Monthly Archives: March 2016

Since I have no interest in seeing it, I'm not the guy to spend a lot of time discussing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I suspect a lot of industry folks and industry observers are wrestling with a dilemma this morning. The movie made a ton o' money over the weekend — more than enough to be considered a smash hit on one level.

Then again, its grosses also plunged over the three days suggesting that bad word of mouth kept people away, as did the mostly-contemptuous reviews. At WonderCon, I heard from some who loved it but there seemed to be a lot of "buzz" that it's not only a bad movie but one that defaces its lead properties. A lot of people didn't exit the theater disappointed so much as angry.

So now you have the question: Is this film a model to be emulated in the future? Or an example of what you shouldn't do if you get to make the next movie of Batman or Superman or any established character with a lot of history? The level of box office drop-off in the coming days may help some answer that. The ancillary income from merchandising that ties-in with the movie may provide additional clues. But right now and maybe for a long time after, heads in Hollywood will be spinning over this conflict.

Big companies which own big properties need to deal with the fact that a great character has his or her breaking point; that you can devalue a precious commodity by letting this producer do one version of it, another writer do that version of it, another director do yet another version of it, etc. The more that is changeable about a character, the less he or she is really about. And the more different interpretations you have out there, the greater the chance that some will damage the affection that audiences have for the character or that the variance will water it down to the point where it's not very special at all.

Is Superman a dark, gritty, maniacal character or is he a sunny, positive force with a personality as grand as his powers? If he can be one in some appearances and the other in others, eventually he becomes not about either. He's just a name and maybe a visual which can be altered a lot.

Characters like that can go from hand to hand. The creator(s) usually has/have the best take…though admittedly there have been creators who didn't seem to know what they'd created or didn't care what you did to them. If you made Batman into a Transvestite Nazi, Bob Kane would have probably praised it as true to his vision if his credit and the amount on his check were both of sufficient size.) Thereafter, the character's value has a lot to do with the sensitivity and skill of those entrusted with him or her. Ideally, you hope they land with someone who can and will say to the right proposals, "No, no…that's not right for this property!"

The problem when a character like Superman or Batman (or Bugs Bunny or Yogi Bear or a thousand others) is controlled by a company the size of Time-Warner is that so many different parties have input or temporary control that some are by the sheer law of numbers, going to be wrong. And at times, there may be no one who can take the long view of the character and say, "No, no…that's not right for this property!" Since Mel Blanc passed, no one at Time-Warner has even settled on one actor to talk for Bugs. Every time a different producer or director is in charge of a Bugs Bunny project, he picks from about eighteen people who do Blanc imitations of varying fidelity. The wabbit no longer speaks with one voice and from appearance to appearance, he varies in other ways as well.

I'm not writing this to say that Superman and Batman are wrong in the new movie. Well, maybe I am but since I haven't seen the film, my opinion there ain't worth even as little as it usually is about anything. Still, when so many people walk out of a movie saying, "That's not my Superman and/or Batman," something is wrong. If even half the moviegoers walked out of a James Bond film saying, "That actor is not James Bond," that actor would probably not be 007 in the next installment in the series…because it's supposed to be a series. There's supposed to be some consistency and continuity and there are certain things about James Bond that make him James Bond.

Just as there are certain things about Superman and Batman that make them Superman and Batman and it's not just the names and an approximation of the visuals. Great characters have great premises and great concepts and there are things about their stories that cause people to fall in love with them. The audiences will put up with a certain amount of variance and interpretation and modernization but if you lose the basic core of Superman and Batman, you've done something wrong.

Those of us who love Superman and Batman are used to seeing versions of him that seem wrong to us. There are Batman lovers who bought his comic book through whole decades when they thought he was in the creative custody of writers, editors and other folks who didn't understand what the Caped Crusader was all about. The same is true of Superman…but it's easy to shrug off a thirty-two page comic book that defaces your favorite hero. There's another issue going on sale next week and someone else is writing that one and eventually, someone comes along who does it right and sales go back up. As one of his editors once said of Superman, "He's indestructible! Even bad stories can't harm him."

A string of bad movies? Maybe. A lot of superstars have found that to be worse than Kryptonite.

We all know Jack Kirby is the King of the Comics. But did you know he's also King of the Cakes?

John Oliver is off this week so he left us a conspiracy theory as sound as most of them…

Ed Kilgore tells us how messy the Republican Convention could be if no candidate — which presumably would be D.T. — arrives there with 1,237 committed delegates. And even then, things could descend into chaos.

I just hope they'll make time to reprise the best part of the last G.O.P. convention: Having Clint Eastwood come out, debate an empty chair…and lose.

