This Is Fine..

DC Comics has 3 different Scooby-Doo comic books going. There's the traditional Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, a bi-monthly Scooby-Doo Team-Up, which has the Scooby Gang members paired with DC Comics superheroes and other Hanna-Barbera/Cartoon Network cartoon stars...and Scooby-Apocalypse, which is set in an alternate reality where the gang are survivors wandering a post-apocalyptic Earth, encountering zombie mutations and sharpening their survival skills more than their sleuthing skills.

That last book is a cornerstone of Hanna-Barbera Beyond, a line of comics published by DC which showcase radical alterations of old Hanna-Barbera characters in neo-noir stories. It's been functioning more as an oddity than something solid...I'm convinced it was created to capitalize on Archie Comics' success with Afterlife With Archie, in which most of the cast either turns into flesh-eating zombies or has to fend off the flesh-eating zombies. Ironically, this paved the way toward the revamp of the whole Archie line, eschewing the house style set by the late Dan DeCarlo in favor of a more realistic, if somewhat unremarkably generic style. The old look didn't pave the way to Riverdale, but I never thought there was anything wrong/old-fashioned about it...except maybe the story style. I remember following the Jughead comic book in the late-90's and early 2000s back when Craig Boldman & Rex Lindsay were working on it..and it rivaled any humor comic out there at the time and today.

Back to Beyond...funny enough, that brand name isn't promoted well - I only know of it because it's still around on Wikipedia...are the books any good?...meh. Scooby-Apocalypse is last man standing, anchoring rotating mini-series and one-shots introducing takes on different characters. And Apocalypse of late has been sharing space with back-up stories featuring a bizzaro take on Secret Squirrel, which looks like a spoof of Alvin and The Chipmunks movies..or any "talking cgi animal" films, because Secret is depicted as a realistically-drawn "real" rodent squirrel in a trenchcoat, working as a secret agent. Last time I checked, it looked like his tail had gotten blown-off and was bandaged..at $3.99, that's a long way for a monthly 6-pages.

Here's the thing...these books are solid proof it's possible to work on a project featuring a subject that you're not a fan of and deliver what's being asked. You really don't need to be familiar with the past incarnations of these characters to understand what's happening...because it's pretty likely that none of the creators involved watched any of those cartoons...like, literally sat down in front of a television and watched. If they had, then  they could've had more fun with creating a convincing texture that doesn't just feel like an exercise in tinkering with accuired intellectual property...the Flintstones book had some interesting moments, but it seemed to ask us to take seriously what was always meant to be a gentle parody of sitcom tropes at heart, not a socio-economic, socio-political allegory. Ambitious, yes. Fun?...

...suppose I give the benefit of the doubt. Let's say Jimmy Palmiotti loves The Jetsons...but they don't live in Brooklyn. He had Harley Quinn move to Brooklyn. He had Deadpool go to Brooklyn. He had Superboy move to a Metropolis counterpart to Brooklyn. Orbit City is a series of elevated platforms on poles that are grouped into a "city"; it has no boroughs. It's suggested that the Beyond version of The Jetsons Orbit City exists hovering over a submerged New York City...so they live over Brooklyn. Try as he night, Jimmy doesn't really have his frame-of-reference accessible to him, so the only story he can tell is to have Brooklyn emerge from the depths of the ocean and threaten to destroy Orbit City...that's revenge for spoiling his muse.
The only book that felt like it appreciated what was there before..or seemed to, was Future Quest, but I thought it was just okay. It's plot felt stretched thin and it sotta lacked empathy. It wants to be Crisis On The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera using their action-adventure guys, but it needed more wrinkles in the plot, more interesting character mashups and less cliched crossover tropes.

So here's the other thing: it's possible to be a fan and not really have stories to tell within the context of premise you've been given...or you can be the experiened journeyman who creates suspense by making you wonder if he's familiar with these characters or just having a laugh. The Dastardly and Muttley comic looks like Garth Ennis couldn't be bothered to recreate theplot of the TV series and is really revisiting his Adventures of The Rifle Brigade concept that burlesqued army comedies...and hinting that he hates cartoons? I can't tell. The plot is that the Earth has become exposed to a poison gas that is radically transforming all people, places and things into people, places and things, creating multiple gory casualties as real-life physics collides with cartoon physics in transition. Any resemblance to Dick Dastardly and Muttley is coincidental. Any resemblance to the plot of Cool World is also coincidental.

