Super heros are back in style

[DuncanWatson]

Marvel and DC crushed most of the independents in the 90's with exclusive deals on the major distributors. This kept independents from many stores. A number of illustrators I know were quite upset as it really reduced the market for their work.

Superhero's are fun and I enjoy films with them but it is a genre like many others, it can be done well and it can be done very poorly. Finding the gems amidst the dross is the difficult part.

 

[KatG]

Rumor has it that The Cape is so bad that the final episode for the season will not be on tv but only available on line.

It wasn't bad at all, just uneven and trying to find a groove. They were trying to do something very noir, kind of like The Shadow. It mixed retro style with some cyberpunk bits. The writing had some good dialogue lines and the carnival characters were really just getting interesting. It was a lot of fun to have Vinnie Jones play this villain with a skin condition and James Frain, who was also very good in True Blood, had a great time chomping scenery as the main baddie. But the scripts varied considerably and they weren't given time to work the kinks out. I enjoyed it more than No Ordinary Family, which was sweet but has many aspects that drive me insane, and I gather it also isn't doing that well.

I don't get why the networks keep trying to do dark, cable-like shows to try and attract some of the same audience I guess, but then they just turn around and decide they don't want them the next minute.

 

[Sparrow]

The movie Kickass this year was a fantastic example of an above average superhero movie. I thought it should have been nominated for best picture.

Oh c'mon, you must be kidding.

 

[expatrie]

Superhero fiction.

This will sound mean, but nothing by Judd Apatow and friends will ever be worthy of a best picture. They just don't operate in that field. By choice, and there's really nothing wrong with it. It doesn't appeal to me, but that's fine.

I'm not sure if y'all are discussing movies or books, (I did see the Soon I Will Be Very Tired of Reading this Book comment). Most of the superhero fiction I've picked up has been a disappointment to me. Soon started strong but I felt it was too inside the character's heads, some nice action description and a fistfight or two--a la Batman--would actually have been nice. Fortress of Solitude was better, although the super-hero element was pretty sidelined, and Superheroes--ah, it just didn't get there for me. I feel the genre is oversold and burnout is imminent. Then the publishers will get shy on them and the quality may rise again.

Ebb and flow.

As a disclaimer, I was never much taken with Watchmen. Dark Knight - (please, not the movie) I did like. And I do sorely miss the X-men (not the movies, please) and the Sentinels--I just dig giant robots run amok. Days of Future Past is a favorite, as well as the New Mutants sequence where half the team is in "mutants win" and the other half is in an alternate future where "mutants all flee."

As to Superhero adjacent fiction that's not superheroes, give Junot Diaz's The *mumble mumble* ... life of Oscar Wao a try. That I did like, with all the references to X-men, Dr. Doom, the Beyonder (how can you not like that character?), and all the others, Lord of the Rings, Morlocks and whatnot. What's not to like? I mean other than his fetish for Nissan Pathfinders and that one part where there's a sentence like three pages long. Just because it's a writing exercise you've done doesn't mean it has to yield directly into a book, you can learn from it without publishing it.

--Brian

 

[KatG]

Judd Apatow was not involved with Kick-Ass. It was adapted from a graphic novel. It was interesting in a very bleak way. My teenage daughter loved it. It had a nice streak of dystopian social commentary to it that went well with the guns and craziness.

The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao is a lovely novel, but those interested in superhero fiction, primarily, I don't think it would fit their needs. If you liked Michael Chabon's Cavalier and Klay, then Diaz's novel would probably interest you. Fortress of Solitude is a wonderful novel, but it's more of a coming of age tale. It's interesting to pair the idea of superheroes -- which is all out there and bold colored -- with the sort of magic realism fantasy they all used, but I think tackling the bold head-on has its merits too, whether they are going extra noir, like Watchmen or more adventure like Captain America.

