For OUTLANDER fans, the wait is almost over. The mega big book series hits the Starz Network in just a couple of weeks (with a sneak preview on August 2nd). Producer Ronald Moore and author Diana Gabaldon talk about the road from book to camera. Plus actor Jay Hernandez, from the Fox summer hit GANG RELATED, talks about making good choices in acting roles and Marvel revives Tony Stark’s ego.
Which would you trust more – what a person says or what a person does? Almost anyone with life experience would say they’d trust what a person does more. Mind you, although we know better we often go with what a person says: con men, politicians and advertisers (that may be redundant) count on that.
It’s what we do with story – character is built upon choices, good or bad, which the individual makes. That’s why the writer puts them in difficult and even life-threatening situations. My late wife Kim used to ask me how I might react in a given situation. My response invariably was, “I don’t know. Ask me when I get there.” I know how I’d like to think I would act but the reality is, until faced with the given situation, I don’t really know. Nobody does.
I don’t believe it when someone says “I could never kill someone.” I think Gandhi was capable of killing given certain circumstances. The likelihood of him killing might be small, but he was human and any human is capable of the act. It’s part of our common humanity; a dark side of it, I grant you, but still part of it.
It’s not only big choices that we make that proclaim who we are (or who a character is); it’s the small ones as well. The artist in a graphic narrative, for example, must decide what a given character might wear. What we choose to wear projects how we want to present ourselves.
“Hold on there, Horsestrangler,” some of you might be saying. “I don’t care what I wear. I just throw something – possibly clean – on and go.” (Guys are more likely to say this than gals who, as usual, know better.) My response is doing so is a choice of its own and makes it own statement; it says “I don’t think that sort of thing is important. It’s shallow and trivial and doesn’t represent who I am.”
Except it does. It rejects certain values and/or it says you want to look like everyone else and blend in. Do you dress for a job interview the same way you dress for hanging with your homies? If so, good luck getting the job. If you’re going on a date with someone for the first time, how do you dress? How do you present yourself? If you had to go to a funeral, what would you choose to wear?
Different characters in comics will dress differently. Peter Parker shouldn’t dress like Tony Stark. Clark Kent shouldn’t dress like Bruce Wayne. I remember that in an early episode of The Sopranos, the producers dressed Tony in shorts and flip-flops for a backyard party to suggest more strongly the underlying suburban setting. Advisers to the show said that Tony would never dress like that – and he never did again.
Why do people wear clothing emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo or the name of their favorite sports team and turn themselves into walking billboards for that product? Because it suggests a certain tribal affiliation the same way that inner city gangs wear certain colors. It proclaims us and marks us as part of a greater, possibly stronger, whole. At least, we may think it does.
That’s a choice that people make and it’s something that writer and artists working in the graphic medium have to keep in mind. There are hundreds, thousands, of ways of communicating to the reader who this character is, what the setting is, what’s at stake and what’s going on.
Are there exceptions to this rule? Yep. Sure are. There are situations when you have no choice to make. You can’t choose which shoes to wear when you can’t afford any shoes. Choice exists only if there is more than one thing from which to choose. Otherwise, you have to take what is given.
There is no freedom where there is no freedom of choice.
To quote Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.”
Seriously, I thought after two columns I had exhausted the exhausting “Iron Jonah” storyline which is still running in the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip. I mean, one week I wrote about how J. Jonah Jameson lied to Tony Stark and got his hands on an old suit of Iron Man armor, then used it to try to capture Spider-Man by chasing him all over Manhattan while shooting repulsor rays indiscriminately at buildings and streets. I wrote about how said acts could – and should – have resulted in JJJ being prosecuted criminally and sued civilly for the wanton property damage he caused.
Then, in the next column, I wrote about how the same people who sued JJJ for property damage could also sue Tony Stark – he of the much deeper pockets – for negligently entrusting the Iron Man armor to JJJ which JJJ used to cause the property damage. I even outlined five theories under which the plaintiffs in these suits could have proven their case of negligent entrustment against Tony Stark. The first was strict liability, wherein a person does something so inherently dangerous that the plaintiff doesn’t have to prove negligence or fault. (I wrote about strict liability, even if, like someone who was as big an idiot as Tony Stark was, I didn’t call it that by name.) So, because I didn’t call it by name, and because I love the sound of my own voice even when I’m not speaking but writing, let me expound briefly on strict liability.
