A Devil of a DAREDEVIL (Season 1)

[Cross-posted to my movie blog]

As Netflix has just released the second season of Marvel's DAREDEVIL series; it's probably about time I got around to delivering on my long-promised review of the first. I'd watched most of it in a fairly rapid burst shortly after its release but then, as so often happens, life intruded. I only just got around to seeing the final episode last week.

My pokiness in finishing it certainly shouldn't be taken as any indication of my estimation of its merits. DAREDEVIL was released last spring to almost-universal praise and it earns it. This is a very good piece of television, one of the best Marvel or Marvel-based productions to date. It works as an adaptation and stands up as a very good series in its own right. That isn't to say it's flawless. One of the pitfalls of seeing this particular series through the eyes of a very longtime Daredevil fan is that one is acutely aware of the potential of such a project and of where it fails to live up to it. On that score, the series sometimes hits and sometimes misses.

DAREDEVIL is the story of Matt Murdock, who, as a child, is involved in an accident wherein he's struck by some radioactive gunk that takes his sight but amps up his other senses to superhuman levels. His father, a broken-down boxer, is later killed by gangsters after refusing to take a dive during a fight; Matt grows up, becomes a lawyer as his father wanted but he assumes another identity by night, that of a costumed crimefighter. Daredevil.

This story was adapted to the screen once before, a creative abortion of a feature film from 2003 that certainly did the property no favors. Marvel reacquired the screen rights from 20th Century Fox and produced this series in-house. It was good to see carried over here a heaping helping of the "pulp noir" aesthetic of the book during all of its finer moments and this and the overall quality of the series marked a bit of a comeback for a Marvel Daredevil. At the time it appeared, the comic of the same name had been a mess for years; Mark Waid, its contracted scribe, seemed determined to upend, undo and defecate upon everything that made DD great and unique and had, for nearly four years, been grinding out an overbearingly lighthearted stew of silly, jokey, faux-Silver Agey trash--a "Daredevil" that was still called Daredevil but was otherwise thoroughly unrecognizable. The series wisely steers clear of anything reeking of that particular run. For longtime DD fans, it was good to finally get the character back in a recognizable form and being done well.

This DD is set in a recognizable place as well. When Marvel first announced DAREDEVIL and its other Netflix series were going to be shooting in New York itself, I was pretty skeptical of the decision. Shooting Marvel stuff in New York, where so much of it is set, seems, on the one hand, a dream--something one wishes could always be done--but New York is an extremely expensive place to shoot, needlessly expensive, and my filmmaker bone felt it would probably be better to spend a television budget on recreating the city somewhere much cheaper. It's impossible to argue with these results though. From the waterfront to the rooftops to the view of it all from fancy apartments and expensive restaurants, the city just looks awesome. DAREDEVIL needed even more of it--more broad vistas, more stuff from the street, traffic, people to-ing-and-fro-ing, local color, atmosphere. It isn't enough just to have the characters talk about the city and what they think of it (and there's plenty of that); the series needs to show it, and while DAREDEVIL uses the city well, it doesn't use it enough. Hopefully something future seasons will remedy.

Matt has only just started his nocturnal activities here and his crimefighter persona is still a bit of a work in progress. He's privy to a lot of the ugly things people do to one another, carrying around a lot of anger and at the same time seems afraid of that part of himself, the "devil" in him that makes him want to do very bad things to very bad people. A Catholic, he goes to confession as the series opens and soon strikes up relationship with the priest, Father Lantom, who proves to be an interesting character and counsel as the series moves along.

The entire supporting cast is excellent, not a miss in the batch. When it comes to writing them, the series uses the comic to great advantage. Instead of looking down upon the book and approaching it with the idea of "fixing" it, the series' creators are very respectful and closely port over a lot of what has made the original work for so many years. The characters are strong, their relationships mostly well-played, a terribly watchable tableaux of very human and very likable characters. Some of the more colorful personalities in the Daredevil universe are brought to life with great gusto. Scott Glenn as Matt's ninja-master mentor Stick, Rob Morgan as Turk, low-level hod and Daredevil's frequent informant, Vincent D'Onofrio as archvillain Wilson Fisk, Bob Gunton as his chief money-man Leland Owlsley,[1] Toby Leonard Moore as his well-spoken right-hand man James Wesley. The comic version of Karen Page was a young innocent who worked as secretary for Matt and his law partner Foggy Nelson then, in later years, saw her life take a dark turn into drugs and prostitution. The series version, essayed by the breathtaking Deborah Ann Woll, has her history reversed, her shady future becoming instead a shady past she's trying to escape. In the comic, Ben Urich was a reporter for the New York Daily Bugle who figures out Matt's secret identity then becomes a frequent Daredevil ally; the series reimagines him as a sort of hybrid of the comic Urich and Spider-Man newsman Joe Robertson, giving him a promotion, making him older and changing his race. Vondie Curtis-Hall is rock-solid in the part but near the end of the run, in what's probably the single biggest misstep of the entire series, the writers opt to bump him off. Urich features, often centrally, in a lot of the best stories in the comic--a lot of potential adaptations of great Daredevil lore died with him.

