My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

The first thought: It’s tricky. Obviously, Marvel has provided a blueprint on how to create a blockbuster film that acts both as a standalone film and as a sequel to numerous other standalone films featuring the origins of the cast of your current movie (so that you don’t have to spend the first ten hours of your two-hour movie just explaining who everyone is.) They’ve shown not just that it can be done, but that you can structure the contracts to retain (almost all of) your cast and have a strong studio involvement to keep things consistent from film to film while still attracting A-list directors with unique personal styles (like Branagh, Joe Johnston and Joss Whedon.) But Marvel had a big advantage that DC doesn’t: They hadn’t made a whole bunch of movies already before coming up with the idea.

DC, on the other hand, has a high-profile Batman trilogy that isn’t even wrapped up yet, one which establishes an internally consistent mythos for the character that doesn’t involve any other superheroes. It’d be difficult to imagine Nolan and Bale’s Batman standing on the same screen with Green Lantern and Superman, even if it seemed likely that Bale would return to the role (which it doesn’t.) They have a Superman franchise whose most recent movie has been more or less entirely disavowed by the studio despite positive reviews and box-office success. And they have a Green Lantern movie that woefully underperformed both financially and critically. The Superman reboot that could serve as the beginning of a hypothetical Justice League launch is coming this year, but it’s anyone’s guess whether Warner Brothers had gotten its act together sufficiently by the time Man of Steel went into production to be able to think of their comics properties in these terms. (I have insisted, and will continue to insist, that the reason Marvel’s films have done so well while DC’s have done so poorly is because Marvel is in a position to be able to dictate terms to the studio, while DC is ultimately just “the hired help” at Warner Brothers.)

So the first thought ultimately leads to the second: There’s gonna be a lot of rebooting going on. Two of your three core members (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman) need a new movie to establish themselves as part of the DC Movie Universe, and one of your second-tier members has a stinker that needs to be swept under the rug (a la Ang Lee’s Hulk.) How do you handle this?

You start by ignoring it. You’ve got an Aquaman movie, a Wonder Woman movie, a Green Arrow movie and a Flash movie to make. By the time you get through those four films, there’s a pretty good chance that you can go back and do a soft reboot of Green Lantern that isn’t so obviously an admission that the previous film tanked. Then, with five films under your belt, you can go in and do your Justice League film.

“Wait, what, five?” I hear you say? “What about Batman? What about Superman? What about the Martian Manhunter?” But honestly, I don’t think you need a movie to establish Batman and Superman before putting them in a JLA film. Batman and Superman are, at this point, such iconic characters with such iconic origins that babies practically come out of the womb knowing that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed and he was inspired by a bat to fight evil. The last thing we need, pardon my mild frustration, is yet another goddamn retelling of the origin of Batman and Superman. (You can see how excited I am for the Man of Steel movie, aren’t you?) Just mention them from time to time in the other films, establish that they exist, and then throw them in the final flick.

As to the Martian Manhunter, he’d be filling the Nick Fury role on the DC end. He’d appear in all of the different movies, talking to the different heroes about how he’s getting them together to face a larger threat, one that he knows about as a telepathic space alien. (Maybe even one that killed off the Martian race…) This would link the various heroes together, whet interest for later films, and give audiences time to get used to the Martian Manhunter, who is definitely something of a legacy from a very different age of science fiction and comics.

So who would the villain be? Actually, surprisingly enough, I’d pick Libra. Go back to his original roots, where he was a supervillain attempting to steal the powers of the entire Justice League, and give a tip of the hat to his recent role in ‘Final Crisis’ by a) having him do so in order to better prepare Earth for the coming of Darkseid, and b) having him recruit a passel of henchmen to help him out. Then, in the Justice League movie, you pull a big surprise at the end…in the third act, after he steals the powers of Superman and the Flash and Green Lantern and seems pretty much unstoppable, you find out that the Martian Manhunter’s been recruiting a lot more than just the heroes who have movies. The final battle would have cameos by dozens of superheroes, from Zatanna to Black Canary to the Elongated Man to Steel to everyone who you haven’t gotten the rights to, all dogpiling on Libra and his Secret Society. In the end, Libra overloads himself absorbing everyone’s powers and blows up (a la his original appearance…) but the greater threat is still out there.

