Two little words

Taking a break from Godzillarama - well, actually, G v. Mechagodzilla is on in the other room, so the rama is still ramin' - to post what might be my favoritest Xmas story of all, courtesy of Leonard Pierce, who I used to read at his LiveJournal, and who is now on Instagram and GoodReads and probably some other places as well. Anyway, here's his story:

***

The big man didn’t belong in this bar. Not like Widner did – you could take one look at Widner and tell that he’d spent most of his adult life on a fake leather stool throwing back vodka tonics. The big man was different.

When he’d walked in, the jingling bell on the door (old Fluke, the bartender, made this one concession to the holiday spirit and no other, which is why Widner drank here) was nearly drowned out by the howling winds outside; the big man brushed snow off of his shoulders, thus removing the only thing that marred his five hundred dollar suit. He had perfectly styled hair, blue like gun steel and with a precious little spit-curl that he absently smoothed back into the coif that had probably cost more than the suit. He sat at the stool next to Widner and ordered a Soder.

Well, at least it wasn’t milk, thought Widner, wincing his way through another vodka. The big man peered at him through his big, round glasses as if he was a jeweler looking for flaws; he’d find plenty. Only two types of people looked at you that way: cops and queers. 

“Take a picture, pal,” Widner hissed. “It’ll last longer.”

The big man chuckled. “Actually,” he replied, “it wouldn’t. I have a photographic memory.” He sipped at his cola and gave a bit of a pull to his blandly handsome face, as if it was stronger than what he was used to.

“You a cop?” Widner asked. He wasn’t particularly worried; there was no paper on him that he could remember – nothing fresh, anyway – but he still didn’t relish the prospect of dealing with the law, not with the problems he was having.

“No, I’m no policeman,” the big man said, chuckling in a rehearsed-sounding way. “Actually, I’m a reporter.”

Widner squinted through the vodka mist. “Hey, yeah, you look familiar, actually. You from TV? I seen you before, I’m sure of it.”

The big man shook his head with finality. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m strictly print. I work for the Planet, up in Metropolis. I’m down here researching a story, as it happens – I sort of got lost along the way and stopped in here to get my bearings.”

He kept peering at Widner through those hokey coke-bottle lenses. It was starting to make the half-drunk barfly extremely nervous. “Look,” he said, in a lush’s voice that tries to hide itself but comes out as suspiciously quiet, “what, why do you keep staring at me like that? What’s this story you’re doing in a dumpy little burg like this, anyway?”

“Oh, it’s a real pip,” said the big man. “I’ve been following the story of this SKULL experiment that went awry. Apparently they’d hired a lot of fellows, ex-cons mostly, and subjected them to a radiation treatment that changed them somehow.” 

Widner’s face went as pure white as the snow stacked around the corners of Fluke’s windows. He flashed back to the ad he’d answered six miserable years ago in the Underworld Star, the horrible sterile chamber they’d stuck him in, the sickly pink glow that washed over his body and turned him into a monster for a penny-ante paycheck. He remembered how all his troubles began.

“It so happens,” the big man continued with a gregarious smile on his wide, honest face but a steely glare behind his round frames, “that what this treatment did was to unleash the id of these men. It somehow actually gave a sort of parapsychic life to their innermost desires, to their basest instincts. The men couldn’t control this id-creature. Different things would trigger its release – particular sights or smells, emotional reactions, even combinations of words.”

On his creaky barstool, with subzero temperatures outside, Widner began to sweat. He couldn’t pull himself away from the big man’s piercing gaze. And as he spoke, as he described the exact circumstances that had turned Widner’s life into an unending nightmare, Widner flashed on the last six years – how, once a year, whenever anyone would say two little words, two words people only said during the last few weeks of December, he’d black out. When he’d awaken, he’d have money in his pockets, blood on his hands, and the knowledge that he’d soon see a newspaper article about a hideous pink demon made of glowing light that had wreaked havoc in a bank, a bordello, a police station.

“At any rate,” the big man continued, “it turns out that there’s a very simple cure. But there’s one man left, who didn’t get the word, and I’m trying to track him down.”

Widner panicked. Simple cure, my ass: this guy was probably some sort of snitch. If he fessed up, the big man would turn him over to the cops in a heartbeat and he’d spend the rest of his days in a cage – or strapped to a table in some lab. No, sir. Not for Sal Widner. The big man stared at him more steadily than ever, but somewhere, somehow, Widner found the strength to tear himself away. He leapt up from the barstool, nearly pitching over forward into the big man’s arms.

