What happened to those guys?

It occurred to me while watching Cowboys and Aliens, an otherwise enjoyable film, that way too much time was invested in the character arcs for my own personal taste.  As always, this is subjective, but I didn’t really need subtle motivations and character growth for a movie about cowboys fighting aliens.  I call it the Conan Rule.  Conan isn’t there to learn any important life lessons.  He isn’t there to make friends and become a better person.  He arrives to slay sorcerers and mad kings, to destroy monsters and ride into the sunset with a maiden on his arm and a grim smile across his face.  And that’s just fine by me.

(Speaking of Conan, let’s hope the new film understands this.  I’d hate to sit through a story where Conan wrestles with feelings of guilt and uncertainty.  It’d be completely missing the point of the character.)

Not every protagonist needs a character arc.  James Bond doesn’t need a backstory.  John Carter of Mars doesn’t have to contemplate the futility of living in a violent world.  And Wonder Woman can just be an Amazon crimefighter, here to lend a hand.

Recurring characters, in particular, suffer from the desire to give them arcs.  These characters weren’t designed for it, and often, it comes across as strange.  I don’t need to read yet another Spider-Man story where Peter Parker learns to live with his gift / curse.  I don’t want to witness Superman coming to terms with his amazing powers.  And I don’t care how many adventures Conan has, I don’t need him to be anything other than Conan.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve grown so fond of the reboots and re-imaginings of late.  Because the only way to give Peter Parker, James Bond, or Superman a character arc is to start over.  After these characters have learned their “definitive” lessons, established their defining philosophies, there’s nothing new to be done with them on the personal growth front.  And because character arc seems to be required at this point, they become uninteresting.  But rather than just giving Superman robots to fight or moving onto new characters, writers instead decide to reset everything so that they can tell the same character arc again.

This is the problem with a recurring character.  If they continue to grow and change as time goes on, then logically, they should eventually become unrecognizable.  Writers are stuck between two opposing goals.  They want to write about the character changing, but they don’t want the character to actually change.  Batman will never decide to give up crimefighting.  Spider-Man will always be broke.  And James Bond will always be a spy.  Because that’s what defines them.  Even when it doesn’t make sense.

Spider-Man, for example, is part of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four.  But somehow, he’s still broke and an outcast hero.  He was even married to a supermodel for decades before she was magically removed to make him more “relatable”.  But I think she was removed because she didn’t fit with Spidey’s established character.  And writers, unable or unwilling, to explore new Spidey stories about a married man (and maybe even a father) who is a superhero, just reset the character.  And they probably weren’t wrong to shy away from that development because it’s not what most readers want out of Spidey.

Character arcs for recurring protagonists / antagonists are almost always going to be a waste of time.  And disappointing.  Once you get them to where they need to be, there’s no need for them to grow and change, and it seems strange that characters exhibited the ability to change and then just suddenly stopped doing it.  X-Men: First Class showcases Eric’s transformation into Magneto, which is fine, but once the film is over, we are given the final version of Magneto, the character who will now never change or grow again.  Charles has every single bit of his character development happen in the film too, including getting paralyzed.  Prof X is finished as a character, and further growth is impossible.

I miss adventure stories where the character doesn’t learn anything about themselves and where the focus of the plot is less about what the characters are feeling and more about punching evil aliens.  Maybe it’s deemed too superficial, but the other side is that the more time characters spend learning about themselves, they less time they have to fight bad guys and save the world.  And while I’m all for a good story of personal growth, I also really enjoy it when James Bond blows up a bad guy’s secret installation or Captain America punches out Hitler.  And sometimes, a cowboy can just shoot the evil aliens because they’re EVIL and that’s what cowboys would do.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

I am not a fan of prequels either.  Possibly the biggest reason for me is that prequels by their nature take place before a story really begins.  The most obvious example is found in the Star Wars prequels, a series of 3 movies that add absolutely nothing to the original trilogy.  We can put aside the question of whether they’re good movies or not.  That’s irrelevent.  But do they make the original trilogy stronger?  Nope.  There’s really nothing in the prequels you need to know to enjoy the original trilogy.  If you watched The Empire Strikes Back without watching Star Wars (and yeah, I call the first film Star Wars, not A New Hope or Episode 1), you could still enjoy Empire.  But you’d be missing something, elements that made the story payoff.  You could watch Return of the Jedi all alone, but you’d be missing out on the payoff that comes from the arc of the three films.

