Peter David's Blog, page 82

What Fans Want

Originally published October 3, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1246

My my my, has John Byrne gotten himself in dutch with the fans.

In recent computer postings, John has announced his plans for using the Demon Etrigan, and these plans entail ignoring or undoing much of what such top-flight writers as Alan Moore and Garth Ennis did in developing the character. Byrne’s intentions are to rewind the Demon back to his original incarnation as first developed by Jack Kirby. This, of course, is entirely his right. He’s also made it clear that no one is allowed to make use of the Demon while he is the caretaker of the character.

And oooohh, is there yelling. And oooohh, is there screaming. John Byrne is dissing Garth Ennis. John Byrne is Evil. How dare John Byrne get to have total control of a character and no other writers can use him?

I dunno. Seems pretty much like Standard Operating Procedure in the world of comics to me. Granted, John’s been fairly blunt in stating that he didn’t like Garth’s take on the character, but, y’know… so what? Blunt is Byrne’s style, and there’s no reason on earth that—if he’s been given hold on the character—he should be obligated to write the character in a manner that he feels uncomfortable with.

Furthermore, I can’t help but think of all the times that fans have come to me, after reading a guest appearance of the Hulk in some other title, and complained, “Why do you let these things happen?” Well, it’s not up to me. In John’s case, it is up to him…and the fans condemn him.

Part of the problem, I think, stems from the inability by some fans to distinguish between criticism of the work versus criticism of the person. That’s one of the first things one has to do when embarking on a career in writing: You have to be able to disassociate yourself from the work. Too many young writers take critiques of the work as a critique of they, themselves, as people.

I learned early on that you cannot, must not, take it personally. That way lies madness. You also have to remember that one person’s opinion is no more and no less than that. One person. I’ll never forget when no less an authority than Del Rey Paperbacks editor Judy Lynn Del Rey rejected a book proposal of mine—consisting of the first hundred pages and an outline for the rest of the work—with the following tender words: “I could barely wretch my way through the sample chapters. I couldn’t imagine vomiting through the entire book.” If I’d taken that personally, I’d probably have blown my brains out. Instead I just read the rejection notice, said, “Awww, that’s sweet,” and submitted the book elsewhere. And the book, entitled Knight Life, was published by Ace books and is now a somewhat sought-after little item.

So John doesn’t like Garth’s take on the Demon. So what? Just one guy’s opinion. Ah, say the fans, but now Garth can’t write more “Demon” stories. Oh, the tragedy! Garth Ennis, banished from the Demon because of high-profile creator John Byrne! Nevermore will Garth write the Demon! And Mark Waid and Ron Garney, banished from Captain America because of high-profile creator Rob Liefeld! Nevermore will Mark and Waid… oh. Wait a minute.

I suppose I just can’t get as worked up about it as the fans since I’ve been down this road myself.

Some fans hold up my tenure on the Hulk, and my development of the character over the years, as the “correct” and “respectful” way to handle the character. Well, they sure weren’t singing that tune ten years ago. When I started on the Hulk, what few letters of comment we received were almost uniformly negative. People stating that the grey Hulk should have been immediately removed and that the Hulk must, must, must be restored to his status as monosyllabic and of limited intelligence. That to stick with the grey, crafty Hulk was to ignore the previous twenty+ years of stories or—even worse—to be dissing them by saying that that character was not one I was interested in writing.

Who was I, some guy with two first names, coming onto a book and refusing to write the Hulk the way he was supposed to be written? I was ignoring the fans! I was spitting on what they desired to see! Get me off the book immediately and replace me with someone who will write the one, true Hulk! (Some people are still saying that.) I was doing a (gasp!) disservice to the fans, who are always right and know how a character should be treated. Doesn’t matter how many times the fans are proven wrong in hindsight; the shouting the very next time the issue comes up is never any less strident.

Let us suppose (as one fan suggested) that John Byrne were to return to the Hulk. Let’s say he felt that not a single worthwhile story has been done in the title since he left over a decade ago, and decided to establish that my entire run was a dream. That the Hulk had never gone through any of the development that I’d put him. Some fans would proclaim, loud and long, that such an action would be an insult to me. That, as one fan calling himself “Scavenger” put it, “BOOM, 10 years work has just been labeled worthless.”

Yeah… but what if you’re a diehard “dumb Green Hulk” fan (heck, what if you’re Erik Larsen?) who will finally rejoice, shout “The dark years of David are over!” and come flocking back to the book, just as the “dumb Green Hulk” fans abandoned the title years ago. To them, the last ten years ARE worthless. Fans who are arguing over this things as if they’re a matter of principle are ignoring the fact that there’s no principle at stake: It’s just a defending of personal preference. It would mean that the fans of the current incarnation would be deeming their “vision” of the Hulk as being more worthy and inherently better, because it’s the Hulk they want to read. What fans of my work would see as a disservice by Byrne-the-Encroacher would be seen by others as a “return to greatness.”

And do my ten years of stories become “worthless?” I’d like to think not. The fans will always be able to go back and read the stories I wrote and enjoy them, taking them as a work unto themselves. I can still read the Silver Age Green Lantern stories or GL/GA and enjoy them, despite the character’s eventual insanity. I can still read the Silver Age Flash even though Barry Allen died an awful death. The legacy of the enjoyment of the stories remains, no matter what.

The problem is that writing for a high-profile, company owned character is a trade-off. The first and biggest challenge which a writer faces is getting an audience to emotionally invest in the stories he wants to tell. When one takes on an existing character for a main-line publisher, one is inheriting a pre-existing audience. Whether the readers stay or go hinges on the writer’s talent, but there’s already some emotional investment based on the efforts of predecessors. That’s the upside. The downside is that different writers bring to the series different visions. As a writer, you have to live with that. It wouldn’t hurt if fans realized and understood that no one ever figured that fans of comics would be long-term. Comics were considered entertainment for young boys who would eventually grow out of funny books and move on to girls. There was no thought given to continuity which contradicted itself ten, twenty years later, or varying visions of the characters being at odds with each other. Reader turnover was (and, frankly, remains) the norm. No one expected to have the same readers on a title two decades later. It would help some fans, I think, if they realized the realities of long-term characterization and varying viewpoints as new writers take over a title. Like or dislike what the new creators do with a character as you see fit. But condemning their right to do so is wrong-headed.

But isn’t the writer being an ingrate? Doesn’t he owe his career, his popularity, his very livelihood to the fans?

Well… no. No, what a writer owes the fans is a story well-told to the best of his or her abilities. Period. End of obligation. It’s absurd to imply that a writer’s job is to serve the whims and dictates of the fans, because (a) that’s a gutless way to be a writer and (b) the fans don’t operate with one uniform gestalt mind, so it’s a hopeless task. It’s the squeamishness and lack of convictions born of Hollywood movie testing. Hey, audience, should we have a happy ending or a sad ending? Gee, tough call. Happy ending!

A writer does not owe his career to the fans. He owes it to luck, determination, skill, professionalism, and a singular creative vision for which some fans would pillory him. The fans are a pleasant by-product of a career. They’re great to meet, their input is always welcome. But they’re not the be-all, end-all of the writer’s career, no matter how much some would believe it to be so and have a sense of moral outrage when their personal requirements are not met.

If a writer wants to express his gratitude to the fans, and wants to do his best work, then sometimes the dictates of producing what he feels will be his best work will require him to put the fans’ noses out of joint. If John Byrne wants to write the Demon, and feels that the way he can do his best work on the character is to ignore what Garth Ennis has done, then he is doing everything the fans would ask of any writer… except they would censure him for it.

You can’t always give the fans what they want because, when you get right down to it, fans ultimately want the characters whom they love to be able to live happily ever after. Unless you’re writing a limited series or novel, that’s impossible. Then again, maybe that’s the single most realistic thing about comics. In real life, there is no such thing as “happily ever after.” Not really. It’s just that the writer concludes his narrative on a high note. In the story of Princess Di, she survives her difficulties, finds a new love, and lives happily ever after…as long as you end the story an hour before the traffic accident.

Every true story has an unhappy ending. Every single one.

In comic books, which are merely a distorted reflection of reality, there are no endings. Death is transitory, characters are handed off, and the only thing that doesn’t change is that things change.

What fans react to with outrage, I just see and shrug and say, “Same old, same old.”

You just can’t get upset about this stuff. You can’t.

And by the way… did you see how they completely screwed up Spider-Man 2099 after I left!?!

Geez!!!!

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

Peter gets jokes

Originally published September 26, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1245

People keep sending me jokes.

I’m not entirely sure why. But literally every day now, whenever I log on AOL, I find funny lists, jokes (some of them unprintable in a family publication) etc., in my mailbox.

So I figured I’d share some of them with you.

Why? Because (a) I’m crushed between deadlines on New Frontier books and several other projects, and (b) I’m feeling kind of down about Princess Di at the moment and don’t feel like talking all that much. So… I’ll let others talk for me.

The main thing I regret is that I can’t always credit the original authors. These aren’t always like that wonderful Xena parody in which there was a name attached. But where I can, I will.