The writing breaks down in a few places. Some sharp dialogue is often made to rub elbows with some significantly less-than-sharp lines. Some arbitrary drama plays out near the end of the season when Matt's law partner Foggy learns of his powers and vigilante activities. Up to this, Matt and Foggy are best pals, thick as thieves going back years, and Foggy becomes way, way too angry upon learning of the DD business. It doesn't really affect him in any meaningful way and he should be as fascinated as he is upset but he treats the matter as if Matt had sex with his wife--absolutely furious and doesn't even want to know the guy anymore.[2] Throughout the series, Wilson Fisk's criminal empire is shown to be massive, pervasive and he's a master of covering his own tracks but toward the end, when Matt manages to find a key witness and get the guy talking, this empire unravels far too easily. What should have been a gradual process taking months or even years and maybe never touching the man at the top at all is relegated to a brief montage in the final episode and ends with Fisk being marched away in cuffs. Should have been done better.

One thing that probably couldn't have been done any better is the appropriately visceral way DAREDEVIL handles its violence. Villain Fisk is a real sadist--nearly beats one of his own men to death in a pointless rage, kills a Russian gangster by slamming the fellow's head in a car door until it comes off, doesn't mind having old ladies killed. DD lacks super strength or speed and doesn't carry around a lot of anti-personnel gadgets; he puts down his opponents the old fashioned way, by beating them until they don't get up anymore. In one spectacular sequence, he shows up to rescue a kidnapped child from a building full of hoods. In a single shot, he goes down a hallway the thugs have staked out, passing from room to room, bashing every one of them to a pulp until he gets to the door at the end, the room in which the child had been stashed. The fight scenes in this first season are excellent, some of the best I've seen in a television production.

The series adopts the noir aesthetic so central to the best Daredevil work. Its darkness is ever-present but not indulged in a silly, juvenile, aren't-we-kewl-to-be-so-"dark" way like MAN OF STEEL (and, by most reports, the just-released BATMAN V. SUPERMAN). A few relatively minor items do, at times, bring it close to that territory. Matt, in the early episodes, walks around looking unkempt and with unshaved beard stubble, the way comic Matt sometimes looks when he's at the depths of a downer. But tv Matt isn't at the depths of a downer at that point and this definitely smacks of a production trying a bit too hard to sell the idea of Dark Character. Thankfully, that bushy look disappears as the series continues. It's also the case that the characters are way too quick to turn to massive amounts of alcohol to deal with their troubles, to a point that it becomes rather silly and feels more like lazy writing. Something to fix in the future. On the other hand, I would have liked to have seen some of the darker thematic elements taken much further, with, among other things, much more Expressionistic cinematography[3] and a more ambiguous wrap-up (as evil that pervasive is never entirely defeated).

There's a lot to like about DAREDEVIL and despite the fact I would do some things quite differently if I was behind it, there isn't a lot to dislike. In an era that so often produces safe, mediocre screen translations of popular comics, it's definitely a keeper and I'm looking forward to taking in season 2.

--j.

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[1]  The comic version of Leland Owlsley is also known as the Owl, a mutant crime-lord. The series mostly ditches the character's comic persona, carrying over only Owlsley's past as a bigshot Wall Street money man. Gunton's ever-acerbic Owlsley is--forgive me--a hoot.

[2] In the comic, Foggy learns Matt is Daredevil only after they've been law partners--and Daredevil had been active and often involved in their lives--for many years. Karen had known of Matt's dual identity for years as well and Foggy is initially angry with her, thinking she must have known Matt was alive when he'd faked his death (a long story). His anger, which was much more justified, doesn't last beyond that initial outburst.

[3] And better-managed cinematography as well. At one point, there's a classic noir moment, two people in an office at night with light coming through the window blinds, but the characters (Karen and Foggy) are having a warm, friendly discussion. This set-up would have been better employed for some of the darker moments that came later but which, paradoxically, often aren't photographed to reflect the mood.

Sheenas

In the beginning, there was Sheena.

As a child, Sheena was orphaned when her explorer father died while trekking through equatorial Africa. She was adopted by a witch-doctor named Koba, who raised her in the ways of the jungle until she was virtually a part of it--its queen and its protector. She took on a mate in a hapless hunter named Bob--the usual gender roles reversed, she must rescue him from danger rather frequently--and the two shared many adventures, taking on threats to the peace of the jungle.

While there were jungle girls before Sheena, both in literature and on the screen, Sheena was the first to break into comic books, a creation of the legendary Will Eisner/Jerry Iger team. In much later years, the two disagreed on the details of her creation but both acknowledged the obvious, that she was conceived as a female Tarzan. Sheena is one of the first comic book superheroes of any gender. She predates the Batman. She predates Captain America. Her first appearance in the British publication Wags #1 in 1937 predated Superman's U.S. debut but Superman beat her U.S. debut by 5 months. Hers was one of the strips that spearheaded the entry into the comic field of prolific pulp publisher Fiction House, whose first book, Jumbo Comics #1, marked her first appearance in the U.S. She quickly became the cover feature and central attraction of Jumbo, where she continued for the whole of its 15-year, 167-issue run. In 1942, she achieved another milestone when the spinoff debut of "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle" made her the first female hero to have an entire comic book devoted to her exploits and to have the book named after her--she beat Wonder Woman to that punch by four months. 

