"I'm Getting Too Metallic For This $h!t."

(Fair warning: plot spoilers below.)

In this year’s episode of “Tony Stark, Billionaire Douchebag,” we get an updated version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with Tony getting a visit from The-One-Night-Stand of Christmas Past, The Terrorist of Christmas Present, and the Chemically Enhanced Billionaire Douchebag of Christmas Yet To Come.  Plus an adorable urchin, a Christmas Story gag, and (as a stuffed holiday goose) the traditional Shane Black shoot-out on a docked oil tanker.  There’s even a nice little stocking gift for those of you who are Gwyneth Paltrow haters—you get to see her fall to a fiery death, which will definitely make you squee with delight; and then you get to see her get better, which will push your Oh Please Girl button even more than you thought possible.

There are a lot of other buttons that will be pushed here, most of them smartly.  I’ve always believed that there are only two stories when it comes to a comic book character (the origin and the last battle) and that everything else is an episode that echoes one of them.  Iron Man 3 definitely goes back to the origin—specifically the Jeff Bridges line in the original movie: “Tony Stark was able to build this in a CAVE!”  That’s the guy we fell in love with, and that’s the guy we get here—the mechanic, complete with a cave-like garage.  And with that adorable urchin standing in for Yinsen.

And speaking of comic book tropes, for a lot of people, this movie is going to be an introduction to one of the core problems with comic book continuity: in a universe where SHIELD and Captain America are also tasked with defending the country, how come nobody but Iron Man shows up when the President is threatened?   

The scriptwriters actually deal with this question in a clever fashion, by showing how Tony has panic attacks whenever anybody mentions anything related to the Avengers movie.  It becomes not only a running gag, but a stealth command to the audience: “Don’t bring up The Avengers, or Tony will have a conniption.”  So whenever it is brought up, we cringe a little, because we care about this guy, and in the back of our minds we don’t want to see anybody from The Movie Tony Can’t Talk About have a cameo, because we know that if Samuel Jackson ever shows up in person, Tony is going to gut him with his repulsors. 

Another little bit of writer sleight-of-hand is that adorable little urchin.  After a Y2k one-night stand with Rebecca Hall’s Maya Hansen, there’s a great deadpan joke when Stark meets Maya again. 

TONY:  You don’t have a 12-year-old kid in your car, do you?

MAYA:  He’s thirteen.

And our adorable little urchin is that kid in the joke.  Seriously.  He’s the right age, and he talks about his mom, but she never shows up—so in the back of our minds we can still relate to him as Tony’s love child with Maya.  He also serves as a double Christmas Ghost doppelganger, because he’s also got a Little Tony vibe going, which is why he’s the one who knows exactly who Tony is and what he does.  “You’re a mechanic.  Make something.” 

So it’s a fun flick.  But I had one major beef with it.  (Besides the incredibly extended final battle and the rushed voice-over wrap-up.)  I didn’t like what they did with the Mandarin.  To be coy, he is not what he seems to be—and while there’s a chance that what we see is actually a double fakeout, that we’re watching a man who’s pretending to be innocuous when he’s really dangerous—there’s nothing in the movie to justify anything except an out-and-out Fooled Ya moment that had more than a liberal whiff of liberal hogwash in it.  I felt like the air went out of the movie, and it became less real than what it could have been.  Plus there’s a big plot moment that completely gets undermined, which is why I really wanted to see this line of dialogue:

TONY:  What kind of actor shoots a guy in the head on-camera as part of his performance?

THE MANDARIN:  A method actor.

"I told you that story to tell you this one."

Speaking of prequels, he said, as he began to ramble, . . . 

There must be something prequellian in the water because Prometheus opened the same week that DC Comics began publishing the first of their Before Watchmen cash-grabs, and Somebody Who's Not Martin Scorsese began filming  Raging Bull 2  in LA.  (I know, I know--that's a sequel--but "prequellian"--wow--I just invented a perfect rhyme for Orwellian.  Twenty bucks says Sondheim steals it before my birthday.)

If you ask me, all this so-called creative writing has more to do with product placement than actual creativity, which adds the latest Spider-Man reboot into the conversation, since the only reason Sony made the movie in the first place is because, if it didn’t, then the rights to the character would revert back to Marvel.  So if you read any interview where one of the thousands of executive producers on Spidey says that they made the movie because they wanted to tell a good story, try not to yell “Bullshit!” too loudly, okay?  

