FINAL CRISIS
March 29th 2011 00:33
Final Crisis
Thirty years before I was born the likes of The Shadow (1930), Dick Tracy (1931) and Flash Gordon (1934) were thrilling young readers and captivating their minds with serialised mild satire, adventure and science fiction. Cartoon strips, comic books and graphic novels have come a long way since then.
I was in hospital for a couple of extended periods of time when I was a kid, around the age eight to ten. I enjoyed reading already and very much enjoyed comics by the time I was trapped in a hospital bed. After getting through the Doctor Dolittle (Hugh Lofting, 1920) novels, and a series My Naughty Little Sister (Dorothy Edwards, 1914) which actually resonated when I read Rubyfruit Jungle (Rita Mae Brown, 1973) in my late teens, I had gone through the Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome,1930), and I had found the wonderful world of comics via the newsagent at the bus terminus where my mother and I had to pass on my visits to hospital.
My parents introduced me to comics telling tales with all of the Disney characters, Mickey Mouse (1928), Donald Duck (1934), Uncle Scrooge McDuck (1947), also Archie (1941), Sabrina the teenage witch (1962), Superman (1932), Green Lantern (1940), Flash (1940), Thor (1962), The Hulk (1962), Lois Lane (1958), The Uncanny X-Men (1963), The Justice League of America (1960) and Batman (1939). These were the captivating characters I eventually spent most of my hospital hours and recoveries with. The ones I really enjoyed the most were the superheroes.
Strange people with amazing powers or living under very odd conditions, as I graduated from the antics of Disney, these strange people became my favourites.
I think they were more modern in general for one thing, or more akin to what futurists would create.
Although there were a good deal of annuals and bumper editions of comics, it was rare to see a hard cover or a slick shiny soft cover full format volume stacked with your favourite superhero characters adventuring when I was a lad. Floppy comics were the go, usually with newsprint innards and a slick colour cover all stapled together in the middle. The Disney covers were not slick, they tended to be newsprint through and through, but they were full colour comics. They were very stimulating reading and full of greatly vivid images for a young developing mind to enjoy.
The Wizard of Id (1964) was one of my favourite newspaper cartoon strips. The Wizard had quite a few special bumper editions available at the local newsagent, but I was definitely in my later teens or early twenties before I caught sight of a big glossy volume of Batman for example.
It was not until the early nineteen nineties that I became quite interested in the graphic novel, while I was working with Tabitha Bourke a computer programmer, writer and designer. I was her script editor as she developed a new interactive comic book concept. She drew my attention to a few graphic novels like Sandman (1939) and Watchmen (1986). She was very much taken by The X Files (1993 – 2002) on television at the time I was working with her. I remember having fond memories of watching Darren McGavin in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) on television; that was pretty damn good.
The X Files were in the same territory genre-wise, but I never got caught into anticipating the weekly episode, not like I did with Twin Peaks (1990) or Holocaust (1978).
Obviously I acknowledge that I now have a more developed appreciation for comics and I find them a way of reconnecting with so much of what I must have absorbed as a youngster when I return to them. Much like enjoying the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes (1933 - 1944), going back over some of the stories and characters that must have been rattling around in the back of my brain for decades is certainly stimulating.
I would say Batman is the most deeply embedded character in my mind simply because he has always been around, you know, since I can remember.
Adam West and Burt Ward were on the television (Batman 1966 – 1968) almost every day, they had their feature film (1966) which I saw on the big screen more than once. I sat in the actual Batmobile one year at the Royal Adelaide Show; there’s a highlight of my youth I still remember.
The feature films came along with Michael Keaton (1989 & 1991 Batman, Batman Returns) playing Bruce Wayne then Val Kilmer (1995 Batman Forever), then George Clooney (1997 Batman & Robin) playing the role; there has always been a Batman. The whole Batman saga has had yet another re-boot since those guys with Christian Bale (2005 – present) playing the cowled one and, of all people, Michael Caine playing Alfred the butler.
Personally I would have gone for Ian McKellen, but he was most likely otherwise engaged as part of the X Men or Lord of the Rings, who knows?
The whole marketing campaign surrounding Batman’s cinema re-boot in the early nineteen nineties was certainly successful in hooking me and at least one other adult friend of the time into collecting bubble gum cards. My mate found it was a great way of meeting “Fathers he’d like to fcuk with” as he put his massive collection out for sale and or swap events by appointment.