But the prequels don’t add anything.  They elaborate on backstory that is already well established and intended to be just that: Backstory.  As in events that take place before the real story begins.  Even if the prequels had been great, it would be hard to make them relevant to the original trilogy because the original trilogy was made to work without them.

This is the prequel’s dilemma.  How do you make something relevant when it is irrelevant by design?  We don’t need to see Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side.  If you do a good job of it, then we are just allowed to watch events unfold in a predestined way that is difficult, if not impossible, to make interesting.  If you do a bad job, you make established backstory seem ridiculous and stupid.  So you can either be boring or harmful.  You can rarely be neither.

I’m not arguing that prequels cannot be commercial successes, which is ultimately all they’re there for.  When a writer is out of ideas and wants to milk a few exra bucks from an established property, prequels work great.  They have the illusion of importance, of being worthwhile information.  If Darth Vader’s eventual redemption is worth seeing, then shouldn’t it follow his corruption is too?  Well, no.  No, it isn’t.  And this can apply to a long list of ideas that don’t really pay off the way they could in our ideal imaginings.

Is anyone really excited to know that the Empire was formed via political manipulation?  Does knowing how Luke and Leia’s parents met and fall in love add anything to their story?  Is any depth added to Boba Fett when we discover that his dad was a bounty hunter too?  And do we care more about C-3po if he was built by a young Darth Vader rather than just bought at a store?  These are unnecessary, unimportant.  They’re the illusion of character development, of world building.  But they are answering questions that don’t need to be answered.

Ironically, the character that comes out the best in the Star Wars prequels is Han Solo because he isn’t in them.  His dad isn’t in them.  We don’t learn that Emperor Palpatine built the Milennium Falcon in his garage.  And because of that, Han remains an interesting character.  His past remains mysterious (which is part of what makes him interesting), and we aren’t forced to hear about every unimportant detail of his childhood in the mistaken impression that if Han Solo, the smuggler turned hero, is worth following then Han Solo, Jr. space ace, is someone we should watch too.

It’s easy to pick on Star Wars.  Heck, all but the most ardent Star Wars fan will admit the sequels are flawed at best.  But the problem with prequels of all sorts is that they just remain pointless exercises.  The Wolverine prequel suffered from the same flaws the Star Wars prequels did.   A meandering story trying to squeeze plot points together into a coherent story, an obsession with making even the smallest details important.  And this isn’t just true for films, but for comic books too.

The prequel’s comic book cousin is the retcon, a reworking of past events to make them fit a current story.  And it is, with rare exception, a waste of time.  I much preferred when Wolverine didn’t have an origin over the one we were finally given.  He worked just fine as a character without it.

Sometimes a story is best served when questions aren’t answered.  Either because they’re unimportant or because any answer we get will be unsatisfying.  I don’t need to know how Bruce Wayne built the Batcave.  I don’t need to know how the Kent’s adopted the young Clark.  I don’t need to know who built C-3po.  I don’t need to know a whole hell of a lot to enjoy a story.  And knowing won’t always make me enjoy it more.

The observation is as true as it is irrelevant.  Prequels aren’t made because people think those stories need to be told.  They’re made because they’re an easy sell.  And if art is all about money, it’s hard to argue that either the Wolverine or Star Wars prequels were failures.  They put butts in the seats.  They make money, and money is what it’s all about.  And I can respect that to some degree.  It’s like dropping zombies into Pride & Prejudice.  You don’t do it for the artistic merits.  You do it for the money.  And, like all artists, the approval.

