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As a man once wisely wrote, “With great power must come great responsibility.” My power as a columnist is not particularly great, but now I feel a certain duty to pay more attention to some comics-related works than I might do otherwise. For example, MTV just premiered its new Spider-Man animated series,. showing two episodes back to back on Friday and repeating them on Sunday. Even if I didn’t have this new column I would be interested in checking it out. Staying with it, though, is another matter entirely. As the first episode went on, I found myself inspired to pursue the following line of thought: What else is on? Hmm, Comedy Central is showing Christopher Guest’s funny and inventive movie Best of Show, and Turner Classic Movies is showing a genuine classic musical, George Cukor’s A Star Is Born. And look, Cartoon Network is running The Chuck Jones Show, almost guaranteed to showcase genuinely fine animated films. Why, there are several better ways to spend my time than watching this Spider-Man show. But, no, I’m writing a column and I should watch this first episode until the end so I can review it fairly, In fact, I should even watch the second episode to see if it’s any better. See what I mean about duty and responsibility? No wonder Spider-Man gets depressed.

Although on the surface the figures on this new Spider-Man series resemble line drawings, in fact they are computer animated, accounting for the off-putting, robotic way in which they move. However expressive the figures often were, I just could not adjust to the eerily nonhuman movements. I don’t have this problem with, say, the Pixar animated features: perhaps the Spider-Man animated series can’t or won’t go to the expense and trouble of moving its characters more realistically.And why were so much of these episodes so dark? Spider-Man, with the bright red of his costume, his humor, and his spectacular web-swinging, is a super hero who is suited to daylight rather than the gloom of night. But, of course, even with the wide spectrum afforded by computer coloring in comics nowadays, grim and gloomy (a variation on grim and gritty?) is the standard visual cliche, and the animated series picks up on this.Worse, there is nothing insightful or different in the treatment of Peter Parker/Spider-Man and the other familiar characters from the comics, and new characters are utterly one-dimensional. The story lines are run of the mill (guy uses powers to take vengeance on other people, rich guy pays hired assassin to fight superhero). The villains in the second episode were hollow and trite; a smarmy rich guy, a cold-blooded Asian swordswoman who goes on and on about honor, neither of whom betray any facet to their personalities beyond being mean to poor old Spidey. And Spider-Man’s jokes all fall flat, betraying not an iota of genuine wit.

Yes, it was the kind of show wherein it is dangerous for Mary Jane Watson to start complaining in the second episode that the film she is auditioning to be in has a terrible script and gives her a one-dimensional character. Is this metafiction? Is she commenting on the Spider-Man episode she is in? (Hmm, by now Cartoon Network is showing Max Fleischer Popeye cartoons, in all of which Popeye moves more convincingly than the android versions of Spidey and his friends in this show.)

There is one story element in these first two episodes that strikes me as deserving extended comment. The first episode, based on a story by comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, who is an executive producer on the series, was about the classic Spider-Man villain Electro, sort of. I would have thought that one of Marvel’s innovations was that the personalities of its characters were often as important or more important than their powers. Spider-Man is not just someone with spider-like abilities; writers could not kill Peter Parker off, give someone else the powers, and, voila, have a new Spider-Man. (This is, of course, what DC Comics has done with some of their classic characters, although I, and others, would argue that Barry Allen and Hal Jordan, the deceased Silver Age Flash and Green Lantern, had more personality than the Powers That Be recognized.) No, what makes Spider-Man Spider-Man is the personality and backstory of Peter Parker.

So now lately I see instances in which people decide that classic Marvel characters really do consist of the nom du guerre and the powers, and personalities can be altered at will. In the Hulk movie Bruce Banner’s father, David Banner, becomes, in effect, the Absorbing Man, although the filmmakers do not seem clear on the way his powers work, and I know I was not the only one confused by what happened in the Hulk’s climactic battle with his father.

To me this seemed a waste of a good concept. The Absorbing Man in the comics has a distinctive, vivid personality: a hardened criminal from a lower class background, a former convict in a chain gang, vulgar in speech and manners, making him a fine contrast to his original nemesis, the regal thunder god Thor. There’s even a subtext of a class struggle going on when Thor and the Absorbing Man have it out. Couldn’t the filmmakers on The Hulk have found an alternative to just affixing the comics’ Absorbing Man’s powers onto Bruce Banner’s demented dad?

