#Top5ComicBooks of 2015: #5 - "Resident Alien: The Sam Hain Mystery" by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse

I'm surprised Resident Alien hasn't been optioned for a TV series..yet. From Dark Horse Comics, this sci-fi/detective series has good characters that would be fun to watch, but part of it's appeal is that it has a nice quiet, low-key tone to it. It's protagonist looks like an older Chameleon Boy from The Legion of Superheroes mixed with the cool demeanor of Mister Spock..it's the Martian Manhunter comic book I would love to read from DC Comics, but they're not delivering. Thankfully, the team of Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse are offering something much better.

Stranded space alien Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle lives in the small town of Patience, Washington and presides as the resident 'town doctor'. He has a recessive telepathic ability that allows him to cloud minds and interact casually among humans without an elaborate disguise. Part of the suspense comes from his telepathy allowing a margin of error; there are humans capable of seeing his true form, particularly Asta, his nurse at the clinic, who became his friend and confidante. Since his showdown with a serial killer in the first arc, he's often shown walking with a cane after a leg injury. There's a subplot involving government agents slowly investigating his whereabouts, and a lingering mystery about the orange lunchbox-shaped object he's carried with him (the only article he's kept since his spaceship crashed) but that's still in the background. It's a bit Northern Exposure meets Diagnosis Murder with 5% Twin Peaks thrown in...those are awfully dated refrences..I'll add Gravity Falls to it...like if Ford was revealed to be half-alien, less of an egghead and solved mysteries rather them compile them in journals, he'd be Harry Vanderspeigle.

At the forefront of the series is Harry's aplomb as an amateur sleuth. In The Sam Hain Mystery, he discovers the mystery novelist he admires may have resided in the town of Patience and left behind an unpublished manuscript with the town doctor - Harry's predecessor, but the only known writer of note is a cookbook author...

It's the third arc of the series and a fourth - The Man With No Name - will debut this year. It's schedule is similar to new episodes of Sherlock - a series of mini-series, so there's no chance the creators will tire of it or give in to nonsensical storylines. This series is a class act that is worth your time.

5 Ways to Write A Martian Manhunter Movie

With The Avengers a rip-roaring success for Disney, fans on the Internet are busy wondering when Warner Brothers will launch a Justice League of America film. They tried before, with George Miller as the director and a script that tied-in to then-current storylines like The OMAC Project and Checkmate, but he had cast too many relative unknowns as the heroes and the script had been rushed into production too quickly.

There's a lot of talk about how c  following the formula Disney-Marvel made to get to an Avengers film would not be possible - Christian Bale is done playing Batman, Green Lantern tanked, Zack Snyder's The Man of Steel  is still a question mark and nobody knows what to do with Wonder Woman or The Flash. So everyone is looking toward the rest : Hawkman, Martian Manhunter, Plastic Man...etc. I want to play, too, starting with the other green guy - not the Hulk, not the Green Hornet, not the Spectre, not Green Arrow, not Green Lantern (he needs a break)...J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter .

I already mentioned in a previous post that I imagined Taylor Lautner as the Martian Manhunter and I haven't been turned off yet by that decision (the character is shirtless and pantless most of the time, so we need a popular young actor with pecs that can carry over 120 minutes). He played Sharkboy, for crying out loud! As for the voice, that's moot. Lawrence Fishburne was the voice of the Silver Surfer, so why not try casting him again as the voice of J'onn? There we go. Actor? Check. Voice? Check.

Also, the powers. MM has a wide range - he's Superman with extra powers, or the Fantastic Four-in-1. He can shapeshift/stretch, become invisible/intangible, has super "breath" (he can blow out any candles on any birthday cake), flight, super-strength,super-speed, "Flame vision" (fire shoots out of his eyes) and is telepathic. He is also a compulsive snacker: he loves Oreo cookies, or any other sandwich cookies (obviously, I would love to see a package of Oreos with J'onn J'onzz on the wrapper. That would be just right). He also may or may not still have a fear of fire...and may or may not still be the last of his kind...I'd rather avoid all that continuity baggage and focus on J'onn as an interesting complete character.

The villains - the White Martians, Scorch (a winged devil-gargoyleish chick with firestarting powers), Bette Noir (an albino vampire, kind of like Batman foe Nocturna, but BN is a vampire, whereas Nocturna was just a glamed-up goth who played like a vampire)...I'd throw the Ultra-Humanite in there because he'd offer a  great visual - an albino ape with a Broccoli-shaped head and the voice of Jeremy Irons. Works for me.
Directors are tricky. I wouldn't mind Brad Bird or Terry Gilliam taking a crack at it - they would find a way out of the rut that a lot of these superhero movies are in - MM  would/should have a different approach to it...