“Listen, pal,” he sputtered in panic and false bravado, “I ain’t never heard of this crazy crap, and I don’t like the way you’re lookin’ at me. Now, why don’t you clear your big-city ass up on out of here, before I clean your clock?”

The big man simply smiled, a jovial, reassuring smile, and rose from his own barstool. “Sure thing, friend,” he said. “Didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers. I’ll be on my way, to see if anyone knows the fellow I’m looking for.”

As the big man walked with a confident, easy gait towards the jangling door, Widner couldn’t help but call out to him. “Hey!” he shouted. “What’s the so-called cure, anyway?”

The reporter turned and smiled that calming smile again. “A concentrated, fast dose of x-rays,” he answered. “You have a merry Christmas.”

 And, for the first time in six years, nothing – glorious, holy nothing – happened to Sal Widner.

***

Like I said, a great story.

Season's Greetings!

5 x 5 Movie review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

1. Wonder Wife and I made sure to watch this latest Avengers movie between episode 2.19 and episode 2.20 of the television show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  The integration was seamless. Seam. Less. Is this the future? To get the whole story, I will need to participate in several simultaneous narrative streams?

2. Why does Marvel Studios get that the Avengers, and Captain American especially, would care about civilians becoming collateral damage, while DC Entertainment has Superman engaging in battle in the middle of a town or city with hardly a concern for the locals? Has anyone at DCE ever even read a comic?


3. Nice to see lots of faces from the supporting casts of all the different movies; the two missing Women were lampshaded amusingly.

4.  I know that I have said this in other review, but why does every battle have to be so big and so loud and so chaotic ALL THE TIME?! The rise of CGI has taken the constraints off some aspects of filmmaking, and constraints generate creativity. Now, all the action is quick cuts and confusing perspectives, incomprehensible and unengaging, particularly when held in contrast to the quieter, character-directed bits, which were actually quite good.

5. I do not 'ship Natasha and Bruce, not one little bit.

Rumination and a Query

So, while I was looking for something else entirely, I came across this image on someone's genealogy blog. I was of course intrigued by the Seattle connection. The attribution said the image came from the Tuesday, March 5, 1940 edition of The Seattle Daily Times (now just the Seattle Times) and I was hoping that it was a teaser for an appearance by a Superman actor at a department store or amusement park. I was so intrigued that I paid to have access to the full article: it turned out that the story was a promotion for the Superman comic strip, which was to begin running in the newspaper the following Monday.

The most fascinating characteristic of the article is that the writer had to explain who Superman was. Here are some excerpts from the piece, starting with the opening:

The writer continues with a short summary of the origin story, with "Jor-L" predicting Krypton's doom, the infant in the rocket, and the Kansas orphanage. He closes with this:

What struck me was how new it all was. Superhero was not yet a genre - this strip called "Superman" was still an 'exciting adventure strip.' There are no clichés yet, no tropes, no stereotypes: a cape, a mask, and a secret identity had not yet become trite or been reduced to shorthand emblems; [fill-in-the-blank]-man jokes were not the commonplace they are now. The whole genre was still being created. If I created a new superhero comic strip and had it syndicated today (miracle though that would be) the strip would be described as such, in those words, and the character would probably compared to anther superhero. (Metropolis has Superman, Gotham has Batman - and Bigtown has Captain Fireworks!)

This familiarity has in-story effects as well having a real-world, social dimension. Not only were these types of stories new to the readers, but these types of heroes were new to the other characters in the stories. A tough cookie like Lois Lane could be shocked, confused, or mystified by a seemingly normal person with extra-normal abilities - especially one wearing a costume and purporting to be an altruistic do-gooder. But now, 75 years after Superman came to Seattle, we've all read about or heard about or seen superheroes, and it is hard to imagine a fictional world in which people haven't. In 1978, the classic "You've got me - who's got you?!" line from Superman - The Movie was clever enough for us to forget that the idea of being surprised by a superhero was already wearing a bit thin. By last year's Man of Steel, it really required a willing suspension of disbelief to go with the idea that no one in the 21st century had any familiarity with the concept of super-powered people - or alien invasions.

Because we have a similar problem in other genres. How could anyone not recognize a mothership now, or at least be familiar with the concept? If an alien invasion happened for real, our population (at least the industrialized, hollywooded world) would have all sorts of cultural narrative contextualizing their response - how can we accept movie people reacting any differently? Same for zombie movies: can anyone watch a zombie movie now and believe that the characters have never seen a zombie movie?

