-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Apart from anything else, this stuff is out of date.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

-255

“I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.” -- The Mikado

1:

Can you have a "sequel" to a "fairy tale"?

If a fairy tale is a story which ends "and they all lived happily ever after" then the answer is "no", you cannot have a sequel to a fairy tale. Because we have just defined "fairy tale" as "a story which cannot have a sequel".

This is not to say that Cinderella and the Prince did nothing for the rest of their lives. Doubtless they held elegant balls and launched ships and made speeches to the nation at Christmas. It is even possible (let us hope) that Princess Ella used her new-found power to improve the lot of abused scullery maids up and down the country. I suppose they became King and Queen eventually; and I suppose the Prince must have been sad when the King died. But to live happily ever after means to live as happily as anyone can, not to never have a single bad day.

Eventually, Queen Ella and King Charming must have got old. We don't want to see that. We can take it for granted. I think the King probably dies first. The Queen is sad for a bit, of course, but she is a pious lady and believes that they'll be together again in Heaven. She lives on for a few years as a very contented widow, taking the title Queen Mother, and dies at a very advanced age surrounded by children and grandchildren and one very small great grandchild. Which is as happy an ending as anybody gets.

That's why we use the term "fairy tale ending" to mean "everything came out fine in the end". Because everything doesn't usually come out fine in the end in real life.

Because stories lie to us and we shouldn't read them, particularly not to children.

Because stories arbitrarily stop before Prince Charming contracts typhoid fever and Cinderella crashes her golden coach in a tunnel in Paris.

Because a story is a thing made of words, and a fairy tale is a particularly beautiful but particularly artificial creation precisely because it is closed off, finished, complete in itself.

As a matter of fact, the Cinderella story doesn't begin with the words "once upon a time". It begins "There was once a rich man whose wife lay sick..."  But that's still a beginning.

Stuff must have happened before Cinderella's mother got sick and her father married a nasty widow with two beautiful but wicked daughters. (It is only in the most vulgar versions of the story that Cinderella's sisters are ugly). But that's where the story starts. You could say things about Cinderalla's life with Baron Hardup before the Baroness got consumption (I assume it was consumption) but they wouldn't be part of the story. They might be part of a different story, but that story wouldn't be worth telling, because right up until her mum died, Cinderella was a perfectly ordinary little girl. (Grown ups sometimes read books about perfectly ordinary little girls to whom nothing interesting ever happens, but that's because they are too old to know any better.) Unless, I suppose, you think that Cinderella was a special little girl from the beginning. That the very moment she was born, a chorus of Fairy Godparents sang to the world that this was the Chosen One whose destiny was to marry the Prince, establish an alliance between House Hardup and House Charming, establish a dynasty, bring peace to the land...

But that's a different story. And it's turned "Cinderella" into a different story, and not such a good one. "Cinderella" is the story of an ordinary little girl who falls in love with a Prince.

(Cinderella was different from other little girls because she was lucky enough to have a fairy godmother. So I suppose you could tell the story of how her godmother came to be a fairy, and if she remembered to send a card for her confirmation, and whether the Vicar minded. But so far as I can see it was normal to invite fairies to Christenings in those days. Things only went wrong if you forgot. And anyway, in the Grimm tale it's the spirit of Cinderella's mother in Heaven who arranges the miracle. That's a much better story.)

So that's the answer to my question. Yes, you can continue telling a fairy story after you have said "and they all lived happily ever after." And yes, you can extend the fairy story backwards and say what happened before you said "once upon a time". But what you would be left with would no longer be fairy tale.

2:

If you are briefed to write a new story about an already existing character, there are two questions you could ask.

a: What was fun about this character to start with? So Let's create more stuff which is fun in just that way!

So if you are creating new Spider-Man stories, it is your job to think of better wisecracks than ever before; ways for Jameson to be meaner than every before; and an animal themed bad-guy who is more ridiculous and more scary than anything Steve Ditko and his assistant ever dreamed up.

If you take this approach, the audience will say "What the hell was the point of that? We already have loads of good Spider-Man stories!"

b: Let's suppose this character and their situation is perfectly real -- what would follow logically and realistically from that?