Debuting tonight on the PBS series Independent Lens is the documentary An Honest Liar about the life of James Randi. If you're not familiar with Mr. Randi, he's a former magician who has spent much of his life debunking (a term he doesn't like) folks who claim to have psychic powers or supernatural ways to heal the sick or the ability to communicate with the dead…stuff like that. Since I believe all such claims are nonsense if not outright frauds, I applaud the work of Randi and his associates, and have been delighted to meet and speak with the man on several occasions.

The documentary is not entirely flattering and it delves into some aspects of his life that he might have preferred not to have included. But there is much in there of which he should be proud. If you get a chance to catch it, catch it. It's on most PBS channels debuting tonight and running again for the next few days.

I was able to perform yesterday at WonderCon thanks to that little blue pill. No, not that one. I'm talking about Aleve, which worked wonders to keep my new knee from hurting as I strode about the vast, impersonal complex known as the Los Angeles Convention Center. I won't (again) go into why I don't like that place but I don't like the place. On the other hand, I love WonderCons.

Saturday seemed somewhat more crowded than Friday, maybe because it was. Friday didn't sell out but Saturday did. I heard a few people complain about the crowding but a certain amount of that is a "given" when you go to popular events. If you don't want to wait in lines, go to Marco Rubio speeches.

We did a Quick Draw! game to a packed house with Sergio Aragonés, Scott Shaw! and Kyle Baker wielding the Sharpies. You may have heard the audience laughing where you were. Boy, those guys are good.

We did a Cartoon Voices panel with Maurice LaMarche, Candi Milo, Townsend Coleman, Amanda Troop and David Sobolov demonstrating their artistry. You may have heard the audience laughing where you were. Boy, those guys are good.

And then I went home. Conventions are a little different when you can do that instead of returning to your hotel room. I think I like that but I still hope they don't do any more WonderCons here.

• To honor the name of the late Bill Finger, maybe we should be campaigning to get it off the Batman movies.

That's a photo of the folks who bring you Groo the Wanderer — top row, Stan Sakai and Tom Luth; bottom row, Sergio Aragonés and Your Obedient Blogger. The pic was taken yesterday at a panel we did on Day One of WonderCon 2016 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Walking to the panel room, it felt like the con was there and our panel was back at the Anaheim Convention Center. As I've probably said here more times than you need to hear, I do not like the Los Angeles Convention Center. I'm quite sure it was designed by the same guy who lays out airports where I have to make connecting flights and puts the gate where I arrive as far as possible from the gate where I depart.

The parking there is also dreadful but I got around that my going to and from the con via Uber car, as I will again today and tomorrow. You see, I like WonderCons…like them a lot. How much do I like WonderCons? I like WonderCons enough I'll even go to them at the Los Angeles Convention Center. That's how much I like WonderCons and believe me, that's a lot.

Once I got inside the Exhibit Hall, things were fine, though I wish the L.A. Convention Center would pay their electric bill. I'm not used to conventions with romantic mood lighting inside…and believe me, it didn't make any of the exhibitors look better.

A lot of folks were talking about the convention's introduction of RFID badges. RFID stands for Radio-Frequency IDentification and it means that your badge has a little computer chip in it that validates it's not counterfeit or expired. Periodically as you walk about the convention center, you have to pass through set-ups that look like subway turnstiles without the turnstiles and you must "tap in" or "tap out," tapping your badge where specified. It's not a hardship, though those of us who are over six feet in height have to stoop a bit to make the tap. I am wondering if in addition to verifying that your badge is valid if it also yields info about how long you remained at the con, where in the building you roamed, etc.

I didn't stay long yesterday; just picked up my badge, said hello to some people, hiked eleven miles to my panel, did my panel and then fled. Today and tomorrow, I'll be there all day. Hope to see lots of you at Quick Draw! (10:30 in room 403AB) and the Cartoon Voices Panel (4:30 in the same place). Right now, my Uber awaits…

Rolling Stone, which I doubt has much influence on how even its loyalest readers vote, has endorsed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi makes the case for Bernie Sanders over Hillary. I don't have a strong preference as to which would make the better president…or even which would be the safest bet to defeat the Republican nominee. I actually think Sanders could soundly trounce Donald Trump. When I look at the delegate counts and the polling, I have serious doubts he can beat Hillary. But hey, this is the election where lots of things have happened that once looked highly unlikely…

There was a decade or two in my life when I could have used a case of this stuff…

A lot of Republicans are scurrying about, begging people to vote for Ted Cruz instead of Donald Trump. Why? The two men have pretty much the same stated positions on most of the major issues. Why are the Lindsey Grahams and Mitt Romneys so fervent for Cruz over Trump? Jonathan Chait can probably explain it.

