King of Komics, Part I: First they came for the mutants...

First off guys - all what, one of you? - I'm sorry to say the Thor review I was talking about just ain't happening. My film major friend Dom, who was gonna guest-blog the review, is too busy with all his stuff to get it done (you can catch his most recent short film, The End, here) and since by now a review would be so far past the point of relevance anyway there's no reason to bother. I'll say it was definitely my favorite superhero movie of this past summer, and I loved how it didn't give two shits about its romance sub-plot, because who the fuck does in a superhero movie? The production design was spot-on, it totally captured the cosmic, sci-fi tech aesthetic Jack Kirby endowed the original comics with. Seeing those fantasy realms so fully realized was refreshing change of pace, considering how disappointingly earthbound the genre usually is, and I was surprised by how well they meshed with the sequences on our humble planet. Some people thought all the bird's-eye shots were distracting, but it's a movie where Gods look down at earth and pay us a visit from their astral plane, so to me it was a clever cinematographic choice; Kenneth Branagh is the man when he's following an internal logic instead of randomly adapting As You Like It to 19th century Japan. Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston were outstanding as Thor and Loki, respectively, even when the writing occasionally failed them (particularly the latter, who would have been better off written in the vein of those great Shakespearean rat-bastards). All in all, Thor is a well put together, thoroughly satisfying superhero flick that pulled off an epic scope with just the right mix of humor, action and mythological gravitas. Also Anthony Hopkins was in it and he was wearing an eye-patch. And there was a black dude in a suit of shining gold armor. It was awesome.

Although it had a pretty positive consensus, a number of celebrated writers and critics had some big problems with Thor. I couldn't help but find most of these cases to be astonishingly petty and spiteful, as if they disliked it for no other reason than they had to dislike the summer's biggest blockbuster. It was interesting to see such respected figures react with such personal bile and glibness; I wonder what going on in their heads as they saw the movie belied such insecure, venomous lashings-out.

Did I mention it had Anthony Hopkins with an eye-patch and a black dude in gold armor? 'Cause
that happened. It was awesome.

And now onto what this post was supposed to be about: the King of Comics.

If you know anything about superhero comics than you're familiar with Jack Kirby. He is perhaps the single most acclaimed and influential figure in the medium (the only person I can imagine coming close is Will Eisner) - Grant Morrison has equated him to the William Blake of comics. There's a reason he's called the King. I'm not going to delineate his incredible accomplishments or how he formed, innovated, REVOLUTIONIZED!! everything about the industry; hundreds of others have done a more comprehensive job at that than I ever could. But I am going to touch on one thing that I feel most people have missed.

Jack Kirby defined the DC and Marvel Universes.

Okay, so that's a very flippant way of putting what I'm trying to say, let me explain. We all know that Kirby created or co-created most of the Marvel Universe, and we know that his groundbreaking Fourth World saga became a cornerstone of the DC Universe, but I'm talking about something bigger. When people debate why Marvel is better than DC or vice-versa, they're not really arguing whether or not the Hulk is cooler than Superman; both worlds themselves are utterly distinct on a foundational level, and have their own unique aesthetic properties. These two worlds appeal to people in very separate ways, and I'd argue that is what fanboys battle over in the greasy, pathetic cesspools below the Android's Dungeon.

So what makes Marvel and DC so fundamentally different, and how did the King shape those fundamental differences? It all comes down to the baddies. What makes villains so important in superhero comics (besides the whole causing the story's conflict thing) is that they illuminate some aspect of the hero that would otherwise be left obscured. They serve to contextualize the hero, providing added dimensions to the ideas they embody: all great supervillains riff off of and further explore an element of the superhero's thematic core, either as twisted parallels or antitheses. We learn more about what Batman represents by juxtaposing him with the Joker or Two-Face; pitting Spidey against the Vulture and Doc Ock helps shed light on what our hero's all about. Kirby was the first to advance the conceit that superheroes and villains - like the figures of classical mythology - are heightened, abstract personifications of universal ideas, their battlegrounds the stages where they play out grand debates...WITH PROTON BLASTS!