Having never really gotten that level of approval, I can’t even claim to be immune to it.  If someone offered me a million dollars to write a Gil’s sequel, I’d write it.  I’m not taking the high ground here.  I’m just making an observation.  It’s not a scientific fact, just an opinion from one humble novelologist.  Make of it what you will.

Speaking of unnecessary reboots.  There’s a new Spider-Man film in the works.  Funnily enough, the reason has less to do with any demand for such a film as for the legal requirements that if they don’t make the film, the studio might lose the rights to the character.  That’s pretty common.  As a wise person once observed: “It’s true that Hollywood is the Dream Factory.  Well, the factory part at least.”

Also, I watched The Mechanic this weekend, and it was a good movie.  Nothing mind-blowing but a good story told well with some nice action pieces.  Jason Statham can sleepwalk his intensity through a film like this at this point, and it’s pretty standard.  But SPOILER ALERT, Statham’s character lives at the end.  In the original film (which I recommend by the way) the mechanic as played by Charles Bronson dies.  It’d be tempting to say that it reflects a different society that sees no need to have it’s anti-hero protagonist get is comeuppance.  But it really has little if anything to do with that.  It’s all about sequel potential, something the original film didn’t even consider.  But that was a different world, when sequels were the exception, not the rule.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

My first reaction is: beats actually trying to write a good story with a character DC hasn’t had a clue about for decades now.

My second reaction is a little more nuanced.

On the costume:  Superhero costumes should be simple.  Simple colors.  Simple patterns.  Maybe an iconic logo.  It should be easily identifiable, shouldn’t be too busy.  It should get the job done and not much more.

If you look at the superheroes who have survived the decades, almost all of them have very simple costume designs.  Batman is just a cowl with bat ears, his logo on the chest, a utility belt, and a cape.  Superman is red and blue underwear, a red cape, and again, another great logo.  Spider-Man is red and blue.  No cape.  But the mask with its large eyes is very distinctive and you can’t ignore the webbing.  Also, logo on chest.  Iron Man, while having many armors over the years, has stuck with red and yellow for decades.  And, while it isn’t exactly a logo, he does have that circle in his chest.

It goes on.  The Fantastic Four have blue with a four logo on their chest (of course).  Each has their own distinctive features.  The Invisible Woman is blonde (and, yes, a woman).  The Human Torch is quite often on fire (and being on fire usually helps one stand out in a crowd).  The Thing is a giant orange rock monster.  And Mr. Fantastic’s gray streaks at his temple are practically part of his uniform.

It goes on.

Hellboy is a red demon with ground down horns in a trenchcoat with a giant fist.  The Hulk is mostly naked green giant in tattered jeans.  The Joker has chalk-white skin, green hair, a purple tuxedo.  The Penguin has a tux, too.  And what would Dr. Doom be without his green tunic and gray power armor?

The point here is that most comic book characters that have stood the test of time are fairly simple to draw.  There’s a practical reason for this.  Not all artists are created equal, and the simpler the design, the easier it is for an artist of even modest talent to draw it.  In the 90′s, artists loved to draw elaborate character designs, full of complicated patterns, belts, and pouches.  Oh, how they loved the pouches!  While it looked edgy in theory, it also made these characters blend into each other.  If you’ve seen one Image character, you’ve seen 90% of them.

And that’s important to remember.  A character can be too busy.  Spawn might have looked “totally awesome” with his huge cape, chains, and skull accessories, but if he wanted to be more memorable, all he really needed was to ditch the accessories, put a logo on his chest, and maybe keep his skulls down to one on his belt buckle.

The new Wonder Woman costume isn’t simple.  That’s my biggest gripe against it.  It’s far too busy.  Some have pointed out that it’s outdated, very 90′s, and that’s a fair criticism.  But my bigger criticism is that it just isn’t very memorable.

