Somnopolis

Bleeding Cool is reporting Christoph Waltz may be under consideration to play the Lizard.

Burn.

Dylan Baker played Dr. Connors in two of the Spidey movies, a set-up for the transformation that never happened (bit like Billy Dee Williams in Burton’s Batman).

What makes this worse is this isn’t the first time this has happened to Baker. In Todd Solondz’s Happiness he wowed critics by playing a character who was a paedophile in such a way that you actually feel sorry for him. Solondz recently released Life During Wartime, a sequel to his earlier film that recast all of the roles, including Baker’s.

The debut novel of Austin Grossman is a strange beast. It’s a novel that at its heart is a love letter to comic books, the bastard cousin of the more refined print-based artform, criticised in the past as a childish interest suitable only for illiterates. Grossman himself is feted as a newcomer to genre fiction, although a quick wiki reveals his father is a poet, his mother a novelist, his twin brother also a writer, his sister a scultor – and Grossman himself well-known in the computer game industry for his involvement in

• Ultima Underworld II
• System Shock
• Deus Ex
• Thief: Deadly Shadows
• Tomb Raider: Legend

Plot based Role-Playing Games for the most part, hardly the usual first-time author juvenalia. He’s even written for the New York Times! Then there’s the promotional artwork of Bryan Hitch that features in the book, the comic-book artist credited with inventing the ‘widescreen’, aesthetic that has allowed comics to further ape the visual excesses of big budget summer blockbuster movies. Not the typical amateur cover art then.

Thankfully Soon I Will Be Invincible carries the weight of expectation ably. Its knowing title is a clue to the awareness Grossman brings to the comic book tropes on show. The story focuses on two first-person narratives. Doctor Impossible, a twelve-time imprisoned supervillain who has a horrible habit of blurting his secret plans and blames his villainous behaviour on a personality disorder; and Fatale, a new superheroine plagued by self-doubt in the typical Modern Age fashion, whose tragic origin allows for that other great trope of contemporary comics, the fetishizing of the female body courtesy of her cybernetic implants. Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven-of-Nine meets Brian Michael Bendis’ Alias.

Doctor Impossible, the arch supervillain who just will not quit trying to take over the world, is the stronger character of the two. Given the title I suspect the original draft may have solely focused on his attempts to defeat the hero team The Champions. Perhaps Grossman felt this was too narrow. In any case courtesy of the two POV characters we follow the progression of the plot, with the heroes attempting to stop Doctor Impossible following his latest jailbreak and solve the mystery of their colleague CoreFire’s disappearance.

We are invited to sympathize with the villainous Doc, despite his continued efforts to takeover the world. Even he is unable to explain exactly why he acts as he does. He appears to be of the opinion that his vast intellect actually drives him to be evil, that to see the world as he does predestines supervillainy. In that he follows the Stan Lee tradition of villains who are at times misunderstood, occasionally even noble. Doctor Doom may be a totalitarian dictator whose hatred of Reed Richards is spurred on by vanity – but he also is a bereft son, whose study of the occult was undertaken to rescue his gypsy mother from demons. In Kevin Smith’s Mallrats Lee makes a cameo appearance and delivers dialogue he wrote for the Spider-Man villain the Vulture, which revealed a vulnerable side to the costumed criminal another writer may have ignored.

Grossman’s Doctor Impossible is also not a world away from Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible, or The Venture Brothers’ The Monarch – both ultimately delusional romantics who have been left disillusioned by the world. The heroes to them are merely the next stage in development of the schoolyard bullies they grew up with. CoreFire’s invulnerability lends him a smugness that’s similar to Whedon’s Captain Hammer: Everyone’s a hero in their own way / Everyone’s got villains they must face / They’re not as cool as mine / But folks you know it’s fine to know your place

The post-Marvel Age, post-Watchmen deconstruction trend allowed writers to re-examine superheroes with regard to their motivations and true intent. Batman became a psychopath, the X-Men child soldiers in a battle of ideologies, Superman a fascist boyscout and the Incredible Hulk a victim of abuse. Grossman plays with this exaggerated comic book ‘realism’, but undercuts it with genuine affection for supers.

