Just gray

There's something primal about certain media in black-and-white. Most noir films were done in the pre-color era and the tone and atmosphere of all of them suits that presentation. Bright colors just don't speak "noir"; quite literally, since it's the French word for "black" or "dark." The Glass Key wouldn't be what it is if that first dining room scene was in a nice set of peach and olive pastels that could've represented the average decor of the time. No, it needed the grays and the shadows implied by them to give the sense of menace that shrouded the politics and the maneuvering of the various characters to make the film a classic, in addition to the writing and the performances, both of which are excellent. Likewise, many comics are just suited to that more stark presentation. Quinn and Vigil's Faust just wouldn't have had the same visual impact if it was in color, since a lot of Vigil's excellent fine line work would've been washed out by color, some by the printing process and some by the failure of the human eyes to discern detail when distracted by other stimuli. This is to say nothing of the requisite blood spray in every third panel. Indeed, although we were doing all of Fifth Panel Comics' output in black-and-white because of economics (color printing was far more costly at that time), I soon decided that our presentation was better because of the lack of color and when Jeff suggested we do the Webcomic, I was still scripting while imagining everything in monochrome. (I usually still do.) That's why when I heard about Spider-Noir and that it could be watched in the old visual style of the period in which it's presented (the 1930s), I was kinda geeked about it. I mean, yet another Spider-Man production wasn't particularly thrilling, but doing it in the style of a Dashiell Hammett story sounded great. Having watched the first episode (in the lack of coloration, as intended), I have mixed feelings as yet.

I have a fondness for noir, even if some of it seems relatively staid in the succeeding decades that so much storytelling has been built upon its foundations or has tried to emulate it. Just like with jazz, I can both see and understand the underlying meaning of those stories and the style and appreciate the building blocks that they represent to a lot of more modern drama. Miller's Crossing is my favorite Coen brothers' film for more than one reason, but a primary one is that it's clearly an homage to the noir films of old, even as it retains the Coens' famed quirkiness in many of its scene changes and reaction moments. But the other reason it's a favorite is that all of the characters are fully developed people. This is, of course, a sticking point for me in all media. If you're going to tell me a story, you have to tell me a story about humans (or at least really interesting demons/aliens/whathaveyou.) If your characters are just serving the plot, rather than living their lives, a lot of the shine is going to come off your story, no matter what style or genre it happens to inhabit. That means you have to sell me on the first episode of any series with real people. Spider-Noir, unfortunately, didn't really do that.

Why can't I find any good black-and-white pics of Reilly? Should tell you a lot.

Part of it is the Nicolas Cage effect. I don't like Cage as an actor, really, because he's a capable character actor trying to do the Leading Man thing. While he was brilliant and believable as a dying drunk in Leaving Las Vegas, in all of the rest of the roles I've seen him in, he's still doing Nicolas Cage. It's the same combination of faux world-weariness and occasional jarring surprise at being in these circumstances in the first place when everyone can see said circumstances except him. Every time. This has been the same pattern since The Rock (Why am I forced to be doing this incredibly exciting thing?!) with one exception in Adaptation. Even then, half of his dual role in that film was still Mr. Put Upon Who Doesn't Understand Why Life Won't Change. And, yes, Ben Reilly is still Nicolas Cage. It's just not interesting anymore and here he has an entire role built around that perspective, as the failing PI (stereotypical) who's a retired superhero because of a tragedy and who is alternately pitied and held in contempt by everyone around him who don't understand why he can't snap out of it. Yes, a lot of noir leads are supposed to be cynical, as that's the style, but just like another of Marvel's characters, Jessica Jones, if anything Reilly is too cynical, to the point that it gets tiresome, rather than remains humorous or otherwise entertaining.

