Golden Age Friend Group

Today I installed a whimsical hanging shelf in my office crafted to represent a fire escape. Then I placed some action figures on it. These guys are members and friends of the Justice Society of America, the first super-hero team, its creation dating back to 1940. 
 

Justice Reimagined

To my utter surprise - and maybe it's because my expectations were so low - I did not hate Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021). In fact, I can honestly say that I even enjoyed it, with reservations. This version of the film has more natural humour (though only in sparse doses), Cyborg and Flash are far better developed Batman gets a little more dignity, the action sequences are more effective overall, and the final battle in particular offers genuine jeopardy and suspense--it feels like there are real stakes. The plot actually makes sense now, for the most part. Even Steppenwolf's story is fleshed out, enough to make him an actual villain instead of just CG animation. And we get to see more of Jeremy Irons' Alfred and J.K. Simmons' Commissioner Gordon; both are treats. Amy Adams' Lois Lane doesn't fare quite as well, but she's still more important to the film than she was in the original theatrical release. 

On the downside, the score is terrible except when it includes snippets of Zimmer's themes from past movies. There are still moments that feel out of character for our heroes. There's way too much slow motion. The big new character cameo is welcome to fans, but still feels tacked on. Some sequences could be cut without hurting the film at all. Some of the humanizing moments from the theatrical cut are gone and I miss them, but on the other hand, those cuts make this version more tonally coherent - even if I'm not a fan of Snyder's portentous, somber take on the genre.

As a bonus, comparing this version of Justice League to the theatrical release is a great way to discover the importance of editing.

Crisis on Infinite Budgets

YouTube creator UltraSargent has assembled a really fine-looking trailer that asks the question "What might result if someone adapted Crisis on Infinite Earths with an unlimited budget?" Lots of fun easter eggs for DC fans. 

It Takes a (Wonder) Woman

Placeholder for review. 

Facets of Madness

Here's another in a quickly growing array of bad self-portraits/lazy blog posts. At least there'll be a Wonder Woman review coming soon! 

Fighting for Your Rights by Curbing my Appetites

Maybe I should start wearing a tiara. Yes? No?

Sexist Villain

From Wonder Woman #219, 1975. The story itself is called "World of Enslaved Women!" The villain is called Mchsm, which almost seems like a vowel-less spelling of masochism...nah...couldn't be. 

Lego Therapy

A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of nostalgia, I picked up this Lex Luthor versus Superman and Wonder Woman Lego set - mostly, in truth, for the adorable minifigures.  It took me about an hour to put the robot together, and I marvelled at the little touches; if you look closely, you can see that both the robot and the Superman-destroying pistol it's carrying are powered by little chunks of Kryptonite. Good thing Superman called Wonder Woman for help! (A couple of posts back Jeff asked if I'd constructed the robot from scratch. Sadly, no; it came from a kit.)

Building Lex's robot turned out to be surprisingly therapeutic. During the time it took to build the set, I felt all my stress dissipating; it was really quite remarkable. So two weekends ago I found myself at the Lego store in Southgate mall, where I picked up a couple of Lone Ranger sets and an assortment of extra minifigures. Sylvia and I are going to build the Lone Ranger stuff together this weekend.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I'd forgotten why I loved Lego so much as a boy. Now I remember, and not just with my brain, but with my hands. What a great toy. Lego forever!

The Moonhaulers

When I first saw this calendar sometime back in 1977, I'm sure my face fell in slack-jawed wonder. Some villain had knocked the moon out of its orbit, and only the Justice League (and Supergirl) could put it back in its rightful place! The concept is ludicrous, but the great Neal Adams somehow makes it work. Those kilometres-long harnesses bolted across the face of the moon are wonderful, and look at the strain on the faces of Superman and Supergirl. Adams totally sells it. Everyone has a role to play; presumably Green Lantern is either shoring up the harnesses so they don't snap, or helping push; possibly both. Wonder Woman is using her lasso to help arrest the Moon's fall, even though in this era she couldn't fly under her own power, so I'm not sure what's going on there. Compared to the titans putting all their godlike energy into the effort, Hawkman's Thanagarian police cruiser probably isn't adding much thrust to the package, but all for one and one for all. I suppose Aquaman, Green Arrow and Black Canary are on board to provide damage control if the ship blows some fuses.

As for Batman, well...thanks for coming out, Bruce, but standing there and yelling "Push! Harder!" can't be that helpful in this situation.

An A for Avengers

In the beginning - and only the beginning - super-heroes inhabited their own worlds. Batman struck terror into the criminals of Gotham, Superman brought robber barons to justice in Metropolis, Wonder Woman fought Nazis. But it was only months before Sheldon Mayer and Gardner Fox decided that their four-colour heroes should meet, and thus, with the publication of All-Star Comics #3 and the Justice Society of America, the concept of a shared superhero universe was born.

Decades later, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby decided that the next wave of super-heroes, Marvel's Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk and so on, should also explicitly inhabit a New York teeming with super-heroes. For decades, shared universes of larger-than-life characters have been the norm in comic books.

But a trope taken for granted on paper has proven difficult to translate to film. The Superman movies of the 70s and 80s made no mention of Batman or Green Lantern; the Batman films have referred to Superman only in passing.