 * * *

The first came from, of all people, editor Kevin Dooley:

If I ever become an Evil Overlord…

1. My legions of terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.

2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

4. Shooting is NOT too good for my enemies.

5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box.

6. I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.

7. When the rebel leader challenges me to fight one-on-one and asks, “Or are you afraid without your armies to back you up?” My reply will be, “No, just sensible.”

8. When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him.

9. After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

10. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labeled “Danger: Do Not Push”.

11. I will not order my trusted lieutenant to kill the infant who is destined to overthrow me–

I’ll do it myself.

12. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum—a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.

13. I will be secure in my superiority. Therefore, I will feel no need to prove it by leaving clues in the form of riddles or leaving my weaker enemies alive to show they pose no threat.

14. I will not waste time making my enemy’s death look like an accident: I’m not accountable to anyone and my other enemies wouldn’t believe it.

15. I will make it clear that I DO know the meaning of the word “mercy”; I simply choose not show them any.

16. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

17. All slain enemies will be cremated, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.

18. My undercover agents will not have tattoos identifying them as members of my organization, nor will they be required to wear military boots or adhere to any other dress codes.

19. The hero is not entitled to a last kiss, a last cigarette, or any other form of last request.

20. I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

21. I will design all doomsday machines myself. If I must hire a mad scientist to assist me, I will make sure that he is sufficiently twisted to never regret his evil ways and seek to undo the damage he’s caused.

22. I will never utter the sentence “But before I kill you, there’s just one thing I want to know.”

23. When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.

* * *

The next item came from “Trillseekr.” Some of them kind of sound like Steven Wright’s (“Why isn’t there another word for thesaurus’?”) brand of humor.

Why do you need a driver’s license to buy liquor when you can’t drink and drive?

Why isn’t phonetic spelled the way it sounds?

Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii?

Why are there flotation devices under plane seats instead of parachutes?

Why are cigarettes sold in gas stations when smoking is prohibited there?

Do you need a silencer if you are going to shoot a mime?

Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?

How does the guy who drives the snowplow get to work in the mornings?

If 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the doors?

If a cow laughed, would milk come out her nose?

If nothing ever sticks to Teflon, how do they make Teflon stick to the pan?

If you tied buttered toast to the back of a cat and dropped it from a height, what would happen?

If you’re in a vehicle going the speed of light, what happens when you turn on the headlights?

You know how most packages say “Open here”? What is the protocol if the package says “Open somewhere else”?

Why is it that when you transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it’s called cargo?

Why is it that when you’re driving and looking for an address, you turn down the volume on the radio?

* * *

Lastly, this also came from Trillseekr, but there’s actually an author’s name attached to this one: Diane Kornf (although that may not be her full last name, but hey, I tried.)

In honor of the new season of Voyager… yes, here they are—my fearless psychic predictions for the upcoming Voyager season—direct from the Voyager JCC Psychic Hotline.

At some time during the season the following will occur:

1. The Voyager will encounter a spatial anomaly!

2. A shuttlecraft will be damaged or destroyed!

3. After an attack on their ship, crew members will be forced to hang on to the nearest equipment as they are thrown mercilessly from side to side. Some may even fall down!

4. During such an occurrence, part of Janeway’s hair will fall out of her pony tail.

5. One of the crew members will die!—I see, yes, I think I see the color red—could possibly be a red shirt.

6. Janeway, seeking companionship, solace, and stimulation (intellectual stimulation of course!) will turn to none other than, yes, you guessed it, a holodeck character—the emotional equivalent of hiding under a desk perhaps?

7. Several crew members will be forced to use the turbolift!

8. Contrary to what you may have heard, Tuvok will not mate with Neelix in an effort to reproduce a son named Tuvix.

9. Genevieve Bujold will not guest star as Neelix’s new love interest.

10. Jeri Taylor will not guest star, period.

11. The Voyager will encounter a terrifying alien species called the… let’s see… I sense a B, possibly an O, maybe a G. Yes, that must be it, the BOG!

12. While on their journey home, the crew of the Voyager will not recruit tall, athletic aliens with promises of multi-million dollars contracts and advertising deals.

13. Janeway will be seen looking at Chakotay’s lips.

14. The new Borg, 7 of 9, will not start a prostitution and gambling ring.

15. Chakotay will say, “Yes, captain,” several times.

16. Janeway will say, “Let’s do it.” It is unclear whether she says this to Chakotay or to the bridge crew in general.

17. Millions of fans will be confused and misled by Paramount Voyager previews.

18. Harry Kim will be part of an away mission.

19. The doctor will say, “I’m a doctor, not a(n)…” Sorry, the last word will not come in.

20. Janeway and Chakotay will be seen naked together in a bed, on the grass, in the turbolift, and in the water—Oh wait, I’m sorry, I believe that last one belongs on my Voyager FanFic Psychic Hotline List.

Remember, these predictions are guaranteed to have at least a 50% chance of being true! Yes, there is a 50/50 chance that we will, or will not, see these in the upcoming season.

If you would like to call the Voyager JCC Psychic Hotline for more fascinating details that will make your life more fulfilling, help you find that love interest you seek, get you more money on your job, just call 1-900-474-747-4747. All calls will billed at $47.00/minute. Proceeds go to support the JCC Addiction society.

—Diana K. (I apologize if I have inadvertently stolen any ideas from anyone. We psychics never know where our information comes from. It just appears.)

 

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport,NY 11705. But you probably knew I was going to say that. Hey! Maybe you’re psychic!)

 

“The Dark Knight Rises.” Like a souffle. But then a loud bang makes it fall. My spoiler-filled comments.

Knowing comics fans, I’m figuring that everyone who’s inclined to see “Dark Knight Rises” (henceforth DKR) in the theaters will have done so already. So let’s delve into it for the dancing and dining pleasure of the folks hereabouts. Spoilers, regrettable but necessary, abound, since I can’t discuss the things that bothered me without blowing key moments of the film. So: you are warned.

I won’t bother giving you a blow by blow summary because I honestly don’t see the point of that. So let’s just go over the things that I liked and didn’t like.

LIKED: The human factor. The fact is that the human body isn’t designed to endure the sort of punishment that normally occurs in an action adventure film. This was lampshaded in the sorely underrated deconstructive “Last Action Hero” where wounds catastrophic enough to be fatal in the real world are dismissed as “barely scratches” in the fictional world of films. Martin Riggs got perforated at the end of “Lethal Weapon 2”; by the next film, he’s back and barely lost a step.

Yet in DKR director Christopher Nolan once again grounds his film (co-written by Jonathan Nolan) in reality by giving us a Bruce Wayne whose body was ground down thanks to the constant pounding he’s taken since putting on the bat armor (and before that, when you think about it.) He walks with a cane, his body’s cartilage is nearly non-existent, and he has head trauma (which explains a lot, actually.) Presumably because having people see him in such a weakened condition is anathema, he’s turned recluse, prompting some Howard Hughes references that will likely go past anyone under the age of twenty-five.

I have to say, I appreciated this move. Television and movies oftentimes present a world where the effects of violence are minimized. Sure, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has mega-healing powers, but Giles and Xander got hit in the head so many times they should have been drooling idiots by season 2. I think downplaying the catastrophic effects of violence sends bad messages. I don’t think movies need to be splatterfests, but we also don’t need to let kids think that they can, say, hit another kid in the head with a pipe and the victim is just going to bounce to his feet and say “Ouch.” The problem with movies and TV isn’t that they show too much violence; it’s that they don’t show enough, i.e., the consequences. DKR at least attempts to do so, so well done all around.

LIKED: The acting. All around kudos to all. Christian Bale’s Bruce remains a seething volcano of guilt and self-loathing. He’s been mourning Rachel’s death and blaming himself for eight years. And if that seems a bit much (as it did to Harry Knowles in his mostly wrongheaded, although occasionally correct, condemnation of the film) well, consider that his guilt over his parents’ death caused him to retreat behind two masks: Batman’s, and the fake Bruce Wayne persona of jovial playboy. With Rachel’s death, he retreats all the way into himself and the furthest recesses of the manor. For me, that tracks.

Then there’s Anne Hathaway, who my wife asserts—correctly—is so much a modern day Audrey Hepburn that it’s astounding they haven’t had her star in a remake of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” (For that matter, can you imagine her in a remake of “My Fair Lady” with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as Higgins and Pickering?) This is clearly an actress loving every second of being Catwoman and—despite the Halle Berry misfire—could easily support her own stylish caper film as Selina Kyle. Pay particular attention to the moment when she simulates fear to convince the police that she’s just a horrified bystander. Even though we know it’s Selina faking out the cops, she’s nevertheless utterly convincing to us that she’s simply a terrified woman, panicked to be caught in the crossfire of such violent men. The fact that she can turn it on and off like a spigot with such seeming effortlessness underscores the quality of her acting.