I’m going to preface this week’s column by saying I’m going to express what I realize is a very unpopular opinion.
I hate Superman.
I don’t mean that I hate one of the movies, or one of the TV shows, or a particular run of the comic. I hate the character of Superman, because I find him boring.
For me to be interested in a superhero, the hero has to be flawed in some way. Iron Man has been my favorite hero for some time because of how deeply troubled Tony Stark is, from the narcissism and egomania that get him into tough spots, to the self-destructive tendencies that emerge when he’s forced to face the fact that he isn’t perfect. To be the hero he wants to be, he must grapple with a dark streak inside himself, and watching that internal battle is a thousand times more compelling to me than any external battle Iron Man engages in with an antagonist. And even when I am watching him take on a villain, Iron Man doesn’t really prevail because of the powers of his suit. Everything hinges on the man inside the suit using his advantages to the best of his ability, and that ability is sometimes compromised by the man himself. At the end of the day, Iron Man doesn’t even matter as much as Tony Stark, whose flaws have given him a complexity that makes him matter a great deal to me.
Superman, on the other hand, is basically perfect. Sure, there’s a type of rock that makes him physically weak, but to me that’s about as interesting a flaw for a hero as a gluten allergy. But even putting aside his ridiculous physical attributes, Superman continues to be about perfection. His biggest problem is that no one could possibly understand his infallible and unwavering goodness, and that he’s so benevolent he can’t help himself from dedicating his life to protecting the human race. He may brood alone in the Fortress of Solitude, but when all of a character’s contemplation stems from how hard it is to deal with being so darn unflawed, there’s neither complexity to that contemplation nor capacity for change. And while Tony Stark is sometimes Iron Man, with Superman it feels much more like Superman is sometimes Clark Kent. Stark is a person who is humanized by his flaws, but Superman is an alien who sometimes masquerades as a normal person. If Superman will always be Superman, and Superman will never be wrong, I don’t care about watching him fight villains because his external conflicts are no more interesting than that of any other hero, and almost any other hero will have an internal conflict to bring to the table as well.
But why is it that flaws and the internal conflict stemming from them are what make a hero interesting in the first place? Because those are the things that move characters from people I can sympathize with to people I can empathize with. For a long time, I wasn’t a fan of Captain America because he struck me as another hero who is little more than the embodiment of good poured into a red, white, and blue costume. But once Captain America was brought to present day and had to contend with being a man out of time, I was completely engrossed. Trying to find a place in a world that has so greatly surpassed the core beliefs around which his whole identity had been built is an internal conflict rich enough to make me care for Steve Rogers, and more importantly, it invites me to put myself in his shoes by making him vulnerable in a relatable way. I can imagine how he feels because his emotional struggles are universal even if his specific circumstances aren’t, but I can’t say the same about Superman since he has little to no emotion to struggle with.
At this point, I suppose it’s only fair for me to point out there’s technically one incarnation of Superman that I do like, but it’s one so markedly different from any other representation I’ve seen that I honestly don’t think of it as the same character. Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son imagining a world in which Superman fell to Earth in Soviet Russia rather than the U.S. manages to put aside the hero’s perfection by making Superman a tool in a society he wants to actually belong to. Instead of willfully holding himself apart from humanity, Red Son features a Superman who recognizes he’s a cog in a machine and yearns to be something more. Reading Red Son was the first and only time I’ve seen a Superman with that kind of emotional depth and realism, which makes it the first and only time I’ve ever felt I could relate enough to what Superman was feeling to care about him.
A couple weeks ago, I tweeted the rankings I’d give recent comic book movie baddies when it comes to how alluring I find them. Bane took a solid first place, but the gap between the Winter Soldier in second and Loki in third was miniscule. I jokingly added the conclusion to be drawn is that I’m attracted to men with their faces covered or long dark hair (which often obscures a face in its own right), but the thought of masked villains versus unmasked villains kept popping into my mind days later. I realized that the joke I’d made stemmed out of a true preference for bad guys wearing masks, and started to wonder why I like my antagonists so much more when I can see so much less of their face.
