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According to Variety, which I understand to be some sort of entertainment industry publication, the CW has ordered a pilot for a television series called The Graysons, which will focus on Dick Grayson’s life before his parents are murdered and he becomes Batman’s sidekick. That, relatively speaking, is the good news.
The bad news is that the series is being produced by Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson, executive producers of Smallville, and McG, executive producer of another CW show, Supernatural, and director of such bold artistic statements as the two Charlie’s Angels films and the upcoming Terminator Salvation. Is my once-impossible dream of a Batman/Fastlane crossover about to come true?
 Even if I weren’t skeptical about a show intentionally set years prior to the most exciting period of the protagonist’s life, I’d have misgivings about this depiction of Dick’s pre-Robin years. For one thing — and this is probably my biggest gripe, since the pilot isn’t even in production yet — I’m sick to death of prequels. Thanks to George Lucas’s shameless and lucrative looting of his Star Wars franchise, Hollywood has been prequel-crazy for almost ten years. Enough already. Sequels are hard enough to pull off; prequels are even more problematic, because you’re telling the audience that significant events — important enough for you to make a film about them — occurred in your characters’ lives prior the first film, but have never, ever been mentioned before.
The result is almost always either too cute for its own good (Clarice Starling’s first visit to Lector in Silence of the Lambs taking place within moments after the end of Red Dragon — Hannibal was busy that week!), or unfathomably stupid (ten-year-old Darth Vader building C-3PO). Almost never are we treated to a truly revealing and interesting bit of character development that allows us to deepen our appreciation of the prequel and the original. In fact, can anyone think of when a prequel has ever done that? Can I just say “never?” Smallville is one of the worst offenders. Not only has it blown through most of the problems which we would expect the adult Superman to have to contend with, it’s made the familiar status quo, with Clark Kent working with Lois Lane at the Daily Planet, his secret identity intact, and Lex Luthor operating as a clandestine criminal mastermind bent on destroying the Man of Steel, increasingly implausible. Smallville depicts Clark and Lex as best friends going way back to Clark’s freshman year in high school, meaning it’s virtually impossible for Lex to meet Superman as an adult and not realize immediately that this is the same guy he hit with his car and who repeatedly saved his life/foiled his evil plans back in Kansas. And don’t even get me started on that fucking cave. The Smallville creators are already putting their distinctive, hip stamp on The Graysons, rechristening the lead character “D.J.,” since apparently their target audience is incapable of following the adventures of a young man called “Dick” without snickering like Beavis and Butt-head the entire time. What other clever, wink-wink tweaks can we look forward to? A bittersweet anonymous romance with a slightly older girl who turns out to be Barbara Gordon during a circus performance in Chicago? Accidentally meeting Aqualad while enjoying a dip in Loch Ness during the circus’s European tour? Facing and defeating major Batman villains before Batman even exists? I can hardly wait. How old is Dick — I beg your pardon, D.J. going to be in this anyway, I wonder? Clark is 14 in Smallville’s first season, but Dick’s already Robin by that age in the comics. They’re hyping this as a potential companion/replacement for Smallville, so something tells me they won’t cast a sixth-grader as D.J. If the show becomes a hit, will we be seeing Dick still doing the family trapeze act at age 20, with no Boss Zucco in sight? Do the people writing the show have any idea who Boss Zucco is? Time will tell. I know it’s too early to tell, and maybe the success of a more serious, mature project like The Dark Knight will nudge this in a good direction, but what do you all think? Will this be better or worse than the Birds of Prey show? | |
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Today Ashley and I went to the mall so I could read comic books and she could shop. Our first stop was Waldenbooks, where she got me the first volume of Showcase Presents Superman to look at while she went to Old Navy and the Gap. The Showcase Presents series is DC’s answer to Marvel’s indispensable Essential line of cheap black and white reprints of classic issues from days gone by. It’s what allowed me to catch up on the early Lee/Ditko/Romita days of Amazing Spider-Man for a very reasonable price. Being a little slow on the trigger, DC has only been publishing Showcase Presents editions for the last few years. Better late than never, I guess.
