Who Cares What Scorcese Thinks of the MCU?

Recent comics-related headlines have been overwhelmed by Martin Scorcese’s pronouncement in October that the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are “not cinema.” He went on to equate the films with theme parks, and then dropped a critique that has raised many an ire: “It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

There have been a plethora of responses from supporters of the MCU, but also shows of support from fellow auteur directors. Francis Ford Coppola waded into the battle with this lovely bit of vitriol: “When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration. I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again.”

Both directors have produced remarkable works in their time, and on the topic of cinema there are few whose opinions we might give greater weight. But their critiques of the MCU are not really critiques of cinema. Or rather, they’re critiques of cinema that are missing the point of superhero stories in much the same way that critiques of the comics themselves as “not real books” (something I actually heard a parent say to a child while they were in my comic book store) misses the point. Nor are these criticisms even remotely new, or really that scathing. Coppola calls the films “despicable,” a harsh term to be sure, but it pales in comparison to other ways that comics have been critiqued in the past. Frederic Wertham (who, hopefully, is in a very uncomfortable afterlife somewhere) once said that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.” Yep, he compared the superhero, crime, and horror comics of the day to the architect of the Third Reich.

Superhero comics, and comics in general, have always been maligned by the mainstream. My own experience in academia, within the last 5 years, proved this to me implacably. With the exception of a few scholars in the department, most of the professors I dealt with had little good to say about comics, even though they themselves had virtually no experience with them. One of the (many) reasons I left my PhD program is that there was a palpable antagonism toward what I studied, that comics were not worthy of academic interrogation.

Regardless of all of this, the criticisms miss the whole point of the superhero genre. When Coppola calls watching the films “seeing the same movie over and over,” perhaps he is forgetting that old saw in literature that there are really only a few plots – we just have so many different ways of telling them. I’ve always been of the opinion that superhero narratives, the best of them, are slowly replacing our older spiritual texts, telling stories of redemption, heroics, sacrifice, and humanity in ways that we can take from the screen, or page, and apply to our own lives. Superhero stories are cathartic in the same way that the dramas of the ancient Greeks were. Think about how often superheroes wear masks, after all. Indeed, I have to wonder if Coppola would question Scorcese’s decision to make The Last Temptation of Christ when that’s a story that has, literally, been retold over and over again for two millennia. And, of course, it’s a story that has been offering the same lessons and ideas that something like All-Star Superman does (how many Superman origins have we had? The story remains relevant), or that even Avengers: Endgame does. What about Tony Stark’s sacrifice to save everyone is that different from Jesus’ sacrifice to save everyone? They’re the same tale, just dressed up a bit differently for a contemporary audience. It’s simple, really.

I think that critiques like these ones come from a place of fear, and that fear comes from a place of misunderstanding. Cinema is not just one thing. Nor is literature. Nor is art. They are multiplicities. That’s the whole point of art, to stretch our imaginations and ideas into places they’ve never been. And to take us to places we’ve been before, but in different and varying ways. To just dismiss a whole artistic genre (the comic, the superhero film) is to cripple art, to force it only to tell some stories, but not all of them.

That’s really all I want to say about this. I get why so many people are so annoyed by these comments, but the comic book fans have heard it all before. We don’t care. We know what we know, and if the critics aren’t willing to come and perhaps learn from us, and vice versa, then there’s really no point in trying to have a discussion.

The irony has not escaped me.

Our boyfriend came for a visit this week, and there's been very little extra time. Catching up now.

Here.

Have some articles I've written for CBR lately:

Archie Comics Celebrates National Coming Out Day with It Gets Better Project

AMC Theaters Bans Man for Life Over Joker Prank

Valiant's Quantum & Woody Return With New Creative Team in 2020

Serpent War Introduces An Obscure Robert E Howard Hero to the Marvel U

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1672: Time Bandits, 1982 (Movie Adaptation Week)

The last of my film adaptations for this week comes from a movie I loved (LOVED) as a child. I haven't watched it in many years, so I'm not sure how it holds up, but anything from the pens of Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin, produced by George Harrison, has to have something going for it. Those who've never seen it, I recommend it. Imagine Monty Python doing science fiction, and you'll have some idea of what the film is like.

This adaptation is one of the few this week that I can actually compare to the movie, since I've actually seen the movie. And it's a pretty good version. The likenesses to the actors is good, though perhaps not great, but the narrative follows the film pretty faithfully. The static nature of the medium keeps some of the physically-comedic notes from coming across fully, but the puns and satire are there.

