Posted: 13 November 2018 at 11:02am | IP Logged | 10
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When Jack Kirby died, Norm McDonald made a joke on Weekend Update that no memorial service was to be held since they intended to bring him back in a future issue.
Every now and again, a character would crop up on screen somewhere who was a comics artist. It somehow made the character seem hapless, child-like in some ways, and out of joint with the world. Sometimes they'd protest that it was a real job, but those around them wouldn't quite buy it, and the comics artist character didn't have time to argue since he was under a deadline. It was not a staple character in the Hollywood lexicon, but it was within their wheelhouse nonetheless.
The characters themselves were portrayed on screen as being more ordinary than they were in comics. As mentioned in Robbie's thread about serials, the tendency was always to include as few fantastical elements as possible. The Hulk could fight a bear, but he could not fight a robot bear, even if Steve Austin was on another channel fighting an alien robot Sasquatch. That was all right because Steve Austin was a secret agent with a few medical enhancements. David Banner was still a transforming comic book monster. That was the one gimme that show was generally allowed.
Fred Hembeck once said that Spidey's trips to the television screen all played like cop shows, which was something Hollywood already knew how to do. For the most part, comics were regarded as too far-out or worse, too childish for general audiences. Each time a comic property succeeded on screen it was seen as freakish and almost certainly due to any contributing factor than it's source of origin. Really, who could ever believe something so... out there?
Plus, they were consciously ridiculous. I mean, from the general public's standpoint, the people making these things, whoever they were, they had to know how silly rubber people and rock men were, right? Because, hoo boy, if they didn't... well, at least they're confining their nuttiness to the comics page and not hurting anyone. Part of growing up for most of our lives was abandoning outre' fantasies and accepting life for what it is. We could put these things on screen for entertainment purposes, but only if we winked at them along the way just so no one thought we hadn't properly figured this stuff out ourselves.
That has changed somewhat in the past few decades. The prequels and LOTR films played a part, I think, but the biggest contributing factors I believe are twofold; the rise of anime and the cultural saturation of video games.
Anime allowed adherents to speak of the comics medium in terms heretofore considered silly or lunatic. Their existence as a cultural staple in the daily lives of the Japanese, acceptable on trains or otherwise in public, made fans of anime insist that they were exploring a world that was not inherently childish. It was exotic. And no less complex and intricate in its way than any other art form.
Fans of anime were not among us in vast numbers, but they did change the dialogue about the comics form, even if many insisted they were only talking about those made in Japan and other Asian countries. Their growing insistence that there was something to these products besides the "Biff, Pow, Sock" world of American four-color blood and thunder allowed for publishers to argue that they too were capable of producing "prestige" level versions of their product. Batman could be written at a high enough level to become The Dark Knight. Defunct comic lines such as Charlton could be re-imagined to operate at an acceptable literary level to appear on Recommended Reading lists and receive awards. Oh, it didn't happen often, heavens, no, but the public did regard these products in a new light, one that their parents' generation would merely shake their heads at.
And when video games hit, ever one was living their lives in an outre' fantasy world for hours at a time; immersing themselves in whackadoodle premises with robots, spaceships, and fantastical power sets you could get for your character if you unlocked the correct combination code and slayed the radioactive smog monster to get to. Super-powers were something you wanted to have; no, needed if you were to breach that lava-filled expanse on level five. Yes, guns and devastated, death-strewn landscapes filled with zombies were the norm, but comic books played to those sensibilities as well. Suddenly spending all of your free time in fantasy wasn't the waste of time and energy Grandma and Grandpa made it out to be. Your friends were all leveling up. Why weren't you?
As for the changes made to LOTR, well, changes are always made and always have been. Nearly every change in those interminable, unwatchable slogs of CGI muck and mire (sorry, I can not abide them) was geared to turn some literary moment into a film cliche. Seriously, the attack of Gollum where he and Frodo both go over the edge and we (the camera, that is) run up to the edge to find they've both somehow spun around and grabbed onto just the thinnest outcropping of rock... but they can't hold on forever!! Good God in Heaven above, just shoot me now...
And fans of the prequels (of which there are more than there should be) will tell you that they are MORE accurate to the Lucas canon than less since they represent Lucas's own vision of what that era in his story was like. There was a significant validation of nostalgia in the uproar against these CGI walk-and-talks, I agree, but the acceptability of the fantastic in one's daily entertainment diet was already on the rise.
One of the reasons an FF film was not made until one finally was was that the power set makes no logical sense from the outside. One event cannot give four people (five if you stick Doom into the origin) into a whole different set of biological enhancements. Yeah, you can say their inner selves and self-images were strangely literalized or imprinted upon the radiation signature yadda yadda, but the Hollywood of the 70's and 80's would have told you audiences were never going buy it. Fast forward, and hey, it's just your buy into the movie. Now, is the film itself going to be any good...? Turns out, no. But just the fact that a family of four could wind up stretching, flaming, clobbering, and fading from view meant you could do The Incredibles and get people to show up. Suddenly, all of this keeping the powers and weird stuff on the down-low was in fast retrograde.
Remember how flipping amazing it was seeing Knowhere built inside the skull of a dead Celestial in Guardians and then seeing a live one stride across the Collector's screens? And no one left the theatre going, "Aw, c'mon? Space Giants? Really...?" Audiences were primed for this stuff.
What audiences are still not primed for and likely never will be are the comics themselves. Yes, many many thousands more have picked up graphic novels and trade collections than we would have ever dreamed possible in our youth, but those numbers are still not the majority. Reading itself is dropping off the list of things we want to do today unless it's in the form of text messaging or a short article reinforcing our already extant political view on something.
It should also be noted that films are experiences and comics are items. Bad writing in a two-hour experience comes and goes. Bad writing in a comic and you're still left holding the thing when you're done. Now what are you going to do with it? It's still there in your fingers, not going away. Yuck.
And comics are still, by and large, badly written. It's one thing to enjoy a schlockfest of a movie. It's another to have a collection of schlock in a white box in the corner of your house taking up space. People are going to come over and see that thing. Yeah, you can put it in the basement, but now every comic you buy going forward means A.) another chance to be disappointed and B.) another trip downstairs to find a place to put the thing when you're done with it.
Comic movies are kind of rad. Comics themselves, however much slack we're willing to cut them, kind of aren't. You can have Avengers: Infinity War or even Ant-Man on your DVD shelf when your new girl or guy is coming over. You really can't have a stack of comics out.*
Will that ever change? Maybe. Hey, we didn't think this was going to happen the way it did. Stan had an inkling this stuff could be so much more popular than the Hollywood of the 70's and 80's ever imagined, and even though he was selling something, he was right. That pitch he'd been honing for decades finally fell on the right ears, and the truth of the characters' popular appeal turned out to pure movie-and-money-making magic.
* Try telling them you got those for a paper you were writing in college and have never gotten around to throwing them out. Then try to laugh it off when she tells you the one on top is from last month.
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