5 approaches...as short as possible.

Film Noir - yes, yes, in this genre, there are no winners, but who cares? In the comics, he supposedly rivals Batman as a great detective, so I would revisit The Maltese Falcon, only instead of a statue of a bird, how about kryptonite? An absorbascon? A talisman of the Bat-God Barbattos? Mercury's slippers? A golden lasso? set-up, set-up, set-up, set-up...

High Noon - how about planting the seeds for the rise of the Justice League with the disbanding of the Justice League International? J'onn has to suddenly put down the cookies and save Earth on his own, showcasing the full range of his powers. I would pit him against Manga Khan, who always seems one step away from the Fourth World  villains of Apokilips... set-up, set-up, set-up...

"It's Like Die Hard But With A Martian Superhero!" - I couldn't resist that old chestnut, but think about it - J'onn rivals Batman in efficiency as well as deductive reasoning. This could be fun. Supervillains only, please. Bank robbers and generic Bond villains need not apply.

Remington Steele - The romantic comedy. He's fronting a struggling detective agency run by an attractive and intelligent, but neurotic P.I. and they go search for that macguffin I'd set up in the film noir pitch. How about Pierce Brosnan dubbing the voice?

Supermax - a few years ago, there was a pitch for a high-concept Green Arrow feature inspired by the TV series Prison Break, in which Green Arrow wound up in a prison filled with DC Comics Supervillains. Sharp-eyed fans might recognize the story played out in Marvel Comics' Thunderbolts with Hawkeye, not GA. Anyway, forget Green Arrow - why not let it happen to J'onn J'onzz? The concept would still work, only it would rise more to the occasion because you had a superhero who could put up a real fight.

Anyway, that's enough from me. It's time Hollywood put the spaghetti in the machine and started rolling. I know a place that sells green paint real cheap.

Martians Can't Jump

As with Tintin, the Internet is full of people posting their two cents on why John Carter got trounced... by a Jonah Hill comedy... and the foofawraw over The Hunger Games. Of course, I'll drop my million cents into the bucket.

I notice that the film was not promoted particularly well. Disney didn't front Lynn Collins and Taylor Kitsch as well as, say, Jennifer Lawrence or Jennifer Love Hewitt (posters of this image are all over midtown Manhattan - on bus stops, phone booths (people still use those?):

http://www.sinlung.com/2012/03/jennifer-love-hewitt-client-list-ads.html

What about the source material? The first five books in the series are back in print (Thuvia, The Maid of Mars and The Chessman of Mars were collected in an affordable omnibus edition). Are they palatable to the tastes of a modern audience? Well...the new editions are easier to read than the teeny tiny print from those old paperbacks that used to sit on the shelves, but the prose is dated. I don't hate it - I found it has an odd taste of comfort food; John and Cathoris' (the son of John Carter and Dejah Thoris - spoiler alert!... if you did see the movie..I'm waiting for it to arrive on video, which should be very soon) have adventures that resemble travelogues of Monument Valley. I may not follow exactly what's happening (Is his companion/pet...Battlecat?) but it's not a crashing bore. Maybe there's not enough sex.

 I do find the novels don't resemble the old Marvel comics much - those pamphlets were like Conan in Outer Space, as if Robert E. Howard had not got around to writing Conan The Star Warrior or Conan The Investigator (oh, wait, wait,wait! That's my next essay! I don't want to give it away yet!). Tars Tarkas, the J'onn J'onzz/Hulk prototype, only figures into the first three adventures and fades out - in the comics, he's Carter's wingman, like Ultra Magnus to Rodimus Prime, or Will Riker to Jean-Luc Picard, or Kit Cloudkicker to Baloo or Shawn Chapman Holly to Lindsay Lohan. Dejah Thoris is usually clad in G-String and pasties - I imagine Lynn Collins could have pulled this off, though her shimmering belly dancer outfit is alluring.

Nowadays it's not enough to see just one book in a series make it to film - we need to see all the books make it. It's disappointing when the studio has to scrap their plans. Did you know that if Star Wars had bombed, Lucas would have made Splinter of The Mind's Eye for television to recoup on any losses? That might not be a great example, because they were not adapted from a series of books (well, unless anyone wants to stir to pot...).

You know what the worst thing about all this is? I own a copy of  The Warlord of Mars and won't get to see images I found hard to picture translated on screen. I'll just have to read with my hi-lighter and go through it a little slowly the next time...I'm sure the people who spent a lot on John Carter comics just to resell it online for more money than they're worth are pleased as peach -good . :)

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...