cape fear

One of my first posts on this still-young blog was about superheroes and the general failure of television to compellingly depict them or capture what works about comic books. Since then, the spring season has begun to wrap up and there have been a few significant developments, so it's worth a followup:

The CW-verse

Is there an umbrella term for the CW's DC shows, now that there will be three of them in the fall? They don't seem to share continuity with any of the DC movies or CBS's Supergirl show (I hope I'm wrong about the latter), so "DC TV-verse" doesn't work.

Anyway. Because The Flash crosses over with Arrow a fair bit, I've watched a few more episodes of Arrow, and ... like I said last time round, I just cannot take it seriously. It's like knockoff Nolan. I'm so tired of the idea that "taking superheroes seriously" means making them grim-n-gritty, an idea that was horseshit in the early 90s and is horseshit 20 years later when other media are catching up to comic books.

I know everyone - well, everyone in their forties - fondly remembers Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters, which de-camp-ified Green Arrow and made people stop focusing on ridiculous trick arrows, but just like with Frank Miller's Batman, it worked in part as a palate cleanser from the excesses of camp, and landed at a time when, because of Crisis, no specific view of the character had come into clear focus. There are plenty of ways to do Green Arrow that don't have him grinding his teeth all the fucking time, and the Hard Travellin Heroes stories that focused on Queen's social activism in contrast with Green Lantern the space cop are a perfect example.

Ugh. This Green Arrow would be such a terrible presence on a Justice League. He would just sit in the corner glowering with Batman.

The Flash is much better, thank God. It always got the tone just about right, and the series has become more populated with superheroes and supervillains as the season has gone on, with compelling time travel twists and an excellent villain in the Reverse-Flash. Some of those new superheroes are going off to do the Legends spinoff, so I hope season two continues to create new recurring characters and do the work to make this feel like a show set in a world with superheroes, not just one or two dudes in costumes.

Netflix

Netflix's Marvel experiment -- four solo hero shows followed by a Defenders series teaming them up -- has started. (I gotta say, I wish they were calling it Champions instead of Defenders, because now that they're doing a Dr Strange movie, an ACTUAL Defenders movie with Dr Strange, the Hulk, and -- well, if Fox still has Silver Surfer, then somebody else, maybe even Spider-Man -- would be terrific.)

Man, people went nuts for Daredevil.

I ... like it okay.

I still haven't finished it.

Look, the cast is just right. They assembled the correct pieces. Vincent D'onofrio is especially good as the Kingpin, and Scott Glenn as Stick, but the trio of DD, Foggy, and Karen are a great foundation. There's just a lot of punching.

I mean, yeah, it's an action show, and it's a superhero show where the character doesn't have other offensive powers. But it's a lot of punching. And my attention winds up wandering, and I check my email or I get up to do the dishes or something. It's not 1986 and I'm not watching The A-Team -- punching wears thin after a while.

Is part of the problem that I'm not enough of a Daredevil fan? I don't know. I was a big fan of Frank Miller and Ann Nocenti's runs on the book back in the day, although to recycle a point from Green Arrow -- at the time, part of what I enjoyed about them was how different they were from other superhero comics, and that contrast is no longer in evidence.

But comics-wise, I've always been a bigger fan of the cosmic/weird stuff, along with the Avengers and Spider-Man. Daredevil was probably never in my top ten books at the height of my comics fandom (though also never lower than my top twenty). So maybe I'm just responding at the appropriate level of enthusiasm to a well-made adaptation.

It does play in to my frustration that so many superhero adaptations are just, you know, punching in costumes -- the super powers in evidence here are on about the same level as pulp hero stuff like The Shadow, where I want webshooters and Olympian gods and bio-stings.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron

I won't spoil any specific plot developments. This movie is in that tricky area where it was disappointing while still being good.

The Black Widow criticisms are all absolutely valid, but that's easy for me to say, because I thought she was terribly written in the first Avengers movie. She was moderately better written in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but that movie contributes to the trend of pairing her off -- as a love interest or at least flirting partner -- with a different character in every movie she shows up in.

The movie version of this complicated and interesting comic book character has always been sorely underwritten, and I don't think she was even accidentally underwritten, I think she was created as a cipher who would be available for whatever plot needs became manifest, given that they needed her to appear in a dozen or so movies, filling slightly different needs. They purposefully chose a character without powers -- and therefore without additional special effects budget requirements -- to bridge these many Avengers-verse movies, and paid little attention to her beyond her plot-serving uses. I know the ScarJo version of the character has a devoted following, but I don't pretend to understand why.

She's not the only character who seems to serve the plot more than her own needs, here -- Tony Stark is very important to the movie but for the first time comes across as a character with little existence beyond his plot-use. There are times when the same almost seems true of Thor, but Chris Hemsworth is really underrated in his Marvel work, and ably does more with less.

The new characters are largely good; Scarlet Witch and the Vision are terrific, and I would love to see them in their own movie.

The movie is way too long, and at least some of that bloat is pretty transparently caused by the movie's need to serve multiple masters, which does not bode well for the next Cap or the next Avengers movies (though I am glad Whedon is off the train by then).

Another reason it's too long is that some of the action scenes are way too long and, really, not very interesting. I'm glad a lot of the action minutes are spent saving bystanders, but so many of them are devoted to smashing buildings and Michael Bay shit like that, and it's just boring.

Bonus: iZombie

Okay, it's not a superhero show, and although it's a comic book show, it's a very loose adaptation from what I understand (I haven't read it).

But it handles so many superhero tropes so well, and it's about a character with a secret identity, who is hiding from her loved ones the fact that she developed new powers following a traumatic accident, and that she uses those powers to solve murders and fight bad guys with the same powers as hers. One of the people she's hiding her secrets from is her ex-fiance. So I mean. It's a superhero show.

And it's such a good one.

I don't want to spoil anything. The premise, if you can't piece it together from my Mad Libs, is that Olivia Moore became a zombie after a wild party on a yacht went berzerko, and she took a job as a medical examiner in order to fill her need to eat brains -- without which she gradually becomes dumber and more aggressive, more like the zombies of the movies. (The need to eat brains to stave off zombie-mind is also used to good effect in Marvel Zombies - there you go, another superhero connection!) When she eats brains, she occasionally gains skills or other traits of the deceased for a temporary period, which provides the juice for the "case of the week" plots, as she solves murders and whatnot by drawing on the victims' memories and abilities.

Meanwhile, another zombie is amassing power by turning people into zombies and making them dependent on him to supply their food; Liv's social worker ex stumbles onto this without knowing what he's stumbled onto, when he investigates a rash of missing kids.

There are a lot of things the show does well. It starts out feeling like Veronica Mars, which makes sense -- this is a Rob Thomas show, with a snarky blonde solving crimes. But over the course of the first season, it develops its own identity, and it's doing things shows of this stripe have often veered away from doing: most significantly, Liv's decision to keep her secrets hidden from her ex and others has had real consequences beyond Lois being mad at Clark or Mary Jane dumping Peter. The ethics of the double life are really called into question -- and really, this aspect was there even in the pilot, given that Liv only breaks up with Major because she knows she has these secrets to keep, instead of trying to maintain a relationship and a secret life. It just wasn't clear from the pilot that this dilemma was going to become so important to the show. (To be fair, The Flash has done a better than usual job dealing with the secret life dilemma, too. But it has also given Barry Allen an almost nonexistent social life outside of his work as The Flash, so that the matter of secret-keeping is much more narrowly focused.)

Anyway, it's one of my favorite new shows, and deserves more attention.