It’s Thanksgiving at the Justice League of America household and things are just as awkward for them as they might be for your family. Join Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and more as they give thanks. Via the Nerdist: http://www.nerdist.com
Written by Joseph M Petrick and Andrew Bowser
Directed by Andrew Bowser
Cast:
Wonder Woman: Valerie Perez
Batman: James Mastraieni
Superman: Ryan Stanger
Aquaman: Steve Szlaga
Green Lantern: William Sterling
The Flash: Steven Meissner
Raven: Celia Sutton
Ms Marvel: Olivia Taylor Dudley
Green Arrow: Bradford Jackson
Robin: Jesse McKeil
Martian Manhunter: Charlie Sanders
Wonder Woman Cosplay Courtesy of Valerie Perez
Superman Cosplay Courtesy of William Sterling
Batman Cosplay Courtesy of Sam Schmucker
Aquaman Cosplay Courtesy of Christopher Cho
Green Lantern Cosplay Courtesy of Thomas Parham
Green Arrow Cosplay Courtesy of Sam McClellan
Flash Cosplay Courtesy of Steven Meissner
Robin Cosplay Courtesy of Kelly Mark
Raven Cosplay Courtesy of Celia Sutton
Ms. Marvel Cosplay Courtesy of Mandie Bettencourt
“Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country”
Horace Greely
Editor, New York Tribune
July 13, 1865 Editorial
The New York Tribune, established in 1841, was the most progressive and influential newspaper of its day. Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the paper, was a notable social reformer and political activist and through his leadership, the Tribune advocated for abolition, the legal protection of unions, protectionism (known today as anti-globalization or anti-free trade), and against nativism, the political position of demanding a favored status for certain established inhabitants of a nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants. (In modern America Greely would be considered a leftist liberal Democrat, though in the antebellum, Civil War, and eras those beliefs belonged to the Republican nee Whig Party.)
Today a statue of Greeley sits at 33rd Street and Broadway in Greely Square, directly across the street and south of Herald Square, home to Macy’s and the end point of the Thanksgiving Day parade where the Rockettes do their famous line kick dance every fourth Thursday of November.
I know that statue well, for Greely Square is also across the street (and above) from the 33rd PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) terminus. And the PATH train was the way I commuted into New York City whenever I needed be at DC Comics, back when the company “lived” at 666 Fifth Avenue.
Last week – Tuesday, Tuesday, October 22, to be exact – Diane Nelson, President of DC Entertainment, sent a memo to DC employees. You might have seen it already, but here it is:
Dear DCE Team,
As I hope you know, I and the entire DCE exec team work hard to offer transparency about as much of our business plans and results as we possibly and responsibly can. In an effort to continue to do that where possible and to ensure you are hearing news from us, rather than a third party, I am proactively reaching out to you this afternoon to share news about our business.
I can confirm that plans are in the works to centralize DCE’s operations in 2015. Next week, the Exec Team will be in New York for a series of meetings to walk everyone through the plans to relocate the New York operations to Burbank. The move is not imminent and we will have more than a year to work with the entire company on a smooth transition for all of us, personally and professionally.
Everyone on the New York staff will be offered an opportunity to join their Burbank colleagues and those details will be shared with you individually, comprehensively and thoughtfully next week. Meeting notifications will be sent tomorrow to ensure the roll out* of this information and how it affects the company and you personally.
We know this will be a big change for people and we will work diligently to make this as smooth and seamless a transition as possible.
Best,
Diane
My first reaction when I saw it was “Oh, maaaaaan.” My second reaction was “knew it was going to happen.”
My third reaction was sadness, and, surprisingly, since it’s been thirty (!) years since I first stepped onto the PATH train in Jersey City (New Jersey) and took it to 33rd Street and Greely Square to walk up the Avenue of the Americas and west on 53rd Street to 666 Fifth Avenue and the offices of DC Comics, a feeling of dislocation. I felt cast adrift, even though 99% of my friends and co-workers no longer work at DC, and, in fact, the office itself has long since moved to 1700 Broadway, across from the Ed Sullivan Theatre, home of the David Letterman Show.
Many people on various websites have commented on the move. The news media picked it up, including a rather stupid, no, correct that, very stupid piece on WPIX Channel 11 (CW-NYC) while on break at work on Wednesday. I suppose the segment producers thought they were being clever, because they tied the news into some guy who wants to start a “superhero” school in the city, although actually it looked more like self-defense classes for kids. As far as the DC thing, they showed animated Superman and Batman, etc. on the screen, and then the reporter signed off and “flew off.”