The easy answer, of course, is that wearing a mask makes someone mysterious, and anyone from teenage girls to pickup artists could tell you being mysterious is an age-old way to attract others. It’s just human nature to be curious about what someone is thinking, and the more difficult it is to deduce what that might be, the more curious about it we become. Sure, I still like the Winter Soldier in the scenes where he has no mask on in the latest Captain America movie, but in comparison to his masked scenes, my interest in him was almost halved.
By this logic, popping a mask on a character should be a surefire way to get me more invested in him. I thought about other comic book movies and realized that logic does indeed hold…except when it comes to heroes. Give me a scene of Iron Man in his full suit, and a scene of Iron Man either with his face shield down or the camera POV inside the suit with him, and I’ll enjoy the latter option more every time. I find it much more difficult to care about Spider-Man when he’s in his full costume than I do when he’s not wearing his mask. And as much as I like Captain America in his latest movie, put on his mask and I find him downright silly. But if I love masks on villains, why is my response to masks on heroes the polar opposite?
Probably because I need something much different from a hero than I do from a villain. Ideally I should be rooting for the hero of a comic book movie, and it might seem like this is a pretty easy thing to get the audience to do since protagonists in this kind of film tend to be on an irrefutably “good” mission that more or less amounts to saving the world. But with goals that usually boil down to the same altruistic point, I find the mission of any individual comic book movie protagonist rarely varies enough from other works in the genre to get me invested in the achievement of the hero’s goal. It’s enticing me to care about the individual emotional journey of a hero that will get me truly rooting for a protagonist, and to care about what Tony Stark or Peter Parker or Steve Rogers are going through, I need to be able to empathize with them. Their faces are a gateway to their emotions, so connecting with their internal struggle is infinitely easier when they’re not wearing a mask. It makes them more real, and thus makes it more likely I’ll be able to put myself in their shoes.
And that’s exactly what I don’t want when it comes to a comic book movie antagonist. I want the baddie swearing to burn the world down to seem like he could really do it, but with every piece of emotional information revealed about a villain, he becomes more of a real person and less of a threatening force. If I can put myself into the baddie’s shoes, it’s easier to sense not only what he’s going to do, but also what the limits of his capabilities are. Throwing up a wall between me and a villain’s emotional state in the form of a mask, though, helps to keep the baddie mysterious and unpredictable. Sure, this mysteriousness may often translate into me finding a villain physically attractive, but more importantly it means I find the role narratively attractive.
Narrative attractiveness is much harder to rank, though. I’d definitely need more than 140 characters for that.
Billionaires become billionaires because they use their superior business acumen to start an enterprise and build it up over time until it, and they, are worth a billion dollars. Or they inherit the billion-dollar business from their fathers and have no business acumen of their own.
Tony Stark is, apparently, the latter kind of billionaire. And over in the Amazing Spider-Man comic strip, he’s proving he has no business sense by committing acts so monumentally stupid that he’s opening himself up to dozens of lawsuits.
Last week I described the story they’re currently running in the Amazing Spider-Man comic strip – a story that’s been plodding along since back in December. For want of a better name I think they’re calling it “Iron Jonah,” but that’s only because King Features Syndicate wouldn’t let them call it by its proper name “Dumb and Dumbass.” Here’s what’s happened so far in this story. (more…)
Okay, a promise is a promise. And I promised to lay off the Superior Spider-Man this week. Lucky for me there’s still an Amazing Spider-Man.
I know you think there aren’t any new Amazing Spider-Man stories right now, but I assure you there are. Where? Well, in the words of the philosopher, “See you in the funny papers.”
In the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip – where J. Jonah Jameson is still the editor/publisher of The Daily Bugle, not mayor; Peter Parker is still Spider-Man, not Doctor Octopus; and Peter and Mary Jane still have at least one more day of marital bliss – they’re running a story in which JJJ is trying to unmask Spider-Man. (JJJ? Lois Lane? What is it about alliterative initials and secret identities?)
