Posts Tagged superheroes
The Hulk as Hamlet
“I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.”
That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)
Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.
Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.
No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)
It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?
Frankly, I’m not sure why.
It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.
The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.
Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.
Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.
And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.
A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?
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.
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.)