As the title suggests, the Showcase Presents series focuses mainly on Silver Age stuff. Volume One of Superman starts with issue #241 of Action Comics, June 1958. The writing is goofy and primitive when compared to something like Superman For All Seasons or Alan Moore’s classic “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” from twenty years ago, but the old shit has overpowering nostalgic charm. The very first story reprinted, the feature from Action 241, is classic Silver Age Supes.
It’s “The Super-Key to Fort Superman,” the first appearance of the Fortress of Solitude, complete with gigantic key which only Superman can lift to open the door, and packed with evidence of how lonely, isolated, and totally fucked-up weird the Man of Steel’s private life is. The story opens with a brief tour, showing us Supes’s intergalactic zoo, the robot “playmate” he plays chess with, and the succession of profoundly creepy souvenir rooms dedicated to his closest friends — Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Batman.
Plot finally trickles in when Superman discovers that someone has been breaking into his fortress and leaving him ominous messages, threatening to reveal his secret identity to the world. Superman is so preoccupied with his stalker’s identity that he nearly dumps an ocean liner he’s rescuing back into the sea upside down. After another visit to the fortress, he announces via a thought balloon that he has solved the mystery. An earthquake causes a cave-in, trapping Superman, de-powered by a chunk of kryptonite, in a chamber with the intruder — Batman!
See, it turns out that it’s the anniversary of Superman’s landing on Earth. Unable to think of a proper gift, Batman decided to give Superman a puzzle to solve. So he concealed himself inside the giant key used to get inside the fortress, and hid out for a few days, wreaking havoc and terrorizing his great friend Superman, while totally neglecting his duties as protector of Gotham City (not that it was such a big deal back then, what with Robin, Bat-Woman, and Bat-Girl around to pick up the slack, and nobody ever killed anybody, anyway).
Once Batman comes clean, Superman reveals that he’s been playing possum this whole time, tosses the fake piece of kryptonite aside and breaks them out of the caved-in cavern. The two greatest heroes in the DC Universe, flagships of the company and idols to millions, laugh off the sadistic pranks they have just played on each other, and go back to the Batcave for a piece of gigantic birthday cake.
Seeing Batman behave this way wasn’t such a shock. Even back in the Golden and Silver Ages, when he was basically a civics teacher in a Halloween costume, Batman wasn’t above humiliating Robin in public or smacking a woman around. It’s a stretch to say that Frank Miller invented the whole “asshole Batman” persona. Batman’s been an asshole since day one; Miller’s innovation was to stop asserting the contrary.
But Superman? Don’t we expect better than this from him? To see the mighty Man of Tomorrow behaving like a frat brother is a little dispiriting. Thank God he’s back to his old self in the next story, where the aliens from the future hypnotize him into collecting artifacts from throughout the solar system to place in a time capsule so all of them in the 50th Century can see how great of a guy Superman was. | |
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 Last night I was up late watching Super Friends on DVD. (These aren’t the depths I’ve sunk to while Ashley is on vacation — it’s pretty much my normal routine.) I was passively enjoying “Rokan: Enemy From Space” when something Superman said made me sit up and pay attention. Rokan is a flying dinosaur from Krypton with diamond eyes that shoot yellow lasers. He survived the planet’s explosion (incredibly), and crossed the vastness of space (more incredibly) to eventually arrive at Earth (what the fuck can the odds be for that?). After Rokan wrecks a few small towns and lays eggs all over the world which hatch into destructive Rokan Babies, Superman suddenly hits on a brainstorm: Rokan is from Krypton, and therefore vulnerable to kryptonite. Batman turns a dial on the omniscient computer in the Hall of Justice, and the computer (which Superman apparently programmed to have his voice, the arrogant prick) estimates that a kryptonite asteroid weighing thirteen billion tons would be sufficient to kill Rokan and his babies, or at least chase them back into space. This show is based on 1970s DC Comics continuity, so there are continent-sized kryptonite asteroids floating just above Earth’s atmosphere ripe for the plucking. Before Wonder Woman can jump in her invisible jet and fly up there to lasso one, the computer chimes in with this crucial addendum: the kryptonite asteroid needed would be so big that just having it on the planet will probably kill Superman. Jayna the Wonder Twin, wielding her considerable authority, immediately vetoes the plan. But Superman wags his finger, and says: “Not so fast, Jayna. We’ll decide this the same way we decide everything — the greatest good, for the greatest number of people!”  