“Whose side are you on?” That’s how Marvel touted its mega-event of 2006-2007, Civil War. Me? I’m on the readers’ side. So, even though Civil War ended some time ago, we’re still living in its aftermath and I’m still looking for a way to prove it couldn’t have happened.
Civil War started because the New Warriors, a team of “poorly-trained” super-heroes, tried to boost the ratings of their reality show by capturing a group of super-villains on camera. One of the super-villains, Nitro, the villain who can blow himself up over and over, decided that rather than be captured, he would blow himself up “real good,” killing over six hundred people, including a school bus full of children.
Everyone blamed the New Warriors. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s easier to blame the heroes than the super-villain who actually killed the six hundred people. Maybe because Civil War’s plot needed a plot device that would prompt Congress to enact a Superhuman Registration Act. All I know is that in the eyes of the law, the New Warriors shouldn’t be blamed for Nitro’s acts.
See, the law has this thing called the Doctrine of Emergency, which says people can act in emergencies without being subject to normal standards of care. The doctrine exists to encourage good Samaritans, so the law seeks to immunize them if they try to do good in an emergency situation but cause some harm as a result. So if a person performs emergency CPR on a heart attack victim and accidentally breaks the victim’s ribs, the good Samaritan isn’t liable for breaking the heart attack victim’s ribs. In the same way, if a group of super-heroes takes on a group of super-villains who are attacking a city, the heroes shouldn’t be held responsible if third parties get hurt or killed in the fight; and they especially shouldn’t be blamed if one of the villains acts on his own and kills said third parties. God, if the Doctrine of Emergency didn’t exist, can you imagine the property damage and wrongful death suits that would have been brought against Superman after [[[Man of Steel]]]? Instead, he got thanked by some Metropolans in the middle of a bomb crater.
Civil War had major problems in its premise because of the Doctrine of Emergency. The New Warriors shouldn’t have been be liable for the deaths that Nitro caused. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the law may not be on its side, the Marvel Universe Congress passed the SRA. After all, when has a little thing like the law not being on its side ever stopped Congress?
The SRA required all super-powered individuals in the Marvel Universe to register their identities and super powers with the federal government, so that the government could train meta-humans to use their powers properly. Riiiiight. Our government couldn’t even train FEMA agents how to book passage on Orbitz to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, it’s the perfect organization to teach Captain Wrigley how to keep his mutant-powered minty freshness fresh all day.
Under the SRA, failure to register was a criminal offense. Several of the super-heroes, most notably Captain America, opposed the SRA. They refused to register, and immediately became outlaws and fugitives because the SRA and its registration requirement went into effect the day it was enacted. Which is the second legal reason why Civil War couldn’t have happened.
In the real world, laws have a phase-in periods. New emission control standards don’t go into effect overnight, before any automobile manufacturer had a chance to comply with them. Car manufacturers are given time to get their cars into compliance with the standards; usually years. Registration laws also have phase-ins periods. When the Selective Service Act was enacted, the federales didn’t start rounding up the unregistered at the stroke of midnight on the day the law went into effect. No, the SSA gave people a period of several months to register before they were called draft dodgers.
Why? Well, what if someone was in Europe on the day the law went into effect so couldn’t register? Should he be a criminal under those circumstances or should he be given time to return from Europe and register? Now multiply that problem a millionfold for super-heroes. What if, when the SRA went into effect, a super-hero was visiting the Blue Area of the Moon, or fighting Blastaar in the Negative Zone, or was dead and hadn’t been retconned back to life yet? Should said hero be guilty of violating the SRA?
So, if the SRA had a phase-in period, and it would have had one, that means Civil War hasn’t actually happened yet. Remember, the Marvel Universe time moves much, much slower than real time. In the Marvel Universe, the SRA’S months-long phase-in period probably wouldn’t be ending until right about now. We still have time to give Captain America and Iron Man a copy of Civil War #7, with its oh-so-obvious solution to the problem, and keep them from fighting in the first place. We can keep Civil War from happening.
