles on with other Deaths who are kind of dicks.4 Pratchett’s Death in the Discworld books is really the only holdout on the “Death is probably a pleasant enough fellow” side of the equation.

So my idea was that Uriel would appear as a kindly old hippie – think Tommy Chong in his late sixties, shuffling around a hospital in a fringed brown jacket in sandals, escorting the ghosts of children on towards whatever came next. I rather liked that image; I think it’s got some oomph to it.5 The idea of Death as perhaps just a bit mournful, a dedicated and concientious professional doing a really, really terrible job, is one that I think works. (Pratchett’s Death comes close, but is, when you get down to it, a bit too alien to really get existentially sad about his work. He might have a bit of a depressive moment, but he always rebounds. What I’m talking about here instead is a general sense of melancholy.)

That’s how writers recycle their own unused chaff, trying to find a little wheat they can still use. Because the great secret of writing is that you are not a special flower and your ideas are not unique snowflakes; somebody else will have them if you don’t use them.

1. Also writers would talk about it all the time and write novels about it. And have. But I digress. [↩]
2. Of course, over the course of the series discovering friendship et cetera humanized by his drafted “companions” and so forth. [↩]
3. I was all NO SERIOUSLY I EVEN NAMED IT THE SAME GODDAMNED THING. That one physically hurt. [↩]
4. See also: Final Destination’s unseen Death, who really is a total asshole. [↩]
5. That is a very technical term. Oomph is quantifiable. For example, Tom Mota spraypainting the billboard in Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End is a sequence with forty-one oomph. [↩]

No, you haven’t accidentally mis-clicked on an article for Cracked.com. This is still Mightygodking.com, even if I’m not him and I’m totally stealing a gimmick from Cracked’s lists (that are more like crack than Cracked, honestly. Once you start clicking on them, it’s five hours of timesink before you know it.) Because let’s face it: Lists, especially non-comprehensive lists that you can add onto yourself in the comments section, can be fun.

This time, it’s about film adaptations. We’ve entered a true golden age of film adaptations in some ways, especially when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy films; the improvements in effects technology, combined with the general viewing audience’s increasing familiarity with sci-fi tropes, has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and effective adaptations that bring the book (or comic book) to life. But sometimes, I find myself wondering if “faithful” should really be the defining quality of an adaptation. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, and vice versa. By way of counter-example, here are five films that changed a lot, but still made excellent movies.

5. Blade Runner. This one is low on my personal list because, despite it being a beloved cult film that influenced a generation of movie-makers, I really don’t care for it. I’ve watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, pretty much every cut they put out, and it always feels like a slow, shapeless mess that wastes Harrison Ford’s talents as an actor (or, arguably, where Harrison Ford wastes his own talents as an actor–Ford can be brilliant, but you can tell when he’s not emotionally invested in a project, and he clearly sleepwalks through this one.) But I’m aware that it is much adored by a great many people, and I can appreciate that even if I don’t share it.

And to the extent that it is good, it’s good specifically because it abandons Dick’s original novel; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” never really looks at the moral ambiguity present in the Replicants, instead taking the claim that they lack empathy at face value. “Blade Runner” admits the flaw in this entire concept, questioning the morality of gunning down people who look human, act human, and may in fact be more human than human. In fact, I’d say that the less faithful an adaptation of this novel is, the better it could be. (Witness “The Wedding Banquet”, which abandons every single aspect of the novel and is absolutely charming. 🙂 )

4. The Collector. This is an interesting one, because in terms of plot, it’s totally faithful to the original novel…but the original novel was absolutely unadaptable in its existing form. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a kidnapping told first from the perspective of the kidnapper, then from the perspective of the victim, then returning to the kidnapper’s point of view for the finale. The narration manages the almost impossible trick of making you understand the motives of the kidnapper and even sympathize with him at times (the victim’s POV scenes make her out to be every bit as snooty as the kidnapper’s persecution complex imagines her to be)…right before hitting you in the gut with the final sequences.