Meanwhile, we also have the intrepid reporter who knows the truth (Lamorne Morris, playing Robbie Robertson of Daily Bugle fame), the disgusted secretary who, like Cher, doesn't understand why Reilly can't pick himself up (Karen Rodriguez), the femme fatale/important client who clearly has motives beyond the central thrust of the plot (Li Jun Li as Cat Hardy, another prominent Marvel character (no spoilers!)) and the powerful crime boss whom half the city lives in fear of for one reason or another (Brendan Gleeson as the notorious Silvermane.) In the end, the only one of those who delivered an interesting performance was Gleeson and he had the least screen time. Why? Because all of them are filling stereotypes, rather than actual roles, but Gleeson adds the one thing that Cage sorely lacks in all of his leading man attempts: gravitas. Yes, he's still Brendan Gleeson, but he's not the Gleeson of In Bruges or 28 Days Later or Cold Mountain. Why? Because he can leave at least part of himself behind and inhabit the character of all of those roles, which is something that Cage has never really been able to do. Of course, that's a writer issue, too, in that all of those other roles I mentioned are stereotypes, which means there's not as much for those actors to work with and Oren Uziel may be capable at his craft but he sure isn't Martin McDonagh, Alex Garland or Anthony Minghella, respectively.

There is, of course, a little Marvel cachet with the aforementioned roles, plus the appearance of Flint Marko (the comics nerd in me immediately blinked in memory and mumbled: "Sandman?", later confirmed by the requisite fight scene) and I totally appreciate the reframing of all of said characters in the 1930s style, in which Reilly's former identity wasn't "Spider-Man" but was instead The Spider, akin to The Phantom or the original The Spider. I like all of these things because I'm a comics nerd and a noir nerd and, consequently, it would seem like this series should be right up my dark and shadowy, newspaper fluttering alley. But I'm not sure that either Cage or Uziel are the ones to make it work. I'm not bailing out immediately. I'll give it a couple more episodes to see more of Gleeson and to hopefully see Tombstone, whom I've been told is present in the series and was one of the last interesting characters I remember from the days when I was reading Spider-Man titles (the late 80s...) But it wasn't a great start (i.e. it didn't do a The Wire/Breaking Bad/Chernobyl, even if that is a very, very high bar to reach.) We've also seen the first season of Sons of Anarchy in the last few days and I haven't written anything about it because I haven't really found it worth the time. Maybe later.

Boys will be boys

Having delved into Amazon recently and found it somewhat wanting, I figured I'd continue with something a bit less random, given my history of involvement with the comic medium, and watched the first couple episodes of Garth Ennis' The Boys. I was a once a huge fan of Ennis' work. I think his original run on Hellblazer, along with Jamie Delano's which preceded him, makes up the definitive version of the character of John Constantine. But after Ennis started a run on The Punisher in the mid-90s, his work began to take on trappings of that character and a decided glee in the "hardass for the sake of being hardass", as it were. Aside from a comedic turn in the miniseries Dicks (which I freely used at one Chicago Comic-con for an attempt at some very cheap laughs with the event announcer), Ennis was mostly producing ever-bigger guns and ever-bigger pools of blood. The introspection of his earlier work was largely missing. I haven't read the comic series that Amazon's production is based on, but after two episodes of their series, I can say that not much has changed.

The premise is that superheroes exist in the 'real world' and a major corporation (Vaught) has lined up most of them as employees that they then make money from via movies, advertising, product placement, and by contracting them out to be the resident protectors of various municipalities that pay dearly to have their own pet super. The supers, of course, are as corruptible and foible-filled as any of the rest of us and are not above using their fame and the constant adulation that results from it to get whatever their petty hearts desire. The Boys are an impromptu gathering of people who've decided they've had enough of being second-class citizens and want to blow the lid off of this situation, including a willingness to blow the respective lids off of the supers in question... which, I mean... OK?

It's not a particularly original premise (cue: superhero comics rant), but not everything has to be if it's told/presented well. It's kinda trying to out-Watchmen The Watchmen, but that's the cinderblock that every "superheroes in the 'real' world" story is going to have hung around their neck, especially given the storytelling abilities of Alan Moore, which often exceed those of the people lined up to attempt the same job. Moore layers themes into his stories, often with subtle visual cues that resonate down through them. The blood drop on the Comedian's smiley face button is the classic example from The Watchmen. Ennis, being less concerned with themes and more with entertainment, instead tends to batter you about the head and shoulders with them: "THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING! Corporation bad! Supers bad! Mercenary killers somehow good! IT'S A QUANDARY!" There's nothing for the viewer to figure out because it's not really supposed to be figured out. You're mostly supposed to sit there and be entertained by the blood spray and the fact that famous people might be rapists, too (which in the era of #MeToo seems kind of pedestrian, if still a nod to real life.)