It's Spring, 1966 and the Marvel Universe is still getting bigger and bigger, ever-expanding after the Big Bang that was Fantastic Four #1 five years ago. Stan Lee is content with things the way they are, with simply continuing to add new faces and circumstances to Marvel's ever-increasing batch of (lucrative!) icons. The rest of the bullpen, however, feels confined under Lee and have trouble reconciling their current situation with their loftier artistic/philosophical ambitions. Steve Ditko's starting to devote himself to Objectivism in all its forms; he'll leave Amazing Spider-Man in August. Kirby's work now can barely contain his cosmic imagination, which pushes the medium past what it was capable of at the time to craft a Space Age mythology. He wants to give a greater meaning to this universe he has created, and he thinks to himself, "if I can use a supervillain to contextualize a superhero, I can create a supervillain big enough to go up against all the heroes and contextualize their entire world!"

AND LO, MORTAL, SO DAWNS THE COMING OF GALACTUS...!

In Fantastic Four #48, Kirby introduced Galactus, the Big Bad of the Marvel Universe. He ain't the final boss of MvC3 for nuthin'. The fabulous image above is from Lee/Kirby's Thor #169 (Oct. 1969), and it pretty much lays out Galactus' shtick. He's the Devourer of Worlds, a tremendous Godlike being above myth, a legendary force of nature beyond reproach or opinion, beyond our mortal conceptions of good and evil. He survives by eating planets, so he comes back again and again to menace the heroes of Earth when it comes time to feed. What's important is that he's not doing it out of malicious intentions - he's not some diabolical monster like Loki or the Red Skull - it's just that a guy's gotta eat, right? You can't fault him for being self-interested and not wanting to starve to death, can you? Lee puts it really well in this splash page: "The puny survivors flee! I shall make no move to stop them! For I am indifferent to their fate!"

There it is, Galactus as the embodiment of indifference, of our natural inclination toward selfish inaction and apathy. That's the archenemy of the Marvel Universe. The MU isn't really concerned with the dichotomy of good vs. evil (which is why Mephisto feels so out-of-place in it), nor is it particularly conscious of it's own myth-making or iconography. Marvel was always considered the more naturalistic and grounded of the Big Two - that's what differentiated it from boring old DC Comics in the 60s, the flawed characters and real-world problems and all that revolutionary jazz - so it's appropriate that the MU is framed around a social reality affecting our society. The Marvel heroes stem from a tradition of social activism; at their very essences, all of them are taking a big stand against indifference.

Let's start with Spider-Man, since he's both the most obvious example and the most enduringly popular Marvel character. After he gets his powers, Peter Parker uses them to rake in cash as an entertainer. Selfish, perhaps, but...well yeah it's a pretty damn selfish way to use superpowers. Then he witnesses a robbery and, thinking there's no reason to get involved, does nothing to stop the burglar as he runs by Peter. This is something the movie screwed up big time: it gave Peter a reason to let the burglar get away. In the comics, he is simply predisposed to inaction, and that was the entire point. He pays for it when that same burglar ends up murdering dear old Uncle Ben that very night. "With great power there must also come -- great responsibility!" From that point on, Peter abandons his selfishness, vowing to never make the same mistake again - as Spider-Man he now fights against the pervasive apathy that led his uncle's death.

Next we have...how about Captain America? He was the first Marvel superhero after all, barring Namor and the original Human Torch. Cap punched Hitler in the jaw a full nine months before the US entered World War II, at a time when public sentiment was entrenched in isolationism. While the rest of America sat idly by, choosing not to intervene in the systematic execution of millions, scrawny Steve Rogers enlisted in the Army and volunteered for an incredibly dangerous super-soldier experiment. He refused to be crippled by the same inaction that plagued his beloved country, and inspired others to do the same (both in the comics and out of them). The Cap movie messed this up, too, but that movie messed a whole lotta things up. He and Bucky thwarted Nazi saboteurs and spy rings long before Pearl Harbor allowed them to thwart actual Nazis on the front lines.

We find a similar thread in the Fantastic Four's origin story. In the original tale, we're at the beginning of the Space Race. Those damn dirty Soviets got the heads-up on us and we've got a lot of catching up to do. In the Marvel Universe, America just can't get its act together, we're all too listlessly complacent to get anything done while those zany communists are up there making a space cannon or something. It's up to Reed Richards to build his own private rocket and put our flag on the moon before the cosmonauts get there. The story's been updated again and again, but every time the principle is still the same. Now it's Reed discovering an anomaly in space heading towards earth and saying, "hey these cosmic rays I'm seeing could be pretty dangerous, we should probably take a closer look at this or something," to which his colleagues, the government and the general public respond with a resounding "meh." As we know, Reed and his true believers get the last laugh when those cosmic rays give them all cool powers.

