Christopher Eccleston…

…May actually have become my favourite Doctor. Hmm, yes, maybe even slightly squeaking past Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy. And the “New New Doctor”, David Tennant, who let’s face it is a great, great Doctor, but…

I dunno. Christopher Eccleston. Mr. “Lots Of Planets Have A North”. He really is terrific.

But, it isn’t just him. I’m so incredibly impressed with the younger generation’s ability to create (if I may heaken back to my second-ever post) Real Doctor Who, I can’t even tell you. The effects may be better, but they’re still writing it like the walls were made of particle board and the costumes were nicked (as Bully might say; note to self, must remember to write a post on things British that Bully might like) from the Shakespeare productions next door…and here’s your proof of that commitment: at the end of every episode they actually mostly give away what’s going to happen in the next one, in terms of action and conflict and drama…

But, because in the end it isn’t all about the action, so they really can’t truly give anything away, no matter how much they show. Because it’s all in the acting, the writing, the…well, what is the correct word for it…the prestige. The pulling of expected rabbits from expected hats, in what is (somehow) an unexpected way. And not excepted from what they pull: my adoration for the way they do it. Yes, everything about this new productional incarnation of Doctor Who positively screams that hello! this is the same thing, we’re the same and you’re the same, and you’re that thing so precious beyond words, our audience, and we want to please and amaze you…

And yes, why do you ask? As a matter of fact I am working on an extremely large post about Quesada, Millar, Bendis, Brevoort, and the “new new Marvel”, that it seems to me doesn’t actually consider me their precious audience, at all…in which I hope to finally articulate, in an economical way, my annoyance with a certain type of Marvel scriptwriting that’s been bothering me more and more lately…
It’ll be up in a day or two, promise.

Meanwhile, let us consider not just Christopher Eccleston but Billie Piper: it’s a bit nerdy, but on occasion I wonder to myself if I am not just the tiniest bit in love with Rose Tyler…ah, again, nice job, new generation. Thank goodness Joss Whedon isn’t among you, or she would’ve been dead after a month and a half, just to shock me out of my complacency about happy endings…or to make me relive being broken up with by my first girlfriend…like there’s a difference, damn you…
Well, okay, not exactly fair. And I think Joss is great. So let me retract the above statement, thusly:

She might have been dead after a month and a half, just to shock me out of my complacency, etc.

Sixty percent chance she would’ve lived, honest.

…But seriously, has anyone considered the thing I’ve been saying for years, that the problem with SF/Fantasy TV and movies is that the people who are writing and directing them now are the people who grew up reading Big Two comics in the Eighties? People weaned on the Death Of Phoenix or the Death Of Electra…people who have an inbuilt emotional shorthand for “wow” that demands more, more, ever more…YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT ISSUE/EPISODE! I AM TELLING YOU YOU’RE GOING TO FREAK OUT! Gee, that sounds like me, circa Grade Nine, trying like Dan Pussey to get someone into X-Men who’s previously only shown some liking for Electric Ladyland or The Godfather. “Look, it’s just like The Godfather, Wonder Man is like Fredo…!” “Look, it’s just like Electric Ladyland, there’s a huge crescendo of time-travel madness, and then the drums kick in…!” “No, Phoenix dies, really DIES…!”
Has no one else noticed the preference for dramatic-yet-super-emotionally-distancing camera shots in American film and TV, that are kind of theatrically useless, but that in the comics medium would probably be extremely cool? And, has no one noticed that in comics these days everyone is willing to sacrifice their footing for a killing stroke, storytelling-wise?
Has no one noticed that everything we wished for has come true, but just not in a good way?

And it’s only going to get worse…

Can you imagine Jim Lee’s incredibly glossy adaptation of the movie “Network” to comics?

Ah, but now can you imagine what Gilbert Hernandez or Eddie Campbell would make of it…

(Sorry, that’ll be a completely different upcoming post, actually…)

But no one will ever ask Gilbert or Eddie to do it, that’s the problem, and they probably will ask Jim Lee. At some point. But oh well. On to other (if related) matters: you know when I was seventeen, I wished that there would be a resurgence of the swing music scene…little did I dream that it would happen, but that the people in it would be awful poseurs whose real personalities were bound to reassert themselves after four drinks, and ruin it for everybody else…well okay, just me…and never mind their tailor-made white tuxedos, they were all yelling for “She Sells Sanctuary” at the end of the night…

Gah. Yes, sometimes I wonder if there’s an astrological system in which I was born in the year of the Monkey’s Paw…

But, enough negativity! And this all began so well, too…say, did I tell you yet that I can’t watch Arrested Development without somehow thinking I am getting a privileged glimpse into what RAB‘s sense of humour is? I swear I don’t know why I think this: as far as I know he has never expressed any online liking for Arrested Development. And yet whenever I see it I picture Ron Stoppable chortling, or worse, RAB’s own picture doing so (shudder). I can’t help it. Whenever I read Estoreal, I hear “The Final Countdown”, and hear Michael Bluth saying “that dance you’re doing doesn’t look like a chicken”. Also, I’m a tad late, but go over and wish Sean a happy one-year blogging anniversary, if you please…and then join me in petitioning him to create new categories on his sidebar: Online Discussions Worth Noting, Cover Month Posts, Blogs By Illustrators, Sean Reads Post-DC Kirby Comics…

Personally, I’d like to see you conduct a couple interviews with colourists and letterers, Sean…they always get short shrift…
Oh, but I fear I’ve run out of babble, finally. Just one more thing: I’m very surprised to be impressed by the bestselling author from my neck of the woods named William Deverell. I thought he was just a Canadian version of John Grisham, but not so! He can write half-decently, and anyway a mile and a half past Grisham. Mr. Deverell, I take back 95% of all those things I said about you before. You ain’t no Chandler — hell, you ain’t any Lawrence Block, neither! — but you’re okay in my book, and I can be very tough on B.C. writers you know. Suffice it to say: what you write from now on, I’ll be reading.

