Platypus Thoughts: Millar Time

Apparently long-time Marvel Comics writer and 20th Century Fox superhero “guru,” Mark Millar says that a Justice League film is a good way to lose $200 million. Can someone in the audience tell me what is wrong with this picture? It is not that Mr. Millar is wrong. A Justice League film has the potential to be a nine-figure atom bomb like 2011’s Green Lantern but his reasoning for why such an endeavor would fail bothers me.

“I actually think the big problem for them is the characters are just too out of date. The characters were created 75 years ago, even the newest major character was created 68 years ago, so they’re in a really weird time...The actual logistics of each member of the Justice League is disastrous, and you put them all together and I think you get an excellent way of losing $200 million.”

Mr. Millar has always entertained the notion that Superman and his cohorts were too “outdated and irrelevant” to the point where it borders on obsession. When I peel away his reasoning, that most of the Justice League members should be collecting old age pensions, it falls apart when I take the longevity of Marvel’s stable into account. Captain America is pushing seventy-five himself, the Hulk and Thor are now fifty, and Iron Man will be turning fifty this year. I fail to see how DC’s characters are irrelevant because of their age when Marvel’s characters are not exactly a breath of fresh air themselves. Never mind the fact that the current incarnations of the Flash and Green Lantern predate Marvel by a few years (1956 and 1959, respectively.) That would be akin to a seventy-five year-old telling me he is not a senior citizen because his neighbor is ninety-five.

Logistics, on the other hand, is where Mr. Millar may bring up a valid argument. Let us hear what he has to say:

“Now the stuff I grew up with… I adored the DC stuff growing up but really, how do you do a movie about Green Lantern,” asks Millar, “his power is that he manifests green plasma from his imagination and uses them as weapons against someone? Even that in itself if you just imagine then watching a fight scene with a guy who’s like a hundred feet away making plasma manifestations fight someone – it’s not exactly raucous, getting up close and personal.”

This statement demonstrates how Mr. Millar knows very little of why the Green Lantern film was a failure. There was and is nothing wrong with the concept behind it: a dying member of an extraterrestrial police force gives test pilot the most powerful weapon. It was the horrible writing abysmal execution that torpedoed it with its rushed plot that was thin on characterization, packed with needless exposition, and overuse of computer-generated imagery to name a few. Furthermore, I fail to see how Green Lantern’s ability to generate plasma constructs through his ring would make fight scenes any less exciting because it is not “exactly raucous” or “up close and personal.” Especially when many of the Marvel films to not heavily depend on close-quarters combat.

Take Matthew Vaughn’s (who also directed the film adaptation of Millar’s Kick-Ass) X-Men: First Class where neither Charles Xavier nor Magneto possessed powers that required them to get up close and personal with Sebastian Shaw and his associates. Likewise for Banshee, Havok, and Emma Frost. Similarly, neither Iron Man nor Thor needed to get into a physical confrontation because of the nature of their abilities in the Avengers. Iron Man could dispatch enemy combatants from a hundred feet or more with his armor’s repulsor rays and Thor could just as easily summon lightning and hurricane-force winds with Mjolnir and that did not make the film any less enjoyable. Conversely, Green Lantern can produce swords, axes, and other close combat weapons with his ring to physically engage with his adversaries (like Sinestro) similar to how Thor uses Mjolnir as a blunt weapon against the frost giants. Also, given Hal Jordan’s brashness, it would make more sense for him to engage in close-quarters combat because of his ego.

Millar, quite frankly, is grievously mistaken in his assumptions over Green Lantern’s failings. The Green Lantern franchise has the potential to become DC/Warner Brothers’ answers to Lucasarts (and now Disney’s) Star Wars. However, the management was too eager to jump on the superhero bandwagon 2008’s Iron Man started and they paid for it in disappointing box office returns. Perhaps DC Comics and Warner Brothers should watch the original, unedited Star Wars trilogy and read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Methinks they would learn more from those sources than from Mr. Millar’s ill advice.