I simply enjoyed collecting a full set on the sidelines and eventually selling it on at some stage. Mind you there were thousands of other adults into the cult of Batman at the time. I partied with about six thousand or so of them at an enormous Bat Party in the Horden Pavilion with them. That was exciting.
As new music by Prince and a variety of other Batman sounds with dance music was pumped into the pavilion, thousands of adults danced along and waited for the big reveal on the main stage.
The Batmobile was slowly being exposed behind a big black fire wall. Slowly the big thick black firewall was raised until eventually the crowd went a little ballistic as the Batmobile was revealed in all its mysterious shiny black glory. Shades of the “Kong, Kong, Kong” sequence with the natives on Skull Island in King Kong, but not exactly.
The pavilion was effectively decorated in the theme of Gotham City and the party goers were enthusiastically wearing costumes essentially drawn from the world of television Batman. It was a great party. I remember sucking Bat Gas on a handkerchief and swaggering around in my Billy the Kid get-up until the wee small hours of the morning.
Batman – The Cult , is a gritty and compelling story about a demon getting under the skin of Gotham and attempting to destroy Batman. Robin the boy wonder plays a great hand in helping Batman win this fight.
The big difference between Batman derived from the television rendition; the camp, pop art version with silly crazy kid-friendly subversion, gently woven up with fast wit, silly costumes and pantomime – the difference between that and the recent re-boot, is the gritty quality that has pretty much always been there in the comic. Dark, moody, lots of sharp edges and stark images in black and white.
The original Batman strips started in issues of Detective Comics in the nineteen thirties. Big black pointy cape blowing behind him. Vast shots of cityscapes. Superman was out there, the original super hero, but he was different, he was alien and could fly.
By 1943 Batman used his brains and his boy wonder in a syndicated newspaper cartoon strip, there was also a Columbia Studios produced serial Batman played by Lewis Wilson with Douglas Croft as the boy wonder. It was very cheap and nasty by all the accounts I’ve read. I do remember seeing parts of it once and just thinking it looked funny.
FINAL CRISIS my ultimate focus here believe it or not involves Batman and Robin, and a whole lot of other folk from the DC universe you may or may not have had the pleasure of meeting before.
Impossible to really effectively engage myself in FINAL CRISIS without thinking back and appreciating those original essential elements I enjoyed about comics to begin with.
To break it down into two levels, I think ultimately the best thing about comic books on the physical level is the way they look, feel and present as an object. I like the physical feel and look of them.
I could read them in bed. They are soft and light to hold, bendable. You can fold them back. On the mental level, what I like the most about them is the expansive imagination they encourage.
Alone... well; as alone as you are as a child in a hospital, you feel alone even though there are people around you. It is easy to become completely engrossed in a story where anything can happen when you feel so alone.
Stories that are epic in their proportions are very exciting to read and comforting as well because of the “It’s just a comic book story” aspect and “It’s not happening to me, I’m safe” reality.. The big events are really great to look at in little pictures and it is really good to be able to see who is saying what. It is after all, pop art.
Anyway the mental process of imagining these little drawings are real stories playing out using the words and images as my guides, enabled my mind to appreciate it in a way different to reading a novel. In some cases I could imagine the pictures moving and the sound of the characters’ voices, particularly with the Disney characters because they appeared on television and film as well, so there were references in my head already.
Spiderman was also a very big favourite of mine, I think everyone knows the Spiderman theme song, or is that only me who thinks we all know it?
But seriously these days to keep up with the characters in the DC Universe, it is handy to have some reference books around. My bad, because I have not been consistently and continuously reading comics through my whole life, I am not up-to-snuff as far as knowing who everyone is anymore.
I put comic books behind me long ago as far as the collecting of, investing in or seeking out of them goes. I do enjoy sitting down and reading a graphic novel or a volume of a particular strip. To stop now and notice the width and breadth of information, and how things generally came to this, is a little astonishing, but then again, I have already admitted to having some deeply absorbed relationship with the whole area of graphic novels and cartoon books. I am certainly not alone, obviously, and there must be a great big market out there absorbing a whole lot of material I am completely unaware of at this time, although I am sure another version of me in a parallel universe is more than conscious of all of the essential detail I lack.
If I had remained as close to the whole genre I would probably not need to consider finding a copy of The Official Crisis Index, a couple of volumes published by Eclipse Comics some years ago.