…Oh my God, is that really the time?

Update! To “Fantastic Four…!”

Hmm, well on second look there are a few annoying things. First and foremost, it looks like the Puppet Master’s power is also tied in with the FF’s accident (whatever it was), and of course that’s bad: since this is a kid’s cartoon instead of a movie, it doesn’t need (and probably would be better off avoiding) an endless callback to the origin. I mean, is it necessary to have everything tied up in such a neat knot all the time? Can the Puppet Master’s clay not simply be “special radioactive clay”? I mean I suppose you don’t want kids seeking out radioactive clay to play with, but…

A minor quibble though, I guess.

It bugs me a little bit more that Ben has a big blue “4″ apparently painted on his chest — in the first episode I saw, I just assumed it was a classic “hey Ben, you need a costume!” thing, and that I’d missed a few scenes of him walking around grumbling “stupid idea…like anyone’s gonna not know who I am…bad enough looking like a brick wall, they gotta put graffiti on me like one, too…” But apparently that never happened. Too bad! Also, Sue is in some kind of phenomenal shape, isn’t she? Looks like she got hit with cosmic Pilates rays…

And Ed was right, the visuals are unappealing for the most part — man, I just can’t stand cheap-looking computer animation, although it has to be said (and I think I did say it) that this is by no means the cheapest computer animation a Marvel cartoon’s ever had…

(Hey, by the way, WordPress is auto-saving my text here as I type…so awesome…)

…But in places you can see it working a bit better than it does in others, so I continue to have hope. And for the most part the figures and backgrounds do manage to look like they were drawn. I think the cheap-ass TV cartoon world has to date not quite settled into a groove with how best to interleave drawn and computer-generated elements yet, and I do believe that the integration of the two will get more seamless in time…hey, in a way it’s just like what’s going on in film: The Phantom Menace sometimes employed its CGI to great effect (mostly in creating more convincing “matte paintings”, that incorporated moving elements as well — hooray!), but then ran too far with it in the placement of unconvincing CGI characters in the foreground…and then you have Lord Of The Rings on the other end of this continuum, where Peter Jackson prefers for the most part to limit his CGI to atmospheric uses…and then where he doesn’t, to spend more time on making the integration smoother…

And, is this weird? I was kind of expecting Philip Masters to be white, somehow, and found it jarring that he was black. I don’t know…there are marriages where the father’s white and the mother’s black, so what’s wrong with that? I’m not calling racism on it, or anything silly like that, but I had a qualm…for a moment I thought “jeez, the bad guy’s black, well crap.” Ordinarily such things don’t bother me, like, one tiny little bit, so I don’t know why I noticed it here…maybe it was just because the Puppet Master’s whole shtick seemed to be misplaced jealousy and rage over other artists making the big bucks instead of him, and they’re all white, and he and Alicia are the only black people in the show…hey, I’m not saying it stopped me in my tracks, but it did occur to me, and usually this sort of thing doesn’t, so…could it have been just a dumb accident? Of course: just like the woman of Asian descent who wrote a book about her father’s confrontation with racism when he came to Canada, and who experienced an unfortunate dumb accident of her own in an interview about it…

INTERVIEWER: “Was it hard for you to write this book?”

AUTHOR: “Well, I’ll admit, it was a struggle…but it was my struggle…”

Italics mine, but really…what? If you were the interviewer, wouldn’t you have turned off the tape recorder at that point, and politely said “listen, no offence, but we’re gonna have to do that again with different words, never mind why, just trust me when I say you’ll be happier with it this way…” And yet it makes it into the paper somehow, and caused me to think “Aw, Christ, lady, please think before you speak…”

Then again, it could totally happen to anyone. So, Philip Masters is black, so what? So nothing, it just struck me as an unforeseen tonal consequence of a change made elsewhere. I notice the same thing whenever people mount productions of “Twelve Angry Jurors”, because to me the key to what that script is about is the interplay and breakdown of traditional authority structures, and representing that with white men seems much more on-point than making the jury room all demographically-balanced…and no one cares about this in the slightest except for me, so again: so what? So nothing. I just noticed, is all, and it’s interesting.

Upshot:  some annoying things, but I’m totally watching this again. Can’t wait, in fact!

Better Than Vic Tayback

…And definitely better than that one I apparently missed in the Nineties, it’s the new Fantastic Four cartoon, and I have to say I’m impressed, even though I only saw half an episode. People always talk about the crossover effect from movies to comics, but what about the crossover from cartoons to comics? Obviously I don’t know, but at the very least it sounds like a better bet. And this one I saw seemed…what’s the word? Good. For a few reasons:

1. Humour. Wow, I couldn’t believe it. I suppose those of you living in the States have seen this already, it was the episode with the Skrulls…and fitting very well into (was it Marionette’s idea?) the explanation advanced for how the Skrulls got tricked by some clippings from “Journey Into Mystery” way back in FF #1: the Skrulls, as a race, have no imagination.