Adaptations are a tricky business. They're always going to be compared, be it favourably or no, to the source material, whether film or screenplay. And when they're adapted from the screenplay, sometimes there will be vast differences between what eventually ends up on the screen and what we see in the comic. Over the weekend I read the adaptation of the Howard the Duck film, and the creatures at the end are actually supposed to be monstrous ducks, rather than the insectoid creatures we see in the final film. Sometimes these differences are good, and highlight the freedom that drawing a story affords artists, but sometimes the differences are bad, and one can see why, in the final film, they would have been changed. I think the monster ducks were a change that needed to happen.

Not sure where we're heading tomorrow, but I'm sure it'll be interesting.

"And for the loser...a soggy death by drowning in a giant bowl of warm custard! Isn't that a scream?!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1668: Planet of the Apes, 2001 (Movie Adaptation Week)

I remember watching the original Planet of the Apes series when City TV would do marathons of them over the course of a day. Spending a whole Saturday on the couch watching this bizarre future history unfold was a lovely way to pass some of my adolescent time. But, as with the other movie adaptations I've reviewed this week, I've never actually seen this one.

I think perhaps that's a good thing - this way I can judge the piece on its own merits, rather than in comparison with its source material. And on that topic, you'll note that the cover says "Based on the motion picture screenplay," rather than being based on the film itself. I read a synopsis of the film, and the comic actually removes the "twist ending" from the film. Or rather, I think the film added something to the screenplay. Either ending didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. In the comic, it seems our hero Leo is going to go back in time and completely erase the future he's just helped to save, and no one seems to have a problem with this. And in the film ending, how the hell did the apes Leo defeated manage to travel back in time? Though, really, I ought to see the film before bashing it too much.

The edition I read today was signed and numbered by writer Scott Allie. I likely picked this up as a premium comic to sell at my store, though the lack of success of the film meant that the comic adaptation didn't really have a huge audience. Which brings me to an interesting question: who exactly is the audience for a movie adaptation? I suppose in the days of no streaming services or Internet, it was a way to relive a film that you might not have easy access to. But does something like this film, which would have hit home media very quickly, really need an adaptation? I suppose it speaks to people who would rather read a comic, or novelization, than sit and watch the film. And it's more portable, I suppose?

Anyway, it wasn't very good, all things considered. There was a strange propensity for the captioning to switch between past and present tense, which simply reinforces my idea that all comics publishers should be hiring ex-English academics as their editors. We do not miss stuff like that.

"Daena also knows that this she-ape wants more from Leo than a rescue."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1667: Marvel Super Special #20, 1981 (Movie Adaptation Week)

I'm reasonably sure I've seen this film, though there really is a good chance that I haven't. I have vague impressions of it, though I would only have been 7 when it came out.

Maybe I haven't seen this film.

I'd really like to, though, because this was a pretty great story. While I'm concerned that the special effects may not have aged particularly well, the tale that's told is pretty solid. There's lots of cool twists, some very mythic stuff going on, especially the bits that touch on Christianity. It's a story that really feels like it could have happened in our world. Though I can't really say why without spoiling one of the coolest parts, IMHO, of the story.

Apprentice wizard Galen has to face off against the last dragon. That's all I'll say. It sounds like a pretty standard fantasy story, but, as I mentioned, there's neat twists that definitely set it apart from the usual bunch. Though I grew up on a pretty steady diet of Dragonlance in my early teens, I've never really been a huge fan of the genre. Given my penchant for Dungeons & Dragons, that's a bit odd, but I think I've always taken from superheroes the same sort of escapism that fantasy brings. We geeks, we sometimes focus on one genre to the virtual exclusion of all others. So it's worth noting, for me at least, when a fantasy story does resonate. This one did.

Denny O'Neil adapts the screenplay, and Marie Severin and John Tartaglione handle the art. One of my planned theme weeks will feature Ms. Severin and a couple of other female artists from the early days of Marvel. The likenesses to the cast of the film are well done. I can't imagine having to draw a story in which you had an actual real-life original that could be compared to your work on pretty much every page.