But no one thought of the history behind the thousands of four-color pages produced by DC. No one thought of interviewing Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel that chronicles the rise of the comics industry in New York City though thinly veiled characters based on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and dozens of other early comics professionals. No one thought to interview those writers and artists who made their name at DC.
And no one thought of the history behind the hundreds of thousands of four-color adventures that started out as a way for those writers and artists to earn a living during the Depression and became the mythology of the 20th century, a doorway into imagination for generations, for hundreds of thousands of dreamers who grew up to become artists and writers and police officers and f, refighters and astronauts and astrophysicists because of those four-color pages, those adventures of Superman and Batman and the Flash and Wonder Woman and Green Lantern and the Martian Manhunter and so many, many more, inspired them.
Yes, Marvel Comics is still here. (But for how long?) Yes, many of those who created those adventures never lived in New York City or its surroundings, originally mailing in their work, then faxing in it, then e-mailing their pages over the internet. Yes, Marvel Comics is still here. (But for how long?) And, yes, New York City will always be the city of dreams for the millions who come here to start or restart their lives.
But the citizens of the great metropolis will never again look up in the sky and cry, “Look! Is it a bird? Is it a plane?”
No, it was DC Comics, home to the supermen and superwomen who lived here, if only in the imaginations of those who loved them.
*By the way, Diane, there’s a typo in the memo. It’s “rollout,” not “roll out.”)
A fine friend of mine – a comic shop retailer, convention promoter, and all around great geek – tasked me with a topic for the week: the death of collect-ability. As a collector himself, my friend postulated that “[It seems like] Marvel Comics no longer has any ongoing series, and everything they create now is a limited series.” Interesting thought, no?
For those paying close attention to the racks these days (which I admit I’ve not… but more on that later), they’d note that within the big two, no issue is numbered over the forties. Between Marvel NOW and the New 52, the industry has taken a shine to newness as the gimmick du jour. Gone are the long-running series that toppled in the hundreds before they were relaunched into new volumes. Serious collectors would amass each issue into their glorious bags and boards, stacks, and boxes.
Devotees of the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Action Comics, or Detective Comics would “ride the run” as it were. Through the high times and low, the collector made a simple statement: I want all of this. When the volume ended, a new line in the Overstreet is made and thus, said geek has the ability to opt out and move on. It might also be appropriate to hypothesize that when a volume ended, it did so not at the height of its quality or popularity. As my buddy Triple H might say? It’s always about what’s best for business.
Let us dive into that then, shall we? As a retailer, a #1 is a boon for business. It’s the universal jumping on point for a reader. Sales charts proclaimed that the New 52 was an initial success. As were several gimmicks revolving around funny numbers. Marvel NOW got into the same tactics, albeit under slower pretenses. At the end of the day though, all the ongoing series now sit in their infancy, and it is perhaps leading to an antsy fan base changing titles the way they surf the Internet. Keep producing #1s and you spark the base for a quick jolt of sales each time. The same way TV launches their seasons of new shows. The same way movie studio reboot and relaunch franchises when they want guaranteed money.
I personally am not getting any book with Wolverine in it. I freely admit though that when I see a new Wolverine #1 with a new team I stop and think “maybe I should get in on that kooky Logan business…” Hell, whilst driving home from the New York Comic Con, my Unshaven cohort declared that Matt Fraction was going to write a new Silver Surfer series. Given that I loved the new Defenders mini he did (which I bought, oddly enough, because it was a #1 and I was low on books to buy that week it debuted…), there I sat, hands on the wheel thinking that it’d be worth a try. By the way, I hate the Silver Surfer. He defeated Kyle Rayner in Marvel Vs. DC in the 90’s and I’ve never forgiven him. Yet, the allure of a #1 and a creative team I like is enough to sway my snarky heart. Scary, no?
My unnamed pal noted his sadness that his newer customers would “never get to experience of watching a series / character / creative team grow”, and those words ring true. Ron Marz’s run on Green Lantern anchored my teen years. By watching Rayner grow from a newbie ring-slinger to the true torchbearer of the corps, I built a life-long love of the character. Do I feel the same way about any character I’ve read in the last several years? Hardly.
I love the Superior Spider-Man right now, but I know that love is entirely fleeting. Much as I’d hoped Dick Grayson would hold the cape and cowl of his mentor for more than a hot minute, I knew that the industry I wallow in is one of transitory entertainment. Nothing lasts longer than the sales figures allow them to. When Walt Disney’s petulant corpse and the unseen Brothers Warner loom in the darkness with gluttonous desire, the idea that a paltry four dollar rag be given years to find a voice and mature is as impossible as a mouse actually piloting a steamboat. It’s a small world after all, and it doesn’t run on dreams and candy. It runs on movie and merchandise revenue. Comics these days serve their purpose more for maintaining rights, and collecting otaku for monetary tribute. The business model for doing that simply doesn’t take into account anything more than a bottom line in the black.
One thing I’d be remiss to mention here is how my very own studio has thought of production. Our Samurnauts concept was built to be presented as a maxi-series of mini-series… if that makes any sense. Knowing our audience as we did when we started, it was hard to not want to make everything last only long enough to make it into a trade. Then slap a new #1 on the next mini, and make everyone start back at the beginning. Simply put? When I walk past an indie table, and see a series past even four issues? I’m already walking past for fear of the costly barrier to entry. While the series itself may be absolutely amazing, as a fan, I freely admit that I’m always less likely to buy-in when I know there’s a backload of material to catch up on. Comics aren’t seasons of shows on Hulu or Netflix; they’re commitments of dollars, and as such I’ve ended up becoming a slave to newness.
I open the argument to you, the people of the court. Are Marvel and DC doing you wrong by continued experimentation, relaunching, and ADHD production? Or do you like the idea that you’re never too far away from a jumping on point? Do you find the pulp of today to be too transitive, or do you like to consume your sequential fiction one micro-series at a time?
Warner Archive Collection and The Paley Center for Media, in conjunction with New York Comic Con, proudly present a special event celebrating Warner Archive’s upcoming Blu-ray™ release of Batman: The Brave And The Bold on Friday, October 11 at 7:00 pm. The popular animated television series will be celebrated with an episodic screening and a lively panel discussion featuring Diedrich Bader, the voice of Batman, at The Paley Center for Media in New York City (25 West 52nd Street).
Extremely popular on Cartoon Network, Batman: The Brave And The Bold teams the Dark Knight with some of DC Comics’ favorite and more eclectic heroes, including the Blue Beetle, Plastic Man, Green Lantern, Kamandi, Doctor Fate, Jonah Hex, Black Canary, Green Arrow, Mister Miracle and The Atom. The combinations create a perfect mesh of fast-paced action and humor for the first season, which spans 26 episodes.
Batman: The Brave And The Bold is Warner Archive Collection’s first-ever animated release on Blu-ray™ disc. Anticipated street date is early November 2013.
Fans attending the October 11 event will have the opportunity to watch an episode and select clips of Batman: The Brave And The Bold, and hear from a distinguished panel that will include Bader, producer James Tucker, 8-time Emmy Award-winning dialogue director Andrea Romano, and Warner Archive podcasters Matt Patterson and DW Ferranti. Moderator Gary Miereanu might even have some unique prizes waiting for a few lucky audience members.
A limited number of free tickets are available for the general public. Fans wishing to receive free tickets to the New York event on must RSVP via email to BatmanBATB@gmail.com.
The body of all fan RSVP emails MUST include the following:
Name of the entrant
A valid email address
The name of the media outlet/website by which the entrant learned of the screening
Tickets will be distributed on a “first come, first served” basis, and fans will be notified via email.
My regular readers have figured out by now that when I sit down to write this column every week, my tongue is usually so deeply planted in my cheek that my face scares homophobes.
Which is why I come to you today with a heavy heart. And an uncharacteristically downbeat-sounding bunch of words. I have nothing to joke about – at least, not “above the cut.”
Oh, I continue to monitor, and very discriminatingly partake, of the various expressions of Geek culture chronicled, dissected, and celebrated here and elsewhere. But I can’t seem to get as excited about any of it as do all the other too-numerous and overstimulated chatterers.
Something is missing.
Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be a big deal that John Romita, Jr. is maybe gonna draw Superman. And no one can figure out why Kick-Ass 2 was a box office disappointment. And people can’t wait to know what the Guardians of the Galaxy movie is gonna look like, or how Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who is gonna be different from Matt Smith’s. And on and on and on. But, for some reason that’s really starting to bug me, because I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, I can’t motivate myself to give a rat’s patoot about any of it.
From most of the comics and movies and video I sample, something is missing. For a long time I thought it was just that I was somehow managing to miss “the good stuff,” but now I’m not so sure.
It can’t possibly be Just Me. Not with the fistful of antidepressants I take every day. No, of course not. That can’t be it.
I suspect that what I’m really experiencing is a massive case of Be Careful What You Wish For, You Might Get It. And what veterans of the comics biz like myself have always wished for was that comics – the genre, if you can call them that; the type of content, not the physical printed product – would became a mainstream entertainment phenomenon. And they have.
Thanks more to CGI and Hollywood than to their modest printed spawning-ground, comics and related pop culture are, of course Big Business now, and have been for so long that most readers of sites like this one can’t remember a time when they weren’t. Which means they can’t remember, either, a time when all this stuff wasn’t quite as mindlessly escapist, or – at the opposite end of a spectrum that seems not to have a mid-range – leadenly, pretentiously Serious Minded.
That condition obtains, perhaps, because mindlessness sells big-time, while Seriousness of Purpose wins Eisner Awards and fanboy cred (and the occasional crowdfunding bonanza), which freshly-minted capital is then expended by the mintee on being mindless for a much bigger payday.
But something, nevertheless, seems to me to be missing.
What first got me seriously wanting to write comics instead of just reading them were things like Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’s original Green Lantern / Green Arrow series and Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck. Titles that were a vibrant and perceptively critical commentary on the culture they arose from, but whose Creative always enveloped its core concerns with a sugar-coating of good, solid, old-fashioned fun. Fun as in slam-bang heroic-fantasy action or verbal jokes and sight gags – the stuff that allowed the less demanding readers to remain oblivious, if that was their wont, to the Big Ideas the writers of such comics were trying to explore. In so doing, these comics were hits among fans (as opposed to being successful by the casual-reader-at-newsstands-only distribution “metrics” of their day. But the industry learned, for a brief time in the ‘80s, that such content was solidly marketable in the direct-only environment.
The art of producing that kind of comic book entertainment seems to me almost lost. At least, I haven’t been able to find it – not for a few years now.
If that’s the something that’s missing, I want and need – need – to find it again. Or somehow become a force in reviving it, if not just making it more visible than it is now, if it’s even still out there. And that’s what seems to be preoccupying me this week, and will, I hope, be grist for this mill in weeks to come.
All this is why something else is missing this week: a column that tries to be itself entertaining, while “sugar-coating” with humor an observation or caution that I hope might prove thought-provoking or inspiring of debate.
Oh, well. Maybe next week.
At least I didn’t do what too many in the blogosphere are tempted to do, and write a column about how I couldn’t figure out what to write about.
According to Robot 6 and a few other comic blogs Paul Pope pitched an all ages Kamandi series to DC. Upon hearing it, supposedly, DC responded “You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do Scooby-Doo. Well, I don’t know how true that is, but it certainly brings a few thoughts to mind.
Let’s say that the statement was in fact true. We don’t actually know the context in which it was said. I’ll assume Pope can tell sarcasm apart from snark. So, if DC actually had the balls to be so rude to such a great talent, they’ll deserve the continued flack they seem to be gunning for on what feels like a daily basis. There’s so many things wrong with what they said… so much so I don’t even know where to begin. How about the beginning.
“We don’t publish comics for kids.” You don’t say. I recall a while back DC had a whole line of comics for kids. I assume though, that it wasn’t profitable, even with the acclaimed Art Baltazar and Franco’s Tiny Titans, and Mike Kunkel’s Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam. Oddly enough though, when I type “DC Comics for Kids” into Google, I seem to be directed to dcnationcomics.kidswb.com! How odd that a company that doesn’t publish comics for kids seems to do just that. Of course my only real options for DC kids comics these days are Scooby-Doo, Looney Toon, Lil’ Gotham, and Adventures of Superman, I might tend to agree that they indeed don’t. Not to knock Superman or Lil’ Bats, but comics for kids amongst the big two always seem to be cordoned off, and rarely beloved. To be even more fair? The only time I’ve personally ever cared to peruse an all-ages book by either Marvel or DC has been Tiny Titans. Then again, I’m not the target audience of less-than-mature comic books.
I’m also not 45, but I get the potential point they are hypothetically making. That point though, is a terrible one. No company in their right mind should be aiming to please 45 year olds. While I plan on being a comic book reader until I’m unable, I freely admit that a comic (and let’s be bland and say traditional super hero comics) should be targeting a younger market. Go back and read something from the silver age. Stan Lee and his ilk wrote simplistic stories with solid doses of emotional depth. It was only when the industry went goth––and started getting mean, and angry – did the product by-and-large seem to start aging with its audience. The point though is this: yes… teens, tweens, and toddlers alike seem to not be embracing the super heroes as much as the Yuhi-Ohs or whatever. What a load of bull-pucks.
This is where I’m perhaps the angriest. There seems to be the insane undercurrent within our niche industry that somehow, someway we need to reach the kids. How the future of our livelihood depends solely on our ability to make ankle-biters know we’re here with funny books. Guess what? We won, years ago, and no one noticed!
Go to Target, Wal-Mart, and the like. Do you see Avengers T-Shirts? Do you see Batman underoos? Do you see an entire aisle of toys that are comic related? Because I do. Go to the electronic sections of the same stores. Do you see the literal wall of DVDs that are comic book related? If you don’t, you’re blind. Facts are facts: Super-Heroes of Marvel and DC are in the zeitgeist. And while comic sales are seemingly no better (as in, kids aren’t rushing in droves to their local comic shops like we all seem to hope…), the fact that the movies, TV shows, and merchandise is out there. For those kids who want more than a movie, show, or toy to play with, there will always be comics. Hell, that’s exactly how I myself came into the industry!
If I were to play devil’s advocate for only a second, I can see between the poor choice of words spoken to Mr. Pope. He pitched a character that by and large is unknown. And while his name brings with it an audience, a Paul Pope Kamandi book doesn’t necessarily come close to the potential profits of a Paul Paul Batman book. At the end of the day, as much as we may love those tertiary characters deep within the catalogues of DC and Marvel… those two companies don’t stay in the black because of them. Marvel makes its money on Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Avengers. DC does with Batman, Superman, and to a lesser extent Wonder Woman / Green Lantern / Flash. Show me the bottom-line earnings of a Kamandi or a Ka-Zar book, and I’ll show you why DC offered Paul Scooby-Doo.
That being said, I’d personally love to see his pitch and take on the character. He’s incredibly talented. And just as I would have wanted to see the Static Shock John Rozum originally pitched for the New52. To me what this pull quote really makes me think is this: There needs to be a way for Marvel and DC to allow amazing creators to drive their own ship, and still make money. Reduce their pre-production / up front pay in lieu of per-piece pay. Release the book digitally only, and then collect it into a printed trade if the sales permit it. Open up the catalogue and let creativity be the driving force of what you put out. Certainly we know that the pulp and paper market will only live so much longer. And beyond that? When a creator wants to deliver an all-ages title? Embrace it! A comic that can be read and enjoyed by more than one demographic only increases the possibilities of readership.
You think you can step on creators as much as you want? Why don’t you just go back to publishing Scooby-Doo.
O.K. I’ll admit it upfront. I was kind of wrong. I was all prepared to hate Beware The Batman, the new DC Nation animated series.
There are a whole lot of reasons for this. First, I like my Batman to have a forehead. Second, the teevee bastards cancelled Young Justice, which I really enjoyed. So did my adult daughter and, from time to time, either or both of our cats. It was a family experience. Third, the CG is clunky and lame, lacking the grace of the Green Lantern series. Fourth, Lt. James Gordon is as big as the Incredible Hulk and almost as old as dirt. If he didn’t make captain before he got Reed Richards’ hair, he’d counting the days to his pension.
Next-to-last, do we really need a fourth Batman animated series? They did it right the first time, they did it wrong the second time, and the third one was surprisingly entertaining. How many times can you go to the well before you hire Jim Carrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
But, most of all, head over heals of all, what they did to Alfred Pennyworth shouldn’t have been done to… oh, say… the Joker. He’s an entirely different character. A military super-Seal MI-6 type, roughly fourteen feet tall, no mustache – indeed, no hair at all, and a chin so pronounced he looks like the illegitimate son of Jay Leno and Bruce Campbell. Simply put, he’s not Alfred. I would have been happier if they called him Sid.
But I dutifully had my TiVo watch the first three episodes and I sat down to watch the first. Maybe it was a case of diminished expectations, but I mostly sorta liked Beware The Batman. I found myself going from the first to the second to the third, and then setting up a season pass for the rest.
Once I got past the stuff about Sid calling himself Alfred, the writing is quite good. Paring Katana with Bats as a de facto Robin works. The whole Task Force Batman thing (my phrase, not theirs) works better here than in the comics. They decided to focus on underused villains that have been mostly unused on television, which is a very smart move. In fact, I’m in favor of any Batman series that doesn’t feature the Joker in the early weeks. Make ‘em work for it. The relationship between Sid and Bruce is solid and convincing, and Bruce doesn’t come off as a douchebag.
As is true with virtually all Warner Bros. projects, the voice work is impeccable. Yes, I miss Kevin Conroy in the lead – he’s had the job longer than any single Batman actor, and that includes Matt Crowley (Google, chillun). But as always, voice casting director Andrea Romano rules.
None of this makes up for what they’re calling Alfred and I call Sid. This is an abomination – but not quite a dealkiller. For a while, in the comics they established Alfred was involved in the World War II French freedom fighter movement with Mlle. Marie, and that worked for me because he was still Alfred – reasonably athletic, extremely clever, and highly effective. They got past this when his World War II service would have defined him as older than Methuselah.
When all is said and done, Beware The Batman is an entertaining show.
But when I watch it, I still think “Oh. You mean Sid.”
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON: More Betta Emily S. Whitten!!!
There are certain films I’ve discovered just by channel surfing; likewise, there are films that I know and when I come across them (again, channel surfing), I may stay to watch a given scene and then find myself watching the film through to the end. Most of the OT Star Wars movies are like that; so is Casablanca. This morning my Mary and I came across another, Miss Pettgrew Lives For A Day. I found it first on TV, bought a copy, and today watched the movie through to the end anyway.
The 2008 film stars Amy Adams, Frances McDormand, Ciaran Hinds, Lee Pace, Mark Strong and Shirley Henderson, among others, and it was directed by Bharat Nalluri with a screenplay by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy adapting the 1937 novel by Winifred Watson.
I suspect you’ll already know Amy Adams’ and Frances McDormand’s work. Bharat Nalluri may be more known to ComicMix readers as the man who directed episodes of MI-5 and Torchwood: Miracle Day. Writer David Magee wrote Finding Neverland (another film I love) and Life of Pi. Simon Beaufoy won an Academy Award for Slumdog Millionaire and has also scripted the upcoming The Hunger Games: Catching Fire as well as The Full Monty.
Ciaran Hinds has a mixture of films to his credit. He played Dumbledore’s brother in the final Harry Potter film, was also in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as well as John Carter and Game of Thrones. I thought he was very hammy in Political Animals, the Sigourney Weaver TV miniseries but he’s wonderful and understated in Miss Pettigrew.
Mark Strong was in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and John Carter as well and also played Sinestro in the Green Lantern film as well as Lord Blackwood in the Sherlock Holmes film with Robert Downey Jr. Lee Pace is in all three Hobbit movies and will be playing Ronan the Accuser in the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy film.
Why do I tell you all this? To drive home that Miss Pettigrew has a really good pedigree and it lives up to it.
The story is gossamer light for all that it’s set in London in 1938 on the eve of World War II. That gives the film an underlying shadow; we know what’s waiting in the wings. So do some of the characters and it adds a poignancy to the story.
The story? Imdb does a nice job of summarizing the story so I’ll quote it: “War threatens London as Miss Pettigrew, a destitute governess, filches a client’s card from her agency and presents herself at the door. A singer named Delysia Lafosse wants a social secretary as she seeks a West End role by sleeping with a feckless producer in the bed of Nick, a smarmy nightclub owner with whom she also dallies. She ignores Michael, her piano player, who loves her and has tickets for New York on the Queen Mary. Miss Pettigrew’s job is to make sure Delysia gets the part. Over 24 hours, Miss Pettigrew is also called upon to help an ambitious and unfaithful fashion editor patch things up with her older fiancé, a lingerie designer. Has Miss Pettigrew found her calling?”
Amy Adams is Delysia and she’s perfection. She has superb comedic timing and shows real heart in a character that could otherwise be described as flighty and manipulative. The character is a fake but there are reasons why and a past that comes up at key moments. There’s an innocence to her. And it’s a brave performance. At the emotional climax, when she sings “If I Didn’t Care”, there are notes where Amy Adams shows us that Delysia is a good singer but not a great one. She’s not as good a singer as Amy Adams proved in Enchanted. You can hear that song on YouTube.
Listen to how the real character breaks through as she sings the song and discovers where her heart truly lies.
Frances McDomand’s performance as Miss Pettigrew is a lesson in underacting. The character starts very cold and distant, with a very set idea of what is right, and it all gets turned upside down as she encounters Delysia. Her heart, her warmth, opens up as she deals and helps the chaos that is the younger woman.
All the actors are wonderful and the movie itself could have been made in the 30s – all the period details seem so right. It’s a beautiful film to look at and the costumes and the cars and the sets all establish a reality – one that you know is soon to vanish. I never escape the underlying threat of war that runs through the film.
Just wanted to share a film that has become one of my favorites. Will you like it? Beats me. But if you’re a tad tired of superheroes right now and explosions and all that, you might want to give it a try.
Justice League #22 came out today, touching the fuse for DC’s summer event, Trinity War, which we already know leads into the fall event, Forever Evil.
(Obviously, there’s your mandatory SPOILER ALERT!)
In all fairness, it’s a heck of a setup issue – the battle lines are drawn, it is made abundantly clear the stakes are high, and there are wheels within wheels of which few of the players are aware. It’s a book that absolutely brings you back next week to see what will happen. Geoff Johns is a master of this – he weaves a long-form plot into his books that all ties up into bows whenever he chooses to pull the plot threads. I don’t think he’s ever written a book that didn’t delight me in all his years at DC.
Add to that his wonderful ability to pull obscure characters and plot threads out of the distant past and make them relevant and exciting today. We saw the Shaggy Man make his debut in the New 52 recently, and in this issue we see the on-screen premiere of The Outsider, an old Batman villain (and a long story in and of himself), and a variant version appearing in the Flashpoint minis, written by James Robinson, the mini which I went on record as being my favorite of the bunch, and the one “new” character I said I’d most like to see find his way to the New 52. I’ll be curious of the details of this new iteration of the character.
Having said that, the book had several things going on in the book that I found infuriating, more as a reflection of what’s going in comics in general today.
Death, Death and Death
We saw two characters (seemingly) die in the book – one brand new and one very old. Old Firestorm villain Plastique took out Madame Xanadu, and thanks to The Outsider’s manipulations, Superman seems to have killed the brand spanking new Doctor Light. The former is annoying because of the legacy of the character, the latter, not only because the character was seemingly created solely to be killed, it’s another minority character to have been used in the same fashion. Geoff caught some hell for a similar scenario in Aquaman – a new character of middle eastern descent was killed off in her first adventure – a flashback, no less.
I say “seemingly” because a sub-issue is while DC has sworn blind that the new status quo is “dead is dead,” they don’t seem to mind swerving the readers with the heavy suggestion that a character has died only to reveal the next issue that they’re fine, it was just a flesh wound, they switched at the last minute, etc. Now that’s a tried and true device, used endlessly in the Republic serials, but as Annie Wilkes explained, it’s not good storytelling, it’s cheating. Catwoman never got into the cockadoodie chair.
So it’s entirely possible that Madame Xanadu teleported, or was teleported away, and that Doctor Light will return with even more amazing powers and a serious mad on for the heroes. But the point is, the moment was designed to shock us, provide a hotshot to get us back for the next issue, as opposed to creating a solid dramatic moment. In a documentary, Hitchcock talks about the difference between shock and suspense: one provides a moment of excitement that passes quickly, and one provides a long scene of emotional duress that people will talk about for a long time. Both of these deaths were mere moments. And if they turn out to be false alarms, they’ll be empty moments.
Stories Without End
Literally and figuratively. Event crossovers, mini-series, any story, really, but finite, limited stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s lots of opportunity to lay plot threads that can be returned to should the need arise, but time was you’d close the last issue and think “That was a good story.” Or at least, “That wasn’t that good, but at least it’s over”.
The Empire Strikes Back may be the first example in modern narrative where that didn’t happen. They already knew they were making a third film, so there was less of an impetus to make the film end definitively. It didn’t really end – it just paused for three years. Everyone was safe and all, but there were so many questions left unanswered it felt more like a season finale than a film.
So too in comics, the event / maximegacrossovers don’t quite end as much as they seem to just lead straight into the next one. The defeat of the Big Bad only serves to set up the next one, and not even in a few months – sometimes right at the end of the last issue. Marvel’s been doing this for some years now – each big event would set up the next, and the event wouldn’t quite…end, it’d just say “Join us for next event in a few weeks!”
Geoff Johns had been writing one big long story in Green Lantern, one that included several huge crossover events. But they were all discrete, they ended, they had winners and losers, and there was a sense that something had been achieved. Even if the next big plot point was teased at the end, it was given months, even years to grow and bloom.
DC has done a couple of these in the past. The Oracle: The Cure mini-series had an overcrowded mess of a climax (what pro wrestling fans refer to as a “Schmoz” finish) that literally ended with “The story continues in Batgirl #1!” James Robinson’s much maligned mini Justice League: Cry for Justice(!) Seemed to have gone through quite an overhaul – originally pitched as a more “pro-active” League, it quickly turned into nothing but a springboard for Green Arrow’s new plot twist. AND it was chock full of death that only happened to make the main characters angry and “Justice!”-yelly. James was good enough to un-do one of the more egregious demises, and did it well.
This is DC’s first attempt at Marvel’s “direct flow” format in a big way, but at least they’re being fair about it. We’ve already been told, clearly and distinctly, that the events of Trinity War will cause the villains to win, which will be portrayed in September’s Forever Evil event, and the “villains month” of books. We don’t know “The ending” per se, but we do know that it won’t be an ending, per se. It’ll be a direct segue to the next event, and a very expensive event it’ll be, if you’re the type that likes to get every part of the story.
It effectively changes Trinity War from the main event to a mere prologue to the next event. I do not expect many plot points to resolve here, save for the various teams realizing they need to team up to fight the real threat. I expect the actions of Superman to be explained to the public very quickly and quickly forgotten, far different from the way they dealt with Wonder Woman’s killing of max lord in the last universe, and the stellar way Gail Simone is dealing with the death of her own brother, and Commissioner Gordon’s (a.k.a. her father) witness of the act.
The Roots Are Too Deep
There’s nothing wrong with foreshadowing. It’s the sign of quality literature. Before Crisis on Infinite Earths, they teased The Monitor in DC titles a full year ahead of time. In this event, at least one title, Justice League America, seems to have been set up for the express purpose of setting up this event. It exists not because there was enough demand for a third JL series (tho sales suggests the audience was happy to accept it), but only to serve as a place to put all the plot that would be needed to have Trinity War make sense.
This has been happening for some years now. Dwayne McDuffie’s run on Justice League was severely hindered by Editorial asking him to shoehorn in plot points that only served to set up an upcoming event, and in some cases, being asked to step aside entirely for a couple months.
There’ve been more than a few examples of Editorial getting in the way of the creators since the New 52 came to be as well, many of them ending in creators leaving said books, willingly or no. There’s nothing wrong with an Editor wanting to work with the writer on the stories. When the editor starts taking more of a role than the writer, conflict is almost certainly to follow. There hasn’t been an editor good enough to do that in several decades, and I don’t see one coming along anytime soon.
We’re seeing too many stories that exist only to set up an upcoming event, stories that don’t quite fit in the continuing narrative of the titles, ones that don’t quite end, and ones that just plain get in the way. They cause a small jump in sales as collectors grab the “first chapter” of the next big event, but they rarely bring new readers long-term.
There’s every ability for a writer to turn out a great story, even if any or all of these issues appear. I fully expect to enjoy the rollercoaster ride that Geoff and his cronies have set up. But it’ll be in spite of what I describe above, not because of them.
I freely admit a bias. DC’s animated efforts have always trumped Marvel’s. Always. Super Friends smacked Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends two ways from Sunday. And for every great episode of the 90’s X-Men or Spider-Man there were two Batman or Superman: The Animated Adventures. And sure, Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and the Sensational Spider-Man were brilliant, but they don’t belong in the same breath as Justice League Unlimited and Batman Beyond.
At present moment the only animated war (and it’s a weak one at that…) that may be around is Ultimate Spider-Man against Teen Titans Go! Both are meant to skew young. But only one of them is doing it right. I’ll give you half a guess – it’s Teen Titans Go!
In the simplest of terms, Ultimate Spider-Man ultimately sucks. And that hurts to say, because my personal lord and savior Paul Dini, is a creative consultant. The show is a schizophrenic attempt at making Spider-Man for a new generation. This is after the way-better-written Sensational Spider-Man, mind you. Every single trope a cartoon can use to wave the white flag of “love me!” is plastered throughout the show. A misfit team of B and C listers meant to accompany the star? Check. Family Guy style cutaway gags every few minutes? Check. Frequent guest stars to make you forget there’s no character development? Ch-ch-check. In all the episodes I’ve sat through, the only thread that connects them all is the desperation that oozes from the pores. Here is a series that reeks of plot by committee that does anything short of shuckin’ and jivin’ in order to grab the kiddies’ attention.
On the other hand, Teen Titans Go! seems to suffer from none of this. An oddly post-modern retread of its former self, TTG takes the titular titans of 2003, and re-imagines them in kawaii form. This super deformed (more cartoony, if such a term could ever be applied to a cartoon) Titans show plays towards the micro-sized popular companion toons like Regular Show or Adventure Time. With no serious episodes to be had, TTG is a show hellbent on solely being entertaining. No secret machinations present. Where USM seeks to birth a brand new Marvel Animated Universe™, TTG seeks only to get some laughs. I should note in the wake of the cancelation of Green Lantern: the Animated Series and Young Justice I was apt to be cranky with whatever replaced them. It took literally two minutes of TTG to crack my grimace.
Normally I’m a bit more verbose, but the proof is in the pudding. As it stands, Marvel continues down a terrible path, choosing to aim at any market that will have them. DC continues to allow their creative teams to explore, experiment, and ultimately (heh) aim their cartoons with laser focus. Combine that with their continued brilliant voice casting, and smart writing? You get, more often than not, a superior product.