At one point Fatale even wonders self-consciously if we have entered a ‘Rust Age’, in keeping with the classifying of different comic book periods as Golden Age, Silver Age etc. The general rule of thumb is that the earlier comic books represent a more hopeful era. Comic book historians have to turn a blind eye to the prevalent racism and misogyny to maintain such a claim, but it’s one that still holds some currency. Fatale herself, with her badgirl look and militarised powers is firmly in keeping with the modern era’s blending of sex and violence. Grossman has her repeatedly question her origins though, obscured by a convenient bout of amnesia and in that query the treatment of characters like Fatale, who are oftentimes designed to titillate rather than exist as independent female superheroes. That this all becomes a function of the plot itself displays just how much Grossman intended the book to be both a critique and a homage to the comics he loves.

Soon I Will Be Invincible I was gratified to discover is much more than a printed version of some gamer’s Champion’s campaign. It’s quite possibly the most entertaining book about comics since Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

I’ve long been of the opinion that one of the few film directors able to properly adapt comic book properties for the screen is Guillermo del Toro. Sam Raimi also managed to inject a sense of fun and overblown melodrama into his Spider-Man films. How could anyone hate emo-Peter Parker! It was just goofey.

Del Toro surpasses him due to a combination of humour and a blanket enthusiasm for fantasy. This is a man who would think H. P. Lovecraft is appropriate bedtime reading for children, whose Spanish language films are lauded as high fantasies or examples of magic realism. Whereas Hellboy, a comic book by Mike Mignola which Del Toro has being raving about for years, is seen as slumming somehow.

See not all comic book films have to be dour. Perhaps this is the inheritance of the grim ‘n’ gritty era that the comic industry has had a horrible tendency of falling back into again and again since the 80’s (see Alan Moore’s parody of Frank Miller’s Daredevil for an example). I suspect that it’s more than that however. In the US and the UK comic books are viewed as a distraction for children. The cavalier attitude towards a ‘juvenile’ artform’ might be more a holdover from the colonial Protestant work ethic, an early form of Constructivism that is still with us.

Yet juvenile or not, comic book films are big business. The Dark Knight made a tremendous amount of money for Warner Brothers, allowing them to reclaim some of the territory staked out by Marvel Entertainment with their Spider-Man and Iron Man franchises. However, troubling reports have emerged that Warner execs believe it was the doom and gloom factor that resulted in box office success. From the WSJ:

Like the recent Batman sequel — which has become the highest-grossing film of the year thus far — Mr. Robinov wants his next pack of superhero movies to be bathed in the same brooding tone as “The Dark Knight.” Creatively, he sees exploring the evil side to characters as the key to unlocking some of Warner Bros.’ DC properties. “We’re going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it,” he says. That goes for the company’s Superman franchise as well.

This development probably also sunk the promising Captain Marvel project, a character whose nature is sweetness and light, about as brooding as a lemon-flavoured lollipop unicorn. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns was itself not a trip to the amusement park, with the Kryptonian becoming an absentee father and a villainous plot involving real estate. How much more bleak and depressing do they want it to be? Warners talk of positioning the property of Superman. I can’t help but feel what they mean is filming the nihilistic Dark Knight for a second time and simply slapping another coat of paint on it.

See this is what I like about Del Toro’s Hellboy 2. There was no concern for overblown realism. No child abandonment. No scenes of gratuitous violence towards women. A gun-toting prince of hell went about punching elves, trolls and giant Hyperborean war machines with a grin and a quip. And what the hell’s wrong with that?

Peter Milligan’s work-for-hire for Mavel has been notable for the attempts to expand the dimensions of its costumed superfolk. Take for example X-Statix, a satire on celebrity culture and the excesses of reality television that happened to feature mutants. Toxin, a book centred on a minor Spider-Man character packed with more literary and artistic references than the average Chuck Jones Warner Brothers cartoon. Milligan routinely explores questions of identity and mental illness using the tropes of superhero comics as a vehicle for his concerns.

