Batman and Robin Update

More details here on the new Grant Morrison - Frank Quitely Batman & Robin series I mentioned earlier. Speculation has it that this is actually Dick Grayson in the Batman role (Bruce Wayne/Batman is allegedly "dead" at the moment, remember) and Bruce Wayne's supposed son Damien Wayne in the role of Robin. For what it's worth, this is who I think the pictured characters are, too. Morrison is capable of surprising, however, so we'll see. Note also the speculation that Morrison will kill Grayson at some point... it is common knowledge that Dan Didio, the current editor-in-chief of DC seems to want to off poor Dick Grayson for some reason.

Watchmen

Like everyone else in the comic world, I've been awaiting the Watchmen movie with a mixture of excitement and unease. Watchmen was the 1986 Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons masterpiece using pastiche versions of the 1960s Charlton characters DC had just bought. It's impact on the field probably can't be overestimated, and people have been trying to figure out how to film it ever since.

While I very much appreciate the much-ballyhooed decision to film it with a very great loyalty to the way it looked on the page, I've decided not to see it. There were two key elements in my decision. First, I read some reviews, and while there was a mixture of opinions, I'm troubled by the fact that several writers thought the main flaw was a too-great adherance to the printed page. That suggests that what worked on the page doesn't work on the screen, which doesn't surprise me. One my favorite scenes in The Lord of the Rings is something I would have hated to see filmed - it wouldn't have worked at all with live actors. I'm thinking of Aragorn's justification of his actions to the Rohirrim when he, Legolas and Gimli first encounter them in the Two Towers. I love his speech; but it would have been unbearably arrogant and strange if filmed. It only works on the printed page.

Second, I reread parts of the original Watchmen the other night. And the more I read, the less I wanted to chance my memories of the brilliant, tightly constructed work to the vagaries of film. I'm sure there are pleasures at seeing Dave Gibbons characters, sets and scenes translated to film. But I think I'll settle for the book.

Here is a review that compares The Incredibles to Watchmen. The writer is making a different comparison to the one I made at the time The Incredibles came out, more or less contemporaneous with Fantastic Four. The Pixar movie was a classic that captured the vibrant heart of why superhero comics work on any level; Fantastic Four didn't work at all except as vaguely amusing entertainment, unlike the wonderful original comic. I suspect the same will be true of Watchmen.

By the way, I fairly recently saw The Incredibles again. I agree with the reviewer; it's a classic that makes most comic book movies look sick.

Big Batman News

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely are to do a new Batman ongoing called Batman and Robin, according to Comic Book Resources here.

The writer and artist, both Scots and regarded as some of the top talents in the comic book field, just completed a hugely praised 12 issue series of All-Star Superman. I'm not a huge Superman fan, but that was in the top ten best comic stories I've ever read. I bought the series, which was more like quarterly than the projected monthly (Quitely is not a fast worker, apparently), and then bought the hardcover compilations. That good.

Their moving over to Batman and Robin is suggestive. All-Star Superman, irreverently referred to as ASS by many fans, was part of a line of projected prestige series to be out of continuity and done by the very best creators in the industry. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were to get this treatment initially, and it was suggested that other major DC properties would follow. (All-Star Batgirl and All-Star Green Lantern were announced, but so far nothing has appeared.) The idea of the All-Star line was to give the best creators the chance to do Platonic ideals of the characters without having to worry about continuity. So Morrison and Quitely's Superman was the basic Silver Age template of the character, with some features of the Christopher Reeves Superman movies, especially in the depiction of Clark Kent. It was shockingly good, and made Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen seem like much more interesting characters than they had before.

However, All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee, did not meet with the same critical success. Very slow paced (the first several issues appeared to take place during a single night), it made Batman and his supporting cast seem less appealing than their usual depictions; indeed, Miller's Batman seemed to be deranged. As the series went on, it became apparent to some critics that the book might have some qualities, perhaps as satire, but mostly it engendered a sort of appalled wonder among the readership. Miller had Batman growl to crooks on whom he was inflicting savage beatings "I'm the god-damned Batman!" which caused everyone to repeat the line endlessly in reviews, scoffing. Miller seemed to pick up on this and had Batman say it several times an issue. Very weird. It was interesting to look at, but I didn't read more than a couple of issues. Not the success All-Star Superman was, to be polite.

All-Star Wonder Woman, to be written and drawn by"good girl" artist Adam Hughes, has been repeatedly delayed; the current line from DC is that it will finally appear during 2009, but I'm not holding my breath.

So moving Morrison and Quitely over to Batman and Robin seems to suggest that DC understands that they didn't hit the nail on the head with Miller and Lee's version. The new book does not appear to be branded as part of the All-Star line, but knowing Morrison, it likely won't have much to do with continuity as the rest of DC understands it, anyway. I'm looking forward to this.

Comic Book Indigene

The Absorbascon reports on a new exhibit on comics, Comic Book Indigene, at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. Very cool. The museum was under construction the last time we were in DC; I'd like to see it very much. By the way, I very much recommend Absorbascon, who comments on comic books weekly.

Player vs. Player

PvP is one of the more intriguing and popular webcomics. Webcomics are published by cartoonists at their own websites, and usually either haven't been picked up by a syndicate for the papers or are too edgy or narrow in appeal to be considered. There are a lot of them out there, but the only ones I follow daily are Little Dee, PvP, Pibgorn (a labor of love by syndicated cartoonist Brooke McEldowney, who does 9 Chickweed Lane), Day By Day, a dry political strip, and Least I Could Do, a surprisingly appealing strip ostensibly about sex but more about the amusing and unlikely adventures of the testosterone-poisoned protagonist.

