Posts Tagged comics
Muppets Now and Forever
Everyone knows there’s a new Muppet movie in cinemas now. The tagline is “MUPPET DOMINATION”, after all. They’re obviously taking no prisoners where publicity’s concerned. It’s the plot of James Bobbin and Jason Segel’s new film The Muppets, too: how to best return these characters from pop cultural obscurity to their rightful position as entertainment icons?
The good news: the movie’s very enjoyable. The concept used to introduce brothers Gary and Walter – one human, one muppet – is a clever one; the songs are mostly great; Jason Segel’s excitement at being surrounded by these puppets is palpable. I laughed, I cried. And yet…
The bad news: the voices are wrong. For the first hour of the movie I cringed every time Fozzie or Piggy spoke. It’s like seeing your favourite band play but hearing a cover song boom out of the speakers. It made me feel a little bit like I was going mad.
This isn’t the first time. When Jim Henson died, and Kermit’s voice changed forever, I remember thinking that maybe the character should’ve been retired. But that’s a selfish thought – why shouldn’t new generations enjoy Kermit, just to spare my feelings? New voices won’t matter to the kids who see the film. That’s how it should be.
It’s harder to take in The Muppets because Frank Oz – the man who gave life to Fozzie and Piggy – is still alive. The fact that Oz was unhappy with the script and worried it didn’t “respect the characters” did affect my viewing experience. Couldn’t they find some way to allay his concerns and get him on board?
It doesn’t always serve art to give creators the final say over their creations. Everyone alive agrees the Star Wars universe would be much improved if someone had found a way to ignore George Lucas’ whims. Everyone except Lucas, anyway.
It comes down to this: what is a muppet? Is it a character that should stay an extension of its creator or creators? Or is a muppet a Robin Hood or a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, kept alive by dozens and dozens of different interpretations by artists good and bad?
(Or, as Homer Simpson once said, a muppet might be “not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet… but man! So to answer your question, I don’t know.”)
My favourite new Muppet story isn’t the film. It’s the muppet comic book by Roger Langridge from a few years ago. They mimic the format of the 1970s Muppet Show, keeping its anarchic humour while managing some beautiful character moments. His muppets are pencil-and-ink abstractions of already abstracted foam-and-felt, but they’re absolutely alive.
Ignore the funk revelations of the decade-old Muppets in Space movie. Langridge provides the definitive answer to Gonzo the Great’s true identity, completing an emotional journey that began in 1979’s The Muppet Movie as he sang ‘I’m Going To Go Back There Someday’.
Scooter asks Gonzo: “Tell me… please… what the heck are you??”
And Gonzo replies: “Oh, Scooter. I thought you knew. I’m an artist.”
X-Men First Class: Mutant TV
After I saw Wolverine: Origins, I actually defended it. Kind of. I said that it was so haphazard, nonsensical, and oddly-shaped it provided perhaps the most accurate recreation of what it’s like read mainstream superhero comics. In two hours, it made me feel like I’d read a year’s worth of issues in one sitting – with a few different writers, some rushed fill-in art, and a helping of editorial interference.
Now X-Men: First Class achieves something similar, only much more successfully. A 1960s-set prequel to Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men movies – with Singer back on board with a story credit and as producer – this is a welcome return to the thematic material that makes mutant stories interesting.
Admittedly the characters are sometimes forced to announce these themes out loud, but that’s a small price to pay.
Director Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass) does very well in some smaller moments, especially in the striking reverse-angle transformation of an innocuous office to a torture chamber; he also knows that the movie’s power comes from James McAvoy’s Charles and Michael Fassbender’s Erik, and the scenes they share are the movie’s highlights. If only the same could be said for January Jones as Emma Frost, who is embarrassingly lifeless here. The comic book version of Emma would be appalled by this pretender wearing her lingerie.
Vaughn struggles in the movie’s special effects-heavy sequences, though. Towards the end, things take on the look of a big-budget Smallville finale. That’s not a compliment. (I know fans, situated both in and out of Hollywood, can easily become obsessed with fidelity to their source material. I maybe just fell prey to it talking about Emma Frost, above. But including Banshee’s flying-with-flappy-wings-and-screaming-towards-the-ground? Yeah, that was never going to work.)
In fact, the whole movie looks a little cheap. A little made-for-TV. And that got me thinking: why not?
In some ways, First Class does mimic the structure and feel of comic books. For example, it begins with the same sequence that brutally kicked off Singer’s first X-Men film, and then adds another twist to it. This is common practice in comics as new writers pick apart heroes’ origin stories, always returning to embroider them with new, painful details. But with its small-screen spectacle, cast of thousands, and overstuffed plot – this ends up feeling less like comic books and more like mutant television.