But all that, of course, assumes that Warner Brothers is interested in replicating Marvel’s success, something which has never been particularly clear from their actions. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that the people who made ‘Batman and Robin’ are interested either in making money or in bringing joy to the lives of others.

Torontoist asked me to review the OIRPD’s report on police overreaction during the G20 summit here in Toronto, so I did.

Zach Butler, a while back, asked:

So how’s being a lawyer going?

Well. I work here.

The thing about family law that the casual reader may not understand is that in law school, I’m pretty sure there isn’t another branch of law where you will hear more horror stories – many of them from former family lawyers who got out – about the practice of family law. You have to really be dedicated to the idea of practicing in it to want to do it while you’re still in law school, which makes my roundabout way of having become a family lawyer (I certainly never planned on it when I went to law school) all the more odd. I recently attended the Ontario Bar Association’s annual family law conference, and was struck by the age of the participants: I’m not exactly a kid any more but even so, I was still one of the younger lawyers there. Granted, the entire Ontario bar at this point is aging, it seems, but the family law bar is definitely older than many other subsectors of law, and I think young lawyers being scared away from it has something to do with that.

This is not to say that it is not emotional and difficult work. It is, and I had to learn early on to not take it home with me. A lot of people can’t do that – find that line where caring about your client and wanting the best for them stops at where it becomes onerous on your own emotional health. I can do it, though – that’s quite obvious to me at this point. (I’m not sure what that says about me personally.)

Clients can and will lie to you – most of them will do so unwittingly because they have become to believe their narrative so firmly that the points where said narrative is not really true in the classic sense will become lost to them, but every so often you deal with the client who just straight-up lies to you because they’ve realized that, as a lawyer, you actually aren’t allowed to lie on their behalf, as so many people assume is the case. I can not proactively mention details that are pertinent to my client’s case in a proceeding, but I can’t lie about the existence of those details.1 But the active liars are easier to deal with than the self-convincers, frankly, because the self-convincers are, well. convinced. Most of the time, it is not so great an issue that it can’t be resolved. A lot of people just need their lawyer to tell them “this is how it is” and be a sympathetic but firm voice of reason. But sometimes it is an issue.

Ultimately, I like the work. I don’t know if it’s my life’s work per se, but I’m going to do it for a while because, well, I’m kind of good at it. The emotional thing aside, I quite like the fact that in family law, being somebody’s counsel isn’t just an empty word: I have to talk with my clients about much more than legal strategy because a large part of practicing family law in Ontario is explaining to clients that it doesn’t matter how much they might loathe their ex at this point: if they had kids together (and practically all of our casework involves custody in some way), then the other parent of your children is going to be a part of your life for the next twenty years regardless of how custody and access plays out because, hey, you had kids together, and the province takes the view that, where a parent isn’t abusive, it’s in the best interests of the kids to get to have a relationship with that parent. Which means you’re just going to keep seeing them. Which means part of my job, as a lawyer, is to get clients to accept that and move on – help them get past the emotional pain of the end of a relationship and work them through the five stages as quickly as possible so they can get to “acceptance” for their own sake. I’m not going to do all of their counselling – I’m not a therapist – but I have to be mindful of it. And I quite like the fact that my work is hands-on in that sense.

1. In many ways lawyering is much like being an Aes Sedai in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Yes, I said that with a straight face. [↩]

So apparently George W. Bush plans to “publish a book outlining strategies for economic growth.”

No. Really.

Prospective titles for this book include

Don’t Know Much About (Economic) History, The One Percent Solution,, and Hey, If You Turn That Chart Upside Down It Looks Great!

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

It has been pointed out to me, on occasion, that I spend many of my blog posts (here and elsewhere) complaining about things that frustrate me and irritate me about comics. This is, to some extent, a fair criticism; I do spend more time talking about the things that I want to stop than the things that are doing perfectly well and continuing to delight me. But since I’m starting to worry about my potential for becoming known as nothing but a curmudgeon, I thought it might be a good idea to occasionally write posts that are nothing but positive. Things that I love about comics. Like, for example, Hawkeye.