All of us comic book fans know this costume isn’t going to stick, and that this is little more than a publicity gimmick from DC.  And that’s the biggest problem here.  DC hasn’t known what to do with Wonder Woman for decades now, and if I can be brutal, I’m even going to suggest that DC would gladly get rid of her if she wasn’t such a recognizable icon.  She’s an asset, not a character.  They really have no interest in her, in crafting interesting stories with her.  They just want something for merchandizing.

Maybe that’s harsh, but it seems to be true.  The costume change is just another in a string of gimmicks to keep the character in the public eye, and that’s really not much different than what happens to other characters now and then.  But for Wonder Woman, that’s almost entirely all she has.  Taken at face value, this costume change is just another attempt to draw attention to Wonder Woman, to keep her a viable merchandising icon.

The problem is that nobody ever seems interested in making Wonder Woman anything other than that.  I’ve written before about Wonder Woman and how I feel she isn’t a great character.  She has her defenders, and I get where they’re coming from.  I want to like Wonder Woman, and I have in the past.  I loved her in Justice League: The Animated Series.  I thoroughly enjoyed her recent direct-to-DVD Animated film.  But for the most part, I find Wonder Woman either dull or saddled with far too much baggage.  The costume change only serves to diminish her further.

It might be naive of me, but I believe that people will care about a character when a character is worth caring about.  And it will take more than a bad costume change to make Wonder Woman worth caring about.  It’ll take a writer and editorial team that are more interested in her adventures than her costume and how much mileage they can milk out of changing it.

If they’d really just wanted to update the outfit, they’d have just give her some pants.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

By the way, I’ll be taking part in Borders.com’s Babel Clash, a two week blogging exchange thing.  I’m not really sure how it works or what I’ll be doing, but it’s flattering to be asked to participate.  So I’ll be doing it because any chance to meet new fans without forcing me to get up and leave my house is cool with me.  It’ll start next Wednesday.  I’ll keep you updated gang.

So I finally finished CATCHING THE MOON.  Still have work to do on it, but I felt comfortable enough to turn it over to my editor and see what they have to say.

And now I’m free to just relax and pursue a new manuscript.  I’ve started MOJO NEPTUNE, WARLORD OF EARTH.  It’s a story about a retired alien supervillain and the problems he gets into trying to save a world he previously conquered himself.  Mojo is the space squid equivalent of Doctor Doom, chaotic neutral (or possibly chaotic lawful), and he isn’t exactly a nice guy.  But he’s really not evil either.  He’s just super intelligent and bored and trying to figure out what to do with himself.

I tweeted the title and backstory of the story a few days ago, and two of my close friends told me they thought it was a joke.  For the life of me, I don’t know why.  This is a story with a space squid protagonists, Venusian warriors, Saturnite stone people, ray guns, time machines, and probably (though not certainly at this point) an Atlantean uprising.  Doesn’t it sound like something I’d write?  Heck, I’m not sure it’s even the weirdest thing I’ve written.

The other thing that came up was the funny writer label.  One or two people observed that if I didn’t want to be viewed as a funny writer, I probably should stop writing stuff like this.  And I can see where they’re coming from.   It has some funny stuff in it.  There’s humor.  There’s absurdity.  But, despite all that, I still wouldn’t call it a funny book.

But maybe it’s just a matter of perception.  I don’t like being called funny, but I do like being called fun.  I do like writing fun books that make you smile, that are enjoyable to read, that engage the reader with cool ideas and snappy dialogue and strange, memorable (hopefully) moments.  Fun is good.  Fun is a worthy goal.

Funny is just too much damn pressure.  It’s also just a touch one-dimensional.  The line between drama and comedy is mostly an illusion.  It seems as if anything makes you smile or doesn’t bring you down that it must automatically be silly or light.  But, as I’ve said before, I don’t buy that.

One of my favorite movies last year was CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS.  Yes, it’s an absurdist romp with plenty of jokes.  But I really did care about the characters, and there’s a satisfaction in the growth and resolution of their characters and conflicts.  KUNG FU PANDA isn’t just about cool super kung fu battles.  It’s also about Master Sifu’s struggles with his own guilt, Tai Lung’s ruthless (and tragic) pursuit of kung fu perfection, and Po’s evolution from jovial wannabe to jovial hero.  These films are funny, yes, and fun.  But that doesn’t make them less.