The film adaptation doesn’t have the ability to do any of that. But with nothing more than a tiny bit of voice-over narration, it still conveys that same sensibility, solely through the acting talents of Terrance Stamp. His body language and facial expressions convey everything that the film can’t show in other ways, and Samantha Eggar strikes just the right note of ambiguity as the victim (it helps that Eggar shot Stamp down for a date when they were at college. Nothing says awkward like actual awkwardness.)

3. Memento. I’m going to try not to gush here, but…the original short story was a very clever idea, expertly presented in an artfully precise short story. Christopher Nolan then took that idea and used it as the seed for a chillingly brilliant film that explores the nature of revenge in a way that almost no Hollywood movie ever does. Seeing that final/first scene, and realizing where Leonard’s quest for revenge has taken him, is a moment far more powerful than any of the various “Death Wish” clones out there ever deliver. Lots of films talk about how revenge is ultimately hollow, but they usually do that as an obligatory wrist-slap after the hero gets heaping helpings of juicy, delicious revenge that we can vicariously enjoy. “Memento” radically departs from that model (which is equally present in the original short story) and is all the better for it.

2. The Princess Bride. I actually read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember watching the whole thing in a state of constant, low-grade dread because I knew how the book ended. I know there will always be purists who feel that the original, unhappy ending is somehow “truer” (I hear the same thing a lot about “The Little Mermaid”, too) but I think that sometimes we need a little bit of fairy-tale in our life. We need happy endings in stories precisely because we don’t get them very often anywhere else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting them. And “The Princess Bride” is just an unabashedly beautiful film with plenty of heartfelt moments (I defy anyone in the world not to shed a tear the first time they hear Inigo say, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s not exactly a “Memento”-level commentary on the hollowness of revenge, but it gets the point across.) Most interestingly, this is a rare case where the writer and the adapter are one and the same person; William Goldman was undoubtedly proud of his novel, but he wasn’t afraid to kill his children if it resulted in a good movie, and “The Princess Bride” is one of the best.

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? If you’ve never read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?”, the novel that formed the basis for the film, let me save you some time: Don’t. It’s downright inept, a muddled murder mystery full of red herrings and an ending that comes so far out of left field that you might legitimately suspect it to be from another ballpark. But somehow, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman managed to throw away the gallons of bathwater and still keep the baby. Almost nothing remains of the original save the barest bones of the central concept–“Toons”, a private detective, and a murder–but those elements make the story what it is. Every change improves the story, and they’re all done with a keen, aggressive eye towards making it all click with audiences. If you ever want to run a clinic on how to rewrite a book into a movie, this would form a core part of the curriculum.

So that’s my five…or at least, five of my many. As always, feel free to add yours in the comments section!

I love (and write) science fiction, but there are a bunch of things that show up a lot in SF movies, novels that have become such a part of the furniture of the genre that nobody bothers to ask whether they make any sense. An unquestioned assumption is not necessarily something that’s implausible or impossible but something that gets plugged into stories like a widget, without any thought on the part of the writer.

For example:

Bionics: Or, as we say in the real world, prosthetics – which are, of course, becoming increasingly common and sophisticated. What they’re not doing is making anyone superhuman. Go take a look at a VA hospital (and by the way, how much of an opportunity did the people behind Bionic Woman remake miss by not making her an Iraq vet?). Nobody there is lifting cars or taking spy photos with their camera eyes; they’re lucky if they can get anything like the former abilities of the limb or body part being replaced, and even if they give an advantage in one area (as Oscar Pistorius’ legs supposedly did) it’s pretty limited. Even if you could make a bionic limb super-strong, of course, the problem is that the hand bone’s connected to the wrist bone, the wrist bone’s connected to the arm bone, and so on, and that whole chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So superhuman strength is pretty much off the menu (you could conceivably build a bionic hand with superhuman crushing power that wouldn’t stress the wrist too much, but that’s about it) unless you replace basically the whole skeletal structure, which brings us to…

