Blacker than Blackest?

As we know, the DC Comics universe is deep into their latest Giant Crossover Event, Blackest Night which features, among other things, a villain reviving a whole slew of dead characters to wreak all kinds of havoc on the living heroes. It also seems to be resurrecting DC's status with fans (will Final Crisis ever truly be forgiven?), as the series has been August and September's top selling book. And, setting aside thecheap gimmicks to sell tie-in books, the buzz around the book seems pretty positive (haven't read it myself, so I can't comment).

So, with that in mind I found it very intriguing to hear about Marvel's newest Mutant Crossover Event, Necrosha which features, among other things a villain... reviving a whole slew of dead characters... to wreak all kinds of havoc on the living heroes.



Perhaps this is just coincidence; As I pointed out last post, zombies are everywhere at the moment, and both events sound like they've been building for a while. And yes, Marvel did start putting the Marvel Zombies series years ago. Still, one could see a trend developing with Marvel, were one so inclined:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I leave it to you to decide...

Jumping the Undead Shark

Well, hello there. Yeah, guess it has been a while, and the blog was starting to resemble one of those abandoned houses Time Magazine is writing about – you know, not taken down, but not maintained, just a withered reminder of the glory that once was and we all hope could return.

So in that spirit, and appropriate to the upcoming holiday, the topic at hand for this post is: zombies.

I had set out to write this entry after reading about the Night of the Stripping Dead, but before I could, I encountered last week’s Savage Love article, which featured a question form a reader regarding the ethic of – you guessed it – zombie sex (you’ll have to scroll down for it).

In case you missed that, someone wrote to a national sex columnist to get advice on the morality of having sexual intercourse with the living dead.

Seriously, people.

All of this reinforces a question I’ve been asking myself lately: has the zombie phenomenon hit its peak?

Of course, a lot of this ties into the release of the movie Zombieland – which, despite its use of the modern running zombie is hilarious and worth seeing. Interestingly, it seems that whoever did the marketing for that movie knew their stuff, as I’ve seen the movie promoted by several Zombie Walk groups (including

Detroit’s own). And with AMC producing a televised version of Image Comics’ series The Walking Dead, it seems the march of the pop culture undead is going to be a hard to put down as the monsters themselves. (In this case it may not be a bad thing, since if the show turns out even half as good as the book, it’ll be one of the best series on TV). And lest we forget, while you’re waiting for the show you can always read some zombiefied Jane Austen.

Yes, everywhere you look, there be zombies.

But why does there seem to be this tendency of late to turn everything into a phenomenon anyway? Time was, you could be into pirates or ninjas or robots or primates or whatever it was, and it wasn’t a big deal, it was just what you were into. Mainly because you were ten, and ninjas were the baddest-ass thing you’d ever heard of in your entire decade-long life. But now, it doesn’t seem to be enough to just like, say, pirates. You have to be “OMG!! Pirates!!!” Everything becomes this grand statement pop cultural identity.

To further illustrate this, I give you a prime example: bacon. Once it was simply fried pig flesh that many people enjoyed at meals. Then came Baconnaise, and all its offshoots. Then the April Fool’s Day joke Bacon Lube, which proved so popular it became a real item. There are bacon t-shirts. I’ve seen a Beer and Bacon happy hour at some hipster bar. That thing that used to be just to make you stop being hungry? It’s now something you show off to demonstrate your hipness.

This could be a result of the constant barrage of cultural input we get. If you’re some artist or Hollywood executive trying to cut through the endless sea of stimuli to get your product/creation/message across, and you see some wave that people are actually paying attention to (especially if those people are in your target demographic), well, wouldn’t you try to ride it as far as you could?

Or maybe it’s just that I’m not used to the things I like being mainstream. It’s kind of like watching a band go from playing dive bars to packing stadiums – you’re happy for them, but it’s just not the same. Then you start saying how they’re not as good anymore, and anyway none of the new fans get the band like you do.

But I digress…

Now the question is, with vampires making a comeback, will the zombie be pushed out of the undead spotlight? After all, what could possibly be a bigger draw than a bunch of shuffling, rotting corpses?

Superman lives... despite Brian Singer

The Occasional Superheroine recently mentioned this commentary about why Superman Returns failed to score big at the box office.