Sheena's success was explosive and the industry responded with the sincerest form of flattery. Soon, newsstands were bursting with Tiger Girl, Jann of the Jungle, Tiger Girl, Leopard Girl, Rulah, Jungle Goddess, Camilla, Wild Girl of the Congo, Cave Girl and on and on. Sheena may have inspired as many clones as Tarzan himself. This probably played a role in Sheena's undoing as well, as the market became super-saturated with these jungle-based heroines. As the 1940s became the '50s, growing public concern with sexy and violent content in comics led Sheena's publishers to try to tone down the strip, which also helped finish it off. In 1953 and '54, Fiction House left the comic field entirely, bringng down the curtain on the character's first incarnation.

You can't keep a jungle queen down though and a year after the demise of Fiction House, Sheena became one of the first comic book heroes to jump to the small screen (only three years after Superman). Pinup model Irish McCalla portrayed the character in a 26-episode tv series that ran from 1955-56. The series was somewhat hampered by an overly modest budget and the poor decision to--yes--ape Johnny Weissmuller's by-then-familiar dumb ape-man dialogue ("Me Sheena, you Jane") but it still proved incredibly popular. For reasons probably lost to time, its creators opted not to produce a second season. The existing eps ran in syndication for years.

Nearly three decades passed before Sheena returned to the screen, this time in an upbudget 1984 feature production starring the breathtaking Tanya Roberts. Gone was the ape-man-speak and Sheena was given the power to telepathically communicate with the beasts of the jungle. In spite of incredible locations, an obviously healthy budget and the perfect star, the flick was a disappointing failure, an inane, badly-written turd of epic proportions. 

Sheena returned to television in a syndicated series in 2000 starring former Baywatch beauty Gena Lee Nolin. This time, Sheena was given shape-shifting powers that allowed her to assume the form of animals. Alas, the series never really rose above an at-times-entertaining diversion. It lasted two seasons, 35 episodes.

Each of these adaptations have their strengths, particularly in the casting of Sheena--no misses there, and these ladies are a big part of why each of these adaptations developed a fan-base--but the weaknesses have always outweighed the strengths. The addition, in the feature and second series, of superpowers reeks of Standard Hollywood Idiot Thinking and a lack of confidence in Sheena's basic premise, which is unfortunate. While Sheena, Queen of the Jungle is and always has been a perfect property for the screen, the definitive screen Sheena has yet to appear. In this age of copious comic-to-screen adaptations but a drought of comic-heroine-to-screen adaptations, this needs to be corrected.

--j.

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A NOTE: Yes, I know this is a very cursory look at all of this--probably the least substantive thing I've ever blogged here. I put it together last year for one of my Facebook groups as a means of introducing newbies to the character and just decided I'd put it up here. Sue me.

Holy Sexism, Batman!

Lately--usually when I should have been doing something else--I've been going through a bunch of old Batman comics and this morning I came up with a doozy, Detective Comics #371 (Jan., 1968). Its lead feature, "Batgirl's Costume Cut-Ups," is built around what were, even in 1967 and even in a DC comic, utterly dinosaurish sexual politics--unintentionally hilarious, if only because they're so abjectly appalling. The cover tells the story:

And check out the splash:

The plot here follows the bat-family's pursuit of the Sports Spoilers, a gang of criminals who carry out sports-themed capers, but these images tell the real story in play: can a Batgirl overcome her gender's natural obsessive vanity, stupidity and weakness and become an effective crimefighter?

Aren't you just dying to know?

As the story opens, the Sports Spoilers are in the midst of robbing an armored truck. Barbara Gordon just happens to be on the scene. She makes a quick-change into the Batgirl and tackles them on her own. Though significantly outnumbered, she fares pretty well at first but then the pedal on a bike ridden by one of the gang moves her headpiece slightly off center and more concerned with her appearance than the matter at hand, she finds she simply must stop to adjust it. She gets knocked on her ass and most of the gang gets away, though the timely arrival of Batman and Robin results in the capture of one of the hoods.

Batgirl is depressed. "My vanity betrayed me!" This isn't just some one-time random screw-up, you see; the problem is identified as her natural "feminine instincts," which could--and do--flare up at any moment and cause the same sort of trouble. Batgirl becomes obsessed with trying to overcome this, as though merely not acting like a moron  requires the strength of will of a Jedi Knight. She rides around town trying to find a crime in progress so she can test herself but it apparently takes a more brainy--and manly--superhero to manage even that; while she comes up with nothing, she reads in the paper the next day that "Batman and Robin didn't have any trouble finding crooks last night! They bagged two robbers, three holdup men--and half a dozen jewelry thieves! And I came home empty-handed!" The next night, her big idea for finding a crime is simply to tail the batmobile. Let the boys find the trouble.

Batman and Robin trace the Sports Spoilers to a sawmill, where the gang is in the process of robbing an adjacent metal workshop of gold and silver used to manufacture sports trophies. The Spoilers attempts to escape by dumping a bunch of logs in the river--they jump in on top of them and start rolling them away, confident the caped crusaders "never learned" to roll logs. But it's never wise to underestimate the Dynamic Duo! They charge right out on to the logs in pursuit. "They didn't expect us to be expert log-rollers too," taunts the Batman. Who knew?

Batgirl, coming upon this scene, lets out a scream!