Ditto whenever DC editor Dan DiDio says something laughable like this:

After twenty five years, the Watchmen are classic characters whose time has come for new stories to be told.

TRANSLATION:  We’re taking the one piece of comic book fiction that everybody points to as exceptional and making it as run-of-the-mill as Superman.

Or like this:

The big selling point is that this material is true to the source material, but it gets the chance to examine all the aspects of ‘Watchmen’ that made it great.

Selling point is right.  It makes me want to yell out, “Hey DiDiot--you know what made Watchmen great?  It had a beginning, a middle, and an end!  You know--like literature?”

But comic books are not literature (which is why Watchmen has always been the exception).  And superhero comic book publishers (aka Marvel and DC, the Big Two) are, at the moment, in the business of churning out corporate-sponsored fan fiction based on intellectual properties owned by Time Warner and Disney.  Batman is not a character any more; he’s a brand--he’s a franchise--he’s something you market; and because he’s a product, you can’t really make any major changes to him.  (Which is why what Christopher Nolan has been allowed to do with Batman is nothing short of miraculous.  And it’ll look even more miraculous when the new Batman origin movie comes out in six or seven years, he said cynically.)

 

But again, this is what corporations do when they own products.  They slap NEW AND IMPROVED on the label and stock the shelves with them, which is exactly the same thing DC did when it re-started its universe last year, and exactly what Marvel is going to do when it re-starts its universe later this year.   In which situation the words NEW AND IMPROVED are meaningless, because the only new thing is the packaging, and the only improved thing is the artwork on the package.   

Think of it this way: as far as superhero comic books go, it’s literally a supermarket.  When a publisher says he’s trying to tell new stories and keep those characters relevant, it really means he's going to hire different writers and artists to revisit the same old avenues and maybe map a new alley or two in the same old city with the expressed purpose of increasing product sales.  He's not going to create a new city.  But if, in the course of working for him, somebody DOES create a new city, then he owns it, and everybody in it, and gets to market it to whoever he thinks will buy it.  Which is pretty much the Hollywood business model these days, no? 

And a pretty good example of Matthew's Third Law of CultureDynamics: "Everything decays into Hollywood."  Or in physics terms, if literature is radioactivity, then Hollywood is lead.  (Case in point: Raging Bull 2.  I mean, really?) (And what's the over/under on me living to see the inevitable Taxi Driver remake?)

THE SUPREME COURT: A lot better, now that we've passed Obamacare!

Remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels--none of those are the rules of literature.  And maybe that makes me a book snob, but there's a reason certain stories and characters appeal to successive generations of readers.  It's because they embody something, they epitomize something, they say something.  And then they shut up.  The fact that they actually do stop existing at the end--that their story is self-contained--adds weight and significance to the work in which they live.  Weight and significance which is diluted like Bretton Woods diluted the gold standard when you have remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels.

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE:  Says the guy who reads every new Sherlock Holmes story he can get his hands on.

ME:  Not every one, he said defensively.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: Says the guy who wrote a sequel to Hamlet.

ME:  Okay, okay--but that still doesn't mean I'm going to buy a single issue of Before Watchmen.

DAN DIDIO:  Why not?

ME:  Because I don't want to read Before Bovary or The Rise of Gatsby or Getting The Car Ready For The Road any more than I want to read what Rorschach did either before or in between those Watchmen panels in which he appears.  Because if I'm going to be sold a product, I want something that survives beyond its shelf life.  If you can promise me that you won't restock the Watchmen aisle with sequels, prequels, and side-stories--if you swear to me that your company is committed to NOT creating a whole Watchmen Universe--then I might reconsider.

DAN DIDIO:  I wish I could do that. 

ME:  And I wish I could live forever.  But it's against the law of nature.  Like corporations being creative.

DC AND MARVEL: Hey! We hire creators all the time!

ME:  I rest my case.

 

Sucker-r-r-r-r . . . . 