Uploading, or cloning for that matter: Not that either of these things are necessarily impossible (though both involve a fair bit of handwaving, especially the copying-memories part of the latter), but neither are they any kind of ticket to immortality for the simple reason that neither an uploaded version of your mind nor a clone with all your memories is you: they are both copies of you, which will no more prevent you from dying than having children will. With that in mind, it baffles me why anyone would want to do either of these. Who would want to have an immortal or, worse, much younger copy of yourself around? How would that take the sting out of aging and death? Not to mention the fact that you would be made to suffer Robert Burns’ most terrible curse: to see ourselves as others see us. Most of us can’t stand to hear a recording of our own voices; imagine that magnified by a factor of a million and you’ll get the idea of just how annoying and uncomfortable it would be to have a simulacrum of you wandering around.

Sensors: Such an innocuous bit of technology, those machines that let Mr. Spock or whoever tell you what’s going on down on the planet. Unfortunately, nothing like them actually exists. For example, one thing people can always tell with sensors is the presence or absence of “life signs.” How do they do that? It can’t be through infrared or heartbeats, since neither of those would be detectable from space (well, infrared could be, but not individual heat signatures) – but the magical sensors usually can not only detect individual life forms but tell you what species it is! Sensors are practically the definition of the unquestioned assumption; they’re such a background element that hardly anyone bothers to think before plugging them into a story. (This goes double for tractor beams.)

Space combat: This is probably the most commonly appearing one on the list, but think about it for a minute. Actual combat mostly consists of one person trying to get to a target, and the other one trying to stop them; a fighter-interceptor trying to stop a bomber, for instance (or disabling the bomber’s fighter escort.) That works all right when your battleground is the sky, because there are a limited number of possible approaches and escape routes. But when the target is a planet that limited number increases until it approaches infinity – so it’s likely that your fighter-interceptors will simply be unable to intercept anything.

Aside from that, though, the notion of space war is equally unlikely. Even if we assume the existence of FTL travel (something that would have been on this list thirty years ago, but which writers have more recently made more of an effort to justify), it’s almost certainly going to take a lot of energy to get from star to star; what could be waiting there that would be worth the effort involved? You might argue, of course, that war pretty much always takes a lot of energy and that’s never stopped anyone, but the fact is that almost everything of value on an inhabited planet can also be found on uninhabited planets, asteroids or comets. Sure, you can come up with some other reason for an interplanetary war – an ideological difference, some genuinely unique resource, a pathological hatred of the colour blue – but by this point you’re either handwaving or actually giving the matter some thought, which means it’s no longer an unquestioned assumption.

Sol III: This is a pet peeve of mine. SF writers figured out a long time ago that aliens wouldn’t call our planet “Earth,” so you often see it referred to as “Sol III,” which sounds much more science-fictiony. The problem, of course, is that “sol” is Latin for “sun,” which means that instead of calling the planet “Earth” you’ve called it “Sun III” – so much less geocentric!

None of these are bad ideas, necessarily – except for that last one – but I’m tired of seeing them recycled over and over like so much dorm room furniture. So here’s my challenge to everyone who writes SF in novels, movies, comics or wherever: the next time you’re about to use one of these ideas, think it through – odds are good that after a few minutes’ consideration you’ll wind up with a more interesting and original story.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a dynamite idea for an epic about bionic space marines I need to work on…

It’s a deceptively simple question: When exactly did ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, the series, end? To some, of course, the answer is, “It didn’t.” Dark Horse Comics has already announced a Season Nine to come after the conclusion of the comics-only Season Eight, and the same people who wrote for the TV series are clearly enjoying the upsides of writing a Buffy series with an unlimited budget and no worries about actor availability. That’s ‘Buffy’ in some form, definitely.

But to others, ‘Buffy’ ended when the series left television. Seven seasons, two networks, 144 episodes, no writing Emmys. Certainly, the facts argue in favor of that interpretation; ‘Buffy’ Season Seven features the same core cast as Season One, the same basic setting, even the same theme music. But Season One was about a teenage girl who was trying to make it through the metaphorical hell of high school while simultaneously trying to stop demons from the literal mouth of Hell, while Season Seven was about…um, a twenty-two year old woman looking for a career, and a bad guy who couldn’t do anything but make vague menacing threats, and Andrew for some damned reason. They’re set in the same place, they feature the same people, but they don’t feel like the same series when set side by side. Only because we watched the transformation as it slowly occurred does it feel seamless to us.