Isn’t that just the most brilliant damn retcon idea you’ve ever heard of? But of course, they’re shapeshifters who walk around in their regular forms all day, they obviously have no imagination! So how could they grasp the idea that somebody would deliberately create an unreal picture of something? Something similar goes on in this episode, as Skrull impostors of various FF hangers-on (including an awesomely bitchy older lady who’s a resident of the Baxter Building) get their impersonations completely wrong, but think they’ve got the FF hoodwinked anyway.

2. Characterization. Sure, Reed sounds a bit younger than perhaps he should, and Johnny may be a bit of a flake – but who cares? Reed is written smart, and Johnny likeable, and Sue and Ben are just about spot-on. The aforementioned bitchy neighbour is a welcome addition, and Alicia’s in there, and Willie Lumpkin too. I buy it all. It’s kind of like The Jeffersons, only with cosmic rays.

3. Cleverness. Not only is there a mystery to figure out, which Reed duly figures out, but it seems very lighthearted FF-derived stuff, playing with established storylines etc. in a way that makes them fun to revisit. As I said, you folks down south probably know if they manage to sustain this, but from where I sit it looks like a pretty nimble adaptation so far. I look forward to “The Challenge Of The Super-Skrull!”, which has been very nicely set up. Hey, they even rehabilitated H.E.R.B.I.E.!

4. Simplicity. Because as I’ve said before, the 60′s cartoon got it just about right when they said the FF exist to “defend the Earth from interplanetary eee-vil!” You need something simple to do the right kind of disbelief-suspending in this case, and “the super-team that’s also a family” just doesn’t cut it, owing to that idea being dull, dull, dull. Sure, they’ll meet the Mole Man and Dr. Doom, and that’s fine. But this is the first FF cartoon, even including the Sixties one, that I can imagine the Inhumans figuring into. Oh my God, they’re going to do the Inhumans, I just know it. Oh…my…God.

And now, what doesn’t work.

1. Maybe the big glowing “4” hovering atop the Baxter Building.

Umm…

Nah, forget it, I can live with it. Just so long as it’s called “the Baxter Building”.

You know, I’ve heard people say this is no good. From what I saw of this episode, I can’t understand why. Yes, well, obviously I miss the original costumes (not to mention the old Hanna-Barbera sound effects), but I know I can’t have everything. Does this all go horribly wrong in a season or so? Do they get into Civil War or something? More importantly, do they meet the Inhumans???

If someone could let me know about that, I’d be grateful. Right now, I have pretty high hopes.

Mind you, I haven’t seen the title sequence yet.

A Good Day For Browsing

In addition to all the Pogo talk that’s out there today – and I won’t link to anything in particular, because everybody’s chattering about it, but – hooray, Pogo! – I also came across something really interesting for anyone who like me is a fan of the Gerry Conway/Ross Andru Spider-Man…this post, discussing my favourite oversized Treasury of all time, Superman vs. Spider-Man, which turns out to have been even more complicated in the making than I thought it was. It’s practically the King James Bible, it seems: proof that too many cooks don’t always spoil the broth after all.

For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of encountering Event Comics that actually live up to expectations, you should go out and find this. And especially, for those of you who’ve never gotten a really good look at Ross Andru’s incredibly gifted composition (especially for aerial scenes), this is an awfully good first impression to get.

Also, if you’re interested with what’s on display in this article, you could do worse than to supplement your reading with Immortality by Milan Kundera, The God Who May Be by Richard Kearney, and Greg Egan’s short story “The Walk”, collected in his book Axiomatic.

Somewhere in all that, I think, there’s a pretty good philosophy for our current age.

But if you have to pick between Superman vs. Spider-Man and all that stuff, pick the comic. No, wait! I think I can Kevin-Baconize all this for you: together with Supes vs. Spidey, read Geoff Klock’s How To Read Superhero Comics, And Why (with special attention to the section on the origins of the Authority and the crossover with the Alien franchise), and then go watch the Christopher Reeve Superman movie again…then move on to the Lethem and the Kearney and the Kundera and the Egan. Um, maybe put the Kearney last, though – it’s a bit dense, even if rewarding, and if you don’t care for that kind of lingo you’ll be better off if already primed to spot the connections…

You know, I think I may have the beginnings of a syllabus, here! See, comics blogs aren’t all about wasting time…

Flashback! To “Superman Returns…”

Yes, I thought I should see this, so I saw it. Saw it a little while ago, actually.
Oh, what did I think?

Well, the effects were really good, Kevin Spacey was (as expected) incredibly brilliant in his continuation of Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor stylings, wow! WOW! And let’s not overlook Parker Posey, she was fabulous too…WOW! They nailed this one, for sure. Terrifically fun stuff.

Also, I love the opportunity that a Superman movie gives us to imagine a world where Superman is it – no Batman, no Green Lantern, nothing getting in the way. Short of re-reading the earliest strips, it’s hard to call that long-ago feeling back to life…so, in that sense, I really appreciated this movie.

But there is another sense in which I did not appreciate it at all.