It's interesting to note that, at the climax of Galactus' first appearance, the Four scare him away with the threat of mutually assured destructing, bringing the greatest social concern of the Cold War to the attention of cosmic beings. Just sayin'.

The Hulk came next in Marvel's publication history; he, too, fits the mold. We're introduced to Bruce Banner as the head physicist for a modern-day Manhattan Project -- think of him as Oppenheimer without the humanity. He's aloof, reserved, emotionally withdrawn; about as indifferent as a person can get. He's also the man behind the gamma bomb, a WMD that makes Fat Man look like a spitball. And. He. Doesn't. Give. A. Fuck. So it's poetic justice that, after he's suddenly struck with conscience, Banner gets blasted with his own doomsday device and transforms into a furious, angst-ridden monster, a giant green cautionary tale on indifference toward human suffering. The same idea applies to Tony Stark, who didn't care that his career amounted to providing the world with tools for death and destruction...until it got him kidnapped and stuck with a battery for a heart. So to save the world from his own disinterest he becomes Iron Man! As Stark put it in the movie, which this time got it completely right, "I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend them and protect them. And I saw that I had become part of a system that is comfortable with zero-accountability...I came to realize that I had more to offer this world than just making things that blow up."

Alright, who's left? Thor? Yeah, he definitely needed a lesson in humility, but the real reason daddy banished him was because he was set against the status quo (great link, btw): a non-aggression pact with the fucking Frost Giants, fer Chrissake! When Thor comes back he's no longer arrogant, but set against the complacent order of things more than ever. Doctor Strange? Same deal as Tony Stark, but with medical billing instead of weapons manufacturing and magic instead of a robot suit. The X-Men? For all the people who sling hate-filled "muties!", there must be many more who simply aren't invested in the issue enough to bother with mutant equality; it's a lot like the big problem facing gay marriage legislation outside of the South, I imagine. Daredevil? Indifference enshrouds his world like a fog. The Kingpin became as powerful as he is simply because no one bothered to try and stop him, and now his omnipresent influence can only be casually accepted as The Way Things Are. No one really cares about anything Daredevil does because they know he can't be anything more than a nuisance to the Kingpin's untouchable crime empire. Yet in spite of it all he continues to fight the good fight...and if anyone arsed themselves to look, including ol' Mr. Fisk, they'd discover what a difference he's actually making. It's all spelled out pretty explicitly in Born Again.

Have I covered all the bases yet?

As you can see, this theme always lurked just underneath the surface of Marvel's foundations. But that's all it was, a recurring idea buried deep within each individual mythos, only loosely connected to a greater whole. Kirby was perceptive enough to recognize this thread and, with the introduction of Galactus, brought it to light. Solidified it. Through Galactus, this cosmic God of Indifference constantly in the back of every other character's mind, Kirby was able to thematically unite the shared universe in a way never before seen; solely by the virtue of the character's existence he formally cemented the struggle against inaction as the core, fundamental tenet of the Marvel Comics world.

Tune in next time for Part II, when I do the exact same thing with DC. Fun stuff, I know!

At da moofies: Drive: A Real Hero and a Real Human Being

Wow, guys. Now THIS was a pleasant surprise. What was advertised as some B-list action thriller turned out to be - thanks to mesmerizing cinematography, outstanding performances from the entire cast, a killer story, a propulsive euro-synthpop soundtrack and striking art-house direction from Bronson's Nicolas Refn - hands-down the best movie of the year. If you haven't, now is the time to go out and see it. If you're reading this odds are you have time to kill. Also lots of spoilers, so there's that.

Drive at first seems to defy classification; it blends genres and styles as diverse as splatter, chase, crime drama and neo-noir with 60s antiheroes, David Lynch send-ups and 80s burnout aesthetics. The result is highly stylized, existentialist thrill ride...but trust me, it's a lot less pretentious than I'm making it sound! Anyway, what surprised me most about the movie - and this is something many people have picked up on - was the one genre that cohesively united all of Drive's disparate elements; it's totally a superhero film. It doesn't look like a superhero film at first (it hardly plays out like the dime-a-dozen origin stories on the screen these days) but if The Dark Knight showed us there could be a movie about a superhero that wasn't a superhero movie, this film has now proven the opposite. This is a superhero movie that is not about a superhero...or, more accurately, not about a superhero we instantly recognize as such. Refn, for his part, has commented extensively on the genre's influence on Drive. QUOTE BOMB:

"...Drive was essentially an allegory of a superhero in the making. He became a superhero at the end of the movie and that's why it's a happy ending...In the beginning, he is there for her as a human being and when she needs him as a hero, he's there as a hero. He is what you need him to be. It's why he will continue to roam the landscape being a driver of the night, the superhero with a scorpion sign on his back as he protects the innocents against injustice."