That all changed when Marvel Studios began the most ambitious comic book film project ever: introduce a handful of Marvel super-heroes to the big screen one movie at a time (Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger), weave over-arching narrative threads and supporting characters through each film, then bring all the heroes together in one spectacular team-up.

That team-up, of course, is Joss Whedon's The Avengers, the story of a small group of people with remarkable gifts and equally potent hang-ups who are recruited to save the world. It's a super-hero story in which the paper-thin plot serves merely as an excuse to play these characters off one another, and frankly that's fine with me.

Even though each of the titular Avengers - Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, Hawkeye and Thor - have already been introduced to movie-going audiences via the preceding films mentioned above, Whedon spends a little time to re-establish each character, mainly to ensure that when they're brought together the various personalities clash in believable and amusing ways. Norse demigod Thor is torn between respect, frustration and amusement for the "little people" he sees as children in need of protection. Captain America, frozen in time since World War II, struggles to adapt to modern mores. Bruce Banner - the Hulk - reigns in his berzerker rage with dark, quiet humour. Tony Stark, the billionaire genius under the Iron Man armour, tosses sarcastic barbs at his comrades to mask his own hopes and fears. And Black Widow's lethal professionalism is tempered with a tiny hint of realistic - not sexist, not pandering - vulnerability. (She alone seems to understand the full danger of recruiting the Hulk.)

While the film is generally serious in tone, its greatest asset is the warmth and humour generated by putting all of these characters (and their fine actors) together in the same milieu. Each of them is given multiple moments to shine, and at the screening I attended these moments were greeted with great enthusiasm by the audience.

Oh, there's a threat, of course; Norse god Loki recruits an alien armada to eke out revenge for his treatment in Thor, but the existential threat hardly matters to the audience; what's fun is seeing how these messed-up characters learn to work together. The last third of the film is a glorious mess, a hyper-kinetic action set-piece that puts each hero through his or her paces and sets the stage for more adventures to come.

The show-stealers this time around are Black Widow and the Hulk, for reasons I can't reveal without spoiling the fun. And as with other Marvel films, be sure to stay all the way through the end credits for not one, but two additional scenes.

The Avengers may not be as complex as Christopher Nolan's recent Batman films, but its greatness is of a different kind. This is comic-book fun of the first order: unselfconscious, brazen, hyperbolic, and most of all, just plain fun.

Revolt of the Super-Chicks

In late 1965, Supergirl and Wonder Woman starred in The Brave & the Bold #63 - "The Revolt of the Super-Chicks!", a love letter to conformity and traditional gender roles. The premise: lacking romance because she's seen as too intimidating for men, Supergirl abandons her role as a superheroine so she can focus on being what men want: something feminine, i.e., weak and frail. That's not subtext in this story, it's flat out text:

It seems laughable on the face of it that men wouldn't be attracted to an adorable blonde co-ed in a skintight leotard and miniskirt, but in the world of sixties comics, apparently Supergirl can't catch a break in the dating game. So she takes drastic measures...

Superman, playing the voice of masculine authoritarianism, tries to convince his cousin that she's making a bad decision. But she's a little too clever for Supes, with hilarious results:

"Why...uh...ulp...I - I'm very FOND of girls...I...uh.." Methinks thou dost protest too much, Superman.

Supergirl figures that Paris is the home of romance and the best place to get some action, and she's right - no sooner does she set foot in the City of Lights that she becomes a "glamorpuss playgirl," at least according to Wonder Woman, dispatched by Superman to talk sense into his cousin. But Supergirl is a bad influence, and soon enough Wonder Woman finds herself a suave French playmate as well...

...a chauvinist dimwit who thinks fighting crime is unfeminine. Tell that to the world's female police officers! And yet, Wonder Woman buys into her lover's point of view without question.

Meanwhile, some boulders conveniently fall out of nowhere to reinforce the sexist point. "If I stop them with my super-powers, I'll no longer seem feminine to him!" You know, if Sylvia could throw boulders, I'd still be attracted to her. Were men really this insecure in the sixties?

The rest of the story is cheerfully mundane; Supergirl and Wonder Woman team up to fight the forgettable Multi-Face and realize that they must continue to serve as superheroines, foregoing romance. It's as if the two endeavors are completely incompatible, yet super-heroes have no trouble fighting crime and having girlfriends. No double standard there!

Bat-Jerk

From The Brave and the Bold #78: Batman gives Batgirl and Wonder Woman a callous brushoff. And people wonder why girls don't embrace comic art to the same degree as boys...

Not-so-Wondrous Woman

To be fair, many people have trouble with this trick.

Seduction of the Innocent

Hmmm. What would Fredric Wertham think of this?

Super Fashion Disaster

I didn't know that Diana (Wonder Woman) Prince owned a "mod boutique" until reading this 1969 issue of Lois Lane. Groovy.

Superman claims that the wig isn't his bag because it'll increase his wind resistance when he flies. Uh...you're Superman. You can fly through the sun, and you're worried about the drag from a wig? I guess he was desperate for any excuse to get out of Diana's little game of dress-up.

Needless to say, this issue's plot revolves around Lois' perennial jealousy over Wonder Woman. At this stage in comic book history, Wonder Woman was operating sans super-powers, using martial arts mojo and feminist determination to demolish her foes, so for once Lois thought she wasn't a threat...until this little scene. Why Lois keeps on pining after Superman I'll never know.

Especially when Lana Lang is single. You're young, Lois - experiment a little.