Basically because publishers DC acquired a whole stable of super heroes as they bought out a variety of smaller comic publishers who were going broke over the years they were able to create interactions between the characters acquired and the ones they already had – much like an old Hollywood movie studio would buy a contract of an artist to feature them in a particular film.
Then the merger between Time, Inc., and Warner Communications, in 1989, placed DC Comics and their world of superheroes into a whole new context.
Keeping in mind that comic strip type stories had been doing very well through the whole decade of the nineteen eighties with Conan the Barbarian finally making it on to the screen along with other original favourites in similar genres like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars.
The genres of science fiction, adventure and action grew in popularity through this decade. Classics like Blade Runner, ET, The Dark Crystal came along and really stood out, finding a dedicated audience. Comic characters like Tarzan had already had a run on film and television, and was originally a stand out from literature, but in his comic form he had a dedicated following as well.
The Terminator, Nightmare on Elm Street, Robocop were all great movies in their original moment one way or another, some of them remain classics.
The Fly with young Geoff Goldblum and Geena Davis was quite thrilling and deeply disturbing surpassing the original with technology that looked credible thanks to new and improved special effects, make-up and lighting.
I would think Bruce Willis in Die Hard owes a fair amount to James Bond in his cartoon strip incarnation. The action, adventure and general episodic nature to the comic strip Bond makes it a classic in my book, Die Hard is a closer fit in some ways than the campy Bond of the Seventies through to the present. Daniel Craig as Bond is suitably masculine in the same way Bruce Willis and Sean Connery both are. Their inherent masculinity exudes from them in a way so naturally obvious it can’t be faulted as strong character – even if the actual character can be scorned for behaviours.
The weight of the sequels to some of these films sometimes weakens the memory of the original and its freshness; not always, but often. Some of the Die Hard films are a little repetitive, and I realise I have moved away from comic books here; my side-point is this - screenplays have a lot to learn from graphic novels, serial adventures and comic strips, then they also have their own traditions and histories to develop in terms of how the stories they tell are delivered.
Die Hard and another Bruce Willis film, Death Becomes Her are films that I think echo comic strip plots and even genre mixing in satirical twists and turns.
I have to mention a book I have been reading by film writer and critic David Thomson here because it is a fascinating idea he suggests. From Thomson’s perspective the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) really broke new ground for story telling on film, and he suggests the sensational impact of the film extended influence over other films to come, then he lists a wide range of films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Shining (1980), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998).
I have found Thomson a little cursory at times, but I am enjoying his idea here and anyone with the interest in film criticism or the vast world of Hitchcock is encouraged to seek out and read “The Moment of Psycho” by David Thomson. It is well worth a read.
That list of movies from the eighties came along before some of the rarest treats from that decade even appeared, films such as The Lair of the White Worm or Beetlejuice and then finally Batman with Jack Nicholson as the Joker.
Around this time both old and new, the expanding cast of DC Comics’ superheroes became assets owned by a movie production house, so hence the growing number of them finding their way to the screen.
It is not easy to make a good superhero movie.
Flash Gordon is remembered for the brilliant music created by Queen, but otherwise there’s one re-boot waiting to happen. The Shadow featuring Alec Baldwin did a wonderful job of recreating a mood and style. Dick Tracey was a fabulously rendered gesture from Warren Beatty, wouldn’t there be room for a television version along the lines of Glee in today’s market? Planet Of The Apes did well in comic form, television and film. Another re-boot could pop that open. The Christian Bale Batman and Heath Ledger Joker are gritty enough to authentically represent the original milieu of Batman today, a decade into the Zippies (2000’s).
Alien and Predator blending into a string of ‘Carry On bleeding acid and being invisible fight flicks’ is too tedious to go into.
Avatar takes a lot of The Lion King and The King and I and more or less mumbo jumbo’s it up into a rite of passage origin story, kind of like I Can Jump Puddles on acid.
But imagine FINAL CRISIS on the screen in decades to come? Would it be worth the effort? Ultimately yes it would. Would it be a vast and complicated road to travel, yes. It would be a fascinating trip on screen. Possibly a little like the Lord of the Rings.
FINAL CRISIS is something that needs to be explained over a series of films in order for it to be most easily absorbed.
The story is broken down into segments: DOA The God Of War, Ticket to Bludhaven, Know Evil, Superman Beyond, Submit, Darkseed Says, Into Oblivion, How To Murder The Earth, New Haven New Earth... and so far as I can tell, every character in the whole DC universe comes into play on some level, even if it is only as part of a crowd scene, and there are plenty of them.