The recent JUSTICE LEAGUE: CRISIS ON TWO EARTHS is, in many ways, a dark story about a villain who seeks to destroy the universe for no other reason than his nihlistic obsession.  That’s pretty heavy stuff.  But it’s also about a guy in a batsuit and an alien in blue and red spandex who fight evil counterparts from an alternate dimension.  It’s fun.

Fun is not a bad thing.

So, yes, I’m funny.  And I don’t deny it.  But it has never been my goal to make the audience laugh, though if that hurts I’m not complaining.  Still, I’m striving to entertain, and if that makes me less of an artist, I’ll live with it.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

I recently started a Twitter mini-debate with a friend of mine.*   Watching a preview for the new Kick-Ass movie, I remarked how the movie straddles a clumsy line between superheroes and realism.  This has always been a tricky prospect.  Some elements of fantasy are closer to reality than others, and superheroes are about as far from reality as one can get.

I haven’t read the original mini-series this movie is based on, but the premise is an exploration of what would happen if people in the real world tried superheroics.  This could be interesting.  Although it seems like the story would be really, really short.  Person in funny costume leaps out at bank robbers.  Bank robbers shoot costumed person.  The end.

However, the premise is destroyed for me the moment Hit-Girl, a small child, is able to kill a whole room of thugs and killers all by herself.  This might even be possible under the right circumstances, but Hit-Girl is able to dodge bullets, reload guns by throwing clips in the air and slamming her pistols into these spinning clips, able to kick a grown man across a room, and cut off limbs with a sword.

None of this is realistic.  All of this dwells firmly in the realm of the absurd.  For all practical intent, Hit-Girl isn’t a parody of superheroes.  She’s not a deconstruction of the superheroic fantasy.  She’s not even really a tongue-in-cheek joke about superheroes.  She’s just a superhero.

Kick-Ass seems even less realistic than Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  At least those films go out of their way to justify Bruce Wayne’s training and equipment.  These aren’t realistic films by any stretch of the imagination, but at least by giving Batman a technological edge and an elaborate backstory, they’ve designed a fantastic justification for why Batman is Batman.

But Hit-Girl is just a little girl who has been trained to kill people.  And while I do believe it wouldn’t be that hard to train a young girl to shoot people, I think teaching anyone to dodge bullets in a firefight would qualify as a superpower in itself.

Realism is absurd in this context.  Once a character, any character in any story, is able to dodge bullets, you are dealing with fantasy.  If you don’t believe me, then try an experiment.  Have five or six friends stand around you with Nerf guns in a small room.  Then have them all shoot at you.  Can you dodge all those slow moving, readily visible projectiles?  Of course you can’t.  And that’s giant foam darts, not speeding, invisible bullets.

Also, swords don’t just slice through flesh-and-bone like Play-Do.  I know that Kill Bill helped to cement this in our pop culture perceptions, but even that film took the time to justify it by giving our heroine a special sword, her own personal Excalibur.

None of this is meant as a criticism of Kick-Ass as an off-beat action adventure film.  But it is a criticism of the realism of Kick-Ass.  And anyone who suggests that Kick-Ass is realistic has no weight with me.

Realism in fantasy films is one thing.  But what about realism in other mediums?  How about video games?

A big game right now is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  It’s a first-person shooter that involves running across the globe, fighting terrorists and other bad guys.  While certainly on the surface, this game is more realistic than Super Mario Galaxy or Pokemon, in the end it isn’t very realistic at all.  Because a realistic FPS would involve the player running around in a panicked state, trying to keep cool in a sea of chaos.  And when you were shot, you’d die.  End of story.  Admittedly, getting shot doesn’t always kill you instantly.  So the game could choose to have your character lay helplessly on the ground for a few minutes until either you expired or someone came along and carried you off to the infirmary.

