Aquaman’s cancellation and Mission: Impossible 2

Originally published June 23, 2000, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1388

A couple of things…

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Folks are asking me my opinion on the announcement about the cancellation of Aquaman. Perhaps they think I’ll take some sort of glee or satisfaction in the demise of a title that I left in such frustration over.

Quite the contrary. I couldn’t be more upset. (Well, I could. If one of my kids was lying in an ER with tubes up her nose, I’d be pretty distraught.)

When I started on that title, I had three goals. First and foremost, of course, was to tell stories that would engage the attention of the readers. Second was to erase, for all time, Aquaman’s reputation as a loser of limited appeal who was unable to sustain a title. I have never, ever understood why anyone regarded Aquaman as a second-rate hero. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Drop Aquaman, with no provisions or life-sustaining equipment, in the middle of Gotham City at midnight, and he’ll come out of it just fine. Drop Batman in the middle of the North Atlantic under the same conditions and the odds are spectacular that he’ll never be heard from again. And third—and admittedly, purely selfishly—I was hoping that a successful Aquaman title would finally stir the powers-that-be to put out in trade paperback The Atlantis Chronicles (as I was assured they would a mere decade or so ago), the single work of which I’m the most proud. A project that I’ve been told would be financially impossible to undertake, although curiously they had no problems releasing them as TPBs in Italy at a reasonable price a few years ago.

I’d like to think that I succeeded in the first ambition. But the fact that Aquaman is once again being deep sixed is a personal disappointment. I feel as if I let him down somehow; that I wasn’t able to set up the character in a sufficiently strong situation that was able to sustain him after my departure. Writers on Superman and Batman can come and go and sales will go up and down, but not to cancellation levels. And even if sales do drop, there’s enough confidence in the characters’ long-term selling power that patience will be displayed. Not so, apparently, the King of the Sea. Whatever I did, obviously it wasn’t enough.

Especially because, from everything I understand, Dan Jurgens is doing commendable work on Aquaman. I haven’t read it, but that’s nothing personal; I rarely read anything on any title that I’ve departed, particularly when it’s under as acrimonious conditions as my leaving Aquaman. However the sentiments of the fans have been uniformly positive, and anything that has fans uniform about anything is certainly worth checking out and even supporting. The book has, to my knowledge, received absolutely zero promotion. If there have been posters or full page ads touting a “new era of greatness” or some such line in Aquaman, it sure hasn’t registered on my radar. As we’ve discussed, it takes any comic at least nine months to a year, on average, to show a noticeable turnaround in sales. It seems to go like this: It takes retailers at least three months to notice that there’s an increased demand for a title. Then they just kind of watch this for another three months or more to see if the demand maintains, and during that time they may engage in reorder activity to get a read on just how many copies of a title they can sell under optimum conditions. And after they’ve gotten their collective toes firmly in the pool, they jump in and start increasing the orders… for the issue that will be coming out three months after that.

It’s easy for me to be sitting in the trenches and say that publishers have to be more foresighted than the retailers. That they have to look at the whole picture, including the reception work is getting, the track record of the creative team, etc. The thing is, DC must have some belief in Aquaman. They keep starting him over again. By taking a short-term view of the current profit situation, they’re shooting themselves in the foot because sooner or later, based on publishing history, they’re gonna take another whack at launching him.

The thing is, when I started on the title six years ago, I faced cynicism and skepticism from fans and retailers who wanted to know why I was bothering to waste my time with a character that was such a consistent sales failure. I worked hard to overcome that. I ran into serious editorial misdirection, getting such contradictory instructions and story interference that I gave up and walked away. Erik Larsen hit the exact same problem to such a degree that, like the secretary in Mission: Impossible, he has disavowed his actions on the title. Well, the editor’s gone, and Dan Jurgens is trying to keep Aquaman afloat. By cancelling the title yet again, not only is DC undercutting Jurgens’ efforts, but it’s undermining the efforts of whoever is the next creative force whenever DC decides it’s time to try and restart Aquaman again. Because retailers are going to be looking at the (effectively dead) 70+ issues of the yet-again-canceled previous endeavor, gathering dust in the back-issue bin because there’s no ongoing title to fire interest, and the cynicism and caution I encountered six years back is going to be that much greater. It’s not going to matter if God comes down and says, “Hey, got a great take on Aquaman, and Da Vinci is going to do the artwork. Wait’ll you see the smile he puts on Mera.” Retailers will still say, “Oh, not another Aquaman title,” and they’ll short-order it. And fans will say, “Why bother? They’ll just cancel it again,” and not buy it.