The back half of the magazine is given over to "making of" features. There is, of course, one that focusses on the creation of Vermithrax Perjorative ("The Worm of Thrace Which Makes Things Worse") - the titular dragon. One particular part of that article jumped out at me in the first description in the article: "...it is the last of the great dragons, a four-hundred year old androgyne, a fire-breathing monstrosity" (emphasis mine). There's no other mention of this in the entire magazine, but I find the idea that the dragon is non-binary very interesting. On the one hand, the creature is squarely conceived as an evil force outside of nature, contrary to humanity and it's perceived binary of male/female. From this perspective, the dragon represents something contrary to Christian binary worldview. On the other hand, Christianity is not well-presented in this story, particularly, and even the ending hints at a hidden way of perceiving magic within the Christian framework that comes to dominate the world. But the dragon is still (SPOILER in case you missed the title of the comic!) slain, and the magic, and androgyny, they represented is hidden. I'm perhaps making too much of this, but I'm fascinated by the appearance of gender identities that are becoming more widely recognized in older works of literature.It tells us a lot about cultural attitudes toward such things through history.

(Of course I've just realized that the main female lead in the story begins in drag, so as to avoid the lottery of maidens sacrificed to the dragon, but "comes out" partway through the story. Maybe I need to think more about this one.)

"You can't stop me. After all, I've been a man longer than you have."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1666: Marvel Spring Special #1, 1988 (Movie Adaptation Week)

In an effort to get back to regular updates, I'm doing some theme weeks. This week we'll be looking at film adaptations. Like novelizations of films, these are always a bit of a dodgy prospect. The comic can't deviate too far from the source material, though there are instances where the comic was created from an earlier draft of a script and features things not in the film. I imagine that artists would also try as hard as possible to give the characters in the comic as much resemblance to the actors as possible, but in a stylized art form, that's not always easy. As such, adaptations can disappoint for not cleaving quite so photo-realistically to the film they adapt.

I've never seen the Elvira, Mistress of the Dark film. Or if I have, there's no recollection of it in my brain. I know of Elvira, mainly because of her prominent cleavage that was in the background of my adolescence, but I don't think I ever watched any of her television shows. For those not in the know, Cassandra Peterson plays Elvira as a late-night horror film host, sort of a sexy version of the Crypt Keeper. She's also featured in comics where she plays a similar role. At some point her popularity must have crested and she got her own feature film. The story is somewhat akin to Footloose, though with a slinky goth/valley girl in the role of agitator rather than Kevin Bacon. The sultry Elvira inspires the youth of the town to overthrow the restrictive laws of the older generation.

One thing that I'm curious about is whether or not each discreet scene in the comic follows the film. I suppose this would hinge on whether or not the artists were able to see the film prior to creating the comic. If not, I imagine that Colon made decisions for each scene that might have been substantially different from the choices director James Signorelli made. I am not, however, going to sit through the film just for the sake of comparison, I'm afraid. The story just wasn't that good.

Join me at the movies again tomorrow, won't you?

"Hey! I've seen "The People's Court"! I'm entitled to one phone call and a strip search!"

Look What I Just Found! - Man-Thing Appears in Guardians of the Galaxy!

Maybe someone else has seen this, but I couldn't find anything online about it. In the end credits sequence for Guardians of the Galaxy, we see one of my favourite characters, Howard the Duck. Howard first appeared in the series Adventure Into Fear when it was the primary vehicle for Man-Thing, a character that's far more interesting and far less sexual than he sounds.

Here's what he looks like:

In the post-credits sequence, we pan down on the Collector sipping a drink and getting licked by Laika. But have a look at what's in the top left of the screen:

Here's a closer look:

(Note - edited May 22 - tried to enhance the picture a bit.)

I don't know about you, but that certainly looks like Man-Thing's eyes and nose, and it definitely looks like a plant.

Both Howard and Man-Thing had their heydays under the auspices of the amazing Steve Gerber. His runs on both titles are near the top of my recommendation list. Actually, the Guardians' first substantial run was written by him too, though they were a very different team. Definitely a writer worth checking into.

Keep Reading?

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1234: Giant-Size Man-Thing #4, May 1975

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1248: Howard the Duck #9, February 1977

Weird Worlds: The Minor Mainstream Works of Steve Gerber, Part 1 – Dr. Fate

Some thoughts after having seen Captain Marvel

I often wonder how much I’d disagree with teenage me. He was a surly little shit. There are definitely things I’ve done that I know, I know, teenage me would snort at with disgust. We’d probably still agree on music. I had impeccable taste in music as a teen. And we’d agree on how great it is that superheroes are out in the public consciousness in a way we haven’t really seen since the very early days. And I know, I know, you’re all sick of them, and they’re all the same story, and the effects are covering up a pretty thin story, and how many times can they go to the same well over and over and over?

Which, honestly, is what you can say about every fucking myth ever, including the Abrahamic ones – let’s just put that in there right from the beginning.

