-233

I have heard Bob Dylan perform on four occasions now. Every time there has been ecstatic applause and standing ovations. And every time the question is asked: are we standing up and cheering this old guy because he used to be Bob Dylan? Or are we cheering the idiosyncratic, gravelly old blues-man we've actually seen on stage?

So the thing we already knew, the thing that made the people at that American Star Wars convention cheer like they were at a Rock Concert, is that we see Han Solo and Chewie. We knew we were going to see Han Solo and Chewie, inasmuch as we knew that Harrison Ford was in it and Peter Mayhew was in it; but like, actually seeing them. Actually seeing them. That's Dylan on the stage there, playing Blowin' in the Wind on his mouth harp. He's not actually playing it very well, or even, you know, recognisably. No, didn't you hear me? That's Dylan. On the stage. Playing Blowin' in the Wind.

Tatooine. Presumably Tatooine. Crashed X-Wing in foreground. Presumably X-Wing. Slow pan through sand dunes. Realization that we are not looking at a sand dune but at a wrecked Star Destroyer. Definitely a Star Destroyer. Definitely wrecked.

Shipwrecks are cool, and Star Destroyers are cool, and the idea of wrecked Star Destroyer is definitely cool, and raises the question "what the hell wrecked it"? 

Star Wars: Rebels opened with a shot of the hero, Ezra, looking at a Star Destroyer as it passed over head; which I argued was a play on the iconic opening scene of Star Wars. Wouldn't it be interesting if the opening scene of the trailer was also the opening scene of the movie?

• Star Wars: We are way above the surface of Tatooine. A little ship flies over head. Suddenly, a much bigger ship (which we now know, but didn't then, to call a Star Destroyer) flies over, dwarfing it.

• Star Wars: Episode VII: We are on the surface of Tatooine. We see the wreck of a little ship. Then we see the wreck of a much bigger ship, which we recognize as a Star Destroyer.

The voice of Mark Hamill; presumably Mark Hamill: "The Force is strong in my family. My father has it I have it, my sister has it, you have it too."

Luke Skywalker, singing one of his old hits. It's what he said to Leia on Endor when he finally admitted to her that they were related. 

The trailer assumes you can identify the quote. The trailer also assumes that you can identify Han Solo, the Millennium Falcon, Star Destroyers, lightsabers.... Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe great big spaceships and portentous mythological quotes are cool whatever their sources?

We know from the prequels that Jedi Knights are celibate, and always have been. So presumably, the "you" must be one of Leia and Han's children. From which, incidentally, it would follow that Leia never became a Jedi, that Luke's prophecy that in time she would learn to use the Force never came true. 

If the Force is passed through families, does it make a great deal of sense for the Jedi to be celibate? Like the famous Irishman who said that genetics is when your parents can't have children and neither can you.

As he says "My Father has it" (as opposed to, for example, "My Father had it") we Darth Vader's melted breath mask. I think it is displayed on some kind of plinth. We hear (I think we hear) Darth Vader breathing in the background. 

Luke told Leia that he was her brother on Endor. Darth Vader was cremated on Endor; that's where his ashes and the remains of his armour presumably lie. Does that mean that part of the Force Awaken will be set on Endor? (There are trees in the X-Wing vignette.) Would that mean...

.... more Ewoks?

Actually, I don't think more Ewoks would necessarily be the worst idea in the world. What I do think would be the worst idea in the world is to bring Darth Vader back from the dead. YES, Vader is the second most iconic villain in the entire history of cinema; but he gets an absolutely brilliant death scene in Return of the Jedi. Well, I liked it. Not everyone does. But even if you are one of the people who didn't like it; even if you don't buy the notion that a death-bed repentance can wipe out a life time of Dark Sideyness; even if you are seriously p'd off that George pasted Hayden Christopher's face over Sebastian Shaw's in the "special" edition; then it is still unthinkable that Darth Vader should recover from his death and spend three more films, innumerable comics and a stand-alone movie ranting at underlings and strangling admirals. It would undo the ending of Return of the Jedi; change the trajectory of the sextology; make the prequels pointless (don't say a word). 

On the other hand, this is the guy who changed James T Kirk from Horatio Hornblower to James Dean, so there is no guarantee that he Gets It.

We see Luke ... we assume it is Luke ... touching Artoo Deetoo with his prosthetic hand.

