Somnopolis

So Kenneth Brannagh has cast Idris Elba as a god.

Well of course he has, that’s perfect casting. I’ve had a sneaking man-crush on the bloke since Ultraviolet.

Turns out though that the deity in question hails from the Norse pantheon, that drunken bunch of viking fanciers, so some people got their knickers in a twist. Like so:

“This PC crap has gone too far!….Norse deities are not of an African ethnicity! … It’s the principle of the matter. It’s about respecting the integrity of the source material, both comics and Norse mythologies.”

Ah when comic book fanboys attempt to engage with the debate on race. It’s fun. You may recall many were upset when Michael Clarke Duncan was cast as Kingpin. I’ve even written before about the ‘Will Smith as Captain America’ furore. This amuses me for a few reasons. For one this notion of ‘integrity’.

We are talking about comics here right? I mean, there’s not even any point in discussing the issue on this front. Comics are written to be sold. No deeper meaning than that. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, the boys who built Marvel and created this comic book called Thor? They were just trying to distract you from the antics of Superman and Batman with whatever they could pull out of their ass. Not to say Kirby or Lee’s work is poor, but it is sensationalist and improvisational, to a wild degree. Attempts to imitate it slavishly do it a disservice. I take my hat off to Mark Millar for reinventing the Norse god as a possibly deluded environmental activist with a messiah complex and nary a hint of Ye Olde English dialogue.

It was a timely reinventiong of a tired and backward looking character concept. The shameless raiding of Brewer’s Dictionary of Myth to come up with antagonists for the mealy mouthed Norse god got tired years ago. Furthermore, even if you consider Mark Millar the comic book antichrist, look to the much welcomed J. M. Straczynski revamp of Thor. There the guardian of Asgard was revealed to be using the form of an inhabitant of New Orleans, who berates Thor for his inability to help the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Once again, not exactly the same ol’ same ol’.
Furthermore, for all the claims of stunt casting and PC gone mad (now there’s a meme I wish would curl up and die), I leave you with the perfect rejoinder. Morgan Freeman – Shawshank Redemption. After all, did Stephen King not write the character as an Irishman? Frank Marshall has Freeman smirk as he replies to Tim Robbins’ question – why is he called Red – with ‘Maybe it’s because I’m Irish.’

And that’s that.

In the end, Idris Elba is a fine choice and frankly the fanboys should be thanking their lucky stars the film has attracted actors of his talent. Here’s another comic adap the man is starring in, Andy Diggle and Jock’s The Losers!

You may have missed the Grauniad interview this week with Mark Millar promoting the release of Matthew Vaughan’s Kick-Ass. Now comic fans are used to the Glaswegian’s heady mixture of self-promotion and hyperbole, but I wonder if the journo involved was a little overwhelmed. I’ve quoted some choice passages below, including a claim that Millar is the most influential comic book writer since Stan Lee.

‘cough’

What’s interesting is the article’s focus on his working class Scottish background. Warren Ellis once commented on why British comic writers so often outstrip their American cousins, pointing out that class was a huge factor. In the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore, the bearded magus recounts his own working class childhood, quipping that some of his neighbour’s pets even shared the same harelip due to the amount of inbreeding in the area. Comics therefore for the British working class were a cheap and readily available source of entertainment, whereas novels and higher education belonged to the bourgeois families in the suburbs.

Millar is convinced his success is down to his upbringing: his mother died when he was 14 and his father four years later, so he had to drop out of university to bring up his brother. Money was so tight that “the cat ate one day and we ate the next”. Writing was an economic imperative.

Mark Millar working class hero? This I find a bit hard to swallow. I’m not denying that he managed to overcome many hurdles to succeed, but this anecdote is pitched to provide the author with a certain cachet of authenticity. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps dammit!

No mention of fellow Scot Grant Morrison offering a helping hand no? Even submitting scripts for The Authority under his name when Millar was laid low with a debilitating illness?

It’s the next claim though that really gets my goat.

On the page, Millar’s outlandish plotlines have made him the art form’s most powerful influence since Spider-Man’s legendary co-creator Stan Lee.

