Assessing the exploitation of DC Comics

I’m a fan of DC Comics until the end of days. No getting around that. My first formative comics-reading experience, or at least the earliest one I remember, was Crisis on Infinite Earths, featuring every character in DC’s stable. I didn’t follow the Avengers or the X-Men, I read Justice League. I liked Batman, Superman, and even Blue Beetle and Booster Gold far more than Spider-man or Captain America.

Today I’m less exclusive. I read my fair share of Marvel books, just way, way less than DC. I’d still rather read an okay comic about Superman than a great comic about Wolverine.

Which is why it breaks my heart that when it comes to movies and other adaptations, Warner Bros. is getting their ass kicked so hard by Marvel Studios.

Let me explain. It’s not the success of Marvel Studios that bothers me. Well, not most days. There is a certain internet geek pundit who I shan’t name or link to who is so obsessed with slagging everything DC does, inventing flaws if necessary, while championing every single thing that Marvel Studios does, ignoring flaws as often as he has to, that I felt this weird need to resent Marvel properties to balance him out. But that is not healthy, and it’s why I’m giving up his videos and articles. Because I can’t stop him from being rigidly and unflinchingly biased (if you honestly think Agents of SHIELD is a better show than Arrow, you’re just wrong), but I can stop myself from sinking into the same swamp.

So, no, it’s not that I resent Marvel movies doing well. Super excited to see both Captain America: Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy. What kills me is that Warner Bros. is not keeping up. And when they do try and exploit DC’s properties, you just have to ask… are you even trying?

At the movies

I liked Man of Steel and I’m not sorry. As such, I refuse to be pessimistic about the upcoming sequel featuring Ben Affleck as Batman, especially since it means the next Batman movie won’t be an origin story. And if they do, in fact, try to follow that up with a Flash movie leading into Justice League, I am all for it. Hell, there’s still time to get Darkseid into a movie before Thanos finally makes a proper appearance in Avengers 3.

That sounded like slagging Marvel but it’s just that Thanos is a knockoff of Darkseid (no, really, look it up), and I’d rather people not claim it’s the opposite just because Thanos made it into a movie first. That’s all.

For decades now, Warner Bros. has been coasting on Batman. Since 1989, there have been eight theatrically-released movies about Batman, ranging from incredible (The Dark Knight) to great (Batman Begins, Mask of the Phantasm) to pretty okay (Batman, The Dark Knight Rises) to crimes against cinema (Batman and Robin). In the same 24 year time frame, there have only been two good-but-not-great Superman movies, one movie for Green Lantern that could charitably be called a misfire, and Shaquille O’Neal as Steel. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on that one.

No I do not count Catwoman. That movie has as much to do with the comic character Catwoman as the Karate Kid movies had to do with the Legion of Superheroes. Same name, no other connection or similarity.

Now consider what Marvel managed to do in half that time. Since just 2008, Marvel Studios alone has cranked out three Iron Man movies, two for Thor, one for Captain America (with another in the wings), one for the Hulk, and their crown jewel, the Avengers. And these range in quality from amaze-balls (Avengers) to merely mediocre (Iron Man 2, Thor), with most achieving a rank of “actually pretty damn good.” Throw in the characters they sold to other studios before forming their own, and in only 13 years we’ve had four movies for Spider-man and the X-Men, two for Ghost Rider, the Fantastic Four, Wolverine, and the Punisher, one for Daredevil, a spin-off for Elektra and another for Hulk. Now, these range in quality a bit more drastically, from great (Spiderman 2, X-2) to pretty bad (most of them) to downright excruciating (Ang Lee’s Hulk), so quantity doesn’t assure quality.

But in terms of numbers, Warner Bros. can’t really compete: Marvel Studios exists to crank out Marvel properties, whereas DC Entertainment is but a part of the larger Warner Bros. empire, which has other things going on and can’t commit to the same mass-production. But here’s my real problem.

By 2014, there will have been eight movies for Batman, six for Superman, three for Blade, and two movies starring freaking Ghost Rider, but zero movies starring Wonder Woman. The greatest female super-hero of all time, the third member of DC’s Big Three, and Rocket Raccoon is going to be in a movie before she is. Nobody at Warner Bros. should be proud of this, and whoever fired Joss Whedon when he was trying to write a movie for her should be banned from movie-making forever.

Maybe Warner Bros. can’t commit to more than one movie per year. But come on. Diana of Themyscria should be at the top of the list.

Now… the small screen.

On the teevee

I’m going to focus on DC’s shows here, because that’s my main point. Suffice to say I’m intrigued to see the four shows Marvel sold to Netflix and I sure hope Agents of SHIELD gets better.

