Bloom County was originally about Milo Bloom, a wisecracking kid in glasses, and his family with whom he lived in a boardinghouse. Then one day, supporting character Binkley got himself a penguin as a pet, and we all know what happened next: Opus eventually became the flagship character of the strip and Berke Breathed’s entire career.

Brainiac Five is, in that sense, the Opus of the Legion of Super-Heroes. After all, the Legion stories were originally the province of Superboy and his three friends Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl – but for a very, very long time those three characters were all bland milquetoasts, and not simply because of the Silver Age’ tendency towards whitebreadiness: Rokk and Garth were both pretty bland for decades after their creation, and Imra only came into her own late in Paul Levitz’ run as “the one who was willing to go further to get the job done,” which is pretty basic but is at least a character note. Eventually – and primarily in the reboots – Rokk became Captain America of the Future and Garth became the hothead, and those three finally had personalities, but it was too late for them to reassert their prominence as the founders.

Mostly this was because Brainiac Five showed up. Brainy has become pricklier in recent years – the beginning of the reboot, where he was downright antisocial, was probably the apex of that – but the character, even in the Silver Age, has always had a streak of self-importance and ego that is nonetheless appealing because you have to admit he’s got a point: he really is the smartest superhero in comics, smarter than ten Reed Richardses put together, and if he occasionally loses patience with Element Lad you can’t blame him for that.1

But also it’s appealing because you understand where Brainy is coming from. After all, his name is Brainiac Five: most incarnations of the character have established that he’s the “only good Brainiac,” with all of the other ones being evil universe-conquering android dictators.2 Despite being the engine for most of the team’s plans and ideas – when Brainiac Five is stumped, you know the team is really, really in trouble, because he’s their go-to guy for having a solution to whatever evil they have to beat – he’s always proven himself to be absolutely balls-awful at being the leader of the team.

It’s interesting, because most other characters who become “most popular” among fans (and Brainy is, at this point, far and away the most popular Legionnaire ever) eventually become the de facto leader of the team: see how Wolverine has grown from being just the team berserker into the respected elder statesman of the X-Men, to the point where the next X-crossover has him openly challenging Cyclops for leadership of all mutants everywhere.3 But despite the fact that the Legion’s greatest successes are all more or less driven by Brainiac Five and he’s the most popular character, he’s definitively not the leader of the team.

You can of course explain his popularity pretty easy: he’s the Batman of the Legion in terms of style, the thinker, the planner. Nerds always love thinkers and planners, because the idea of not having any superpower other than “I’m smarter than you” is one most nerds imagine themselves to already have.4 But he’s usually also the idealist: the guy who refuses to exploit the Metal Men once he realizes they’re sentient. Nerds like that too. He’s surpassed being a bit of a social outcast, but is still clearly his own man: nerds like that as well. And he gets to be a bit of a sarcastic dickhead and get away with it because his smarts are so necessary, and you’d better believe nerds love that idea. You can make an argument that Brainiac Five is in many ways the ultimate mirror for nerd self-flattery…

…except, of course, that he’s got a history of mental instability.

…and his greatest failure – being unable to save Supergirl, the woman he loved – puts the lie to his “I can solve any problem” reputation.

…and he’s quite clearly unhappy most of the time.

That’s why Brainiac Five is such a great character: he takes all of those nerd fantasies, embodies them, and then destroys them by demonstrating their irrelevance. It doesn’t matter that he once temporarily destroyed the embodiment of a conceptual end of the universe by smashing it in the face with a different conceptual embodiment of the end of the universe: at the end of the day he’s still, all things considered, a very sad person. And that’s a pretty great thing.

(Also: I love super-smart characters because they can engage with essentially anybody and be ready for it. You just know that Brainy knows of the existence of the Endless, for example. He might be irritated that they exist, but he can handle the idea that vague concepts can be personalized. Wouldn’t you love to see him chat with Destruction some time?)