Um….Bendis, Morrison, Johns, Busiek – Alan Frigging Moore!

He had never heard of McAvoy [star of Wanted] or Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov, and “had just seen Borat, so presumed Bekmambetov must be cheap Russian labour”.

McAvoy is a young Scottish actor on the up-and-up. Ok I guess Millar is not a cinephile – he claims Geena Davis’ The Long Kiss Goodnight has one of the best film scripts ever, which strikes me as a cynical attempt to ape Tarantino’s ability to reposition unappreciated cult classics. But McAvoy was also the star of Shameless, a great British television series set on a Manchester housing estate. If ever there was a show that demonstrated the rotten core of Tony Blair’s socialism-lite ideals, it was this black comedy.

I guess Millar doesn’t watch much telly.

He also doesn’t really know much about films, as Bekmambetov was hardly some one-night-wonder from Eastern Europe. This was the director of the phenomenally successful Night Watch, an urban fantasy series that had Hollywood producers bending over backwards to get the rights. Fox eventually won out to much fanfare. In fact Night Watch is exactly the kind of movie Millar should be ‘homaging’, as it is chock full of arresting images and thrilling sfx sequences. Reading his comic work can often provide an amusing few minutes of ‘spot the film rip-off’. Hell his Old Man Logan storyline is Unforgiven, but with more gore and misery.

The script was a particular problem. Millar, used to autonomy, was shocked at the accommodations he had to make. “I don’t really do happy endings, so there’s a huge difference between Kick-Ass the movie and Kick-Ass the comic,” he says. “In the movie Matthew [Vaughn] really wanted the lead to get the girl, whereas in the comic, this guy is a loser and pretends to be gay because the girl works in a shelter and is really right-on. She just wants to be best friends, he wants to have sex with her, and in the comic when he confesses she tells him to fuck off. In the movie, Matthew has them having sex.”

Millar is once again being disingenuous here. He forgets to mention that Wanted does not resemble the comic he wrote even a little. The initial story set-up is similar, but after that the garishly coloured pages go flying out the window and Bekmambetov fashioned his own story. The walking and talking piece of humanoid shit is conspicuous by his absence in the filmed version.

“Glasgow’s the perfect education – it’s given me a unique life experience compared to everyone in the New York publishing industry and Hollywood. Every single person in Hollywood looks the same: the writers are all skinny, bald guys with glasses, who hang out in coffee shops all day.”

Whereas you’re a skinny, pale-faced, wee-man. Gosh that was easy. There is also yet another call-back to Millar’s working class credentials in that quote. Moore! Dog with hare-lip!

The game being played here is simultaneously one of self-aggrandizement, and self-deprecation. It’s interesting to observe. This whole ‘wee Scotsman who grew up envying the bright lights of Manhattan’, shtick grows tiresome when you realize his take on the American vernacular is actually quite superficial. If anything the most successful accommodation of the American voice by a British comic writer is by Garth Ennis. He not only retains the gallows humour of his Belfast upbringing, but throws in a heck of a lot of research into whatever period he is writing about. Out of the whole British invasion, it is Ennis, not Millar, who I wish was being courted by Brangelina and Joel Silver.

More’s the pity.

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.

Mr Chick is a man I first heard of in Trinity college ‘98. A Christian cartoonist with what some might call controversial views regarding his faith (I would choose the phrase ‘batshit crazy’) he has issued various comics out to subscibers depicting his ‘take’. There was a time when most of it was available on the internet – his piece on the evils of D&D was a particular favourite of mine – but that is no longer the case to the same extent as, last time I checked, people are willing to pay for this bilge. I even remember a note on which schools were in receipt of these ‘religious magazines’.

Anyway, rant over. I’m including a wiki on the man below, but first! A sketch that apparently represents a previously unknown collaboration between Chick and Stan ‘the Man’ Lee.

Ye gods, is nothing sacred. It’s times like this I wish I could speak Yiddish. Stan, I’m so disappointed :O

Anyway,

http://www.yourmomsbasement.com/archives/2006/11/galactus_is_com.html

And the wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Chick

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.