...It's BirdPlaneMan! Fuck me, he's hideous!
I believe I predicted earlier that once Superhero movies started consistently tanking at the box office, studios would stop making superhero movies. I was incorrect in this regard, simply because if you market these things well enough, they're going to at least make the millions of dollars back that it took to produce these things. Also, it's not like the public has another medium to explore the superhero genre in these days, does it? Ah, right. Video games and T.V. shows. Of course, of course. Excuse me whilst I digress:
Back in the day, about 1988, back when modems were dial-up, and the cool kid was the one who had a 300 baud modem that only took fifteen minutes to download a 16-bit Playmate centerfold from a bulletin board, there was a serious controversy a-brewin'. Was it the election of wimp George Bush the Elder? Nope. Was it the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the effect on our glorious capitalist economy? No, again. It was the casting of a specific actor as the lead in the upcoming 'Batman' movie. Yes, Warner Brothers had greenlit a big-budget screen adaptation of The Batman, and comic fans hearts everywhere were all-aflutter over the obviously egregious casting of Michael Keaton, that 'Swing-shift' comic actor guy as the lead. The horror! Now, this was pre-internet, so if you were a comic fan, you had to register your disdain by writing an actual letter to the Comic Buyer's Guide, and many did, thus showing their commitment to the promotion of the superhero comic book as a Serious and Legitimate Art Form. What was Warner Brothers thinking? Was this movie going to be a campy joke fest? Was Keaton going to start doing the 'Batusi' half-way through the film? Why not cast a real serious actor like Rutger Hauer or Bruce Willis? The fools! Didn't Warner Brothers read all those magazine articles that said, "Bang! Pow! Zoom! Comics aren't just for kids!" The release of this 'Last Temptation of Batman' was going to set the cause of the comic book industry back to the dark ages! (Well, casting Jack Nicholson as the Joker was a nice touch.) The end result? Batman went on to make over four hundred million dollars worldwide.
And the last 'Batman' film made over one billion dollars. If I was a majority shareholder at Time/Warner, I'd be doing some serious accounting. "So...how much does the DC comics licensing division make per year? Um, hm. And that figure with all those zeros behind it, that's on the up and up. Okay. Now. How much is the-what are they called again, silly book division? Oh, comic-book division making this year? Yeah, with that whole '52 reboot' thing. Hm. That's a lot less zeros over there. Why don't we take all the people who are making the few zeros at the end of the integer from that division... and move them over to this division with the more zeros at the end of the integer? We'll make a lot more zeros with the more successful division! Sorry, what? Oh, the superhero comic book fans will be angry if we reduce the amount of comics in our stable. Oh. Gosh, I bet they'll be so angry, they'll protest by not seeing the movies based on their favorite comic book character? For the first weekend, at least! And I'm sure they won't buy any video games or DVDs either! Oh, I'm so concerned. Look, here's my concerned face! Look!"
I guess my ultimate point is in all this rambling is that while the superhero comic is a dying medium, the superhero genre is as strong as ever. It's just that Time/Warner, (DC's parent company) and Disney, (Marvel's parent company) have seen the writing on the wall and in this case, the wall is a movie screen, and the writing is projected images of A and B list actors in tight suits emoting in front of green screens. So superhero comics, as a medium, get left further and further behind. The publishers will continue to try marketing gimmicks like DC's recent 'New 52' lineup, sales will continue to slowly drop, more talent will leave for other commercial mediums, sales will keep dropping, and finally, an odd equilibrium will be achieved where superhero comics, manga, "Art" comics, and non-superhero comics will all occupy the same rough region in the publishing arena.
Case in point: X-Men: First Class (C+) Not bad, not great. Weird thing is, they had a good movie in this somewhere, but it kinda got lost along the way. I think. Here's some notes:
-The retro 60's look of the film works to its advantage; they don't hit you over the head with archaic references. It's a nod to the classic Bond films, I suspect. The thing is, since the Bond films were the property of the Broccoli family, the directors in question were somewhat limited in the directions that they could take their films. This led to the whole series having the feel of being done by competent, if uninspired journeymen directors. Which is what's happening here.
-James McAvoy and Micheal Fassbinder work just fine as younger versions of the mutant leaders. However, it's kind of embarassing watching Fassbinder, whom I'm developing a hetro man-crush on as an actor, bathetic-ally monologuing at the movie's end. Did Stan Lee write this bit? (Seriously, go watch Fassbinder in Steve McQueen's brilliant 'Hunger', after you see this. An actor's life, indeed.)