Superheroes are one of those ideas that can be used for either fantasy or sociological SF. Sometimes they are about science run amok, but mostly they are for social commentary and identity issues. I've been interested in checking out Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge's Black and White series, which has two female superhero/villains in the near future and the line between them tends to get defined by corporate interests.

 

[oceanworld]

They are

They do seem to be popular these days.

 

[freebird]

This will sound mean, but nothing by Judd Apatow and friends will ever be worthy of a best picture. They just don't operate in that field. By choice, and there's really nothing wrong with it. It doesn't appeal to me, but that's fine.

I'm not sure if y'all are discussing movies or books, (I did see the Soon I Will Be Very Tired of Reading this Book comment). Most of the superhero fiction I've picked up has been a disappointment to me. Soon started strong but I felt it was too inside the character's heads, some nice action description and a fistfight or two--a la Batman--would actually have been nice. Fortress of Solitude was better, although the super-hero element was pretty sidelined, and Superheroes--ah, it just didn't get there for me. I feel the genre is oversold and burnout is imminent. Then the publishers will get shy on them and the quality may rise again.

Ebb and flow.

As a disclaimer, I was never much taken with Watchmen. Dark Knight - (please, not the movie) I did like. And I do sorely miss the X-men (not the movies, please) and the Sentinels--I just dig giant robots run amok. Days of Future Past is a favorite, as well as the New Mutants sequence where half the team is in "mutants win" and the other half is in an alternate future where "mutants all flee."

As to Superhero adjacent fiction that's not superheroes, give Junot Diaz's The *mumble mumble* ... life of Oscar Wao a try. That I did like, with all the references to X-men, Dr. Doom, the Beyonder (how can you not like that character?), and all the others, Lord of the Rings, Morlocks and whatnot. What's not to like? I mean other than his fetish for Nissan Pathfinders and that one part where there's a sentence like three pages long. Just because it's a writing exercise you've done doesn't mean it has to yield directly into a book, you can learn from it without publishing it.

--Brian

I just finished Super Born http://www.superborn.net and I love how the "super woman" throws beer trucks around and makes the bad guys look pitiful. It has great action moments.

 

[phil_geo]

Alternatively, the climax of the Dark Knight Returns? Batman kicks Superman's ass.

All those other comics you mention are great (of the several I've read) but I think you missed a lot in The Dark Knight Returns. It's mostly about growing older. I don't even think I appreciated it until I had experienced some of it. Commisioner Gordan's story is one of the most powerful, although the main experiences are through Batman. The commentary on media bias and vigilantes is also very good.

And do you know why Batman and Superman fought? It wasn't just a gratuitous fight between superheroes. The President wanted Batman dead because he was losing control of the world situation, and Batman was just another example of that. He made Superman his assassin - and the appalling part is that Superman went along. The reason Superman lost is that blind obedience to a higher power, no matter what that power is, is a bad idea. You have to follow your principles. Superman wasn't doing the right thing - he was doing the easy thing. And after all that, when the vigilante psychopath has the good guy's life in his hands, who shows mercy? The points were made through a fist fight, but there's so much more there than a fight.

You sold us out, Clark. You gave them - the power - that should have been ours. Just like your parents taught you to. My parents taught me a different lesson. Lying on the street - shaking in deep shock - dying for no reason at all. They showed me that the world only makes sense when you force it to.

 

[nposecznick]

I've been collecting comics for the past 26 years maybe and of course most have been superhero comics. I think y'all have covered most of the bases.

• Superheroes are part of American culture.
• There is already a strong merchandizing base.
• Both Marvel and DC are hooked up with big movie studios.
• It's action packed, escapist and heroic, always a win especially when times are rough in the economy.
• There are years of storylines to pick through and massage into a movie.
• Special effects has reached the point of feasibly doing these things.

As for what has come out, I'm not all that impressed.

The Christian Bale Batman's were pretty decent except Bale's growl always makes me laugh.