If you take this approach, it is your job to pretend that no-one apart from you has ever written about Spider-Man before. And to suspend your disbelief and assume that there really was a 15 year old boy with insect-like powers in 1960s New York, and that he really did decide to become an urban vigilante in his pyjamas. What would really have happened?

If you take this approach, the audience will say "What was the point of that? It had absolutely nothing to do with Spider-Man."

Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn was the product of the First Approach. It does all the stuff that Star Trek does on the TV, only more so. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was arguably the product of the second approach: granted that there were such a person as Batman, it asks, what affect would he have on the world? What would the authorities think about him? What would happen when he's too old to carry on?

There are, of course, other approaches as well. Maybe the existing stories were told by unreliable narrators and you are going to reveal that the "real" Conan was a wimp and a braggart and the "real" Sherlock Holmes was a fool. Maybe you are going to tell an origin story in which some unrecognizable character gradually turns into the famous one. (This appears to be the only approach Hollywood now permits. An origin myth for Paddington Bear, forsooth?) And, of course, you might very well decide to slap the character's name on some entirely unrelated property and affect incredulity that anyone ever thought that your Tarzan character would have anything to do with some book by Edgar Rice Borroughs.


3:

In 2001, Marvel Comics did a thing called Ultimate Spider-Man which may have been the last comic I unreservedly loved. (*) The idea, in case you have forgotten, was to do create a new comic, unconnected to the Marvel Universe and 40 years of Spider-Man continuity which would sort-of kind-of retell Spider-Man from scratch, as if it were happening right now, and sort-of kind-of make sense. Spider-Man was no longer a thirty year old college lecturer and photo-journalist married to a supermodel who had experienced the tragic deaths of his entire family, several fiances, and defeated the Mad God of Titan. He was Peter Parker, a 15 year old school kid who was just about to have an unfortunate mishap involving a spider.

The cool thing about this was that it didn't matter if you hadn't read Spider-Man for a decade and didn't know that Peter had sold his soul to Satan in return for the clone of his second dead girlfriend not having been sleeping with the resurrected clone of his worst enemy. You could go back to reading about the young kid whose got superpowers and hasn't figured out how to use them. Which is what was cool about Spider-Man to begin with.

But within within a year — within five years — this new Ultimate Spider-Man was not really recognizable as Spider-Man. He was a pretty much an unrelated character in a similar costume some of whose villains had some of the same names.

Not because the writers hadn't been true to the original brief. They had been. "Let's suppose that Spider-Man is a real kid, in the real world...what would happen?" they asked.

And the answer, of course, was Stuff. And if you a trying to tell a realistic story once Stuff has happened, it can't un-happen. The character grows and mutates and evolves and become a different character.

In the end they killed him off, which I suspect was the plan from the beginning.


4:

Opera-buddy sometimes refers to the Great Underpants Question.

How is it, she asks, that the Famous Five can go on camping holidays that seem to last the whole summer long and never once change their underwear? If we assume that the underpants washing happens off stage, who does the laundry?

This matters more in some universes than in others. It doesn't break genre too much to assume that, from time to time, Frodo and Sam find a bit of water to bath in; and when that happens Sam takes the opportunity to do a bit of laundry as well. (I am not sure if people even wore underwear in Middle-earth. We are all a lot more sensitive to bodily smells than people were in the days when the Queen had a bath once a month whether she needed it or not.) And there are lots of stories in which underwear and laundry and other boring smelly things simply don't exist. Winnie-the-Pooh would be one example. Hamlet would be another.

I think that the the point of the Underpants Question is that it is perfectly okay not to ask it. But once you have asked it, you can't unask it. If, on just one occasion, we decide that we can't go and ask questions about the mysterious foreign gentlemen in the big house because we’ve been sleeping in tents for four days without a change of clothes and smell to high heaven; then we can’t say in the next chapter "oh, everyone was locked in the mysterious foreign gentleman's cellar for three days without needing to go to the loo, but that’s fine, because it’s not that kind of story."

5:

I read the first couple of Timothy Zahn books with enthusiasm, and kept reading the old Marvel comics out of bloody minded loyalty. But I never properly bought into the Star Wars "extended universe".