1. Partially because Element Lad is such a douche. [↩]
2. As someone quipped early in the first reboot: “What, was Darkseid Two taken?” [↩]
3. See also: Batman. [↩]
4. Which usually they don’t, but. [↩]

Discussion of this Ebert essay is spreading around the internets because that is what the internets do, and the trope I’m hearing most regularly is the old canard of “well poor people are willing to support policy positions that benefit rich people because they think they might get rich some day.”

This is crap and has been crap for a very long time: it rests on the assumption that poor people are stupid and don’t realize how unlikely they are to become rich. I talk to these sorts of people frequently, and I think poor people who vote for policies that benefit rich people generally know exactly how unlikely they are to become rich. That’s not why these people support [insert policy here that screws them and helps rich people].

Instead, I think it’s generally because the elites who want these policies enacted have very successfully communicated their ideas in terms of basic fairness. “It’s not fair that I worked hard for all this money and when I die I have to pay estate taxes and my children won’t get everything they deserve.” “It’s not fair that my company has to pay more tax than an equivalent company in Somewhere Else.” “It’s not fair that I should pay a higher income tax rate than someone else just because I make more money.” “It’s not fair that you should be forced to buy health insurance if you don’t want to.”

That these positions are frequently disingenuous is besides the point: the point was to make these terribly unfair policies appear fair, because the voters who come out to support them really do value the concept of fairness more often than not, and if you can demonstrate that a policy they support is basically not fair then gradually they will change their minds.1 When liberals natter about how non-rich conservative voters are voting against their interest because of some cynical hope that one day they’ll benefit from it, all they’re doing is engaging in cariacature, mostly because it’s satisfying to portray political opponents as idiots2 but ultimately it just feels like an excuse: if you want to get people to endorse policies that are truly egalitarian rather than ones that only pretend to be that, you have to put in the groundwork.

1. See the steadily growing support for same-sex marriage, for example, which is tracking support for gays in the military by about six years behind but at the same pace. [↩]
2. God knows I do it often enough. [↩]

One of the perks of this gig is that now when I have a lengthy response to an MGK.com post I can just post it here.  Convenient!

Truth be told, I knew I was going to have to challenge Bird on this matter even before yesterday’s post, because the other day he was complaining about Green Lantern’s mask.  I don’t see the problem, seeing as:

1. They decided to make a Green Lantern movie.
2. Green Lantern wears a mask.
3. They used the same mask in the movie.

To me complaining about the mask is like arguing that there shouldn’t be a monkey in Speed Racer.  You can debate the merits of Speed Racer as a film, but of course there was going to be a monkey in it, because it’s frigging Speed Racer.

Anyway, I think my liege raises valid concerns about comic-book movie adaptations becoming overly faithful to the source material, at the expense of presenting new ideas.  I just don’t think those concerns are nearly as big a problem as the alternative.

Bird offered some fine examples of Richard Donner, Tim Burton, and Christopher Nolan introducing concepts in their movies that are now gospel in the Superman and Batman mythoi.  That’s great when you can get it, but it cuts both ways.  Donner’s vision of Superman was so influential that it’s become difficult for filmmakers to think of Superman in any other way.  (Coming soon, Superman fights General Zod!  Again!)  Joel Schumacher’s Batman basically ensured that nobody else’s Batman would be in a movie for eight years.  Tim Story presented a groundbreaking new take on Doctor Doom wherein he didn’t use anything anybody ever liked about Doctor Doom.  And so on.

These decisions matter because they have a lot riding on them.  Consider the perspective of a comics fan who dreams of seeing the next big superhero movie.  You wait for years, perhaps decades, for your favorite hero to emerge from development hell.  At last work on the film starts and suddenly Hollywood is casually dismissing heretofore unquestioned truths about the property.  The people working on the project talk about the character and the comics in the past tense, like they’re relics from the 1950s that nobody cared about until now.  You whine on the internet and everybody calls you a geek for even caring so much.  Finally the movie comes out and you just have to make do and hope it doesn’t suck.  Because if they got it wrong, that’s it–you might get a reboot several years later (Incredible Hulk), or maybe nothing at all (Constantine 2: Yeah Right).