No, it isn’t what you’re thinking, although hey, I obviously agree with all those points of yours. As much as there was to like in this movie, there was a lot to dislike in it too, and I can’t say it didn’t irritate the hell out of me. It irritated the hell out of me! But there was something more important than all that stuff. And, oh, say, is that today’s date? Is it really Valentine’s Day already? Okay, let’s talk some Valentine’s Day stuff then. Flowers. Chocolate. Love.

For God’s sake, where is the love for Clark Kent in this movie?

I can’t believe I’m the only one who’s…well, sure, yes, perhaps actually a bit offended on behalf of ol’ Clark. What has he done, after all, to deserve such disrespect? Look, they don’t even care enough about him to give more than a minute to suspecting he’s Superman…and I’m talking about the filmmakers, here. Good Lord, what has gone wrong? How can this have been forgotten? For a second, as the DVD title sequence played, I thought I was going to see something that was really, really like Superman…they played the shot of him in the elevator, resignedly removing his glasses, and I thought they were going to get it right…and then inexplicably they got it wrong. Wrong! How could you get that, of all things, so wrong? There were so many things to do, so many ways to go, so much freshness to be brought to this, and yet they just glossed over it entirely. I can think of at least a half-dozen ways to use Clark better here, just off the top of my head…Christ, he didn’t even work on a story! He even came back on the very same day as Superman, and no one took the slightest notice! Well, but how could they…except for Jimmy, they didn’t even notice that he was back at all. Lois, you heartless cow. Perry, you cold bastard. How can you be so unfeeling? Man, I’ll tell you, if the people I knew cared so little for me, I’d leave Earth too.

Yeah, there’s a lot to pick apart in this movie, but this is the worst thing, because this is the main symptom of what was wrong with it. That Clark Kent is secretly Superman is an extremely important part of Superman’s mystique, an extremely important part of people’s interest and affection for the character. It is not an accident; it is not a minor detail. It’s what people read the comics for, what they know about the comics if they know nothing else. Clark Kent is the gateway to reader/viewer identification with Superman, and closing that gateway makes no sense, no sense at all. I mean I could go on, but if you don’t already agree with me, I can’t think of any simpler way to say it. Where’s Clark? What happened to Clark? Is Clark all right? Say, has anyone seen Clark? Christ, he doesn’t even need the glasses: he’s ended up completely invisible, anyway. Because he’s ended up completely unloved.

Even by the audience.

And, that’s just wrong.

I Call, Damn You

So I watched Heroes tonight. Well, some of it…

I would say it’s because I’m a comics fan, but it really isn’t. Comics fans are just a little further ahead of the curve, at this point. Soon everyone will notice.

That you’re bluffing, entertainment media.

Don’t bother denying it. I don’t want to hear it. Look, the conversation’s over: I call. Lay your freakin’ cards on the table, and let’s see what you’ve got.

The other day I was reading, but the TV was on in the background. I heard this:

VOICE: “Is it possible…to have the world at your fingertips? Can you imagine…being everywhere you want to be?”

Etc., etc. Cut to me, thirty seconds later, screaming at the TV:

ME: “For Christ’s sake, do I ask you endless questions questions QUESTIONS all the time, car-commercial voice? Just tell me what you want, and stop WASTING MY TIME!!!!”

Then there’s me watching (you see I admit it) “Beauty And The Geek”:

BORING HOST: “And in just a second…we’ll find out…just who it was…who won this highly-contrived ‘contest’…and is safe from having to go…to the elimination round…and possibly lose their chance…at a quarter…million…DOLLARS…”

Cut to commercial.

ME: “My God…do you really think I care that much? Do you honestly imagine that this is the kind of suspense that will keep me from flipping away? I mean…suspense over the numbers? Really?”

This show is a good example of how received wisdom can go wrong, actually. The idea is clearly that I am fixated on who will win ALL THAT MONEY, who will stay and who will GO HOME, and this means that if there is anything I must not be permitted to know before the commercial break, it’s what happened.

Which is precisely the wrong way to think of it, you see.

Because I actually don’t really care who wins. I’m just sort of…watching. To see what happens. So, when will I see it? Because if you think about it, what happens is really the price you pay for having me continue to watch…and not, not, not the other way ’round…

“Next week on ‘The Apprentice’…your eyeballs will literally MELT RIGHT OUT OF THEIR SOCKETS when you see what happens!!!!” Oh no they won’t.

“And on the next ‘Deal Or No Deal’…we absolutely guarantee you…you won’t want to miss a SECOND…!” Oh yes I will.

“When you see what we’ve got planned for Spider-Man at the conclusion of 2011, you will SHIT YOUR PANTS SO HARD YOU’LL WANT TO TELL PEOPLE ABOUT IT…!” Alright, that’s enough. No, seriously. Now you’re just embarrassing yourself. See, at some point, and I don’t know if anyone’s laid it on the line for you like this before, but at some point you have to give me something. Actually give it to me. You really can’t put it off indefinitely. Look, take your cue from the generation previous: they thought that the first payoff was itself the hook, that would keep me coming back for more payoffs later on. They tried to produce the feeling in me of “whoa, I can’t believe they did that! How satisfying that was! I am totally sticking around to see what happens next, so I can experience this satisfying feeling again!” But you seem to think that I will pay endless amounts of attention, time, and money just to see the thing which is misdirection for the real trick.

Which, for some reason, never gets performed.