The scream distracts the heroes and the Spoilers are able to put them down long enough to escape their clutches. Batgirl has an idea though, to "raise the underwater chain-net that used to restrain logs from piling up in a log-jam," thus cutting off the gang's intended getaway. Unfortunately, one of the Spoilers sees what she's up to and throws a log in the mud in front of her. It doesn't hit her. It isn't intended to do so. The Spoilers know a woman's Kryptonite; the chucked log splatters mud in her face and she's compelled by her "feminine instincts" to wipe it off. "Oh no--not again!" But it's true; this latest pause brought on by her terminal womanliness allows the gang to roll to the nearby forest and escape for a second time.

Though Batgirl is a grown woman, even Robin, who is just a kid, scolds her. "Even such determined fighters are we are... get distracted by a lady's scream!" So there, you girl!

The final act of this dreadful play occurs at a charity ball being held in Gotham Park by a certain millionaire playboy. The Sports Spoilers opt to turn up with the intent of robbing the guests but Batman and Robin have already deduced this would be their next target and are waiting for them. They charge into the midst of the crooks and a devastating donnybrook ensues. Barbara Gordon--Batgirl--is in attendance at the ball. She's a girl, so the only way she can find a crime in this story is to have one coincidentally happen in front of her. She ducks away in the confusion and reappears in her crime-busting duds but as she's about to charge into the fight, she discovers she has, as she puts it, "a bigger problem" than a gang of no-goodniks to fight. "A run in my tights!"

This time, though, her girly problem works to our heroes' advantage--the entire Sports Spoilers gang pause in the midst of their ferocious combat to wolf-whistle and gape at her flash of leg like a bunch of drooling horndogs who haven't been laid in a decade.

This, um, loss of concentration allows our heroes, who are, yes, Dr. Wertham, apparently immune to such charms, to finally put the gang down for the count. "Batgirl's femininity gave us a break this time," raves Robin.

The Batman moves in to impart the moral of this story. "You see, Batgirl? That was one time you turned a feminine trait to your advantage--and the disadvantage of the criminals!"

"It sure was lucky for Batman and me that you tore your tights when you did," adds Robin, "or we might have wound up on the short end of the score!"

Just when one thinks this story must have exhausted the cringing it can induce in the reader, we get this parting panel:

This was a comic that appeared in the midst of the "Batmania" craze spawned by the '60s BATMAN tv series and the bat-books were trying to ape that show. If one wishes to illustrate the extent to which that show is an abominable blight on both the Batman's history and on comics in general, this tale is an excellent example. The appalling sexism on display here didn't start on tv though. It was quite common in DC books. Times move on and earlier this year, a variant Batgirl cover showing the character menaced by the Joker ignited such a furor against sexism that the cover's artist asked that it be cancelled, which was done. That cover commemorated Alan Moore's great graphic novel "The Killing Joke." There are perhaps worse things in heaven and earth--and in comics--than are dreampt of in the philosophy of many of the Keyboard Crusaders who took up arms against that cover and demanded it be withdrawn. And maybe what I've just done here is a better way to address them.

--j.

SUPERGIRL: The Pilot

I've long been a mouthy advocate for getting--finally getting--comic book heroines on the screen and Supergirl has always seemed to me a character with a lot of potential for adaptation. Her one feature appearance, 1984's SUPERGIRL, became a bit of a fiasco and, in turn, became something of a camp classic. She was later introduced into SMALLVILLE, which did hint at all that potential but she was still just a supporting character. I was pleased when Greg Berlanti, a creator of CW's ARROW and THE FLASH, announced he was working on a Supergirl series. Eventually, CBS picked it up and last night, it made its big debut. The pilot is slapdash at times, dramatically confused at others but it left me at least willing to see more.

The series eschews the original--and convoluted and bad--origin of the character in favor of a sort of mucked-up version of one introduced in the comics about a decade ago. In the tv telling, after baby Kal El--Superman--was launched to Earth from a dying Krypton, his cousin Kara Zor El, then 13 years old, was dispatched to look after him. The blast-wave from the explosion of Krypton knocked her ship off course and into the Phantom Zone. When it finally made its way out and to Earth, twenty-four years had passed, though she, preserved in suspended animation, hadn't aged.

Given Superman's own story, the nature of the Phantom Zone, etc., very little of this makes much sense but as quick and dirty as it seems to a comic vet, it effectively sets up everything.

When Kara arrives on Earth, Superman finds her and places her with an adoptive family. It's a long tradition in Superman adaptations to recruit for cameos actors and actresses from previous screen incarnations and here, Kara's adoptive mother is played by Helen Slater, the original screen Supergirl, and her adoptive father by Dean Cain, Superman from LOIS & CLARK. Kara grows up and goes to work as the assistant for media mogul Cat Grant but all the while, she keeps her powers and her real identity secret. When the plane in which her adoptive sister is flying nearly crashes, she's forced into action. She saves the plane but she's photographed, becomes a media sensation and gets hero fever--decides she'll just burst if she doesn't take up the cape and the family business. Supergirl is born.

Melissa Benoist plays Kara in an overly-bright-eyed and maybe way-too-enthusiastic manner that is, at first, rather endearing--the vibe is straight "it's cool that a girl can do this stuff"--but carried too far and too long, it could make her look flighty and stupid. Benoist is basically doing a 15-year-old Supergirl. That would be great if the show featured a teen Supergirl. The character in this series is supposed to be 24 years old.[1] How this will play out is something only time will.