Moving on…

“The Flash has door handles on the side of his mask and if he doesn’t wear that mask, I’ll be pissed off, you know what I mean? They’re in a weird, weird situation – if you’ve got a guy who moves at the speed of light up against the Weather Wizard and Captain Cold or whatever, then your movie’s over in two seconds.”

I see it as bad omen when Mr. Millar begins with a criticism of the Flash’s costume. Partly because the wingtips on his “ears” not only invoke the mythological imagery of Hermes/Mercury, but also speaks to the characters streamlined design that hails from the jet age. Perhaps, Mr. Millar is correct in that the Flash’s speed makes it difficult to give the character dramatic tension when he could theoretically solve any problem in a matter of nanoseconds but it is not impossible. A potential film could easily borrow from Barry Allen’s post-New 52 origin and adapt the “Move Forward” storyline with Mob Rule. While some Rogues like the aforementioned Weather Wizard and Captain Cold may not be conductive for a film format due to the nature of the characters but Gorilla Grodd could still give the Flash trouble with his telepathic powers and raw savagery. Talking gorillas from a hidden city may stretch the suspension of disbelief, but would it be more of a stretch than let us say, a city of technologically advanced space Vikings in a distant galaxy?

Then we have Mirror Master, who can conceivably keep the Flash on his toes with the light motif, or the potential for a Reverse-Flash down the line. Plus, with the Flash’s history of traveling through time or to parallel worlds, there is a wellspring of potential.

I am beginning to wonder if Mr. Millar simply lacks imagination.

“You can get away with stuff in comics that in live action’s just a bit sucky – the best one is definitely Aquaman. Aquaman can’t even talk under water. If you think about it in comics it’s fine, you just have a speech balloon, but how do you have Atlantis and people talking under water? Are they gonna talking telepathically? Is it going to be body forms?”

Okay, this is beginning to get more ridiculous. Out of all the reasons not to produce an Aquaman film, Mr. Millar is worried about how the people of Atlantis are going to speak underwater? Given the possibly Shakespearean drama from a plot where Aquaman is locked in a struggle for the Atlantean throne with his brother, Orm (AKA Ocean Master), I would believe that any such concerns regarding how they will speak underwater is secondary. I could cite examples of how Wonder Woman, and even Firestorm, could have the potential to be great concepts but the problem here is that I believe Mr. Millar, in his capacity as a creative consultant for the pending Fantastic Four film reboot, is simply trash talking the competition. I also detect some lingering acrimony from the controversy over censorship of his run on The Authority might factor into his criticisms as well. Personally, I do not know why a website such as SciFi Now would consider Mr. Millar a “superhero guru” when is a decent, if not good, writer at best. Why not ask Kevin Feige, how has overseen the Marvel Cinematic universe? How about more acclaimed writers like Millar’s former partner, Grant Morrison, or academics like Ben Saunders? Millar’s criticisms strike me as shallow, unimaginative, and I fail to see why I should take them seriously.

ADDENDUM:
 

However, does he have a point? I suppose. As a friend of mine said in response to the original draft of my commentary, one of the major obstacles to a Justice League movie is that it would appear to be a desperate attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Avengers and the ill-conceived Green Lantern film does not do much to allay those fears. But Mr. Millar is especially off base in his claims that Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and so forth are irrelevant due to their age and the nature of their abilities. I will also put my friends assertions that Iron Man and Thor’s abilities are “more accessible” into dispute. Jane Foster herself paraphrased Arthur C. Clarke in Thor when she said, “Magic is science we do not understand yet.” So if Mjolnir and the Bifrost are products of technology that is far more advanced than anything found on Earth, then why Green Lantern’s ring, a piece of alien technology, is less believable than anything found in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? The same applies to lightsabers and hyperdrive from Star Wars, which movie going audiences had little difficulty in suspending their disbelief for, but I digress. Maybe it is simply the wrong time for DC and Warner Brothers to try to shoot for the Moon in a cardboard box when Marvel already won that race, which Mr. Millar is attempting to convey but lacks the eloquence to do so.