Superman Beyond and Submit are crossover tales by Grant Morrison who is responsible for the script.
What a complicated world. There are more than one planet Earths, there are a string of duplicate individuals on each of the parallel earths. Complicated huh?
What I enjoy about FINAL CRISIS is the size and scope of it all. The sheer magnitude of the evil forces that threaten existence are capable of destroying a whole lot of humanities, a whole lot of super people, and average common or garden people as well...
To me, comic books have always represented the now in a strange kind of way. Sure they are written as original characters so long ago, but they are written again and again by new writers as well, the characters update.
Anyone remember Lois Lane sharing an apartment in the 1970’s with an African American woman and another woman who I think may have been Japanese American? The Mary Tyler Moore obviously liberated, radically influenced, pantsuit wearing Lois? I do.
It was kind of strange compared to the Lois Lane on the television when she was still black and white and wearing little hats. It’s this sort of lateral, innocuous, cross platform referencing that starts to come to the fore of my mind when I’m reading FINAL CRISIS.
All the imagined thoughts of worlds within worlds and parallel universes does the mind a lot of good. On a clear day you may not be able to read the future, but you can tie up a lot of loose ends in your parallel universes to sort out the present and set the future off on a positive track.
Evidently the publishers were determined to do just that at one stage and created the whole concept of the various superheroes living on various worlds that duplicated Earth, and in the process they freshened up various aspects of a variety of characters they owned.
FINAL CRISIS as a film would have to be very well determined and follow the story close as it can. No reason to muck around with the story. I think people would capture the idea pretty fast once they understood the whole parallel universe thing and that’s not too hard to show on film these days.
It is an evil verses good, plot to crush kill and destroy to put it mildly, but in all of the epic gestures of it, there is a personal story here and there that is touching, and wonderfully gentle in the surrounding mayhem.
It is going to take an awfully long time to get this to the screen, but I hope it gets there – and in the mean time I encourage anyone who ever enjoyed reading a good superhero comic to go out and grab yourself a copy of FINAL CRISIS and read it.
Read it again, and again... because you can, and because the first read will simply open your head up to how much fun the second read is going to be. It is marvellous, absolutely wonderful!
Thirty years before I was born the likes of The Shadow (1930), Dick Tracy (1931) and Flash Gordon (1934) were thrilling young readers and captivating their minds with serialised mild satire, adventure and science fiction. Cartoon strips, comic books and graphic novels have come a long way since then.
I was in hospital for a couple of extended periods of time when I was a kid, around the age eight to ten. I enjoyed reading already and very much enjoyed comics by the time I was trapped in a hospital bed. After getting through the Doctor Dolittle (Hugh Lofting, 1920) novels, and a series My Naughty Little Sister (Dorothy Edwards, 1914) which actually resonated when I read Rubyfruit Jungle (Rita Mae Brown, 1973) in my late teens, I had gone through the Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome,1930), and I had found the wonderful world of comics via the newsagent at the bus terminus where my mother and I had to pass on my visits to hospital.
My parents introduced me to comics telling tales with all of the Disney characters, Mickey Mouse (1928), Donald Duck (1934), Uncle Scrooge McDuck (1947), also Archie (1941), Sabrina the teenage witch (1962), Superman (1932), Green Lantern (1940), Flash (1940), Thor (1962), The Hulk (1962), Lois Lane (1958), The Uncanny X-Men (1963), The Justice League of America (1960) and Batman (1939). These were the captivating characters I eventually spent most of my hospital hours and recoveries with. The ones I really enjoyed the most were the superheroes.
Strange people with amazing powers or living under very odd conditions, as I graduated from the antics of Disney, these strange people became my favourites.
I think they were more modern in general for one thing, or more akin to what futurists would create.
Although there were a good deal of annuals and bumper editions of comics, it was rare to see a hard cover or a slick shiny soft cover full format volume stacked with your favourite superhero characters adventuring when I was a lad. Floppy comics were the go, usually with newsprint innards and a slick colour cover all stapled together in the middle. The Disney covers were not slick, they tended to be newsprint through and through, but they were full colour comics. They were very stimulating reading and full of greatly vivid images for a young developing mind to enjoy.