I mean, since when could the questions “who’s that guy now?” and “where are they taking her, d’you think?” be relied on to create infinite excitement?

All of which is by way of saying: gee, Heroes is one slow-moving show, isn’t it? There are lots of questions. Every cliffhanger’s a question that really should’ve been asked, and answered, three episodes ago. Oh, I like Heroes, don’t get me wrong! But if there were a place I could go to see spoilers for it, I totally would.

And if you like, you can ask Ed this about me: “does he hate spoilers?”

He will laugh and laugh if you ask him that, because I have a pathological fear of spoilers that he finds incredibly comical. But, even I can’t hold my breath this long. Not when everything in the whole media universe is geared to keep me permanently and completely and only on the edge of my seat, ’til the turtle swallows the ocean…I mean, this is starting to feel like watching a Moonlighting marathon, you know? And, HEY! Just like in Moonlighting, honestly I don’t care anymore. Do what you want. Cut, as much as I hate this expression, to the freakin’ chase already! Because I am beginning to reconsider the way I invest my attention, I’ll tell you frankly. Because I am starting to think I should be looking for things that pay me an actual dividend on it every once in a while. As opposed to this, what you’re all doing…which is starting to look like a game of no-limit hold-’em played between J.D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates: they can just keep on raising forever, but who would ever watch a twenty-four hour hand of poker? No one would. No one.

No one.

You know, this may sound funny, but one of the things I find appealing about 52 is that it is guaranteed to end with issue #52. So…at least that, eh? It all won’t have a claim on my soul into the afterlife: eventually I really will be able to find out what happened.

How unusual that is, these days!

How precious!

“Who is Ronin? Well, that would be telling…suffice it to say it’s a character you know very well, it’s the last person you’d expect – or is it? – and all will be revealed by the time the Sun burns out.” No. Reveal it now, or shut up forever. Seriously. This is too much, blast you. I didn’t sign on for this. In fact unless Ronin is really the Batman of Earth-2, and his secret is that the multiverse still exists, I’ll tell you right now I don’t really care who he/she/it is, like at all. Ultron? Modok? Squirrel Girl? Dragon Lord? The cast of Friends? Time’s up; I call. I call. I CALL.

And: next hand! While we’re young, please!

Give Me A Short Enough Lever, And I Can Annoy The World

Say…

Anyone else around here noticed those new energy commercials?

You know, the ones that say “Canada’s nuclear power plants = GREAT!”, and “The existence of ethanol-blended fuels indicates we have nothing to worry about concerning Stephen Harper’s election promises re: energy and the environment”?

Yeah…I thought not.

Well, you’re not missing much.

All Ducks Are Birds

…But it bears remembering, not all birds are ducks. Today’s quibble: the mischaracterization of Iron Man in Marvel’s Civil War – but, not necessarily the kind of mischaracterization you think! Because it’s the word futurist that I have a problem with, you see.

Said problem being: it doesn’t mean anything.

Well, not unless you count always being wrong as meaning something.

Fact: there are no good futurists, if we measure “good” by a record of predictions coming true, because everyone who’s ever called themselves a futurist has missed the boat by about a mile every time they’ve lunged for it. Futurism is humbug; futurism is balderdash. Futurism is spoon-bending. Futurism is less predictive than the worst of science fiction. This is not the way the world works, at all: there are no “futurists” worth the name, unless by futurism one means something very much the same as mentalism. Yes: though it’s sad to say so, having plants in the audience is the only way to create that particular illusion.

Eh, Mark Millar?

But what there are, occasionally, are visionaries, and this no one can deny.

Ladies and gentlemen: Tony Stark, visionary. Tony Stark the brilliant engineer, Tony Stark the brilliant businessman, but most importantly Tony Stark, the brilliant engineer and businessman who owns the biggest and most advanced foundry in the world.

And the Iron Man suit is just a knock-off of his particular genius, see…

Because, sure: Reed Richards is a crazy polymath beyond understanding, but do you think he hand-machines all his equipment himself? He does not: he orders in specialized miniaturized manufacturing components from Tony Stark, the world leader in mass-production (and occasional custom-production) of revoltingly high-end super-scientific machine parts, and he puts them on account just like everybody else does. And, where would Reed be without Tony’s vision, of a world where such a stratospherically high-tech manufacturing company could turn a profit? Unless you’re already selling crateloads of those bits and pieces of mad-scientist Lego, you could never afford to make them: Reed’s Radical Cube probably would’ve cost fifteen billion dollars to hand-tool, and he would’ve had to buy half of California just to get started with the wrenches. Not that he couldn’t. But Tony already has that well in hand. Fifty million tops, Reed…but for you, twenty million. No, don’t ask me to go any lower, I’m already cutting my own throat here. Well…okay…hey, if I don’t help you, who will….tell you what, let’s work something out…

It’s serious business. Remember that Michelinie/Layton Iron Man/Dr. Doom thing? Where Tony’s outraged to discover that Stark Industries is still selling the full contents of its catalog to Latverian purchasers? Those were components for Dr. Doom’s time machine for heaven’s sake, people! You think there would even be any time machines in the MU if not for Tony’s youthful, visionary ideas about how to take his father’s company into the next century? Doom would still be building the deframmulator, trying to get it just right. He’d be Tesla by now: a crazy man. AIM would have already killed ten thousand “volunteers” trying to create a MODOK out of cast-off X-ray machine parts and rusty carburators and spit…and Professor X would have spent six hours trying to get his home-built Cerebro off his head so he could go to the bathroom. SHIELD’s helicarrier would still be sitting on the runway at Groom Lake, slowly denting under its own weight. No wonder Nick Fury was pissed that Tony got out of the munitions business! No wonder every supervillain worth his salt (including the U.S. government) has wanted to co-opt Tony Stark! The man is a global treasure!