So when did ‘Buffy’, the show that started in 1997 on the WB, end? Did it finish on the WB as well? It’d be hard to argue that, I think; Buffy as protective big sister/single parent to Dawn, working out of the Magic Box to battle demons alongside super-witch Willow and semi-redeemed vampire Spike, feels less like Season One than Season Seven did. (Not to mention Season Five marks the breaking point where the series ceases to be about people growing up and begins to be about people who have grown up and find their life really sucks and it’s not what they thought it’d be in high school and they’d really rather go back and be teenagers again…actually, Seasons Five through Seven really suck the joy out of re-watching Seasons One through Four. “Oh, aren’t Willow and Oz so cute together?” “Yeah, they go through a painful break-up later on, and then she becomes a lesbian and falls in love with this really sweet girl…who gets shot and killed.” One of the big problems with both ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ was that neither series knew when to stop bumping off supporting characters.)

So it’s Season Four, then. Except…as much as I love Season Four (and I do; I think it’s the last good season, and it’s got some of the best comedy episodes) it’s actually a much bigger break from Season Three than Five is from Four or Six from Five. It’s a change of setting, a big change of supporting cast (gone are Angel, Cordelia, Principal Snyder, Joyce, Jonathan and Oz as regulars, and in comes Riley, Maggie Walsh, Forrest, Graham, Tara, Spike and Anya as regulars) and a change of mission, too. Buffy and her friends aren’t teenagers dealing with teenage problems anymore. They’re grown-ups, learning what it’s like to be out in the wider world.

No, I think that you can safely set aside Seasons One through Three of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ as a seamless whole, an epic story about how we become adults told through a prism of sorcery, horror, kung-fu, and witty quips. All of the themes introduced in the beginning of the series (“high school is hell”, “Buffy’s friends are assets to her Slaying and not liabilities”, “your first love might seem passionate and true and the deepest you’ll ever experience, but they’re not necessarily good for you and passion isn’t enough to sustain a relationship”, “growing up means making decisions for yourself instead of listening to authority figures”, “having true friends that stick with you through thick and thin is better than being powerful”) are wrapped up in dramatic and spectacular fashion in the season finale (the commencement speaker turns into a giant demon snake, Buffy rallies together the entire high school class to defeat it, Angel walks away afterward to let her find someone who can be happy with her, Buffy tells the Watchers to sod off because she doesn’t need a Watcher anymore, and the season ends with everyone together watching the flames and then walking away hand-in-hand.) Heck, the Season Three finale even ends with the suggestion that there’s no need to worry about the Hellmouth anymore: the last line of the episode is, “Why do demons even come here anymore?” What could be more series finale than that?

‘Buffy’, as we finally saw it, is a genuinely great piece of television. But the first three seasons are the true ‘Buffy’ because they’re the execution of the central concept, a great idea turned into a magnificent series that ended just like it needed to. After that, it’s just a matter of following the character around while she lives her life, and frankly that’s not the same thing as telling a story. Buffy might keep fighting evil forever, but ‘Buffy’ ended the day she got her diploma.

The movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance” popped into my head this morning. (And you think you have problems…) Thinking about it reminded me about how back when it came out, there was a big debate ovSer the movie’s use of the “magical negro” stereotype. I remember agreeing with the people who pointed this out, but not without some reservations…after all, I pointed out, if George Lucas had cast Sidney Poitier as Obi-Wan Kenobi instead of Sir Alec Guinness, would he have automatically become a magical negro even though the script hadn’t changed?