Of course we want more Star Wars stories; but of course novelisations and sequels are only ever going to be novelisations and sequels. There is no Aristotelean mean between "All you have done is told the exact same story as A New Hope all over again only less well" and "What the hell did that even have to do with Star Wars?"

George seemed to have recognized this in the early days, when he was still talking in terms of a IX or XII part history of the Skywalker clan. Star Wars 2 is not a sequel, he kept saying, it's a different story set in the same universe.

Dispatches came to me from the extruded universe from time to time — Han and Leia were married, with twin children; Chewbacca had died. Luke had got married: to a lady named Mara. Later on it turned out that Jedi were celibate, and always had been. I assume this was covered. Although there were occasional smiles of recognition, this was not a setting I recognized or had much desire to visit. Shadows of the Empire was quite interesting, if a little preoccupied with underpants. Too much Stuff had happened. Each book added a Clone of the Emperor, a New Empire, an Invasion of Cybernetic Cockroaches or a Galactic Civil War. Each book made Star Wars, my Star Wars, my Journey of the Hero to save the Universe from the Emperor's Ultimate Weapon smaller and smaller.

An on-line Star Wars resource tells me that Mrs Skywalker was an agent of Palpatine and "a Force Using operative in her own right". That Anyone can type the words "Force using operative" and still believe that you are talking about Star Wars eplains why I never bought into the Extended Universe. (And now it has been decanonised.)

6:

I suppose this is why the great poets invented Tragedy.

The story of Cinderella and Prince Charming is over because the story teller has declared that it is over: he can't stop someone else from writing, or everyone else from imagining, a story in which they feud and quarrel and then decide it's fairest on the kids if they have as amicable a separation as possible. But the story of Romeo and Juliet is much more satisfactorily over because they are perfectly and irrevocably deaded.

(*) Nova. I positively like Nova. But it's only doing Ultimate Spider-Man again, in the "official" Marvel Universe which seems now to be distinguishable from the Ultimate universe only by checking Nick Fury's skin colour. The point of the the Ultimate Universe was that it was more realistic and less comic-booky than the Marvel Universe, but in the last decade the Marvel Universe has stopped trying to be comic booky. So Nova is a pretty good run on "what if a young lad got crazy superpowers in an otherwise realistic universe." So is Ms Marvel. So, obviously, was the original 1960s Spider-Man. 







If you are interested in fairy tales, you should totally buy my game.

If you enjoy my writing, the best way of encouraging me to write more is to buy my book.

(The second best way is to buy the Kindle version.)

How to Make the Bible Mean Whatever You Want It To Mean - A Very Boring Note

It has been suggested to me that I should have quoted the eucharistic passages from the Gospels more fully. 

It may be that the "revolutionary Christ" theory involves rejecting the "bread and wine" section wholesale (since it seems to come from Paul) and retain the other material as more "authentic".  You could certainly make out a case that Luke's version is a composite of two different versions (note that the wine is passed round twice.) 

This would leave us with something like this. 

MATTHEW

When evening came Jesus was reclining at the table with the twelve...While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying: "Take and eat, this is my body. Then he too the cup, gave thank and offered it to them, saying "Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it answer with you in my father's kingdom. When they had sun a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

MARK

When evening came Jesus arrived with the twelve...While they were eating, Jesus took the bread, gave thank and broke it, and gave it to his disciples say, "Take it: this is my body." Then he took the cup, gave thank and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many" he said to them. "I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God"

LUKE

When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them. "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you the truth, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. After taking the cup he gave thanks and said "Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes." And he took bread, gave thank, and broke it, and gave it to them saying: "This is my body given for you: do this in remembrance of me." In the same way after the supper he took the cup, saying "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you."

Leaving us with: 

FRASER:  

When evening came, Jesus reclined at table with his twelve disciples. And he said to them. "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you the truth, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my father's kingdom. Do this in remembrance of me." When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

If still don't get why he rejects 1 Corinthians as a Paulist invention by holds on to "do this in remembrance of me" as coming from the original left-wing Jesus.