There are a lot of articles around which say that Democrats should not assume that Trump, if he is the nominee, will be an easy defeat in November. Personally, I think he will be but that the Dems shouldn't presume that and should run as if he's a real threat. For what it's worth, Daniel Larison over at the American Conservative thinks Trump would not only lose, he'd lose big enough to damage the Republican brand in many ways.

I keep saying that I will be convinced that Trump might win when someone can show me numbers that suggest he will flip enough states Obama won to get an electoral advantage. As Josh Marshall notes, if he can do that with any large state, he oughta be able to do it with Pennsylvania…and the polls there currently show Hillary beating Donald by double-digits. Yeah, he's sewing up the disenfranchised white male vote all across America but so did Mitt Romney.

Of course, there's a long way to go and already a lot of things that no one thought could happen have happened. I just don't see much chance yet of Trump picking up the non-white or female vote, or for millions of angry white guys who haven't voted in the past to suddenly materialize at the polls. What I'm afraid of is not that Trump has the momentum to win but that suddenly something will come along — some new revelation or actual evidence of wrongdoing — and there will be a much better reason than there's ever been to not vote for Hillary. That's assuming it's Hillary.

I don't have a whole lot of interest in seeing the new Batman Vs. Superman movie, a film which has achieved something I didn't think was possible. It actually caused my dear friend Leonard Maltin to use the word "sucks" in his review. Even Rob Schneider never managed that and lord, how he tried.

Actually, for reasons I probably should elaborate on someday, I don't have a whole lot of interest in seeing any recent movie which takes a character I followed as a younger reader of comic books and turns him into a live-action merchandising vehicle.

In the same way it's possible to love James Bond when Sean Connery is playing him and not when someone else is in the role — or to enjoy a novel but not the movie based on it — it's possible to love a comic book character only when he's a comic book character…or only when he's a comic book character rendered by certain writers and artists or in a certain style. I'm also not a huge fan of action movies loaded with CGI and I really need to write a post on how that technology has made it harder for me to think of the people on a movie screen as mortal human beings. In some of the films I've seen, they clearly were not.

But I'm especially not interested in seeing this new Batman-Superman Meeting of the Merchandising. First off, all the trailers and ads make it look very dark and grim and violent. To me, a dark, grim and violent Superman make about as much sense as a dark, grim and violent Bugs Bunny. I don't think it's cool or adult or realistic. I think it's just the wrong approach to the character, especially when they strip him of all sense of humanity. It reminds me of those YouTube videos where someone executes a deliberate clash of styles like "What if Bambi had been directed by Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino?"

I can more easily view Batman in that light except that when they make him dark, they usually make him psychotic and kind of personally repulsive. Often, he's not different enough from the foes he's battling for me to particularly care who triumphs. That's someone else's Batman and it may be fine on its own terms. But mine has a guy I care about in the bat-suit and I ain't seen much of him for a long time.

Really though, it comes down to this for me: Superman and Batman don't belong in the same world. They really don't.

I absolutely understand the marketing reasons. If I were the guy in charge of them, I wouldn't be able to resist the sales advantage of crossing them over and teaming them up. But since that's not my job, I can look at it from another, purer angle. It's fun to see your favorite characters meet and maybe even fight. I didn't read it but some years ago, someone worked out the contractual problems and did a crossover comic of The X-Men and Star Trek. I'm sure that was delightful for fans of both properties and very lucrative…and since it was a one-time event, not particularly injurious to the mythology of either. Readers could just mentally declare it "out of continuity" and not worry about how it maybe damaged the internal logic of one fictional world to merge it with the internal logic of another fictional world.

It's harder to do that with two mismatched properties that appear together on a routine basis. Superman and Batman were created and configured as standalone, self-contained features. They were no more intended to appear together than Popeye and Prince Valiant…or Flash Gordon and Donald Duck.

Some history. In 1939, the firm we now know as DC Comics had a chance to publish a comic to tie-in with the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. It was a 96-page anthology featuring stories of all the company's top characters and naturally, it cover-featured Superman. Batman certainly would have been in it but he was just then being created.

The comic sold so well that they squeezed in a 1940 edition. This time, there was a Batman story and they put Batman, Robin and Superman together on the cover. It also sold well so they kept the anthology going without a World's Fair tie-in. At first, it was World's Best Comics but apparently, another company which had a comic called Best Comics objected so it became World's Finest Comics. For years, it was a top-seller. It was a little more expensive than other comics of the day but it felt very special, featuring as it did one story of Superman and a separate tale of Batman and Robin. All three were on every cover in a little scene which didn't appear anywhere inside…since Superman and Batman didn't appear together inside.

