After They #ReleaseTheSnyderCut ...

Most movies nowadays are filmed on digital cameras and the footage is stored on hard drives, which would be about the same size as the sought-after "Mother Box" that is a key plot device in the live-action Justice League movie.

It's a smartphone, it's a virtual assistant, it's a universal remote, it's a personal computer, it's a pocket calculator, it's an alarm clock, it's a portable dimensional portal generator...

 Snyder kept a separate hard drive containing his copy of the footage he shot - allegedly enough content for a 4 or 5-hours long film...a very different movie from the shortened, reshot film that was presented in theatres under his name by his replacement, Avengers director Joss Whedon, who had been brought in to...make it more like the films at Marvel Studios, effectively giving us The Whedon Cut...

That's not Gal Godat, by the way...that's her stunt double. Godat refused to do that scene. Ezra Miller on the other hand...

And then there's this abomination:

       "What the heck was that!?"

I don't blame Snyder for wanting to disown a cut of a film that he claims used only a quarter of the work he did. This upcoming "Director's Cut" is unfinished business. I remember liking the film we got, but I never rewatched it since. And I still haven't subscribed to any streaming services...I just figure that when "Zack Snyder's Justice League" debuts on HBOMax, it should be good enough to also be released on DVD/BLU-RAY.

         Hey, where's Daffy Duck?

What I find more tantalizing to me is the faint possibility of sequels. I don't dislike Darkseid, but aside from "Rock of Ages", a lot of the Justice League vs. Darkseid stories are pretty flat to me. If Snyder does a sequel to his final cut, it should incorporate elements of one of the few big, epic tales from DC Comics that managed to catch on..I already mentioned "Rock of Ages", but recent news about Marvel Studios having no plans for a "Deadpool 3" started rumors that Ryan Reynolds might come to Warner Brothers to give Green Lantern another try...obviously, it would be more his way than the first go-around, but that got me thinking about Zero Hour:

The CW television series' "Arrowverse" already adapted Crisis On Infinite Earths, so it's natural that Zero Hour gets a look. For one thing, this arc, unlike Crisis, features more of the A-list DC stable, with a lot of fun moments where they encounter different incarnations of each other. How fun would it be to have Robert Pattinson, Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck as different versions of Batman onscreen? Likewise, Henry Cavill, Brandon Routh, Tom Welling and Tyler Hoechin as different versions of Superman? Then there's Batgirl Barbara Gordon having a key role. You could also have Lynda Carter, Grant Gustin, Stephen Amell...it goes on..

  That's right..Lily Collins is Batgirl.

The plot of "Zero Hour" is Crisis in miniature - a villain named Extant appears to be screwing with timelines, resulting in characters from parallel worlds interacting with each other...then it's revealed that Extant was just a puppet for Hal Jordan, who had become drunk-with-power villain Parallax in the 1990's, in his scheme to rewrite history...which sounds like Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet..

I do find Hal as Parallax a more-interesting villain than Darkseid, plus, Reynolds has more of a beat to play than he did before - I wouldn't mind if the film adaptation of "Zero Hour" reveals that he is being used as a puppet by Darkseid, obviously ditching the character of Extant entirely and improvising this new arc that opens up things here and there. Extant was too sketchy to be interesting, despite Geoff Johns efforts to bring him back..

      Eh...the stuff that 'back issue'          boxes are full of...

Besides, Reynolds' experience filming "Green Lantern" had rewards of it's own..

            Blake Lively is a fox..

Justice League: Zero Hour...that's a sequel I want to see..ironically based on a quarter of the actual plot of the mini-series that it's based on, but there's a nice symmetry in that...Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame don't exactly resemble Jim Starlin's Infinity Gauntlet, either.

#FlashbackFriday - The Cereal-ized #JusticeLeague

These comics were critic-proof. You get a free mini-comic inside a box of cereal. Bagged, of course. The only difficulty lay in the fact that they were randomly inserted into the boxes, so you were always at risk of getting "repeat" copies of comics (I'm reminded of the scene in Evan Dorkin's "Eltingville Club" comics, where Josh goes insane searching for specific trading cards packed in bundles of sliced bread at a supermarket). With luck, I only wound up with 1 repeat copy and got all 4.

These were simple Justice League stories, although juggling a large group of characters like that in an itty-bitty amount of story space is a feat, so it's hardly a simple matter. Each issue spotlighted a specific character and juxtaposed a flashback to their respective origins amidst repercussions felt in an adventure happening to the team in the present day. 

There are neat tidbits of things: Batman's mommy, Martha Wayne's vocation as a professional artist (a rare bit of character development for a character that is mostly unknown aside from serving as a catalyst in her son's story); Bat-Mite's rivalry with Mr. Mxyzptlk; Green Lantern's Simon & Jessica coming off like Wonder Twin analogues...It's nice that the comics were done by actual veterans and not freelance newcomers, so you can definitely meet them on the convention circuit, but this was all done to coincide with the release of the Justice League movie, which came and went. 