"Audiences no longer crave truth, justice and the American way. They want an icy-cold, psychologically jacked hero that shoots heroin in the women's restroom after ripping out the spine of a baddie while bemoaning Corporate America. Superman, the embodiment of all that is good and right, is now merely looked upon with nostalgia -- not as a viable Hollywood product."



Reading the commentary, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the film exec who claimed that “movies starring women don’t sell,” citing the 2004 Halle Berry vehicle Catwoman as an example. Now, I’ve never actually seen the film, or any trailers that I can recall, but just from the poster I could tell you that’s a crap movie.



But with Superman Returns, the writer poses the idea that the movie failed because Superman was too pure, and supports the theory that the world wants a darker Superman. But the whole “Dark Superman” premise is exactly why Returns failed. Or rather, it’s that the film wanted it both ways.

Director Brian Singer made his name with his 1995 film The Usual Suspects, a very dark and cerebral crime drama. Geeks celebrate him for the first two X-Men movies, which managed to be good movies which also captured the spirit of the comic quite well. But with Superman Returns, Singer tried to merge his talents for dark melodrama and flawed characters with the cartoony iconography of Richard Donner’s Superman movies. There were numerous nods to those films – most obvious being Brandon Routh’s dead-on impersonation of Christopher Reeve – but mixed with those was a hard edge that didn’t fit the character.




You want dark? There’s the scene where Lex Luthor stabs Superman with the kryptonite shard and breaks it off inside of him, prison shank-style, then has his thugs mercilessly beat the hell out of our hero. When Superman is lifting up the giant kryptonite island, and one of Lex’s minions is crushed by a falling rock – something which Superman is either unaware of or just doesn’t care about. Oh, and the part where Superman’s illegitimate son kills a bad guy with a piano.

What caused Superman to fail wasn’t its lack of darkness, but that it tried to marry this darkness with the naiveté of the original movies. Having a hammy Perry White chew on his cigar while “gee whiz” Jimmy Olsen runs around trying to get that perfect shot of Superman doesn’t gel with a world of petty criminal kicking a man in the rubs while he dies of radiation poisoning. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the issue of Superman’s son which, let’s face it, was a bad idea from the beginning.



What’s most disheartening is that the Superman movie is simply following the standard of the comics. In the last few years, DC has taken an unfortunate turn in its overall tone. The company has been heavily resurrecting characters from the Silver Age, bringing back Hal Jordan as Green Lantern and most recently (and notably) Barry Allen as the Flash, as well as some of the more gimmicky elements, such as Krypto the Super-Dog or having the Justice League reside in the Hall of Justice from the Super Friends cartoon. This in itself isn’t necessarily bad, but along with these reminders of more “innocent” comics (hero fights villain, wins, no one gets hurt and everything’s fine, the end) comes a more “gritty” vision, perhaps best exemplified by the sequence in Infinite Crisis #1, where villain Deathstroke impales super heroine Phantom Lady with his sword, explaining to her that it’s “just business” as she dies; meanwhile, the once-goofy Superman villain Bizarro punches another hero to death, boasting gleefully the whole time.



This disconnect is jarring, and ultimately gets tedious. This happened before with comics in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, in the wake of The Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. So it’s a bit ironic that, in the wake of the Dark Knight film, we see yet another push toward “gritty” and “realistic” superheroes.



Or perhaps not. While the commentator clearly thinks American audiences don’t want to see noble, righteous people doing good things, we have the success of Star Trek to perhaps indicate otherwise. While the heroes in Trek definitely have their inner dramas – Kirk’s hot-headedness versus innate leadership ability, Spock’s human/Vulcan conflict – ultimately, their goal is the same – defeat the enemy, save the Earth, and live to see the next adventure. Yes, there are casualties in the movie – a whole planet is destroyed – but it’s in that larger-than-life manner that works in Big Adventure movies. What really sells Trek is the crew’s nobility, determination, and camaraderie, without which they could never have been successful.



He’s correct: Superman Returns “failed” because it wasn’t what audiences wanted. But it’s not that they want a dark, flawed hero a la Christopher Nolan’s Batman, it’s because they want a well-made movie that doesn’t deviate so wildly in tone (although the success of X-Men Origins: Wolverine might dispute that). If Smallville has lasted as long as it has, obviously there is an audience. But to write off a character based on one poorly executed and therefore poorly received movie is not only drawing the wrong conclusion, but guarantees more poorly made movies to follow. And the world already has too many of those.