A verb, Senator. We need a verb.
I don’t think anyone can deny that Ang lee’d they hell out of the Hulk movie. Ang just lee’d all over it.
This and other lowbrow Hollywood offerings are escapist entertainment. Work all day at your terrible job, restrain yourself from punching your coworkers, go back to your strained marriage, yada yada, have some fun watching Batman wreck a dude’s spine. It serves a purpose. Or you can watch a “mature” and “sophisticated” movie like, I dunno, Synecdoche New York and feel the urge to slit your wrists.
In some corners of the internet superhero movies are dismissed as “capeshit movies.”
And occasionally the inverse.
Anyway, I solemnly promise to never force the OP at gunpoint to watch a superhero movie. Who’s with me?
Okay, I was willing to accept that this was just a case of different tastes until you complemented the boring year-long toy commercial that was Secret Wars. If that was deeper than the rest of what you were actually reading than it appears you chose… poorly.
Some better early 80s comics include runs in the middle of series, such as the Great Darkness Saga or the Dark Phoenix Saga. God Loves, Man Kills was an excellent graphic novel from 1982. The original Wolverine limited series. Heck, Moore himself wrote classics before 1986, see his run on Marvelman/Miracleman and “The Anatomy Lesson” from Swamp Thing.
If you limit it to a 1984 Marvel limited series the Magik (Illyana and Storm) limited series was far deeper than Secret Wars, though I may be remembering that with rose-colored glasses having read it as a kid. Heck, even if you limit the category all the way to a 1984 Marvel limited series that doubles as a toy commercial, at least the X-Men and the Micronauts miniseries was more interesting (even if creepy rapey Professor X might have been a little out of character in that.)
Well played, sir. A fine Comic Book Guy smackdown.
Our comic books from the 50’s were legislated to be childish after that decency law was passed. And everything in that era was kinda childish - the post-war US culture valued Wonder Bread, and TV was as innocent as can be. Pre-Rock pop music was also childish - How Much Is That Doggie in the Window is the classic cite.
The underlying structure of hero myths can handle anything.
You’re blaming the reflection of the culture, not the nature of the culture itself. Step back one level please.
As Bruce Banner’s always said: “Don’t make me Ang Lee. You wouldn’t like me when I’m Ang Lee.”
Anyway, you know what’s infantile? Drama. It’s all about people running around being terrible to each other, when a moment’s reflection would solve the whole problem and resolve all of the first slept with the second while betrothed to the third and the fourth person drank a whole fifth to forget. Utterly stupid. No wonder it’s such a passing fad. Why, once the Holocene is over, the passing scene will have moved on entirely!
But aren’t those two rather on the stupid end of the spectrum for gods/demigods?
It’s hard to script dramatic challenges for a god on the smart end of the spectrum.
I remember noticing that and being annoyed by the conversation between Loki and Black Widow. Sure, she’s deeply trained in interrogation techniques and Psi-ops and such but he’s the GOD of tricksters. He should be toying with her, rather than getting angry, unless him pretending to get angry was another deception and who the hell knows - his plan was already pointlessly convoluted enough.
Worst. Simpsons reference. Ever.
Slightly more seriously, perhaps I wasn’t 100% on the original topic but I was making a direct response to a post by the original poster, that should count for something.
The brouhaha surrounding Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and the resulting Comics Code Authority(CCA) are largely why the bulk of the medium was limited to superheroes for a few decades. I must point out a substantive error though - as far as I’m aware no actual “decency law” was passed. The threat of such a law was so strong that the whole industry self-censored. The CCA was always voluntary, and independent comics were always legal, with the only formal legal censorship applicable to the same extent as would have been applied to the pornography of the day.
That’s why, decades later, the industry didn’t need another actual law to be passed or repealed in order to choose to ignore the CCA and widely publish more diverse content.
I am sorry. I didn’t me my step back comment for you. I meant it for the OP. I am learning from you.
Any fans of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City out there? In the forward of the first trade, “Life in the Big City”, Kurt writes
[QUOTE=Kurt Busiek]
The complaint, which never fails to charm me, is that superheroes are limited. They’re inherently juvenile, I’m told. They’re simplistic. They’re just an adolescent male power fantasy, a crypto-fascist presentation of status quo values, elevated over anything strange and alien.
And sure, yeah, I can see that. Superman is adolescence personified – Clark Kent the weak child whom nobody takes seriously, turning into the powerful, respected (and sexually attractive, but nervous around women) Superman as swiftly as a teenager’s voice cracks, and then back to the meek, unimportant Clark. Spider-Man is adolescence from a different angle – the teenager stumbling toward adulthood writ large, making mistakes with disastrous consequences and doing his best to remedy them as he learns to be a responsible man in an adult society. Captain America is the American ideal and self-image circa 1941 rolled into one – the biggest kid in the global playground, who’s going to make the other kids play nice, even if he has to get a little rough to do it. I can absolutely see that.