One thing that's kept this promotion from being entirely forgotten is the cereal boxes, particularly the one with Wonder Woman on the box of Multi-Grain Cheerios. I have never seen that box of cereal on any supermarket or grocery store shelf during that time. I saw the other General Mills cereals featuring their mascots dressed as DC Comics superhero characters: The Trix rabbit as Superman; Sonny, The Cocoa-Puffs bird as The Flash; Lucky, the Lucky Charms leprechaun as Green Lantern; the Honey Nut Cheerios bee dressed as Batman (or Bat-Mite, perhaps), but no Wonder Woman on Multi-Grain Cheerios.

The only time I saw that image in particular were in two places: on Neal Adams Facebook page  (for he was the artist who illustrated the character in this promotion) and in-person, when I visited Neal's "gallery" on Free Comic Book Day that year  (this was in 2017). The boxes were offered as merchandise available for sale at the "gift shop" corner of his gallery...which in all honesty, was clearly his Continuity Studios office in midtown Manhattan, which he toyed briefly with offering guided tours under the auspices of the location being an art gallery but was clearly an office space that we were invited to look around and brose the decor...it was nice, if dimly-lit in places and the corridor was a tight fit to maneuver when traveling among a group of four while nodding "Mmm-hmm, a-ha, mm-hmm, a-ha, oh, yes, that's interesing!", but yes, it was interesting. The man is a living legend, so it was a fun opportunity. His private office had a model globe illustrating that "Expanding Earth"/"Hollow Earth" theory, which he did not create, but has become associated with because he talks about it more often than those who did originate it..imagine a round, blue balloon with a single slice of pizza lying face down ontop of it...and that's it. He was also giving out free signed copies of reproductions of The Neal Adams Sketchbook, a sampler that he used to sell in the late-70's/early-80's that offered xeroxed reproductions of line-art. It was worth getting just for his drawing of Atomic Mouse, a character that probably should be dusted off and brought back, preferably with Neal's design, which reminds me of Andy Panda:

Ain't that cute?

I remember he signed that new "edition" free and then charged a fee if you wanted anything else signed. I got my copy of Batman: A Celebration Of 75 Years signed, simply because I had brought it along with me and those "Anniversary" books from that time seem built for that purpose.

An autograph book? 

 But I didn't buy the cereal box. I have never paid more than five bucks for any box of cereal and those boxes on display were priced at more than a sawbuck...I wonder if Neal still has them...I'm assuming he has the same bunch he used for that photo of them bundled in that tiny shopping cart. My dad used to save an old can of lager beer because it had a baseball-themed image on it, like an old-time baseball card, but that can got thrown away because the metal rusted and...well, it's kind of a gross idea to collect and trade beer cans like bubble gum cards...or Camel Cash, if anyone out there remembers that.

Neal's experiment with tourism made for a fun Free Comic Book Day memory. And I still have those mini-comics, so I can go back and read them, so I don't have to remember what they were about.

Now...Atomic Mouse..when are they gonna bring him back? Maybe the guys at American Mythology would be interested...

The Great Justice League #Fancast of 2014...

I'm just going to hazard an assumption that fans of superhero teams like to imagine their own lineups. Like NBA draft picks. In 2014, I posted on Instagram two pages from my bullet journal of a Justice League lineup that consisted of 1) Azrael, Batgirl, Hawkman, Captain Marvel, Green Lantern & Plastic Man and 2) Azrael, Batgirl, The Atom, Hawkman, Vibe and Element Woman.

Considering that it was 2014, it was a very timely bit of casting. Barbara Gordon was back as Batgirl after 25 years spent wheelchair-bound as Oracle; Vibe had been sharply modified in large part by appearing as a supporting character in The Flash; Element Woman had appeared prominently in the Flashpoint mini-series and was presumably going to appear more often (she didn't). The point behind the two images was me imagining two or three years worth of stories, so this pipe-dream follows the tradition of shuffling the team roster midway through the tenure to keep things fresh. I even imagined Azrael's habit of wearing different costumes come into play - I used an image from when Sergio Cariello was drawing him, followed by the red armored costume he wore in Knightquest. 

So...of course, I  paid attention to Azrael appearing in Justice League Odyssey. Did somebody involved in the book see my post from 6 years ago and say, "Okay"? It's an extraordinary coincidence to use a character who had been in mothballs from DC canonical continuity for almost two decades. I remember turning Hal Jordan into The Spectre was based on a suggestion from a message board...having the 90's incarnation of Superboy be revealed as a clone made from DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor was inspired by a fan letter that got published in an issue of said placeholder's comic book.

At the end of the day, every idea gets used. I didn't imagine Congorilla joining the Justice League, but that was something James Robinson had in his bullet journal..maybe they just get willed into existence that way. Or we're just reading the same stuff. I'm not going to go into too much detail on how my take on these characters working together would've worked out, but hopefully it will inspire their existence.

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.