Just like every other thing in our lives, our myths and beliefs are becoming more public. Superheroes have always been one of the ways that we do this. The story is created as a reflection of a hoped-for zeitgeist, and as the story spreads the change is reflected, one hopes, in the affected culture. This is also how advertising works – think about that. It’s not a perfect process. The trouble is remembering that these are human-made stories, rather than divine truths. They’re metaphors. Once we recognize this, it becomes much easier to manipulate these myths in our favour – which literally every religion ever has done. But once we realize that the myth is in our power, we can begin creating new ones – thus Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. Women have, in these films, wrested the mythic power from the men who’ve wielded it a good few thousand years, and have given us back the mythic women we’ve needed for so long.

Of course, teenage me would just be fucking in love with the special effects. He thought Masters of the Universe: The Motion Picture was a pretty good film.

*sigh*                                                                                                

Road to Infinity War - Re-Watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe part 2: The Incredible Hulk

I'm not sure why, but The Incredible Hulk is that part of the MCU that too-often gets overlooked. It wasn't, I don't think, as successful in theatres as Iron Man, but it does a whole lot to set up the wider universe within which the characters exist. It does this by having a very cool opening sequence. Rather than us getting yet another origin story, TIH opens by showing us the Hulk's origin as the credits are rolling. It's somewhat similar to the origin story in Ang Lee's disappointing Hulk, but with a much more believable Edward Norton as Banner. There are also, near the beginning of the film, counts as to how many days it has been between "incidents." What these two devices do is place the origin of the Hulk somewhere in the recent past of the film's universe, and by extension Iron Man's universe. Thus we aren't saddled with the weird inception point of Stark becoming Iron Man. The film as filmic artefact is the inception point of the series, but narratively it is only one story of many that are ostensibly happening at the same time. Of course, once we get around to Captain America, we come to realize that there is a much longer history of powered individuals in the MCU, a phenomenon that is only compounded by the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. television series.

It was a very wise move to do things this way. One of the things that makes comic book superhero universes successful is the history they carry with them. This can be both literal (i.e., the length of time a particular universe has been in publication existence) and narrative (i.e., the stories that weave backward in fiction time). In giving us a possibly concurrent origin for the Hulk as we have for Iron Man, the series moves from the premise that Iron Man's advent inspires other heroes to the premise that this is simply the latest age of heroes to dawn. DC's "Arrowverse" has had a lot of success with much the same process.

So while it may not have been the smash success that Iron Man was, which is definitely not to say that it's not a good movie, The Incredible Hulk is instrumental in establishing the MCU, and along with the first two Iron Man films provides a solid, and still relatively "realistic" setting upon which the subsequent films start to build a ridiculous and fantastic superhero universe. After TIH, things only get stranger in the MCU.

Well, there's a bit more groundedness in Iron Man II, which we'll talk about next.

Road to Infinity War - Re-Watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe part 1: Iron Man

In anticipation of the coming Avengers: Infinity War, I thought I'd refresh my memory and re-watch the films leading up to what is looking to be an amazing superhero movie. I've also recently got back into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., one of the more under-rated superhero shows, I think. I am loving this season's arc thus far. Classic, full-on, superhero time-travel shenanigans. What more could we want? Sadly, though I'd love to do it some day, I won't be watching the television shows that intersect with the movies. One day I will, but probably only after I retire. Who has time for that otherwise?

And, of course, Iron Man is where it all starts. It had even slipped my mind that this film is the first time we meet Phil Coulson.

While watching it last night, I was struck by what a great movie it really is. It might be traditional to leave such a summation until the end of my assessment/review/blog post (whatever we want to call this), but I think it's an important thing to put out there up front: this is a really good movie. Even if it hadn't spawned what is ostensibly the first shared universe in film, it would still have stood on its own merits as an entertaining and pleasing piece of cinema. A good story arc, likeable characters, bad-ass special effects. It does everything an action movie needs to do. But it's more than an action movie, isn't it?

I should interject here and say that that's not a derogatory statement about action movies. Please don't misunderstand. I like a good action movie as much as the next person.

