Never Mind the Batfleck – Why Ben Affleck as Batman Isn’t really the issue

Contains spoilers go Man of Steel.

So, the Internet snapped again. It doesn’t take much nowadays, not now we’ve adopted it as the designated home of nerd rage. The Net was designed to survive nuclear Armageddon, but announce that Ben Affleck is going to play Batman and you’ll immediately feel the servers start to buckle under the strain.

I have a pretty easy-going take on the news. Man of Steel may have had a few scripting issues, but its casting was spot-on; I have no reason to believe that Zack Snyder and co. have dropped the ball this time. The Batman mythos is full of left-field casting decisions – Adam West? Michael Keaton? Heath Ledger? – and yet they worked for the type of stories their producers and directors were telling. I’m going to give Affleck a break.

Besides, everyone knows that the One True Batman is Kevin Conroy.

No, my worry about the forthcoming Superman/Batman movie is that we’ve yet to have a solo Superman film set in this continuity, because Man of Steel was really about the last generation of Kryptonians and their mess; in some respects it felt like a prequel to a more dedicated Superman story.

Okay, I might be off-base here, but think about it; Superman’s deal is that he’s an old fashioned, straight-forward hero figure, the guy who’ll save your cat from a tree and your kid from a rampaging alien death robot. You can play around with that, but that’s his thing. Problem is, that’s yet to be established in DC’s movieverse. On his first day on the job, he’s involved in a war his dad’s generation started, resulting in obscene property damage and, presumably, thousands of casualties. Compare this to Chris Reeve’s first action set piece, where he catches a helicopter and saves Lois. Yes, Man of Steel showed Clark saving a school bus full of kids and the crew of an oil rig, but they were presented as moments that threatened his future, not that defined Superman’s character and heroism.

So a sequel is coming in 2015, but a character that is yet to be fully defined is going to be sharing screen time with another character that exerts substantial gravitational pull. I’d also argue that, story wise, Batman might be the wrong character for the first DC movie team-up. Bats is a darker, more tortured character than Superman under normal circumstances, but here we have a Superman who has seen Metropolis levelled, thousands murdered and who was forced to execute General Zod on his first day on the job, not long after discovering that his home world was destroyed and the only other survivors were genocidal fanatics.

Beat that, Batman.

The commercial motivation for all this is to establish a cinematic DC Universe and to catch up with Marvel’s success story. From that point of view, putting DC’s two biggest characters on screen together makes perfect sense. Story-wise, however, I’m not so sure, not least because, based on the plot points left at the end of Man of Steel, and established characterisations across continuities, Batman would presumably have to the winner in any moral argument – are superhumans a public threat? Yeah, look at the ruins of Metropolis. Is killing supervillains wrong? Considering the need to keep popular bad guys like Lex and the Joker alive for sequels then yeah, have a no-kill rule. So would this lead to Superman abdicating moral responsibility in his own movie?

Now, if you want to establish the basis for a Justice League movie in the Man of Steel sequel then that’s possible but you don’t cast Ben Affleck. Why? Because the hero you need is Wonder Woman.

This is because Wonder Woman is a character from a warrior culture who nevertheless works as an ambassador for peace. If you want to ask whether Superman is a noble warrior who can live with killing his enemies, or a largely peaceful guy who helps people (necessitating the occasional smack down), then she’s a character who can illuminate both sides of that debate. She’s a known quantity and a Justice Leaguer and a character that genuinely expands the DC movieverse.

Now, I know it’s problematic introducing a major female character as a way of furthering a male character’s arc, but seeing that DC seem incapable of getting a Wonder Woman film or TV show made, then maybe problematic is better than non-existent. I may be wrong on that though.

So there we go – give Ben a chance but don’t screw over Superman in the process. The casting here isn’t as important as the writing, so let’s hope the script gives us the chance to get the Justice League movie we’ve been waiting to see.

Where I Am With Comics

I had a dream last night, one of those strange, realistic dreams where everything seems normal except the condensed time frame and people being where they shouldn’t. And because this is how interesting my dreams are, it was about how I spent five hours in a comic shop.

It was the details that gave it away – books and graphic novels were all published in  elegant. minimalist covers which made it easy to navigate your way through the continuity and publishing history of things like Star Wars and DC Comics – and it’s been a long time since I’ve spent any time in a comic store, never mind five hours. As far as I can tell there isn’t one in Derby, and while I’ve made the transition to reading comics entirely on my iPhone, the industry has been slipping away from me.