You will believe a god can make breakfast

Don't let the glowering poster fool you. Thor is actually a pretty cheery movie, which follows the Iron Man arc of setting up an asshole and then humanizing him--in Thor's case, literally. Is it a believable humanization? Yes and no. The problem, I think, is that Chris Hemsworth plays Asshole Thor so well that, by comparison, his Humanized Thor is kind of boring, almost as if he was channeling Errol Flynn and then replacing him with Robert Taylor. It helps that he plays most of his Humanized Thor scenes opposite Natalie Portman. A Toyota Celica could look human next to Natalie Portman.


Is the movie fun? Yes, but not exhilarating. Marvel still hasn’t managed to duplicate the sheer joy of the original Iron Man, which looks better and better as time passes. The most joyous part of this film is in the opening half hour, when Thor and his friends go off to battle the Frost Giants. It ends up being a hard high point to match, especially since the rest of the film is about how Thor gets humbled and humanized. Compared to the joy of calling down the lightning, serving eggs over easy can’t help but look bland.

Of the two other potential high points, the battle with the Destroyer seems rushed and almost perfunctory, even though -– wow -- best realization of a Jack Kirby visual concept ever. And yet even in its truncated state it’s still strong enough to make the final throw-down with Loki feel a little anti-climactic.

Which is probably the only bad thing associated with Loki in the film, thanks to Tom Hiddleston’s performance in the part. When he’s onscreen, you can’t take your eyes off him, even when he appears to be doing nothing at all except thinking and observing. And no, he’s nowhere near as sly or mischievous as he should be, but then this is his origin story too, and he travels in the exact opposite direction from his brother Thor, from someone who appears thoughtful and sensitive to someone who is full of himself and always has one more trick up his sleeve. Which means that, as Thor gets blander, Loki gets more and more interesting. And to everybody’s credit, he doesn’t do the Obvious Bad Thing, given his father fixation. What he does is a lot more subtle, and is a clear echo of the same flaw in Thor’s character before he’s Humanized.

The other standout performance is Idris Elba as Heimdall. The guy manages the near-impossible feat of being wrapped up in an incredibly Kirbyesque costume and projecting not just authority, but godlike authority. You get the feeling that Kenneth Branagh walked around the set whispering "This is not a comic book movie, this is Shakespeare," to all the Asgardians, and Hiddleston and Elba really stepped up to the analogy.


The film is actually so many different movies rolled into one that it has no business being a consistent whole, so credit Branagh with that as well. It’s a little bit King Lear, with Thor as Edgar and Loki as Edmund; it’s a continuity-based entry in what has become Marvel’s Big Avengers Crossover; and since Thor’s new-found humility is shown when he cooks everybody breakfast, it’s a chick flick as well. (“Oh my God -- he’s a god -- and he can cook!”) The weird thing is, even with all these mismatched parts, the film doesn’t feel like it’s all over the place, like one of those awful productions of Shakespeare you see sometimes where twenty actors are in twenty different plays. Its chief flaw is that it suffers greatly from a near-total absence of script. By which I mean, “Somebody actually wrote this?” There is a noticeable dearth of clever or memorable in the dialogue, and if it weren’t for solid performances from the main actors, this would be a very hard movie to listen to (though a gorgeous one to look at, thanks to the Asgard scenes). I swear to God, there’s a universal law which states that intelligent dialogue exists in inverse proportion to high production values, which explains why the more special effects you have in a movie, the dumber the dialogue sounds.

For the theologically inclined, the whole "Is this guy really a god?" question gets its modern-day science-as-religion based answer (quoting Arthur C Clarke on science and magic, throwing out the "Primitive society would think they were gods" option), but really--if you can believe that Natalie Portman is a scientist, how hard is it to believe in Norse gods? It's the Natalie Portman Premise Law in action. (I mean come on--the only reason everybody believed Black Swan was a serious movie is because it was ten times easier than believing Portman was a ballet dancer.) Me, I had no problem with the Asgard angle. But what I still don't get, and never did about Thor, is how he can be a kid and growing up in Asgard in the relative here and now, and yet have appeared a couple of thousand years ago in Scandinavian legends.

For the visually inclined, skip the 3D version -- the only really cool 3D effect is in the final credits, which says a lot about how this whole 3D thing is just a way to soak an extra ten bucks out of people. For the continuity inclined, there is a cameo that looks forward to next year’s Avengers movie, as well as the now-traditional easter-egg teaser at the end of the credits which looks forward to both Captain America and Avengers. And for the psychologically inclined, it’s worth noting that the humbling of the title character occurs when he realizes he can’t even get it up with a derrick—it being his “hammer,” which is a word I can't hear and not think of that Nathan Fillion line from Dr. Horrible.