But a superhero movie is slightly different. It's getting, or has long been, cliche to talk about superheroes and myth. Any reader of my blog knows that, for me, it's a foregone conclusion that these stories are attempting to serve the same purpose in our culture as the major religious texts did, and do, in their own cultures. Isn't it the perfect embodiment of the post-modern deity that we're all completely aware of its artificial nature? And what better embodiment of that artificiality than Tony Stark and Iron Man? The classic reversal of Iron Man is the man of flesh with the iron heart becomes the man of iron with the living heart. He takes the grossest of our contemporary material productions, weapons, and, as the second film (which I'll get to in a couple of weeks) says, turns them into a shield. This is the lesson that Tony Stark's story tries to teach us, the kerygmatic aspect of this particular myth.

All that aside, though, it's also the film that kicks off the MCU, and it's blatantly designed to do so. The tiny stroke of genius that is the final scene of this film, combined with the final scene in The Incredible Hulk (next week's feature) did the one thing that superhero fans have been waiting for for so, so long. They told us that these two movies existed in the same place. That while Iron Man was having his scuffle with the Iron Monger, Bruce Banner was on the run from the U.S. government, sometimes as himself, and sometimes as "the other guy." And off on a different plane we'd come to realize that Thor was getting himself in trouble. Or that somewhere in the Arctic there was a plane buried in the ice containing a hero who would rise again in the hour of our greatest need (you never thought about Captain America as North American-ized Arthurian myth? Me neither til just now!). Finally, we had the Marvel Universe we knew and loved, and it seemed that movies had figured out what kind of a vehicle they needed to be for the tenor of the genre.

Well, at least until DC came along and managed to bungle it supremely. But perhaps that's fodder for another post.

Iron Man is a great place to start because it's a great movie. The MCU hits the ground running and never stops, really. Though the next film, The Incredible Hulk, is perhaps the slowest spot. We'll talk about why that might be next week.

Very Brief Movie Reviews: Thinking about Spider-Man

I just watched Spider-Man: Homecoming for the first time. I remember when it came out there was a lot of kerfuffle about the reboot, how we'd just had Andrew Garfield's unfortunately aborted run at the hero, and why did we need a new one? But the thing is that this happens in the comics too - a new creative team takes over and inevitably retells the origin and then moves us into current continuity. This is what Homecoming had the foresight and ability to do.

It was a pretty great movie. Michael Keaton made me actually care about the Vulture for the first time since Jenkins and Buckingham in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #37 (you should go check that comic out - it's amazing).

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 593: Master of the Universe The Motion Picture #1, 1987

A few weeks back I read through Paul Chadwick's Concrete: Fragile Creature mini-series, in which the title character assists on a film set for Rulers of the Omniverse, a movie based on a children's toy line. I thought it would be amusing, and slightly metatextual, to review the comics adaptation of the movie that Chadwick apes in his story.

I was a huge fan of the Masters of the Universe toy line - my brothers and I had the figures, the castles and playsets, the vehicles. I even collected the comic well after I'd lost interest in the toys and cartoons, and the final couple of issues of the Marvel series, a dystopian possible future story for Eternia, are just excellent. On top of this, I remember fondly the movie coming out, though it only slightly captured the feel and strangeness of the toy. (Also, Courtney Cox, well before Friends, and a little after Misfits of Science, starred, and I've always liked her.)

It's that capturing of the strangeness of the toys that I'd like to focus on. The designs of this comic are much more in line with the toys, cartoons, and comics for MOTU, much more so than the actual movie. Now, partially I'm sure, this is because Dolph Lundgren would have looked ridiculous in He-Man's costume - I'm teaching my students Michael Chabon's "Secret Skin" tomorrow, and in he talks about attempts to realize superhero costumes in our own physical reality, and the failure of such ventures. I think the furry-shorted He-Man might suffer a similar problem. But that the comics adaptation went with the original designs allows it to fit more properly with the stories that were being told in the comics. It's for reasons like this that I continue to wonder where the series would have gone had it been able to continue after the cancellation of the toy line. Today's comic reads much like a finale to the whole He-Man versus Skeletor story, with Skeletor finally victorious, and a few of the last Eternian heroes rallying to defeat him. It's a pity we don't see more of the other heroes, but the three major players are present. The comic also plays down the magical aspect of Eternia significantly, making everything much more science fictional than the source material, and replacing the annoying Orko with the equally annoying Gwildor.

One thing that I find odd is that Beastman, a staple of the toys and cartoons and comics, and one of the more recognizable of the villains, is illustrated in this comic in his film version, rather than his toy version, unlike every other character in the comic. It's an odd choice, especially since Beastman's original clown-meets-bear design is quite strange and intimidating.

So, not a terrible comic, but not a great one. Probably a better story as a comic than it was as a movie, but nostalgia cleanses so many sins from our memories.

Onward!