A significant plot point--because it will provide the series' villains--is a Kryptonian prison ship that apparently followed Kara's ship out of the Phantom Zone and to Earth. It seems pretty unlikely a whole prison full of inmates--hardened criminals with the Earth-shattering powers of Kryptonians--have been hiding out on Earth for over a decade without drawing the attention of, say, Superman. There may be a larger plot at work here. Something else to watch. In the pilot's biggest error, the identity of "the General," the central villain revealed at the end, was quite confusing. It's Kara's Kryptonian mother, who, up to that point, hadn't be shown to have a villainous bone in her body, to say nothing of the fact that she's supposed to have been dead for years. In the brief preview for next week's ep, Kara calls her "aunt," so I'm assuming Kara's mother had a twin sister but there's no mention in the pilot of any twin sister.

When it was announced earlier this year, the casting of Mehcad Brooks as Superman's longtime pal Jimmy Olsen caused a bit of an internet stir. Jimmy Olsen is, of course, a very young, short, wimpy, freckle-faced redheaded white guy, whereas Brooks is a 35-year-old, 6'5', 230-or-so-pound muclebound bald black guy with a deep voice--a guy who could, himself, be playing a superhero. And, indeed, he is, in practice, as bizarre a Jimmy Olsen as he looked on paper, a guy who commands nearly every room he's in. While the comic vet in me just can't seem to accept him as a Jimmy Olsen, his Olsen is a very good character--my favorite, in fact, of the supporting roles so far. As it turns out, he knows all about Kara; her cousin filled him in.

Nearly everyone knows about Kara. Olsen knows. Her adoptive sister knows. Her adoptive sister's employer--a secret agency charged with monitoring and countering potential extraterrestrial threats--knows. She even tells a friend at work. The only regular among the  so-far-introduced supporting cast who doesn't know is Kara's boss Cat Grant. This exposure could come back to bite our heroine in the future.

The pilot's biggest shortcoming is that nearly all of the performances are carried out in an over-the-top, anti-naturalistic manner that perpetually borders on camp yet they're so contrary to one another they never cohere as a unified dramatic universe. One sees all of these sorts of performances pretty regularly with genre properties (though, mercifully, not as often as was once the case). With Kara, this sort of characterization can seem charming. With Calista Flockhart as Cat Grant, it's full-blown caricature. And at the other end, Kara's mother/the "General" is insanely over the top, spouting ridiculous, stilted, ever-so-serious dialogue as melodramatically as possible. One could break down each of these by their relative merits but whatever conclusion such an evaluation may yield, few of them seem as if they belong in the same show.

Still, while this wasn't a great pilot--it certainly wasn't up to that of either ARROW or THE FLASH--it was, rough edges aside, a pretty good one. I'm pleased to have Supergirl back on the screen and interested to see where this incarnation goes.

--j.

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[1] When Kara's boss Cat Grant dubs the mysterious new hero "Supergirl," Kara objects, arguing for "Super Woman," but not only is it a ridiculous objection given how Benoist is playing the character, Benoist is also playing the very scene in which she's making this objection as if she was 15.

Bob Haney & the Bat-Spank

Here's an image much circulated on the internet:

It comes from the Brave & the Bold #64 (March, 1966), drawn by Win Mortimer and written by longtime B&B scribe Bob Haney. "Batman versus Eclipso" is a free-flowing and frenetic tale, as Haney's could often be, a 12-cent epic of adventure, romance, sin and silliness with more twists than a neurotic pretzel on a bad-hair day.

I'm a big fan of Haney. As the image suggests, his Batman is like no other. In context, bratty rich-chick Marcia Monroe is out one night making a very public spectacle of herself, apparently inebriated and tottering across a catwalk on a suspension bridge high above a river while police risk their lives to try to save her. The Batman appears, disapproves and her antics and administers a much-needed corrective to the wealthy and wayward playgirl. She, of course, falls madly in love and after a whirlwind romance, the two are soon engaged. Marcia and the Batman, that is; while he's prepared to make a wife of her, he never reveals his dual identity. She eventually breaks his heart--sends a him a "Dear John" and skips town for Euro-Parts-Unknown. "I guess the 'cure' didn't take," he laments, and with a forlorn look and perhaps a mental note about the need for a more severe disciplinary regimen with future potential mates, he returns to his life of crimefighting.

Years go by and the Batman, patrolling the docks one night, finds a dishy dame about to be dusted by a well-dressed gangster using a bow! As surreal as that seems, the Caped Crusader then manages to lasso the arrow in mid-flight! And the assassin's target turns out to be none other than Marcia herself.

"But," asks the Batman, "why was that bow buzzard trying to ventilate your beautiful torso?" Marcia's story is that Cyclops, a powerful crime syndicate, is out to get her because her latest fiancee filched the priceless Cat Emerald. The no-goodniks have already blown the boyfriend to oblivion but his dying wish is that Marcia return the emerald to the museum from which he stole it to make up for what he'd done. She tasks the Batman with the job and he goes along.

...which, of course, results in his being framed for having stolen it in the first place.

An indication of how much plot Haney could stuff into a book: everything I've just described only gets us to page 8.

