That’s right, two of DC Comics’s most powerful mortals, Superman and Captain Marvel, have their birthday today! Of course, for the Man of Steel it’s just the Earth equivalent to his Kryptonian birthday, while Captain Marvel dates his “birth” to the night young Billy Batson uttered the name “Shazam!” and was transformed into the World’s Mightiest Mortal.
Still, those are some powerful candles…
Apart from some chronic bouts of concentrated cliffhanger enthusiasm in visits with the pioneering Texas cartoonist-turned-fine artist Frank Stack, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention in recent years to the extinct form of Hollywood filmmaking known as serials, or chapter-plays.
Billy Batson will have his work cut out for him if "Shazam!" director Peter Segal has his way.
According to this report on IGN, the "Get Smart" director likes the idea of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson donning the pointy ears of Captain Marvel nemesis Black Adam. And Johnson doesn’t sound opposed to the idea, either.
According to Segal:
We were looking for something else to do together. [Johnson] said, ‘What are you working on?’ And I told him among other things Shazam!. And he said, ‘Do you think I can read a draft when you’re ready?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ John August is writing it and then we went on strike, so I don’t have a draft to show him yet. But I just started telling him the story and I thought that he might be a great Black Adam.
Segal also teased that "Shazam!" wouldn’t be the light-and-fluffy affair that "Fantastic Four" turned out to be. Instead, he said Batson’s desire to avenge the loss of his parents would provide a more serious
tone to the film.
This week it’s all about the shopping, and maybe that eating thing, too. ComicMix Radio kicks it off with our preview of new comics and DVDs that hit your stores even before the bird is stuffed or the parade kicks off, plus:
• Valiant keeps bouncing back – this time with some new X-O Manowar
• Captain Marvel and Mice Templar both go *poof* – in a good way!
• Tim Burton & Disney bring back Alice
• Coming Soon – 3-D without those annoying glasses
We’ve even got a link to a sneak peek of Black Friday deals on books & DVDs, so Press The Button!
There may be some practical reasons why the grown-for-television superheroes dress in plain clothes rather than the colorful garb of their comic book and movie counterparts.
(For those of you who came in late: we’re continuing last week’s discussion of superhero costumes.)
I remember visiting the set of one of Joel Schumacher’s Batman flicks and watching costumers take a long, long time – 15 minutes? More? – just to fit Batman’s mask on a stunt man, a process that involved putting plastic wrap on the guy’s head and then trimming it after the mask was in place. And that was just the mask. Imagine what efforts went into getting tights, cape, boots and all to fit properly. Dash into a closet – a phone booth? – for a quick change? Maybe not.
Though I have no firsthand knowledge of this, I understand that there is actually a closetful of batsuits for the actor and his various doubles; which one gets worn in a particular scene depends on the scene’s content. Are we fighting? Running? Driving our spiffy car? Standing dramatically silhouetted against the skyline? We must wear the appropriate outfit!
Subtract all this time, effort and expense from the task of garbing your good guy and you have…what? Well, have a look at either of the Batman movie serials made in the 40s for your answer. The Superman and Captain Marvel suits from that era are better, but they don’t approach the panache of the average Curt Swan or Jack Kirby drawing.
One of the panels I was most looking forward to at Wizard World Chicago was the Zudacomics panel, where Richard Bruning and Kwanza Johnson were going to show off the reader and answer questions. Sadly, their demo wasn’t working at the time, so it just turned into a lot of questions and answers. Jason Fliegel was there and covered many of the thing I wanted to, but there are a few points to add and emphasize.
Jason points out the issue of the contracts: "First… DC didn’t brief the panelists on the legalities of the deal that is being offered to creators. Or DC hasn’t figured it out themselves yet. Or both. During the panel, Bruning noted that DC would own the trademarks in the characters. I asked whether the trademarks would be registered with the Patent and Trademark Office, and if so, in what categories. Bruning and Johnson looked flabbergasted, then bullshitted me for thirty seconds before moving on to the next question. Clearly they had no idea."
Let me add: DC/Zuda will let the creators keep the copyright to the work, but they will retain the trademark. If you think that’s not a problem, let me refer you to Chris Butcher: "Trademark is interesting, it’s why the KRAZY KAT collections that Fantagraphics are doing are called Krazy & Ignatz and why the GASOLINE ALLEY collections that D+Q are doing are called Walt & Skeezix. The copyright on those early works may have fallen into the public domain, but the titles (marks) used in business (trade) haven’t, and are still owned by the syndicates." Or think Captain Marvel instead of Shazam.
At the recent Wizard World convention in Chicago, Jim Starlin was part of the DC Nation panel. Starlin created the brilliant graphic novel, The Death of Captain Marvel, which was so well done that it made me cry like a little girl even though I wasn’t that familiar with the character. A running gag throughout the hour was that, in the upcoming Final Crisis, Starlin was going to let loose and kill a bunch more characters in the DC Universe.
It’s bugged me for a few years that, in comics and sometimes in other media, death is the gag. Death is the only meaningful drama. The recent hype about the last Harry Potter book was whether or not Harry would die, and who else might join him. This misses the point.
