* Eve Tushnet reviews the bloody blue bejesus out of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen here and here. (That second link is weird, but it should show you four separate posts on the movie.)
* Speaking of Watchmen, Curt Purcell continues to insist, Linda Richmon-like, that the “logical conclusions” of the superhero genre are neither logical nor conclusions. Discuss. Actually, I agree with Curt that “logical conclusion” is overstating the case a bit, since as he points out with a clever comparison of Dr. Manhattan to the Squadron Supreme’s Hyperion, there are any number of ways “what would superheroes really do?” can be taken. But I think he brushes it all off a bit too completely. Most the the superhero stories we’re discussing are self-contained; they can’t take place in the corporate shared universes that exist, like DC or Marvel’s, because they upset the delicate balancing act required by those universes. For example, Marvel prides itself on being a more “realistic” universe than DC’s, so you can’t have a President Nighthawk and you can’t have Reed Richards phase out fossil fuels by having us fill our tanks with Kirby Krackle instead. DC has a set hierarchy in terms of which superheroes are the biggest deals, so you can’t have a godlike supervillain like Black Adam just walk up to Batman and pull his head off, nor can you have Golden Age Flash be more popular than Wally West even though, as Tom Spurgeon once put it, that would sort of be like Babe Ruth coming out of retirement but people are still more interested in Derek Jeter. What the superhero stories that purport to take the genre to their “logical conclusions” do is take certain ideas inherent to the genre much, much further than the shared-universe structure could ever allow them to do without falling apart at the seams. In that sense they really would be “concluding” stories for those universes as we know them–which is why many of them are literally apocalyptic or Ragnarokian in nature even when removed from those universes. So there’s definitely something more to such stories than simply being “a tour-de-force that takes superheroes remarkably far in a relatively unusual direction”–in many cases, certainly in the better cases, they really would break the average superhero comic if they were attempted in that context. But of course that’s because of the various business considerations and weird historical quirks that led to the creation of the Marvel Universe and the ad hoc assembly of the DC Universe, and thence what was considered by superhero creators and fans to be “normal,” not anything inherent to the genre per se.
* Here are seven clips from Caprica, the upcoming Battlestar Galacitca prequel-pilot-movie. I’m not watchin’ ’em but I hope they’re good.
* Wow, terrible news about shoddy subtitle translations on the DVD version of Let the Right One In. (Via Jason Adams.)
* Finally, here are some pictures of Patti Smith, who is attractive in them.
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Well, Sean, of course there are ideas inherent in the genre, but there’s no trajectory inherent in those ideas. They have no predetermined direction or endpoint. Those things have to be supplied by creative decisions. It’s natural to wonder why the much more powerful villains like Black Adam don’t just hand Batman his head, but that’s not to say it would necessarily happen if you turned the characters over to a creator with no strings attached. Nobody would have to tell that story, and if they did, they would be choosing to do so rather than performing a syllogism. It hardly makes sense to ask whether it would happen if superheroes really existed, because if that were the case, we have no idea what the superhero landscape would actually look like.
But to get down to brass tacks, my real beef with these kinds of “deconstructions” is the “logical conclusion” that under every costume is psychosexual dysfunction and/or fascism. That’s the same damn complaint we heard from Wertham and Legman, and it’s one of the central themes of Watchmen. Sure, superheroes can be depicted/interpreted in that light, but Moore and Snyder seem to believe that in doing so, they’re exposing the whole genre’s dirty little secret. I suspect you’ll agree, that’s hardly the case.
Carnival of souls
* I don’t have any idea why, but apparently I never linked to my friend Kiel Phegley’s epic interview with Art Spiegelman. Done and done. Say what you will about Spiegelman’s blend of self-effacement and ego–saying nobody wanted what he…
This is probably as good a place as any to talk about this, but I’m thinking the Let the Right One In subtitles brouhaha is kind of overblown. I say that as somebody who only recently saw the movie on DVD, so I experienced the “bad” translation. And looking at the comparisons on that site, I don’t think the intent or meaning or emotion of the scenes was lost by a poorer translation, and definitely not to the extent that he seems to think. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to trying to determine the meaning of the text from a less-than-perfect translation in my various experiences of foreign material (foreign films, manga, anime, whatever), but it really didn’t bother me. Of course, while I liked the movie, I didn’t find it to be a mindblowing reinvention of the vampire genre or anything, so those who have ascribed a sort of religious fervor to their support of it would probably disagree. But while it will probably be good to have a better translation, I don’t think the one on the DVD was so terrible as to ruin the experience. That’s my two cents.
Sean,
I responded to one of your comments here at length:
http://arche-arc.blogspot.com/2009/03/exclusion-of-one-conclusion.html
Sean,
I responded to one of your comments here at length:
http://arche-arc.blogspot.com/2009/03/exclusion-of-one-conclusion.html
Sean,
I responded to one of your comments here at length:
http://arche-arc.blogspot.com/2009/03/exclusion-of-one-conclusion.html
Invincible again
* There are a few interesting responses to my review of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible the other day. First up, in the comments, Tim O’Neil points out that many of the book’s virtues are shared (and pre-dated) by Erik Larsen’s Savage…