I don’t mean to overdramatize the unwarranted entitlement of fanboys, but you can see why they have a lot more at stake in a particular comic book film than anybody who’s making it.  For the mainstream, superhero movies are a dime a dozen, but each hero has fans who consider him their personal Superman, and they demand their own personal Superman: The Movie.  For me that was Steel, so as you might imagine I’m not surprised that the hardcore base prizes loyalty to the comics canon above all else.  By now it’s an easy choice–everybody can generally agree upon the canon (that’s why they call it “canon”) and nobody knows what kind of stupid crap the director is going to conjure up because he’s never read a comic book in his life.

None of this is to say that I want comic book movies to be 1:1 adaptations.  I figured that out when I watched Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four and noticed a) it was astonishingly close to the comics and b) it sucked sour frog ass.  So yes, Filmmakers need to have the room to, y’know, make films and all that. Nevertheless, if I have to choose between a faithful movie like Thor and something more innovative like Spider-Man 3, I’m going to take the safer bet.  In a perfect world, I’d have a third option that is both an awesome movie and an acceptable adaptation, but I won’t hold my breath on Steel Returns.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

So Thor is… pretty good, all things considered. And this comes from someone who is avowedly not a fan of Thor comics, so for once I was approaching this more as a general moviegoer than somebody with the Fuck Yeah _____ t-shirt on. It has decent performances, fun enough action, some pretty decent dialogue and plot, gorgeous visuals and solid editing. It was a perfectly decent superhero movie.

That having been said – some critics have accused it of being bloodless or soulless, and although I don’t agree with them I can see where they’re coming from, because Thor really toes a line that’s been bothering me more and more vis-a-vis superhero movies. Thor in many ways feels like a different sort of exercise than what moviegoing should be like: what bothers me, however, isn’t the “this is the obvious Piece X in the set of pieces to make the Avengers movie happen” aspect of the film (which is certainly prevalent).

What bothers me about Thor is that, although it doesn’t quite cross the line, it definitely comes right up to it in that Thor feels like the balance between “let’s make a really good and faithful adaptation of some comics that were good” and “let’s make a good movie.”

When I talk about this I’m not talking about something like Watchmen, which is a slavish imitation of the original comics and way way over the line. That’s certainly an example of the problem, but a hyperbolic one. What I’m talking about instead is that Marvel’s movies – and looking at Green Lantern it appears DC is following the trend – have started to get a really slick, corporate feel to them. I know that sounds like an odd complaint (“wait, you’re saying that enormous movie studios are making corporate product? Shut your mouth”) so let me explain.

Basically, the filmmaking process for superhero movies is starting to feel less organic. Fans have praised Thor for being visually and thematically faithful to the Kirby vision of what Thor comics could be, and to that my response is “why is that faithfulness de facto praiseworthy?” Granted, after years of things like Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider movie or Ang Lee’s Hulk1, I can see why comic fans might want to encourage filmmakers to stick closer to the existing ideas behind comics. But Fantastic Four, on the other hand, demonstrates that staying reasonably close to the existing formulae doesn’t necessarily mean a good movie either.