The downside of this can be a kind of hermetically-sealed narrative: in superhero comics, there are in-story comics about real superheroes, police departments have metahuman squads, alien civilizations have embassies, and government agencies register superheroes: every cultural facet is accounted for. Alternatively, the stories become cutely self-referential: a superhero who is real in the narrative is compared in dialog to another fictional character who is fictional in that reality; characters allude to Star Wars and E.T. whenever movie aliens invade; and zombie movie characters make in-joke references to other zombie movies. I guess I miss the idea that something fantastical could actually be new, to both me and the characters in the story. But other than setting a story in a historical period before the rise of these genre tropes, I'm not sure how to do that.

The saying goes that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. I guess you also never get a second chance to be the first superhero.

***

PS: On July 5th, when there hadn't been a post in this blog for a week, I got five or six times my usual hits. What the what?

The Time Tunnel

So, a buddy of mine mocks my silver-bronze sensibility: he is a comics fan from a later generation than mine, and he says that my sense of adventure and storytelling (to include my DMing) has been shaped by my earlier reading of sixties and seventies comics, with their frequent innocent goofiness and often clear visions of morality and ethics (which I think he considers somehow equivalent). He's right, of course. I like to think I can be a little more nuanced than that pigeonhole might suggest, but I will not deny that my affection for those comics in many ways did indeed shape my worldview.

The next two magazines in the Spring Break Bargain Box Bonanza are clearly aimed at an audience of folks like me. These are both One Shot comics again, but from 2011. Jimmy Olsen collects and adds to a series that originally appeared in the back of Action comics under the Big Week arc. The Superman magazine is part of the DC: Retroactive Series, a series of specials that each focus on a particular decade of the heroes adventures - in this case, the 1970s.


It should have been a slam-dunk for DC to make me happy with these, but unfortunately, that was not the case.

The Olsen series has all the elements that were supposed to make it appealing and nostalgic: genies, the signal watch, aliens, blue-dress Supergirl, the bow tie, the Flying Newsroom - and a couple of cameo appearances from the Big Guy. Still, it didn't add up, at least not for me. Maybe the creators were trying too hard, but the antics seemed a little forced. Maybe the conceit works better when Jimmy isn't so self-aware of the unlikeliness and absurdity of his life, when every adventure is wonderful and fantastic, even though that's hard for us jaded and sophisticated readers to swallow. Maybe modern references (like the one in the clip below) were just too incongruous and jarring. Maybe shoehorning in Chloe Sullivan from Smallville was the problem, or the art, which made everyone look the 21-years olds who play high-schoolers on TV. Whatever it was, it didn't give me that ol' zee-zee-zee.

The DC Retroactive series seems to have the evocation of pas eras as an even more intentional and deliberate goal. My understanding is that each issue tries to convey the mood and tone of its target decade; in this case, the seventies. Again, this story tries to touch all the bases: we have Kandor (and an appearance by Van-Zee); villains from the day, including the Atomic Skull and the Master Jailer; hot-pants Supergirl; Steve Lombard; and Superman flying Lois to the Fortress of Solitude.

What we don't have is a compelling story, just the usual magical shenanigans of Mxyzptlk, instigated by that hoariest of comic-book cliches: a bet between two trans-dimensional creatures. So, while the story did evoke some sense of the seventies - and much if that decade's output was good in many ways - it didn't capture the best of that era.

There was a bonus feature in the issue: a reprint of a story from 1978. The original publication of  "Superman Takes a Wife" marked the 40th anniversary of Action Comics, but the reproduction here so muddied Curt Swan's beautiful art than I couldn't even read it.

So does this mean that all attempts to capture the lightning, to recreate the joys of the past are doomed to failure? I don't think so. I think these two comics fit that bill (even though they are edging their way toward becoming antiques themselves), and I can think of a more recent example from DC Comics video.

The DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection released in 2010 contained episodes of Captain Marvel, Green Arrow, Jonah Hex -- and the Spectre. While all were of high quality, the Spectre episode was exceptional. It captured perfectly the creeptacular moodiness of Mike Fleishcer's mid-1970s run on the strip, during the period he and Jim Aparo turned the Spectre into a macabre and ruthless agent of retribution. At the same time, it evoked the aesthetic of that era's TV crime shows, for which Quinn Martin Productions set the standard. There were no missteps or false notes - it all worked perfectly, both on its own and as a trip down Nostalgia Alley.

