Fantastic Floored

Are the Fantastic Four cool? I don't think so. I don't think they are edgy or dark or, to be honest, likable or heroic in an archetypal sense - they're too flawed. What makes them an effective superhero team is that they're dependant on eachother to accomplish anything. Reed Richards likes to work in solitude, Sue Storm-Richards is often described as having potential to be the real powerhouse heart & soul of the team, but while she does have her moments, she is not Wonder Woman. Johnny is a giant dork who thinks he's cool, but always runs the risk of being a fatuous phony. Franklin is the wild card - one moment, he's this ordinary, sometimes saccharine Beaver Cleaver-type, the next..he might as well be a djinn. Valeria thinks Doctor Doom is a cool guy and would probably leaves the back door open for him to crash family events. Namor is the myopic homewrecker. As for Victor, he's the guy who has everything, but not exactly to his liking.

And then there's Ben - The Thing. This guy can hold his own against The Hulk, knows how to fly rocketships and has a college education..yet he likes to downplay his intelligence, which is interesting..but never explored much.

All these characters play off eachother and are dependent on eachother...but they are not The Incredibles. That lazy analogy keeps coming up and bores me because the Fantastic Four have a much richer, varied and interesting world than the one depicted in that Pixar film.

I have a theory that nobody really knows what to do with these characters, which is why I'm convinced we've seen a lot of boring/unremarkable/awful comics, cartoons and movies with them. I think it's because the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby run is so highly regarded that the book stagnated and went out of gas, creativity, although John Byrne and Walt Simonson's respective tenures do have a lot of fans. But the consensus, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!", has resulted in either crude pastiche or grotesque reinvention, appealing to fewer people each time. Consider how Doctor Doom was once regarded as one of the greatest comic book villains, the inspiration for Darth Vader, even - yet his portrayals on film have cast him as a roadshow also-ran. Sailor Moon could beat him up.

"The 21st Century Superhero: Essays On Gender, Genre and Globalization In Film", Edited by Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kaklamanidou

It is possible to publish a book of essays about superhero movies without discussing the source material. That's what this book was, as well as offering an argument that the films made in the early-2000s had allusions to 9-11, the war in Iraq and American military action, all within a narrow margin...it feels like it had a limited sell-by date, with some discussions dated by their choice of films to examine  ( it's been a long time since anyone talked much about Hancock, Aeon Flux or the Kick-Ass movies ), but there are some good tidbits:

*Bruce Banner's exile in Brazil's favelas, as depicted in The Incredible Hulk, piqued the author's interest more than the remaining 2/3 of the film ( so...somebody liked at least some of that movie ).

*Jean Grey's "..limited cinematic presence" in the original X-Men film trilogy  is a reflection on "the mythos of patriarchy" in the films - in other words, she doesn't have enough screen time to develop into an interesting character..unless it's a character development that serves the mechanics of the script, i.e., everything centers around Professor X, Magneto, and  especially Wolverine.

*In his efforts at "Understanding 'Hotness' in the superhero film genre", Richard J. Gray had quite a lot to say about Ellen Page's sex appeal as Kitty Pryde. Considering how she barely had about 15-20 minutes of screen time and the essay was focused on her debut in X-Men: The Last Stand...I say he was smitten with Page...she was appealing in Super, though nobody has ever written this much about her attractiveness since - far less was written about her coming out a while back. He also has a crush on Jessica Alba, since he seems to give her shrill, vapid Sue Storm in Fantastic Four a favorable review. Even Halle Berry's Catwoman gets a light love tap of criticism, so whether he wrote the essay to talk shop about attractive female superheroes and ponder why they were sexy or critique their sexualized image is moot.

*No surprise that several essays compared Christopher Nolan's work on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight as commentaries on life post-9/11, but what caught my eye was a shout out to Batman Unmasked, a book I reffered to in my previous blog post as a possible inspiration for Grant Morrison's take on Batman, even confirming my suspicion by noting the passage I vaguely remembered..so now I don't have to hunt for that out-of-print book just to check out a hunch!

*I've never read any of Marvel's Kick-Ass or seen the movies, so I wouldn't be able to agree or disagree if the films share a correlation with the Spider-Man movies in their contrasting use of voiceover narration reflecting the masculinity of their respective effete protagonists, but I do know that nobody's rallying for more sequels to Kick-Ass.