Which, in turn, reminded me of “women in refrigerators”. The list is well-known by now among comics fans, as are some of the excuses different writers have come up with for its existence. But the fact is, the most common one (“Hey, it’s not like men have it easy either!”) is actually sorta kinda true…Steve Trevor bit the big one a couple of times, the Vision was gruesomely dismembered and revived as a pale imitation of himself in order to put a little conflict into the Scarlet Witch’s story arc, the first couple of guys who even thought about dating Ms Marvel bit it, and let’s not even get into the whole Terry Long thing. (Husband and son both bit it there…)

But that’s the thing: Only an idiot would actually try to use these as arguments against the prevalence of racism and sexism in popular culture. Even though you can say, legitimately, that the “magical negro” is simply a mentor archetype that happens to be black, and even though you can say, legitimately, that a “woman in (a) refrigerator” is simply a supporting character that gets bumped off in order to provide a little drama for the main character who happens to be female, we can all recognize that there’s still something skeezy about it all. (Well, most of us can. I know all the enlightened, wise readers here can.) So what is it? Why is it not okay?

The answer is that there are so few other roles for these characters to take that the supporting roles become disproportionate representations of the characters in popular culture. Or, to put that a little less fancy, it’s not that there are lots of black “wise mentor” characters, it’s that there are so few black heroes getting mentored. It’s not that there are so many women in comics who die, it’s that there are so few who get to go off and avenge the deaths. These things are symptoms of a far deeper, more fundamental problem in pop culture, namely a dearth of protagonists who aren’t white guys. Nobody thinks to cast a black guy in the Luke Skywalker role; he’s relegated to the Obi-Wan (or more accurately, Mace Windu) part. We’ve reached a plateau in bringing diversity into our cult fiction, where characters outside the white male “standard” are included, but almost never in a leading role. Until that changes, you’ll continue to see the same stereotypes. Because they’re not stereotypes, they’re archetypes….but they’re the only archetypes women and minorities are allowed to inhabit.

(Spoilers follow, I guess)

I finally got a chance to see Inception a couple of days ago and while I enjoyed it, there were a few things that puzzled me. Not that the movie was confusing — honestly, one of its bigger flaws was that it often seemed to feel the need to spell things out for the slower kids — but for a generally well-written movie it had some odd flaws. Or were they flaws? Well, probably, but just for fun let’s use the No-Prize method and see if we can’t find in them hints of a deeper, better story underneath the obvious one.

See, a lot of people think that the ending means the whole movie was a dream, but that’s not likely. To begin with, “it was all a dream” is no less of a cop-out just because your movie is about dreams, and if there’s room for multiple interpretations you might as well pick the one that doesn’t suck. More importantly, though, the “real world” sequences include scenes that Cobb, the Leonardo DiCaprio character, isn’t in. When was the last time you had a dream you weren’t in?

Interestingly, the scenes without him all feature Ellen Page, whose character is oddly underdeveloped and inconsistent considering how prominent she is. She’s set up heavily (Cobb remarks on how she’s a natural at manipulating dreams), has a heavily symbolic name (Ariadne) and gets a number of scenes without payoffs (for example the scene where she makes her totem, the chess piece.) But in the actual action of the movie she’s not very important, being mostly a vehicle for exposition — the “new guy” that other characters can explain things to, as well as the person who ferrets out Cobb’s backstory. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that there’s another character who plays a similar role — Saito, the one played by Ken Watanabe — and at first glance, at least, the movie would be stronger if he had the role to himself: he has an emotional investment in learning the rules of the game and understanding the plan (since he wants it to succeed) and there’s tension added if he learns about Cobb’s issues with his wife (since he has the power to reunite Cobb with his children), while Ariadne is both uninvested and undermotivated. In fact, her motivation changes several times throughout the movie: at first it’s just professional interest, then a desire to protect the other team members, and then finally (for no clear reason) she’s determined to complete the mission even at the risk of her and Cobb’s lives.