So the Super Friends are utilitarians? Not just that — they are hardcore, Libertarian-Party-membership-card-carrying, John-Stuart-Mill-reading consequentialist motherfuckers. Superman’s “greatest good/greatest number” line is the popular summary of the Greatest Happiness Principle, verbatim. It’s not so troubling in the Rokan episode. Superman potentially sacrificing himself to save the entire planet from flying monsters from Krypton is a no-brainer, standard issue superheroism. But would every choice faced by the Super Friends be so cut and dry? On a Saturday morning cartoon show, sure. But what about in real life? Yes, for the sake of having something to write about, I will transfer this premise from a ludicrous 70s animated comic book adaptation to reality. Let’s say the threat isn’t flying dinosaurs vulnerable to kryptonite. Let’s say Lex Luthor appears on the Troubalert and informs the Super Friends that he has just superheated the Moon into a massive ball of glowing magma, and it will be crashing into Texas in the next few minutes, because he has decided that the Austin music scene just isn’t enough reason to put up with the rest of that fucking state. Batman turns that dial on the computer, and it quickly informs everyone that if Superman flew in circles really fast above the Atlantic Ocean, the massive resulting waterspout would be enough to cool off the molten Moon, which Supes could then nudge back up into its orbit, saving the day. “But hold on just a goddamn minute,” says Aquaman from the far end of the room, raising his hand. | |
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Film Review Justice League: The New Frontier Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, first published as a limited series in 2003, is the best superhero comic of the century so far. Its film adaptation, Justice League: The New Frontier, the second release of Warner Premiere’s DC Universe line of direct-to-DVD animated features, is now one of the best superhero movies — not just of this century, but of all. It’s a little disorienting to be heaping such praise on DC animated projects these last two days. If the first entry in the DCU series, Superman: Doomsday (reviewed yesterday), was a home run, then this New Frontier film is a grand slam. I owe Bruce Timm and company an apology — not for shitting on Batman: The Animated Series and its many successors all these years, but for assuming their general mediocrity was Timm’s fault. Clearly Timm (credited as writer/co-director on Doomsday and a producer on New Frontier) is an able storyteller who suffered under the constraints of producing a half-hour children’s cartoon about superheroes who, at their best, are adult characters. I had my suspicions of this as far back as 1996, when Timm wrote and drew the second story in Batman: Black & White #1, “Two of a Kind,” one of the most outstanding Batman stories ever published. Credit for this film’s success doesn’t belong primarily to Timm, but to Cooke, whose original comic is translated faithfully to the screen. Cooke worked as an animator on Batman: The Animated Series before making his name in comics, and his character designs carry echoes of that experience. It’s a similar simplified, square-jawed style, though with more deference paid to the works of the defining artists of the Golden and Silver Ages. The story itself deals with the difficult transition from the Golden to the Silver Age, so those influences are not just appropriate but absolutely necessary. | |
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I’m a little slow on the trigger here, but since Ashley the World’s Greatest Girlfriend got me the two direct-to-DVD DC Universe animated movies released by Warner Bros. in the past year for my birthday, I’ll be reviewing them today and tomorrow. First up is DC/WB’s first attempt to compete with Marvel in the direct-to-video animated movie market, Superman: Doomsday, with the adaptation of Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier coming tomorrow. Film Review Superman: Doomsday Fifteen years ago the editors, writers and artists of DC Comics’s Superman line made headlines when they killed off their hero, arguably the most widely known fictional character in the world, and left him dead for an entire year. The “Death of Superman” story arc had such lasting impact on the character and on superhero comics in general that I’m surprised it’s taken this long for someone to attempt a filmed adaptation. Even more of a surprise: Superman: Doomsday was well worth the wait. This is Superman at his best, in a story that demonstrates why he is the most important and enduring American literary hero of the last century. Not only is this film better by far than any animated take on the character since the legendary Fleischer shorts of the 1940s, it’s better than all but a handful of the live-action depictions of Superman as well. It’s well acted, skillfully directed, emotionally involving, and written with an intelligence and maturity almost entirely absent from the over-praised animated Superman and Batman shows produced by Bruce Timm and company beginning in the early 1990s. | |
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