Why do I love Hawkeye? Because he’s absurd. It is fundamentally a crazy idea that a glorified carny would one day wake up and decide to show off his archery skills by becoming a full-time superhero. It’s something that shows off just how wildly implausible a superhero universe is; men in powered armor and Norse gods are actually easier to suspend one’s disbelief for, because there’s no way of knowing how the real world would react to a figure of myth showing up in the modern world. But we all know how it works in the real world if you decide to practice archery until you can hit the bullseye every time, and then proceed to decide to glue bombs to your arrows and fight criminals (while wearing what looks, let’s face it, like a purple dress), and the answer is, “YOU FUCKING DON’T.” The very existence of Hawkeye is a sign that you have left real-world logic behind, which absolutely infuriates some people but evokes in others a sense of giddy delight.

I’m with the giddy delight crowd. Hawkeye is wonderful because he is impossible and plausible all at the same time. It’s plausible that someone could be an extraordinarily gifted bowman, but good enough to hang with gods and sorcerers and aliens and twenty foot tall super-scientists? That’s wonderfully impossible. Hawkeye becomes mythic not despite his Everyman status, but because of it. He’s absurdly talented, literally. Even the look of his costume contributes to this effect. It’s the exact opposite of a realistic costume that a real human being would wear when fighting crime, which is exactly what a character like this should wear.

And it comes out in the text. Hawkeye is perpetually dismissed by villain after villain. “An ordinary man with a bow can’t be a threat” is a common refrain over the decades, despite the fact that for the majority of human history, ordinary men with bows were difference-makers on the battlefield. And time and time again, Hawkeye makes bad guys pay for overlooking his talents, because he’s not ordinary at all, even though he has no powers or abilities. He succeeds time and time again, simply because he refuses to acknowledge how out of his league he is. I could name a few favorites…his battle with Imus Champion, where Champion decides to show how amazingly skilled he is by shooting a bomb that Hawkeye is standing next to from a range that would challenge even a champion archer, only to have Hawkeye shoot his bowstring in half from the same range…his fight with Crossfire, which ends with Crossfire dismissing the “weakest Avenger” by preparing to shoot him with his own bow, only to discover that the pull on Hawkeye’s bow is more than he can draw…or his ‘fight’ with Scarecrow. “What kind of arrow is that? Acid? Explosive? What?” “No, I’m all out of trick arrows. This is my old stand-by, the ‘very sharply pointed, if I shoot you with it, it makes a big hole’ arrow.” “Why don’t I just get that cell door for you.”

But more than all that, I love that Hawkeye is a fundamentally straightforward, honest, and decent human being. He’s someone who found direction in life by joining the Avengers, by becoming one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and who wound up epitomizing their code of ethics better than perhaps anyone else. Hawkeye doesn’t believe in having an Avenger like Wolverine around to do the dirty work that the other Avengers can’t or won’t do, because he believes that you can’t call yourself an Avenger if you forget about your ethics when they stop being expedient. He’s someone who believes that there really is a better way of doing things, that you believe in justice even when it’s hard because it’s meaningless if you only believe in them when it’s easy, and that you really can show people a better path in life, and they’ll take it. (That’s why it worked so damn brilliantly when he became the leader of the Thunderbolts, BTW.) (It’s also why, in the interests of staying relentlessly positive, I am not discussing Brian Michael Bendis’ handling of the character.)

I love Hawkeye because he’s bold, brash, and uncomplicatedly heroic, and because that actually works for him despite all of the cynicism in our hearts that says it shouldn’t. And if none of that stirs your heart, I will leave you with Tom DeFalco’s words: “This bow is a work of art that should never be used like a common baseball bat! **WHACK** But I guess it’ll do in a pinch.”

She starts by asserting that Winter Wipeout is proof that gay people want heteros to suffer and… it actually manages to go downhill from there.

Also, watch the guy behind her. His reactions are hilarious.