And that means we don’t have to see Tony Stark become someone unrecognizable to anyone who grew up with him when he was a hero. It means we don’t have to see Reed Richards explain that he was in favor of the SRA, because the law was the law and as long as it was the law, we have to obey it; conveniently forgetting that in his own origin he stole a rocket ship, thereby committing the grandest grand theft motor vehicle in history. It also means that we don’t have to see Captain America scolded for not really knowing what the American people wanted because he didn’t have a MySpace page or a YouTube account. (After all, everyone knows that you really measure how in touch with the American people a person is by counting how many e-mails offering financial aid he gets from deposed Nigerian princes.)
So Marvel’s Civil War couldn’t have happened. And we can ignore all those stories that came during and after it. Well, not really, but sometimes don’t you wish you could? I was born in 1952, some ninety years too young to have been in the American Civil War. And after thinking about Civil War all over again, I realized that I wish I had been too young for Marvel’s Civil War, too.
Author’s Note: I wrote a few installments of “The Law Is a Ass” for Comics’ Buyer’s Guide which, for a variety of reasons, it never printed. From time to time, I am going to run one of these previously unpublished installments, slightly edited to bring them up to date. This is one of those times.
I saw Thor: The Dark World last week with my usual bunch of hyper-critical Fairfield County buddies. Most of us (oddly) agreed the movie was great fun.
This is not a review of the Thor movie. A review should be more in-depth than four words, although in this Twitter-Totter world I realize this is akin to shouting “Hey, kids, get off of my lawn.”
The movie put on the big screen the type of energy and enthusiasm with which I associate the classic Marvel Comics in general – and with Jack Kirby in particular. Of all the superhero movies that have come down the pike over the past decade, Thor: The Dark World was less consumed with the Greek Angst Chorus than any other I can recall. Admittedly, I haven’t seen them all but, c’mon; did anybody actually pay money to see Catwoman?
I’m all for social commentary and significant subtext. I get the allegorical nature of The X-Men franchise. I appreciate Peter Parker’s sundry traumas. I totally understand that Bruce Wayne is in desperate need of some Xanax and a really good shrink. And I could have a swell time doing a Marxist analysis of Tony Stark. But every once in a while, it’s nice to pull the stick out of the nether-region and settle down for a good ol’ time.
It’s the same reason why I watch Robot Chicken and my favorite DC title is Tiny Titans. Well, that and the fact that Tiny Titans is one of the few DC Comics that actually makes any sense.
I realize that, as a comic book editor (let alone as a writer, broadcaster and professional fussbudget) my name has appeared in a lot more than a handful of Important Message Stories. And it will continue to be. Wait until we start telling you about the Hello Herman graphic novel. But an endless stream of Important Message Stories undermines their significance – concepts drown in the endless seas of moral dilemma.
Moreover, I advocate that we deserve Great Fun. The day-to-day slog through the shitstorm of life is tough enough. Let’s sit back for two hours and watch a bunch of talented actors chomp up the scenery without getting all hung up about reality.
Like most people, I enjoyed the heck out of Iron Man 3; it was fast, loud, noisy, and things blew up really well. The handoff from Jon Favreau to Shane Black was a step in the right direction and the casting was superb.
The movie, out now from Paramount Home Video, is definitely a sequel to The Avengers and not Iron Man 2, which everyone now seems to have declared a misfire. Clearly, the United States government has backed off demanding the armor now that they owe him their lives. It didn’t hurt that he allowed Jim Rhodes to keep the War Machine armor for America’s use.
Having Tony Stark deal with the aftermath of nearly dying while trying to end an alien invasion gave the film a nice weight, allowing us to explore the character from a new perspective. The metaphor of his anxiety and the malfunctioning Mark 42 armor was nicely handled without being heavy-handed. This was definitely a Tony Stark movie and Robert Downey Jr. nailed it. We saw his cockiness, insecurities and sheer brilliance, but all the same person.
While Stark is tinkering on armor after armor to combat his sleepless nights, a global terrorist named the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has reared his head, hijacking the airwaves and demonstrating a cold-blooded approach. He keeps promising the President of the United States (William Sadler) a lesson and Black’s script gets fuzzy about what it is the Mandarin wants.