Karl Urban is OK as the lead (Billy Butcher), but kinda lacks the rough edges that you might expect from such a character. Every time I see him, I keep thinking: "This is the urbane Bones McCoy from the new Star Trek films trying to be a badass. And generally failing." I guess there's something to be mined from Jack Quaid's character (Hughie) and his transformation from introvert to a member of a kill team, but I haven't found it yet. In contrast, Erin Moriarty (Starlight) coming to grips with her new situation and complete disenchantment with it has been far more believable. Antony Starr as Homelander has been kind of intriguing, since he's clearly doing the 'stranger in a strange land' bit, albeit as the overeager tool of the menacing Vaught Corp. I admit to not even recognizing Elizabeth Shue (Madelyn Stillwell), which is usually a compliment to someone that has slipped so easily into her role.

But on that note, one of the aspects of the show that really stood out to me is this: These supers are all still mindblowing to everyone around them. Given that the setting indicates that they've been around for years (decades?), it's difficult to rationalize how everyone can still be so much in awe of them. Sure, people get starstruck in different ways and certainly part of the premise is to draw the contrast between how famous and wonderful and heroic these people are and what their normal, human tendencies happen to be. But you're telling me that a multi-term US Senator in tough negotiations with Vaught somehow isn't going to be aware of the paranormal means they might use to entrap/convince him? Not least because the scene was used for one of those cheap (not even) laughs about sex? These guys are going out on nightly patrols and their every move is watched and analyzed on phones and social media just like actors and athletes today and yet one guy taking a long dive off a pier is enough to leave everyone with their jaws on the floor?

Doing these 'real world' situations is always a tough line to walk. After all, it's supposed to be 'normal' and yet not normal. But that single disconcerting note kind of opens the door to my overall impression in that most of this just feels staged. Overall, these don't seem like natural characters doing things that they naturally would. They seem set up to do scenes, rather than follow a storyline; as if, in setting up this tale of ethics about the difference between larger-than-life personalities and the actual people behind them, the creative team kind of lost track of the idea of telling a story and instead are just doing those cheap laughs or playing for shock value. Given that this is the same development team (Seth Rogen, etc.) behind another adaptation of Ennis' work (Preacher), I can't say that I'm too surprised. It's not a disaster and, unlike the fairly bland Mrs. Maisel, it has enough of those rough edges (outside of Urban) to maybe watch a couple more episodes and see if it beds in a little better. But it certainly hasn't reached the level of compelling/binge TV.

Aiming high

Let me state up front that Black Panther is one of the better Marvel movies that I've seen. The fact that a movie about a black, non-American superhero put not only non-American culture but the identity of the person in question, front and center of the film, is something that can only be appreciated; as opposed to a film like Amistad, in which a story about the plight of black people presents two white guys as the lead figures in said story. At every stage, not only were black characters able and empowered to make their own choices, but the two prominent white characters (Andy Serkis as Ulysses Klaue and Martin Freeman as Everett Ross) were clearly the (ahem) Tolkien white guys of the film (Gollum and Bilbo Baggins, respectively in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.) Similarly, all of the female characters were strong, active, and extremely influential in the plot and the progression of it through the film. I have to single out Danai Gurira as Okoye and Letitia Wright as Shuri for being two of the most entertaining characters and whom I would have gladly seen more of. The third in that category would be Michael B. Jordan as Erik "Killmonger" Stevens. I hope that those of you that are fans of The Wire from back in the day are as appreciative as I am that Wallace is still getting screen time and that he has remained every bit as magnetic a presence on camera as he was as a teenaged drug dealer on the streets of Baltimore. Chadwick Boseman does fine as T'Challa, but those three also steal every scene that they're in.

Those are a lot of the upsides of the film. The downsides are a little more nebulous and have a lot more to do with what the film didn't do, as opposed to what it did. A quarter of the way in, Tricia leaned over to me and said: "It's basically a Disney film." Let's put aside the fact that Marvel is now a subsidiary of Disney so, in fact, it actually is a Disney film. We had reached the part where T'Challa was undergoing the ritual challenge for the throne and the festive, musical, colorful presentation of what was intended to be a fairly solemn ceremony (most battles to the death typically are) and it did have quite the Lion King feel to it. Upon T'Challa's defeat of M'Baku to confirm his hold on the throne, the rest of the attendees breaking out in a rendition of Hakuna Matata wouldn't have been overly out of place. ("No more worries... now that you're king.")