Heartbroken at the apparent betrayal, the Batman is arrested and from his jail cell, he gets on the trail of the Queen Bee, girl boss of the Hive, a crime syndicate moving into town. He learns she's arranged his capture in order to get him out of the way for some big operation.

Allying herself with Eclipso, the Queen Bee launches a crimewave. The Batman escapes and pursues the beautiful bug but ends up waylaid by knock-out gas and, dumped in the river for dead, fired upon by some of Gotham's finest, who think they've killed him.

At the Hive, a hooded fellow turns up and announces he's a representative of Cyclops and is taking over their operation. Eclipso is unimpressed and sets out to kill the fellow, who, it's quickly revealed, is the Batman in disguise. The Queen Bee rescues him and confesses the obvious, that she's really Marcia. But now, her story is that her father had gotten mixed up with Cyclops and she's only doing her Queen Bee schtick for the org to save the old boy from their assassins. She aids the Batman in his escape, a complicated piece of business down the side of a building while pursued by flying bee drones with jet-packs and Eclipso on a window-washing rig.

In the end, the Batman is cleared and both Eclipso and "Queen Bee' Marcia disappear. "Some day, she'll have to pay for her crimes," says the Batman. "And when that day comes, she'll need all my help! Until then -- farewell, honey." And yeah, I laughed at the line.

All of it began with that spanking...

Earlier this year, I started a Facebook group to celebrate Bob Haney's work. If, dear reader, it interests you, "Haneyverse: The Brave & Bold Worlds of Bob Haney" is here--come by and join in.

--j.

MAN OF STEEL (2013) & Dumb Darkness

[Cross-posted to my movie blog]

Perusing Facebook tonight, my eye plucked from the plentiful geeky puffery that perpetually passes through my feed a brief op-ed piece from Uproxx that purports to explain "Why the DC Universe is Dark and Gritty." Released alongside the first substantial trailer for BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE and authored by a Dan Seitz, it makes a show of tackling criticism that has been leveled at the tone of DC's cinematic offerings but mostly manages to rather spectacularly miss the point of that criticism. It seems a good hook on which to hang my long-delayed review of MAN OF STEEL.

Seitz begins by beating up a straw man, "the implied idea that nobody wants to see dark and gritty superhero movies." If anyone had ever seriously pursued that line the box-office figures Seitz cites are sufficient to refute it but of course that hasn't been the argument. That a movie featuring some species of dark tone can make lots of money says nothing about whether a particular project should have that tone. Obviously, the Batman should usually be dark but if one is true to the character--the crucial element--one could do lighter stories with him too. BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES sometimes did this. If one has the Superman character down cold, one can go dark with him as well, but what critics in the fan community have noted--and what Seitz entirely sidesteps while in defense of darkness--was that the version of "dark" adopted by MAN OF STEEL, the film that launched DC's new cinematic universe, was entirely inappropriate to the material and, in fact, a deliberate defacement of the character.

And those critics are correct. MOS's "Superman" is born of contempt for the basic nature of the character, and is, in fact, an attack on it.

The key to Superman is the "man" part, not the "super." Though an alien, he was raised as Clark Kent--as one of us. He's a good man, the Midwestern farmboy whose parents instilled in him strong values that guide him through life and who just happens to be able to juggle mountains, powers he uses to help others in need. Over the years, some writers have taken this to an extreme, presenting him as a "big blue boyscout" and even something akin to a saint but such treatments are an exaggeration of the existing character, not any sort of revision of it. Superman's creators conceived their original printed version as a sort of anarchistic super political activist, tackling social ills like corrupt politicians, domestic abuse and inhumane prison conditions. Whatever the variant, Superman is a fighter for truth and justice, sometimes "the American way," sometimes offered with a stern rebuff or full-blown smackdown to those who would cause harm, other times with a wink and a wave from a friend who is here to help. In another aspect that can sometimes be exaggerated, he's a character of hope and of light whose powers are literally derived from the sun itself. That sort of thing may be frowned upon in some quarters today but that's Superman. Superman is not a brooding, alienated, alien anti-hero/god-among-ants and if, as happens in MOS, you chuck what I've just described and turn him into one, you may be trendy and real kewl and all but you aren't doing Superman anymore.[1]

Part of the Superman mythos everyone knows: Sent to Earth from a dying world, the infant who will become Superman is adopted by the Kents, who raise the child they name Clark and shape him into the good man he becomes. The quality of the sense of moral purpose imparted to the MOS version of Clark, on the other hand, is evinced after he, as a boy, saves an entire bus full of his schoolmates from drowning but, in the process, nearly exposes his powers and his adoptive father Jonathan tells him it may have been better to simply let them all drown.[2] Later, an older Clark does just that, when he finds himself in a situation in which Jonathan is menaced by a tornado. It would be child's play to save the man but because doing so may expose Clark's powers to onlookers, Clark chooses to simply stand around and let his adoptive father be killed, self-concern and fear overruling all else, everything that even could be called "Superman" viscerally disposed of.[3] The movie only gets worse from there. The superbeing from MOS who wallows in angst, who chooses to let his father die for nothing and who, in the film's interminable finale, zips around battling Kryptonian villains amidst falling skyscrapers utterly indifferent to the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths he's helping cause[4] is no more Superman than he is Justin Bieber. He's the anti-Superman, a fundamental negation of the character. It's almost impossible to overstate this: No one involved in the production of MAN OF STEEL had the slightest interest in making a Superman movie and they didn't.