I know when this started. Last year, DC Comics carried out a relaunch of its entire line, jettisoning the existing continuity and renumbering everything from scratch. It was a bold move, and seemed to pay off, at least initially. Frankly, the industry needed one of the big companies to do something radical to bring in new readers. I can’t blame DC for going what they did; they don’t make comics for my personal amusement.

But it meant that the stories and characters I was attached to disappeared. Sure, most of them are part of the ‘New 52’, but changed – Superman isn’t married to Lois any more, the Flash I followed is AWOL, they flat out cancelled titles I was following. And they were perfectly within their rights to do that, but when that connection was severed, it failed to return, and with it some of my passion for comic books.

I’m still following some, of course: Aquaman is a great take on a maligned character, and I like how the disdain he’s treated with in some corners of fandom plays in to the storylines. Action Comics I’m reading because I’m a Superman fan and Grant Morrison’s love for the character is palpable. And Paul Cornell’s Saucer Country is (partly) the alien-abduction plotl arc of The X-Files done properly, with meditations on the liminal, mythic aspects of flying saucer mythology. And I love IDW’s Transformers titles, because that particular franchise was one of my earliest geeky passions.

It’s strange how this has happened – I love comics, and I hope the industry finds a way to thrive, and I’ll go to see any and all superhero movies – but I guess that’s just the way it goes. I owe a lot to comic fandom: I’ve made good friends as a result of it, one of which is producing his own comics. I desperately want to see him succeed at this because he’s talented and passionate and the industry needs young voices like that. As for me… Well, am I leaving comics? I don’t know. If I found one title that caught my excitement I’d happily buy it, and I’m sure that title is out there. But I don’t have the time to plough through Comixology to find it, and I don’t have the disposable income to take a punt on multiple titles that I might not enjoy.

Heck, I guess I’m half asking for recommendations. I like writers like Cornell, Simone and Johns, and James Robinson’s Starman is my favourite comic book series of all time. I don’t like dark-and-edgy for the sake of dark-and-edgy – it’s boring – but hard-won optimism is fine. And it doesn’t have to be superhero stuff, because I suspect superhero mythology – the mythology that arose when comics were popular, mass-culture entertainment – is pretty much on its way to migrating fully to the big screen.

So am I alone? Has anyone else found themselves drifting away from comics? Or is this just one of those moments in life when things change and it’s not good and it’s not bad, it’s just change? I don’t know where this is going to end up.

But I know in my dream, that five hours in the comic book store, I was enjoying myself.

Watchmen Toasters. Seriously.

A few months ago, DC Comics announced Before Watchmen, a series of prequels to the classic graphic novel created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This sparked a number of debates, mainly around whether or not Watchmen actually needs this sort of follow-up, but also about creator rights (I blogged about it here, but long story short – I think Watchmen is a complete work in itself and so prequels are unnecessary, but if Moore can remix Dracula and The War of the Worlds into The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, then DC can play with Watchmen).

But if that wasn’t enough debate about the commercialisation of art, today has seen the announcement of the only kitchen appliance on earth powerful enough to make Alan Moore spontaneously combust. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they’re making a Watchmen toaster.

Seriously.

Here’s an article on it.

Obviously it’s the very definition of selling out your artistic integrity, but it’s just so ridiculous that it actually becomes hilarious. In some ways it’s a scathing commentary on culture. I’d half be tempted to belief that it was done to deliberately wind up the sort of comic book fans who take things a little too seriously…

So, who’s up for clubbing together and buying Alan Moore a Watchmen toaster for his birthday?

Happy Birthday Superman!

Today is Superman’s birthday.

You’ve got to feel sorry for the guy. He spends all that time saving the world and yet when does he get to party? Once every four years. Sometimes life sucks if you’re a superhero.

February 29th isn’t the anniversary of the character’s creation or his first publication or anything. It became the traditional birthday for Superman during the Silver Age and it fits – why shouldn’t Superman’s birthday be on the leap day? It’s an unusual birthday for an unusual person.

It’s no secret that Superman is my favourite superhero. Batman may be cooler (and, in a weird way, funnier), and Starman may be better written, but there’s something about Superman. Maybe it’s because he’s the first superhero, the one who defines the genre – he’s pure of heart and never gives up and if you were somehow mysteriously transported into the world of comic books, he’d be the one you’d call for help.