And effortless also describes performances by Michael Caine, who makes it look so easy by this point in his career that it’s easy to take him for granted. We should not. In one of the more controversial moments of the film, Alfred actually abandons Bruce when he sees him heading down what he perceives as a road to destruction. Some contend that Alfred would remain with Bruce to the bitter end. But Caine plays it in the same way that someone who has been enabling an alcoholic or drug addict would: he has to walk away, even though it’s tearing him up inside, so that the addict can hit bottom and hopefully survive it. And what else is being Batman BUT an addiction, a manifestation of both survivor’s guilt and a death wish?

Gary Oldman doesn’t have much to do beyond what the plot demands of him, which is a shame considering what we know he’s capable of. Marion Cotillard is amazingly exotic—by turns unknowable and then intimate—and does a superb job pulling off a shock twist that even had Kathleen looking at me and saying, “You’re kidding.” And Tom Hardy’s “Bane” comes across like the love child of Fezzik and Hannibal Lechter: a hulking physical presence wearing a mask over the bottom of his face, capable of easily beating the crap out of you while dispensing psychological bon mots except you have to strain to understand what the hell he’s saying.

LIKED: The directing. Nolan gets great performances out of his actors and although the action sequences aren’t particularly inspired, at least I can follow what’s going on. Give me that over the salad shooter technique of action from films like “Quantum of Solace” any day.

However, Nolan has to take the rap for where I do have issues: Namely—

DISLIKED: The plot. As Jon Stewart would say: Christopher Nolan—can I call you Chris?—meet me over by camera one.

Okay, Chris, we get it. You were doing the French Revolution. The peasants rising up against the rich, with a dash of the Wall Street sit-ins tossed in. You have them storm the Bastille, except it’s Black Gate Prison, which is (if I’m following the geography correctly) inexplicably situated next door to City Hall. Because naturally if you’re planning a city, you want to have the most dangerous building in town adjacent to the place where high-ranked politicians and dignitaries are going to pass through. What could possibly go wrong? You have the rich being dragged down by average citizens, put on non-trial and given a choice of “exile or death” that’s played so ludicrously one almost wants to see it being presided over by Eddie Izzard (although I will say, choice of judge? Nice touch.) And if all of that is still too subtle for the history impaired, you make sure to have a reading from “A Tale of Two Cities,” which probably will still go past a lot of Americans who spent their time falling asleep in high school Lit classes, but you sure did all you could.

Except I don’t buy it.

First of all, Paris went berserk after years of the peasantry—which was pretty much everyone except the nobility—knew hunger and deprivation. Yet we’re told that Gotham City, after eight years, is a damned good place to live. Everything is positive, the mayor (Batmanuel) is well into at least his second term, and the Dent Act (whatever the parameters of that may be) have cleaned up crime. Yes, there are still people in trouble—kids, mostly, due to a skid in Wayne Foundation contributions—but still, it’s clear that Gotham is thriving.

And then Bane shows up and in almost no time flat, the city is willing to jettison its moral center because of him. The nominal leader and hero of this We-the-People movement claims he is turning the city back to the people. But he’s clearly not some messianic individual. He is a terrorist who murders someone on the Jumbotron with his bare hands, threatens the populace with nuclear destruction and, most heinous of all, blows up their football field during what was shaping up to be a pretty good game.

How does he undermine their faith in Harvey Dent? By reading a letter purportedly from James Gordon that asserts Dent was a murderous douche bag and their faith was misplaced. The fact that the letter is genuine is beside the point: the people have witnessed that Bane himself is a murderous douche bag, so how does he have any credibility? (Not to mention that any time he made a public address, I kept waiting for the crowd to chorus, “What?” just as the Transylvania crowds did every time Inspector Kemp’s accent in “Young Frankenstein” rendered him incomprehensible.)

Bane releases a thousand criminals. Okay. But there’s twelve million people living in Gotham, and I’m betting a lot of them have their own weapons. Why are nearly twelve million people going along with this guy? Because he represents something better? You can’t be serious.

Meanwhile Bane is inexplicably keeping three thousand buried Gotham cops alive. Why? What possible reason? There’s no believable in-story justification for it; it’s only for the story reason that Batman is going to require an army to attack Bane later on. Which is odd because in “Batman Begins” he had an incredibly devastating army at the call of his boot heel. Rather than risk three thousand human lives in broad daylight, he could have attacked at night while summoning a few thousand bats to send the freaked criminals running. Done deal.

What makes Gotham’s slide into anarchy especially egregious is when you hold it against the climax of the previous film, in which two ferries full of passengers are willing to risk being blown to hell rather than themselves condemning others to death, all to satisfy the dictates of a murdering lunatic. Batman proved the Joker wrong: the moral centers of the citizens of Gotham City were not for sale, even at the risk of their own lives. Order trumped chaos. Even the criminals didn’t knuckle under to the vision of a madman. Yet now it’s eight years later, things are supposedly even better, but suddenly it’s every man for himself just because Bane says so. The positive message of the previous film has been thrown under the bus just because—I don’t know, Chris–you and your brother decided “Les Miz” was the greatest show ever and wanted to reenact it, right down to having barricades and casting Fantine as Catwoman.

And speaking of Catwoman, particularly how she figures into the end: Really? The whole film; is about the dyanamic between Batman and Bane, but the moment it’s revealed that he is actually someone else’s stooge, he literally becomes cannon fodder for a quipping Catwoman? Really? It’s like having Princess Leia take out the Emperor: interesting development, but it’s not what the film’s dynamic is about. Bane vs. Batman is mostly a psychological battle; you don’t resolve it with twin cannons from the Batpod fired by a supporting character. Not without risking the resolution being a huge letdown.

And then there’s the ending. MAJOR SPOILER, KIDS.

I’ve made no mention of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s intrepid office Blake. I disliked the character intensely, and it’s not because of the actor. JG-L was fine. I’d expect nothing less. But his mere presence telegraphs the resolution: Batman will be gone and this guy will take his place so that Gotham will continue to have its symbol. He has no other reason—none—to be in the film. Way too much time is invested in setting up his backstory to justify him serving any other purpose than to be the next Batman, which means the current one goes away by film’s end.

Fun fact: Nolan originally wanted to kill off Batman. DC refused to sign off on it. I kind of wish they hadn’t blocked that ending, because if you thought Bane snapping Batman’s spine was painful, that’s nothing compared to the back breaking contortions they had to go through to keep Bruce alive. He keeps the fact that he’s fixed the autopilot secret from Lucius Fox. Why? On the off chance he may have to fake his own death?

He flies a ticking down atom bomb out into the bay. We see him in the batwing seconds before detonation. One assumes he bails out at some point. So what? He’s still going to be well within the bomb’s six mile blast radius. How does he survive the bomb blast at effectively ground zero, especially without a refrigerator to hide in?

Then again, we must suppose it’s a good thing that Bruce Wayne skips town considering that, thanks to the fallout, at least half the town is going to get cancer, many children are going to be born deformed, and the drinking water won’t be safe for about forty years.

What it all comes down to, Chris, is that the moment the physical infrastructure of Gotham collapses thanks to Bane’s explosives, the infrastructure and believability of the plot goes with it. Which is a shame considering the adherence to realistic thinking that you displayed when showing how Bruce’s body was so banged up. Eventually Bruce is able to overcome his physical weakness, but the literally holes that open up as part of the plot swallow all sense of logic and reality into a pit from which the film doesn’t quite manage to escape, no matter how many feel-good last moments are crammed into the end.

PAD

Looking back on The Hulk

Originally published September 19, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1244

Monsters. I’m told the theme for this issue is monsters. I have some small familiarity with the subject, having lived with one in my head for over a decade.

Ten years ago, when I had been writer on The Incredible Hulk for less than a year, then-promotions head Steve Saffel told me that title was going to be my “breakout” book, the one that fans would notice me for. I told him he was crazy. Hulk was simply not a title that anyone was noticing. Fan mail was so utterly non-existent that I had had to put out an appeal, stating that I would respond personally to any and all people who wrote in to the book. Plus I figured that I had maybe a year’s worth of stories in me. I didn’t see it as a long-term gig at all.

So now it’s 140 issues later (plus annuals, one-shots, a limited series and a novel). I have easily written more words about the Hulk than I have any other single other character. Although if asked which comic series I’m proudest of, I’ll always answer The Atlantis Chronicles (proudly remaining uncollected by DC), The Incredible Hulk nonetheless remains my magnum opus.

How’d it happen to develop that way? Beats the hell out of me.

Over a decade ago, I was sales manager at Marvel Comics when editor Bob Harras trotted into my office one day, plopped down in the chair opposite my desk, and said, “Would you be interested in writing The Incredible Hulk?

To this day, I’m not entirely certain why he asked me. My tenure on Spectacular Spider-Man had put a number of editorial noses out of joint, for it was felt that someone in sales had absolutely no business being involved on the editorial side. In fact, editorial pressure (by editors no longer there) resulted in my being fired off of Spec Spidey, so I figured that my short writing career at Marvel Comics was pretty much over. Yet there was Bob Harras, asking me if I’d be interested in taking on one of Marvel’s oldest and—frankly—most limited characters. At least, limited as far as I was concerned. Dialogue is one of my strengths, and telling the adventures of a character who had no grasp of personal pronouns and spoke mostly in catch phrases (say ’em with me: “Hulk is strongest one there is”; “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets”; “Hulk smash!”; “Hulk hate puny Banner!”) didn’t exactly float my creative boat.