Or you could be captured and thrown in a cell for years.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?

A life bar or health meter makes a game fun, but it doesn’t smack of realism.  When was the last time you were punched in the face and said, “Thank the Mighty Robot King that my health bar was full!  Now if I can just find a health pack and a power up.”

Now Mario is, in the spectrum of things, more unrealistic.  Realism is probably the last thing the designers of Mario games worry about.  As I play Super Mario Galaxy, I don’t try to make much sense of it.  Why does a big, evil turtle have an obsession with kidnapping princesses?  Why does he emply an army of turtles, mushrooms, skeleton turtles, ghosts, and walking bombs?  Why do I climb a giant toy robot in one level, fight a flower monster in another, and turn into a bee in another?  Who knows?  Who cares?  It’s Mario.  That’s just the way Mario works.

I’m not suggesting that Mario is a better game than Call of Duty.  I like Mario better, but that probably has less to do with the quality of the game and more to do with my old school platformer roots.  And I do enjoy weirdness for weirdness’s sake.  I have no reason to believe that Call of Duty isn’t a solid game in its genre.  But is it realistic?  No, it just ain’t.  It’s only realistic in comparison to something that is less realistic, and it’s hard to find things less realistic than a chubby (yet surprisingly athletic) Italian plumber who explores the universe, collecting stars, fighting the minions of a giant, fire-breathing turtle to rescue a princess.

Kick-Ass will undoubtedly be more realistic than much superheroic fantasy.  The costumes alone demonstrate this, and the fact that many of our characters are clumsy wannabees with illusions of grandeur is more realistic than many comic book universes, where it often appears as if just putting on a costume makes you capable of fighting crime.  But characters like Big Daddy and Hit-Girl are cut from the superhero cloth.  They do swear, but a lot of modern comic book heroes do that.  They do kill people, but a lot of modern comic book heroes do that.   They’re thinly disguised psychopaths, but a lot of modern comic book heroes are that, too.   

(When will we get tired of retelling Moore’s Watchmen?  Or at least when will we stop acting like retelling the story is edgy or original?  Just wondering on that one.)

There’s very little, if anything, to distinguish these characters from your garden variety superhero.  And that’s not a problem for me.  I like superheroes.  I like superheroics.  And Kick-Ass looks like it could be a fun, surreal, dark comedy adventure.  I’ll probably even see it though I’m not a fan of Millar in general.  I could launch into a rant about the ridiculous nonsense that was “Old Man Logan”, but that’s another blog post entirely and one most people wouldn’t give a damn about.

(Long story short: Old Man Logan was a very dumb Wolverine story.)

There’s nothing wrong with surrealism.  There’s nothing wrong with realism.  Both are valid styles.  But don’t try wrapping surrealism in a realism package.  Because that’s just silly.  It makes realism look bad.  It makes surrealism look bad.  And it’s just unnecessary.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

*My friend-in-question is Russell C. Connor.  He’s a good guy, and he has a couple of books available on Amazon.  There’s a plug for you, Russ, because I’m cool like that.

Oh, I believe comic books (and superheroes) will be around for a while.  And, yes, I know that comic books aren’t strictly about superheroes, but let’s be honest, it’s what they’re most famous for at this point and it’s probably what they’ll stay famous for.  Road to Perdition and A History of Violence may have both been based on graphic novels, but neither seemed enthusiastic to advertise that.  No, to the general public, comic books are about superheroes, and there’s just no way around that.

Ironically, I’m not even sure how many comic book writers right now actually care about the superhero genre in the first place.  Most comic books I pick up are talky, dull affairs about people who just happen to have super powers.  It’s almost as if most the writers who grew up reading comics loved the medium but don’t really like superheroes.  But if you want to make a living writing comics, odds are good that you’ll be writing something with superheroes in it.

But I’m getting off topic.  (Funny how often that happens when I write about this stuff, isn’t it?)