Yet Marvel may have shot itself in the foot with the Avengers because how can they top what many believe was nirvana for comic book geekdom? Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and perhaps the Hulk are all viable franchises but what else does Marvel have to use? 20^th Century Fox owns the film rights to the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises and Columbia holds the rights to Spider-Man to which both companies will keep producing films for to hold said rights. That leaves Marvel with Daredevil? Luke Cage? Black Panther? Captain (formerly Ms.) Marvel? I seriously doubt that any of those characters, aside from Daredevil, are capable of carrying a film by themselves. I enjoy Edgar Wright’s work but I do not have any reason to believe that he can rescue ­Ant-Man from obscurity than he could with Scott Pilgrim. Nor do I believe that Guardians of the Galaxy will be a roaring success because those characters are on an even lower tier than Daredevil and Ant-Man. When I give it more thought, perhaps it is a better idea for DC to shelve their plans for further Green Lantern or Flash films and carefully watch what their competition is doing. After all, despite their terrible luck with non-Batman or Superman films, they have done a respectable job with their properties on television with Arrow as their latest example. Perhaps they can learn a few lessons if Marvel’s cinematic universe implodes under the weight of its own success.

Platypus Thoughts: One More Day

Noted Internet reviewer and critic, Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug, recently savaged the much-maligned Spider-Man story, One More Day, for the two hundredth episode of his web series, Atop The Fourth Wall, and rightfully so. Throughout the course of the seventy-five minute view, he exposed a number of plot holes and contrivances that bring the quality of the story into question but I find this criticism of particular interest: Spider-Man is the most irresponsible hero in any universe. A curious notion considering the axiom, “With great power comes great responsibility” defines his very motivation for becoming a superhero in the first place. However, I have difficulty disagreeing with Mr. Lovhaug who notes that Peter Parker always uses his alter ego as an excuse for his personal failures and repeats the same mistakes. One example Mr. Lovhaug uses is that Spider-Man did not even have life insurance to ensure his family’s well being in the event of his death at the hands of a supervillain. As Mr. Lovhaug says:

“He never learns from his mistakes. Never takes into consideration how his life as Spider-Man affects everybody else.”

What would happen to his family if he were to die from an “occupational hazard?” What does he do if his gallivanting as Spider-Man negatively impacts his family and friends?” He rarely takes those questions into account and lets his personal and professional life suffer because he refuses to make the necessary sacrifices. This becomes especially egregious when you take Peter’s age into account. Peter became Spider-Man after he turned sixteen and at least ten years passed since then according to Marvel’s “floating timeline”, which would make him at least twenty-six years old. Most adults around that age try to find some balance in their lives between work, love, and recreation but Peter’s approach to the world is still that of a teenager. That has to make me wonder if Peter Parker’s irresponsibility and immaturity is indicative of a deeper malady afflicting the comic book medium: the refusal to believe that even fictional characters are, in fact, mortal.

The problem with the comic book medium is that it is a serialized form of fiction with decades worth of continuity to draw from (seventy-five years for DC Comics, and fifty years for Marvel.) Very few formats, aside from the waning daytime soap opera, can even brag to have that kind of history. However, the problem Spider-Man poses is that these characters static because the perception that character development destroys the long-term marketability of the Big Two’s major trademarks. Joe Quesada, current Chief Creative Officer of Marvel and main architect One More Day, justified the magical annulment of the Peter/Mary Jane marriage with the following assertion:

“We worked too hard to get Peter to this point. I can understand why some of you want to see the characters grow old, but we have to manage these characters for the future – a future beyond you and me. A married Peter Parker – as cool as that may seem – from a creative standpoint, it handcuffs the character. It’s a very problematic thing for Peter because it cuts him off and makes Peter the oldest person in the book.”

