The Dark Knight Rises Revisited

Yes, it’s another not-at-all-timely movie post. The other night I watched The Dark Knight Rises for the second time, the first time I saw it since it opened in theaters. I really wanted to like it then, enough that I enjoyed watching it once. But its flaws were too much for a second viewing. I probably could have overlooked them all, if I wasn’t immediately tripped up by how wrong they got Batman.

Batman is supposed to be relentless. He is someone who draws strength from the tragedies of his past. He is committed to his personal crime-fighting mission beyond ordinary rationality. Yet, the movie begins by telling us he gave it all up — due to a broken heart — and has been idle for 8 years. Which incidentally means that the sum total of Batman’s career is the first two movies. If he only ever fought The Joker and Ras-al Ghul, he’s not much of a superhero.

Superheroes are not complicated characters. That’s a large part of their appeal. The name and the costume should give you all the vital information you need as an audience. Not all there is to know, but all you need to get on board. (This is why the show Heroes never worked– they eliminated hero names and costumes. That and the stupid stories.) Uncomplicated does not mean unsophisticated; superheroes can have rich inner lives, inhabit complex worlds, experience convoluted plots.  But, dear moviemakers, you have to stay true to the characters’ root elements. Do that, and you can have a whole thrilling ensemble of distinctive mythic beings, like The Avengers. Fail to do it, and you get Green Lantern, Spider-man 3, Daredevil, etc etc.

As a standalone action movie, The Dark Knight Rises isn’t bad. But The Dark Knight really raised the bar. It captured Batman and The Joker so well, it illuminated the whole superhero/supervillain dichotomy. To wit: a superhero turns weakness into strength. Within himself at minimum, within others when at his/her best. A Supervillain turns the strength of others into weakness. Watch it again and see how beautifully that basic conflict plays out. That’s what I’ll be doing. What third movie?

Sweet, Sweet Brain Candy

in any credible universe, the guys on the right would totally win

I love comic books. I try to keep a toe in the more literary comics; Fun Home, Asterios Polyp, Acme Novelty Library, Tragic Relief, etc; and those are undeniably great, but I always find myself drawn back into the shiny, sugary world of superheroes. But strictly the contemporary stuff. Lots of books within the last ten years, a few gems from the 90s, nothing pre-1985. I’ll try not to launch into a long history of the medium, but suffice to say, things have changed a lot. The target audience for comics is now young adult to adult, rather than pre-adolescent. Today there are enough really good creators doing really good work (Bendis, Mignola, Morrison, Moore, etc) that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Modern comics may still require a lively inner child to be appreciated, but they are a far cry from the crass appeals to ten-year-old boys of yesteryear.

I’ve read reprints of the first appearances of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. I’ve learned a little bit about the major creators and how the industry worked back then. Academically, I understand that The Golden Age and Silver Age comics represent a lot of breakthroughs, but lets face it; they were breakthroughs in children’s entertainment.  Taken at face value, those early comics are laughable at best, unreadable at worst.

Or so I thought.

Marvel and DC have been reprinting fat, black-and-white volumes of those old comics. I have studiously avoided them. But last week I found a couple at a garage sale: Essential Iron Man vol 1, and Essential Avengers vol 3. I brought them home, figuring I could breeze through them and then sell or donate them. But then a funny thing happened: I thoroughly enjoyed them. And now I’m dying for more.

Several factors are at work here. Perhaps foremost, the Avengers comics of the late 60s are not far removed from the first comics I ever read as a child in the 70s. John Buscema’s lush, dynamic artwork is simply nostalgic in a way that the fine lines and stable panels of the Golden Age are not.

Also, the art is actually stronger in black and white. Full color may be richer, but it has a stilling effect on the images, freezing everything in place and deadening the environment. Black and white allows the negative spaces to remain vibrant, which enables the movement and life of the characters.

And, I’m not reading these books very carefully. I’m skimming the text. There is a LOT of text by today’s standards, much of it extraneous from a narrative standpoint—lots of repetition of who someone is, what they do, why they do it, and what happened in previous issues. Stylistically it’s just painful. There is no punctuation but the exclamation point! The drawings are much more fun to look at, and mostly they tell enough of the story. The specific details are often less entertaining than the implied larger picture that comes from incomplete comprehension.

Which brings us once again to my experience of comics as a kid. I didn’t actually read very many. I think my brother and I had half a dozen that I read over and over again, until we discovered subscription by mail. (And then what did we subscribe to? What classics of the Bronze Age? Shogun Warriors and Micronauts. Make of that what you will.) But far back in the mists of my earlier memories, the way I got to know and love superheroes was through the puzzles and games of The Mighty Marvel Superheroes Fun Book. Pretty much every hero and villain appeared somewhere in the book, but it didn’t tell you any stories about them. However, it implied a whole universe of stories, just based on names, masks, and chest insignia; conflicts between good guys and bad guys, secret origins, partnerships, rivalries, diabolical plots and heroic actions, all half-formed in the reader’s imagination. To a certain extent I still prefer that kind of thing to a fully told story. (Did a kid’s puzzle book give me a taste for experimental anti-narrative? That would be ironic.)