And the current crop of super-faithful movies don’t advance the characters or their overarching story: you only get that when you let filmmakers tinker a bit with the ideas. Superman wasn’t a Kansas farmboy until Superman: The Movie established that Smallville was in Kansas. Gotham City wasn’t the dark, nightmarish Gothic city that’s dominated the comics for two decades until Tim Burton and Anton Furst got their hands on Batman.2 If you want a smaller-scale example of how this can work, think about how the Blade franchise turned a Z-lister into a really cool bunch of B-movies, which is no small accomplishment when your main star is Wesley Snipes.3 Or how The Crow turned what was, let’s be honest, a pretty lousy comic into a pretty great movie.4

Thor is fun, but there’s no really new ideas to it: the closest you get is the exercise of making certain elements of a superhero mythos that might not work in a two-hour movie palatable for a mass audience, referenced as callbacks for nerds. Most of the modern crop of Marvel movies fit into this mold (the first Iron Man is an outlier, mostly because of Robert Downey Jr.’s performance). When critics complain about superhero movies becoming soulless, that’s what they mean. These movies don’t advance the story: they’re about “let’s make a Thor movie that’s just like what the comics would be if they were a movie!” And that’s kind of a shame.

1. Yes, I know people have tried to reclaim it as a secret success. Those people are wrong. [↩]
2. And then Christopher Nolan completely ignored what had become the standard and plainly portrayed Gotham as Chicago in his Batman movies, which again goes to show how a fresh take on a character can creatively rejuvenate a franchise. [↩]
3. He used to be a big star at one point! [↩]
4. Which then had pretty lousy sequels. [↩]

There has come to be something of a debate over the last few days over the morality of the Doctor’s actions in the opening two-parter of Season Six. It’s something I really want to talk about, to the point that I’m posting a day early to weigh in on it (since I just posted a piece about The Incredibles in my own blog and I don’t want to push it down the page right away.) And since Season Six is so recent, I’m going to quarantine the whole thing behind the cut so that people who haven’t seen “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” can remain unspoiled. Then I’m going to point out some things to those who feel that this is out-of-character cruelty from the Doctor.

continue reading "On Moral Culpability In ‘Doctor Who’"

Everything about the Green Lantern movie looks awful. And this is completely dysjunct from the talent involved. I mean, I like Ryan Reynolds. I like Mark Strong. I like Peter Sarsgaard. I even enjoy Blake Lively as an actor (she was great in The Town). Even the smaller cast details are perfect: Geoffrey Rush voicing Tomar-Re, for example, or Angela motherfucking Bassett as Amanda Waller. I’ve always liked Martin Campbell as a director – I mean, come on, The Mask of Zorro! And although I dislike Hal Jordan as a character intensely, the movie seems to be playing him more like, well, Kyle Rayner, which was always the way to go.

But it still looks absolutely awful, right down to Hal’s domino mask (which straight-up needed to get tossed). They’re spending millions of dollars at the last minute, apparently, to make the CGI not un-terrible. Every action scene in the trailer looks like a mediocre video-game cutscene: the characters don’t feel real in any way, mostly because they aren’t. They’ve taken a loyalist approach to the comics, which in the trailers looks like a terrible, terrible idea – this is a property that needed some serious visual imagination and inventiveness to work as a movie, and instead it looks like they’ve just puked up the comics onscreen and said “okay, good enough.” They even use the Green Lantern oath in the trailer, and if ever there was something that just doesn’t work outside of a comic book, it’s the Green Lantern oath.

I can’t be the only one who thinks “oh my god this is crap,” can I?

(Between this and Thor – on which I am decidely lukewarm – it’s looking like Captain America is going to be the only promising superhero movie this year. Which is funny, because of the three, I think that would have been the one most fans would have said would be the least slam-dunkish.)

I don’t want anybody to get me wrong when I praise the DC Comics version of the O.S.S., which appeared in old war comics – mostly G.I. Combat – and were, well, basically war comics. War comics geared more towards espionage, obviously, with all the cool fripperies that World War II-era spying had on the side. But, yes, by and large, bog-standard war comics, really only noteworthy by the fact that Control – the dude with the pipe – was actually really awesome both visually and as a character, a predecessor in a lot of ways to the modern incarnation of Nick Fury (who’s become a lot different than the 60s-era Nick Fury, who was a glamourous secret agent rather than a byzantine spymaster). But other than that, nothing beyond perfectly good war comics.