However – and you knew there was going to be a however, right? – what charms me about that objection to the superhero is the way it points out, in the guise of criticism, what to me is the greatest strength of the superhero genre – the ease with which superheroes can be used as metaphor, as symbol, whether for the psychological transformation of adolescence, the self-image of a nation, or something else. A genre that can do something like that – is that really a limitation?
I don’t think so.
If a superhero can be such a powerful and effective metaphor for male adolescence, then what else can you do with them? Could you build a superhero story around a metaphor for female adolescence? Around mid-life crisis?* Around the changes adults go through when they become parents? Sure, why not? And if a superhero can exemplify America’s self-image at the dawn of World War II, could a superhore exemplify America’s self-image during a less-confident 1970s?** How about the emerging national identity of a newly-independent African nation? Or a non-natiounal culture, like the drug culture, or the “greed-is-good” business culture of the go-go Eighties? Of course. If it can do one, it can do the others.
I could go on, but I’ll spare you. The point is, an attempt to describe how limited superheroes are quickly turns into the question, “What can’t they do?” The possibilities of the genre are endless, and the terrain rich and inviting.
*In fact, it’s already been done. Do yourself a favor and hunt down a copy of Superfolks, by Robert N. Mayer [Dial Press, 1977], a novel that brilliantly uses superhero symbols to tell a sidesplittingly funny and emotionally affecting story of a man dealing with middle age; it’s long out of print but it’s well worth the trouble of finding it.
**The Kinks use Captain America to do just that, in their song, “Catch Me Now I’m Falling,” on the album Low Budget.
[/QUOTE]
Feel we’re oversaturated with superheroes? Yeah, I can see that. But we’re living in an age of unprecedented entertainment choices, so you can avoid them like I avoid horror/slasher flicks or romcoms. If you want to see them as childish, I could see that too… if we were living before the 80s. Superheroes aren’t what they were when I was a kid in the 70s, watching the Adam West Batman and Hanna Barbera’s Super Friends.
Also, Astro City is awesome.
sb
Yes! (I have some commissioned original art by Brent Anderson; he used to live right here in San Diego. He caricatured some friends of mine in “Strikeforce Morituri.”)
The art is good…and the writing is better! Busiek is taking comfortable old superhero memes, and humanizing them, bringing them to a scale that we ordinary people can comprehend. The early issue where Samaritan can only enjoy the freedom and joy of flight in his dreams, because his life-saving duties mandate that he only fly straight and very fast to arrive at crime scenes or natural disasters – brilliant! He just wants to soar, to do loop-the-loops, but he’s needed in Sumatra to stop a tsunami…NOW!
The long story cycle about the policeman and his ne’er-do-well brother was brilliant: it emphasized the human part of superhuman activities. What if you were the guy in one of the collapsing buildings in Superman vs. Batman? That’s something most superhero comics don’t deal enough with – although they almost always give a nod in that direction.
(“Beast Boy, you go protect the civilians in the street. Wonder Girl, you’re with me to defeat this guy!” And guess which of these two activities is actually depicted!)
Also, Astro City is upbeat and optimistic! It’s a word that rejoices in its superheroes, and even sometimes turns a wry smile on the villains. “‘Major Domo?’ You do know that’s a servant, right?” (quote only approximate from memory.)
Definitely one of my top ten comics…ever.
I agree with the OP, I feel the same way every time critics rip on Transformers films. Have you seen the tv show? It was a childrens show and the plot was always stupid as hell.
Deadpool was awesome though, I like Ryan Reynolds and the superhero film genre needs to be made fun of.
My thought is that if you don’t like superheroes, you should read/watch some Alan Moore. He doesn’t like them either. 
I have read, I think, the first 2-3 collected Astro City stories. Good stuff.
Aw, he had a grand old time taking shots at them, but then he turned around and did some pretty upbeat stuff with TOM STRONG: a super-powered do-gooder who prefers to solve problems by reasoning with people – sure, from a position of strength, but if he doesn’t have to resort to force he’d genuinely rather save the day as an amiable guy who makes a lot of sense than as a superstrong gadgeteer.
(It doesn’t always work, so we get enough action scenes to carry a comic book; but it often does work, because otherwise he’d kind of look like a moron for always trying but failing to show folks the error of their ways by talking stuff over.)
And so he foils crimes and saves lives and stops alien invaders like a diplomat with no real psychological hangups – and, granted, he got a masked archenemeny who has psychological hangups; but given how many other villains can be reasoned with, that works out to a pretty good batting average for the raygun-toting hero who – okay, yes, can outleap any Olympic jumper and outmuscle any Olympic weightlifter, but that just helps him engineer win-win solutions.
Of course it was a childrens’ show, and of course the plots were stupid. It was a show based on toys, built on the strength that the toys happened to be really cool. But the recent movies forgot all of that, and so they end up sucking.