More about the others another time (but you should check out Little Dee).

Player vs. Player is a daily strip, presently published Monday through Friday, about the adventures of the staff of a computer game magazine. While there are a fair number of strips about the subject of the magazine, they tend to be funny and comprehensible even to someone like me who has never successfully played any computer game other than Myst. (Judging by my friends, who are mostly slightly younger than I am, I just somehow missed the cutoff date for getting into computer games - the appeal is inexplicable to me. Although I really did like Myst.)

The writer, Scott Kurtz, is not exactly sophisticated. Sometimes his strips are pretty predictable, and he will go for the easy joke. He has a lamentable delight in what he enthusiastically and unashamedly bills as "fart jokes", and he exhibits a strange nostalgia for The Dukes of Hazzard, a hokey 1970s television show that is something of a byword for just how bad network television can be. But at times he excels, bringing his popular culture commentary to genuine heights. I get the impression from his blog commentary, also at the site, that he is something of a procrastinator and realizes that he doesn't apply himself with quite as much energy as he might. But he's genuinely talented, and he's apparently managed to make a living with PvP, which has become a comic book from Image and has been collected in book format. And the strip is consistently entertaining, occasionally moving, and often hilarious.

This week, Kurtz is displaying a degree of wit and sophistication at satire that might surprise the regular reader expecting the daily gag about D&D, comic books or movies. On Monday, he launched without ceremony into a sequence inspired by the Watchmen movie coming out Friday (or more exactly, by the legendary graphic novel itself.) The characters, however, are comic strip characters - on Monday we find Popeye as Rorshach, Jon from Garfield as Nite Owl and a discussion about the murder of "Blockhead", obviously Charlie Brown. And immediately one begins to wonder who is going to be Dr. Manhattan or Ozymandias. I won't spoil the rest of it. But this is really clever.

Like almost all of Kurtz's work, if you aren't a fan of the popular culture subject he's addressing (in this case Watchmen and mainstream comic strips), you won't get it at all. But if you are, well, you really shouldn't miss this.

Television

I just noted on Facebook one of those bits where you tell things about yourself and circulate the list to friends. One of the questions was something like "What four television programs do you watch?"

Four? That would be a lot. Right now, I think Battlestar Galactica and Venture Brothers are the only programs I watch. I can see that a few others are clever and entertaining: House, 24, Monk come to mind. But none seem worth making an effort about. Aside from that, television is something that either conveys news and sports, or the occasional old movie one comes across by accident. There are some older series that I occasionally dip into on DVD: Newsradio, Nero Wolfe, Twin Peaks, Rome, Futurama. But aside from that, not much. I've watched a lot of Star Trek, but don't bother to watch old episodes; I saw all of Babylon 5, but despite being enjoyable at the time, it doesn't hold up in reruns - too precious and self-indulgent.

I guess it's the same phenomenon as movies - they've made only a few I care for during my lifetime, but give me Cary Grant or Grace Kelly, and I'll watch it. Born too late, apparently.

Does Futurama Have a Future?

Maybe is the best the folks at Newsarama, a pop culture site with a particular focus on comics, could get out of co-creator David X. Cohen.

I'm a big fan of Futurama, made by the same folks who made The Simpsons. I'm not really surprised that Futurama didn't take off the way the simpler and more accessible Simpsons did, but I am surprised that it has languished as a cult favorite while inferior pieces of crap like Family Guy get renewed and become big hits.

(Ok, I can't resist a minor rant about Family Guy. I know a number of people who claim to enjoy it, but have little to say about Futurama or the clever, raucous Venture Brothers adventure/comedy cartoon. This is mystifying. Family Guy is a blatant cheap knock off of The Simpsons, and has nothing new or interesting to say. The characters are uniformly unlikable, and the gimmick of using pop culture references to segue off into a non-sequiter flashback is incredibly lazy. The central character, Peter Griffin, is a lazy, dumb, fat slob like Homer Simpson, but where Homer is endearing no matter how appalling his misdeeds, Peter is just appalling, without even the slightest quality or character. He's merely cruel to everyone around him and stupid to a degree that makes it impossible to understand how his relatively agreeable but rather dim wife would put up with him for even a moment. And the other characters are rendered with mystifying inconsistency: why is the fairly ordinary daughter, Meg, loathed and dismissed by the other family members? Is the toddler, Stewie, a mad genius ala Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory, or merely a pissy aesthete? Can the other characters understand Stewie, or is it only the dog, Brian who understands him? It appears to be both or either, depending on whether it's convenient to the writers to allow Stewie to interact with other characters or whether they merely want to use him for sarcastic asides the other characters don't have to react to. And why does the dog talk, but no other animals do?

I'm not suggesting that an animated program of this type requires complete consistency. Futurama is full of little inconsistencies, and the Simpsons essentially resets every episode no matter what calamity occurs. But the characters in these programs are not merely cardboard cutouts for the writers to push up against each other; they have a consistency of characterization.)

Well, I came to praise Futurama and ended up burying Family Guy. But I hope the program is continued in some format. Or if not, I'll have four seasons on DVD, plus the four direct to DVD movies, and an ongoing comic book that is consistently fun.