So, it can be done. It just wasn't done in these comics.

Positive/negative

So, I already weighed in on Man of Steel, as have so many others. Despite what seems to be a lot of hedging and qualifying going on in the reviews, I guess it's making a good deal of money, and will go down in the win column for Team DC. Now that this re-boot has been deemed successful, eyes are looking forward to the playing out of the DC universe film franchise, eventually leading up to a Justice League movie. And that train of though ultimately leads to a comparison with Marvel's Hulk-Iron Man-Thor-Captain America-Avengers movie-to-movie build-up and whether DC can emulate Marvel's triumphs.

Pursuing this comparison, Jim McLauchlin, in a guest post at CBR, writes that "the world that the Marvel Comics character films take place in is an ultimately optimistic one, and the world that the DC Comics character films take place in is ultimately bleak." He offers some evidence for this from Man of Steel and The Avengers, and further says "The effort to make all the Marvel movies take place in a world that you want to be a part of is a very conscious one" and wonders whether DC's choice of  a "dangerous, edgy, gritty world" was made in a bid to corner the youth market, thinking that's what they want. He concludes that this is a wrong-headed strategy, as his experience with youth tells him that they are used to a malleable (his word) world in which they expect to have some control and get what they want, and will want to see movies set in that same kind of world because it is the world they would prefer to live in.

I have a lot of responses this argument; while it sounds pat on a first read, the situation is much more complex.

First of all, thinking that the youth market can be appealed to with things that are dangerous, gritty, and edgy is not  an egregious error, if indeed it is an error at all. Video games like Fallout, Bioshock and Grand Theft Auto (based on what I have read and had reported to me - I am not a gamer) seem to evoke this sensibility, as do any number of gorenography and revenge porn movies. The era of the grim antihero does not seem to be waning much, and even the new Wolverine movie seems to be playing up the darkness and Logan's monstrousness.

That said, Marvel as the bright, optimistic universe and DC as the bleak, dour universe does seem to be an odd reversal of roles. Marvel's rise to popularity was based at least in part on its subversion of the "optimistic" superhero standards set by DC: not all their heroes were successful and squared-away; not all the conflicts with super-villains ended in unqualified successes; and not all the endings were happy. It was this "realism" - this grittiness, if you will - that distinguished Marvel books from the often still-juvenile DC books (at least until the Bronze Age of Comics was well underway).

But maybe it is a case of that was then and this is now, and the question is not whether the viewer wants to live in the world they see but whether they can relate to living in the world they see. In the sixties, the boundless optimism of DC comics was becoming out of place in a world where the youth were beginning to feel disaffected and disenfranchised more and more; as the counter-culture grew, so did the desire to have comic book heroes who were every bit as challenged and alienated as the reader. Hence the rise of Marvel heroes in the comics. Now, youth feel not so much disaffected as they do entitled - everyone expects to be rich and happy and satisfied - to get what they want. So Marvel gives them Tony Stark, who proves you can be rich and witty and sexy and a hero and a genius all at once. I get that.

But it doesn't explain why so much grim 'n' gritty does still sell.

The problematic nature of so many responses to Man of Steel is not just that its world is too bleak; it's that Superman's world in particular is not supposed to be so bleak. Maybe the Marvel heroes are malleable enough to transition from the darlings of the disaffected to the millennial mainstream - they were never quite as radically different as we all like to think, anyway. Superman, though, is another story: he's not just a comic book hero, he is a cultural institution. Re-interpreting him doesn't just play with the rules of fiction, it messes with expectations and symbolism that have seeped into our society as a whole. None of characters featured in The Avengers has anywhere near the cultural weight that Superman does, certainly not Iron Man, and not even the Hulk or Captain America. That weighty mythology is out of alignment with the world presented in Man of Steel, and that alone makes it a bad choice for the film.

As I said, the movie seems to be doing pretty well, so we'll see whether DC's choice in this direction is ultimately a profitable one. Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy was about as dark as it comes, and the second two films are in the top ten for movie box office take. We can presume Batman will be rebooted as well, but into the world in which Man of Steel was set, so we can expect that darkness to remain. And as other characters are added in, we will see how the setting develops.

It seems to me that having a dark universe may not be a bad business decision for DC movies; it just may be a bad artistic decision.

I have been waiting for a couple of years to use this Squirrel Girl clip...

Six of one: Intertextuality

So, I was thinking about how what we know of other texts (in the widest sense of the word) can affect our apprehension of another work. A conclusion in this vein about Watchmen is what drove my essay in Minutes to Midnight; maybe it's just some sort of grad school PTSD that keeps it coming to mind.