Watchmen was a very good attempt but it may not really be possible to translate it properly to film and have the same effect.

The Sam Raimi Spidermans were good. I haven't seen a good deal of the others as the trailers have been turning me off.

I liked X-Men 2 better than 1 and hated 3.

I tried to watch The Cape but I felt it was painfully bad. It seems trapped half way between trying to be serious and trying to be the 1960s Batman. I liked both I just wish it would be more one or the other.

Frankly I'd prefer superhero stuff to go 2 ways. Either light and family friendly like The Incredibles or more adult and move towards the Pulp Hero aesthetic updated to today.

Although I have an entirely separate issue with superheroes of my own, which is that I'm a far lefty politically. Superheroes essentially protect the status quo and so at some level I feel they are not really the good guys. A superhero modeled on Robin Hood, Zorro and the Liang Shan Bandits is what fits me.

But that's just my issue. Anyhoo, there are some comics that would make great flicks:

Warren Ellis' Planetary was just great and would make an excellent film or even better an X-filesish TV show if done correctly.

Kirkman's Invincible would surprise the crap out of the public who hasn't read it. It'll feel like Superman at first but it moves elsewhere quickly.

This isn't superheroic but Frank Miller's Ronin is perhaps my favorite of his works and would make a slam-bang film. More sci-fi than anything else really.

That's all I got.

 

[DailyRich]

I'll defend the third X-Men film in the sense that it reminded me of one of those "senses-shattering climax!!!" issues of the comic, where all the groundwork had been laid and you got 32 pages of mayhem to wrap things up. So I didn't mind it being pretty much all spectacle (although Cyclops certainly got shafted).

Nowadays, more people probably saw the three Spiderman films than read every Marvel comic released over that time combined. Publishing comics is becoming a losing game, killed by a combination of the speculator boom and bust in the 90s, publishers saturating the market (how many Spidey and X titles are there now?) and event fatigue (we just finished last year's cataclysmic cross-over and now we're starting another one that undoes the last one? Really?). They're not for telling stories anymore, they're almost just advertisements for movies and video games.

 

[Randy M.]

About The Cape TV show:

It wasn't bad at all, just uneven and trying to find a groove. They were trying to do something very noir, kind of like The Shadow. It mixed retro style with some cyberpunk bits. The writing had some good dialogue lines and the carnival characters were really just getting interesting. It was a lot of fun to have Vinnie Jones play this villain with a skin condition and James Frain, who was also very good in True Blood, had a great time chomping scenery as the main baddie. But the scripts varied considerably and they weren't given time to work the kinks out. I enjoyed it more than No Ordinary Family, which was sweet but has many aspects that drive me insane, and I gather it also isn't doing that well.

Couldn't have said it better. I think TC had potential. If it was hobbled by anything, it was by trying to make TC a bit too good. It might have worked if he'd shown a bit more cop-like cynicism.

I don't get why the networks keep trying to do dark, cable-like shows to try and attract some of the same audience I guess, but then they just turn around and decide they don't want them the next minute.

Once they get it, they chicken out. FOX is notorious for this Mantis, Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and so on.


Randy M.

 

[expatrie]

Reality....

I just finished Super Born http://www.superborn.net and I love how the "super woman" throws beer trucks around and makes the bad guys look pitiful. It has great action moments.

Which is exactly where I stop as a reader. If you try to throw a car at someone, which part of the car, exactly, is designed for the car to be hung from it, say? The door handle? No, it'd snap off. The bumper? It'd bend off and snap at the bolts. What you're left with is deadlifting the car and then throwing it, and I have to ask--just how sticky are those shoes the character is wearing that they can accelerate a car to the point it would do any damage? Beyond lobbing at them like a watermelon and hoping they're too distracted to dodge it? Considering the coefficient of friction on those shoes is probably the same as the car's tires on the asphalt, getting that car to 60 mph by throwing it would take some doing... either a running start a la the javelin toss or a big-ass slingshot.