As critic Paul Verhoeven wrote in his review: “Really, what they should have done was give it the Game of Thrones treatment and make a big, detailed, character-driven story all about the early Academy days.”
I couldn’t agree more. Charles and Erik, travelling the globe, recruiting mutants! Having zany adventures and philosophical disagreements on their ideological differences! Killing an occasional nazi along the way! That’s a season’s worth of entertainment even before they begin their mutant academy and lifelong rivalry. As enjoyable as this movie is, its second half feels like a clipshow of episode highlights to come.
Watching First Class also made me realise something has shifted in what I want from TV and what I want from film. It’s now television that seems to give me stories with truly epic scope. At the cinema, I’m leaning towards more singular spaces, driven less by narrative and more by a character’s subjectivity or particular mood.
It also made me realise, as so much television now looks so ‘cinematic’, I should probably stop saying ‘made-for-TV’. Then again, ‘straight-to-video’ is still in my vocabulary…
Reading Comics: Free Talk on Monday Night
This Monday night I’ll be giving a free, casual talk at North Fitzroy library explaining once and for all: what’s so good about comic books, anyway? Here’s the details:
Reading Comics with Martyn Pedler
7pm, Monday August 9th
240 St Georges Rd, North Fitzroy Vic 3068
In the spirit of Thunderdome, I’ll be splitting the night down the middle. Half on the best of the indie / alternative scene and the particular joys of the comic book medium, and half on how to wade into the regularly insane world of superhero comics. Feel free to come along and tell me about whatever favourites I’ve missed.
Some exclamation points to get you excited:
Doom Patrol! American Splendor! Hellboy! Astro City! Jimmy Corrigan! Batman: Year One! From Hell! Casanova! Bottomless Belly Button! All-Star Superman! Eddy Current! Sandman! David Boring! Zot! Probably some X-Men, too!
If anyone’s bored in Melbourne on Monday night, it’d be great to see you.
Batman Hates Goodbyes
There’s a gag that’s been running through Batman comics for as long as I can remember. Batman and Commissioner Gordon are engaged in a terse discussion over Gotham’s latest batch of murders. Batman then disappears mid-conversation, leaving poor Gordon talking to himself by the light of the Bat-Signal.
Every writer seems to have provided their own variation on this same vanishing act, but only one I know of explains why Batman does it.
Before I get to that, though, a little more on my last mention of the “tangle of personal tragedies and pointless minutia” of some comic book continuity. Company-wide reboots like Crisis On Infinite Earths are one way to fix these snags, but more common is to perform on-the-fly ‘battlefield surgery’ on continuity hiccups. Writers create new justifications for odd notions from previous issues as they go – or, at worst, they find new excuses to ignore the weirder or dumber elements of their characters.
Geoff Johns’ work on Green Lantern is dedicated to this conceptual surgery. He took the fact that Green Lantern’s ring originally didn’t work against the colour yellow – a random weakness introduced to give villains a shot at winning – and transmuted it into an all-encompassing, world-building logic for his corner of the DC Universe.
He’s created a sci-fi “emotional spectrum” of warring colours that explains early Green Lantern stories while also providing endless fodder for later ones. Admittedly, I’m still waiting for him to tackle the time Green Lantern fought The Shark despite his invisible yellow forcefield. (Yes. You heard me. Invisible and yellow.)
Sometimes a retroactive justification can be much smaller in scale. Greg Rucka wrote an idiosyncratic Batman story called “Falling Back” in Legends of the Dark Knight #125. It came towards the end of a sprawling crossover called “No Man’s Land” – a surprisingly good crossover, too. Even when it was leaking logic it was full of fascinating ideas and dark character turns.
Gordon is upset that a defeated Batman disappeared, abandoning Gotham. Now that Batman’s back, Gordon wants nothing to do with him. He’s furious that Batman left the city unprotected without even a word; furious that no one in law enforcement will take him seriously because he needs a masked vigilante to help him.
They finally meet, face to face. This issue is almost entirely dedicated to their conversation: no fight scenes, no flashbacks. Artist Rick Burchett lets whole pages sit, empty of dialogue, as these two men struggle to find the right words. Downstairs, a waiting Robin nervously says it feels like his parents are deciding if “the divorce is final”.
When Batman tells Gordon that they’re still partners, Gordon responds: “Partners are equal, Batman! When have you ever treated me like your equal? Partners, for example, tell you their plans! They keep you informed! And they sure as hell don’t walk out on you in the middle of a sentence!”
Batman slowly bows his head, and says: “I’ve never been good at saying goodbye.”
Batman’s disappearances aren’t just him being needlessly spooky; it’s that he’s still so consumed with guilt and grief over his parents’ murder that he’d rather vanish than risk another goodbye.
And, just like that, a tired gag is injected with retroactive heartbreak.