Being the first carries with it a specific set of problems though – he’s sometimes seen as boring because he lacks an ‘edge’ (that’s because he’s the baseline and so it’s easy to forget the uniqueness of his first appearance), and because he’s the first – and therefore ‘establishment’ and ‘patriarchal’, he becomes the one to knock down in order to prove another character’s credentials (this is key to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which was so influential that everyone ended up doing it).

All this has been used to call into question Superman’s relevance; I say it enhances it. Certainly in the UK we’ve had a couple of years that have served to highlight the corruption of many of our institutions – MP expenses scandals, newspapers hacking phones, bribes paid to police. We suffer from a lack of heroes, real and fictional. In that context, the concept of Superman, who’d fight to the death to save one person, and who’d never take a bribe or fiddle his expenses, is a powerful one. That’s why Grant Morrison has taken him back to his 1930s roots as a crusader against social injustice – the character’s relevance has been confirmed by echoing his birth.

I don’t know what Superman’s future holds – how it will be shaped by the move to digital publishing, how the forthcoming Man of Steel will compare to movie juggernauts like The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, how truth, justice and the American way survives in a world that’s lacking all three.

But I do know that, as a character, Superman is still loved, still has something to say, still leads the pack when it comes to fictional heroes. And so today I’ll read a comic, wear my Superman t-shirt, and be grateful that, once upon a time, someone dreamed of a man that could fly.

 

Before Watchmen: Good or bad idea?

Well, today was one of those days when the internet broke. As you’ve already guessed, this is because of news that’s swept the geek world – DC Comics are publishing prequels to Watchmen.

Now, if you’re not familiar with the book, Watchmen is one of the pivotal comic books. An apocalyptic story of messed-up superheroes and looming nuclear war, Watchmen is based around the idea that if superheroes were real they’d be nuts.

(It’s far deeper than that, of course, but I like understatement.)

Reaction to the prequel news has been mixed – some think it’s a fantastic way of returning to characters created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons; others think it’s an horrifically unimaginative idea – chief among these is Alan Moore himself, who suggests it would be akin to writing a prequel to Moby Dick.

I’ll admit I unleashed some Twitter scorn when I heard the news, but it’s not something I’m going to get too worked up over – I’ve always found Watchmen to be a work that’s easier to admire than it is to love, and the existence of prequels won’t affect the original one way or another. But it’s impossible to ignore that it has been the major influence on the comic book industry since its publication. Something that big, it’s suggested, demands to be revisited – after all, no-one’s stopped writing about Superman and Batman have they?

Thing is, it’s a different situation. Superman is a character that exists in an ongoing serial narrative; Watchmen is a self-contained story with a beginning, middle and end. Its structure actually includes its own prequel; everything you need to know about the characters and their world is contained in the book. I don’t think Moore’s being arrogant when he compares his work to Moby Dick; he’s just making the point that any additional stories feel redundant.

But wait, who says they’re redundant? Watchmen was a product of the 80s – the world’s changed a lot since then, why shouldn’t Moore’s characters be used to speak to the concerns of 2012?

The counter to that is that those characters are wed to their timeframe, a world of opposing power blocs and the threat of all-out nuclear war. 2012’s concerns are very different, so much so that it would be smarter just to try and create something from scratch that has the same sort of impact as Watchmen. Ambitious? Sure, but why not shoot for the moon?

Ahh, but Alan Moore has made a living out of revisiting character’s created by other writers, albeit those out of copyright. Why should Watchmen be sacred? After all, we’re living in the age of the remix, the remake, the reboot. If Alan Moore can revisit Mina Harker, other writers can revisit Dr. Manhattan. It’s only fair. Although I should note that most of the writers Moore borrows from are long dead…

I’m not convinced there’s an easy answer – my gut instinct is to think the whole thing’s a little recursive and it would be better for the industry to find a brand new way forward. But if people want to buy new Watchmen material – and they will – why shouldn’t they have the opportunity?

The questions will rage, but I’m not sure they’ll have answers – after all, debates over art vs commerce, the necessity (or otherwise) of sequels and creation as a collaborative act have been around for centuries. But for the next few months at least, everyone’s gonna be watching the Watchmen.