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.
There’s a part of me – as reluctant as I may be to admit it, a LARGE part – that admires and appreciates any effort to keep these characters alive in comic books… but I really can’t help but wish it wasn’t done in this particular way!
ReplyDeleteNow, I’d never trade-away the dream assignment of working on the Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge comics, as I do for IDW, but how I'd love to work on Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, or just about any Hanna-Barbera character or property created up through 1965!
Anyone familiar with the work I do at IDW knows that I would do them properly, per the classic series, and do them RIGHT! (I just wish DC *wanted* to do them RIGHT! …Guess I’m blowing my chances to work there, eh?)
But, truth to tell, DC Comics doesn’t need to figure out how to “do those characters RIGHT”!
They have had a title going for several years that does exactly that! And it “does right” by a widely-ranging spectrum of characters that exist under the Warner umbrella. That title is SCOOBY-DOO TEAM-UP!
For instance, there were certain things I liked about the recent FLINTSTONES (Beyond?) title, and there were certain things I did not.
But the FLINTSTONES property, as it appeared in SCOOBY-DOO TEAM-UP # 7, was THE FLINTSTONES done to perfection! Better than DC’s nice-but-innocuous THE FLINTSTONES AND THE JETSONS title of the late ‘90s – and even better than the early-to-mid-sixties FLINTSTONES title from Dell and Gold Key comics, which was published during the life of the TV show.
Just do THE FLINTSTONES as it was done in SCOOBY-DOO TEAM-UP! And do THE JETSONS that way! And do QUICK DRAW McGRAW that way! And do TOP CAT that way! And do SECRET SQUIRREL that way! They were all done so VERY WELL in SCOOBY-DOO TEAM-UP, that you don’t need to go “Beyond”, because you can see how great H-B was to begin with!
I think there’s nothing worse than having someone put in charge of a classic property who either “knows nothing” or “cares nothing” about it! And, SCOOBY-DOO TEAM-UP is a delightful exception to that rule!
That’s why the IDW Disney product is a good as it is, despite whatever difficulties may be involved in producing it! We, who work on the front lines (front pages?), really care about the characters because we’ve been fans all our lives! …With this, I think I may have answered your question!
It's actually possible to imagine a different extreme - the "Archie Meets The Punisher"/"Archie Meets Predator" route, where the stock company is on-model, but the story goes to a point of no return, and in the case of the Predator crossover, a very gory point of no return. That's when you realize that the target audience is people who were never into these characters enough to want to read of them in a traditional sense. As Joe Pesci's character in "Casino" put it: "Always the dollars..always the dollars."
DeleteBtw, I was able to browse through the last issue of the "Dastardly and Muttley" mini-series..and I'll be darned - Ennis ripped off the climax to "Cool World" (SPOILER) by killing off Dastardly, Muttley and Penelope, yet have them reborn as their cartoon counterparts in reruns..it's all so meta. And it's not like Garth Ennis is of the "too cool for school crowd"; he did a Dan Dare comic that purportedly read like a Valentine!