"By day, he was a human being, by night he was a hero. And the movie is about his transformation into this superhero, by bringing his human morals into the hero role, so that he does what he does for the right reasons."

"You can kind of say that the Driver is a man who is caught between two worlds. At night, he is a man in costume who roams the streets of L.A., wanting to protect the innocent. And in the day, he's a car mechanic and a stuntman. And through the course of the movie, he realizes he's schizophrenic in a sense that he doesn't have two personalities, but he's two people. And he, through the course of the movie, becomes the superhero that he plays in films, and saves the innocents against the evil … it's mythological storytelling, which is what superhero stories are."

Riding (OR SHOULD I SAY DRIVING HURHURRR) on Refn and Ryan Gosling's words, I want to take a closer look at how the aesthetics, symbols and conventions of the superhero genre have informed Drive. For starters, our protagonist is referred to only as the "Driver," a superhero-esque codename relating to his persona and abilities; the alias wouldn't feel out of place among one of the X-Men. Like all the great superheroes, the Driver is very much an archetype - he's that same antihero stock character as the Man With No Name or Frank Bullitt or any of the samurai Toshiro Mifune played, you've seen him in various media dozens of times before. Of course the Driver's a bit of a deconstruction of that trope too - his stoicism, rather than making him seem tougher, primarily softens him, his unassuming toothpick a stark contrast Clint Eastwood's gruff cigarillo. But this still plays into the superhero dynamic, because when in the last 25 years have superheroes not been all about deconstruction?

By day, the enigmatic Driver is a stunt...uhh, driver for Hollywood action films. Meta right? It's like this was written by Grant Morrison or something. By night, though, he's a wheelman-for-hire, the best at what he does (sound familiar?). But when innocent people - his neighbor/love interest Irene and her young son Benicio - are put in danger by the mob, the Driver abandons this selfish use of his skills and becomes a superhero (also sound familiar?), striking against organized crime from the darkness with impeccable combat prowess (also also sound familiar?). What most soundly cements the superhero analogy is the fact that he dons a costume during his nighttime exploits: a white satin jacket with a gold scorpion embroidered on the back. It may be more subtle than the capes and tights we're used to, but it is still quite clearly a superhero costume as it is utterly unique, it is worn solely when he asserts his extraordinary abilities and, most importantly, it invokes an animal totem.

Historically, animal totems have played an enormous role in the creation of superhero identities. Bruce Wayne was inspired to take on the archetypal qualities of a bat in what is perhaps the most iconic origin story. Peter Parker famously had the characteristics of a spider thrust upon him, and the best Spidey stories in recent memory have meditated on the totemic nature of Spider-Man's world and of superhero comics in general. Like these heroes and so many others, the Driver is conscious of his emblem, and when he puts on his jacket he takes up the mantle of the scorpion. It hearkens back to that cornerstone of all great superheroes and superhero stories, mythology. Specifically, the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which the Driver paraphrases to his archenemy. And here's where things get deeeeeeeeeeep...

You know the story. Scorpion needs to make it over the river so he tries to hitch a ride on top of a frog. Frog is afraid scorpion will sting him. Scorpion explains that if he did that they would both drown. So frog ferries scorpion along and wouldn't you know it, just before they reach land scorpion stings him in the back, dooming them both. Frog asks why scorpion would pull that shit, to which scorpion responds, "that is my nature." The question of human nature is what Drive is all about: are individuals predisposed to behave by a certain irreversible nature? Are they predisposed to conflicting drives struggling for dominance? Are they able to transcend or change their nature? Can they transform or elevate themselves by embracing their drives? Are people capable of understanding or recognizing what they even are? Can we be a real human being and a real hero? It's a regular Jodorowsky, this one.