The Wizard of Id (1964) was one of my favourite newspaper cartoon strips. The Wizard had quite a few special bumper editions available at the local newsagent, but I was definitely in my later teens or early twenties before I caught sight of a big glossy volume of Batman for example.
It was not until the early nineteen nineties that I became quite interested in the graphic novel, while I was working with Tabitha Bourke a computer programmer, writer and designer. I was her script editor as she developed a new interactive comic book concept. She drew my attention to a few graphic novels like Sandman (1939) and Watchmen (1986). She was very much taken by The X Files (1993 – 2002) on television at the time I was working with her. I remember having fond memories of watching Darren McGavin in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) on television; that was pretty damn good.
The X Files were in the same territory genre-wise, but I never got caught into anticipating the weekly episode, not like I did with Twin Peaks (1990) or Holocaust (1978).
Obviously I acknowledge that I now have a more developed appreciation for comics and I find them a way of reconnecting with so much of what I must have absorbed as a youngster when I return to them. Much like enjoying the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes (1933 - 1944), going back over some of the stories and characters that must have been rattling around in the back of my brain for decades is certainly stimulating.
I would say Batman is the most deeply embedded character in my mind simply because he has always been around, you know, since I can remember.
Adam West and Burt Ward were on the television (Batman 1966 – 1968) almost every day, they had their feature film (1966) which I saw on the big screen more than once. I sat in the actual Batmobile one year at the Royal Adelaide Show; there’s a highlight of my youth I still remember.
The feature films came along with Michael Keaton (1989 & 1991 Batman, Batman Returns) playing Bruce Wayne then Val Kilmer (1995 Batman Forever), then George Clooney (1997 Batman & Robin) playing the role; there has always been a Batman. The whole Batman saga has had yet another re-boot since those guys with Christian Bale (2005 – present) playing the cowled one and, of all people, Michael Caine playing Alfred the butler.
Personally I would have gone for Ian McKellen, but he was most likely otherwise engaged as part of the X Men or Lord of the Rings, who knows?
The whole marketing campaign surrounding Batman’s cinema re-boot in the early nineteen nineties was certainly successful in hooking me and at least one other adult friend of the time into collecting bubble gum cards. My mate found it was a great way of meeting “Fathers he’d like to fcuk with” as he put his massive collection out for sale and or swap events by appointment.
I simply enjoyed collecting a full set on the sidelines and eventually selling it on at some stage. Mind you there were thousands of other adults into the cult of Batman at the time. I partied with about six thousand or so of them at an enormous Bat Party in the Horden Pavilion with them. That was exciting.
As new music by Prince and a variety of other Batman sounds with dance music was pumped into the pavilion, thousands of adults danced along and waited for the big reveal on the main stage.
The Batmobile was slowly being exposed behind a big black fire wall. Slowly the big thick black firewall was raised until eventually the crowd went a little ballistic as the Batmobile was revealed in all its mysterious shiny black glory. Shades of the “Kong, Kong, Kong” sequence with the natives on Skull Island in King Kong, but not exactly.
The pavilion was effectively decorated in the theme of Gotham City and the party goers were enthusiastically wearing costumes essentially drawn from the world of television Batman. It was a great party. I remember sucking Bat Gas on a handkerchief and swaggering around in my Billy the Kid get-up until the wee small hours of the morning.
Batman – The Cult , is a gritty and compelling story about a demon getting under the skin of Gotham and attempting to destroy Batman. Robin the boy wonder plays a great hand in helping Batman win this fight.
The big difference between Batman derived from the television rendition; the camp, pop art version with silly crazy kid-friendly subversion, gently woven up with fast wit, silly costumes and pantomime – the difference between that and the recent re-boot, is the gritty quality that has pretty much always been there in the comic. Dark, moody, lots of sharp edges and stark images in black and white.
The original Batman strips started in issues of Detective Comics in the nineteen thirties. Big black pointy cape blowing behind him. Vast shots of cityscapes. Superman was out there, the original super hero, but he was different, he was alien and could fly.
By 1943 Batman used his brains and his boy wonder in a syndicated newspaper cartoon strip, there was also a Columbia Studios produced serial Batman played by Lewis Wilson with Douglas Croft as the boy wonder. It was very cheap and nasty by all the accounts I’ve read. I do remember seeing parts of it once and just thinking it looked funny.
FINAL CRISIS my ultimate focus here believe it or not involves Batman and Robin, and a whole lot of other folk from the DC universe you may or may not have had the pleasure of meeting before.