The problem with comic books, the inescapable dilemma they’re facing, is how the hell do you write a comic book that appeals to fans and non-fans at the same time?  As of yet, nobody has really figured out how to do it.

I make no bones about it that fannish devotion to previous continuity in comic book universes is killing the comic book.  Most non-fans would have a hell of a time picking up any random comic book, even one featuring mainstream heroes, and knowing what the hell is going on.  And that’s just too bad because while the fans may love spending hours researching the backstory of 12,ooo characters to make sense of a story that takes two or three years (and several hundred issues and several hundred dollars) to unfold, your average reader probably isn’t willing to invest the same amount of effort.  And who can really blame them?

Yet the fans are the only thing keeping comic books afloat right now.  The die hards who read anything with Wolverine or Spider-Man in it are where most of the money is.  But these popular characters also come with a lot of baggage that most fans want to see exploited.  A straight-forward story where Batman tracks down some bankrobbers is just not going to appeal to them.  No, they want to see Night Wing and Robin and the Joker.  And they want Night Wing and Robin to have a clever exchange of dialogue that refers to something that happened “a few years ago” in comic book time, but is probably more like 15 years ago in reality time.  Leave those out, and they’re disatisfied.  And they’ll let you know.

The problem is that these devoted fans are strangling the life out of the very thing they love.

And yet, non-fans are not that interested in comic books because comic books are not a mainstream thing.  Comic book heroes may be mainstream, but comic books themselves are still a specialty product sold in special outlet stores that, while not always hostile to non-fans, are rarely very welcoming.  I still visit my comic book store and it’s not unusual to get a feeling like you’re an outsider.  Not because anyone treats you as such, but just because everyone seems to know so much more than you.  It’s like being a rocket scientist in a room full of anthropologists.  You may know you’re smart, but you also can’t help but feel like you’re missing out on a lot of the subtleties of the conversation.

DC’S BLACKEST NIGHT is the latest fan service event about an army of evil undead black lanterns who rise from their graves to do something evil.  I’m not going to lie to you.  It’s pretty terrible.  Fans will love it, of course.  Because the thing is filled with all these fan moments.  Also, I’m not so sure that many fans of comic books actually like superheroes either.  They’d much rather read a zombie book with superheroes pasted into it.  But that’s just me being grouchy, so ignore that.

But let’s take Blackest Night for what it is.  It’s a comic devoted to pleasing fans, and it probably does a good job of that.  While non-fans will find themselves confused by the long-winded conversation between Green Lantern and Flash about their complicated pasts and then utterly unimpressed by the appearance of Zombie Martian Manhunter, fans will eat this up.  When Zombie Elongated Man and Zombie Sue Dibney confront Hawkman and Hawkgirl, most fans’ eyes will glimmer with sinister glee and most non-fans will wonder who the hell any of these characters are.

Blackest Night #1 is all set up.  If you’re already invested in these characters and this universe, it’s not bad.  But what if you’re not?  This is the problem.  This is the gnawing catch-22 that is slowly eating comic books alive.

How the hell do you make a comic book that is full of in-references and beloved fan characters (both famous and obscure) that doesn’t alienate non-fans?  Or, vice versa, how do you write a comic book full of action, adventure, and accessibility that will keep hardcore fans interested?

Though I’ve always considered myself a comic book fan, I have discovered that, in truth, I’m not.  Because even though I get many of the references in Blackest Night, even though I understand much of the backstory and am familiar with the characters, I couldn’t give a damn.  I just don’t care.  I suppose I’m trapped in some strange twilight realm between fan and non-fan.  I know enough to follow what’s going on, but I’m not invested enough to give a crap.  I know that having Zombie Martian Manhunter coming after Green Lantern and Flash is supposed to be a crowning moment of cool.  But instead, it just comes off as fan service, as pandering.  Like World War Hulk (“Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the Hulk beat up everybody!”) or Civil War (“Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if half the superheroes started fighting with the other half!”) I find the entire thing laughably ill-conceived.  But, hey, I’m not a fan.  I’m just some guy who likes comics.  And it turns out there’s a world of difference between the two.