A true visionary!

But, not a futurist. A futurist only tries to predict, and fails…but a visionary gets it right, and then swiftly gets bored with mere prediction: because a visionary decides to make the world a better place out of their own efforts, and so heads off an unsatisfying future, by replacing it with a little of their own imagination. And then, if they find they have enough power, they start heading off bad futures that haven’t even happened yet: like Tony Stark, making Iron Man the beta-test of munitions technologies that aren’t even going to go to market. What a citizen! And, how I wish I owned a copy of Steve Englehart’s “Big Town”!

Iron Man: is he connected to the whole world, or what? Iron Man: an awesome character filled with edifying moral conflict, and with many stories left to be told about him. A disguised idealist; a figure full of…yes, I’ll say it…irony. Someone whose change of heart has changed the world. Man, this character is so great!

Maybe we’ll see him again in a few years. I hope so. As I’ve said before, I’d want it to be Steve Gerber and Michael Avon Oeming, but we’ll see.

And, I miss the good Tony.

So get it together, Marvel, you idiots!

This Iron Man post dedicated to the return of 2 Guys Buying Comics, the blog that thinks Iron Man is awesome.

Who am I to disagree?

 

Warning: Canadian Content Ahead!

Tonight, if you don’t mind, a few words about the CBC. Oh, and CTV, and the Globe and Mail, and the National Post too. But mostly, the CBC.

I love the CBC. It’s a great network. No, really! Minute for minute, it’s got more watchable programming on it than most stations, if you don’t believe me just do the math and see how it adds up. And that’s just the TV. That’s not even counting the radio, which (though it’s often forgotten) is a lifeline to all those living in rural communities across our country, from sea to sea to sea, as it were…

In fact: wow! Does CBC radio ever get a bad rap from the folks in the major urban centres! But then what do they care about having a lifeline…they think the city is everything…

(Yes, I’m afraid there will be a small amount of Toronto-bashing in this post. But, not too much! Don’t worry! It’s an extremely specific complaint I have, as you’ll see, and it relates only to one specific little tic on the part of television writers who are from Toronto. The rest of you are fine, really. Relax. In fact I’m pretty sure you’re going to agree with me about it…)

Now, let’s see, where to begin. Tom Stone? Mosquito Lake? Gullage’s? Or should I dive right into Little Mosque on the Prairie?

No; I’ll tell you what. Let’s start with sports, and Larry Sanders, and the late night movie: start, in other words, with what the CBC’s life-cycle is based on.

…So every few years, a new government appoints a new director or president or what-have-you of the CBC, and it’s always the same. The CBC loses money; politicians love to “cut the fat”; it’s a good opportunity to demonstrate a little new-broom-ism. Because if you live in urban Canada, your perception is very probably that the CBC is a fairly lousy institution – years upon dreadful years of unfunny sitcoms, schizoid dramedies, superflop dramas, and the painful earnestness of issue-based TV movies (not to mention the perennial miniseries tropes about growing up poor on the Prairies/Irish in the Maritimes/Jewish in Montreal – always never a laugh riot) have soured most urbanites on CBC by the time they’re twenty. Mind you, a lot of the time the commercial networks like CTV don’t fare too much better: a counterpoint to CBC, they used to be loaded with APPALLINGLY BAD programs produced, one suspects, literally on a shoestring…that were just as embarrassingly Canadian as the ones on the CBC, even though they tried not to be, because their settings and subjects were so VERY, VERY AGGRESSIVELY “not-Canadian”. These were programs produced essentially for mass export to other countries: Pepsi “B”, if you like. Events took place in “the city” or “the mountains”, just like The Matrix Reloaded…police cars that looked like cans of generic soda, endless references to “the mayor’s office” and other nationally-unspecific entities that fit into the nationally-unspecific storylines…reminds me of what Ed had to say about the Iron Man cartoon of a few years ago, where Tony Stark fought tirelessly to defend something called “our democracy”…so it scans in Canada or Latvia or the Philippines the same as it does in the U.S…

But anyway. What I’m saying is: it was pretty bad. And I haven’t even mentioned Snow Job or Check It Out! yet…

So overall, there’s a persistent idea that Canadian TV in general, and the CBC in particular, sucks. You have to understand, we’ve always gotten a lot of American TV up here. There probably never was a television character as universally beloved in Canada as Archie Bunker…

So when the new head honcho of the CBC is appointed every few years, he or she always has some grand new-broom ideas, and they’re always the same ideas. Get rid of sports. Get rid of American programming. Get rid of late-night. Make more original Canadian shows that will be successful, i.e. profitable. Downsize. Restructure. Centralize. Amalgamate.