That's dark, isn't it? The prosthetic hand is a reminder that Luke was roundly trounced the first time he met Vader; and also a symbol of Luke's potential to go over to the Dark Side. There is a sense in the scene that he's reconnecting with Artoo; touching him for reassurance; remembering the old times; reaching out to a friend?

Someone hands a lightsaber to someone...

At first I assumed it was Luke, handing a lightsaber to his nephew or niece, the "you" of the opening speech. But that arm looks awfully thin to be Mark Hamill's. (Some people think they can see an alien face. I think they are taking the whole thing a bit too seriously.) 

And isn't that Luke Skywalker's lightsaber? The Lightsaber that his father wanted him to have, when we was old enough (from a certain point of view)? But wasn't that lightsaber in Luke's hand when Darth Vader chopped it off in Empire Strikes Back? So shouldn't it, by rights, had been floating around the clouds of Bespin for the last 40 years? 

And anyway, if Clone Wars is cannon, which, rightly or wrongly it is, Jedi are not given their lightsabers; they make them, as part of a right of passage. The Jedi does not choose the lightsaber, the lightsaber chooses the Jedi.

But the semiology is irresistible. Star Wars started with a great big space battle. The Force Awakens starts in the aftermath of great big space battle. The first scenes are looking backwards. Ship wrecks. Relics. Old friends meeting.  Then, the Torch is quite literally passed and...                                                                                                                                                                                                                        ...bang, bang, bang, ten tiny small little vignettes whoosh past us, actiony bits which are, after all, what Star Wars is really about.... 

We see speeder bike girl, sad Stormtrooper and little orange droid (who we now know to call Rey, Finn and Beebee) running away from an explosion. 

We see Finn sweating and taking off his helmet. 

We see Finn near a crashed space ship and Finn helping him to his feet. Very likely their first meeting. 

We see the cross-bladed lightsaber from the first trailer being swung (in a burning building, with a stormtrooper in the background) and then a separate shot of a guy with a metal mask (Kylo Ren?) holding up his hand to do something Forcey. 

It's a different lightsaber; not the one with the crosspiece. So the dark guy from the first trailer is fighting against this guy. So either this guy is the goodie; or that guy is; or else the Dark Side are fighting among themselves. 

Or he has two lightsabers. Or it's a continuity error. It's too early to say. 

Whoever he is, he's breathing like Vader. So perhaps it was his breathing we heard over Darth Vader's mask. Holding onto the Sith Lord's breath mask as a "relic" is the kind of thing Dark Side baddies might do, isn't?

(A half formed plot starts to coalesce. It is the future. The events of Star Wars have already become legendary. Most people don't believe in the Jedi. Luke Skywalker has vanished. A secret cadre who fancy themselves Sith Lords preserve Darth Vader's mask as a holy relic. Another sect have scoured Bespin and preserved Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, legendary and precious as Excalibur. And then for some reason Luke Skywalker, long hidden, emerges.)

Final Shot of Han Solo and Chewie.

And it quite definitely is a shot of Han and Chewie, being Han and Chewie, but much older. Well, Han is much older. It is canonical that wookies live much longer than humans. (Chewie appears briefly and irrelevantly in Return of the Sith.) 

Han Solo hasn't changed his clothes in 40 years. 

I am not quite sure. I want to see Han Solo again. But I want to know what Han Solo has been doing for the last thirty years. I don't, to use an analogy I have perhaps used too much, just want to see someone put their Han Solo action figure on the table. 

What did Han do after Return of the Jedi? Did he go back to his old life — if not actually as a pirate than at any rate as professional trader and money maker and trouble maker? Or did he stay with the rebels, in the New Order? I think I would rather there were scenes in which we meet an elderly, abrasive senator (or president? Or ambassador) and to our surprise say "hey, didn't you used to be Han Solo", than seeing a very old Harrison Ford trying to strike poses that he first struck thirty eight years ago. I think I want Luke to be the new Ben, old and wise and mysterious, not a guy of 60 trying to swing across chasms. 

When Star Trek was a going concern, stupid people called it "wheelchairs in space" because it was, like, really funny that a guy of 50 could be a ship's captain. I am one of those who likes Dylan as he is now; who thinks that his new performances are quirky as hell but genuinely interesting. But Dylan plays himself as he is now, a gravelly old man in a hat. He doesn't remotely pretend that at 73 he can still be a fresh faced young spokesman for the new generation. 

Let us hope that Han Solo doesn't turn out to be an aging rocker embarrassingly wiggling his arthritic hips.