I hate it when that happens.

And for all the blissfully non-geek in the audience, the thing in the teaser at the end?  You can read about it here.

So now that Disney has bought Marvel . . .

. . . you have to ask yourself: what are the Disney pit bulls lawyers going to do about this?

(from Comic Mix).

On the one hand: ew!

On the other hand: if someone really was bitten by a radioactive spider? That's exactly how his webs would be created.

What Marriage? - Part 2

Best. Mashup. Ever.

What marriage?

From Diesel Sweeties:

Why reading comic books will always be a sign of immaturity

Those of you with real lives may not have heard that Peter (Spider-Man) Parker's 20-year-old marriage to Mary Jane Watson has been retroactively erased from current Marvel continuity. Why? Because stories about married guys are not as dramatic as stories about single guys who could be sleeping around.

You think I'm kidding? Check out this interview with Marvel Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada, and try to think of all the unspoken things which the phrase "soap opera" is code for:

The golden era of Spider-Man gave us things we had never seen in a comic before. We had a lovable loser as the hero, a character with some incredible failings, but an amazing amount of heart. “With great power there must also come great responsibility” was his motto, but at the very core of what made Spider-Man stories great and, more importantly, different, was the fantastic soap opera and the cast of characters and villains in Peter Parker’s life. Spider-Man stories revolutionized the comic book super hero because the stories were about Peter Parker; Spider-Man was secondary. This was a big shift from a world in which Superman and Batman were what was important. Clark and Bruce were just facades. And let me add, sometimes Spider-Man would lose against the bad guy and sometimes Spider-Man wouldn’t make the right decision. These were revolutionary ideas for a super hero comic at the time.

What really made Spidey unique wasn’t so much his powers or his costume, sure those were cool things, but what really made him unique was that it was about the guy inside the costume and the soap opera that was his life. Peter could have had a whole different set of powers and it still would have been a ground breaking comic because in the end, that’s not what made Spider-Man stories different. So, with every little bit of the trappings of his life that got chipped away, more and more of the soap opera dwindled.

When Peter Parker got married, it caused the character to be cut off from many of the social situations and settings that put him at conflict with his family, friends, and especially the girl he was dating. Suddenly, something as simple as the tension he had with Felicia Hardy was completely defused; if Peter ever gave in to temptation or even considered it, he would be, in the eyes of the fans, the lousiest guy in the world. It became harder to place Peter in situations where he could hang out with other single characters, without him seeming like the oldest person in the room, even if he wasn’t. And whatever nerdish sex appeal he possessed, we had to tread very carefully. He became the perpetual “designated driver.” Sure, Peter could hang around with other married folk -- I bet that would be exciting!

Let me try to put this as plainly as I can, and let’s be really honest here, let’s really look at marriage for a second. I'll get personal, for a moment. I have an incredible marriage and a fantastic kid, but there is no question that my life was much more story-worthy when I was single. Was I happier? Absolutely not. Was my life a better story from a drama sense? Ummmm, yeah. It had many more twists and turns and theater and was a bit of a mess. Now let me say, not everyone, but for most: When people get married, they tend to settle down -- life slows down and you gain different responsibilities, grown-up responsibilities, boring responsibilities. You go out to dinner less, see fewer movies, your social life is curtailed and revolves, as it should, around your significant other. In short, life hands you a mini van. While marriage makes for an okay story, there is less drama in a (healthy) marriage than in a single relationship. That’s one of the many reason we get married -- we want stability, we want comfort, we want kids, etc., etc. No one gets married because they want more drama in their life. What’s good for one’s life doesn’t always make for great stories when the heart of your character’s universe is drama. From a writer and artist’s point of view, the people who are creating the stories, it’s like giving Daredevil his eyesight back. It works for a short time and eventually erodes at the foundation of the character and what makes them unique. We all want Peter to catch a break and to settle down and have happiness in his life, but that isn’t really what we want. If that actually happened, people would stop caring about Spider-Man.

