It’s easy to lose faith. As a fan, reader and outspoken advocate for the medium of comics, it can be a struggle to argue your corner when folks will only see the worst parts of your favourite things. Worse, when they confuse the medium with the genre and offer up their gotchas based on prejudice, misinformation or plain ignorance.
When someone tells me how dumb comic book movies are, my teeth start to grind. It’s a problem because, to a certain extent, they’re right. Comic book movies—and let’s for the sake of argument, use the hater’s term for a moment and consider the modern superhero movie—are dumb. They’re predictable, cliched, bloated. Worse, they’re pandering to a very limited sector of the potential audience. Typically, the folks who complain most loudly about comic book movies are comic book fans, and Hollywood has been on the back foot about how to deal with them and their demands for a very long time. Hence, for example, there are four different versions of Zach Snyder’s Justice League film, each longer, more convoluted, worse. Fans still whined, demanding the one true text which would show how a sullen, humourless and underlit approach was the best way to depict their favourite heroes on screen.
Hence my cape fatigue. I’ve ignored the last couple of Marvel movies, and haven’t seen a DC-verse offering since, cripes, I dunno, The Suicide Squad when it popped up on More4 (this was not, I stress, the earlier David Ayer-directed Suicide Squad which had some of the same cast, a very similar plot and you can see why people get confused and just give up, can’t you?).
I was sick of it, to be frank. I had better things to waste my time on. Reading comics, for example. Why bother with a pale imitation of the real thing?
But this week, I had my faith reaffirmed. In the space of three days, I saw the future of comic boo—sorry, superhero movies.
And finally, I saw a reason to smile.
SPOILERS FOR BOTH THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS AND SUPERMAN LURK BEYOND THIS POINT. STEP CAREFULLY, BOLD TRAVELLER
Over the course of a couple of weeks, we have been gifted with two different takes on classic heroes from different studios and creative teams. Both have a remarkably similar look, mood and tone—lighter and brighter, the angst and nihilism of the previous decade swept away in favour of optimism, of positivity, of hope. It’s as if Marvel and DC both looked at the world outside the studio walls and decided ‘you know what, things are crappy enough without depressing people when they just want a Friday night out’. Of course, the decreasing financial returns of super-cinema is a contributing factor. The need for a new direction was glaringly obvious. Money maketh movies. Go bleak, go broke.
What’s striking about both Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps and James Gunn’s restart of the Superman franchise is just how far both film-makers have referred to the original source material for this brighter, shinier new age. Shakman goes so far as to depict the front cover of the first FF book in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot in the dazzling, dizzying introduction to the movie, with the First Family in combat with a creature tearing up through the tarmac of a New York street scene.
Meanwhile, Gunn has been very open in his debt to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman. For me, the tone of his film is grabbed from the wildly imaginative, expressionistic Golden Age of the 50s, a time when anything can and often did happen in the course of twenty-two brightly coloured pages. Supes battering a giant lizard-thing around a shiny Metropolis plaza? You got it. And yes, that’s a two-for-two in Kaiju fights in urban settings. Both directors know what their audiences want.
You want a clear example of the new direction? Check out the important part the kid-friendly companions play in both films. H.E.R.B.I.E. in FF:FS (maybe I need to find a less exasperated acronym) is drawn straight from the animated TV show, a replacement for the copyright-unavailable Human Torch, and is very much part of the team. Cook, babysitter, co-pilot, all-round help-meet.
Then there’s Krypto. Superman’s dog has been canonical since 1955, a true friend to Ol’ Big Blue for 70 years. The Last Dog Of Krypton is not just comic relief—he’s pivotal to the plot, saving Supe’s bacon several times through the course of the movie. The love for Krypto has been a pretty big factor in keeping Superman in the public eye—and hey, anything that gets people thinking again about adopting a rescue pupper is alright by me.
The point here is that we have two characters which make you smile every time they’re on screen. They’re deeply toyetic and just lighten the mood. A cute dog counterpart in the Snyderverse would have been brutally killed to give Superdouche something to swear revenge for. This was an era when Jimmy Olsen was shot in the head for shock value, fer chrissakes.
Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal, the character through which comic’s wildest scenarios came to life month by month as the cub reporter was changed into a space turtle or forced into marriage with an alien princess, is one big part of the most successful element of James Gunn’s Superman—the wholescale raid of DC’s back pages to bring together a crazy supporting cast. Sure, Perry, Lois and the Daily Planet crew are there. But we’re also seeing, in the Justice Gang and Lex Luthor’s henches, a broader spectrum of the characters on offer. The worst Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, is a highlight for me, with Nathan Fillion dialing up the obnoxiousness and ego. Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl is the mean girl of the group, fearless and as at home with a spiked mace as a cutting remark. It’s incredible to see Metamorpho in a mainstream movie, let alone when he’s played with such vulnerability and pathos by Anthony Carrigan. Edi Gathegi as the fighting genius Mr. Terrific may be the break-out star, though. Unflappable, unstoppable, he’s a two-fisted super-scientist who is also ineffably cool.
I mentioned vulnerability, and that’s a watchword for both David Corenswet’s Superman and Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards. They both have their lives turned upside down, whether by fatherhood in Mr. Fantastic’s case or the discovery that the message by which Kal-El chose his Earthly path was not what he believed. The two have doubts in their abilities, in their place in the world. These are movies in which Superman takes a beating in the very first minute, in which the world’s greatest scientist, the man with all the answers, is forced to say ‘I don’t know.’ These are not just punchy guys in spandex. They have flaws and are all the more relatable and human because of it.
Both men, when it comes down to the wire, can’t do the job on their own. Reed, of course, has the rest of the Four beside him. Clark Kent—Kal-El—is saved by The Justice Gang, by Lois and Perry and Jimmy, by his loony rescue pup. This is the key point to make, I think, and why I believe them to be so successful as reinterpretations of the comics tradition. The two films are both explicitly about family, about finding a place to belong, people with which to share that feeling and a community who will offer support when you’re at your lowest. The Fantasic Four are their own unit, solid as a rock from the very beginning. They fight, sure, but only out of love, and everything is fixed in time for Sunday dinner. Clark has had to build his family from scratch, finding a girl, a pal, powerful super-friends. But he knows they will be there to pull him out of the anti-proton river when he needs them.
I find tremendous comfort in all this. Comics have been a major part of my life since I learned to read—I’d argue they are part of the reason I’m such a book-hog. I’ve found friendship and community in my love of The Ninth Art, an infinitely malleable medium which can do things no other format can. To see those worlds, that experience, brought so vividly to life on the big screen gave me happy chills.
Sure, both The Fantasic Four and Superman may be silly, frivolous, ridiculous. But both Shakman and Gunn know that and lean hard into it, making a virtue out of the foolishness. Sure, the films are stupid. But they ain’t dumb. They deal with big themes with a lightness of touch and a wink. You can’t ask for more than that.
Now, please go and read All-Star Superman and Ryan North’s run on the FF. then you’ll really see how superheroes should be.
See you next Saturday, true believers.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 