Now mind you, I am not talking about having to have experienced previous episodes of a continued or serial narrative in order to understand the plot; that's just common sensical. Nor am I talking about having to know the subject of a parody or satire in order to understand the point being made - how without knowing anything about Justin Bieber, any parody you see is just a weird boy singer.

I am talking about how, in a subtle or nuanced way, the narrative presumes of its audience a certain body of knowledge or - and perhaps this is most important - a pre-existing relationship to that information in order to be successful. Beyond that, this intertextuality is not merely content-based, but is also positioned in a meta-context, combining the audience awareness of the work as a text in and of itself and in relationship to other texts. The question that always comes to my mind is whether the intertextuality is critical to understanding the work at hand or just adds another layer to the appreciation of the piece.

Anyway, here are six circumstances that came to mind:

Adventures in Babysitting: In this overlooked gem of an eighties movie, Elisabeth Shue herds her adolescent charges through a screwball series of escapades and exploits in the course of one Chicago night. One of the kids in her care is a young girl who idolizes Thor - specifically, the Marvel comics version of Thor, not just the traditional Norse god. As well as being a sort of running joke through the movie, her devotion to Thor becomes a crucial plot point late in the movie when the group encounters someone with a strong physical resemblance to the superhero. Now, when I saw this, the different resonances that resulted from choosing the Thor character as the girls' idol were clear to me, only because I have sufficient knowledge of and familiarity with that character, his history, and his cachet. Viewers without that knowledge or familiarity would not have the same responses. Really, though, I'm not sure this intertextuality approaches the critical stage; I think that viewers unfamiliar with Marvel-Thor would just hand-wave most of the references away, and that the film-makers could even have replaced Thor with a generic superhero without too much loss of signal.

A Murder Mystery Whose Name I Can't Remember: You'll have to bear with me on this one; my copy of the book was lost in the Great Paperback Purge of 1988 and my google-fu was weak, so I am working from memory.

I recall reading a mystery novel in which the protagonist was a computer systems expert called to do some work in a planned community. The development, a brainchild of an eccentric genius who lived on the top of the hill, is almost fully automated - it is protected by a computer security system, the houses are prefabricated and networked, the streets have heating elements to melt ice, and so on. The genius is obsessed with efficiency and effective design and renowned for cutting edge innovation in engineering, had developed a modular construction system, and drives around in a three-wheeled car. He turned out to be the bad guy.

Yes, the villain is Buckminster Fuller, even though he was named something else and there was a substitute word for "dymaxion."

Even in my callow youth I can remember thinking that that characterization was all that distinguished this book from the rest of the hackneyed detective stories that made up much of my reading at the time. Was the intertextuality critical? Probably not - the trope of the mad scientist is so common that most readers probably didn't notice. But it does elevate the story; at least, it's what's kept it in my memory for 30 years or so.

Samurai: Heaven and Earth: In this rollicking graphic novel (which I reviewed in detail back in the day), a samurai adventures his way from medieval Japan to medieval France and there encounters four swordsmen, brothers-at-arms, members of the king's guards, who get involved with court intrigues and dashing swordplay. Yes, they are clearly the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan. Samurai versus the Three Musketeers! Of course - who could resist the high concept? The creators certainly want us to know what was happening - it adds so much geek prestige to the tale, a cachet that the creators and intended audience would both value. Is a prior reading of The Three Musketeers or even passing knowledge of the characters critical? Maybe not. But samurai versus generic French soldiers is definitely a weaker story, without either geek cred or some universal trope to stand on.

Death of a Doxy: When I was in high school, I devoured Bantam paperback versions of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout as fast as I did their Doc Savage books. Wolfe's genius and Archie Goodwin's cleverness were captivating, and over the years they gathered a wonderful supporting cast in the household (Fritz and Theodore) on the police (Inspector Cramer, Sgt. Stebbins, and Lt. Rowcliff), and among their associates and aides (Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, Orrie Cather, Lon Cohen and Lily Rowan). I liked the Wolfe stories for the detailed looks into different worlds and fields, for their wisecracking dialogue, and for the mysteries as well, although like any such series it might have suffered a little from formula. And like most series of this kind, I started with some book right in the middle of its over 60-year history and filled in as I came across them, and it didn't really mater much which order I read them in. Except for one.

