Comic Books: July 2005 Archives

I expected my title this week to reflect my righteous indignation over the Fantastic Four movie. Given the nearly universal dismal reviews I was prepared to be highly disappointed. I nearly thought of skipping the movie altogether and just waiting for the DVD (I certainly wish that I had done that with Elektra). But I found the Fantastic Four movie to be highly enjoyable and at the end I found myself even wanting to see it again! I’ll wait for the DVD in that case, but it’s something no Marvel fan would want to miss while it’s in the theaters.

Yes, the Fantastic Four movie is full of ludicrous plot-holes, dumb dialogue, and quick short-cuts to keep things rolling along. So were the early issues of the FF; in a way this movie resembles the tone of the first ten or twenty issues, where the Thing was more bumpy than rocky and Reed was not yet married to Sue. The movie cuts very quickly, introducing Reed, Ben, Sue, and Doom in the first ten minutes and explaining why they are going into outer space. Johnny gets introduced in the next five minutes. I think the heart and soul of the movie are Ben and Johnny, two characters that the film gets absolutely right. Michael Chiklis has the perfect personality to play Ben Grimm, and his agony into being transformed into a monster is well depicted. There’s a scene where his fiancée drops his wedding ring (never mind how she got to the bridge in the first place), and his inability to pick it up in his enormous hand is touching. In the comic, Johnny started out as a high school age kid, but he works much better as a guy in his twenties. I didn’t mind the fact that they made him a Tony Hawk type of dude who’s into snowboarding and dirt bikes (in addition to being a space shuttle pilot). The practical jokes and adversarial relationship between Johnny and Ben provide a lot of belly laughs.

The relationship between Ben and Sue is a bit more problematic. The screenwriters turned Sue into a scientist (of what, I’m not sure) and threw in a romantic triangle between Sue, Reed, and Doom. We know that Sue and Reed were lovers and broke up for some vague reason. A lot of the reviews that I read said that Reed was a milquetoast and a weak character; his arc through the movie is to transform into a stronger, more decisive leader. This could have been done in a better way, and perhaps there are some elements left to be explored in a sequel. While Jessica Alba isn’t convincing as a scientist, her role in being the “den mother” to Reed, Johnny, and Ben did work for me. The basic elements of Reed and Sue’s personalities seemed intact and the whole quartet just plays off each other wonderfully as they do in the comics.

The biggest disappointment in the film still has to be Dr. Doom. This should have been the greatest villain of all time. The screenwriters optimized the story of building up the FF and the main villain at the same time. In doing so, we no longer have a Von Doom who is the leader of a country and armed with vast technological resources to attack the FF (although the ending hints that this may happen in a sequel). Julian McMahon does a reasonable job showing that Doom is a real asshole. While it’s far from perfect, I think they did give Doom an even better reason to hate Reed Richards: Reed stole Doom’s girl and he made Doom lose a billion dollars by ruining his company’s reputation. This is far superior to the old “Reed messed up my chemistry experiment and now my face is scarred” origin story. It’s not great that Doom in the movie has power over electricity; he should instead be like Iron Man with lots of different weapons in his suit. That metallic exo-skeleton thing is lame. When Doom finally puts on the mask, it looks just like the comic, but the performance isn’t as powerful because we don’t see his lips moving. It might be more effective if his voice changed somehow, amplified by the mask.

On the whole, I think Fantastic Four is on par with the first X-Men movie, which was pretty light and breezy as well. It’s a fun movie without a lot of angst. Yes, we could riddle it with bullet holes for hours on end, but in the end I just get a kick out of watching "the First Family of superheroes" come to life on screen.

About every four months, I tell myself I need to stop collecting comics. This is happening with alarming frequency. My current collection has items from the 60s, 70s, but it’s mostly comprised of comics from the 80s and 90s. I put them in the traditional long white boxes, mostly bagged, with a few precious gems mylared. I have about 18 of the long boxes, 3 of the smaller boxes for the old Warren and Marvel monster magazines. This doesn’t count the bookshelf in the closet which holds an array of graphic novels, treasury editions, and fan magazines like Comic Book Artist. All of this resides inside a closet, in a room which doubles as my exercise room. Which means that wherever I move, I must have an extra room just dedicated to holding my comic collection?