Yesterday on Twitter Ezra Klein wrote:

Now, granted, at 36 I am only “young” in the sense that if I died tomorrow people would say “oh, such a shame, he was so young,” but that type of young lasts until you’re in your early fifties, at which point by no other metric are you considered young, except by older people who will still say things like “you whippersnapper.” But even so, let me take a crack at it…

Dear old people:

As I look out on this sea of wrinkled, crumply faces today, I have only one thought. It is not “man, you people should smile more,” even though smiling old people are much more pleasant for young people to look at, because when you’re frowny you make everybody more miserable and also you remind us of our own mortality. Seriously, you old people should just smile as much as possible. Unless your teeth have all fallen out, in which case you should stick to a close-lipped grin, or perhaps a magical twinkle in your eyes like Morgan Freeman has.

But no, the one thought I have for you is “get some perspective.” Which is funny, because if there’s one thing older people pride themselves on, it is having a greater sense of perspective. This is, I understand, based on the fact that old people traditionally have more life experience than young people, by virtue of being older. And to be fair, this is not the worst argument in the world. But let’s be honest: about one person in three lives practically their entire life in the same 100-square-mile patch of land, and four people out of five will live in three or less patches of land that size. (And that’s in the First World. In poor countries – let’s just say you’d really better enjoy looking at that one tree you like.) There is a limit to how much experience you can get this way, is my point.

But it’s not completely wrong to say that older people have more perspective, because I know I’ve got more perspective than when I was thirty, or twenty, or ten. In truth, I know much more than I did back then and I can make better decisions then I did back then. But this is the thing I’ve managed to figure out and so, so many of you old people have not: even knowing what I knew at twenty is not applicable to someone who is twenty now. Someone who is twenty now has different challenges than I did – and the gap between me and a twenty-year-old now is only sixteen years. Between you, you loveable old people you, and a twenty-year-old right now, there is a vast gulf, and your life experience means tremendously little – because so little of it is now applicable. Even if you do like Mos Def.

Let us pick a sixty-year-old person in the crowd, because sixty is basically the benchmark where we start considering people “old,” no matter how much we might talk about how many good years you have left – sixty is the age where cancer stops being a tragedy and starts becoming “that, or a heart attack or a stroke.” Someone who is sixty today was born in 1952 – basically you’re Sally on Mad Men. (Speaking for young people, we’re sorry that you had to see Roger Sterling get that blowjob.) You grew up with the Beatles, you remember JFK getting shot, maybe you marched in anti-Vietnam protests if you’re American – but all of that is background, really, because every generation has its music and its deaths and its political struggle.

What matters, really, is that you, the sixty-year-old person, were born into a society where you had it all. You had enormous purchasing power. Yes, computers have gotten cheaper, and that’s great, but the cost of basic shelter has increased and if we’re talking about home ownership it has exploded. At twenty-four, you the sixty-year-old person in 76 (the year I was born!) would be out of university – which cost you much less than it cost me, to say nothing of what it cost a kid today, because university tuition has wildly outpaced inflation over the past thirty-six years. That’s assuming you even decided to go to university, because in 1976 you could get a decent job with a high school diploma – and when we say “decent,” we mean “above the median salary” decent. Depending on what country you lived in, your access to quality healthcare would vary, but generally speaking it was easier for you to get it then than it is for a comparable young person to get it now, be that because a given country’s private system has collapsed or its public system has been chronically underfunded (but not for senior care, which so often manages to escape the knife). And of course you were guaranteed healthy retirements, and anyone my age or younger has been systematically trained to believe that retirement is something we’re never actually going to get to do. (Systematically trained, one would note, by old people. It is convenient how that goes.)

Young people don’t vote – it’s a truism, has been for a long time now. The reason we don’t vote (well, I vote, of course, but I am using the larger “we” here, bear with me) is because from day one in civics class – if we have civics class any more, that is, it may have been cut along with all the arts education funding and everything else that isn’t “useful” – we’re told that the purpose of government is for people to come together and address common concerns. And we keep hearing from every politician how young people are important – and then we see that what’s actually important, in practice, is to address the concerns of old people. Some of the young hippies would say “rich people,” of course, and that’s not incorrect – but other than Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake and LeBron, there aren’t a whole lot of young rich people.