Well over 30 years into the series, Stout threw a curve ball. In Death of a Doxy, the otherwise routine murder mystery turns out to have as its culprit one of the supporting characters. It is a shocker. And only if the reader has read a sufficient number of the stories and developed a sense of Wolfe's world and some expectations about does the emotional weight hit home. If, by chance, this were the first Wolfe mystery someone were to read, none of that impact would be there. In this case, the intertextuality is critical.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (Episode 57): Avatar was a 61-episode series that chronicled the adventures of a group of young people out to save the world - a different world than ours. This episode involves the protagonists, undercover in hostile territory, watching a play based on their exploits; the play recaps the major events of the series from the perspective of an outside observer and not necessarily a sympathetic one. The viewer doesn't have to have seen the rest of the series to understand the play; in fact, it functions much like a traditional clip show, recounting plot points and critical moments and bringing the audience up to speed. What is lost on the new or casual viewer, however, is all of the meta-contextual content that the in-story performance allows the creators to play with.

The production that the characters see both portrays and comments on not just the foregoing story but also the behind-the-scenes story of the show's production and its fan community. Audience reactions evoke fan response to unpopular previous episodes; costume designs for the "actors" play on variant or unused designs for the real characters; ambiguous plot threads are foregrounded; throwaway bits that had garnered followings are highlighted. Perhaps this episode was in the nature of a love letter from the creators to their fanbase, coming as late as it did in the series; in any case, a degree of intertextuality is necessary to appreciate it on all the levels it was written.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?: Few would argue with me if I asserted that this was one of the finest Superman stories written, if not the best ever. Alan Moore's script and Curt Swan's art about the last days of the quintessential comic book hero deliver powerful images and events that I am not ashamed to say bring tears to my eyes even on multiple re-readings; I doubt I am alone in that response.

But I wonder how many people would argue with me if I said that the story, as good as it is, would not possibly have the same impact on a casual fan as it does on someone who has read hundreds of Superman comics over years and years. In this case, both a body of knowledge about Superman - his supporting cast, his enemies, his powers, his milieu - as well as a pre-existing relationship to that information, not just objective understanding, are absolutely necessary for this story to work. I might be back to the same argument I made about Watchmen, but if this were the first Superman story you ever read, it would not have anywhere near the emotional impact is does on long-time fans.

In some ways this seems like I am stating the obvious - it's a coda, so of course it requires knowledge of the foregoing episodes. "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" wouldn't make sense to anyone who hasn't seen M*A*S*H; what of it? Isn't this just that common sensical bit about having to have experienced previous episodes of a continued or serial narrative in order to understand the plot? Well, yes, fair enough, on one level. But on another level, this story does two things that increase the critical nature of the intertextuality.

The first is that the reader does not just have to have an understanding of the content to get the plot; she needs to know the role and weight of all the characters and story elements to really understand the structure of the narrative. It's not just a familiarity with personality traits, or powers, or even relationships between the characters; it's a sense of where each character fits in the overall Superman mythology, and what aspect of that mythology they represent, that really lets the reader connect to the unfolding story.

And that's the second thing the story does: it boldly seeks close the myth, to put an ending to the never-ending battle, and not just in-story. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? was published right before Superman's first-ever complete re-boot. This story was not only a coda to an almost fifty-year adventure story, it was the end of a real-world era as well. Only those with an abiding connection not just to the character himself, but also to his place as a figure in the broad culture, would feel all the resonance of this narrative; it reached back to those hundreds of other stories not just for prior plot points but also for their place as shared texts in a community whose time had come to an end and whose place was being taken. It is for Superman Comics as well as Superman that the story makes us weep.

If the intertextuality exists.

And if I'm not full of beans.

Baker's Dozen: Movie review: Man of Steel

So, with spoilers and reviews exploding all around me like flak around a B1-7, I decided to move up my viewing of the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, and Wonder Wife and I trucked up to the local cineplex for a matinee. I can't say that I went into it completely unbiased; I can say that I was more pleased than I had expected to be. I am giving a generic spoilersspoilersspoilers warning for baker's dozen that follows.

1. The performances are uniformly good. Cavill is a great in the cape and tights, Adams is a fine Lois, and Crowe in particular makes Jor-El believable as both a man and a hologram.

2. The first hour-and-a-half or two hours of the film was a pretty good science fiction movie about first contact with aliens. Stripping it completely of any Superman elements would not change this film very much.

