Hornet’s problem is one of tone.  It’s not quite sure if it’s a comedy, a buddy flick, a superhero film, or a deconstruction of a superhero film.  In this way, I had the same problem with Hornet as I did with Kick-Ass.  Both films wink at the audience and act like they’re cooler than the superhero genre but are just superhero flicks with more swearing.  They don’t really offer anything new.  Nothing that hasn’t been done better and more interesting in other films.

I don’t know.  I’ll admit I just don’t get it.  I don’t get deconstruction of something as ridiculous as superheroes.  Saying superheroes are dumb and that, in the real world, they’d be dangerous, deranged, most likely egotistical individuals never seemed like an impressive observation.  But superheroes don’t live in the real world.  Putting them in it only raises too many bizarre questions.  Dropping reality into fantasy is a delicate business.  It ain’t easy.

It always strikes me as odd what we will accept as fantasy and what we won’t.  Kick-Ass has Hit Girl, an eleven year old girl who can survive gun fights in enclosed spaces and slice off limbs with a sword, even though it’s hard to imagine a child having the necessary strength to pull that off.  And, oh yeah, bones.  There are bones in most human legs.  Did we forget that?

Any fight scene where Hit Girl isn’t killed is pure fantasy.  It’s every bit as absurd and impossible as dragons or cyborgs or magic hammers.  And when The Green Hornet is able to engage in a machine gun battle in the middle of the freeway with no innocent casualties, we have crossed into an imaginary world, one were the rules as we know them no longer apply.  And that’s fine.  That’s necessary.  All fantasy requires that leap.  Otherwise, we’d have to ask ourselves all those irksome questions that fantasy raises.  And if we really wanted to think about those questions, we wouldn’t bother with fantasy.

Another strange example of the limits of believability can be found in the new Thor movie.  Thor is a god (well, he’s technically a magic alien in the comics), and he has a magic hammer.  He lives in the same world as Iron Man.  But Thor will be a harder sell on the believability scale than Iron Man.  The reasons are purely superficial.

Iron Man has a technological sheen over his powers and abilities, but those abilities are so far beyond the limits of current technology that they might as well be magic.  Instead of mixing potions in a cauldron, he creates circuits and forges iron.  Seriously, the movies love to show Tony Stark smelting ore like some kind of modern day blacksmith.  It’s enough to make you believe that your home computer was forged in fire by the fires of sacred Olympus.  But it really doesn’t work that way.

Heck, the Iron Man movies (both of them) rely on a philosopher’s stone stand-in, something so rare and powerful that no one else can duplicate it.  It even points this out.

As I’ve said before, I’ve always found magic more believable than sci fi.  If Thor’s powers come from his innately magical abilities as well as an enchanted weapon that defies the laws of physics, then I’m on board.  My questions are answered before I ask them.  “How does that hammer summon lightning?”  “Magic.”  “Makes sense to me.”

But how does Iron Man fly?  How does he not get turned into pudding when he’s knocked into a bus?  Even if he has armor on, he’s still a flesh and blood man underneath that.  We aren’t made to be shaken like that.  So for me, the only logical explanation is that Iron Man is magic too.  His magic just happens to look like technology.  Where Thor’s magic looks like…well…magic.

As for Thor, I’m mildly hopeful.  Thor was my first superhero comic, and he’s always been a favorite of mine.  But I haven’t read anything interesting with Thor in a long while.  And if the movie is more concerned with excusing its premise rather than having superpunching then I’m sure we’re in for another long, boring film that would rather not be about superheroes, but will throw in a few FX if it really has to.

The one thing the film trailer has going for it is The Destroyer, a magic robot created by Odin to destroy.  In the comics, Odin created it to fight the Celestials, incredibly powerful aliens who even the gods fear.  I don’t know what justification they will have for the Destroyer in this film, but I will say that he looks exactly like he stepped off the page of the comic books.  And that’s pretty damn cool.

Now here’s hoping they don’t have the final fight end in two punches.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

PS. Tron Legacy is a really, really bad movie.  If I were to teach a class on basic writing technique, I would have the students watch Legacy then say, “See this?  Don’t do this.”

Even Alan Moore’s lauded Watchmen is a poor study in realism.  It has realistic elements.  Most notably, the flawed psychology of the characters.  Aside from that though, Watchmen is pure superhero fantasy.  And it’s not just Dr. Manhattan either.  It’s all the characters with their funny codenames, bizarre costumes, super technology, and amazing ability.  The story even ends with a giant space squid, for crying out loud.

Realism and superheroes?  No, my friends.  I’ll have none of it.  They are at most passing acquantainces.  That’s not to say that superheroes can’t explore deeper issues and resonate on an emotional level, but if the writer thinks the only way this can happen is by discarding the innate fantasy of the superhero genre then they’ve made a tragic miscalculation.

But I digress.  I didn’t start this post to talk about superheroes.  Instead, I wanted to say that Public Enemies is a fantastic animated feature, well worth checking out.  What’s most interesting to me as a writer though is that it adapts a good story and makes it great.  The original graphic novel is decent, but it’s full of plot holes and strange twists.  It never quite fits together properly, and after I’d read it, I found myself dissatisfied by its flaws.  The good news is that these flaws are fixed in the animated version.  It’s nothing major, just taking the concepts and scenes from the original comic and making them fit together better into a more coherent story.  The result is excellent and, sadly, only makes me realize how flawed the original comic book is.

Kick-Ass is much the same.  In the original comic book, none of the characters have redeemable qualities.  Kick-Ass is a pathetic fanboy who can’t get the girl.  Big Daddy is a disgruntled father who kidnaps his own daughter and uses her as a tool in his twisted superhero fantasy.  The characters are, at best, pathetic and, at worst, deranged killers.  Kick-Ass the movie changes this significantly, and for the better, if you ask me.  It might be the trend in comic books right now to have every character be an irredeemable scumbag, but that wouldn’t play so well on the silver screen.  Just check out Watchmen, which was a box office disappointment.  And that was an intelligent work with a lot more subtlety than anything found in Kick-Ass.  I still didn’t really get Kick-Ass, I’ll admit.  Neither the comic or the movie really worked for me.  Although the movie did come closer.  Not really a criticism of either though as I’m old school when it comes to superheroes.  No doubt, it’s why I don’t read much in the way of superhero comics anymore.

This is a roundabout way of getting to my real point.  I know that Dreamworks is working on a Gil’s All Fright Diner script, and I’m positive it will be good.  I’m also sure it will resemble my original story, but changes will have to be made.  And I’m wondering if I’ll find myself thinking about the Gil’s movie what I’m thinking about Public Enemies.  Will I applaud the changes as an improvement?  Will I find them distasteful?  If these changes make the story more mainstream will I be able to appreciate them?  Or will I have to stifle my own artistic ego?

Great questions.  I really have no idea, but it should be fun to find out.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

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