And that's kind of the root of my mild dissatisfaction. There were so many intelligent themes in the questions of Wakanda's place in the world and its use of technology that it seemed a shame that the film boiled down to the usual Marvel CGI slamfest at the end where people were blown up and run over by cyber-rhinos (but always without killing them, of course.)  This is a question of science fiction that goes back at least to the days of Star Trek and the Federation's prime directive. Despite having the power to positively influence the lives of billions of people, and especially those of black people, across the globe, the rulers of Wakanda have always been more concerned about the destruction that vibranium could cause if it was misused or acquired (read: conquered, colonized, stolen, etc.) by those with a less restrained outlook on the world, at large. This is just another take on the justifiably discarded "noble savage" canard of fiction (especially fantasy and SF over the years), where the innate goodness of those people uncorrupted by civilization is taken as a given. Despite Wakanda's extremely advanced civilization, their reluctance to engage the rest of the world on open terms is presented as a safeguard for that world. The unspoken fear is that if they did choose to engage, the power locked in the tiny nation would quickly become more bane than good.  Even in the case of obviously self-interested and ambitious characters like M'Baku, it's assumed that his noble understanding of the power of vibranium would prevent him trying to take the throne with outside assistance or threatening the tribal council with the revelation of their secret in order to get what he wants.

The big question, of course, is why these questions weren't being asked in the intervening years of colonial domination, slavery, racial injustice, and persistent poverty. Clearly, at least some of the population was dissatisfied enough to be regularly engaging in efforts against human trafficking (Nakia, played by Lupita Nyongo'o) outside the borders of Wakanda. Equally obvious was the ruling government's concern over the state of people in other nations, since they created the War Dog program to enable assistance to those peoples. Of course, "War Dog" is a strange name for a program that's supposed to be helping people progress out of poverty or enslavement and it begs the question as to why more overt efforts hadn't emerged during the previous two centuries of oppression. One can fall back on the dominance of tradition over sanity which tends to disrupt all kinds of cultural progression (American reverence for a colored cloth, anyone?) and which you can make a plausible story argument for in the case of a nation with overnight spine repair tech and laser weaponry that still decides the transition of a hereditary monarchy through ritual combat.

Similarly, the film has a bit of a Batman problem in that the title hero is not nearly as interesting as his adversaries. Killmonger was a fascinating villain because he was motivated not only by personal vengeance, but a relatively sound and understandable political agenda. You could have given him far more screen time because every moment that he was on screen was fascinating. And yet, in the course of one film, he's already gone. Now, this is the superhero genre, notorious for its inability to let any character rest in peace if someone has a new (using the term loosely) idea. But no writer should want to cheapen the legacy of Jordan's performance and Killmonger's character in this first film by bringing him back in the "bad guy turned good" routine. There was a lot more to say about and with him here, in this film, right now.

This is an example of it being obvious where the cuts were made. Clearly, there should have been more to Killmonger than just being the "real" threat where Klaue was the opener. But there's only so much one can cram into a 120 minute film. For example, you can't tell me that people with that much technology and innovation wouldn't have figured out how to preserve the heart-shaped herb so that they weren't forced to maintain a ritual garden. That dramatic moment where Killmonger burns it fell flat simply because of questions about how they could have let this happen. This wasn't a formula that they've stumbled upon that works once like Steve Rogers. This was thousands of years in development and maintenance. You're telling me that in that whole time, no one has developed a way to keep that tiny garden from being threatened by someone dropping a candle? Some of this stuff could have been given room to breathe with the space provided by, say, a 10 episode Netflix series. But in a film like this, you only have time for a couple good ideas before the last third of it has to be taken up with the CGI extravaganza. The best superhero stories I ever read had very few, if any, explosions. But sometimes you gotta feed your expected audience so, there it is.