I find it amusing that James Schamus, one of the Hulk movie’s writers, has said in an interview that he and Ang Lee originally considered using super-villains from the comics, but settled on their version of Bruce’s father as their main antagonist instead. The movie’s David Banner is founded on Bruce’s father from the comics, Brian Banner, who was co-created by the underappreciated writer Bill Mantlo. Brian Banner was mentally disturbed, but in ways that seemed credible. He was a wife-beater who regarded his own infant son as a monster; quite possibly he was physically repelled by his own sexuality and took it out on its object, his wife, and its product, his son. The movie’s David Banner, though, is a brute whose murder of his wife seems inexplicable, who recklessly performed dangerous genetic experiments on himself, and now seeks to manipulate his own son, who inherited the results of that genetic engineering. David Banner is really no more than a one-dimensional stock figure of evil, capable of any nastiness that the filmmakers require of him, without credible motivations. Lee and Schamus might just have well have used the Hulk’s leading super-villain from the comics, the Leader, instead. Gamma radiation endowed the Leader with superhuman intelligence, whereupon he decided to dominate a world populated by his intellectual inferiors. Now that I can understand: a metaphor for the Nietzchean superman gone wrong, a man who regards himself as racially superior and therefore destined to rule. David Banner, on the other hand, is a hollow creation, less interesting than the comics’ Brian Banner or even the original version of the Absorbing Man.

Now I will agree that the Electro of the comics, whose “civilian” name is Max Dillon (presumably Stan Lee had been watching the character Matt Dillon on TV’s Gunsmoke), has never evinced a particularly interesting personality. But there is potential there that has gone untapped: Dillon was a normal electrical lineman who miraculously survived an electrical accident and found himself endowed with the ability to shoot electrical energy from his body. Now what would happen to a working stiff in an unglamorous job who suddenly discovered he could hurl lightning bolts like Zeus? As Electro, Dillon turned to crime, but his creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko could have done far more in developing his personality, as could today’s writers.

Bendis isn’t the first person to give Electro a personality transplant. In his screenplay for the Spider-Man movie (which in many respects influenced the screenplay of the actual film), James Cameron makes Electro the principal villain, giving him a new civilian identity, the wealthy Carlton Strand. Cameron is great at exploring the potential uses of Electro’s powers: he can, for example, electrically manipulate computers.

But I don’t think that Strand really escapes being the comics cliche of the corporate mogul as super-villain. Although there were earlier versions of this stock type, like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Gregory Gideon in Fantastic Four. Lee and Ditko’s Norman Osborn, whom Lee later revealed to be the Green Goblin, was rich and unscrupulous, but in Lee’s stories, Osborn’s corporate empire seemed unimportant and stayed pretty much offstage. However, this character type of the corporate super-villain first made a real impact with Frank Miller’s reworking of the Kingpin in Daredevil. Stan Lee’s Kingpin was openly a criminal boss, but Miller’s posed as a powerful businessman and made his headquarters atop a Manhattan skyscraper. The character type reached its apex with the revamped version of Lex Luthor in the 1980s as billionaire head of LexCorp, as developed by John Byrne from an initial idea by Marv Wolfman.It seems to me that every corporate mogul villain I’ve seen in comics since then is a pale imitation of Luthor.Cameron’s Electro/Strand is not different enough to escape what has now become a cliche. It’s interesting that Strand claims that he and Spider-Man are members of a new superhuman race that deserves to rule normal humans, but, of course, that’s really crossing into the territory of Magneto in X-Men. Strand is also a sinister mentor figure, attempting to tempt Spider-Man over to the dark side, and just by phrasing it that way, the connection to the first Star Wars trilogy is obvious. In Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie, the Green Goblin works much better as the tempter/father figure, especially since we can compare his relationship with Spider-Man/Parker to his relationship with his own son, Harry. And notice that the movie does not follow the comics cliche in linking Norman Osborn’s villainy to his corporate status: in fact, the other heads of OsCorp nearly succeed in deposing him, and the Goblin operates outside the corporate framework.

And so by this time it’s clear that, aside from the super-powers, Cameron’s Electro has more to do with the Kingpin, Luthor, Magneto, and the Green Goblin than with Lee and Ditko’s character!