I can understand Mr. Quesada’s standpoint. Our lives unfold in phases: we are born, go through childhood and adolescents, accept the responsibilities of adulthood, marry, raise children, and ultimately die. As reviled as the Clone Saga is to this very day, Peter Parker already passed several milestones by the mid-nineties. He married the love of his life, Mary Jane Watson, Aunt May passed away in the memorable Amazing Spider-Man #400 (a very nicely crafted story by J.M. DeMatteis where Peter was finally able to let go), and it appeared that he was going to accept the responsibility of fatherhood. Though Marvel erased the latter two events, it left the character with two options from Mr. Quesada’s perspective: retire or die.

Almost all stories since the days of antiquity are finite in scope. Both principal characters of the Illiad, Achilles and Hector, died by the epic’s end and the Norse gods would meet their end in Ragnarok. Every character aside from Horatio died at the end of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and even J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series came to an end with the Death Hallows. However, the very nature of comic books rarely allows for meaningful conclusions or happy endings for their characters. Mr. Lovhaug’s tone in his One More Day review seems to indicate that he wants character development but the truth is that comic book fans are a very conservative lot and very attached to their characters.

Convoluted storylines aside, Marvel could have given Peter Parker a happy ending in the Clone Saga; he could have handed the mask to Ben Reilly and rode off into the sunset with his wife and unborn child without the question of, “who is the real Peter Parker?” However, could the fanbase or Marvel’s marketing department have accepted it in the long term? I sincerely doubt it for one important reason: Spider-Man became part of the public zeitgeist as the “everyman” hero. He had appeared in at least three animated series by the nineties and the crossover between mediums insured that Peter Parker would always be synonymous Spider-Man in the same way Clark Kent is synonymous with Superman and Bruce Wayne is synonymous with Batman. So struggle does not become so much as the “the man vs. the mask” as it is “the man vs. the icon.”

Characters such as the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom are the exception to this rule because there had been no crossover to other mediums in the interregnum between the Gold and Silver Ages. According to some accounts, editor Julius Schwartz created a new Flash (Barry Allen) instead of using the original Flash, Jay Garrick, in Showcase #4 because or a perceived turnover in the fanbase. Barry Allen became an icon of the Silver Age and many concepts of that era, namely the foundation of old DC Multiverse where his predecessor existed on a parallel Earth, are tied to him. The beauty of Barry Allen’s death in Crisis on Infinite Earths is that DC gave it a sense of finality. I have the “last” Barry Allen issue of the Flash (Flash vol. 1, #350) where he had his “final” battle with the Rogues and reunited with his long-thought-dead wife, Iris West-Allen, in the thirtieth century to have his happy ending, at least until Crisis on Infinite Earth #8. The beauty of his death is that DC gave the character a proper sendoff and effectively ended the old Silver Age status quo in 1986. Similarly, DC Comics gave the Silver Age Superman his own ragnarok with the Alan Moore-penned Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow that closed that chapter of the character’s history and wiped the slate clean for the John Byrne reboot.

However, my problem with the Post-Crisis DC Universe is that DC never properly gave its Pre-Crisis status quo a proper farewell. Most DC’s “history” remained intact aside from the fact that the surviving Earths from the Crisis folded into one universe and former Kid Flash, Wally West, took his mentor’s costume and became the third Flash. While I have no problem with legacy heroes in theory, the very act of putting on Barry Allen’s costume at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 symbolically crippled Wally West as a character. Granted, the lasting appeal of the character is that Wally grew from a womanizing, self-centered jerk into a responsible and respected hero much like his uncle from the Baron run to Messner-Loebs to Waid to Johns' run at the end of the second volume. Unlike Spider-Man, DC Comics let Wally West develop as a character by letting him overcome his insecurities of living up to his mentor’s example. What made Wally’s growth problematic is that he grew up in a universe full of icons.