“You don’t have to do the dumb green Hulk,” he told me quickly when I voiced hesitation. He explained that Al Milgrom had transformed Bruce Banner back into his earliest incarnation of nasty, crafty and gray. Since the sales on the book were nothing to write home about, I had the okay to do whatever I wanted with the character.

The question was, how to approach him in some way that would seem both different and yet a natural outgrowth of what had gone before? Furthermore, how do we take a monstrous character and make him sympathetic? The way it had been generally done before, the Hulk was misunderstood and tormented by the world. A curious dichotomy, really: The underdog is not generally “the strongest one there is.” But that was how the Hulk had generally been made appealing all the previous years. I wanted to try something different, find some new hook for the character, but I hadn’t a clue what it was.

The key turned out to be in issue #314, written by Bill Mantlo. In that issue, Bill described Bruce Banner’s tortured childhood and abusive father. It is said that most heroic fiction is, at its core, the story of struggle between father and son. This was no exception as we learned that Bruce’s father, Brian, tormented and reviled both his son and Bruce’s mother for giving birth to him. We were never given any reason as to why precisely Brian was like this. But we saw the abuse that Brian heaped on Bruce.

To me, that was a pivotal piece of information. Because when one studies genuine cases of Multiple Personality Disorder, abuse suffered in childhood is generally one of the lead causes. Basically, the mind fractures. The core personality is unable to deal with the realities of the horror visited upon it, and so alternate personalities are constructed in order to cope. The individual himself splinters.

Furthermore, it presented an interesting take on the characters since it provided a point of view for both the Hulk and Banner. To Banner, the Hulk was more than just an engine of destruction. He was the symbol of unleashed and unthinking rage, which was everything that his father—his abuser—had been. The transformation into the Hulk was more than simply repulsive because of the penchant for destruction that the Hulk represented, or the pain that the change incurred. Bruce was appalled by the change because he became, in essence, his own father… that which he hated most in the world. And to the Hulk, Bruce was a weakling, a coward. Belittled by his father and unable to stand up to him, deep down the Hulk resented Banner because he felt that Bruce was unable to protect “them” from the threat that his father represented.

It was an intriguing Pandora’s Box of psychological implications. But I quickly discovered that, once Bill opened it, he had promptly slammed it shut again. After that one issue (a Secret Wars tie-in, no less) the topic was dropped. It was as if, having introduced the backstory, Bill felt that everything which needed to be told about the subject had been done.

I strongly disagreed, and proceeded to hinge my entire take on the character around the notion that child abuse had created a classic MPD. There were several subtexts which were part and parcel of my ambitions for the book:

(1) The abuse perpetrated by Brian Banner probably tripped over into the realm of sexual abuse. Although it was never shown or discussed, there is generally some sort of sexual abuse in MPD cases.

(2) Brian Banner was himself abused as a child. This and the previous notion were finally addressed in the Hulk “Negative One” issue.

(3) Bruce Banner would have gone bonkers, gamma rays or no. The nature of Bruce’s childhood abuse made him a prime candidate for MPD, whether he was hit with gamma rays or not. He simply became a super-powered MPD as a result.

It also gave me a hook upon which I could hang my first several years of the series. There had been any number of attempts to cure the Hulk throughout the Marvel Universe. But I couldn’t find any instance where the cure hinged upon a psychiatric treatment or clinic diagnosis. Basically the surface manifestation had been treated, but it had always invariably failed in the long term. Why? Because the core problem was not the gamma bomb, but Bruce and his damaged childhood, and any cure which did not address these issues was doomed to failure. But MPD are, and have been cured. How?

As near as I can tell, generally hypnosis. Hypnotherapy which “folds” the manufactured identities back into the core personality.

Thus would it be for the Hulk.

To my astonishment, I came up with enough story material for four years while, all during that time, slowly moving the Hulk towards an inevitable cure. This occurred in Hulk #377, which introduced the “New Hulk.” He has been that way through much of my time on the series, but lately I’ve decided that he’s gotten a bit too chatty for my tastes, and I’ve opted to make him darker, more foreboding, less loquacious.

However, one might ask: When you’ve lived with a dark, frightening character for so long, doesn’t that begin to affect you?

Well… yeah. Yeah, it does. In many ways, the Hulk has been almost autobiographical for me.

Problems, things on my mind, assorted concerns have all wound up being played out in the pages of Hulk. Naturally it’s always been to a heightened degree, but the principle remains the same.

When a character gets that much into your head, he becomes second nature to you. You get to know his moods, he gets to understand yours. You feel loyalty to him. Indeed, one of the reasons I’ve stayed on the book is dedication and concern. For all I know, if I left the book, a new writer might come in who would undo everything I’ve done over the past decades.

I judge situations as he would judge them. He will say the things that I dare not say… or even think.

And I try not to let my temper get the better of me. Because believe me… you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

Summer 1997 convention travels

Originally published September 5, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1242

Assorted thoughts and incidents picked up from this summer’s convention trail, during which I set an all time personal best (or most exhausted) with a series of conventions including Chicago Comic Con, Orlando MegaCon, San Diego, Shore Leave (Maryland), Stellar Occasion (Texas), RebelCon (Massachusetts), Heroes Con (North Carolina). Or, to put it succinctly, this is how I spent my summer vacation…

* * *

I’m not entirely sure why people will run up to me at the end of a convention and say, “I’ve been chasing you all over the convention (or some previous convention) trying to get you to autograph my books, and it took me this long to (or I was never able to) catch up with you.” Every time I do signings at conventions, the times for the sessions are always posted well in advance. Don’t people read? Can’t they mark it in their schedules? I just find it a little disconcerting because, more often\ than not, there’s an almost accusatory tone to the comment as if I’ve been aggressively leading them a merry chase, trying to stay one step ahead of them. At San Diego, for instance, there I was Saturday, doing a (fully publicized) two hour signing at the Marvel booth, followed immediately by another (fully publicized) two hours at the Claypool table…and during the next five minutes after I started walking around on my modest free time, half a dozen people came up to me and said, “Are you doing any signings today?” This was three in the afternoon—had they all just arrived? Sheesh.

* * *

I was very interested to discover that, according to the fan rumor mill, I have a girlfriend. Not only that, but she’s underage. This apparently arose from the fact that, at the Orlando MegaCon, there was a charming young lady with me who sat with me much of the time at the autograph table, who seemed amazed and fascinated by the crowds lining up to get my signature on stuff, and who clearly was very fond of me. It’s not as if we were necking in public or anything–we definitely weren’t–but her very presence was enough to get tongues wagging. When I related this to the lady in question, she found it most amusing considering that (a) she’s not underage, she’s 29, and (b) she’s my sister, Beth, who has just started getting interested in conventions and accompanied me to a couple this year. Upon learning this, she said, very disconcerted, “Do I look like I’m underage?!” To which I replied, in my most consoling big brother tone, said, “Sure do. You look like jailbait to me.”

* * *

At Shore Leave, I participate in an annual sketch that was founded by DC editor Bob Greenberger, Star Trek author Mike Friedman, and myself. We call it “Mystery Trekkie Theater 3000,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. The three of us sit in front of a screen, our silhouettes cast upon it, and we tear apart an episode of Star Trek. When we first started doing it, we stayed with original Trek episodes which were available on film. Clunkers such as “Turnabout Intruder,” “The Apple,” and even the episode “Shore Leave” itself (Kirk’s nemesis, Finnegan, runs away from Kirk and shouts in our version, “He’s after me Lucky Charms! They’re magically delicious!”) We are usually joined by Brad Ferguson and Bob Pinaha (and this year T. Alan Chafin substituting for Bob) as the mad scientists.

We also do a sketch/invention exchange at the top of the show, and this year we carried off the single most involved bit we’ve ever done. It went like this: None of us were on stage. Then the audience heard an announcer (me) warn over the PA system, “Attention…attention people sitting in the first three rows. You will be… assimilated. Resistance… is… futile.” This caused a ripple of nervous laughter; they knew that something was coming up that was Borg-related, and that at least some audience members were going to be victimized.

Ominous Borg music began to play, and the announcer intoned, “They think… with one mind. They move… with one purpose. You’ve seen them terrorize the Enterprise. You’ve seen them pursue the Voyager. But you’ve never seen them… like this!”

The recorded music suddenly made a hard cut from the Borg music to the drum-slamming pounding of Irish stepdancing. And the announcer bellowed, “The dance sensation of the Delta Quadrant, now on their galaxy-wide tour! It’s… Riverborg!”