Namor The Sub-Mariner is one of the oldest ongoing creations in Marvel’s stable of characters. A sometime ally of humanity, he is more an anti-hero than the traditional caped superman, acting as a defender of his realm under the seas, which is frequently threatened by the actions of ‘surface-dwellers’. Past depictions of the character have varied greatly, with some focusing on his essential nobility, while on other occasions this has been shown as regal contempt.

Milligan has chosen to use the themes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to reinvent Namor. For this five issue miniseries the clock has been turned back to the age of American fears of Soviet territorial expansion. Here, Atlantis is another bone of contention between America’s enemies and ‘The Navy’, which Milligan presents in the same role as the business consortium funding the narrator’s voyage of discovery in Conrad’s novel. An explorer known only as Marlowe has vanished, leaving behind an audio recording that confirms his discovery of the underwater kingdom. The US Navy is concerned that he has turned traitor and will give the secrets of Atlantis to the Soviets.

Milligan’s Namor has yet to reveal himself to the world and is a creature of rumour conjured by superstitious sailors. He holds sway over “uncharted territory. Black water.” Atlantis takes the place of ‘Darkest Africa’, as the unknown centre of the Mavel Universe, with our protagonist Doctor Stein pursuing another Marlowe into strange geography.

Esad Ribic’s photorealistic style, as seen previously in the Loki miniseries, elevates the book above the typical superhero fare. Each panel is an artwork in its own right, with both foreground and background details captured precisely. There is also an avoidance of empty transitional scenes and a sense of craft in the fleshy weight of each individual character’s facial features. 

Stein calls himself “a rationalist, part of a proud Western Tradition”, setting up Milligan’s central idea. Readers know Namor exists, despite the last words of denial in this issue. Stein has had the great misfortune to be a fictional sceptic in a world filled with gods and monsters. Given the post-modern antics of earlier Milligan titles like Enigma and Skreemer, I’m sure this is no accident. Marvel Earth, known among the fan community as Earth 616, also possesses a hidden African kingdom with fantastic technology; a Blue Area on the Moon; and a Nexus of all Realities located somewhere in the Florida Everglades. Conrad’s novel explored the ideas of European chauvinism towards Africa, with the certainty of civilization confounded by the unknown. Milligan’s smartest idea is to set the Marvel universe on a similar confrontation, with the unveiling of ‘unknown unknowns’, such as Namor and Atlantis. The comfort of superhumans battling bank robbers is stripped away leaving the reader with the terrifying realization of how a world so strange and beyond our understanding would be.

Radiation guilt?

Just a notion and perhaps others can point me in the right direction, but I was thinking the other day about how Manga/Anime has dealt with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It echoes through most of the dystopian storylines produced by Japan. There is a recurring story trope of nuclear holocaust ushering in a darker civilization, be they demons, vampires, religious zealots or the Akira dystopia.

In the sixties in the states we had veterans like Kirby illustrating and writing comics. As a member of the Marvel stable, he was among the contributors who created characters whose ’superhero’, identities were the result of radiation. The Hulk is exposed to gamma radiation and becomes a creature of unfettered strength. Captain America is dosed with radiation in order to stimulate his body to become enhanced. Spider-Man is bitten by a radioactive spider, mutants were originally the first generation to be affected by ambient radiation I believe (in keeping with the novel ‘Children of the Atom’), though now we are led to believe it was due to evolution. Even Daredevil receives his powers due to domestic toxic waste.

So were these comic superbeings created in order to assuage public guilt over the atomic bombings? Not in a conspiratorial sense – men in a dark room deciding to brainwash the children of America with Atomic Propaganda – no, I mean more in the sense of cultural synchronicity. There was a general sense of unease over the use of atomic weapons and fantasies were constructed that used atomic power in a beneficial way.

However, being constructed as fantasies this may well have been a self-reflexive admission of ‘guilt’.

Now European comics, as well as Jodorowsky, Bilal etc….don’t see this ‘atomic dystopia/enhancement’, theme so much. DC comic characters acquired before WW2 are aliens, magicians, master strategists and vigilantes. With the ‘Marvel Age’, we have the power of the Atom being employed.

Just curious myself.

Review of Serenity to follow shortly.