"Chewie, we're home."

What was it that the wise man said you can't ever do?

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tolkien, c.s lewis, and their friends

comics in general and watchmen in particular

star wars

doctor who 

-237

The Fantastic Four trailer didn't make me nearly as angry as the Superman trailer. It doesn't seem to have been put together by someone who actively dislikes The Fantastic Four, merely by someone who hasn't read it. And it is certainly nice to see some footage in which The Thing looks like a 3D rendering of an early Jack Kirby Thing, as opposed to, and there is really no nice way of saying this, a poo.

But still, how could anyone get to work on an F.F movie and miss the neon lights flash above every, single issue screeching "The Fantastic Four is a story about a family. The Fantastic Four is a story about a family." (They are sometimes actually referred to as Marvel's first family, aren't they?) 

Reed Richards is a Father Figure. He is middle aged. He is grey around the the temples and smokes a pipe. He is clever and stuffy. He loves Sue. He fought in the French Resistance. (We can probably drop that bit.)

Sue Storm is a Mother Figure. Or, if you prefer, she is a Big Sister figure. She is sensible and practical and the glue that holds the group together. She loves Reed. 

Johnny is the Kid Brother. He is young and reckless. Johnny and Sue are orphans. Sue had to be a mother to her kid brother when their Dad died. That's why she's inclined to be fuddy-duddy and stuffy. 

Ben is Big Brother. Ben and Johnny act like feuding siblings; Sue and Reed act like anxious parents. But Ben is actually Reed's contemporary. He was a fighter pilot in the War. Some people think that the name Benjamen Jakob Grimm suggests that he came from a minority ethnic background. Definitely he came from the poor bit of New York. The cigar, if nothing else, shows that he's the character who Jack Kirby identified with. (We can probably lose the cigar.) 

Superman is not about a god-like alien but about a geeky little guy from the sticks who is also a god like alien. The Fantastic Four is not about four people with amazing powers, it's specifically about an American family who acquire amazing powers. 

"Your my husband, Reed...The world won't come to an end if you take time out for dinner"

"I wish wish I could be sure of that, Sue darling."

"You flamin fig-head! When I'm thru with you there won't be enough left to light a fire-cracker!"

"Ben, don't! That fire proof vault door cost a small fortune!"

I don't want to open up the whole Kirby vs Lee fissure again, but surely, surely, surely the Fantastic Four are made of dialog much more than they are made of drawings and made of cool powers? And if you create four characters who wouldn't say those kinds of things to each other, then what you have created no longer has anything to do with the Fantastic Four? 

Obviously, in the process of making a movie, you have to change stuff. Well, no, actually, that isn't completely obvious to me at all. Of all the comic books out there, the Fantastic Four is the one that permits least messing around with. It is essentially itself: a slab of Kirby pictures illuminated by a wodge of Lee dialogue which is what it is and can't be anything else. Ultimate Spider-Man massively messed around with every aspect of Spider-Man's top heavy mythos, and ended up with something that felt more like Spider-Man than Spider-Man had for years. Ultimate Fantastic Four did the same thing to the F.F and ended up being a fairly good science fiction comic about some unrelated characters in vaguely similar uniforms. My preferred Fantastic Four movie would be one which stayed as close, visually and thematically, to the comic book as the Watchmen movie did to the Watchmen comic. Imagine taking F.F 48-51 and treating them more or less as your storyboard; putting the same kind of effort into Galactus' shorts as they did into Dr Manhattan's wassissname. If that can't happen, then at least set the thing specifically in the 1960s against the background of the Cold War, the Beatles, Atomic War, the Summer of Love, incredibly sexist attitudes, very short skirts. (Surely it matters that The Fantastic Four, the first ever super-hero celebrities, happened at the exact same time as that other Fab Four?) But if even that can't happen, then we know it is possible to wrench a character out of his original context without utterly dismantling him. Mr Cumberbatch has show that you can remove Sherlock Holmes from his world of gas lights and hansom cabs and steam trains and drop him into the world of mobile phones and computers and sex and still have him remain recognizably Sherlock Holmes. Because the character remains the same. Because his relationship to Watson (and Mrs Hudson, and Moriarty, and the police, and his clients) remains recognizably Holmsian.

Of course Reed Richards doesn't need to be a resistance leader. But he does have to be old and stuffy. Of course Ben doesn't have to be a World War II veteran. But he does need to be New York Jewish wisecracker.  