Meanwhile, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) arrives at Stark Industries seeking something and again, what he wants is unclear but Pepper Potts nicely turns him down. As we have already learned, Killian has cleaned up nicely since his 1999 encounter with Stark when he first explained his desire to form a company called Advanced Idea Mechanics. In between, he wound up partnering with Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), the brilliant scientist Stark blew Killian off to bed. The two have wound up creating a bio-repair formula dubbed Extremis that not only can repair injuries but somehow superheats the body. Early experiments resulted in subjects going boom but Killian and his flunky Savin (James Badge Dale), and others have mastered it, becoming superhuman engines of destruction.
Now that we have all the elements in place, Black stirs the pot and things happen. Unfortunately, they don’t all blend terribly well so you have the richness of Stark’s dilemma but Hansen’s fall from grace is half-baked at best, a disappointment and waste. As much as the film is a joy to watch, I came away thinking it could have been better had everyone but Tony Stark been given more to do.
Pepper has no character arc this time around. She loves Tony, is frustrated by him, and becomes a damsel in distress, looking great all the while. But, she’s given no time to actually reflect on what happens to her in the final act and how that colors her view of the world that has changed around her. I also missed the wit of the exchanges between them that came from Joss Whedon’s pen. Here, it was perfunctory. Same with Rhodes. There’s a nice running gag about War Machine being renamed Iron Patriot but he just flies around and banters with Tony. The President and Vice President (Miguel Ferrer) should have had more to do than be chess pieces Black rapidly moves around the board.
Speaking of rapid, the ease with which the armors attach and detach themselves to Stark (and others) strained credulity throughout the film. When all the armors arrive for the fiery climax, they are readily shredded making on wonder if they are attached with Velcro. There’s been a steady increase in speed with which the suits of armor can come on and off, which is to be expected, but this has gone too far, too fast.
As for those who will complain about the radical reinterpretation of The Mandarin from his comic book past – I sympathize. But even when he was introduced in the early 1960s he was already a bit of an anachronistic foe. Frankly, this was the best way he could have been used without inviting commentary about it being a racist gesture, angering their Chinese co-producers. And by casting Ben Kingsley, you couldn’t have asked for a more perfect choice. He steals every scene he’s in.
The film kicks off Marvel Cinema Universe Phase 3 but does nothing obvious to continue the threads we saw at the end of Phase 2, the threat from Thanos. The closest we come is seeing that time has passed and Tony is still hanging around with Dr. Banner. I’ll be curious which film really propels us towards 2015′s Avengers 2. Despite the total absence of SHIELD in the film, the world is richer with the addition of AIM and Roxxon, elements we will no doubt be seeing on film — and television — in the future.
As for the video edition, it comes in the usual assortment of packages so decide which combo pack works best for you, including those who think 3-D TV is the future. My standard Blu-ay disc looked fabulous, with sharp detail and rich colors. I’m not sure it will get better than this, aided by stellar sound. The DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround track lets you hear every engine roar through the skies.
Thankfully, you won’t have to scurry from store to store to secure all the bonus content but what there is leaves you wanting more (which will make you wait for the Phase 2 box set sometime in 2015 or 2016).
Black and co-writer Drew Pearce provide some interesting color commentary showing how much thought went into structuring the film given all that has come before it. You do get a fairly standard Restore the Database Second Screen Experience assuming you want to download the Jarvis app and locate the content (which is becoming as annoying as the AR moments embedded in the comics).
Additionally, there is Iron Man 3 Unmasked (11 minutes), a routine behind-the-scenes featurette that should have been far longer and more detailed. Instead, they give us Deconstructing the Scene: Attack on Air Force One (9 minutes), showing how much was real versus CGI, which is impressive these days. There are also Deleted and Extended Scenes (16 minutes) which is interesting, entertaining, and mostly thankfully not in the final product. As one would expect, anything with Downey in it means the Gag Reel (5 minutes) is funnier than usual although Cheadle nearly steals this featurette. And in case you missed that Thor: The Dark World is arriving in November; you get a two minute sneak peek.
The bonus highlight is Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter (15 minutes), focusing on Peggy Carter, Captain America’s paramour from his first feature. Hayley Atwell is back in the title role (now rumored to being considered for a television series), joined by the always entertaining Bradley Whitford, and the return of Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark. She runs, jumps, kicks ass and we love it.