I liked a lot of the other little touches in the film, like Idrissa Soumaoro's music showing up as T'Challa and other characters stroll around their homeland. I originally mistook it for Issa Bagayogo, another Malian artist, but was pleased to know that I wasn't off when it felt like the writers and producers had taken particular pains to make this an African superhero story and not just a story about an American who is somehow king of a stereotypical nation in Africa. Credit, of course, is due to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for being willing to step outside the (ahem) clearly drawn racial lines of superheroes at the time and to create a black character who was not only a superhero, but also the king of an entire nation in his "civilian" life. You can't get much more empowered than that, especially since he was able to leave the throne to someone else's stewardship and run around with the Avengers for years. Among the other touches was the presence of multiple African languages and different ones for different sections of the country (whereas most Wakandans spoke Xhosa, the Jabari, in the mountains, spoke Igbo.) That's an example of a production team that cares about its product (and, of course, doesn't want to suffer the wrath of the Internets.)

So, yes, it's still a superhero film that drags a bit in the middle and blows up half the terrain at the end. However, it's also a superhero film that asks a number of interesting questions (unlike, say, Guardians of the Galaxy), albeit not thoroughly, and presents a number of great characters that I'd love to see in future releases.

What it meant

One of my earliest memories is of reading a comic. We were at one of those highly-regulated and organized suburban vacation spots called Camp Dearborn. It's actually owned by the city of Dearborn, MI but is 35 miles away in Milford, MI. I have no idea why. They had canvas-roofed cabins that you could rent, a small lake, a swimming pool, a golf course, hayrides, and the whole nine yards. Very Midwest; very "get away for a weekend"-type thing, and that's exactly what I remember us doing. I was four years old and I was sitting in one of the cabins reading an issue of Man-Thing, Marvel's answer to DC's Swamp Thing (in fact, the same writer had worked on both as many of them drifted back and forth between the Big Two in those years) and another example of Marvel's return to horror comics after its neutering of the Comics Code a couple years earlier. We had been sharing a couple of the cabins with another family we knew and I was in the "boys' cabin" and had a small pile of comics with me. My vague memory says that most of them were mine, but I knew that one of the older boys had a few with him, as well. They had decided to leave before us at that point or were perhaps just running home for a while (the camp at the time was only about an hour from our home) and he burst into the cabin, grabbed a bunch of the comics, including the one in my hand, and ran out. I don't remember which issue it was and I don't remember being particularly outraged that I'd been interrupted and perhaps even had something stolen from me. I just remember that the images of that comic stayed with me and turned into an almost lifelong obsession.

I met someone recently and dropped a Stan Lee reference. We'd been texting about being enchanted and it turned into an exchange of synonyms: beguiled, befuddled, bamboozled, bemused. She mentioned that she liked the alliteration and I said I couldn't help it. I'd read too many Stan Lee comics as a kid. Lee frequently titled his columns "Bullpen Bulletins" or "Stan's Soapbox" or was fond of referring to the readers in ways like "the fightin', ferocious, fantabulous fans of fun!!" Any quick look at many of his early characters (J. Jonah Jameson, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Peter Parker) demonstrates that this was a regular habit of his. My new friend mentioned that she wasn't really a fan (fightin' or otherwise) but she was fascinated(!) by people that were and what they got out of comics or why they enjoyed them. That, of course, got me to thinkin'...

Alliteration fer reals. No one has ever really determined why he has to wear pants, either.

I think most kids are into superheroes to one degree or another. One only has to look at Marvel's film success over the past decade to see some of that. I don't remember what my particular attachment became early on and what led me to collect over 30,000 of them in the intervening years. I do remember that I was far more interested in the stories themselves than the accompanying artwork. I wanted to know why Cyclone had kidnapped J. Jonah Jameson in Amazing Spider-Man #143 and why Mary Jane Watson seemed to be having a really hard time in her relationship with Peter Parker (my own parents were getting divorced around this same time.) Furthermore, I really wanted to know why Mary Jane ended that issue by uttering the phrase "Far freakin' out." which was the same exclamation that Green Arrow used at the end of an issue of Justice League of America! (Drifting writers again.) That's not to say that I wasn't interested in the accompanying art. I remember picking up my first copy of magazines like Heavy Metal (the American version of the French Métal Hurlant) or Marvel's own Epic Illustrated and being engrossed in the painting of artists like Mœbius, Richard Corben, and Jim Starlin. Both Marvel and DC would also later venture into more daring artistic approaches with people like Dave McKean and I would remain a fan of the moody approach of Matt Wagner and many, many others. But it was really always the stories that hooked me and what had led people to create them...

Beta Ray Bill, FTW!