Now, here is an area where DC is at least competitive. Sure, Birds of Prey tanked pretty hard, but Smallville lasted ten seasons and as many as six of them were pretty watchable*.

And now we have Arrow, which started out surprisingly good and is growing into the first truly great superhero show in a generation. In their second season, Arrow has made Oliver Queen an amazing and conflicted protagonist, given him a great supporting cast (even Thea Queen, season one’s weak link, has improved dramatically), and is doing unparalleled work at building the comic-based universe around its central characters.

Unparalleled. Looking at you, Agents of SHIELD. (Sorry, sorry, back to my point)

So between the cult hit of Arrow and the hype and moderate success surrounding Agents of SHIELD, it’s only natural that more shows based around superheroes start turning up. Given that comic books are a medium based around serial storytelling, TV has always been a better fit; 22 episodes a year allows for much better long-term storytelling than one movie every two to four years. So let’s see what DC has in the pipeline, shall we?

The Flash

Thus far, the Arrow-verse has held the line on super powers. Nobody has them. That’s set to change when Barry Allen makes his debut for the mid-season finale, leading to a planned Flash spin-off series next year. And I’m excited. Because while the showrunners did fail at producing a good Green Lantern movie, Arrow’s been knocking it out of the park this year, so I trust them to replicate that success with the Flash. Hey, I was a huge fan of the first Flash TV series, which actually holds up better than I thought it would.

My only qualm is that they’re making this Flash series at the same time that they’re prepping a Flash movie, and if they’re not connected? If Warner Bros. officially splits their movie universe apart from the TV universe while Marvel is maintaining one continuity across all of their endeavors? That’s worse than a missed opportunity. That’s grade-A dumb.

So here’s hoping that they do the smart thing and use Flash to link up Man of Steel and the Arrow-verse. I just wish that hope weren’t so fleeting.

Gotham

And now we hit grade-A stupid full-on.

Gotham is a rumoured pilot for the Fox network about Jim Gordon’s early police career in a pre-Batman Gotham City.

Does everyone see why this is a terrible idea? Do I need to go on? Well, the fact that this might be a real thing means someone doesn’t see the massive flaws, so I’ll elaborate.

First off. Splitting your properties across multiple networks is just throwing up barriers to building a shared universe, something that, once again, Marvel has proven works like gangbusters. It will be easy to do Arrow/Flash crossovers, since they’ll both be on the CW, but Fox isn’t known for playing well with others.

Second. It took Smallville several years to start having other proto-versions of DC’s heroes turn up, but it was always a big success. They got a massive ratings spike from having Aquaman show up, of all people. Adding Green Arrow to the cast salvaged the back half of the series. They added Flash (well, sort of), Cyborg, Hawkman, Stargirl, Doctor Fate, the Legion of Superheroes, even Booster Gold and Blue Beetle.

Notice a name missing from that list? Because the fans sure did.

Smallville was basically forbidden to use Bruce Wayne/Batman at any point. Rumour has it they brought in Green Arrow, ultimately making him a regular, because there was a role they wanted young Bruce Wayne to play in shaping Clark’s path but weren’t allowed to use him. Warner Bros. made the baffling decision to isolate Batman from everything else they were doing. Okay, sure, the larger DC universe wouldn’t have fit in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but I don’t see why that means Bruce Wayne couldn’t be on Smallville. And now Arrow is name-dropping Ra’s Al Ghul and rumours are flying that Nightwing will turn up, but again no mention of Batman.

And that is bad enough. Banning Batman from Smallville and Arrow is already a dumb move, but banning him from a series starring one of his supporting cast? A series set in Gotham but with no Batman? Who thinks there’s an audience for that? You want to replicate Agents of SHIELD? Fine. I get that. But there’s already a perfect template for that, and it was called Gotham Central. Gotham Central had a rich and fascinating cast of police detectives trying to solve crimes in a city where the drug dealer you’re planning to bust might turn out to be Mr. Freeze. Most importantly, a series where Batman was never a regular player, but did turn up from time to time. That is the Gotham-based cop show I would watch. The adventures of Jim Gordon before Batman began? No. No thank you. I watched Clark Kent refuse to become Superman for ten goddamn years, I’m not doing it again.

Constantine

Meanwhile, NBC is looking to develop a show based around John Constantine, the magician/con man who has grown from a linchpin of DC’s mature-readers Vertigo line to a key figure in the magical portion of DC’s main product line. As a solo operator or the defacto leader of the Justice League Dark, he takes on demons, monsters, and other magicians to maintain the balance and protect the world, but is generally a bastard about it and tends to get the people closest to him killed. He was already turned into a not-terrible movie starring Keanu Reeves, but is ripe for re-adaption. And possibly this time they’ll let him stay British.