There's a great scene that perfectly sums up the question Drive poses. The Driver and Benicio are watching a cartoon together early in the film, and Driver asks the boy if a shark in the cartoon is the bad guy.  Benicio says yes. "How can you tell he’s the bad guy?," Driver asks. "He’s a shark," the boy casually rationalizes. The Driver inquires, "Are all sharks bad?" and the young child nods his head. The scene could easily be (read: IS) referring to a number of characters in the movie, the most obvious being the Driver himself. It's also referencing Benicio's father, whom the audience is predisposed to hate until he actually appears onscreen and turns out to be a great person thrown into awful, inescapable circumstances. And to Driver's mentor (his Alfred, if you will), Shannon, another good guy who makes a bad choice that leads to disastrous consequences. Perhaps even to the antagonist Bernie Rose, a ruthless mobster who seems to genuinely regret the measures he must take to protect himself. Are any of these people intrinsically good or bad? Are any of them conscious of their individual human natures, if they even exist? Are their actions and behavior, their drives, determined by innate, instinctive characteristics? At first glance the Driver seems to serve as a profound 'YES' to these questions, but that's the beauty behind his lack of backstory and dialogue. We have no idea what he's thinking or feeling or how his environment may have shaped him; he's a total mystery to us. He's Rorschach without the caption boxes telling us his thoughts.

Compelling stuff, no?

Believe it or not, this digression I've taken ties in perfectly to the superhero stuff I'm supposed to be talking about. But first we have to take one last detour. Remember at the end of Batman Begins, when Bruce and Rachel are talking at the ruins of Wayne Manor? Rachel feels up Bruce's face (if I'm remembering the scene correctly) and declares "This is your mask. Your real face is the one that criminals now fear. The man I loved, the man who vanished...he never came back at all." Well all that is obviously a load of bullshit; it's not a simple dichotomy between Bruce and Batman. Batman is clearly not his true persona, just as his actual voice isn't a constipated chain smoker's. The Batman identity is just as much a mask as millionaire playboy Bruce is, and although Rachel may think otherwise for some ill-defined reason, that is not the personality she is addressing right now. The real person behind these facades, the man you loved and you think vanished, is the one you're fucking talking face-to-face to you dumb bitch: the highly disciplined, driven, perceptive, introspective, resourceful and self-reliant Bruce Wayne. The man who has devoted his life to a higher ideal and uses "Batman" as a tool to realize it.

 Alright, now to get back on track. We're at the final lap, folks! To finish his transformation, the Driver dons a mask to hide his identity near the end of his origin story, completing his superhero costume. Crucially, the mask is taken from his day job, when the Driver needed to look like one of the actors for a car crash scene. It belongs in the realm of secret identity, not superhero. Drive knows better than Rachel, you see; it recognizes that a man's identity, his true nature, is much more nebulous than any clear-cut duality, especially between hero and secret identity. The entities are not so clearly defined - far from it - nor are they completely separate from one another. Perhaps there are elements of both in one another. Perhaps one morphs into the other. If human nature is an unanswerable question, than any attempts to explain it by ghettoizing its aspects into two definitive, opposite camps will ring as false as Rachel's half-baked analysis.

It's funny how similar the ending of Drive is to that of The Dark Knight; both have the protagonist speeding off into the darkness, with the screen cutting to black. The difference is that the ending to The Dark Knight is ominous, because by the picture's end Batman is not supposed to be a hero, while the ending of Drive is hopeful for the opposite reason. We started out with a man without any drive and saw him self-actualize. We saw him fall in love, transcend and become a real hero.

If Drive is any indication, we may soon be seeing a comparable transformation in the superhero film genre. I was once afraid that in the near future the superhero flick would over-saturate the market and go the way of the Western, that the genre would devour itself as people flocked away from the same formulaic origin stories over and over again. We saw a hint of that this summer: Thor, X-Men: First Class and Captain America all did very, very well at the box office (not so much Green Lantern), but they nevertheless failed to meet studio expectations by a great deal. There was no Iron Man among this crop of new franchises, and the only one to come even somewhat close was the first released. In light of seeing the formula applied with such ingenuity and unconventionality in Drive, I'm now confident that the superhero movie will not just survive, but will thrive in ways we have now only begun to see as it is freed from the constraints that once bound it. Yeah, the superhero movie will be fine.

It's just the superhero comic book movies that are gonna be fucked.