I can give them a free pass on flying, regeneration and super strength and your basic energy weapon bits (Cyclops, Havoc) and teleportation and magic as being mere fun, but the fights, while visually interesting, aren't realistic enough for me and break my suspension of disbelief (in general).

Similar to the CSI:NY episode where people hid behind roof-top units, which are made out of sheet metal and contain fans, and used for them for cover from gunfire. It just doesn't work that way, folks. Bullets go through sheet metal. That's why they put armor on the side of a tank, not sheet metal.

Now I know I'm getting all physics on the situation, but if heroes are to be integrated with the "real world," as Watchmen pretended, well, they have to play along. And don't get me started on that dip who wrote The Physics of Superheroes.

Where's the eye roll icon?

Pragmatically, as an author, I'd aim my superhero books / novels / movies at the YA and independent readers--I think they enjoy them best. Which seems to be what manga is doing. Aren't those text? I admit I haven't cracked the spine on any of them.

As to the rush of movies--the Marvel and Stan Lee lawsuits probably settled and that's what's allowing all these movies to come out--prior to that they all had options and scripts and no ability to proceed until the lawsuits were settled or decided. As to comics being a losing venture--not really and not anymore. You have to view the comic as a loss leader to get the movie deal once you've established an audience. Marvel teetered on bankruptcy a number of times yet held on. Now with the movie deals they're very happy. Can't blame a company for making a buck.

That said, work-for-hire tends to border on theft. Corporate theft. But the music industry is twelve times as bad as the comics industry. The comic industry actually has a character they're trying to preserve. Look at the tie-in market--those are also (I think) work-for-hire. But the comic created the audience (vide: Captain America), not the book author or the writer of the latest four issues. The music industry has no equivalent. Ultimately, I don't believe anyone in the comics industry in the 60s and 70s anticipated there being movies for these things, and so their agreements with the writers/inkers never covered movie rights.

I still want to see the second Crow movie. Apparently the director of cinematography for The Human Stain worked on that movie. And The Human Stain was well shot. Reminded me of The Third Man.

--Brian.

 

[KatG]

I'll defend the third X-Men film in the sense that it reminded me of one of those "senses-shattering climax!!!" issues of the comic,

What annoyed me about the third movie is that it was so busy setting up for the fourth movie -- the one that never got made. The first two were about introducing characters and the second improved some of the problems of the first one, though Kitty suddenly went from teen to little girl -- and back to teen in the third movie. But the third movie, it was like they said, okay, we have to do the Dark Phoenix story even though we don't want to, so let's get it over with and make it really dark and different and combine it with one of the cure stories and have huge battle scenes, and it will look like we killed Cyclops, etc. Except you don't actually see Cyclops die, so clearly he was going to pop back up in the next one. And there was just a lot of stuff like that so it got terribly disjointed. And now they keep going back into the past, and I don't really want to, especially since they stuck Gambit back in the past. It's just leftovers. They had all this momentum, and they just lost it.

Once they get it, they chicken out. FOX is notorious for this Mantis, Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and so on.

And Dollhouse, Firefly, Tru Calling, Profit, etc. Yeah, I have two shows with them and I try to avoid more.

Expatrie -- Watchmen wasn't realistic. Watchmen was noir satiric dystopia. It gets really tiresome that they're always trying to sell these things as realistic. Also, if the only discrepancy in a CSI series that you're noticing is the sheet metal, you're not giving it your full attention.

 

[nposecznick]

RE: X-men 3 - It's been awhile since I watched it so my memory is a little fuzzy but there were 2 things that irritated me.

1. Magneto moving the entire bridge. The shot started in broad daylight and 5 minutes later it was dark. Secondly, couldn't he just take a metal boat or something and just fly it over there? Strategically the bridge thing felt wrong.

2. Jean Grey was incredibly inconsistent as a character. She has repressed a part of herself (Phoenix) w/Prof X's help.

Fine.