Out onto the stage hop/skipped two young ladies (daughter Gwen and a friend of hers) dressed in black with little skirts, their faces Borgified. They met at the middle, danced as the audience roared… and then Bob, Mike and I stepdanced (or at least some vague approximation of it, since none of us have taken a stepdancing lesson in our lives) up the middle aisle, dressed as the cheesiest looking Borg you could ever hope to meet. We did a bizarre sort of hopping about on stage for a minute, and then were joined by the Borg queen (Beth again) doing the Flamenco. She hauled a sucker out of the audience, proceeded to assimilate him by dancing around him, and suddenly Michael Flathead, the Borg of the Dance (a guy named Danny Coggins, who is a semi-pro skater) leaped up onto the stage and proceeded to do some really nifty steps with the Borg queen. In the meantime the rest of us shuffled, Frankenstein-monster-like, into the audience, hauled surprisingly willing victims onto the stage, spun them around, and formed a long line across as the music reached its climax.

Only time we’ve ever done a sketch that got a standing ovation. As for me, I’d love to see what a group of people who have really good-looking Borg costumes and can actually dance would do with the concept. So anyone who wants to, go right ahead.

* * *

Also making its debut at Shore Leave—a couple of fans, at the Saturday night dance, introduced a little number they called “The Imperial Death Macarena.” It’s a terrifying simple concept: The Imperial March (or as others refer to it, “Darth Vader’s Theme”) from The Empire Strikes Back is exactly the right beat and cadence for dancing the Macarena. Try it, right this second. Hum the basic march to yourself. You know it… dah-dah-dah, dah-DAH-dah, dah-DAH-da, etc. Do the hand movements, the hip pivot. It all times out perfectly, doesn’t it. Isn’t that scary? Fans could start doing it at showings of Empire as if it were The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

A guy saw me dancing with my sister at the party, by the way. He asked me if she was my teenaged daughter. I gleefully related this to her, and she rolled her eyes and insisted she doesn’t look like a teenager..

* * *

I was working late one night and had the TV set on. I saw an ad for one of those psychic phone services. They tried to encourage me to call, that they could help me with my problems. That they wanted to, they were most anxious to. This wouldn’t be a bad idea, because I could use all the help I could get. But I don’t understand something. If they’re really psychic and they really want to help… why don’t they call me? I mean, wouldn’t they just know? Isn’t that kind of the point of being psychic?

It makes me most suspicious.

* * *

Fans were all up in arms about Nicholas Cage as Superman, and I think they expected me to be. I’m sorry, I’m just not, for the following reason:

I was at a convention some years ago on a panel, and the announcement had just been made that Michael Keaton was going to play Batman. And fans were asking the panelists what they thought about the fact that the director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure had cast Mr. Mom to play Batman. Every single panelists railed against the concept and was roundly applauded. And I said, “Uh, guys, look… I hate to say this, but I have no intrinsic problem with this. I mean, he’s an actor. Actors act. Just because Keaton and Burton are known mostly for comedy doesn’t mean the film is automatically going to be campy. Maybe it’ll be good.” It was the first and only time I’ve ever been roundly, and loudly, booed.

The fans later changed their tune. But I refuse to change mine. I have no intrinsic problem with Nick Cage playing Superman. None. Yes, his nose is more angular than we’ve come to expect, and his eyes are oddly set. But then again, if you look back at the beginning, so was Superman’s back in the beginning. What he does seem more than capable of projecting is a guy who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, and if that’s the direction that Burton is going–a man with superhuman powers and, consequently, superhuman responsibilities that are weighing heavily upon him–it could be pretty thought provoking. A return to the roots of Superman beyond Action Comics #1, back to Phillip Wylie’s superb novel, The Gladiator. Can he carry off the classic blue and red tights? Probably not. And Michael Keaton couldn’t carry off gray, black and blue tights, so they changed them and it looked good on screen. They’ll probably do the same for this as well. I’ve love to join with the hullabaloo, but—ol’ dopey me—I think I’ll hold off on demonizing the film until I actually see it. Just this quirky thing I do.

* * *

At San Diego I was part of a contingent of Comics Buyer’s Guide folks who went to see next year’s Hugo award-winning best dramatic film, Contact. I thought it was absolutely breathtaking. The dead silence during the opening two minutes, with the steady pullback into infinity (and beyond) is probably the single most convincing feeling of outer space travel I’ve ever seen. To say nothing of answering the eternal question of, If there’s intelligent life on other planets, why haven’t they made contact with us? It’s a question based on the same sort of human egocentricity that once inspired mankind to think that the sun orbited the earth. The answer is best summarized by Douglas Adams who wrote, with deceptive obviousness, “The universe is big. Really big.” Trying to find us is like trying to find a heavily populated microbe.

What’s a little depressing is that the opening depends entirely upon having a good audience. We did, but when my eldest daughter Shana saw it some weeks later, the dopes in the theater decided to fill the quiet with their endless and extremely unclever chatter (“Space, the final frontier” they called out and laughed loudly at their own wit.) Very annoying.

* * *

I totally psyched out Mark Waid at Chicago.

One morning I ordered up breakfast from room service. In handing me the bill to sign, the room service guy handed me the wrong check. It was the bill for Room 534, and the signature at the bottom was “Mark Waid.” I looked over what Mark had had to eat, and the next time I saw him I said, “So, Mark… how was your omelette this morning you had from room service? Good orange juice?” Mark stared at me in complete befuddlement and said, “How did you—?”

Putting on my best Hannibal Lechter voice and demeanor, I said, “Oh, I know everything that goes on in room 534, Mark.”

He looked like I’d smacked him in the face with a 2 x 4. It was great. Best thing is, I never told him how I knew.

So none of you guys tell him, okay?

* * *

One of the guests at RebelCon was actor Stephen Furst. Beth (who accompanied me to that con) was excited to hear this, because she’s a therapist and knew him from a film called The Dream Team. I told her that was unusual: When it comes to films, most people know him as Flounder. Having almost no recollection of Animal House, she said with surprise, “You mean he was that animated fish in The Little Mermaid?”

Beth and I had breakfast with Stephen Sunday morning at RebelCon. During the conversation, Beth made passing mention of her ex-husband. Stephen stared at her, stunned. “How long were you married?” he asked. “Five years. Why?”

“Because,” he said in amazement, “I thought you were, like, seventeen.”

I’ve never seen her slam her head on a table quite that way.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He’s forty and looks it.)

 

Ask the Wife

Since Peter is in Peru and Caroline is in Jacksonville, I thought I would do another edition of ask the wife.

Usual rules apply and if I say I can’t answer something please don’t badger me over it.

So whatcha wanna know?

Movie review: Spawn

Originally published August 29, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1241

I really, really, really wanted to like the Spawn movie.

First off, I’d gone on record at the Chicago Comic Con as saying that I thought the film was going to gross somewhere in the neighborhood of $145 million. This was based on two factors: (1) the trailer looked rather nifty, and (2) I anticipated a Batman and Robin backlash. Specifically, people had reacted so negatively to the high-camp, stupid, goofy rendition of the former Dark Knight detective that there would be wholesale, massive embracing of any film that at all evoked the late, lamented “serious” approach to comic book movies that Tim Burton had taken. So I figured that people would flock to Spawn in a frenzy of in-your-face support if for no other reason than to send a message to those swell folks at Time-Warner (for let us remember as we pillory Joel Schumacher and Akiva Goldsman that they produced, no more and no less, than the exact film that Warner wanted them to produce. Apparently they were so worried about making a film desirable to licensees that they forgot to make it desirable to audiences.)

Second, nothing would have made me happier than to be able to knock the starch out of those people who love to claim that I’ve got it out for Todd McFarlane (including, on occasion, Todd himself). I thought I’d be able to accomplish that by the simple expedient of liking the Spawn animated series. Unfortunately I had trouble getting past Todd’s intros, which came across like a weird blend of Rod Serling and non-sequitur comedian Steven Wright… and when I did, the show itself either sickened me or bored me.

And third, after the fiasco of Batman and Robin, it would help to have a comic book related film that succeeds. Oh, sure, Men in Black is based on a comic, but—for better or worse—it is movies with guys in tights or sculpted costumes that the average movie-goers think of when they think “comic book films.” And the industry could really use a major triumph with a costumed hero about now.

So I really, really, really wanted to like the movie.

And I really, really, really had problems doing so.

I came into the film with few comics-related preconceptions, in that—aside from an issue here or there—I don’t read the comic book. So I wouldn’t know if the movie was faithful to the comic book; I would only be able to evaluate it as a movie.

For those of you who don’t know, the basic premise is thus: Al Simmons (Michael Jai White) is an government-licensed assassin with flutterings of conscience, working for boss Jason Wynn (Martin Sheen) who doesn’t have to deal with such trivialities. Wynn, in turn, is in league with a satanic Clown seemingly on loan from a Stephen King novel (played by a completely make-up hidden John Leguizamo, who probably never thought he’d come to regard the wardrobe required for Wong Foo as “the good ol’ days.”) And the Clown, in turn, works for a hell-raising demon named Malebolgia, played by Industrial Light and Magic.

Simmons is murdered, but cuts a deal with Malebolgia wherein he agrees to lead a Satanic army if only he can return to be with his wife. But the deal turns sour as an inhuman Simmons returns, incarnated as Spawn, to discover that he no longer has a place in his wife’s life. It’s as if Christopher Marlowe had penned Robocop.