3. I never got the connection between the Kryptonian military insurrection, the depletion of natural resources resulting in the destabilization of the planet's core, and the whole eugenics business - it seemed an awful lot to cram into the last three weeks before the world ended, and it didn't get across a sense of the end of days.

4. Much of the cinematography put me in mind of laundry detergent commercials... too much soft focus, too much just out of focus, too many lens flares.

5. I did like the non-linear structure that carried much of the narrative, and the flashing-back and forward was done well.

6. The preliminary super-heroics were pretty cool, evoking a nice Golden Age Superman vibe.

7. The battles with the Kryptonians were uneven. Sometimes I was struck by just how well the movie captured what a superhuman would look like to mortal eyes: moving too fast to follow, creating destruction with no apparent effort, a nightmare. Yet much of the Kryptonian vs Kryptonian conflict was shot in such a way that made it hard to follow.

8. I have never been one to quibble with casting that deviates from the character model in the comics. In this movie, however, with the whole mood so non-Supermanly for so long, and so many of the trappings of the Daily Planet gone (did we ever see a globe?), Perry White, Steve Lombard, and "Jenny Olsen" could have been anyone, just your generic disaster movie survivors. They could have at least put a bust of Caesar on Laurence Fishburne's desk.

9. But it wasn't even so much the minutiae that was missing: it was something in the core. Costner's Jonathan Kent seemed a little too isolationist, a little too paranoid; Clark a little too distant.

10. The movie didn't really turn into a Superman movie for me until the Superman/Zod showdown. Specifically, Zod says something about being bred and trained as a warrior and asks Kal "Where did you get your training? On a farm?" Well, the answer to that is yes, of course, and that is exactly what makes him Superman: his training was not in strategy or tactics or technique, but in strength of will and courage of heart and commitment to purpose.

11. That said, Superman's ultimate choice in that fight just told me that the writers, in the end, don't get Superman.

12. And I think that was the film's fatal failure: Superman has a rich mythology to draw upon. Choosing to let so much if it slide away may have left a decent story behind, but in the end, it was not a story that leveraged the rich themes and tropes and traditions that the Superman legend holds. It was, in the end, not a Superman story.

13. Or maybe it was. Wonder Wife remarked that it was good as a casual fan to be reminded that Superman was an alien and that his relationship with humanity would be influenced by that. So perhaps as the first movie in a series aimed at a general audience, this movie accomplished what it set out to do.

(Relation)ship of fools

So, I was looking at stuff on ScansDaily and I saw with my own eyes an excerpt from some recent Superman magazine that clearly shows that Superman/Clark is dating Wonder Woman/Diana and that Lois Lane is dating some guy. (I forget who, but he seemed nice.)

I guess I had heard that this was the direction DC was going with the New 52 business, but I must have either blocked it out or forgotten it. (I could easily have forgotten it - current superhero comics have pretty much fallen off my radar screen.) Actually reading an in-continuity sequence that showed this as the status quo was bit surprising. This is just such a stupid idea that seeing it actualized makes me feel a bit like I am peering into the Bizarro world.

I am sure that the comixweblogosphere (or what remains of it) is all abuzz with deconstructions and  interpretations and criticisms pro and con, so I will offer only two succinct arguments:

Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane published by National Periodical Publications 1958-1974.

Sixteen years, 137 issues, moving close to half-a-million copies per issue in its heyday.

Excerpt from "For the Man Who Has Everything" by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 

published in Superman Annual #11 (1985) and, as far as I am concerned, 

the last, best word on the subject.

Super-musings

So, here's a link to thing on Estoreal Adjunct, one of those tumblr places. It should be a little essay about Superman, with a link in it to a Cracked article on Superman. Other than the Cracked piece, I'm not really sure who wrote what on the tumblr page - tumblr is an idiom with which I have not yet become familiar - but I read both of them and then sent them to my friend Johnbai, who wrote me in response. You should read them, too, and then read what Johnbai said, reproduced below.

I've mostly been someone that agrees with the Cracked article.  And I think the other writer agrees as well.  Saying Superman is more like Sisyphus than Diomedes is hardly a disagreement.  He's just saying that Superman's task of protecting all of humanity is doomed to futility (which is what the Cracked writer was saying anyway.) 

While I haven't loved many superman stories, I liked the "For the man who has everything" because it gives you a glimpse of what Superman might crave for himself, beyond all the selfless work-ethic.  It humanized him in a very compelling way.  And it took a writer of fantastic ability to craft that story. 

I also liked where JLU went during the episodes where the Justice League were in conflict with the American government. Because it asked the difficult question, what do you do when the official standard bearers for the "American Way" aren't playing by the rules any more.  