I can cope with the F.F exploring an alien dimension rather than being astronauts. Particularly if the Negative Zone is going to be a thing. If some of the villains are going to come from the Negative Zone and the Fantastic Four are going to be Negative Zone explorers then it makes sense for their powers to come from the Negative Zone rather than Outer Space. 

And the Human Torch effects look cool. 

And Doctor Doom looks like Doctor Doom, and not, say, a cloud of purple gas.

But, oh, for Jack's sake....

The Fantastic Four have been "re-imagined" as a group of kids, under the tutelage of an elderly scientist named Franklin Richards who actually has to say all-I-want-to-know-is-where-are-my-children at one point. Reed is bespectacled teen-aged nerd stumbling wide eyed into great big science thing and being shy around Sue and generally trying to be Peter Parker . 

There has been much speech about how it would be a good thing if there were more characters in movies who were not white dudes.

I agree that it would be a good thing if there more characters in movies who were not white dudes. If Johnny is going to be black and his dad is going to be a black then I am really not at all sure why his sister can't be black as well. Perhaps because Sue and Reed have to be an item and you are only allowed to have movies in which a black lady in love with a white man if that's the main thing the movie is about? (In which case, why not have a black Reed Richards as well? What possible reason is there for this Fantastic Four not to be an all-black team? Why am I even talking about this when it basically doesn't matter?) 

My question was going to be: wouldn't it also be a good thing if there were characters in movies who were older white men, older black men, older women -- if every character in every movie wasn't automatically about 17? Wouldn't it also be a good thing if the great -- the greatest -- American graphic novel about the 1950s nuclear family who get amazing powers to fight commies and aliens and planet eating space gods in purple shorts didn't have to be re-imagined as the story of Wise Old Franklin Richards and how he mentored four young outsiders, helping one to reach his full potential and one to learn to be a team player and one to overcome his callous upbringing and I to open up her heart and let other people in....

Apparently, Reed is not going to be able to stretch his body. No, Reed is going to be able to warp space around himself so his body appears to stretch. 

I can hardly bear to look.

The Ant-Man one, one the other hand, I rather like, and it's pretty obvious why. 

The Fantastic Four and Superman are like geek Holy Writ. They need to be treated with respect. Preferably reverence. Ant-Man isn't even my tenth favorite character. There have been bits and bobs of fun stuff done with him over the years, like when he accidentally created the evil robot Ultron, but that job's been given to Tony Stark for the movie franchise. 

Stan Lee eventually spotted that a character whose only power is to make himself small isn't all that interesting. He reasoned that if a character can use magic pixie dust to make himself very very small then surely he could use that same pixie dust to embiggen himself. Changing his name from Ant-Man to Gi-Ant Man was actually rather inspired. I bet a very small amount of money that they're saving that for the post cred of this movie. 

So, I don't specially care if this movie is faithful to the Myth of Ant-Man and am happy to let it stand on it's own six feet. At one level, it seems to be about as generic a superhero trailer as you could imagine, from the New York skyline in the opening shot, to the sliding doors opening on the big science room that looks and awful lot like the Fantastic Four's big science room to someone saying "Are you ready to become the hero you were meant to be?" Right at the end our hero indicates that he thinks Ant-Man is a bit of a lame name and you can just hear the director saying "No...More like Robert Downey Jnr!" in the background. There is some kind of argument between the guy who invented the shrinking suit and some other guy, and our hero, wearing a Red Suit (that looks a little bit like a very olden days Ant Man costume) seems to have a fight with a baddie wearing a Yellow Suit (that makes those of us who know about these things say "Aha! Yellow Jacket".) I fully expect the argument to be between Hank Pym's bosses, who want the shrinky powers to be used for military purposes and Hank Pym who wants it only to be used for the betterment of mankind, but that's not in the trailer. It's just the kind of thing that this kind of superhero movie tends to be about. 

But if you are going to make a superhero trailer, this is how you ought to do it. I don't want to be lectured about the philosophical ramifications of people with superpowers. I don't want to be introduced to each character one by one. I don't even specially want a recap of the origin. I want to know how much fun a movie about an incredible shrinking superhero is going to be. And in this case the answer seems to be "quite a lot of fun". In two minutes we see him running alongside giant ants; bungie jumping into some teeny tiny tube; running along the barrel of a gun; running around a children's toy train track and derailing Thomas the Tank Engine. 