From the opening, eye-searing credits to the spasmodic closing credits, Spawn as directed by Mark Dippe is either a visual feast or a visual assault, depending upon your taste. The mood is relentlessly gloomy, which I suppose is appropriate for the subject matter. But in a comic book you only have to take it for the ten to fifteen minutes it requires to read the story. Ninety uninterrupted, unvarying minutes of it in a movie theater is more problematic. After about forty-five minutes I found my head hurt and after an hour and ten minutes my attention was seriously starting to wander.

I think part of the problem for me was an element that was also the film’s greatest strength: The make-up. When one is portraying someone who is transformed into a grotesque, it helps tremendously if there is still some visible connection to the lost humanity. It makes the loss that much more poignant. But for an hour and a quarter, we’re forced to try and empathize with a growling guy whose face looks like it was run over with a backhoe. Tough to do.

Think of the aforementioned Robocop. Remember the first time that Robocop removes his helmet? Remember his still-human face looking lost and sad, his head shaved and frightening? For that matter, remember how human Darth Vader looked under the helmet? Here was a villain who had cavalierly killed underlings, tortured Leia and Han, and maimed his own son…and yet we felt compassion for him. In both cases, we connected. On the other hand, ever notice that the Thing is a lot less interesting when the rest of the FF isn’t around? That’s why: The humanity is unseeable, and when that tie is broken, the audience is that much more distanced.

In terms of effects, the film is nothing short of phenomenal. Okay, granted, the sequences in Hell looked more like a music video than a trip through the netherworld. But Spawn’s morphing ability is impressive, he crawls walls with an alacrity that Spider-Man would envy, and his CGI-generated cape looks like, well, a Todd McFarlane cape come to life (indeed, when the cape isn’t around–which is most of the time–the costume is far less effective.). The Clown (who gets all the best lines) is a triumphant combination of costuming and acting (in both deportment and visual, Leguizamo’s own mother wouldn’t recognize him), and his transformation into the more bestial form of the Violater (which I assume is a blend of puppetry and CGI) is mesmerizing. The entire effect is so convincing that I heard a child several rows behind me complaining loudly, “I’m scared” (a concept that would bother some people, but not me. Let the kids be scared. Hell, no one has terrorized generations of kids the way Margaret Hamilton has, and Wizard of Oz remains family viewing.)

Still, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I still felt disconnected, disinterested. My eyes were involved, but my mind only a little and my heart not-at-all. And I tried to determine whether there was something wrong with the film, or something wrong with me. Was I, for instance, having trouble being fair because—oh, I dunno—in one issue of Spawn Todd had seen fit to name a couple of vomitus racists Peter and John (a slam, one supposes, directed at John Byrne and myself). No matter how much I wanted to like the film, was I actually capable of doing so?

So I stayed through the closing credits, and when the lights came up, the only ones there other than me were a couple of guys in their late 20s, and the teenaged ushers. I turned to the 20-year-olds and said, “What’d you guys think?”

Their response was immediate and unequivocal: “Terrible.” “Awful.” “Worst film I’ve seen in ages.” “The story was lousy.” “It was boring.” “Bad story. Bad movie.”

And the usher immediately dropped what he was doing and said, “Are you guys crazy? It was fantastic! It was one of the best movies of the summer!”

Shaking their heads, the older guys left, but I stayed and spoke to the usher to find out what he had found so engaging about Spawn.

And he proceeded to tell me Todd McFarlane’s life story. About Todd’s involvement with the founding of Image. Of his building up this character, the movie, the TV series and the toy lines from nothing. “Todd McFarlane is a genius,” he said with utter conviction. “An absolute creative genius. I love the comic book, and this film is an absolutely perfect translation of the comic book. They made a few changes, but otherwise this is absolutely the comic, and I love the comic.”

Which pretty much sums it up, I guess. I mean, it’s hardly a scientific survey or a rigorous questionnaire posed to legions of Spawn fans, but for on-the-fly research, it’s not too bad.

The obvious question to ask is if it’s better than Batman and Robin. Based on my utterly unscientific polling process, the answer would have to be a resounding “yes.” Because for fans of Batman as seen in the comics, Batman and Robin was a disappointment, a betrayal… in short, everything that fans had once feared Tim “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” Burton’s first film would be. But for people who weren’t followers of the Batman comic, it was just plain stupid.

So with Spawn, for those people who aren’t rabid fans of the comic book, the film is an unending celebration of hopelessness, ghoulishness, and taste ranging from bad to disgusting (the Clown zealously displays stained underwear, licks a woman with a nauseating tongue, and displays an obsession with flatulence unmatched by anyone except for perhaps Howard Stern). For those who are fans of the comic book, however, it is an exciting silver screen realization of a story they’ve enjoyed on the comic pages, and a symbol of a major triumph for a guy they consider a personal hero. And for those who are open to persuasion one way or the other, the film’s long-term success and/or effectiveness will likely come down to whether audiences are willing to accept confusing, lackluster or uninvolving stories as long as there’s a lot of neat stuff and FX happening on the screen. And certainly when it comes to that, the American public has spoken (the cold shoulder for Batman and Robin being more the exception than the rule.)

Or, to put it the way that Don Thompson used to phrase it: For those of you who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Best movie he’s seen so far this summer? Contact.)

 

Myths and Archetypes, Part 2

Originally published August 22, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1240

So… we were talking about myths.

At this point, Star Trek has reached nearly mythic status. One of the tests for that (and I may have discussed this in an earlier column; if so please forgive me, but I’ve been doing this gig for a lot of years and I’m bound to repeat sooner or later) is that discussions of key elements can be held without qualifiers.

For instance, if one were to ask, say, “Who was Napoleon Solo?” (to pick a contemporaneous program) the answer one would get (if one were rewarded with something other than a blank stare or a half-hearted guess such as “Han Solo’s brother?”) would be something along the lines of, “He was a character on a TV series called The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. There’s possible variants, sure, but that’s the most likely answer, I’d think.

But if you were to ask, “Who was James T. Kirk?” the reply you’d likely get would be, “Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise.” There would be no qualifier, no further clarification, and no acknowledgement that one is discussing a television show. To rank as myth, a concept, characters or stories must take on a life of its own, its origins either lost in antiquity or simply irrelevant.

Star Trek fills that bill rather nicely. Comic books are likewise a sort of modern mythos being spun as we go. Superheroes are such strong archetypal characters and concepts that they continue to appeal and to attract fans even after all this time. And Star Trek and comics also constitute prime examples of that mythic pastime called “consistency” or “continuity.”

One of the knocks on the new Disney Hercules was that Disney played fast and loose with the existent myths. Putting aside that Disney did not use the proper Greek name “Heracles,” but on the other hand used all the Greek names for the other gods (Hermes instead of Mercury, Hades instead of Pluto, etc. Although that was probably a wise idea. Can you imagine a Disney film where the villain of the piece was named Pluto? For that matter, when they showed Cerberus, they should have had the three-headed dog sporting three Pluto heads. Talk about your in-jokes. Although I was the only one in the theater who laughed over Hermes’ obsession with floral arrangements. Didn’t anyone else get that? Doesn’t anyone recall the symbol for FTD florists? But I digress…)

Keep in mind that this wasn’t like Pocahantas, wherein Disney mucked with history, upgrading a pre-adolescent heroine into a shapely babe and giving her a hot romance with John Smith. This is a movie based on a character of myth. Yet some people complained that the movie wasn’t “really” how the myths went. And you find yourself scratching your head over the absurdity of the statement. Hello? They’re myths. They’re not true. None of it really happened. Or anything that did happen was embellished in the retelling to the point of creating a mythic figure.

There’s a nice turn on that in the film Braveheart, wherein an assembled army of Scotsmen refuses to believe that William Wallace (Mel Gibson) is in fact the legendary freedom fighter because Wallace in-the-flesh doesn’t match the stories of the warrior reputed to be seven feet tall, capable of slaying the British with bolts of lightning from his butt. This dovetails with genuine stories of Wallace, recounted by a poet whose tales of Wallace’s feats are so extraordinary that some historians tend to discount them, reasoning that they couldn’t possibly be true. Which is kind of unfair: It means that genuinely extraordinary people can’t ever get their due.

Comic book fans have a name for it, however. It’s called “continuity.” It is the obsession the bug-a-boo, the raison d’etre for many folks when it comes to their enjoyment of comics. If the story doesn’t match up precisely with what has gone before, there will be flurries of letters, e-mails, discussions, and demands that it be straightened out. There are still fans who are annoyed with me because I won’t do stories untangling or explaining the origin of Supergirl… a remarkably convoluted backstory exacerbated by the fact that she comes from a “pocket universe” (whatever that is) that now never existed in the first place.

Fans want to know how this can be. There’s two answers to this: (1) I don’t know and (2) I don’t care. Say that she’s left over pocket lint from the pocket universe and leave me the hell alone so I can tell the stories I want to tell. But some fans get annoyed over this because I’m not telling the stories they want to tell. My response to that is, fine, tell your own stories then. It’s a grand tradition, after all. It’s where myths come from, and myths absolutely, no two ways, don’t give a damn about continuity.