Rich people are generally old people; even well-off people are generally old people. And old people look out for old people, and unfortunately over the past twenty or so years the number of old people has been increasing steadily, which means that the interests of old people dominate over the interests of young people, who just have to eventually take care of the old people. I mean – global warming! We all agreed that that was important, right? And then suddenly rich people, who were also old people, all decided it really wasn’t that important any more – in part because they will all be dead when global warming really starts to screw over the human race in earnest – and lectured us all about how the economy demanded that we pretend climate change wasn’t happening. (The economy demands a lot of things. Like tax cuts for rich people – who are, once again, mostly old people.) And when the economy gets better, it doesn’t get better for young people. The story of unemployment in every first world country right now is the same: young people are unemployed at vastly greater rates than old people, with rates double or triple the general unemployment rate.

And young people could see the writing on the wall, and it said “you’re fucked, young people,” as the cost of simply having a life went up and up and up – to say nothing of the cost of bettering ourselves (which you demanded we do, even to get a shitty job working in a soulless office somewhere). And what was more galling was, again, your lack of perspective when you did these things, because at the same time as it became harder and harder for young people to get by, old people started to lecture young people more and more that they were not being young in the right way – e.g. the way that the old people had been young. Which meant an endless deluge of whiny newspaper articles about how young people were still living with their parents into their twenties and not getting married young like they used to and what about all the video games and the hoodies and the rap music? I am pretty sure Rex Murphy – yes, Mr. Murphy, I can see you over there in row twenty-nine – complains about how young people aren’t doing things properly at least once a month. Granted, in Mr. Murphy’s case “young people” can technically mean “everybody younger than Rex Murphy,” which in turn means “everybody in the whole world” since I am pretty sure Rex Murphy is a lich of some sort. In the event that he is not, could the person next to him punch him in the nuts? – yes, that’s great, thank you.

On top of which, your lack of perspective is truly galling when we consider civil rights. Let’s be honest: all those laws against gay marriage and movements against gay people generally? Are old people. And what’s really offensive, old people, is that you know – you absolutely have to realize – that you can’t win on this issue in the long run and possibly not even the medium run. The demographics are completely against you. Every single year, the polling in favour of gay marriage everywhere goes up a little, as more old homophobes die off and not enough new young homophobes show up to replace them. (Granted, the young ones try harder.) Hell, the people pushing for these restrictive and discriminatory laws are now admitting openly that they won’t survive for more than a decade or two! But you continue to get these laws passed everywhere you can, using the power of Old People Vote And Young People Don’t. On behalf of all young people everywhere (albeit only technically in my case), let me say it for you: you’re going to die, and these laws are going to be revoked. When I say you need to get some perspective, part of that is deciding for yourself whether you want to be remembered by your descendants as a proud, forward-thinking individual or someone who was loved (or not) in spite of (or because of) their bigotry. Because that’s how this is going to go down.

Look. I’m not saying my generation – or any younger generation, really – has any moral standing over you in this matter. If it had been me born in 1952, I’m sure I would have taken full advantage of the opportunities you got, and I’m sure every kid who’s twenty right now would do exactly the same thing. We’re not really trained, as a species, to think generationally about long-term sustainability, and at some point we’re just going to have to learn. (The point at which we’re going to have to learn it approaches us much more quickly as a result of policies you invented and promoted, but again – not judging.) We’re resigned to what we as young people have to do, which is fix your mess. But we’d really appreciate it if you didn’t add insult to injury by judging us for not living life the way you lived it when the way you lived life is no longer possible (no more clueless and patronizing New York Times articles that make a hash of sociology, please), or by making things just that little bit harder by enacting hate-filled laws we’re just going to have to overturn. Presumably Rex Murphy – surviving from the power of a gem which contains the screaming souls of a thousand dead CBC employees – will still be complaining even then. But at that point it’ll just be him. So get some perspective, because you don’t all have soul-gems to keep yourselves alive to a sinful age. Thank you.

You would think at this point, people would know better than to draw down in the presence of Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog. Sadly, however, this is not the case.

Not pictured: Rex operating the rifle with his paws to kill three people with a single shot via a richocheted bullet.