It is very possible that the trailer has shown us all the movie's highlights. It is very possible that this is one of those films where they put a few highlights in specifically so they've got something for the trailer.

But right now, Ant-Man is the superhero movie I'm actively looking forward to. 

Now then...

Have there been any other trailers recently?




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-250

I cannot say how much I hated this trailer. I do not understand how dearly beloved characters — or, as I suppose we must learn to say, "franchises" — get into the hands of people who don't understand them. In some cases who actively dislike them.

Who is this stuff for? I have complained before that children are aware of funny pirates that go "arrrr!" long before they have had a chance to be scared of Long John Silver; that people's first exposure to Dracula is in the form of Vampires Love Underpants. Yes, I have admitted that, for me, the Real Star Wars, the Primary Star Wars is Roy Thomas's comic; but we are raising up a generation for whom Star Wars (and Harry Potter, and Spider-Man, and Doctor Who, and the Lord of the Rings) were Lego figurines first and everything else afterwards.

Apart from anything else, this stuff is out of date. Thirty years of of date, and frankly it was already a bit old hat in 1986. But it is very nearly 50 years since the live-action Batman first appeared on TV, and we still, with a terrible, tedious reflexology begin every, single essay on comic books with the words "KAPOW! SMASH!" usually followed by "COMICS AREN'T JUST FOR KIDS".

Well, no; they are not. But it would be nice if there were comics that kids were actually able, or indeed legally permitted, to read. It has been said by cleverer people than me that Stan Lee raised the target demographic of super-hero comics from aged 10 to about aged 14. I encountered Spider-Man when I was 8. Yes, there was stuff which went over my head. There is stuff in Winnie-the-Pooh which went over my head. But there was no doubt that I was reading about a kid who was slightly older than me, who got bullied at school, with a fussy "mum" and amazing powers and scary baddies and cliffhanger endings.

Alan Moore to some extent forswore "darkness" in the years after Watchmen, and tried out things like 1963 and Tom Strong and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — re-embracing his inner KAPOW! Frank Miller, admittedly, continued to embrace his inner spartan. But the movies have never moved on. It's as if Tim Burton expected Michael Keaton to ask the chicks if they wouldn't mine jiving a cup of java juice before laying down some hep grooves and burning their draft cards because dammit, that how Spider-Man spoke and that's obviously the last word in revisionist realism. (And yes, things really have become so predictable that we are looking back on the '89 Batman movie — which was little more than a collection of scenery for Jack Nicholson to chew — if not exactly with nostalgia, then at any rate with a sense of relief.) 

So yes, by all means, the Batman - Superman team. Batman "vee" Superman if you absolutely must. The Famous Batman used to stand in for Superman in weeks when Bud Collyer needed time off to recover from all the breakfast cereal he'd been eating. It was never very interesting. They were too nice, too similar. If you absolutely have to have groups of good guys, they need to be good guys who basically don't agree with each other. And a very long time ago someone spotted that Superman and Batman could be played as good guys who didn't agree about what being a good guy meant. Who maybe didn't even agree about what was "good". 

Superman: bright, shiny, noble, law-abiding, Boy Scout, almost to the point of being naive.

Batman, dark, dark urban, dark vigilante, the dark Dark Knight, the Dark Knight Darkens. 

Dark Batman is more interesting than the silly Batman (who never quite existed outside of the KAPOW! television series). Dark Batman is more in keeping with the basic premise of a character built of rage. But just because Dark Batman is cool is does not follow that Dark Superman and Dark Spider-Man and Dark Paddington Bear would be equally cool. The darker the dark character is the more he needs a bright character character to stand next to. And the brighter the bright character is the darker and cooler the dark, cool one will look. (This is the point of Robin.)

This is one of the things the X-Men movies fumbled very badly: they were so in love with Wolverine that they allowed Cyclops to be a wimp. And Cylcops cannot be a wimp. Cyclops must be tall and moral and impressive and heroic precisely because that makes Wolverine darker and scarier in comparison. 