Hercules played fast and loose with existing myth. The young Hercules, for instance, is shown a mast from Jason’s ship, the Argo. Nice trick, considering that according to myth, Hercules was on the Argo, sailing side by side with Jason. His origin is different, the (rather cursory) telling of his labors is different, and by the way, Pegasus was not formed from a puffy cloud, he sprang from the blood of the slain Gorgon, Medusa, and later aided the Greek hero, Bellerophon, in slaying the Chimera.

Why did lopping off Medusa’s head result in the birth of Pegasus? Beats me. But if that story were first being told in a Marvel or DC Comic, you could bet that Pegasus’ first appearance would only be a prelude to a much more involved, detailed, secret origin of Pegasus one-shot. In the telling of myth and lore, audiences simply wanted to know what happened. Nowadays audiences have to know why it happened. People don’t want to take things on faith anymore.

Look at Star Trek, if you will. If there’s any one modern mythos that has spawned a more continuity-concerned base, it’s Trek. Why, when Scotty came out of the transporter beams in Relic, did he act as if he thought that Kirk was still alive, when in Star Trek Generations, he was present at Kirk’s believed demise. Well, uhm, he was confused. Well, uhm, deep down he always believed that Kirk was still alive somehow. The truth is that the writers weren’t going to let a line of dialogue in one episode of a TV show several years previously torpedo an entire sequence in a motion picture. The further truth is: It doesn’t matter.

Except to the fans, it does matter. This is not to take away from spirited and entertaining discussions among fans where discussing discrepancies is more of a mental exercise than anything. There’s certainly a large element of fun in that. But some folks take it waaaay too seriously. And that’s not limited to the fans; Paramount officials have been known to distinguish between the TV series and the line of novels by declaring, “The TV series is Star Trek fact, while the novels are Star Trek fiction.” This prompted at least one fan–speaking on behalf of all fans, I think–to declare, “Geez, and they tell us to get a life.” And boy, were there noses out of joint at DC when the Star Trek/X-Men team-up was announced. DC reps, back when they had the license, had proposed a Star Trek/Superman meeting, and the proposal was shot down by the then-licensing officials with the declaration, “But… Superman isn’t real.”

And yet many fans want stories in the book to “count.” To be part of “canon.” To be “real.” Because those stories become important to them, and to them they are as vital and significant as those stories which the guardians of “Star Trek fact” consider the one, true Star Trek.

And there are “protectors” of comic book canon as well. Fan protectors who will raise a ruckus the moment that there is a threat to the precious continuity, or the moment that a new creator puts a new spin on the character. They will cry foul, claim that it’s only being done for filthy commercial purposes. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The point is, if the story is interesting, who cares? Storytelling should be about surprise and the unexpected, and it is the height of absurdity to reject a concept or twist or spin out of hand on the basis that it’s never been done before.

I was on a panel at San Diego recently where continuity discussions came up, and it was pointed out (by Mark Waid, I think, although I may very well be wrong, and if so I apologize) that DC, for instance, used to revel in contradictions. There would be a story about the origin of Wonder Woman’s invisible plane, and then, six months to a year later, there would be a story about the origin of Wonder Woman’s invisible plane that would completely contradict what had gone before. It could be argued that the reasoning was that the turnover in comic book readership was such that you’d likely be writing stories for an entirely new audience who will be curious as to the background of the plane, and why just recycle the same story? More likely, the creators simply didn’t care. They figured, “I have a neat idea for a story! I’ll tell it!”

Now, when DC creators get a new and better (in theory) notion for an origin, it’s a whole big deal. It requires intercompany crossovers to justify it. Fans have created terminology to accompany it (“Reboot”, “Retcon”). Yet shouldn’t comics, which arguably have achieved in some instances mythic status, be allowed the flexibility given to all myths. Indeed, rather than obsess about continuity or become angry when stories are redressed for new audiences, shouldn’t we be celebrating part of a long-standing tradition?

William Irwin Thompson, in his book The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, writes of the organic nature of myths, stating that it is the right and obligation of those telling stories to adapt to new audiences and concerns, stating “Forms of knowledge change as society changes.” When one looks at those who obsess about what can and can’t be done, what should and should not be done, desperately trying to keep an organic story to some sort of universal constant, they are setting themselves up as caretakers of something that should not be constricted. Thompson writes:

The structural anthropologist urges us to ignore the orthodox who labor so patiently trying to eliminate the apocryphal variants from the one true text. The priests of the Temple of Solomon works to construct the canon of Biblical literature, and in this work the dubious folktales of the peasantry were dismissed, but for us a legend or a midrash (a folktale variation on Biblical stories) may be a greater opening to the archetypal world than the overly refined redactions of the urban priestly intelligentsia. Once we are freed from the quest for the one true vision of a myth, we are also freed from the concern for determining the exact provenance of the variant. How can one tell where a myth comes from?

Thompson goes on to note,

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that all available variants should be taken into account… There is no one true version of which all the others are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to the myth.

And added:

But there are also other reasons why all the versions of a myth must be considered, and these reasons have to do with the applicability of information theory to the study of the myth as noted by the anthropologist, Edmund Leach. Every message goes from a Sender to a Receiver through a transmitting medium, but every medium of transmission inevitably distorts the message, and so along the way the signal picks up noise. What the Receiver must get is a mixture of noise and information. If there is only one message, then the Receiver has no way of sorting out the noise from the information; but if the message is sent over and over again in ;many different ways, then the Receiver can line all the versions up in a single imaginary space, see the common structure, and sift the information from the noise. For a structuralist like Edmund Leach, the structure is the meaning. Genesis, for example, is about incest taboos; all the rest is noise and mystification. But one man’s noise is another man’s information… Every new school of thought teaches us something and adds a new tool to the scholar’s kit.

In the case of comics, in the case of Star Trek, we do know the origins. They’ve been thoroughly documented, sometimes ad nauseam. But what we’re seeing is something truly exciting: The embracing of something with specific origins and the transformation of that into mythic status. A hundred years from now, it is not impossible that characters such as Superman or Captain Kirk may still be part of the gestalt human mind, but that their origins may be hotly debated. Just as the origins of stories of Men in Black are also debated (some pegging it as far back as four hundred years ago) before Lowell Cunningham put his own spin on a myth that, once again, goes to a core notion: The world is a confusing and contradictory place, and it would be nice to know that there’s some sort of structure holding it together—be it black-clad men, a guy in a blue and red suit, a man in a starship representing a vision of a future in which we are harmonious, or a divine being overseeing the entire mess.

And as for me, all I can think of is that six-year-old Ariel looked a little disappointed as they rolled the closing credits for Hercules. I said, “What’s wrong, honey?” And she looked up, a bit confused, and said, “Why wasn’t Xena in it?”

And so the legend continues.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. At least, that’s the myth.)

 

Myths and Archetypes, Part 1

Originally published August 15, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1239

Okay, so we were discussing myths, mythic archetypes, etc.

There are two things which fans seem to get all heated up about. The first is originality, i.e., “rip offs.” And the second is “continuity.”

In the former instance, whenever there is some new work of fiction that has any antecedents at all, fans will quickly point their fingers and try to dismiss it as a simple knock-off. I’m not entirely certain why this is. It may have something to do with the age-old question of “Where do ideas come from.” It’s the most-asked question that writers get. Those who are not capable of telling stories do not grasp where the stories originate. Perhaps in an effort to make them feel better about themselves, they will seize upon any story, any concept, that is at all evocative of an earlier work, and proclaim, “Ah, it’s just a rip-off of so-and-so.”

A good example of this is Willow, in which critics accused George Lucas of ripping off himself by giving us a farm boy (Willow/Luke Skywalker), a veteran warrior (Madmartegan/Han Solo), a princess love interest (Sorsha/Leia), and a pair of wise-cracking observers (The brownies/C-3PO and R2). Apparently those same critics had forgotten that, when Star Wars was first released, they were equally quick to dismiss Luke as a male Dorothy, Chewbacca as the Cowardly Lion, 3-PO as the Tin Woodman, Han Solo as the Scarecrow, and Obi-Wan as the Wizard, even though the parallels made absolutely no sense at all. It’s as if audiences are so desperate to figure out how it’s done, they will go to any lengths to diminish the achievement so that they can feel less unimaginative.

Fans do it in comics all the time. Although Watchmen, in terms of style and execution, bore no resemblance to the book Superfolk, fans insisted that Moore had shamelessly knocked it off. Some fans chatted online about parallels between my own The Last Avengers Story and Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come, even though I saw absolutely none. It’s probably the point that Jeph Loeb was trying to make in Chicago when, as some fans have noted, he had a minor meltdown during Jim McLauchlin’s panel, “The McLauchlin Group.” The question posed was, on a scale of one to ten, how much of a rip off of Captain America was Agent America. I said ten, Waid said thirty-two, and Loeb went ballistic, pointing out the legion of other patriot-inspired heroes who have littered the comic landscape.