Bottom line, there are so many things that twentysomethings are doing with their lives that a married Peter can’t. He needs to be a single guy. Sure, he can have a girlfriend -- that adds something to his story -- but a married Peter just cuts off too many avenues for good soap opera. Could you have soap opera within a marriage? Sure. But after a while, there’s only so much tension you can bring into Peter and MJ’s marriage before you make him seem like a louse of a husband, or her, like a bickering wife. In contrast, you can only play them as a happy-go-lucky couple for so long -- that adds up to zero tension within the relationship and takes away a crucial element of Spider-Man stories: the soap opera.

Where to begin? No one gets married because they want more drama in their life. Okay, but that doesn't mean there is no drama or no soap opera in a marriage. For instance: guy with secret identity marries actress model and watches her career take off while his alter ego still gets slagged in the Daily Bugle. You don't think there's drama in that? Or how about this: guy with radioactive blood gets wife pregnant and there's a chance the kid will (fill in horrible blank here). That's not dramatic? Of course it's dramatic. It's just not adolescent drama. It's adult drama. Hence the title of this post.

Someone please tell me how "with great power comes great responsibility" is not dramatically enhanced by taking on the responsibility of a marriage. And the responsibility of fatherhood. If the soap opera is Peter Parker as a single guy, and marriage has been totally ruled out by editorial fiat, then your so-called "drama" is a succession of affairs that will never lead anywhere because Ye Editor has decreed that Spider-Man is not Spider-Man unless he's 20 and single. Which says to me The Powers That Be who are currently in charge of Marvel stopped relating to the real world when they were 20 and single. Hence the title of this post.

Look--I understand that these characters are marketable properties, I understand that you have to make them (how I hate this word) relatable to new audiences. And having six or seven decades of continuity means you have to figure out an accommodation between real-world time and comic book time. DC has chosen multiple universes and multiple reboots (the latest of which is next year with the laughable word "Final" in the title). Based on what's happening at Marvel, they're going with reboot (Spidey) as well as Next Generation (Bucky becoming Captain America. Maybe). There is of course a third choice neither of the Big Two has considered: anchoring certain characters in a strict real-world timeline, so that the JSA and Captain America would always be in the 40's and 50's, Dr Strange would be (so totally) Sixties, and Dazzler stuck in the 80's (duh). Do you want to see The Shadow anywhere but in the 30's? Not me. Certain characters only work as reflections of certain time periods; I say you should take that into consideration when creating/rebooting/adapting some of those properties.

But what about the tentpoles like Superman or Batman? Will we ever see Dick Grayson wear the cowl? Hell no-- and given Dan Didio's dislike of the character, we're lucky to be still seeing him alive. The bottom line here is that, in certain cases, what you think is going to be a symphony with movements will always end up being a broken record, and the words "an event which will change everything" will continue to be as accurate as "I did not sleep with that woman" or "I am not a crook."

What does this mean for the future of comics? Stagnation and irrelevance. (And let's not talk about what it means for all the female supporting characters in the upcoming Spider-Man soap opera, who have now been relegated to the status of those who sleep with Peter, those who don't sleep with Peter, and those who want to marry Peter but it'll never happen. Yeah, like that's gonna attract female readers.)

What does this mean for me? I'll be reading more novels, thank you. Novels about married people.

And what does this say about the current editorial direction of both Marvel and DC? It says they both have the ongoing opportunity to make their characters grow and change like real people and they consistently and constantly refuse to do it. Such a great opportunity, too--a chance to do something dramatically that no one has ever tried to do before. And it will never happen. Hence the title of this post.

Face it, tiger--you just lost your fan base.

Captain America Does Green Lantern/Green Arrow

So is Cap really dead? Probably not.

Buried inside Mark Millar’s original proposal for Civil War is the following on the fate of Captain America. Millar proposes something called Doom tech which would

eliminate every superpower in the world . . . It’s right here we have Cap dropped into the situation as he heroically defends his fellow heroes, climbing inside and closing the whole thing down. Huge explosion and smoke everywhere followed by the awe on the faces of the heroes he saved as we see skinny Steve Rogers lying here stripped of his powers . . .