Superman has a very simple narrative core. And yes, I know that this narrative core did not drop fully formed from the brow of Siegel and Schuster. There was a time when Superman was not yet Superman; when he couldn't fly and dropped wife-beaters out of windows and worked for a guy called George at a paper called the Star. The myth of Superman didn't arrive in a single blinding revelation; it grew. (And yes, it continues to grow. Pa and Ma Kent used to have always been dead, but now they have always been still alive.) But if there is one thing that has been consistent in every incarnation from cornflake packet to movie serial, it has been Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White. Not in any great big structuralist sense ("aha, of course, there must always be a Hero and a Hero's Love and a Hero's Friend and a Hero's Irrascible Boss Who Keeps Saying Don't Call Me Chief.") Just in the sense that that's how it has always been. That's the Tradition. There's this geeky little newspaperman, rather shy, very old fashioned; and there is this hot young newspaperlady, especially at a time when hot young newspaperladies weren't all that common, and the geeky little reporter is crazy about the lady reporter but he is outclassed, outshone, literally eclipsed by the BLOODY AMAZING GODLIKE SUPERHERO who keeps rescuing her and she doesn't suspect, not even for a moment, well, maybe she does, sometimes, just a little bit, that the geeky little man she hardly notices and the BLOODY AMAZING HERO are, get this, THE SAME PERSON.

Superman isn't about what would happen if an alien landed on earth. Superman isn't about how the human race would react to a god/God/ in their midst. Superman is about a perfectly ordinary little man who is also a god.

(And yes, once you have spotted that and told stories about bald headed supercriminals and little men in funny hats who disappear if you say their name backwards then of course you can squint your eyes and say "but in the 'language of the night' isn't the perfectly ordinary little man who no one pays much account to who is also God quite a lot like a much bigger and more special story?" Although I don't think that anything very interesting often follows from that observation.) 

So: I cannot say how much I hated this trailer.

FIRST we have dark, dark series of logos, and dark dark musical chords, and someone's voice speaking over a black screen and a dark, dark view of a New York / Metropolis skyline because all superhero trailers have to begin with a view of the New York / Metropolis skyline, because that says to people "it's okay, this is in the real world, it's not skiffy". (Nerd-trailers begin with a picture of stars or planets for the same reason.)

THEN we have dark pretentious voice-overs asking the sorts of DEEP PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS that no-one would ever ask about a comic-strip character who wears blue tights. The main claim appears to be that being powerful is a Bad Thing in itself, because if you are powerful, people will want to follow you, and Lord Acton said that thing about absolute power corrupting absolutely.

I think that the thing about absolute power corrupting absolutely had to do with giving absolute political power to an individual. I think the idea is that if you or I or David Cameron were given the kind of political that Sadamm Hussien or Kim Jong-Un has, we would be tempted to use it and inevitably become as cruel and erratic as they are. The theory is not, I think, that weight-lifters are more immoral than biologists, and that Olympic weight-lifters are more immoral than those who compete at a club level and that therefore a man who could life a Soviet Space Capsule with one hand is likely to be completely immoral.

People who are better at recognizing voices than me think that it's Lex Luther speaking, so it maybe that we are supposed to listen to the pretentious voice-overs and think "what a load of obvious nonsense, I sure hope no-one falls for any of that" as opposed to "those are really interesting questions about the myth of Superman that have never occurred to anyone before, I am sure interested about how the film is going to Explore them." 

THEN we have scenes of people seeming to worship Superman in a way that no-one has ever done in the comic.

THEN we get a close up a statue of Superman, in an empty space (probably intended to recall Ground Zero) over which someone has scrawled "false god".

And we have dark shots of Batman, looking dark, thinking dark thoughts in square boxes.

And then we have lots of explosions.

And then we get him darkly confronting Superman in the dark.

(Has Batman been taken in by obviously silly propaganda by Lex Luthor? In which case is the rebooted Batman is a fool and a villains stooge? Or does Batman agree with the Big Philosophical Questions and think that the existence of Superman is a Bad Thing? In which case is the rebooted Batman a superhero who doesn't agree with the idea of superheroes?)

But anyway: that's very much where we are the moment. Big philosophical questions that no-one should ever have asked with explosions in the place where answers ought to be.  

Doctor Who fans talk about "my Doctor". My Doctor is the one with the scarf; your Doctor is the one with the stick of celery; his Doctor is the one with the plimsoles and the awful scripts. So, yes, just because my Superman is Christopher Reeve's doesn't mean that your Superman can't be Grant Morrison's or Smallville or the DC Animated Universe.

But are there really really really going to be kids for whom "my Superman" is a dark statue of dark darkness in a dark city with "false god" scrawled darkly across the darkness?

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Epiphany experienced while drinking coffee and muffins in a hipster cafe in the trendiest street in England.

I do not especially like comic books,
and never have.

I have always liked superheroes,
and still do.

I am pretty sure
this makes me
a bad person