It never works out the way they think it will. For one thing, most of their new shows that pass the screening process are no good…and for another, more shameful thing, some of them are excellent, but they disappear after a few episodes anyway! Sigh. So many fine, fine programs gone down to noplace because whoever’s in charge can’t tell what quality is, or because the person in charge of them doesn’t care, or can’t be patient…still, I guess I can be thankful I’m not stuck watching “These Arms Of Mine” (a show about Torontonians moving to a weirdly-distorted Toronto’s-eye-view of Vancouver – gah! Bite me!) or worse, the execrable “This Space For Rent”…

And then, too, the new broom finds it can get rid of the late night live broadcasts of World Cup skeleton semifinals from Switzerland at 4 a.m., but unfortunately this doesn’t quite satisfy…all it does is get the skeleton fans (yup, over here) pissed off. They just don’t save that much money on the deal, when they count it all up. And, it damages CBC’s reputation somewhat, since CBC Sports is like the Avro Arrow team of sports coverage, a veritable jewel in the crown, and to not use it is to throw away a cheap way to look good…not to mention a cheap way to fulfill the CBC’s mandate…and besides, what any new broom wants to do most of all is always to get rid of the hockey coverage.

But of course, this they cannot do, for reasons which I deem far too obvious to explain at length here.

So that doesn’t pan out, either.

And so what’s left? The new shows didn’t work. Cutting the inexpensive end of the sports budget didn’t actually help anything. The last new broom already pretty much eliminated the regional programming. And, who knew how much ad revenue “The Nanny” was bringing in all this time? Damn. Okay, back to the drawing board…more new shows. But this time, since we already know we can’t get something people like and will watch (although they could, if they only left the good ones on the air), let’s try something we can support as “good and Canadian”. That means: sitcoms where the “sit-” is multiculturalism, and the “-com” is bigotry. Or, alternatively…and please, Torontonians, you know it’s true…where the “sit-” is “honey, don’t look now, but we’re not in Toronto anymore!”, and the “-com” is “honey, don’t look now, but we’re not in Toronto anymore!” Ai ya. Well, I suppose this is a form of multiculturalism. A dumb form, but a form. Anyway, the imbecilic TV critics at the Globe and Mail and the National Post seem to think it is (although please, they would prefer to be called “media analysts”, just like the sportswriters)…remember how they hated “Corner Gas” when it first aired on the grounds of it not being “Saskatchewanny” enough? Three guesses what they meant, there…oh yeah, and you couldn’t tell it now, but they pretty much abominated “Trailer Park Boys” too…ick, coarseness and vulgarity! Never funny! Jeez. Again, it’s rather clear (to me, anyway) that that’s code, too…code for “how can it really be good-and-Canadian, when I’m not seeing myself in this mirror?” See, they know what the game is. Hate the good stuff because it’s irrelevant, praise the irrelevant stuff because it’s compliant with your self-congratulatory self-image (well, why else do you think that show about the hip-hop station got taken off the air?), pray for hockey to be Raptured away, leaving only the timeless mythopoetic resonance of baseball…I’m sorry, but I did warn you about the Canadian content, and right now regular readers of the Globe sports section should be doing a slow nod, if I’ve done this correctly…and prepare to disavow all surprise when something unexpectedly proves to be popular with the masses. Ah, I’ll let you in on a little secret, “national” TV reviewers…you are actually not that interested in shows, just in ideas of shows. You’re high-concept people. You didn’t like “Gullage’s” because you didn’t see that it was about anything…you didn’t like “North Of 60” after the white guy left because you thought that was the point…your interest in “Tom Stone” waned once he got back together with his wife. And you love “Little Mosque on the Prairie”. Boy, how you love it…!

And that makes me a tad suspicious of it, you know?

The current ad for “Little Mosque”:

HE: A Muslim feminist…that’s unusual.

SHE: Like a friendly Torontonian?

Oh…my, my, why are you trying to play me like that, “Little Mosque”? You must think that you’ve said something I’m sure to agree with, and thus secured my allegiance. But, sorry! I don’t agree, actually. I’ve only ever been to Toronto once, you see, and I have to say everybody was just great. So if you could please go peddle that somewhere else…like maybe in Toronto. Because I do not see myself in your mirror, y’know? Also, just by the way, I don’t think of a Muslim feminist as being a weird thing at all. Why should I? Also again, I think this show’s specific kind of topicality might just be a little off-putting for me in general. And why are all the white people so god-damn ignorant, can you tell me that?

Let me stress that I like all the actors on this show. Some, I like a lot. I would watch it. But…something about it has a little School of Air Farce feeling that makes me leery of it. Sorry again! And, I don’t want to pre-judge…but maybe I’ll check it out once the reviewers from the Globe and Post start thinking it isn’t so hot anymore. If you don’t mind.

Oops, I’m off-topic, suddenly. Where was I? Oh yes…so then the CBC’s in Stage Two of its life-cycle, when it’s making this stuff. Not too pleasant. But, it’s necessary if we’re ever to get to Stage Three, which is when the new broom says, oh well, I guess none of that worked. What the hell. Let’s go back to the way it was.