Back to the Bendis version. In this animated episode Max Dillon is recreated as one of Peter Parker’s fellow college students at Empire State University, a physically ugly social misfit who is bullied by arrogant fratboys. (Do fraternity guys like this still exist, or do these Animal House-style villains only populate fiction?) So when this Dillon undergoes the electrical accident and gets Electro’s powers, he goes after the fratboys, and then starts lashing out at Spider-Man or anyone else in sight. As I said, a trite and tiresome plot. I guess I still don’t understand the reason for the cult of Bendis among today’s comics fans.

But here’s what really annoys me. Back when Stan Lee and Steve Ditko did the original Spider-Man stories in the early 1960s, Peter Parker was the social outsider in school. But it was not his fault. He was not doing anything wrong. As John Byrne once commented, Peter was “the good son,” devoted to the uncle and aunt who raised him, hard-working and successful in his studies. Lee and Ditko clearly put the onus on Peter’s snotty classmates for his isolation at school. Flash Thompson, Liz Allan and the rest were clearly being condemned for their mean-spiritedness in not accepting him as part of their community. Lee and Ditko’s sympathies were palpably with Peter as an unappreciated underdog. (Similarly, over in The Incredible Hulk, General “Thunderbolt” Ross lambasted Bruce Banner as a “spineless milquetoast” while Banner himself was just quietly doing his job and earning Ross’s daughter Betty’s loving appreciation. Lee and Kirby were obviously casting the General as a blustering macho nuisance, like the swaggering soldier ““ miles gloriousus ““ of classical comedy, albeit a dangerous one.)

In recent times, though, even Spider-Man‘s writers have adopted the Flash Thompson point of view, blaming the victim, referring to the high school Peter Parker as a nerd and geek (words that, by the way, were not popularly used back in the early 1960s the way they are now; back then, Peter was just a “bookworm,” an insult that was not all that bad considering how doubtful the level of Flash’s own literacy might be).

And nowadays comics writers are so out of sympathy with the kids who don’t fit in with the cool crowd, that it’s no surprise to see Bendis casting such a kid as not only physically unpleasant but a potential murderer. Dillon is shown to be far worse than the bullies who mocked him. I find this distasteful, and untrue to the original spirit of the Spider-Man concept. And, moreover, it reduces the character of Dillon to a deadly dull stereotype, the nerd who goes postal, and makes for a plot so uninspired that good comics editors would have thrown it in the trashcan.

(An article on Salon back in May showed a similar progression in Buffy the Vampire Slayer from “celebrating the uncool outcasts” as heroes, as it did in the first three seasons, to portraying them “as buffoons or villains” in its later years, concluding that the show had “no more room for a celebration of … the nobility of uncool people.” Perhaps the more successful writers become in a medium, whether comics or TV, the more they find themselves mocking or demonizing those who remind them of their formerly unsuccessful selves.)

Only the night before I saw the Spider-Man episodes I caught Cartoon Network’s late night telecast of episodes of Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, both the work of a Warners Animation crew including Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, Alan Burnett and many others. Neither episode ““ “Roxy Rocket,” in which Batman tangles with the Penguin and Roxy, a reckless villainess who travels astride rockets, and “Target,” a mystery in which Lois Lane is targeted by an unknown assassin ““ were among the best of their particular series. But even with these average installments, I was impressed once more with the series’ high overall standards: the striking visual designs, the suspenseful and cinematic action sequences, the cleverness and wit of the scripts, the vivid characterizations and voice acting. The Spider-Man episodes fare poorly indeed by comparison. I don’t find Cartoon Network’s Justice League series nearly as well-written as its two predecessors, but the Saturday before I caught the new two-parter that involved Darkseid and Jack Kirby’s New Gods and was quite impressed.

For a few years now I’ve been reading speculation that the traditional animated film, drawn by animators, is losing popularity and is being supplanted by astonishingly successful computer animated movies like DreamWorks’ Shrek and Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. The idea is that audiences prefer the more realistic and three-dimensional look of the computer-animated films to the drawn films.

I wonder if this is really true. The Simpsons is still very popular, and so is Cartoon Network, which continues to show mostly films done in traditional animation, whether classic theatrical shorts from Warners and MGM, the vast body of Hanna-Barbera TV animation, or contemporary series. I likewise wonder if DreamWorks and Disney and others haven’t erred in judging what the audience for animated movies wants. If the majority of the audience for these films is small children brought by their moms, it’s no wonder that, say, a traditionally animated film like Lilo & Stitch (cute little girl with funny pet) succeeds, but Treasure Planet and Sinbad do not. Mothers can spot the latter two as being aimed at teenage boys, not small children, and teenage boys can spot that these films aren’t edgy enough to satisfy them. I would like to think that, like Lilo, traditionally animated movies aimed at the traditional audience for these films will still make money.