... which is kind of funny in one respect because I'm a ferocious critic of story and when you look back at many of the comics that I loved at the time they were produced, like the above issue of Thor, produced by Walt Simonson who has long been considered the best writer/artist to ever helm the book, the pace and dialogue are awful. There are long stretches of clunky exposition or explanations of what's going on in the establishment shot (which can be a regular cityscape) or re-statements of who Thor is and why he is. Editor-in-chief of the time, Jim Shooter, always said that you have to have a continuing story to retain regular readers but that every issue is always someone's first read, so the story couldn't be so dense that they wouldn't be able to get into it. That philosophy is blatantly obvious in reading those old series and makes them kind of painful to get through. That approach was standard in TV for much of its history, as well, and it's only comparatively recently that it has changed such that trying to drop into the middle of things like Breaking Bad would have been difficult for new viewers and it's by far the better experience to watch from the beginning. The way to tell good stories is to let characters grow and develop, especially if they're character-driven stories like almost all superhero comics. You can't have that growth or development if you have to keep explaining what's going on to the new readers. Thankfully, the emergence of limited series in the 80s enabled many writers to escape that Minosian circuit and other series developed with that principle firmly in mind, such as Sandman.

Not a Sandman cover, but one of my favorite McKean images

But the mention of Sandman is important here because it led to the most significant shift in comics since the Code destroyed EC. While the book has always been written by Neil Gaiman and he had a definite path in mind for it, since it was in the DC Universe he had to play along with the superheroes in his backyard for the first year of its publication, although he tried hard to skirt them as much as possible. Once Karen Berger finally convinced DC to let her take books like Sandman and Swamp Thing into their own imprint, Vertigo, they were finally free from the thing that has held back comics in many ways for the past half-century: superheroes.

Don't get me wrong: I love superheroes. I grew up with them. I've read tens of thousands of stories about them. The nostalgic pull is strong whenever someone brings up stuff like Iron Man under David Michelinie or Amazing Spider-Man under Roger Stern in the 80s. I think the Wild Cards series of anthologies, edited and contributed to by George R. R. Martin, are brilliant. But, as with any genre, there are limits to what can be done with them. Despite my history, I haven't read a superhero comic with any regularity since the early 90s. I can't. The stuff bores me to tears because in many ways it's still following the Jim Shooter model. My friend, Curtis, who is the owner of the local shop in Ann Arbor, Vault of Midnight, tried to sell me on a new version of Iron Fist a few years ago and I devoured the first six-issue collection which was about the character coming to grips with his past and the spirituality surrounding the strange city of K'un Lun and what it meant for him to hold the power that he acquired. I was like: "Yeah. This is the shit!" It was thoughtful, but retained enough touches to Chinese mythology and 60s-era kung fu films to have just a bit of camp to lighten it at the right points. Plus, having practiced martial arts for many years, I was on the same page with the concept of trying to express oneself physically and conform to the art as laid down by those before you. I was totally geeked. And then I picked up issue #7... and it was Villain-of-the-month again. Bzzzt! Thank you for playing! Lovely parting gifts, etc.

Gothic #1 by me and Kevin Leen, cover by Guy Davis

When we started the studio in the early 90s, it was with the same idea that so many other comics companies have begun: do it differently and better than the big guys. Almost by default, that meant no superheroes. If you wanted superheroes, you knew where to go. Dark Horse didn't do them (except for one brief excursion around that time that I actually kind of enjoyed) because they wanted to avoid competing directly with Marvel and DC and they frequently stated that they thought the concept was more than played out. Image started around that time with the very brash and public announcement that they were going to do things differently from the Big Two. What they produced at the time was utterly similar and essentially the same stuff that all of them had been doing for Marvel with different names. Alan Moore and Frank Miller had shown what superheroes could be taken to in the mid-80s and that limit had pretty much been set. Trying to keep going after that wasn't interesting to me nor was it to many readers who really wanted to read good stories. Fifth Panel Comics produced creator-owned material, though, so amongst our early producers were people that did their hero-of-the-moment stuff but they soon gave up and left. The small core that remained continued with the idea that the medium could only really be advanced with good stories that had little to do with bright costumes and stopping bank robbers or alien invasions.