I was also interested in Miller's portrayal of Superman in the Dark Knight as a thug working for Reagan.  It's a similar dilemma for every paladin or samurai... what happens when your master happens to be a dick? 

I always thought the interesting flaw in Superman was that he just wasn't that smart.  I wanted to see angles pursued that showed that he could be manipulated, or would struggle/fail at something because he just wasn't smart enough to figure it out.  That always seemed like an interesting reason for Clark and Bruce to have their relationship.  Clark needed Bruce because he could connect the dots that Supes just couldn't see.

I just happened to have a spare couple of pennies to toss in on this.

I think the problems with writing Superman that exist because the character is too powerful can be approached in a variety of ways.

The first is to make him less powerful. Look back at the roots of the character: he couldn't always juggle planets. Reducing his strength and limiting his array of abilities in-story wouldn't hurt his marketing value or his iconic status.

But maybe that's a cop-out. After all, I don't see articles written about how hard it is to write a Thor story, or how boring a character Silver Surfer is, or how no one can make Green Lantern interesting. No, it isn't the power level - it's having the character face challenges - internal as well as external - that their abilities cannot easily solve.

As I was reading through these critiques, I thought about a story - I don't know if it is remembered or I made it up - that Superman saves a community of people from some simmering natural disaster that finally discharges, only to see them evicted from the place by the legal owners, who now can make a profit from the location because it is no longer in a danger zone. What would Superman do? How would he feel? I'm sure he would be tempted to re-open the volcano (or whatever) but then he'd be putting other lives at risk. There's a story in there somewhere. Superman may be able to move mountains, but some problems are too complex, or too fragile, or too subtle to be solved by power, if at all. Those are the stories we want to read.

Of course, this can go down silly road as well, as in the old Uncle Mort days of "I promised not to set foot in Criminal City for twenty-fours - how can I possible stop Machine Gun Barker? I know - I'll walk on my hands!" Arbitrary rules, laws, wagers, and conditions do not often a compelling story make, but real limitations do.

In my mind, neither does making Superman a government stooge work, just to give him an ethical crisis when his bosses want something nasty done. I thought Miller's Dark Knight Superman was one of the least interesting versions of the character.  Superman may be a boy from the heartland, but he's no mindless follower. Nor does making him a dullard seem like the way to go - although I think that he might be manipulated because of his trusting nature or native ingenuousness rather than stupidity. That kind of arc, and its aftermath, could also make good story.

Let me end with the hero-of-myth trope this conversation is developing. The idea that Superman will ultimately never get what he wants - the safety of everyone, everywhere - is an element of what makes a good Superman story, but it does not make him Sisyphus, or any other character from Greek mythology. It makes him an Aesir. The Norse gods knew that ultimately Ragnarok would come and that they would fight and lose and die, but they made ready and fought nonetheless. Struggling on even knowing that defeat was pre-ordained - what could be more heroic than that?

It isn't truth or justice or even the American way - it is the neverending battle that can make Superman approachable and relatable.

No wonder they think it's ancient history

So, the interwebs reminded me today (yeah, like it was in my calendar and I forgot to check) that it is the 75th Anniversary of the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1, April 18, 1938.

First of all, let's hear it for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who as boys created a legend and who as men got what many consider to be way too little reward.

The check for which Seigel & Shuster signed away the rights to Superman.   (courtesy Illustration Art)

What came to mind today on this Diamond Jubilee, perhaps because I have had students reading excerpts from Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow and Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Clay, is some historical context.

• The first appearance of Superman is closer in time to the surrender at Appomattox and the end of the Civil War than it is to today.

• The first appearance of Superman is closer in time to the first controlled flight in Europe than it is to the first manned moon landing.

The Man of Tomorrow has seen a lot of yesterdays come and go. I can't imagine what his centennial will be like.

Double-take

While I am in the mood to compare two images:

This image was floating around the interwebs some time ago, apparently taken at a store in India:

It's a pretty standard oops-the-unlicensed-merchandise-got-it-wrong deal, but I think it was the slogan that really sold it: man behind brief and mask.

But it got me to thinking: maybe this wasn't the standard oops-the-unlicensed-merchandise-got-it-wrong deal, bur rather a special oops-the-unlicensed-merchandise-got-it-wrong deal. Maybe that Indian silkscreening had a dim memory of the classic villain Composite Superman, and got that wrong:

Wouldn't that be something?