But I love the idea that there’s more to work with here. Basically, what you have the potential for here is the World War II equivalent of Greg Rucka’s Checkmate: an espionage and spy comic set in a superhero universe. Except that here you’ve got the Golden Age equivalent: a spymaster working with a variety of secret agents to defeat Nazis (and the Dragon King, why not?) in the secret war-beneath-the-war. The tone would be pulpier than Checkmate is, because spying just plain used to be pulpier in the old days: Sten guns hidden in bushes, spy cameras baked into loaves of bread. But it’s the DCU, so you’d get the little touches that would make it worthwhile: an ongoing series of missions to attempt to seize the Spear of Destiny and/or Holy Grail, for example, to break the Axis’ magical wall preventing American superheroes from attacking them. Or maybe an undercover op to destroy the War Wheel Mark II before it can be deployed at Arnhem. Control could have any number of great and relatively underused Golden Age characters to call upon: the Crimson Avenger, the Jester, the Invisible Hood, Giovanni Zatara, G.I. Robot…

…the more I think about this, the more I want to write it.

I know predicting future fashions is never easy (really, I should at some point devote a post to the endless lineup of incredibly terrible civilian clothing in Legion of Super-Heroes over the years. – suffice it to say that the future? Is caftans), but if you end up with a future-military where plumed and/or finned helms are back in fashion, something has gone sharply wrong with your design sense.

For the record, this story ends when the emperor is driven insane by a plague-harmonica of his own creation.

I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence. But there you go. Weird War Tales is like that; the only way this could be more weirdly-warrish is if somehow it was revealed at the end that vampires were somehow to blame. Or, alternately, Space Hitler.

My election aftermath post is up at Torontoist.

Also, I don’t think Harper and the Tories will make dramatic shifts to the right on social policy: I genuinely don’t think they’re that stupid, and I suspect if they tried there are enough newly minted Tory MPs that would break ranks (and Layton is smart enough to get them to do it), because regardless of party unity the public would be 90% against, say, banning same-sex marriage or criminalizing abortion. But they’re definitely going to bring in some horrible fiscal policies (income splitting, for example), and destroy a lot of effective government regulation, and let industry write laws benefiting them (man, the telecoms in this country are so happy today) and nothing’s gonna stop that.

I’m liveblogging the federal election results tonight with the rest of the Crack Torontoist Election Team Central Brigade here.

Hi, I’m Jim Smith, but if you gave a crap who I was you would probably just read my LiveJournal, so let’s move on to more pressing matters.  And on a day like this, I’m obviously talking about Superman renouncing his US citizenship in Action Comics #900.  Because, hell, what else is going on?

If you haven’t read the story, here’s the rundown of “The Incident” by David S. Goyer: For about the twentieth time Superman decided it’s not enough to beat up supervillains, so he flew to Tehran for a peaceful demonstration against the government crackdown on protesters.  The White House has kittens over this, and Superman decides that if he can’t act abroad without being seen as a tool of American foreign policy, he will simply disavow his citizenship.

First, Superman’s bluffing. Technically he has no official citizenship to renounce. Clark Kent does, and he hasn’t renounced anything. I’ll spare you an analysis of whether Clark is just Superman in disguise or vice-versa, but the point is, Ma and Pa Kent tricked the government into putting Clark on the grid, not Superman. It’s Clark who has a Social Security number, pays taxes, etc. Frankly I’m not sure the government has cause to believe Kal-El is even a US resident, let alone a citizen. Symbolism aside, Superman disowning his citizenship is about as relevant as Aquaman and Mera applying for a marriage license in South Dakota.