To break it down into two levels, I think ultimately the best thing about comic books on the physical level is the way they look, feel and present as an object. I like the physical feel and look of them.
I could read them in bed. They are soft and light to hold, bendable. You can fold them back. On the mental level, what I like the most about them is the expansive imagination they encourage.
Alone... well; as alone as you are as a child in a hospital, you feel alone even though there are people around you. It is easy to become completely engrossed in a story where anything can happen when you feel so alone.
Stories that are epic in their proportions are very exciting to read and comforting as well because of the “It’s just a comic book story” aspect and “It’s not happening to me, I’m safe” reality.. The big events are really great to look at in little pictures and it is really good to be able to see who is saying what. It is after all, pop art.
Anyway the mental process of imagining these little drawings are real stories playing out using the words and images as my guides, enabled my mind to appreciate it in a way different to reading a novel. In some cases I could imagine the pictures moving and the sound of the characters’ voices, particularly with the Disney characters because they appeared on television and film as well, so there were references in my head already.
Spiderman was also a very big favourite of mine, I think everyone knows the Spiderman theme song, or is that only me who thinks we all know it?
But seriously these days to keep up with the characters in the DC Universe, it is handy to have some reference books around. My bad, because I have not been consistently and continuously reading comics through my whole life, I am not up-to-snuff as far as knowing who everyone is anymore.
I put comic books behind me long ago as far as the collecting of, investing in or seeking out of them goes. I do enjoy sitting down and reading a graphic novel or a volume of a particular strip. To stop now and notice the width and breadth of information, and how things generally came to this, is a little astonishing, but then again, I have already admitted to having some deeply absorbed relationship with the whole area of graphic novels and cartoon books. I am certainly not alone, obviously, and there must be a great big market out there absorbing a whole lot of material I am completely unaware of at this time, although I am sure another version of me in a parallel universe is more than conscious of all of the essential detail I lack.
If I had remained as close to the whole genre I would probably not need to consider finding a copy of The Official Crisis Index, a couple of volumes published by Eclipse Comics some years ago.
Basically because publishers DC acquired a whole stable of super heroes as they bought out a variety of smaller comic publishers who were going broke over the years they were able to create interactions between the characters acquired and the ones they already had – much like an old Hollywood movie studio would buy a contract of an artist to feature them in a particular film.
Then the merger between Time, Inc., and Warner Communications, in 1989, placed DC Comics and their world of superheroes into a whole new context.
Keeping in mind that comic strip type stories had been doing very well through the whole decade of the nineteen eighties with Conan the Barbarian finally making it on to the screen along with other original favourites in similar genres like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars.
The genres of science fiction, adventure and action grew in popularity through this decade. Classics like Blade Runner, ET, The Dark Crystal came along and really stood out, finding a dedicated audience. Comic characters like Tarzan had already had a run on film and television, and was originally a stand out from literature, but in his comic form he had a dedicated following as well.
The Terminator, Nightmare on Elm Street, Robocop were all great movies in their original moment one way or another, some of them remain classics.
The Fly with young Geoff Goldblum and Geena Davis was quite thrilling and deeply disturbing surpassing the original with technology that looked credible thanks to new and improved special effects, make-up and lighting.
I would think Bruce Willis in Die Hard owes a fair amount to James Bond in his cartoon strip incarnation. The action, adventure and general episodic nature to the comic strip Bond makes it a classic in my book, Die Hard is a closer fit in some ways than the campy Bond of the Seventies through to the present. Daniel Craig as Bond is suitably masculine in the same way Bruce Willis and Sean Connery both are. Their inherent masculinity exudes from them in a way so naturally obvious it can’t be faulted as strong character – even if the actual character can be scorned for behaviours.
The weight of the sequels to some of these films sometimes weakens the memory of the original and its freshness; not always, but often. Some of the Die Hard films are a little repetitive, and I realise I have moved away from comic books here; my side-point is this - screenplays have a lot to learn from graphic novels, serial adventures and comic strips, then they also have their own traditions and histories to develop in terms of how the stories they tell are delivered.
Die Hard and another Bruce Willis film, Death Becomes Her are films that I think echo comic strip plots and even genre mixing in satirical twists and turns.
I have to mention a book I have been reading by film writer and critic David Thomson here because it is a fascinating idea he suggests. From Thomson’s perspective the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) really broke new ground for story telling on film, and he suggests the sensational impact of the film extended influence over other films to come, then he lists a wide range of films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Shining (1980), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998).