*I'm actually bored with reading material that puts Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen on a pedestal, because I don't really think it's the greatest comic ever written and drawn - I just respect the effort that the creators made at telling this story. I do agree with the essay in this book arguing that the film adaptation succeeded in being a pastiche of film noir, but that's what the comic book did, and Snyder was simply following it. It's hampered by the fact that it features an ensemble cast of also-rans, could've-beens and never-weres, so it feels like we're watching a big-budget made-for-cable mini-series on Starz or Reelz instead of a proper superhero adventure film.

So..the book essentially covers what I would argue was the formulative stage of modern superhero movies. If Avengers is being considered the definitive maturation of this genre and Tim Burton's Batman films the embryonic, then the films covered in this book premiering between 2000 and 2011 are formulative development...but that's my hypothesis. If the authors had thought of that, they would've cranked out two sequel books of essays by now..

Writing stories for other writers - Special One-shot, 2nd print

The idea of taking a comic book superhero "Back-to-Basics" is nothing new. Every few years, Batman has to demand a little "Alone Time" from his surrogate family of sidekicks and goes solo. The Justice League headquarters gets blown-up or abandoned in favor of a new pad run by a smaller team of six or seven. A hero retires for the civilian life and passes the costume to someone else (though this is often not as smooth as it sounds). A company goes belly-up and a new company aquires the characters and decides to start fresh. The Green Lantern Corps and the X-Men have a massacre or two. Savage Dragon gets regular 'breaks' -killed off and replaced by other 'Dragons' for a time in rotations. Spider-Man and Superman have chunks of recent history erased. The latter three are the most extreme examples.

There is an alternative to having a character wipe the slate clean to tell new stories - wipe the continuity slate clean to re-tell familiar stories. Now, it's one thing to re-tell the story of how Batman met the Joker to a new audience that's never read the old stuff before. It's one thing to want to re-tell an old story because the original seems dated (the origin of the Fantastic Four is an example). It's one thing to joke about how it seems like the only Spider-Man stories anyone wants to tell are the ones with the clone, the dead Uncle, the crappy boss, the dead girlfriend, and the feeble Aunt. But how about this: I'm re-telling a familiar story because I want a Hollywood screenwriter to see it and take ques from it.

Let us suppose that a movie starring ... J'onn J'onnzz, The Martian Manhunter is in development hell because the screenplay gathering dust lacks snap.  Well, how about re-launching his comic book (he managed to have one for a while on the heals of the successful JLA launch, which made the animated Justice League/Justice League Unlimited possible, which is a good example of this phenomena) but within the context of something hip and happening right now.

Bear with me...these pitches only sell in a single sentence, more or less:

"Martian Manhunter - It's like Twilight with superheroes - Taylor Lautner as J'onn J'onnz, the Manhunter from Mars - he'll have his shirt off for 1/2 of the film."

Now I'll plot a 12-24 issue arc that incorporates his origin, along with all the bells and whistles to make it fit my one-sentence pitch, and be sure to set it up in a way that could help launch a Martian Manhunter film.

That's an example of using a character that's okay, yet kind of so-so...he's actually the only member of the League that does NOT have a movie in the works. Not a single one. I figured playing an all-purpose superpowered semi-clothed Martian would be a cinch for a former sharkboy-turned-werewolf.

Now Geoff Johns has a storyline in the new Justice League comic book that's easy to visualize as a storyline for a movie - the league meets and teams up to fight the ultimate representation of pure evil in the DC Universe. Sure, they've spent the last two issues fussing over a Mother Box, but that's the stuff of deleted scenes. Besides, Mother Boxes are nifty. They're iphone12's - can you imagine? That's their function, yet they're often portrayed/talked about casually like old Rubix cubes, dial-up or Compuserve. Not here. They've spent two issues picking at it like the fancy toy that it is, even at risk of seeming like hitting a creative dead end. Whatever. I wish Marvel did something like that with the Cosmic Cube - what the heck is that, really? It's a strong-enough Macguffin to build an Avengers movie, that's what, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Besides, I don't find Darkseid very exciting. He's become more like a sparring partner at a boxing match than a really entertaining villain. A large statue with blinking laser eyes. All rope-a-dope. zzzzzzzzz...If the 1st six issues are devoted to this cosmic Chinese puzzle box with Darkseid creeping in for a cameo in the final panel - well, this was written for me to read, then!

Don't get me wrong - I'm not using my deductive powers for evil and predicting that Johns is going to try to top Joss' lil' ol' film before it clears the editing room, or that he's telling a familiar story with familiar plot devices to show how easy it would be to get a JLA movie made... well, yeah, I just did. I'm pretending I didn't so that I won't spoil my fun.

I wonder if Lautner has his own production company? He's got to stock-up on green spray paint for the big screen test...