Over the years, comic books got thinner and thinner. For production reasons, the page count of a comic book had to be a multiple of 16 and when they reached the stage where comics went to 32 pages, they decided that was as low as they could go. DC was selling 32 page comics for ten cents and they had a few, including World's Finest Comics, which had 64 pages for fifteen cents. Even with Superman and Batman (and other features) in each issue, World's Finest wasn't selling well. It had lost its "all-star" feel and was no longer an exception to a rule of marketing that comic book publishers had learned the hard way. If you put out comics in two different prices, kids would buy the cheapest ones, regardless of how much they got for their money. To most buyers, it was simple: If you had fifteen cents, you could buy a comic book…or you could buy a comic book and a candy bar. The latter just felt like more.

Also, retailers didn't like having two different prices of comics. Comic books were a small profit item and if your clerk accidentally sold a few fifteen-cent comics for a dime each, it could wipe out your profits for a day. Many distributors urged publishers to make all their comics the same price. A few years later when DC began publishing annuals for 25 cents, they calmed distributor concerns by promising that any comic that sold for more than the standard price would have a flat spine so it would feel different, alerting the cashier it was different.

A 32 page comic book had about 25 pages of comics in it. This presented a problem for World's Finest. Did they keep the 12 page Superman stories and the 12 page Batman stories and drop the other strips, which at the time were things like Tomahawk and Green Arrow. Or shorten everything? They didn't want to do either of those. They also didn't want to chuck either Superman or Batman…so someone came up with the bright idea of having the lead story in each issue be Superman and Batman — team-up stories and then follow it with shorter stories of the lesser features.

The alter-egos of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne had met here and there in comics and also on radio but only for brief moments. Now, they became a regular team and that's kind of where things went awry. Yeah, the comic sold but the price that was paid was that Batman was severely damaged.

You see, hero stories require villains and menaces. Batman was a mortal. His origin may have been contrived and melodramatic but it was not scientifically impossible. No one in his world could fly without an airplane. No one came from another planet. No one could look smug as bullets bounced off his chest. That happened in Superman's world and that's where Batman wound up…and he had to go into the different "reality" of Superman's strip instead of vice-versa. If you'd put Superman into Batman's world, he could have captured The Joker in four seconds and the Penguin in under two.

So the stories had to be about menaces that could present a challenge to a guy who could fly and who had x-ray vision and super-speed and superhuman strength. That meant monsters and aliens and mad scientists and such. They were silly stories and they also weren't very good. I can think of lots of good Superman stories from this period and lots of good Batman stories but not a lot of great Superman-Batman stories. The plots were all so awkward as the writers struggled to come up with ways that the menace could not too easily be bested by Superman…but Batman — a guy who couldn't fly or smash through walls or see through them could still participate.

And since Batman was fighting those kinds of foes in World's Finest Comics, it bled into his own comics, which had the same editor, writers and artists. Batman and Robin in outer space? There's a real premise-killer. And then along came the Justice League of America so Batman really became a guy who associates not with the real-world scum of Gotham City but with aliens and beings with amazing powers, often on other worlds or in other dimensions.

A lot of folks will point to those Batman vs. Space Alien issues and say they represent the nadir of the character's existence…and they were usually poor stories that corrupted the series premise. But Batman never stopped being a guy who palled around with guys from the other worlds, Martian manhunters, Amazon princesses, members of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps, etc. He's still a guy with no super-powers operating in a world where most heroes can fly under their own power and lift up school buses. No wonder he's so grim all the time.

Again, I understand the marketing reasons. I understand how much fun some of that is for Batman fans. I just think that characters like Superman and Batman suffer at some point because so many people handle them and try so many different interpretations that the properties eventually become undefined. There's almost no rule about who they are and how they operate that one of their handlers won't break. The concept gets turned upside-down so many different ways that after a while, there's no rightside-up. Is Batman a sane man in an insane world or is he just as cuckoo as The Joker? Depending on which comic or dramatization you check out, it could be either. How powerful is he? Depends who's writing him this week. What are his motives? His principles? Again, depends on who's deciding that.

It was wrong, wrong, wrong in those comics in our illustrations here that he was battling aliens from other planets…but now there's a multi-zillion dollar movie in which he fights a guy from Krypton. So what's the character all about any more? All I know is that if there's nothing wrong with what a character does and is, there's nothing right. So I think I won't go see Batman Vs. Superman.

Wednesday night, Trevor Noah did an amazing interview with Senator Lindsey Graham, who as I understand it has endorsed Ted Cruz on the premise that while Cruz would be bad, Trump would be worse. What a fine endorsement. Graham actually looked a little tipsy in the conversation. I don't think he was but I can understand how the position he's in would drive a lesser man to drink. Graham was kind of good-natured and charming — enough to almost make me forget that he really is a lesser man…

Antenna TV is switching tonight's scheduled Johnny Carson rerun. Instead of what they had planned, they're running the Tonight Show on which Garry Shandling made his first appearance. It was a night in which Garry's whole life changed, only for the better.