In any case, this is obviously not a repudiation of “the American way,” or even a rejection of American exceptionalism. (I doubt Superman believes in American exceptionalism, but that’s neither here nor there.) Superman’s primary reason for doing this is to provide the US government plausible deniability when it is blamed for his actions. Superman as a character is designed to try to solve every problem put in front of him, particularly the problems that require immediate action. That ideology resonated with Americans in the ’40s and ’50s facing looming, unavoidable conflicts against evil empires. But by now I think even the most hawkish neocon is starting to realize the US has to pick its battles carefully. Superman can’t and won’t be as cautious, though; so, being a nice guy, he’s not going to let that cause trouble for his adopted country if he can help it.

Second, I think Superman is being a bit foolish. (He says as much himself in this story.) His reaction to the Iranian protests is consistent with his character, but it’s not a particularly good idea.  He can address the UN all he wants, and renounce everything from his citizenship to his little red underoos, but people would still perceive him as an American acting on behalf of American interests. (In fact, on the last page of Action #900 he’s posing with the Stars and Stripes. Oops!) Even if he could divorce himself entirely from the US, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would still be calling him a pawn of the Zionists or something, and then what’s he going to do?

The thing is, Superman is not an idiot, and he shouldn’t have to blunder into these lessons like he’s never stopped to think about it before. (I would think just being a journalist would provide enough insight on the limits of brute force for him to already have a fully-formed philosophy on this stuff.) It’s all fine and good for Clark to ask himself why he always punches bad guys and never tries to solve real humanitarian crises, but the bottom line is that these questions have pretty clear answers. Superman punches bad guys because it needs to get done and he’s good at it, and he doesn’t tackle complex sociopolitical issues because he’s not qualified and he knows better. And frankly, ending famine and war isn’t going to mean much if Darkseid or Brainiac are left alone to destroy the planet, so I’d like to think Superman has his priorities in order and carries his end of the load just fine.

Third, I strongly doubt this was meant to go anywhere. Then again, I can’t fault anyone for believing otherwise. The general public is trained to think that, when the media covers a comic book plot point, it’s the start of a major event. (Captain America is dead! Wonder Woman got a new costume!) Comics fans are trained to think that a story appearing in, well, a comic book is going to have repercussions on the next issue. But the fact is, Action Comics #900 has six stories, and only the first (by regular series writer Paul Cornell) is continuing into Action #901. The rest are clearly fluff pieces, not so much intended to leave a mark on the Superman mythos as to get some big names (Damon Lindelof, Paul Dini, Richard Donner, etc.) into the anniversary event.  David S. Goyer is writing the upcoming Superman film, but hasn’t been attached to any Superman comics beyond this one, so I’m pretty sure the goal here was never so much “Kick off a bold new direction for Superman!” as it was “give Goyer eight pages to do whatever, so we can hype his name in the credits.”

It’s possible that by now DC is scrambling to capitalize on the publicity, and Goyer may have guaranteed himself (or if he’s unavailable, somebody) a surefire 12-issue arc somewhere in the near future. There’s certainly potential for a storyline about the controversy surrounding Superman’s decision.  Even so, I don’t foresee this having any lasting impact on the character. This has been a ongoing problem for the Man of Steel for years now. You know nothing he’s learning in his little walk across America is going to matter in six months, you knew a whole planet of Kryptonians was living on borrowed time, and you knew when Clark adopted a son that they’d find some way to undo that almost immediately. I give the citizenship matter eighteen months before it is either completely resolved or completely dropped.

Mind you, I don’t have a problem with Superman stories either upsetting or resetting the status quo. But the goal in this genre should be to achieve the illusion of change–you shake things up enough to make the characters’ lives feel real, but not so much that the brand becomes unrecognizable. Superman has had a lot of trouble with this. He’s perceived as having been too static in the old days, so modern writers are overly concerned with telling a groundbreaking deconstructionist Superman story. So now the problem is that it’s become difficult to find stories that are simply about Superman going to amazing places and doing amazing things like he’s supposed to. I don’t mean to single out Goyer–he only had about eight pages to work with and his story really did turn out quite good. But I can’t help but notice that Action Comics #900 features a lot of soul-searching and relatively little action.