I have two problems with this. First, again, being on a different network means that any Constantine show will again risk being a stand-alone, when all I want is for DC to embrace the shared universe as rabidly as Marvel has. Second, why haven’t they cast Mark Sheppard as Constantine yet? Sure, he’s not young anymore, but he’s a British actor who specializes in playing bastards you can’t help but love in geek-friendly shows. He’s a perfect fit, dagnabbit.

Hourman

Hourman was one of DC’s earliest characters, a chemist named Rex Tyler who developed a pill called Miraclo that gave him super-strength, speed and invulnerability for one hour. Sort of like a super-soldier serum you have to keep taking. There have been other attempts to make characters named Hourman, but the one that stood the test of time is, basically, the first superhero drug addict.

Seriously, the most interesting thing they’ve done with Hourman in the last twenty years is have Dr. Mid-nite, his JSA teammate who is also a physician, constantly berate him about how he’s clearly addicted to Miraclo and how unhealthy that is.

Not that any of this would be in the proposed TV series. No, they’re borrowing a much lesser-known power from a much lesser-known version of the character, the ability to see one hour into the future. Skipping over the costumed adventurer whose powers come from a troubling source, skipping over the time-travelling android from the far future trying to learn to be human, and focusing on the most obscure Hourman-related ability they could find.

Mm-hm.

Is it even a superhero show at this point? Because it feels like an utterly generic “protagonist must stop a tragedy before it happens” show. Early Edition with a tighter deadline. I’m not convinced they’d even give him a costume.

Wrapping up

So. While Marvel is building their universe through more Avengers movies and their ultra-ambitious Defenders project on Netflix, DC looks to be splitting up their universe more and more with redundant Flashes, unnecessary prequels, and farming their characters out to different studios, the exact strategy that is limiting Marvel to their B and C-list characters, because they sold their A-list to Sony and Fox.

And through all of this, nothing for Wonder Woman. If you’re desperate enough to turn to Hourman of all people, you should be desperate enough to finally make a Wonder Woman project that’s any good.

I want to see a DC cinematic universe. I do not want to continue to see DC characters existing in independent bubbles, with no crossing over allowed. Unless, of course, this is all building to the Netflix miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which Smallville, the Nolan-verse, Arrow-verse, and various other movie and TV universes collide… man, I’d watch the shit out of that. Shame that isn’t happening. Great. Somehow I’ve managed to depress myself even more.

But this is why you hurt me, Warner Bros. It’s not because Marvel is beating you. It’s because it doesn’t even seem like you’re stepping up to the plate. Please, do better.

*Not a recommendation. I stand by my policy of never officially recommending Smallville. Watch it if you want, but that’s your decision. I cannot guarantee your safety, nor will I be responsible for your fate.

Flash forward?

So. The Flash.

People who know me know that I’m a hardcore DC fanboy. I love Superman, am at best ambivalent about Wolverine, and own more Green Lantern paraphernalia than suit jackets. It’s not that I have anything against Marvel comics (I read many of their titles), or the Marvel movies… in fact, here’s me co-hosting a Marvel movie marathon for my theatre group.

Not pictured: Superman pint glass, with cape. Not kidding.
My co-host didn’t feel I was embracing the spirit.

So, yeah, love me some DC comics. Have been wanting a Justice League movie for years, even though they let me down every time.

And yet even I’m confused by all the love getting thrown at the Flash all of a sudden.

Why Flash?

When laying out their plans for the future at Comic-Con, (plans that move much slower than Marvel’s, as DC Entertainment is but a portion of the Warner Brothers empire rather than a separate studio like Marvel) DC Entertainment announced that their Superman/Batman movie in 2015 would be followed by a solo movie for the Flash before taking a swing at a combined Justice League.

This caused a few raised eyebrows. After all, the holy trinity of DC Comics isn’t Superman, Batman, and the guy who runs fast, it’s Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. The greatest female superhero of them all. Remember? Wouldn’t making her movie next be the logical move? I mean, other than Incredible Hulk, Marvel opened with their big trinity–okay, well, no they didn’t. As far as the Avengers go, the big three have traditionally been Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor, but in Marvel as a whole it’s Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Deadpool. Two of whom are even Avengers now, at least in the comics. But in terms of characters they still owned the rights to, it’s Cap, Tony, and Thor.

I digress.