The difference, of course, is that Agent America really is a rip-off of Captain America. Had Rob never worked on Cap, it would have been a different situation, much like Supreme‘s superman-esque parallels not causing any particular uproar. But everyone knew that, in this instance, Rob was simply trying to burn off work already done for Captain America. Sure, there’s no new ideas under the sun (although I gotta admit, Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger being twins is pretty damned close) but fans want to feel that at least some modicum of originality is evident. Ideally a story flows from something unique about a character; a plot in which any character can be inserted without disrupting the flow one iota is inherently a weak one. The fans knew this and cried “foul” and “lame.”

Watching the attempted selling of Agent America was like watching the character’s novelty being espoused by Jon Lovitz (“Why yes, Agent America is a totally original concept… yeah… that’s the ticket… a whole new character created by myself… and my wife, Morgan Fairchild… whom I have seen naked…”) Agent America wasn’t created. He was recycled.

All of which is moot, of course, thanks to the acquisition of Fighting American to give Rob a—you should pardon the expression—shield against criticism. The recycling of the Cap pages is now impervious against comment because to criticize the work now would be tantamount to criticizing Joe Simon and—God forbid—Jack Kirby. You can’t criticize Kirby. It’s Just Not Done. So the Fighting American maneuver is sort of the creative equivalent of putting on a condom. Doesn’t matter if the whole thing sucks; it’s safe sucks.

Now if anything ever gets credit for being ripped-off-from, it’s Star Trek. Since, for so many fans, Star Trek was their first exposure to science fiction, they’re quick to think that Trek in and of itself is blindingly original. It’s not, of course. When Star Trek (pitched to the networks as Wagon Train to the stars) first debuted, not only was it covering material that had been done as well (if not better) in literary SF for years, but it had its most immediate origins in the film Forbidden Planet… which was, in turn, a knock-off of The Tempest.

And yet anything that hits the big or small screen these days, if it has anything to do with outer space, is stacked up against Star Trek as if Star Trek were the well-spring from which everything science-fiction/space opera originated. Critics will dismiss any series as a Star Trek knock off, and nowhere near as original as Star Trek, as if Trek had been the critics’ darling from Day One (as if critics hadn’t predicted a quick demise for the series… just as they did thirty years later for Babylon 5.)

As noted above, it all seems to stem from the age-old question of “Where do you get your ideas?” as if spotting the precedents and roots provides an answer… the answer being that writers are not truly inventive or novel or clever, but merely talented thieves without a jot of originality in their souls, standing upon the shoulders of literary giants who were truly great and are now dead, gone, and unable to complain.

There are archetypes, of course, and mythic stories which are repeated and can be broken down and analyzed by people far more scholarly than I. You want to plumb the depths of archetypes? Read Campbell. Read Jung. You don’t need me for that (if you need me for anything.) But when it comes down to this whole business of ideas, a lot of it came into focus for me not too long ago when my mother was in the hospital with a heart attack. She’s fine now; bypass operation and she’s fit as a fiddle. Amazing. Just thought I’d mention it up front to take the edge off.

My father and I were in her room, and a couple of their friends had come to visit. Their friends were, as it so happens, heart surgeons. And I was incredulous to learn that they were impressed by, of all things, me. One of them leaned forward and said, with open amazement on his face, “How do you do it? Where do you get your ideas?”

I was stupefied. Basically, I’m a paid fabricator. What I do, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively trivial (not so trivial that I’ve forgiven that nitwit in back of me when I saw Michael who said I should make way for someone with a real job, but still, it’s trivial nonetheless). Sure, I try to make people think, sure, I’ve had impact on some lives. But that’s nothing compared to a heart surgeon, for heaven’s sake. This guy cracks open people’s chests, takes their heart in his hands, and fixes it. Fixes the human heart. My God. Ever see one of those movies or medical shows where there’s someone with a blocked windpipe, and a doctor–over a headset or phone or something—has to talk a civilian through performing a tracheotomy? If I’m the civilian, forget it, babe. The patient can draw in his last strangled breath for the purpose of kissing himself good-bye. Cut in on a human being? Good lord, I haven’t got the intestinal fortitude to cut in on a dance floor.

To me, what a surgeon is capable of doing is truly miraculous. Truly incredible. Probably the single most impressive thing on earth. And yet, to this surgeon, what I did was really cool and amazing.

And what occurred to me is that, in the final analysis, asking how a writer comes up with ideas is the single most pointless question in existence. It’s like asking a surgeon, “How in God’s name can you crack a chest and mend a heart and stick your hands in there?” Because the only reasonable answer is that, if the surgeon couldn’t do it, he wouldn’t be a surgeon. Work and diligence can only take you so far; there has to be that spark, that gift, that inborn talent. I could want to be a doctor with every fiber of my being; I’d still wind up with a higher mortality rate than the average slate of new network programs because I’m simply incapable of essaying that field of endeavor. I know that beyond question.

Developing ideas and stories is a talent, that’s all. Seeing the world around you and discovering ways to tell stories that reflect that world, or seeing what other people have come up with and realizing that if you tweak it ever so slightly in a different direction—just zig where the other guy zagged—you can come up with an entirely new story to tell. When you get down to it, the answer is a circular one. The writer comes up with a ideas because he is a writer, just as a surgeon shoves his hands into gore because he’s a surgeon. You might as well ask a writer, “Why are you the way you are?” The only reasonable reply was best summarized by Popeye: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” (Well, he said “yam,” actually, but you get the idea.) It’s a God-given ability, and who can figure out God?

Which brings us to myths, continuity thereof, and reinterpretation, and I’ll get to that next week.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

 

My Dance Card for San Diego

With another Comic Con for San Diego rolling toward us, here’s a list of all my scheduled appearances.

And for anyone for whom this is his or her first convention, here’s the Fan Pro Bill of Rights to bring you up to speed for suggested rules of the road.

Thursday, 10-11 AM: Marvel booth signing, #2329

Thursday: 11:45-12:45 Stan Lee’s World of Heroes— The legendary Stan Lee introduces his new YouTube channel that tells the stories of heroes, villains, and the fans who love them. In this epic panel, Stan, Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Adrianne Curry (America’s Next Top Model), Peter David (The Hulk), Jace Hall (The Jace Hall Show), and Bonnie Burton (Star Wars Craft book) talk about their new shows, debut new episodes and trailers, answer questions from fans, and provide a few Stan Lee surprises. Room 6BCF

Thursday: 4:30-5:30 Marvel: Next Big Thing— The Marvel Universe is where the biggest comic stories happen-so wouldn’t you like to be the first to know what Marvel has planned? Get the latest news on Marvel’s plan for their biggest heroes and villains, with some surprises along the way! Editor Sana Amanat, editor-in-chief Axel Alonso, Marvel talent scout C. B. Cebulski, and others answer all your burning questions while giving you a sneak peek at the future of Marvel. Room 6DE

Saturday: 10:00-11:00 After Earth— Enter the world of After Earth with an in-depth panel that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the universe of the upcoming film and comic book. With the film now in post-production and set to hit theaters next June, screenwriter Gary Whitta (Book of Eli) and director of photography Peter Suschitzky (The Empire Strikes Back) will discuss the making of the film. They will be joined by comic book artist Beni Lobel (Spanish horror comic anthology Cthulu; G.I. Joe comic books; Torchwood: Web of Lies motion comic), and writers Robert Greenberger (Iron Man, Batman, and Hellboy novels) and Michael Friedman (Star Trek and X-Men novels) — the creators of the comic book After Earth: Innocence, which will introduce Kitai and Cypher Raige (played by Jaden and Will Smith in the After Earth film). Also joining the panel is Eisner Award winner Peter David (Star Trek novels and comic books; The Incredible Hulk), who is writing the After Earth prequel novel and also created the After Earth bible with Greenberger and Friedman.

Saturday, 4 PM—4:00-5:00 Writing for Comics, Part 1— Peter David (Hulk, X-Factor,Young Justice), Josh Fialkov (I, Vampire, Last of the Greats, Echo) and former Marvel and IDW editor and comics writer Andy Schmidt (X-Men, G.I. Joe, 5 Days to Die) present an honest and informative discussion on the art of writing for comics. Topics include process, enhancing creativity, and keeping your work honest. Want to write comics? This is the place to start! Hosted by Comics Experience. (This is part 1 of a 2-part panel that continues tonight at 7:00.) Room 11AB

Saturday 5-6—Signing at Marvel booth #2329

Sunday, 1:00-2:00 Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two— Warren Spector (Disney Epic Mickey), Marv Wolfman (Crisis on Infinite Earths), and Peter David (The Incredible Hulk) discuss the highly anticipated Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power Of Two video game set for release November 18. The panel will explore how the team mapped out the story for this innovative new title, as well as unveil the first details surrounding the Disney Epic Mickey 2 graphic novel, releasing exclusively in Europe in conjunction with the game’s arrival in stores. The panel will also present a special never-before-seen sequence from the upcoming release. Additionally, Becky Cline (director, archives for The Walt Disney Company) will be on hand to discuss the reemergence and historical significance of Walt Disney’s very first cartoon star, Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, who is prominently featured in the game. Join Warren, Marv, Peter, and Becky for this session. Room 25ABC



Sunday, 3-4: Signing at Marvel booth, #2329