Phoenix breaks out and flips Jean's personality.

Fine.

Phoenix is resentful of being restrained, controlled and dominated and almost entirely id psychologically speaking.

Fine.

She then becomes Magneto's attack dog, following orders without serious complaint.

Huh?

Why in the world would she follow anyone's orders? I don't buy any scenario with her following orders. I can see her bossing Magneto around and taking over, but not following.

 

[Chuffalump]

Which is exactly where I stop as a reader. If you try to throw a car at someone, which part of the car, exactly, is designed for the car to be hung from it, say? The door handle? No, it'd snap off. The bumper? It'd bend off and snap at the bolts.

Hee hee. I thought this when Superman supported a jumbo jet by it's nose. No way was that machine designed to take stress in that way. It would just crumple. But then, if you over analyse these things, you wonder how his skin doesn't feel like rock all the time or why there aren't any cool sonic shock waves (a la Neo) while flying.

 

[phil_geo]

Hee hee. I thought this when Superman supported a jumbo jet by it's nose. No way was that machine designed to take stress in that way. It would just crumple. But then, if you over analyse these things, you wonder how his skin doesn't feel like rock all the time or why there aren't any cool sonic shock waves (a la Neo) while flying.

See I think all of these are good things to address as an author. We all suspend our disbelief for the superpowers, but we don't go along if water flows uphill or it goes from day to night in 5 minutes. The reason is that those are just mistakes, not plot points. It's shoddy writing.

I still remember in the first Dresden book he hits someone with a chair and says "It's not like in the movies. When you get hit with a chair, the chair doesn't break - you do" and it made the book much more credible. The wizard powers I could allow, but having a chair shatter would have been lame.

 

[KatG]

See I think all of these are good things to address as an author. We all suspend our disbelief for the superpowers, but we don't go along if water flows uphill or it goes from day to night in 5 minutes. The reason is that those are just mistakes, not plot points. It's shoddy writing.

I still remember in the first Dresden book he hits someone with a chair and says "It's not like in the movies. When you get hit with a chair, the chair doesn't break - you do" and it made the book much more credible. The wizard powers I could allow, but having a chair shatter would have been lame.

Yeah well, Dresden has its own problems. Like sometimes Harry's effect on electricity happens and is a problem when it's wanted and sometimes it pretty much disappears.

1. Magneto moving the entire bridge. The shot started in broad daylight and 5 minutes later it was dark. Secondly, couldn't he just take a metal boat or something and just fly it over there? Strategically the bridge thing felt wrong.

He was making a symbolic psyche out gesture -- see puny humans, I can destroy your world and your superhero allies cannot stop me. A bridge is more impressive than just a boat, if less strategic. But yeah, the day to night thing was stupid.

She then becomes Magneto's attack dog, following orders without serious complaint.

She follows his orders because they made a deal. Jean is suicidal and wants Wolverine et. al to kill her, not cure her. So she agrees to be Magneto's wraith of destruction. That's why she gets so quiet and broody, like she's a zombie. She's basically crazy at that point and wants to destroy and die.

 

[hippokrene]

Hee hee. I thought this when Superman supported a jumbo jet by it's nose.

Kryptonians create telepathic 'bubbles' around objects they lift/carry. It's the same reason Superman can fly fullspeed while carrying Lois and she's not torn into bits.

Superboy and Supergirl* both have more control/utility with this power. Supergirl can stop bullets in mid-flight or pick up groups of people with her mind.

*I don't know if the latest versions can do this

 

[Chuffalump]

You see? I knew there'd be a logical explanation.

 

[freebird]

I do enjoy the spiderman movies, by my latest favorite"superhero" movie would have to be "The Dark Knight". I too laugh at Christian's growl (how did he get away with it) but Heath Ledger stole the show! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/

Michael Keaton in the movie "Batman" wins the most surprising batman. Who knew he had a good chin? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096895/