I suppose the Wonder Woman movie they tried but failed to make with Joss Whedon (HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN–sorry, rant for another time…), the TV series they tried but failed to make with David E. Kelley, and the more Smallville-esque origin TV series they can’t get even sell to the network that deliberately ran Smallville for a goddamn decade, Warner Brothers is feeling gun shy with Wonder Woman. And they’re not eager to return to Green Lantern, given the harsh reception the last movie got. And Entourage aside, I don’t see them making an Aquaman movie before they’ve tested him in a team flick. Assuming that Justice League is a hit, and they follow it with solo movies. Neither of which are in the same time zone as “sure things” yet. So, yeah, if they’re going to do one more solo movie, I guess I can see why they’d pick the Flash.

And I love the Flash. Ever since Mark Waid’s run on the title in the 90s, it’s been one of my top books. The Flash is definitely one of DC’s top characters when handled well–any character is awful if you write him awful, so don’t throw any silver age nonsense at me–so I allowed my enthusiasm for a Flash movie to override any confusion over their “Man of Steel, Man of Steel sequel–NO WAIT ALSO BATMAN, Flash, Justice League” plan.

This this happened.

Flash of Two Worlds?

For those who didn’t click the link, in addition to a Flash movie in 2016, they’re trying to launch a Flash TV series in 2014 by introducing the character in an episode of Arrow, a move known as a “back door pilot.” And, for the record, the executive producers/showrunners of Arrow are the guys who are supposed to be writing the Flash movie as well.

Um… okay. Interesting choice. This is the part where I might have flipped out in joy. Ranted about how great it would be to set up the Flash in a TV series, a medium far, far better suited to adapting comic books than movies ever were, then do the Flash movie and link the TV universe of Flash and Arrow to the DC film universe. Like how Agents of SHIELD is linked to the Avengers movies.

If only I believed that’s what they’re doing.

Because, you see, as the second season of Arrow starts, super powers still aren’t a thing. The season two sizzle reel showed no sign that they were going to do the one thing I stubbornly hoped for, despite how unlikely it seemed: references to the events of Man of Steel. It’s the first time Arrow has ever failed to bend over backwards to please me, so I let it go… but now the Arrow universe is priming to include the Flash. Super powers are coming to Starling City.

And yet I can’t help suspect that they’re planning on keeping the movie Flash and TV Flash separate. I don’t know why they’d do that. I can’t picture the thought process in which having a movie about a character while running an unrelated TV series about the same character is a good idea. Man of Steel didn’t come out while Smallville was airing. But if you’re willing to fire Joss Whedon off a Wonder Woman movie, you’ll do any damn stupid thing.

Final thoughts

So maybe… MAYBE… this will all become the simple wonder of synergy it logically should be. Maybe the DC cinematic universe started with Man of Steel will link to the televised universe of Arrow, and Flash will be the bridge. After all, Flash was the first character to travel from Earth-1 to Earth-2 (long story). And yet I can’t shake the suspicion that they’re going to go the other way. Hire one team to write two Flashes, going to bizarre lengths to avoid a united universe.

I hope I’m wrong. But I also hope that one day I’ll learn to love things that don’t disappoint, hurt or try to kill me, but my commitment to community theatre and craving for Pizza Hut suggest otherwise.

Still, though. Flash on TV. Didn’t expect that to happen twice in my lifetime. Might yet be worthwhile.

Dan Discusses his TV: Skins of Thrones

Or should it be Game of Skins? No. No, clearly it should not.

If you’ll permit me, I’m going to take a brief break from relating European adventures to talk about something I’ve noticed this week. One of the things I leaped into after I got back was an attempt to catch up on the television I’d missed during the trip. Three weeks’ absence during May sweeps leads to a dangerously full PVR. I’d planned on my priorities being Doctor Who, Game of Thrones and Arrow, but something happened: on a whim, I decided to resume watching the BBC series Skins.

Skins in the Game? No, still awful…

Skins, for those unfamiliar, is a British dramedy (supposedly a comedy but some dark shit goes down from time to time) about high school students trying to lose themselves in sex, drugs, and maybe, just maybe, some approximation of love and happiness. To keep things at that awkward and painful age, every two seasons they change the cast almost completely, referring to them as generations 1-3.