If you decide to read some Marvel Essentials or DC Showcase Presents, I recommend rolling the dice with whatever’s readily available. I don’t recommend hunting down the collection that includes your favorite comics from childhood. I was at Powell’s, and they had a couple volumes of The Essential Hulk, so I flipped through them and I actually found the issue I most treasured as a kid, the one where Hulk is on another planet held captive by toad-men and confronts a godlike cyborg called The Shaper. I was surprised to learn that the whole storyline is confined to that one issue; he’s on Earth in the issue before, and back on Earth the issue after. When I read that comic as a kid, it seemed like one key piece of an epic space opera. Lots of media worked that way for me, because I assumed the adults who made it had authoritative knowledge of the scenario, even if they didn’t pass it on. That illusion is one of many that perishes with childhood. For a mature reader, it’s sadly obvious when a plot hole is just a plot hole.

Anyway. The more interesting thing that came up was a kinship between those old superhero comics, which I have studiously avoided, and the old newspaper comic strips, which I have ravenously devoured. While I deride Stan Lee’s Spider-Man as unreadable junk, and hold up Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon as a paragon of fantasist visual literature, I have to admit that the line between them is thin to nonexistent. It reminds me that comic strips and comic books started out as the same thing. The first comic books were newspaper inserts, collecting previously printed strips.

Today, strip cartoons and graphic novels are two completely separate industries, targeting completely different audiences. How and why they diverged is a topic for another day, but in terms of overall quality they have moved in opposite directions. Today’s comic books are leaps and bounds ahead of their formative ancestors by every measure; highly polished artwork, daring page composition, stories and characters that span the spectrum all the way to compelling, moving, challenging drama. Newspaper strips, on the other hand, have gone from full-page, richly painted, wide-ranging humor and adventure to tiny, feeble, sanitized, formulaic gags. A handful of artists still bring some gold to the comics page, which is miraculous given how drastically the format itself has withered. Even so, newspaper strips have a mainstream legitimacy that comic books don’t. Each medium seems to carry the weight of its history, leading to a distorted perception of its present.

But, that will change. Graphic novels make more inroads to mainstream legitimacy all the time, and print publications are on track to choke the comic strip completely out of existence. I hope the strip doesn’t have to die for the book to receive its proper recognition.

Disney and Marvel

Here’s an email exchange I thought I would share.

Hi Neal,
Do you think the Disney purchase of Marvel comics means the death of an era? Or did that era end when Marvel’s paper products stopped being profitable and they had to turn to movies?

Odd to think of Mickey and Spiderman working together, maybe sometimes under the Disney treacle treatment, and (I assume this is true) the special Disney capital punishment copyright protection suddenly following along this large new realm of characters, just because they are Disney.

Does it seem to be a colorful example of a general national trend? Something Nader-y about powerful corporations?

I am sure you know more about it than moi, would love your thoughts.

Cheers,
P.

Hi Pete,

I am hopeful that Disney will leave the creative side of Marvel alone, as they say they will. It brings them a largely male demographic that Hannah Montana doesn’t appeal to. And with the Touchstone imprint, for example, Disney demonstrates they don’t need to put mouse ears on absolutely everything.
Marvel has never tapped the grown-up audience like DC has with their Vertigo line (Sandman, The Invisibles, etc). I’ve noticed some Marvel titles (The Ultimates, Daredevil) trying to move into more adult territory, but as far as I can tell there is an unbreakable policy against swearing, nudity, and excessive blood. Undoubtedly this is in deference to parents and the cultural assumption that Spider-Man is for kids. It seems likely that Disney will reinforce this policy, and unlikely we will ever see a Marvel movie as deeply evocative as The Dark Knight. Even so, there is plenty of room for fun and powerful movies in the vein of Iron Man, X-Men, and Spider-Man (1 & 2, let’s not repeat #3 please)
The copyright issue is something I had not considered. It’s an interesting thought. Will parodies of the Fantastic Four be met with lawyerly death squads? One hopes not.
As for the death of an era…that’s something I’ve been trying to pin down for some time. I’m sort of amazed that superheroes have any traction at all, given that all the big ones were created in the 40s and 60s by a bunch of hacks who could only appeal to readers of adolescent-to-infantile disposition. The comics of the Golden Age and Silver Age are most valuable as fodder for later writers and artists who gave the characters depth and believability. If Stan Lee had to start from scratch today, he would probably become a blend of Ed Wood and Michael Bay. The point I’m failing to make is this: the beginnings of comic book characters are less important that their present. They are woven into our cultural fabric and will never go away.
I think the real era marker is the creation of Wolverine in the early 80s, the last superhero to achieve cultural icon status. Thousands of new characters have been created since by Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, and others, but none will ever have the broad, instant recognition that Spider-Man or Superman has.