I read very few comics these days and the closest I come to superheroes is Kurt Busiek's Astro City, which is essentially Busiek using the world he'd created as a kid to convey stories about the human condition. The facade is "superhero" but the stories are very human. Otherwise, ironically, I actually read a lot of Image output as they decided somewhere along the way that most of their stuff was played out, as well. Most of the original creators had moved on and they've attracted a stable of artists and writers that produce good stuff from many different genres, like Greg Rucka's Lazarus. But I still have a deep attachment to the medium as I tend to think of stories in a cinematic fashion (comics being far closer to film than prose.) When I pitched the idea of Coding Time to Ghostwoods, I did so with the idea of a film called The Machinist firmly in mind and I wrote it in that fashion. I could see the panel transitions in my head. I still have a ton of stories for Fifth Panel that never saw the light of day (or the black of night) and I'd still like to see them published somewhere. My friend, Margot, suggested to me a few years back that I try to convert them to prose. It's something I considered a few times but always abandoned because, again, of the chasm between the two media. There are tricks that you can perform with comics that are very difficult, if not impossible, with prose. When you can let the artwork tell one half of the story and can tell a conjoined but disparate story at the same time via captions, that's a technique that's not feasible in prose and that wouldn't be easy to do in film, either. But comics can make it happen because your reader proceeds at his pace, not the film's which gives more time for reflection and understanding. If you have eye-catching art to go with it, so much the better.

So, yeah. That (and so many, many more details) is what I get from comics/what they mean to me/why they still hang over me even though my connection to them is fairly tenuous these days. My creative outlook is shaped by them and always will be. I analyze plot and story of films through the glass of comics in many ways (noting that Snowpiercer worked well as a comic but not very well as a film, for example.) I think it's a powerful medium that doesn't get a lot of the respect that it deserves because it's tied to the shadow of the cape and cowl, despite the billions earned by Marvel's increasingly Bay-like films, which are still regularly trivialized as "summer blockbusters" from an artistic standpoint and deservedly so in most cases. But there are still gems to find. I'd like to think that one or two of them are still in my head.

Longevity

 So, a friend pointed me to the trailer of he upcoming reboot of Spider-Man. Putting aside the glaring question of why it seems necessary to do a reboot of the whole story less than a decade since the last set of films began and, once again, grind through the origin story routine when Raimi's films set up a decent bed to lie in, let's take a look:

Well, let's see. Tragically missing parents, hunted by cops, sounds like Batman. "No, no, no. This is the new 'grim and gritty' Spider-Man with the mysterious past who is driven by the deep secrets of his childhood and equipped to handle the modern world!" Haven't we seen this before? Oh, yeah! Batman!

The reason that Batman has lasted as long as it has is because of the simplistic motivation behind the character: revenge melded with a personal sense of 'justice'. The reason that Marvel took over the comic industry in the 60s and has never relinquished it is because their characters were originally driven by motivations far less Gothic or nebulous in tone. Spider-Man, for example, was driven by guilt and a sense of personal responsibility. We've all been there. Very few of us have been motivated by revenge as the driving force of our lives. In fact, it's hard to see how long that could drive anyone, which is why it's more difficult for people to relate to Batman for lengthy periods. He becomes the antagonist of his own books, because it's easier for people to relate to his wacky villains and their often quite human instabilities than the granite-like icon of justice. Spider-Man is, in many ways, Average Joe and is motivated by the same things that Joe feels or has felt. That's what makes him work. Turning him into Batman is at least mildly pointless and certainly won't give the script writers any more room to maneuver; often less. Severe caveat here: I haven't read a Spider-Man book in almost 20 years, so the current character may be a refugee from Bamboozilonia, for all I know. I do know that the character's long-time marriage was ended some time ago by one of Marvel's facsimiles of Satan, Mephisto, in true Bobby Ewing fashion, so it's not like Marvel has been completely immune to the Hollywood (or DC, for that matter) impulse.

I guess the question comes down to: a) what makes a viable, long-term character? and, b) is it possible to have a story without an ending? Looking at a), there are often external constraints, especially in the world of film, that prevent going forward with an established franchise. There are reports that the main actors of the Raimi films no longer wanted to participate. Given things like the dancing scene from Spider-Man 3

it's hard to blame them. But it's also true that often what is most compelling about many superheroes (or heroes, in general) is their origin story: the foundation for why they became what they are and act as they do. In most cases, this is Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" in some form or fashion. However, I think the secret to Marvel's success with characters like Spider-Man (and the long-term affection that enables extravaganzas like a multi-film buildup to tonight's Avengers) was in breaking away from the "tragic circumstances" motivation and continuing to present the characters as actual people, with bills, family, school, work, and all the other facets of modern life that most of us deal with on a regular basis.