DC went to great pains to state that there could only be one Superman and Batman in the Death of Superman and Knightfall story arcs. Though DC presented its audience with four “Supermen” in Reign of the Supermen, none of them could ever be the genuine article, and Azrael proved to be a poor substitute for Bruce Wayne. If Barry Allen’s uniform became the “iconic” look for the Flash then would Wally West be slightly more than a substitute for his predecessor? I concede that Greg LaRocque redesigned Wally’s uniform in 1991 but it was still too aesthetically similar to Barry’s to truly distinguish the two. Wally West fell in love with and married a television reporter, Linda Park, as Barry did with a newspaper reporter, Iris West. Both had twins in Don and Dawn Allen (The Tornado Twins of the 30^th century, long story), and Jai and Iris West. Wally took Barry Allen’s position on the reformed “Big Seven” version of the Justice League, and though he had his own unique Rogues, Wally West inherited Barry Allen’s enemies during Geoff Johns first run on the Flash. Wally West essentially became “Barry Allen-lite.” Even Bruce Timm and his production team had to radically transform the character from his personality to his motivations to make Wally viable for Justice League.

I own a few issues of the original Barry Allen run (mostly those with the Firestorm backups), and while the Geoff Johns writing was more sophisticated Cary Bates, I have trouble seeing what makes Wally distinct from Barry in terms of personality. I would go as far as to say that the focus of the title moved from Wally to Captain Cold and the Rogue during Johns’ first run, and then to Jai and Iris West during Mark Waid’s third run. The fact that Bart Allen’s “death” and Wally’s return coincided with the just-as-maligned Countdown probably did not help either.  Between Marvel’s mishandling of Spider-Man in One More Day and DC’s mishandling of the Flash franchise from Infinite to Final Crisis, I have got to wonder why the Big Two simply do not give their universes a complete reboot. After all, the 2003 re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica kept no continuity from the 1978 original and it was successful. It comes down to the fact that DC and Marvel kept their characters in continuous publication in the almost twenty-five years whereas Battlestar Galactica had been off the air. The fact is that we, as fans of DC and Marvel’s characters, want our beloved characters to grow but yet we tend to grab our pitchforks and burn Joe Quesada and Dan DiDio in effigy that idea of making too radical change. The fact is that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. If we want our characters to grow and change, we have to accept that their stories have to end as Barry Allen and the Silver Age Superman’s did twenty-five years ago.

That is my fundamental problem with One More Day: Joe Quesada believed that he could “magically” erase twenty years of continuity to reorder the fictional cosmos of the Marvel universe to suit his whims. That is simply amateurish and reads like horrible fan fiction written by an eleven-year-old with a “D+” in English. (I must apologize to all eleven-year-olds now. They could write much better stories than One More Day.) Moreover, One Moment in Time essentially made One More Day even more pointless because Peter and MJ were still “together” for those twenty years but just not “married.”  At least DC tried to bring their character back to formula after Crisis on Infinite Earths and The New 52. Sure, they failed spectacularly with how you need a scorecard to keep track of the history of the DC Universe but at least they tried to simplify their universe. I do not want to figure out how Emerald Twilight, Green Lantern: Rebirth, Sinestro Corps, Blackest Night, and Brightest Day “happened” when many of the principal characters like Firestorm did not “exist.” I am not interested in seeing the pre-Flashpoint DC Universe or Peter Parker’s marriage return. I would much prefer to see the Big Two grow a pair of stones and do what Julie Schwartz did back in 1956: sweep out the clutter and start over with a clean slate. Comic book fans are essentially the hoarders of popular culture fandom; we cling onto every obscure scrap of continuity and complain whenever the big two deviate from it. After almost three decades of grandiose “events” where the Big Two claim that, “nothing will be the same again,” only for the characters to revert to their standard modus operandi because writers, editors, and fans cannot “let go” of the stories of old, I have serious doubts whether the industry has much life left in it.