For whatever reason, director Zack Snyder and the film's other creators introduce a theme of freedom of choice vs. predetermination, with their alleged central character purported to represent the former but in everything they put on the screen that doesn't involve characters giving speeches on this matter, their "Superman" isn't even the protagonist. Their story, rather, is about a civil conflict on a long-dead world being continued on Earth, a fight between an exiled criminal and the ghost of his long dead enemy. While Superman is the title character in what's supposed to be the beginning of a franchise built around him, he's virtually irrelevant to any of this. He merely shows up, the alleged representative of this freedom, to act as the proxy of a dead father he never even knew in the final act of a battle that happened before he was born.

"Superman's" killing Zod at the end of the film created some controversy in the fan community, where many hold that Superman should never kill at all. My own objection to that moment was his immediate and over-acted, depth-of-his-soul grief at having taken out a  genocidal monster who had just committed mass murder against helpless innocents on the scale of a world war, was promising more and was in the process of carrying out that promise. To kill someone is a terrible thing, in the abstract, but the film had done nothing to establish any aversion on the part of its central character to killing anyone--indeed, a sociopathic indifference to the lives of those around him was front-and-center throughout the film's never-ending climax--and this kind of totally unbalanced reaction after the massacre just inflicted, a massacre that didn't draw any real reaction from "Superman" at all, suggests a rather profound moral deformity. Whine later, hero; there are people dying in the rubble--the rubble you just helped make of the world--who need your help.

Seitz argues that "the entire point of these movies" is that "the good guy wins against all odds. All we're really talking about here is how brightly lit his path happens to be as he gets to his inevitable destination." Even setting aside the question of this truncated notion of what the films should be, one can't escape (even though Seitz doesn't address) the fact that the hero's triumphant "win" at the end of MOS occurs over that almost indescribable excess of carnage and death, horrors which, in the movie, are, for all intents and purposes, entirely without consequence. Put on the screen before one's eyes then not even touched upon.[5] Elsewhere, in reply to critics who had slammed the film for its humorlessness and, more broadly, joylessness, Seitz asserts that the film "just wants you to take the idea of a man who can fly and bend steel with his bare hands seriously," as if a complete lack of humor or joy are required for any such project. And is it really necessary to point out that the consequence-free destruction on display hardly bespeaks a serious, mature engagement with the material?

The rest of the film doesn't fare any better on that score.

For decades, comic Superman's extraordinary powers have been said to come from the reaction of his Kryptonian physiology to Earth's yellow sun. MOS alters this equation--they're now the result of a combination of Earth's sun and atmosphere. Appropriately, given this, when Superman goes on the villains' ship and breathes its Kryptonian atmosphere, he loses his powers. But throughout the film, the Kryptonian villains walk around on Earth in spacesuits that pump Kryptonian air for them to breathe yet have all the godlike powers of Superman anyway. Zod, their leader, wants to terraform Earth, giving it a Kryptonian atmosphere, which would presumably take away their powers. Why in hell would anyone who could live as a demi-god want to do that? It gets better too, because he also asserts that merely living on Earth as it is, sans terraforming, would require years of pain to adjust to its atmosphere then when his suit is damaged, he adjusts to the Earth atmosphere almost immediately. Zod has a world engine that can make over the Earth into a clone of Krypton but the process will destroy its inhabitants. This same world engine could presumably make over any planet in exactly the same way but he wants to use it on the already-populated Earth because, well, because he's the designated villain and that's just the sort of evil stuff villains do. To defeat the villains at the end, Superman opens a black hole within the Earth's atmosphere!

That--just the tip of the iceberg--is how "seriously" MOS takes its premise. For Seitz, though, humorlessness and "darkness" equal "seriously." It's a view one encountered with depressing regularity in the early '90s, when the mad proliferation of the sort of badly-crafted "dark" comics being aped by this film helped to very nearly run the entire industry into the ground. Seitz doesn't stop short of implying the inverse either, that because THE AVENGERS has humor, it doesn't take itself at all seriously, another unfortunate manifestation of that same constipated early-'90s attitude.

In reality, the "serious" MOS is nothing more than a big, stupid, noisy, explosion-filled special effects show aimed straight at the lowest common denominator, a perfect example of the absolute worst breed of Hollywood tentpole spectacle[6] that is utterly off-putting to anyone with any respect for the character--or anyone who gives any aspect of the film any thought at all.. Awash in muted colors, mindless video-game violence,[7] trendy brooding and consequence-free disaster porn, it's a 2+-hour insult, a $225 million rape of a venerable American classic and a black mark on its 77-year history, one Warner Brothers now aims to use as the foundation of its big DC cinematic universe. Pity these iconic characters that they find themselves in the hands of such creatures.[8]

--j.

---
[1] The inappropriately bleak characterization and its accompanying tone are accompanied by inappropriately bleak, shitty, washed-out, near-black-and-white cinematography--lifted, without alteration, straight from the Nolan bat-flicks. But, hey, at least Jon Peters got his Superman-in-black battling a giant robot spider at the end, eh?

[2] John Schneider, who essayed Jonathan Kent for years on SMALLVILLE, recently registered the outrage every fan of the Superman mythos owes that moment.