Now, I realize that I made a lot of my reputation in this industry from the 1992 Death of Superman (and not just my extraordinary good looks and keen wit). Isn’t that what started this whole death-cult in comics?
Yes and no. I used to joke that DC had to kill Superman every seven years, whether or not he needed it. What made the 1992 event different? Some might think sold so much because the release coincided with the collector craze, but I’ve always thought it was more than that, and started even earlier. I thought it started in the fall of 1990, when Clark and Lois got engaged. The media went crazy, with stories on television news and national newspapers like USA Today. A few months later, it happened again when Clark revealed his secret identity to his beloved.
People felt like they knew the Superman family. A lot of them expected an invitation to the wedding. When they found out Doomsday was going to kill Superman, they felt like they lost a friend.
Marvel was able to evoke similarly honest feelings when Captain America died. Again, they had done their homework with the general public, explaining the central political conflict in the Marvel Universe. In this case, the increasing discontent with the Iraqi war may have also contributed to the emotional response. It’s a perfect storm of entertainment and real life.
On the west coast, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum is debuting an exhibit on Osamu Tezuka tomorrow. Creating over 700 manga titles during his lifetime, he is best known in the West for his cartoons of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. His prolific manga work contains two main streams: manga ‘comic pictures’ for a youth audience, including Astro Boy, Kimba and Princess Knight; and gekiga ‘drama pictures’—more seriously-toned, adult oriented narratives such as Song of Apollo and Ludwig B, that stress realistic effect and emotional impact. Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga ends September 9th, with a parallel exhibit, "Manga in the making" ending September 2nd.
On the east coast, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey is premiering two exhibits tomorrow as well: Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes and Comic Book Legends: Joe, Adam, and Andy Kubert, featuring over 150 comincs and drawings from 1938 to the present. The Museum will also be running comics-related movies under the stars over the summer, from the original Adventures of Captain Marvel serial this Tuesday to Superman and Batman Begins in August.
According to our friends at Publisher’s Weekly, this November Marvel is cancelling Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and Sensational Spider-Man. They’re replacing both titles with… Amazing Spider-Man.
Yep, Amazing will be coming out three times a month. This one-ups the original Captain Marvel’s twice-a-month release schedule, back in the 40s. But it does beg the question of whether Marvel will follow Mad Magazine‘s lead back in the 1960s by publishing three annuals each year.
An announcement will be made at next month’s San Diego Comic-Con as to how they’re going to juggle the talent workload.
One wonders why Marvel doesn’t just bite the bullet and make Amazing Spider-Man a weekly.
Artwork copyright Marvel Characters. All Rights Reserved. Artwork copyright Marvel Characters. All Rights Reserved. Artwork copyright Marvel Characters. All Rights Reserved.
In a bygone age of self-defeating fair-play isolationism, comparatively few outposts of the U.S. entertainment industry saw fit to take issue with the congealing Axis powers. Timely Comics’ Captain America books tackled a larger agenda of wish-fulfillment Nazi-busting in 1941 at a time when popular sentiment and much of the mass communications media, stateside, were still holding out for an anti-inflammatory approach. Just two years earlier, the lower-berth Hollywood producers Ben Judell and Sigmund Neufeld had run afoul of their industry’s attempts to repress a film called Hitler – Beast of Berlin, starting with a Production Code Administration complaint that the very title might pose an affront. It is always an awkward choice, even in the realm of heroic fiction, between pre-emptive action and a wait-and-watch attitude.
And between this difficult patch for the Judell–Neufeld movie and the ferocious début of Captain America, the Third Reich began insinuating such self-glorifying motion pictures as Campaign in Poland and Victory in the West into American theaters with impunity if not necessarily articulate English intertitles. Said the show-biz tradepaper Variety, bucking the mollifying influence of the Production Code: “Instead of making Americans frightened of the terrible power of the Reich’s Army, [Victory in the West] inflames them.”
The Captain America stories may have been thusly inflamed, but likelier Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the talents responsible, were springing from an intuitive sense of developments more appalling than any ostentatious display of aggression. (Superman had tackled fictional-allegory aggressors and, then, squared off against Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin as early as 1940 – though far outside his own formal continuity, in an isolated gimmick story for Look magazine.)
As emphatic a stand belonged to the comics series known as Spy Smasher, from Fawcett Publications. The property’s retooling as a movie serial began taking shape in 1941 at Republic Pictures – which recently had adapted Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, with a tone markedly grimmer than that of the funnybooks – and a shooting script was completed shortly before the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. It was with a newfound sense of propagandistic ferocity that the Spy Smasher serial went into production on Dec. 22. The attraction began arriving in weekly big-screen installments on April 4, 1942.
The movie version takes some savvy liberties with the source, providing the lead character – Alan Armstrong, alias Spy Smasher – with an entirely civilian twin named Jack, and thus obliging star player Kane Richmond to handle essentially three roles. A recurring villain called the Mask was literally un-masked for the screen, allowing Hans Schumm a richer opportunity for characterization.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
