3 posts tagged “comics”

Did you know that only one letter separates the name of NBC's show and the name of a highly communicable social disease?  it does!  I nearly named this entry "On Herpes."  But thankfully, I know a great deal more about the former than about the latter.

If the creator of Heroes were at all versed in comic book lore (which he isn't), he would doubtlessly know a thing or two about superpowers.  By the way, a small digression here; Tim Kring, the creator, based this series almost entirely on seeing the Incredibles (which could just as easily be called The Fantastic Four With Better Writing), and not because he, you know, liked comics.  He's just a regular old douchey Hollywood TV dude, not a fan, not an afficianado, and most decidedly not the best choice to be writing this show.  Even so, the stories and the characters are pretty solid - he might not know superheroes, but he's nailing the ensemble drama. 

Depending on the universe in which your heroes exist, different rules apply differently.  For all the scientific scrutiny applied to the application of his abilities, Superman might as well be magical.  As it is, his powers don't really make sense.  But that's ok.  I don't care.  Superman can fly really fast and his body is incredibly dense. 

Those are only contradictory if the stories about him are specifically about the scientific possibilities of his powers.  Superman's stories aren't.  Superman isn't science fiction, he's fantasy.  Just as you don't criticize the Jedi for for their impossible lightsabers, you don't need to question how the Flash can run really fast without his clothes being incinerated by the friction against air molecules. 

Marvel and DC are like this, though Marvel tries a little harder to give a few of their heroes a scientific basis.  A lot of the time they just give up - it's hard to apply science to a guy who smashes a stick into the ground and yells a phrase in order to become a character from Norse mythology. 

I'm not very well versed myself in the comic history of the Flash; I bring that up only to note that the very short-lived but interesting Flash tv series that I used to watch on an ancient black and white TV while I did my homework actually did explain why his clothes don't get incinerated by friction.  Er, that didn't come out right - see, his clothes did get ripped apart, so a helpful scientist created a special suit for him.  That show also had the Flash carrying around a suitcase full of chocolate bars, and depicted him passing through solid matter when he really got his molecules moving.

That's an example of a universe that does try to explain how its heroes have their powers.  Most don't bother, and that's ok. 

I think Heroes would benefit from more scrutiny.  If you're going to do gritty and realistic (which they are), I think a serious analysis of the characters' abilities is a good thing. 

There's another series of stories about regular people who get amazing superpowers.  A book series called Wild Cards, edited by George R.R. Martin, trod this ground ages ago. 

The premise is this: in the late 1940s, a bomb explodes over Manhattan.  It distributes a virus (called the wildcard virus) that kills 90% of the people it infects.  9% of the survivors become deformed Jokers, while a lucky 1% develops superpowers.  Every infection is unique - no two Aces have the same power, and no two dead people die the same way. 

If I remember correctly, many (or most) of these powers are explained thusly: the wildcard virus did not kill these people, and it did not give that 1% of people its powers.  Instead, the virus unlocks the latent psionic powers in every human being , for good or ill - either out of self-loathing or an inability to deal with what's happened to them, they killed themselves.  The Aces get the powers that they always secretly wanted, consciously or not. 

On a narrative level, every power that somebody has can be explained by the application of incredibly powerful psychic abilities.  It's simple, but it works.

If you like Heroes and you like reading, I very much recommend reading the Wild Cards series.  Start with his one. 

The first Fantastic Four movie was sheeeeeeeiiiiiit. I walked out of the theater a satisfied viewer, in a kind of Movie Mirth (it's the rare movie that I'm unhappy having seen, in the first hours after seeing it), but the bad qualities eventually outweighed the good qualities in my mind, and I saw it for what it was.

They got the family nature of the Four, and it came through on the screen, but nearly everything else was garbage.

They botched the Thing's look (they apparently wanted The Commish so badly that they gave into his demand to have the Thing be a rubber suit instead of a much more sensible CGI creation), Jessica Alba is only good when she plays strippers, and Doctor Doom was somehow made lame.

But the sequel is coming out next year, and the teaser trailer is available here.

The Silver Surfer is one of those characters that's going to be really tough to translate to the screen. See, he was created to cash in on the surfing craze a few decades ago. He's called the Silver Surfer because he's silver and he rides a silver surf board. In space. It's easy to see him as a silly, crass construction.

But if you read enough comics with him in them, you quickly forget about the silliness of it, and see the character for who he is. I'm very, very tempted to go through the whole history of Silver Surfer, because I'm geeky like that, but I'll save you the tedium (especially when you can just go read it here).

Quick version: Silver Surfer is a dude from another planet who saved his people from certain destruction by agreeing to become the Herald of the being bent on doing the destroying. This being is Galactus. He's so powerful he's more like a cosmic force than a monster or something. You can get an idea of his scale in this picture. Oh yeah, and he eats planets. Surfer's job is to find planets for Galactus to eat. He finds Earth, and tells Galactus where the buffet line starts (somewhere near Neptune). In the beginning of the Surfer's story, he's a nice guy trying to solve his own planet. In the end, he goes back to being that nice guy, but there's a lot of genocide there in the middle (but it wasn't really his fault, as Galactus was somehow supressing his Herald's morality). The Fantastic Four are in there, too, right before he goes back to being a good guy.

Spider-Man beats up crooks, rescues people from burning buildings, stops muggers, that sort of thing. He's a tactical superhero. On a really good day, he might save the city, but usually he's just helping out individuals.

The Fantastic Four are constantly saving the entire goddamn planet. It's what they do. Any decent Fantastic Four movie is going to depict just that, a cosmic-level event that requires a solution only they can provide.

If this movie gets that part right, then it has the potential to be a decent film. I'm not getting my hopes up.

Also, a few things to note:

- I don't think Surfer ever had the power depicted in the trailer. It's entirely possible that they're melding his character with Vision, a robot who has that power exactly (well, he actually has the power to control the molecular density of his body, which lets him be as, well, hard as he wants, or to pass through matter). Surfer IS one of the most powerful heroes in comics, with an indestructible body, the power to shoot beams out of his hands and almost complete control of all forms of energy. What he does to dispatch the Human Torch in the trailer is pretty much exactly as the Surfer of the comics would do it.
- I think that's Brian Posehn as the wedding officiant.

I think it's going to suck.

I'm skeptical of superheroes depicted in non-comic media - very few movies and tv shows get it right. It's not about super powers and special effects - it must always be about the people, just like any good story.

Already in the first five minutes of this show, I've witnessed hamfisted exposition ("But you always wanted your father's approval!") and a big factual gaffe, repeating a long-disproved myth, that can be resolved in a single, simple google search.

Sure, that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be bad - one should never judge a show by its pilot, let alone by the first few minutes of it.

But I hardly ever watch TV anymore, since I can't help but think I have something better to do. Sure, that probably means playing another fucking video game, but still - I have a hard enough time crafting decent stories of my own to waste my time absorbing somebody else's shitty ones.

ADDENDUM:

Of all the color schemes to pick for your black-haired flying character to wear, don't pick these two.

There's another show that's kind of covering that territory.