[3] In Richard Donner's excellent SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE--a great screen adaptation of the Silver/Bronze Age comic version of Superman that revised the character in various ways while still staying true to it--Jonathan's death by heart attack when Clark is a teenager is presented as a lesson in humility; with all his powers, all the things Clark can do, he couldn't save his father. The parallel scene in MAN OF STEEL is an assault on the basic premise of the character: Clark prioritizes his own convenience over the life of his father, an obscenity rendered even more abominable by the fact that Jonathan died because he put himself in danger to rescue a dog from the same tornado.

[4] Not only does this "Superman" never even try to take the fight with the Kryptonians out of populated areas, he repeatedly drags it back into populated areas when it strays from them, a move that seems motivated by nothing more than the director's desire to see buildings, streets, etc. blown up and destroyed on the screen.

[5] Thursday, Joss Whedon revealed he had designed his upcoming AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON as a refutation of this sort of thing.

[6] That such movies have been a dime-a-dozen for a few decades gives some wider context to Seitz's effort to argue in favor of such films on the grounds that "it's nice to have a little variety."

[7] Also mind-numbing. The movie turns into a CGI cartoon for what feels like about 40 minutes in which big sections of the world are being completely destroyed by battling superbeings yet the computer-generated images are so divorced from any semblance of humanity that it becomes boring, like watching a video game demo you can't skip.

[8] Though to be fair, Warner Brothers' tv-based DC products have fared much better. DC doesn't have a cohesive universe sewn between its tv and feature productions like Marvel and this has made a mess of the various projects, which feature or will soon feature two Flashes, two Supermen, two Deadshots, two Deathstrokes, two Bruce Waynes (both set in the present but one being a 40-something adult hero and the other being a young, pre-Batman teen), and on and on.

The Big, Fat Disappointment: SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR (2014)

Took me a while but I finally saw A DAME TO KILL FOR. Loved SIN CITY (2005). Really wanted to see this one. Bad word of mouth made me shelve it for a bit--didn't want my heart broken--but some mechanical troubles last night left me with some time on my hand--my computer has a condition--so I popped it in and gave it a once-over.

SIN CITY cost forty-million bucks and made a nice pile of green for an R-rated pic. Creators Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller managed to spend $25 million more on this one and couldn't even make back their budget.  A DAME TO KILL FOR is mostly empty and uninspired--not worth killing for at all and trying to thrill on autopilot on her last call after a long night. The pieces are all there--tough guys, beautiful dames, grifters, grafters, mugs, pugs, thugs, gore, cynicism and darkness--but it's all just style without much of the fun. Few sparks. Nothing holding it all together. The extra dough (for a lot shorter show) seems to have bought a lot more computer graphics than the original had but little else. The near-decade of technological advances between them sure as hell isn't apparent--everything looks way cheaper than it did before. Mickey Rourke's Franken-Marv makeup is slapped-on and crude this time around and not in any good way. Jessica Alba is still playing what's supposed to be the hottest number in town as a stripper who makes it a point to never strip. There are no less than three assaults on the heavily armed compounds of rich assholes, two featuring Marv and two as the climactic setpieces of two of the film's three longer stories. The graphics are on overload, to the point of becoming quite overbearing. Badly CGI'd cars go up CGI'd winding roads over and over again. Bodies and parts of them fly through the ether. While the violence in the original was gleefully profuse and over-the-top, it always had a point; here, it's even more over the top but the glee is most definitely gone, and a lot of it--maybe even most--is just gratuitous. There for its own sake. And even with all its blood and thunder, A DAME TO KILL FOR manages to be pretty damn dull. Not boring, just mostly uninteresting. Quite a trick.

Eva Green one-sheet
banned by the MPAA.

It ain't all bad though. A lot of what I've just been bitching about gets in the way of what are, at heart, some pretty good stories. "Just Another Saturday Night" is a throwaway piece that doesn't really go anywhere, and "Nancy's Last Dance" is pretty forgettable--more like a highlight reel of a bunch of stuff we've already seen--but "The Long, Bad Night," about a gambler who earns immortality by showing up the most powerful man in Basin City, is a keeper, and the title story "A Dame To Kill For" is definitely the highlight. Its pacing often sucks--the style fucking up the substance--and all the other shit weighs it down but it has a killer cast--as does the entire picture--and most importantly, it has Eva Green. Manute, her maniacal, superhuman manservant, describes her character (Ava) as a goddess who enslaves men to her will. Robert Rodriguez reportedly wanted Angelina Jolie to play the part and she was the obvious model for the comic original but for whatever reason that didn't work out, which is just as well. When it comes to goddesses who could enslave men to her will, Eva Green will do just fine. Gotta' fess up, I'm a big fan, and of all the Sin City comic tales, "A Dame To Kill For" is probably my favorite. The screen version doesn't live up to it and yeah, that's disappointing after how well the first film's adaptations were handled, but it's far from terrible.

For that matter, the movie isn't really terrible. A lot of critics burned it all to hell like it was something personal with them. Maybe with some of them it was--they didn't like the first one and it was great and made a pile of dough anyway, so they doubled down on this one. Can't say it doesn't earn some abuse. It should have been a lot better. As it is, it's, Eva excepted, depressingly middling. An overpriced monument to the declining powers of its creators. Not a complete failure but no getting around it, it was the Big Fat Disappointment.

--j.