I have found Thomson a little cursory at times, but I am enjoying his idea here and anyone with the interest in film criticism or the vast world of Hitchcock is encouraged to seek out and read “The Moment of Psycho” by David Thomson. It is well worth a read.
That list of movies from the eighties came along before some of the rarest treats from that decade even appeared, films such as The Lair of the White Worm or Beetlejuice and then finally Batman with Jack Nicholson as the Joker.
Around this time both old and new, the expanding cast of DC Comics’ superheroes became assets owned by a movie production house, so hence the growing number of them finding their way to the screen.
It is not easy to make a good superhero movie.
Flash Gordon is remembered for the brilliant music created by Queen, but otherwise there’s one re-boot waiting to happen. The Shadow featuring Alec Baldwin did a wonderful job of recreating a mood and style. Dick Tracey was a fabulously rendered gesture from Warren Beatty, wouldn’t there be room for a television version along the lines of Glee in today’s market? Planet Of The Apes did well in comic form, television and film. Another re-boot could pop that open. The Christian Bale Batman and Heath Ledger Joker are gritty enough to authentically represent the original milieu of Batman today, a decade into the Zippies (2000’s).
Alien and Predator blending into a string of ‘Carry On bleeding acid and being invisible fight flicks’ is too tedious to go into.
Avatar takes a lot of The Lion King and The King and I and more or less mumbo jumbo’s it up into a rite of passage origin story, kind of like I Can Jump Puddles on acid.
But imagine FINAL CRISIS on the screen in decades to come? Would it be worth the effort? Ultimately yes it would. Would it be a vast and complicated road to travel, yes. It would be a fascinating trip on screen. Possibly a little like the Lord of the Rings.
FINAL CRISIS is something that needs to be explained over a series of films in order for it to be most easily absorbed.
The story is broken down into segments: DOA The God Of War, Ticket to Bludhaven, Know Evil, Superman Beyond, Submit, Darkseed Says, Into Oblivion, How To Murder The Earth, New Haven New Earth... and so far as I can tell, every character in the whole DC universe comes into play on some level, even if it is only as part of a crowd scene, and there are plenty of them.
Superman Beyond and Submit are crossover tales by Grant Morrison who is responsible for the script.
What a complicated world. There are more than one planet Earths, there are a string of duplicate individuals on each of the parallel earths. Complicated huh?
What I enjoy about FINAL CRISIS is the size and scope of it all. The sheer magnitude of the evil forces that threaten existence are capable of destroying a whole lot of humanities, a whole lot of super people, and average common or garden people as well...
To me, comic books have always represented the now in a strange kind of way. Sure they are written as original characters so long ago, but they are written again and again by new writers as well, the characters update.
Anyone remember Lois Lane sharing an apartment in the 1970’s with an African American woman and another woman who I think may have been Japanese American? The Mary Tyler Moore obviously liberated, radically influenced, pantsuit wearing Lois? I do.
It was kind of strange compared to the Lois Lane on the television when she was still black and white and wearing little hats. It’s this sort of lateral, innocuous, cross platform referencing that starts to come to the fore of my mind when I’m reading FINAL CRISIS.
All the imagined thoughts of worlds within worlds and parallel universes does the mind a lot of good. On a clear day you may not be able to read the future, but you can tie up a lot of loose ends in your parallel universes to sort out the present and set the future off on a positive track.
Evidently the publishers were determined to do just that at one stage and created the whole concept of the various superheroes living on various worlds that duplicated Earth, and in the process they freshened up various aspects of a variety of characters they owned.
FINAL CRISIS as a film would have to be very well determined and follow the story close as it can. No reason to muck around with the story. I think people would capture the idea pretty fast once they understood the whole parallel universe thing and that’s not too hard to show on film these days.
It is an evil verses good, plot to crush kill and destroy to put it mildly, but in all of the epic gestures of it, there is a personal story here and there that is touching, and wonderfully gentle in the surrounding mayhem.
It is going to take an awfully long time to get this to the screen, but I hope it gets there – and in the mean time I encourage anyone who ever enjoyed reading a good superhero comic to go out and grab yourself a copy of FINAL CRISIS and read it.
Read it again, and again... because you can, and because the first read will simply open your head up to how much fun the second read is going to be. It is marvellous, absolutely wonderful!
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