C’mon, DC. Give Dan Jurgens some breathing space, commit to getting Aquaman to an unprecedented issue #100, get behind the series promotionally in a big way, and see what happens. What you have to lose over the short term is a little money. What you may gain over the long term is another DC success story… instead of just another unfortunate chapter in a “lame” character’s history.

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Speaking of Mission: Impossible…

Just saw M:I2 over the weekend. My basic take: A middling-to-solid John Woo endeavor. The thing that impressed me was that this film had even less to do with Mission: Impossible than the first one did. I wouldn’t have thought such a thing was possible. Then again, to paraphrase Anthony Hopkins, apparently doing so was merely difficult, but not utterly impossible.

The thing is, Hollywood produced a Mission: Impossible movie years ago. It starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman, it won the Oscar for best picture, and it was called The Sting. The current Hollywood geniuses endeavoring to build a franchise out of M:I seem to think that if you’ve got the tape-recorded mission, the theme music that remains catchy no matter how badly it’s butchered, and the snappy pull-the-mask-off-reveal (the instances of that stunt this time around has tripled from the previous one, by my count), then they’re doing Mission: Impossible. Except they’re not. All they’ve done is graft a couple of surface elements from a far more imaginative concept onto a warmed over James Bond plot.

Yeah, sure, watching Tom Cruise dangling with his ripped body freeclimbing on the rock was eye candy (I kept waiting for Captain Kirk to come from the other direction saying, “Do you mind?”) And yes, watching the trademark John Woo slo-mo action (“trademark,” you will note, is the word used by audiences as the intermediate step before moving on to, “God, this again?”) was entertaining enough. And heavens, yes, Thandie Newton as the female lead was gorgeous enough (although male fantasy lives took a hit when she showed up on The Daily Show at least six months pregnant.)

But none of that has anything to do with Mission: Impossible. M:I was something very specific: Although Mr. Phelps and his crew were the protagonists, the story actually unfolded from the POV of the mark. You never really knew what the IMF was up to. And every week, there would always come a time at least once, if not twice, where you’d think that the whole thing was suddenly unraveling faster than Chevy Chase’s talk show career. And then you’d find out that Phelps had anticipated it, or it was part of the scheme, or they’d simply improv something fast enough to finesse it. The series was not a celebration of fast motorcycle chases or chop-sockey action, no matter how lovingly filmed. It was about ingenuity, a mental chess game. For years, a bunch of TV writers were able to pull that off for twenty-plus weeks every season. So why, in three years, has Hollywood been unable to do that once in two tries?

Look, I know it was just a TV show, okay? I know it’s not, and never was, high art. But I loved that series because I was always trying to outthink Phelps and anticipate what the IMF had cooked up, and twice now I’ve gone to the theater hoping that there would be some of that and been disappointed on that level (Cruise’s Ethan Hunt does briefly pull one fake-out, except I saw it coming a mile away.) They’re already talking about a third film. For crying out loud, if you’re going to call it Mission: Impossible, just for once, have it be Mission: Impossible. There’s got to be someone still in Hollywood capable of turning out an ingenious, twisty-turny caper film that will leave the viewer mentally disoriented rather than visually so. Then again, perhaps considering the dumbing down of writing in general, that may be the most impossible mission of all.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. This column will self-destruct in five seconds after you set it aflame.)