When Spider-Man first emerged in 1962, he was presented as a teenaged nerd getting his first real taste of power and admiration, only to let that go to his head and find that a simple lack of action on his part contributed to the death of one of his guardians. The now-canonical catchphrase: "With great power comes great responsibility." became the foundation of his willingness to run around in blue-and-red tights and risk his life on a regular basis. When Marvel discovered that the bulk of their readership was no longer 12-year-old boys but, in fact, college-aged men with money to spend, they did an unfathomable thing in the comics world: they let their characters age. Peter Parker was now a college student, in addition to his part-time job as a photographer. The character was instantly relevant to its primary audience. The aging process slowed down a bit (otherwise, we'd now be talking about The Amazing Septuagenarian) but an effort was maintained into the 1980s to continue to present Spider-Man as that same Average Joe, which was replicated by Sam Raimi in his trio of films. Is that somehow not sustainable at this point? Has the character become too long-term, as it were, to continue to be viable?

In the comics world, the answer would almost invariably be "yes". Comics, as a serial periodical, suffer from b): The Story That Never Ends. You don't get real conclusions. You get temporary cessations of story arcs. The further challenge is that each comic, if properly written, has to have that same beginning, middle, and end to maintain a narrative flow from month to month. Jim Shooter, long-time editor in the comics world, used to say that every issue was someone's first read of that title. So, it had to be accessible to new readers at the same time that it maintained enough complexity for regular readers. TV functioned under the same constraints for decades, in that most dramas or comedies had to present a scenario that a new viewer could engage, but also have enough regular aspects in the form of returning characters and their idiosyncrasies. Thus, each week became Gilligan or Captain Frank Furillo running into variations on a dramatic theme. Most TV series eventually get cancelled as a consequence, since the story simply can't maintain itself with any kind of integrity. The most notable exception in recent years has been The Simpsons which, as a cartoon, is a lot like the comic world: the physical constraints of actors aging has little effect and the story isn't burdened by having to give each character screen time or pay them to sit in their trailer.

Furthermore, The Simpsons, free from those physical constraints, can become far more of a marketing tool. Homer will always look like Homer and can appear on any number of products or doing endorsements for products and always carry the same panache. Same thing for comics. At some point, the characters and their story become secondary to the marketing. Wonder Woman, the comic, has been a perpetual money loser as a comic for the past half-century, but Wonder Woman, the marketing icon, has been a money maker for Warner Brothers, the parent company of DC, for that same period of time. In order to maintain the trademark, DC must publish the comic or see it revert to the Marston family. So, the comic becomes a loss leader for the lunchboxes, beach towels, and toys that let young girls know that they can also be heroic figures if they wear skin-tight uniforms and have big tits...

But does the story suffer from its longevity? Absolutely. At some point, there is nothing new under the sun, so characters that have been in perpetual motion for 50 years begin retreading the same ground. I finally gave up on superhero comics in the early 90s when I realized that a story I was reading was identical to an Avengers story that I had read in the late 70s. I didn't need to read it again in a different context. I still had the original from the 70s. At that point, I also realized that I had put aside several titles from my large weekly purchase to read later and now had several months of various books that I really wasn't compelled to read because they were the same stuff that the respective characters had been doing for 10, 20, 40, 60 years. In fact, writing my own work for the comic studio at the time was far more interesting because I was hoping to do series that had a predetermined finish. I imagine that this disaffection happens to many readers in the same way that a lot of TV viewers get tired of seeing the same canned procedure (intrigue at the first commercial break, crisis at second, deepening crisis at third, possible solution at fourth, and resolution, fini; the hour is over) every week and have begun to drift to choices like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, which are almost expressly designed to be watched from the beginning, which entails either being there at the start or taking advantage of services like Netflix.

So, does a trio of films in less than a decade necessitate a reboot? Is the viability of the character requiring that or the fact that the story will never end and, thus, must be re-energized every so often to keep it fresh for modern viewers? Is it a question of medium? Or is it all of the above?