-"Sure, bad guy who ruthlessly killed all our Government guards to get to us, and destroyed our base, I'll go with you! What could go wrong?" and "Sure, other villain who almost killed my step-brother, paralyzed him from the waist down and went off on an insane tangent with that goofy, over-dramatic speech of yours back there, I'll join your side! What could go wrong?" Which leads me to:
-While Magneto is the bad guy, in the movie's context, his argument against the humans makes the most sense. In that I mean Professor X doesn't seem to have any type of long term plans for the mutant community except for "Let's get a bunch of people with superpowers under the same roof." You don't do your movie any favors by making the bad guy the one with the most logical long term survival plan.
-The movie seems to be positioning Magneto as the superhero Malcolm X to Professor X's Martin Luther King, I suppose. The thing is, if you try to tie in real-world issues like civil rights to a silly popcorn movie, it tends to put a bit of a damper on the whole 'fun' concept, doesn't it? I like to imagine Martin Luther King, in this movie's history, trying to come up with a slogan for his 'Freedom March' of 1964 and going, "Say! Why don't we co-opt the mutants' ideology to succinctly promote our goals of treating all human beings with dignity and compassion?" Then twenty years later, gay rights activists can borrow the mutants' slogans for their cause. Doesn't it seem kind of ridiculous tieing in actual human rights issues to people in costumes blowing up stuff with their mind? (This is why I don't bother with superhero comics. When real-world concerns bang into superhero comic story lines, they just wind up pointing out the inherent absurdities in the superhero genre. Why didn't Spiderman or Superman stop the World Trade Center from collapsing? Why don't they do something about famine in Africa? Or wars in Eastern Europe? Or..? You get my point.)
-When one of your leads has the acting ability of an athlete guest-hosting on SNL, I guess it's a good idea to put her in her underwear for most of the movie. Honestly, January Jones' idea of 'acting' is blinking rapidly while delivering lines meant to be menacing but come off like she's ordering a pizza.
-The shout-outs to Rebecca Romain and Hugh Jackman were a nice touch.
-I believe, at the day's end, the superhero-in-a-movie is going to triumph over the superhero comic if only for the simple reason in a movie you can get your fix in ninety minutes. Whereas in a comic series, a first time reader has to wade through a backlog of plots and story lines decades old in order to keep on top of the current story. The unexpected added bonus of this is that it, -well, getting back issues of comics off the internet, also- has basically killed off the speculator market for comic collecting that sprang up in the Nineties.
As long as I'm ranting about comics, here's some actual comics I picked up...
Century 1969: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (B-) The conceit of Alan Moore's and Kevin O'Neil's comic series is that Mina from Dracula and Allan Quartermain from King Solomon's Mines have teamed up with other fictional characters to fight Evil. The broad concept works well enough, except for a couple of minor issues: Firstly, since Mina and Allan change their appearances in issue to issue, as well as their personalities, it's like having to get re-acquainted with new leads every issue. Wouldn't it be simpler to just take other fictional characters and tweak them enough to avoid a lawsuit? Like, maybe Holden Caufield and Anne Frank team up? (That's an idea in really poor taste, but you get my drift.) Secondly, Moore's adding in fictional in-jokes is a little like XKCD's trope of making obscure science and computer references. Unlike XKCD, Moore's crafted a good enough story so if you miss the in-jokes, you're not lost on the story.
Hate Annual #7 (C+) Peter Bagge's original 'Hate' series worked as it was the result of a suburban man in his thirties looking in on a subculture he had just left- the 'grunge' movement in Seattle. Bagge had enough sympathy for his characters to make his stories relate-able, but enough distance from them to put his comics in perspective. Bagge wisely ended 'Hate' just as his main character, Buddy Bradley, had reached a level of stability in his life, and thus, ended a chapter of his life. When the annuals look in on Buddy's married life, they come across as sitcom material that I suspect Bagge feels more obliged to produce then wants to. Bagge's strips of the history of scientists and libertarians, on the other hand, are what he really seems interested in these days. (Go check out his archive at Reason magazine, here.)
I now realize that the next big project Bagge needs to tackle would be a biography of Ayn Rand. Seriously.
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti (A) Brunetti does in 77 pages what Scott McCloud tried to do in two volumes of 'Inventing Comics' and 'Reinventing Comics'. It's a overview of Brunetti's cartooning classes, and as succinct and as in-depth an overview of the medium of comics and cartoons as you're ever going to get. Even if you don't do his hands-on guide to cartooning, I guarantee you'll come away from this with a deeper and richer understanding of the ideas and craft behind it. A must-have. See? I'm not such a grouchy fuck, after all!
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