So here’s my attempt at a No-Prize: none of these things are mistakes. The whole movie that we see is a dream, but Cobb isn’t the only real person in it: Ariadne is there too (and maybe Joseph Gordon-Levitt, what the hell.) She has inserted herself into Cobb’s dream because he is still stuck in limbo from his experience with his wife — when he experienced her “dying” that was her waking up, but he’s still asleep. The mission is actually to rescue him; like the fake mission explained to Cillian Murphy in the hotel room, it’s a fiction designed to make him rescue himself. That’s why she plays coy at first — the trick of getting the dreamer to do the work for you — then draws out his emotional issues, and in the end is determined to complete the mission at all cost. It also explains her name: Ariadne, after all, was the one who got Theseus out of the labyrinth.

But why was she so determined? Because Cobb has been dreaming longer than he realizes — ten years or more — which explains another motif with no apparent payoff, the hiding of his children’s faces throughout the movie. Ariadne is his daughter.

Everybody hates gratuitous resurrections, right? It’s just a fanboy thing, like bagging your comics or bickering about who would win in a Batman/Captain America fight. It just sucks that they (Marvel or DC, take your choice) continue to insult our intelligence by giving us unbelievably contrived resurrection storylines. “It wasn’t me who died! A cosmic alien impersonated me while I was in suspended animation, then blew herself up and telepathically inserted a shard of her consciousness into my clone, who then got absorbed into my mind when she died!” “No, I never died at all! Being impaled through the chest with an eight-inch-thick chunk of razor-sharp metal merely greatly inconvenienced me!” “Yeah, when I got decapitated by Wolverine? Funny story…”

Comics writers are well aware of this particular fanboy pet peeve; how could they not be? You only need to be accosted so many times at a convention by an angry fan saying, “You should never have brought back Barry Allen/Harry Osborn/Doctor Octopus because their death was so meaningful!” So they try everything they can to make sure that this time, when they kill off a character, they ain’t coming back.

They’ve long ago realized that you can’t just kill someone off in an explosion or a fall; dying off-panel is an automatic “Get Out of Kill Free” card. And they’ve figured out that exotic deaths never work, either; if Wonder Man dies of ionic energy poisoning, you can bet that somewhere down the line, somebody’s going to get the bright idea to bring him back. And who’s to say that ionic energy poisoning doesn’t just cause you to go into suspended animation, anyway?

So it’s got to be on-panel. It’s got to be a “real” cause of death. And the latest innovation: It’s gotta be gory. Sure, you might survive a gunshot wound, but are you really going to survive having your head popped like a zit by Black Adam, or ripped in half…um…also by Black Adam…or impaled on a sword? (By Deathstroke; presumably, Black Adam was busy that day.) Um…actually, the answer seems to still be “yes”. The Martian Manhunter came back after being immolated on-panel, Ronnie Raymond returned from a full-on chest stabbing, Colossus wasn’t stopped by cremation, and even perma-death poster boy Bucky showed up again as Grim-N-Gritty-Cyborg-Assassin-Bucky.

Clearly, the only solution is an editorial mandate. From now on, it’s time to take a hard line: No more gratuitous resurrections. That’s right, no matter how popular the character, no matter how unpopular the death sequence, Psylocke is not coming back from the dead! Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has sp…oh. Hmm. Maybe that’s not as fool-proof as we thought.

The truth is, there actually is a fool-proof way of stopping gratuitous resurrections in comics. It’s even simple, easily executable, and would be wildly popular with fans. Ready for it? Here it is:

STOP KILLING THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Seriously, is this really that hard to understand? There’s no way you can possibly make a death stick in a comic book; they’re fictional characters, they’ll come back as long as someone remembers them fondly enough to bring them back. And as Bucky proves, that can be an amazingly long time. Since there’s no way to make death anything more than a temporary condition in a comic-book universe, why keep deploying it? Surely it can’t be for shock value. Jaded fans no longer care about comic-book death, not when DC kills the Martian Manhunter and resurrects Barry Allen in the same crossover. Death in comics doesn’t matter anymore as much because it’s overused as because it’s impermanent. So why not just let death die for a while?

Except for the Sentry. The only possible reason to bring him back is that he’s NOT FUCKING DEAD ENOUGH.