And that’s the stage I like best. Today I saw a late night Doctor Who replay episode (first-run stuff is on Monday night), followed by a movie for TV, uncut and uncensored. Great! Weekdays at midnight it’s Arrested Development, just like a few years ago it was Larry Sanders…because is it not meet, as well as quite within the CBC’s mandate, to bring Canadians the best of the rest of the world, too? The Canadian identity it’s charged with discussing doesn’t exist in a vacuum, you know…and of course the beauty of this is that CBC is a Crown corporation, and so it can air whatever it wants in pursuit of this lofty aim. Unedited. Commercial-free. Cherry-picked. All special-like. In many ways, it’s simply the best of all possible media worlds…because so much is possible, in this mature stage of the life-cycle, that wasn’t possible before. That isn’t possible for private broadcasters, either! Over time the CBC has been made to serve two masters, God and Mammon, but finding that it can’t serve them together, and then finding that it can’t serve one over the other, it then decides to serve them separately. Late night skeleton for the purity of it all: watch our young Canadians in action! It returns absolutely no money to us at all! Doctor Who, Coronation Street, Arrested Development, movies: it’s British, it’s American, it’s all over the map! It’s fine! Tune in! We need the sponsors! And a little hockey, a little “Little Mosque”, a little “This Hour”, a little “Chataqua Girl” or something, a little random Disney for the kids! Whatever, it’s good, it’s fine! Watch what you like!

Ahhh…so good to have peace in the kingdom.

Mind you, it’s too bad we can’t just port in the show-creation part of Stage One, into Stage Three. That would make it perfect. I think the reason that One fails all the time is because it’s just too important to also be cutting the fat, while you’re reinventing your programming. The pressure to get a hit is way too intense then, you see: we’re not the States, where (I think I heard) ninety thousand pilots (that can’t be right, can it?) are made every year. We make a lot less, and put a lot more on the air. Some, as I said, are really quite amazing. But they aren’t smash hits right away, so they have to go. It’s a bad system. Meanwhile it seems a lot easier to keep a show on the air if it comes out in Stage Two, but then most of the time it can’t be good, because instead it has to be safe. Well, believe me, even at that it’s better than the way things used to be, when a new Canadian sitcom came out like once every three years…ha, thought I wasn’t going to get around to mentioning “Mosquito Lake”, didn’t you? Well, I did, so nyah. But, imagine taking on the Stage One streamlining impulse in an environment where things can be given a better chance to develop. An environment where any show didn’t have to pay its own way practically in advance, but could rely on what it brought to the schedule as a whole. Aha, I wasn’t lying when I said the public broadcaster had more possibilities to enjoy than the private broadcasters, and I wasn’t just talking about decreased emphasis on the bottom line. Because consider this:

A couple of years ago, “Tom Stone” – a show set in a commercial crime unit of the RCMP in oilpatch Calgary (“Tom_Stone”, get it?) – did an episode very clearly inspired by the story of Wiebo Ludwig. My apologies, non-Canadians, I don’t suppose you know much about the Ludwig family. But anyway, this was a family who got kind of screwed by sour gas coming out of the refinery next to their land. And, there it was, skillfully topicalized for this (very enjoyable, I thought) new show. At the end of the episode, on comes a presenter in a station break, who informs the audience that the following night at the same time the investigative-documentary-magazine show that is also new for that season will be doing a whole thing on the real-life Ludwig situation. And I thought…

Gee, that’s kind of smart, isn’t it? I mean CBC is all one big happy family, why can’t the writer of “Tom Stone” call up the news division and say “tell me what you’re working on for next week”? A private broadcaster couldn’t do it, but CBC could lead viewers and listeners whose interest had been piqued very smoothly from one night, one medium, one story to another. It would practically be like hyperlinks. It would be brilliant. “Profitable” homegrown programming? Don’t be so shortsighted, Captain New Broom: profitable doesn’t have to always mean the same thing in every situation. And that could really work well for you, if it had enough time to work…

Unfortunately, in Stage One, it probably doesn’t.

And, as things stand now, there’s a real danger that it never will. At least, to my mind there is.

Back to that dire presentiment in a minute, but first I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the private networks in Canada have something a little different going on: unlike CBC, their big goal was never to produce domestic programming for a domestic audience, so much as it was to obey the quotas for original Canadian programming laid down by the CRTC (our version of the FCC), so they could then import shows from the States, and sell ads for them. So original programming was mainly a cost, to them: the cost of doing business. But, recently – and I can’t thank them enough for this – they’ve changed their tune. Domestic programming for the domestic audience is now their order of the day, and it has to be said they’re not too bad at it. It’s taken time; but, the quotas have worked. No more “our democracy”. No more generic mushroom-soup-can cop-cars.

But, they’re still awfully dependent on rebroadcasts of Survivor and Grey’s Anatomy. Unlike the CBC, they can’t cherrypick the best: their business mandates that they also scoop up the worst. And, God knows what may happen now, with the Conservative government in charge: they’ve always said they’d neuter the CRTC, and sell off the CBC, if they got elected. But that one-two punch could put an end to everything hopeful that I’ve described above. Then again, I’ve got my biases too: I’ll freely admit that when CTV won the Olympics rights over CBC, I thought the world was coming to an end. But, we’ll see about that. And anyway, a minority Conservative government probably can’t do too much harm…

Oh, damn, did I forget to mention this was all just sort of a shapeless pile of random thoughts?

I’m always leaving that part out, somehow…and always forgetting my point, on top of it…

Oh, yeah. I remember it now.

I love CBC.

Especially now that it’s brought me back my mirror. Now, don’t anybody break it! You know how much bad luck that is!

Truer Words

Once again, something pellucid from the eminently sensible Peter B. Gillis.