Another interesting experiment from DC is WEDNESDAY COMICS.  This throwback to Sunday comic weeklies is a nifty idea.  And I’ll admit that so far it’s been endearing and fun.  But who is going to buy this?  Who is going to spend $4 to buy a weekly comic featuring continuing stories printed in a page-a-week format?  The art is great.  The nostalgia is nice.  The stories are developing quite nicely.  But is a non-fan going to pick this up?

And even if they did, what would they find?  Comics that are decidedly retro.  Characters that are in stories nothing like you’d actually read if you picked up a comic.  The Green Lantern strip doesn’t have a single zombie, swear word, or long, drawn out exchange of history referencing dialogue.  The Batman strip is a noirish crime thriller with nary a supporting cast member shown (outside of Commissioner Gordon so far).  The Kamandi strip is just awesome, a great tribute to Prince Valiant, but who is going to become a Kamandi fan from reading it?  And, even if they did, where the hell are they going to find a Kamandi comic book on the shelves?

Nowhere.  That’s where.

Wednesday Comics is intentionally old school.  There’s no blood, no gore.  No attempts at edginess.  Even the Batman strip, the most brooding and dark of the offerings, is surprisingly low-key and subtle.  Maybe somebody will get tortured to death by a power drill at some point, but for now, all its violence is implied, not painted in graphic reds and blacks across the panels.

And I still can’t really figure out who it’s for.  I really like it, but, as stated previously, I am not a fan.  Comic book writers long ago gave up on casual readers.

MARVEL DIVAS is a new series that is an attempt to reach out to a female audience.  Despite having “Divas” in the title (The Mighty Robot King has placed that term in his To Be Reviled Index), it’s not a bad book.  But, again, it’s filled with in-references and fan service.  The cover features our four heroines decked out in sexy superhero attire, but the interior hardly shows them in costume at all.  So if Marvel Divas isn’t really a superhero book (and as far as I can tell it isn’t, anymore than Blackest Night is a superhero book) then why not just admit this and put the ladies in non-superhero attire on the cover?  It’s not as if any of these characters are recognizable icons.  I know Hellcat.  Heck, I even like Hellcat.  But what casual reader is going to walk by a comic book shop, spot Hellcat in the window, and say, “Hey, I want that comic because clearly, it’s a comic about four women (with incidental superpowers) who sit around and talk about dating, fashion, and cancer!”

Quote Will Ferrell:  “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.”

So now I realize I’ve written a whole hell of a lot about a problem that is obvious to most comic book fans and completely irrelevant to everyone else.  And that just shows how big this problem is.  As much as I want to shake Marvel and DC and scream, “Stop with the gimmicks!  Just write a good, accessible story!” I also know that they’re doing the only thing they can think of.

Is it short-sighted?  I think so, but trying anything else is risky.  It’s hard to gamble when the long term gains may never come.

But, bringing this around to me, I have to say this is why I find myself reluctant to start a series.  Because this is the inevitable result.  Inevitably, you become a devoted servant of fan service and not storytelling.  Not to suggest that many series haven’t managed to do both at the same time, but it’s not easy.  And comic books lost that battle a long time ago.

Will they recover?  Hard to say.  I’d say no, but that’s just the cynic in me.  Plus, it’s pretty damned late, and I should’ve been in bed a while ago.  Why the hell do I start these blog entries just before bed time?

So I leave you with a long rant that observes a problem that many others before me have already observed, and I offer no solution.  Sorry to have wasted your time, gang.  Try not to hold it against me.

All I really know about comic books is that more stories should feature Blue Beetle and Squirrel Girl.  And if DC and Marvel ever feel like doing another inter-company crossover, I’d pay good money to write a Blue Beetle / Squirrel Girl one-shot.  That’s right!  I’d pay you, guys! 

Just putting that out there.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee