Tagged: King Arthur

Martha Thomases: King Arthur, Lois Lane and Gefilte Fish, Oh My!

Diversity is in the news!

Warner Bros. spent an estimated $145 million on a movie about King Arthur, directed by Guy Ritchie, hoping to have a new tentpole hit like his Sherlock Holmes films. Instead, the movie opened in third place, far behind Guardians of the Galaxy 2, which had already been out for two weeks, and Snatched, starring Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn.

In other words, a movie based on a male hero of white culture (albeit one with a random but beautiful black man) flopped behind a movie about a multi-racial multi-species space gang and a movie about two women, one of them old enough to have grown children and one of them not conventionally movie-star beautiful.

I’m not here to say that King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, failed because it is not a good movie, or that the two other movies I mentioned here are of higher quality. I like Guy Ritchie, or I did when he made movies like this. Instead, I want to talk about how the modern American audience, the people who pay for our popular entertainment who buy movie tickets, books, comics, music and television subscriptions, is more accepting of diversity than the people who sell them.

That’s the facet of the discussion about the Marvel story that I think gets neglected. Marvel Vice-President David Gabriel did not say that the inclusion of more non-white, non-male characters was the reason for Marvel’s sales slump. He said that a few retailers told him that was the reason.

By itself, this does not mean that books with diverse characters don’t sell. This means that they don’t sell in those retailers’ stores.

There are all sorts of reasons this could be true. I don’t know where these stores are, or what their surrounding communities are like. I don’t know what the capacities of these retailers might be in regard to advertising, promotion, and outreach. Are they located near colleges or other kinds of schools? Are they rural or urban? Do they see themselves as a community asset for everyone, or a safe haven for their loyal Band of Bros? Any of these factors can have an impact on the kinds of books a store sells best.

It is this very variety in the kinds of markets comic book stores serve that should encourage publishers to produce more diverse kinds of books, not only in terms of the characters but in the genres and packaging of the stories. Saying that books about people of color, or books about women won’t sell is just as stupid as saying the same things about movies.

I can understand that many readers of superhero comics are tired stories where an established character is suddenly replaced by someone of another race, gender or sexual orientation. It was daring and interesting when it first happened 40 years ago, but today it’s neither new nor newsworthy. Anyone who tells stories like these today should have some different insights than we’ve seen before.

It’s much more interesting, to me anyway, to create entirely new characters. That’s what Milestone Media did back in the day, and it’s what Catalyst Prime from Lion Forge Comics seems to be doing now. I haven’t seen them at my local store yet, but I have faith in any comic book company that does this.

My real reason for encouraging diversity is entirely selfish: I want more, and I want different. I want to have the time and resources to sample as many different things as I can in this life. Whether that means strange foods or different kinds of stories, I want the opportunity to try the new and exotic.

By the way, the article in that last link (about the growing Jewish community in Berlin) has one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in The New York Times. I don’t know if the Gray Lady meant to be so snarky, but it’s hilarious. See for yourself:

“Jewish culture here is a bit superficial,” said Elad Jacobowitz, a 39-year-old real estate broker from Tel Aviv who moved to Berlin 13 years ago. “It doesn’t fit,” he said, sipping horseradish-infused vodka while listening to a klezmer band at the gefilte fish party during the Nosh Berlin festival.

Dennis O’Neil: Legends of All Time!

Legends of Tomorrow ArtIn this metaphor, time is a liquid and so we find ourselves doing the breaststroke, swimming back, back until we surface until we surface and…

Where might we be? The air is crisp and clean, the ocean before us is deep blue, the whole world seems freshly minted… Oh, of course! We’re somewhere in the region that will come to be called Before the Common Era and we’re watching a group of alpha male-type gentlemen board a sailing ship. Ah, we have it now. The gents are Jason and his pals who will eventually be dubbed The Argonauts, which means that the ship is the Argo, built by a handy chap named Argus and protected by the goddess Hera. They’re preparing to voyage in quest of some golden fleece for reasons with which we need not bother. There we are – everything tied up in a neat package. Don’t you love it when that happens?

But while we were ogling the BCE version of celebrities, the metaphor morphed. What was liquid is now pages, some yellowed and curling, some clean and white and on those rapidly flipping pages… glimpses. There’s King Arthur and the roundtable bunch. (How do we know that this particular king is Arthur? Because we do, that’s how! Now hush.) And there’s Odysseus and his shipmates. And the four musketeers, who, for some reason, are hailed as the three musketeers. (Maybe the seventeenth century French dudes weren’t so good at counting?) And The Shadow with his helpers, and Doc Savage with his and – the pages are crisper and whiter – the Magnificent Seven and the Dirty Dozen and the Justice Society and the Justice League and the X-Men and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow…

Whoa. That last one – it isn’t on a page (yet), it’s on a video screen and I saw it a few nights ago: the latest entry into what’s beginning to seem like television’s Superhero Sweepstakes. What we have here are a number of B-team heroes who, with one exception that I’m aware of, first appeared in DC Comics. (There’s those darn pages again.) They’re united under the leadership of Rip Hunter to combat a giant economy sized threat to the planet and, probably, to ass kick sundry lesser malcontents. They’re not all happy to be part of the team, but that’s okay – we know they’ll be on the front lines when they’re needed. And maybe a bit of bickering will brighten the dialogue – exposition, don’t you know, can be such a bore.

The structure of stories such characters populate is simple and reliable: something threatens the common good, something so formidable that it takes a team to quell it, preferably a team with diverse capabilities to allow for varied action.

Did I mention their… I don’t know what to call it, but let’s settle for “vehicle.” It seems to be a combination airliner, houseboat, taxi cab and time machine, and it is nifty. (Are the toy companies lining up?)

The show itself? Can’t wait for next episode…Well, actually I can, but I will be watching it.

Dennis O’Neil: Crisis On Infinite Superheroes

Simpsons Huck Finn

Cozy down on your couch and wait for it: A Supergirl series coming soon – well, in the fall – to a television set near you. And a new superhero on The Flash and what looks like some supering up of already existing character or characters on Arrow and and and…

I’ll bet the corridors of the media giants in Hollywood and New York (and Chicago? London?) are absolutely buzz with plans and proposals for more stories about that congregation who wear peculiar costumes and bash. I think they call it extending the franchise, and it is nothing new. My current favorite example from antiquity is the King Arthur saga which was kind of inspired by rales of a fifth or sixth century British ruler who fought Saxon invaders. (Did he really exist? Was he compounded of several rulers? Let us shrug and get on with it.)

Anyway, it wasn’t until the twelfth century that Arthur’s tales began to be written down and circulated, though some stuff may have been forever lost in the long gap between inspiration and dissemination. There have been adaptations and additions and redaction ever since. Almost certainly, somewhere on this green planet, someone is even now working on an Arthur piece.

That’s my current favorite example of franchise fattening in Days of Yore, but there are others, including the Tom Sawyer books – Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective – that your English teacher neglected to mention. Heck, even what is by many considered to be the best American novel ever, Huckleberry Finn, could be considered to be an early extension of the Sawyer franchise.

And here we jump over the rest of the Nineteenth Century and a big chunk of the Twentieth and look at comic books, which were in the franchise extending dodge from their earliest days. Like Tom and Huck, Superman and Batman were quite different, but in some ways similar. Superman is a big success and about a year later, voila – along comes Batman. Then the deluge. Dozens – hundreds? – of different-but-similars dotting the newsstands. And witch hunts followed by an implosion. Then, a revival, and here we are, watching superhero franchises being extended – not on cheap paper, but on highly sophisticated electronic delivery systems.

It’s about money, of course. I don’t know if the early King Arthur chroniclers were in it for the coins, but Mark Twain, hassled by money worries for much of his life, certainly had some financial motivation, and so has every professional storyteller since. There are downsides to this propagation of the superhero meme; attraction of creators who have no genuine liking for the material and hence to it badly and hence give others a bad rep; audience difficulty in telling one hero from the other; a dilution of what makes a character unique and interesting; and old-fashioned weariness with the genre.

But I’m of a mind to believe that none of the above guarantees inferior story quality. It’s the recipe, not the ingredients, that’s crucial.

After all, Huckleberry Finn is a pretty good read.

 

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