My wife is pretty patient with me. She doesn’t demand that I stop collecting comics, although it would be pretty pleasant for her if I did. But I am starting to view my collection as a monster in the closet that I can no longer control. My habit has been to venture lightly into the closet after finishing my new comics. I place them in a pile on top one of the long white boxes. I say I will immediately alphabetize them and place them into the boxes, but I never do. Four months later, the pile of new comics is spilling everywhere, so I finally decide to integrate my collection. I pull out several of the long white boxes, because there is one box dedicated to just Flash comics, and I want them all in one place. I might get the urge to re-read “Terminal Velocity” in the middle of the night and I want to easily find all the issues. Likewise, JLA, Batman, JSA, and several other important series have their own boxes. Others just go into a box that I label “New 2005” because I can’t be anal about everything. This is another problem, because if a mini-series spawns multiple years, it’s hard to find them. I once had to dig thru six boxes just to piece the entire run of Planetary together. Lifting all of these boxes is no cakewalk for an aging boomer. I have to remind myself to use my legs or else I’ll hurt my back.

There is a pleasure in going through any of my boxes: I find gems that I had totally forgotten about. Just the other day I was thinking about Deathstroke from Teen Titans, wishing that I had those old comics. Then looking in my boxes I find Deathstroke #1 and various other issues. How great is that? Going through my JLA box, I find a couple of 100 page giants reprinting some classic Gardner Fox stories. Good thing I didn’t buy those $50 JLA archives. And then I find a JLA Elseworlds titled “JLA Created Equal” by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire. What the fuck, I had no memory that such a thing ever existed. I pick it up and it’s got fantastic Maguire art. The story is kitchy, about a virus that kills off all the Earth’s male population except for Superman and Luthor. It’s basically a gimmick to allow Maguire to draw bodacious babes in prestige format. Lots of great scenes involving Wonder Woman, who obviously wishes Superman would dump Lois and impregnate her instead. Zatanna’s fishnet stockings get a lot of show time as well (click to expand the pictures). They don’t deal with the obvious lesbianism that would have to erupt, but you might wonder if Brian K. Vaughn didn’t get an idea for Y: The Last Man after reading this. It’s a fun story, although Superman doesn’t bang all the super-chicks who look lustily at him page after page. It’s a cop-out as this would be his duty to humanity, don’t ya think?

This is one of the things that make me think I should stop collecting new comics. I’ve obviously forgotten 90% of what I’ve bought for 20-30 years, so digging through the boxes and re-reading them would be a series of archeological discoveries. I always told myself when I got old, I would “start with the A’s” and keep on reading. Maybe it’s finally that time. There are a few portentous signs of stopping points. Infinite Crisis is coming up—maybe I should collect through that milestone and stop. I’ll have a pretty good run from Crisis to Crisis. They can’t do anything that compelling afterward, that I haven’t already seen, right? Oh sure, I’ll get a few trades here and there, but the monthly payment to my retailer will end. I’ve tried this before and I couldn’t make it past a month. Sometimes I sold my collection just to re-buy certain items. But now I can’t handle the cost, the space, the lifting of the long whites. It can happen, it must happen, I must stop. I have the will power, just like Hal Jordan. Yeah, right. Nuff said.

I have a number of Marvel Essentials that I haven’t read yet: Thor Vol. 1-2, FF Vol. 1-3, Spidey Vol. 1-5. I’ve picked some up and regretted it so much when I saw them, I couldn’t bring myself to re-read the stories. One of them is Essential Luke Cage Power Man Volume 1 TPB. Over at the Pulse, they have an interview with the three early writers of the 1970s series: Steve Englehart, Len Wein, and Tony Isabella. Now after reading this I have to give this volume another try. Cage was so cool at the time: the first black superhero to have his own series. He had this ex-con origin, where he was framed for a crime he didn’t commit, and tortured in jail by a white supremacist prison guard. As a result of a science experiment, he became nearly invulnerable with steel-hard skin (and yeah something else must have been steel-hard as well). Another thing that was different about Cage was that his series was titled “Hero For Hire”, making him the first mercenary hero, although he did his fare share of pro-bono work. The painful part in re-reading these old stories is all the phony, “black” dialogue that these white writers could only pick up from blaxploitation movies. When Cage’s sales dimmed, they changed the name of the book to “Luke Cage, Powerman!” and had him fight the original Power Man, a bad guy from the Avengers. Still later, they partnered Cage with Iron Fist in a pretty good series that was kick-started by Claremont and Byrne. Marvel tried reviving Cage in a darker MAX title by Brian Azzarello, which thoroughly turned me off. I’ve quite enjoyed Brian Bendis’ depiction of Cage in Alias Vol. 1 and New Avengers.