At present, there's The Ruff and Reddy Show and The Snagglepuss Chronicles. Both remind me of that issue of Astro City about Loony Leo, the cartoon lion who came to life during a superhero skirmish and enjoyed the ups and downs of celebrity life. It was done in one issue and didn't wear out it's welcome. These other two series are set as six-issue mini-series. I don't think they'll accomplish the same beats as eloquently as Kurt Busiek did in that single issue, but my point is both mini-series don't have a lot to say..of course, if you imagined/fancied Huckleberry Hound and Snagglepuss as more than just thinly-veiled caricatures of the Cowardly Lion and Droopy Dog, then you get to see that...

I can't help wondering what they'll try next...how about Penelope Pitstop remodeled to look like Baby Doll from Sucker Punch? Or Inch-High Private Eye's mysteries within the context of The Incredible Shrinking Man? Or Super Snooper & Blabber Mouse fashioned after Benedict Cumberbatch & Martin Freeman in Sherlock? Peter Potamas as Doctor Who? Wally Gator as The Maze Runner?...

All of these things could happen...because it's all apocryphal..so this is fine.

About That Justice League Movie...

Justice League made it's money back, but with only a little bit of "fun money" for profit. I liked it, but I liked Wonder Woman and Batman vs. Superman, but not Man of Steel and kinda lukewarm towards Suicide Squad, so I wasn't insistent on some fidelity to every element of what came before.

Beat for beat, this Justice League movie seemed to be replicating plot points from Joss Whedon's first Avengers film, even borrowing the same auteur for reshoots/band-aids to inject doses of humor/empathy from its stars, as if to keep it from looking like a video game. I'm not a fan of the Avengers films - those two movies look like an assembly of well-paid, attractive people wearing/posing in various costumes and reciting patches of dialogue during an expensive photo shoot. The audiences collective  imagination did all the heavy lifting and applied context behind the magnitude of what we're seeing...I'm going to go on record and say the one film I truly enjoyed from Marvel Studios was Thor: Ragnarok.

It wasn't false advertising - we did get all of DC Comics best-known superheroes and Cyborg (again, lagniappe, though he's appeared a lot in cartoons, so he's not obscure), PLUS...a lot of Gal Godat, looking phenomenal and memorizing. We also get Ezra Miller as The Flash, looking like the son of Jimmy Fallon & Carrie Brownstein and unintentionally pissing off hardcore fans of Grant Gustin, the TV Flash, but I think Miller's performance does a better job at selling the character's humorous side..maybe to the point where he might've been better-cast as Plastic Man, but that character wasn't in the cards. And how is Ben as Batman? Much has been texted around the net about Affleck looking like he'd rather be elsewhere nowadays, but I think they're misreading his performance...and he's not bothering to clue anyone in. Ben's Batman seems to act more at-ease when he's wearing the batsuit and more tightly wound in civilian clothes, as if he needs to overcompensate for not wearing a batsuit in Bruce's dealings with others. It's a subtle thing that's completely ignored, but it makes his Batman/Bruce Wayne more interesting than Christian Bale or Clooney and Kilmer. Michael Keaton's Batman has an added gravitas; modern reception to Adam West's Batman has a lot of goodwill. And Kevin Conroy just has the quintessential voice you want Batman to have. Affleck's Bat seems a little closer to something iconic mired by appearing in ambivalently-received films. Pity that his next appearance might be a supporting role in Flashpoint, since it's the same rut with Mark Ruffalo not appearing in a solo Hulk film. I do wish Affleck had just gone ahead and filmed his script for The Batman as initially planned. As some consolation prize, we got a cameo by Joe Manganiello as Slade Wilson (Deathstroke), who would've been the main villain in Affleck's film.

I want to say the fault lies with the story. If you don't want to have the guys fight Darkseid just yet, then, instead of Steppenwolf (which sounded like a missed opportunity to feature music from the rock band with the similar-sounding name)  have them fight a psychotic mind-controlling starfish, instead. I'm not kidding - the first-ever Justice League of America adventure featured a battle with Starro, a massive alien starfish. The first Avengers film aped the first issue of that comic book by featuring a battle against Loki, so why didn't the Justice League fight Starro? Would it be too silly-looking? Heaven forbid. The only really interesting element of Jack Kirby's Fourth World concept to me were the Mother Boxes, because they foresaw the invention of miniature computers: pocket calculators, digital notebooks, laptops, smartphones, iPads..etc - except in this film, where they'd depicted as big, clunky cubes. I also enjoyed his parody of Stan Lee's public image with the Funky Flashman character..and about 45% of Mister Miracle, but...The King was a really clunky writer..

I had no problem with the cast, the crew or the shorter length of the film..but I do believe it suffered from the lack of a dazzling story beyond an apology for trying to make Superman a darker character over the last decade and just having the big guns...come together. I don't know if fighting a giant starfish or a gang of thugs dressed like playing cards would've been better, but it would've offered more-appealing visuals that cued audiences about what the movie was going to try to be...

Fun.