Who's Who in the CBU 2008

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Bad Movies, Good Comics (And Vice-Versa...)

By Regie Rigby

I’ve been thinking about comics and movies a lot recently, as those of you who were around for last week’s instalment will know.

Indeed, regular readers will have heard much of this riff before – basically good movies based on comics are the exception rather than the rule. Hollywood seems to have a truly staggering lack of respect for its source material, whether it is casting Dolph Lungren as the Punisher, or allowing Stallone to massacre Judge Dredd (and yes, I still have a chip on my shoulder about that movie. You just can’t mess with such an icon of British comics and not get a reaction…)

But it has been pointed out to me in recent weeks that there could be a bit of a pattern here. Shift your focus a little and move from the big to the small screen. Have you been watching Smallville? The first episode aired on terrestrial TV (the only kind I have) here in the UK on New Year’s Eve, and I have to admit that I’m already hooked.

Yeah, I know. I was surprised too. I mean I know he hasn’t put the blue tights on yet, but we’re still talking Superman here, are we not? And you all know how I feel about Superman.

Except, now I think about it, I rather enjoyed Lois and Clark too – and not just because I thought that Teri Hatcher was a great big chunk of loveliness. (although I’m sure that helped…)

Looking even further back, I seem to remember not exactly hating the old Superboy TV series that ran about a decade ago – re-runs of the old 1950’s Superman TV show were the highlights of my summer a few years ago, and as for the wonderful Fliesher animations – well, just don’t get me started.

Why is this?

I mean, I hate Superman!

I’ve written whole columns about why the character is uninteresting. I have railed against his simplistically wholesome worldview and his total lack of reasonable motive (other than being “a good guy” which I have always found to be an unsatisfying explanation).

As a rule, these character traits peruse the Big Blue from the page to the screen, so why are they less irritating there?

By contrast, you know how much I love the Bat?

What has he been like on screen?

Pretty dreadful, when you think about it.

I’m prepared to stand corrected on this, but as far as I know he beat Supes to the Silver Screen when he appeared in an RKO serial during the Second World War. I suppose the general tone of the adventure, in which Batman and Robin tackle a sabotage ring masterminded by an evil Japanese spy is actually quite close to the comic of the day, but now whatever justification a wartime audience may have been prepared to grant the rabid anti-Japanese sentiments expressed, the episodes make for uncomfortable viewing today.

Indeed, much of the script is overtly racist – sample dialogue: “Before the shifty eyed Japs were rounded up by a wise government, this area was known as ‘Little Tokyo’!”

And it gets worse. So, however much the writers thought they were doing for the US war effort, and however popular it might have been at the time, the harsh light of history shows the first Batman serial up for what it was. Nasty, hateful and racist. Not a great start for the Caped Crusader.

(One interesting side note though – as far as I can tell – and again I’m prepared to stand corrected - this film serial was responsible for introducing the Batcave into the whole Batman mythos.)

Then we had the humiliation that was the screen incarnation of the character through the 1960’s, when everything went rather camp. Fight scenes were inter-cut with brightly coloured captions that proclaimed “POW!”, “ZAP!” and “KERSPLAT!” In my view, the Batman TV series, and the spin off motion picture remain one of the reasons why a whole generation of kids, and now the kids of those kids, can’t take comics seriously.

Thanks a lot, Caped Crusader.

And before you say it – yes, I know that Tim Burton’s excellent Batman and Batman Returns were among the finest movie interpretations of comics ever, but they were followed almost immediately by the travesties that were Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, and so that whole franchise became pretty damn shop soiled.

Bats is not alone in this, of course. Judge Dredd is one of the finest comics characters ever to come out of Britain, and he is certainly one of the most consistently well-written action characters in the world. (Not that I have any bias here or anything…) Yet all it took was Stallone and a big budget to turn over twenty years of Dredd history into a laughable and incoherent mosaic of pointless set pieces.

In the late seventies Spider-Man also suffered at the hands of TV – I didn’t realise how badly until I saw a couple of episodes on video a few weeks ago. To move away from action heroes, Josie and the Pussycats have been beacons of light in the Archie universe for decades. Have you seen the movie?

Don’t.

Seriously, don’t. I wasted a whole ten minutes of my life on it. I can never get those ten minutes back.

I haven’t seen the film version of From Hell yet (it opens in the UK in February) but I’m given to understand that Hollywood has taken out most of the aspects of the book that made me love it, and replaced them with plot traits that are likely to make me hate it. (A love interest for Abberline, and a “whodunit” type plot?! I ask you!)

This trend has a long if ignoble history. One of the finest pulp characters of all time, and the character that was responsible for my first experience of “Mature Readers” comics was The Shadow. Now, I know he started in the pulps and moved over into comics later, but I think you’d have to agree that the Alec Baldwin movie more than supports my point and justifies his inclusion in this list.

Now for contrast, take a look at Blade. I know it has its followers, but really, we aren’t talking about the finest quality comics writing in the history of the world, are we? But the movie? Hell, even people who don’t read comics went to see the movie! It was fantastic! For that matter, look at the X-Men - possibly the finest example of a movie based upon a comic book I have seen, and yet with all due respect to the X-Philes out there, the quality of the X-titles has been considerably less than consistent.

So, how does this happen? Are the comics characters I consider to be great too strongly associated with print to make the transition to celluloid? Is it the fact that they are ideally suited to the format that makes them so perfect in comics, but unwatchable in any other medium? Is it just that because I expect too much of the movies based upon comics I like, I am therefore inevitably dissapointed, while I expect little from the adaptations of the characters I don’t like and am therefore pleasantly surprised?

Or is it just that Hollywood and the TV industry is wildly inconsistent and couldn’t find its arse with both hands, even if you provided a map?

Certainly the rule is far from consistent and there are obvious exceptions. While the live action screen incarnations of the Bat have been poor, the animated version has been consistently excellent and on many occasions the Batman comic based on the animated version has been a better read than the regular book. Dolph Lungren as the Punisher – terrible comic, terrible film. That seems fair enough.

Then we have The Mystery Men. Decent Comic, decent film. Tank Girl. Fantastic Comic, fantastic film (in my opinion – I know that one will be controversial). There is the long rumoured movie adaptation of Batman: Year One, the hopeful looking Spider-Man movie which could go some way to redress the shame of seventies TV, and the good news regarding two future Dredd movies which I babbled on about last week.

Maybe (just maybe) Hollywood is learning. Maybe things are getting better. Maybe the bad old days of bad movies are behind us. Perhaps the increased involvement of the people who actually work on the comics in thier translation to other media will lead to an increase in quality all around.

Let’s hope so. Because it is the appearance of characters from comics in movies (and video games, I suppose, but that’s a subject for another time) that serve as the industry’s outreach programme to potential new readers. If the movies and games are poor, or even merely mediocre, why would any potential new reader bother to take that first step of picking up an actual comic book?