Posts Tagged marvel
Superheroes (If You Squint)
Last night, Joss Whedon spoke at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Whedon fans get a bad rap online – obsessive, evangelical – so I first want to say that this Q&A was the most sane I’ve ever seen at the festival.
(According to my rigorous statistical math, this proves regular book nerds are much, much crazier than Firefly fans.)
Whedon spoke a little about taking on the Avengers movie for Marvel. He said that until Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, he wasn’t convinced you could do a true superhero film – but also that Hollywood’s now jumped far too quickly to films like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Dark Knight. He wanted to enjoy more examples of ‘straight’ superhero movies before we started deconstructing them, and tearing their poor heroes apart.
It made me remember how superhero films used to be a rarity. Franchises were kicked off by Donner’s 1978 Superman and Burton’s 1989 Batman, of course, but nothing like the avalanche of onscreen superheroes we have now. Some of the best comic book movies weren’t based on comics at all, just inspired by them: Raimi’s Darkman is one of my all-time favourite B-films.
Sometimes, though, there’s nothing to do but squint if you want movies featuring your favourite superheroes.
Like David Fincher’s Se7en. (Do I really have to type the number in the middle?) It’s secretly one of the best Batman movies ever made. It has the endless rain, portentous dialogue, villain with a ridiculous gimmick, and the hysterical masculine dramatics that good Gotham City stories require. There’s only one difference: in a true Batman story, Brad Pitt’s detective would soon return as a grim new villain, out for revenge.
It was about halfway through the Bourne trilogy that it hit me: an amnesiac, capable of great violence, tortured by that same capacity, struggling to uncover his past but soon realising he might not want to know? If only Matt Damon had less height, more hair, and pointy retractable claws, these would’ve been ideal Wolverine films.
I’ve always thought Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop perfectly captured the mix of arresting violence and blacker-than-black comedy that defines Judge Dredd. There’s a new Dredd movie coming, and they’ve promised to never take off his helmet. It sounds superficial, yes, but it’s a good start. Still, Dredd is such a strange character (so political, so funny, so British) it’s hard to believe even a well-meaning American-filmed version could do him justice.
And it might’ve taken Buffy the Vampire Slayer until recent issues of her new ‘Season Eight’ comic books to become faster than a speeding bullet, but she was never less than a great Spider-Man. She suffered through secret identity blues in exactly the same way, and her regular-life-versus-heroic-calling provided a perfect example of Uncle Ben’s “with great power comes great responsibility” curse.
Whedon said being offered Avengers was a thrill because he remembers reading the comics when he was eleven years old. Comic book influences have always been obvious in his writing. TV shows like Heroes would later take on the trappings of superhero stories while getting everything else about them horribly wrong, but Buffy showed the real meat of Marvel Comics.
Iron Man, Easter Eggs, and Alienation
It’s been a couple of days since the whole world saw Iron Man 2, right? It’s cool to talk about the post-credits stinger? I’ll give you a chance to look away, just in case…
Yeah, it’s Thor’s hammer.
Just like the Samuel L. Jackson-as-Nick-Fury appearance that ended the first Iron Man, Thor’s hammer was basically meaningless unless you were already in the know; unless you’re already enough of a superhero fan to know its significance. (My audience was about one-quarter “wooo!”, three-quarters “huh?”)
And while the gag with Captain America’s half-finished shield in Tony Stark’s lab was fun, there were plenty of these other, oddly alienating moments in Iron Man 2. Why not have someone say the Black Widow’s codename out loud? Why not explain who the hell Nick Fury actually is – other than Samuel L. Jackson letting his eyepatch do his acting for him?
It gets really weird, however, when you remember that the Iron Man movies’ Nick Fury is based on the Ultimate Universe version of the character. He was reinvented by much-praised ‘cinematic’ artist Bryan Hitch to resemble movie-star Samuel L. Jackson – and therefore Jackson was cast as Fury for Iron Man’s first big cinematic finish. It was a bizarre self-fulfilling transmedia prophecy, and I don’t think it’ll be the last.
Superhero movies (and, apparently, their fans) have always loved their easter eggs. These nods to other characters and other worlds are a way to suggest the shared universes of the comics that spawned them. And why not? These thousands of characters and decades of stories are one of the primary appeals of Marvel and DC’s superhero comics.
In his article “The Superhero with a Thousand Faces”, Luca Somigli said there’s a reason why Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman made a pre-disfigured Joker the man who’d killed Bruce Wayne’s parents. It was to approximate the years of animosity they have in the comic books. And when Christopher Nolan’s 2005 Batman Begins revealed its Joker card at the film’s conclusion, it was a thrilling moment – not because it was to reward dedicated fans, but because the Joker is so part of pop-culture consciousness that everyone in the cinema knew exactly what it meant.
Now Marvel’s planned run of interlinked Avengers movies – Iron Man, The Hulk, Iron Man 2, Captain America, and Thor – will let them mimic their comic books in a whole new way. These individual films are planned to culminate in (Joss Whedon’s?) The Avengers, which’ll feature all these characters at once.
Comics often try to be like movies, and that risks ignoring the specific qualities of sequential art and serial storytelling that make them unique. Now the reverse is coming true, too. My concern with Marvel’s films aping their comics is that they’ll feel less like actual movies and more like pointless prologues. Like easter egg hunts with comic book in-jokes and poorly-defined character parades as prizes. Iron Man 2 enjoyed all the trappings of the Marvel universe, but sometimes forgot to give the uninitiated reason to care.
More and more, I think this interconnectedness – and the shying away from more radical and auteuristic interpretations of these heroes it requires – will mean a more cohesive universe, sure, but much less interesting films.