Cut to the epilogues and we basically set up the new Marvel Universe here with Bucky taking over as the new Cap . . . [and then] before we close the whole thing with Nick Fury talking to the 97lb Steve Rogers in the closing pages . . . as he admits that, despite everything, he’s kind of excited to get his life back again. He’s heading out to discover America and rediscover himself and Nick smiles. Steve hopes he isn’t being selfish and Nick says no way. “One Hell of a tour of duty you just had, soldier”, he tells Steve and Steve just smiles. They salute and Steve Rogers, skinny as a rake, walks off into the sunset like all the best heroes should.

THE UPSHOT: Winter Soldier as Cap for a year before Steve gets the call and gets revitalized for the movie.

Revitalized for the movie. DisgustedSigh.wav.

Meanwhile, Cap crisscrosses America driving a beat-up truck in a Neal Adams-drawn 12-issue-miniseries, battling thinly disguised caricatures of the current Vice President. Y'know, like this:

The Funeral of Captain America

So Cap gets his Arlington funeral this week, as the Associated Press reported, complete with stunning John Cassaday art:

It's not the first time Cap has died (Steranko killed him off in a memorable arc in which it was revealed that the God of Thunder is susceptible to knockout gas), and it may not be the last, but give Marvel (and Cap writer Ed Brubaker) credit for giving this death the kind of weight and significance that makes it feel like it could be the real thing.

Will Marvel bring him back? Well, they brought back Bucky. And you can make a case that Steve Rogers has done nothing but come back from the dead since he was reintroduced to the MarvelVerse in Avengers #4. When I bought that issue, I didn't know who the hell he was. But my Dad did. "Captain America? Christ Almighty!" he said, "I used to have all those comic books when I was a kid, until your grandmother threw them out." (This was about two years before my mother threw out all my comics. Some experiences truly are cross-generational.)



At the time, there was a 20-year gap between Cap's last official appearance at the end of World War II and his revival as an Avenger, which is next to nothing in comic book years, and that's probably why the man-out-of-time facet of Cap's character took another 20 years to be played with by writers like Frank Miller, who refers to Cap as "the soldier" in his Daredevil run and portrays him as a man for whom the sound of helicopters is a constant reminder of how out of place he feels in these days of modern times. He is, after all (as my father would be the first to remind me), a man who made his entry into the world by punching Adolf Hitler in the face:




Talk about your wish-fulfilment fantasies, huh? I guess something analogous would be like, oh, I don't know--maybe seeing Batman hunt down Osama Bin Laden. (Like that's ever gonna happen. Oh wait.)

What's interesting to me is that, since Cap is a child of the 40's, his death implies a critique on a set of values from that era in a way that his resurrection and survival never did. Created during a time of war, Steve (Captain America) Rogers wasn't a symbol of anything more than the national desire to kick Nazi ass. It's only after the war is over that his symbolic nature becomes confusing or questionable. So perhaps it's fitting that the week of Cap's funeral (which also occurs during a time of war) sees the reissue of one of the best, if briefest, re-envisionings of Steve Rogers, the Roger Stern/John Byrne run:

Why did I like this run so much? Because it not only dealt with Cap's history and continuity, it dealt with the idea-of-America part of his character that, to me, is what makes him interesting, inspirational, and potentially tragic. It opens up all kinds of stories revolving around the nature of patriotism, nationalism, and obedience to authority; and whatever your opinion of Civil War, putting Cap on the anti-government side feels exactly right. (My opinion of Civil War? Great concept; lousy execution. For something that was supposed to be politically relevant, it's totally ironic and fitting that it's the epilogue--Cap's death--which is resonating more with the public-at-large than the actual issues leading up to that death. Although, can I just say? Tony Stark is a dick.)



To my mind, the flag and the shield make Cap's death more (shall we say) thought-provoking and socially relevant than the death of Superman. Is it a symbol of the death of the New Deal? The death of conscience? The end of nationalism? --patriotism? --jingoism? The death of the dream? (What dream?) Or is it, like an amendment to the Constitution, part of an ongoing, on-growing experiment in government?

In the end, it's like any other life--now that it's over, we try to figure out what it all means.


So where do I stand on the "Will they bring Cap back?" question. I'd like to think that Cap will stay dead because freedom demands sacrifice--because soldiers give their lives in every age for the values of this country. But mostly, I'd like him to stay dead because that's what happens to real people. And to me, Captain America was real.

It's About Fecking Time

Now if only this could have happened about a week before Civil War started . . .