I had four Arrows to watch, five Mad Mens (and counting), and a swath of other shows less important, but I couldn’t tear myself away from Skins, despite the fact that I was pretty sure I hated 90% of what was happening. Sorry, that’s not explaining it right… it’s not that the episodes were badly written, as they were not. It’s not that they were badly acted, as the first generation cast is top notch (including Nicholas Hoult of X-Men: First Class and Warm Bodies and Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire and the Newsroom). It’s just that the actual stories, while at times funny and moving, make me want to scream at every character involved. It’s that kind of show. And after the most recent Game of Thrones episode (Rains of Castamere–no, no spoilers here), it became clear: these two shows had a very similar grip, because despite one being a fantasy series about a bunch of jerks fighting for control of Westeros and one being about British teenagers attempting to sort their sad little lives out, thematically they’re quite similar.

Allow me to explain. The differences are clear: one has kings and dragons and magic, the other has “behind on his homework” as a plot point, but there are a few distinct narrative tropes they both share.

Lovable (?) narcissists

At the center of each show are some of the most selfish, destructive people you’ll ever be dared to actually sympathize with. Game of Thrones has the Lannisters: ranging from the frequently awesome Tyrion, to the weirdly likable Jaime, to the utterly irredeemable Joffrey and Cersei. They’ve been told all their lives that Lannisters are better than other people and believe it so fiercely that they use it as justification for the terrible things they do, and as their punishment they create a monster in Joffrey and start a civil war. (That’s not a spoiler, it’s practically the premise of the series)

Skins has Tony and to a lesser extent his girlfriend Michelle. Michelle is simply pretty and popular and addicted to the attention being pretty and popular gets you, but Tony… Tony is said to have “the cheat codes to life,” as he’s good-looking and charming enough to get away with nearly anything, and self-aware enough to know he can get away with nearly anything, meaning he spends the first season seeing how far he push people in the pursuit of whatever he wants in that moment. His manipulations of his friends, girlfriend and other lovers go from simply thoughtless to selfish to borderline psychotic before… well, that would be telling.

Tony and the Lannisters’ narcissism borders on religious fervour, yet there are moments when we’re supposed to root for them, not hope that they suffer for their sins. And when they do suffer, it’s just never as satisfying as we once wanted it to be.

Good deeds are seldom, if ever, rewarded

My generation was raised on feel-good family sitcoms. Now many of us are able to see them as disposable, two-dimensional morality fables with thin jokes and catch phrases passing for humour… “You’re right, Uncle Jesse, honesty is the best policy,” audience goes “Aww…” then Jesse impersonates Elvis and everyone has a good laugh, that sort of thing. And since they were trying to impart proper values… we’ll skip the debate over what constitutes “proper values…” doing the right thing came with a reward. A kiss on the cheek from the girl, or being told you’re a hero by the cops, or improbably getting the promotion you thought you’d have to lie and cheat to get but yet you still chose the high road and the big boss is impressed.

Not so with these two shows. Doing the right thing might satisfy honour and duty but that’s about it. Honour won’t save you from Lannister scheming on Game of Thrones any more than being a good friend on Skins will save you from getting beat up by a bunch of chav teenage girls looking to hand out a kicking to the first convenient target. Game of Thrones is better at handing out shock value, while Skins often goes for the laugh at the character’s expense, but both are clear: you’d best hope that virtue is its own reward, because it’s the only reward you’re likely to get.

Mistakes are punished…

Which is not to say that doing the wrong thing does come with a reward. I mean, sometimes it does. Joffrey gets the throne and Tony gets whatever girl he wants, but sometimes a character will slip up, and that slip up will have consequences. Sometimes horrible ones. It’s hard to go into specifics without spoiling things about both shows, but the examples are out there. On Game of Thrones, if you make the wrong choice tactically, even if it was the right choice morally, you will pay for it down the road. One character on Skins makes some short-sighted decisions and it ultimately costs him everything, including the shirt off his back.

…but not as much as redemption.

The only thing that gets you beaten down harder than mistakes in these shows is redemption. If a character begins to redeem him or herself, walk a better path, try to become a better person… brace yourself. Something bad is coming. Look at what happens to Jaime Lannister right as he was becoming likable in season three. And in the case of Skins, it’s not even something they deserved. It’s not like someone starts to turn over a new leaf but his past sins come back to haunt him. There are multiple cases where a character finds redemption, finds peace and possible happiness in that redemption, and then BAM! catastrophe from nowhere. Nowhere. And the collateral damage will hit someone you like. Usually Sid. Nothing good ever seems to happen to Sid, no matter how much I–you, the hypothetical viewer, that is… might want it to.

I was going to add a section about characters you like getting kicked in the teeth for no clear reason, but that’s, like, all narrative everywhere. That’s just good storytelling. Also, this got long for something that I once believed would fit into a Facebook status update. But, hey, what else are blogs for, amirite?

Am I not right?

Look, just come back next time. Belgian adventures for reals, I promise.