I did enjoy much of Iron Man 2 (although I felt that trying to recreate the free-wheeling feel of the first one meant every scene went on 15% too long). In the spirit of the post-credits stinger, though, here’s a teaser of my other major qualm about the movie:
Do the military medals that end up pinned to Tony Stark’s chest mean he’s just a weapons manufacturer again?
Brightest Day and Dead Baby Birds
The first page of Brightest Day #0 made me laugh out loud. It’s the first volley of a more traditionally ‘heroic’ era for DC Comics superheroes – and it opens with a baby bird falling out of its nest and striking a tombstone with a spatter of blood, dead.
I feel better already.
Admittedly, Brightest Day co-writer Geoff Johns has said that the tone of the book is “not necessarily optimistic”. It does, however, arrive as a cheerier sequel to his hearts-torn-out-and-eaten-in-front-of-their-owners storyline Blackest Night, and showcases a dozen resurrected characters suddenly pardoned from the growing bodycount of recent superhero stories.
The narrator of the parodic Ambush Bug: Year None put it like this in 2008: “Squeamish, gentle reader? Then it may be time for you to give up reading graphic literature, since we have truly now entered… the Guignol Age of Comics.” Look, you really need to see the font for the full effect:
It’s not just blood and gore that make some squeamish, but also the actions of the heroes themselves. Marvel is promoting its new Heroic Age – a “throwback to the early days of the Marvel Universe, with more of a swashbuckling feel”, according to editor in chief Joe Quesada. Have comic books become so compromised that announcing “heroes will be heroes again” deserves a headline in the mainstream media?
Many trace this grim-and-gritty superhero trend back to comics like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen in the mid-1980s; Moore says he suspects “that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories…”
Everyone would have their own list of superhero stories gone wrong. Personally, I think that Kevin Smith’s Batman series The Widening Gyre seems to have been written just to prove that Frederick Wertham was right about creepy superhero sexuality. I cocked an eyebrow when the alternate-universe Captain America purposefully used a kindergarten full of children as cover during a firefight in Ultimate Avengers #4. Hell, DC just published a story in which a hero murders a villain while quipping “For justice” – a catchphrase associated with their kid-friendly Super Friends title.
I’m torn, though, whenever I feel the urge to complain about what’s being done to these superheroes. In my last column for Bookslut, I talk about alternative superheroes and “underwear perverts”, like James Kochalka’s Superf*ckers and Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys. I end up saying we shouldn’t be so precious about ‘perverted’ superheroes. It’s very difficult for a single story – or even a decent-length run – to do any lasting damage. Superheroes have “existed for too many years, through too many stories, at the hands of too many writers and artists to be corrupted by swear words or a sex scandal.” That goes for Marvel and DC’s own stories, too.
I don’t want to be a they’re-raping-my-childhood! hysteric. I’m all for violence, gore, and death – I’m actually murdering someone as I type! I’m just tired of the so-called “real world” intersecting with superhero stories in the most grim and least interesting ways. This quick, lovely piece by David Uzumeri summarises it best. Comparing Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto to Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s All-Star Superman, he writes:
“Books like Watchmen or Identity Crisis take that tack with American superhero material; they’re both about scratching under the shiny veneer and finding the rotten underside of a metaphorical golden age, about how, in a grown-up world, pragmatism trumps idealism.”
If idealism can triumph anywhere, shouldn’t it be in superhero stories?
(Oh: the baby bird in Brightest Day #0 is magically resurrected a couple of pages later! So, uh, no harm done.)
Generic Comic Book
Look at this cover from Marvel’s Generic Comic Book one-shot from 1984. There’s something disquieting about its brutal honesty, isn’t there? It reads as follows:
GENERIC COMIC BOOK
TYPE: SUPER-HERO ACTION-ADVENTURE
THIS COMIC CONTAINS:
One neurotic Super-Hero type with a variety of personal problems; one bad-guy bent on world domination through arcane means; assorted villainous hench-people; the hero’s nefarious employer, pathetic family, and well-endowed girlfriend; a plot containing a conflict, a subplot, a resolution, a plot twist, and as many fights as it takes to fill up the rest of the pages.
And in the bottom corner: MARVEL NO FRILLS.
As the old headline on The Onion says: I’ve never been so accurately insulted in all my life.
Generic Comic Book is a precursor to the bizarre logic that drives films like Disaster Movie and Meet The Spartans. These movies have evolved beyond the need for anything but the most cursory jokes. Instead, they offer up an endless procession of moments of recognition – opportunities to say hey, that’s that scene from that other movie!
This comic, however, does away with jokes all together. I’m not kidding. It’s the story of an everyday man who develops superpowers, decides to fight crime, and finds that his life just becomes more complicated. Maybe the origin story is a little less dramatic than most – he’s given powers by a lifetime of exposure to the radiation of crappy glow-in-the-dark collectables – but this would probably fit right in to Marvel’s current brand of ‘realistic’ superhero comics. There’s a swishy gay stereotype in there, too, but this kind of comic relief was depressingly commonplace in the 80s.
The moment I saw this cover (when Comic Book Legends Revealed ran a story revealing the issue’s anonymous writer) it reminded me of the issue of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man where poor Buddy looks out of the page and sees you, the reader, watching him, and you want to throw down the issue in horror.
I found myself a cheap copy online, and it’s now sitting uncomfortably with my other monthly comics: the good and the bad, the memorable and the hopelessly generic. It’s mocking the way that their brightly-coloured covers often disguise bare bones underneath.
Maybe the unsettling joke is that Generic Comic Book provides exactly what its title promises.