I would not like to think that I’m wrong about this. It is said that a generation, or maybe two, has now grown up that does not want to watch black and white movies because they prefer color, thereby cutting themselves off from enjoying decades of classic black and white films.

What if the same thing happens in animation, and someday we will discover that kids won’t watch Mickey Mouse cartoons from the 1930s, or Chuck Jones cartoons from the 1950s, or even Warners’ more recent Batman and Superman animated series because they’re not computer animated and don’t look “real” enough. And then we’ll just have computer animated shows and films, both the good ones, and the drab ones with the humans who move like well oiled automatons.

-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson

For months and months the conventional attitude in the news media seemed to be that Ang Lee, who was such a highly regarded director of intelligent cinema, was certain to be a success directing the Hulk movie. Meanwhile, I was telling friends that I thought Lee was the wrong choice for the film and thought it would be a considerable disappointment. I very much liked Lee’s film of Sense and Sensibility, but his achievement there does not demonstrate that he is the right person to make what is basically a monster movie. Watching The Ice Storm feels to me like wading through molasses, and the characters were often so understated in their reactions as to be off-putting. Still, critics seemed to find that this directorial style fit the subject matter. I presume that opinion makers decided he would be great on The Hulk because he had already done a widely praised action movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. When that film was playing, I felt I might be the only person in New York who did not care for it: it was slow-moving, the narrative felt as if were meandering, the performances were too low-key, I did not empathize with the characters, and the battle scenes, however frenetic, lacked real suspense. (I told one friend that I found some of the martial arts battle scenes on Buffy more involving, and she gasped in shock. Okay, I like the battle scenes in Yojimbo and the first Matrix better, too.)

It seems to me that several of the flaws for which the Hulk movie is being criticized ““ the glacial pace, the lack of narrative momentum, the introverted performances (except for the scenery-chewing actors playing Banner’s father and Glenn Talbot, who head in the opposite direction) ““ were present in Lee’s previous films. In other words, one could have seen this coming.Something else that set off an early warning alarm for me about the Hulk movie was a short interview that Ang Lee gave to The New York Times in the early stages of his work on the film in which he said he was investigating the scientific basis for becoming the Hulk. It turns out that Lee’s wife is a microbiologist, and according to The New Yorker (June 30, 2003), he started investigating subjects such as molecular growth and blood cells in preparing the Hulk movie. But how necessary was this?In The New York Times (June 22, 2003) Ang Lee explained that. “The origins of the Hulk are in the Cold War, and we had to find a way to update these anxieties, but not duplicate them.” When The Hulk debuted, in 1962, it was during the Cold War, when Americans feared that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union would lead to a nuclear conflagration. It made sense, then, that the Hulk’s origin was founded in fears of radiation and the nuclear bomb: scientist Bruce Banner was exposed to the radiation of an exploding “gamma bomb” during a test, much like the many such tests before the passage of the nuclear test ban treaty. (Decades later, writer/artist John Byrne updated the origin tale by subtly indicating that it involved a test below ground, which was still permitted under the treaty.)

Today, there are worries about the new science of genetic engineering: will people create terrible new diseases or alter their offspring to be genetically superior? Some people, like author Michael Crichton, warn of the potential dangers of another new science, nanotechnology. So it makes sense that these are the new potential terrors that would play a role in an updated Hulk origin. (I wonder, though, with the concerns over terrorists getting their hands on “dirty bombs” and the North Koreans building nuclear weapons, whether The Bomb will make a comeback as a source of fear.)

So as the Hulk film begins, we see a lot of starfish, presumably to explain the Hulk’s resistance to injury: he regenerates damaged flesh quickly. Banner’s crazy scientist father David Banner (named after the TV version of Banner, a fact no reviewer I’ve read has pointed out) performed genetic experiments on himself, and then Bruce inherited the result. There is nanotechnology involved, I take it, to help explain why Banner was not killed outright by the gamma radiation. And, of course, there’s a burst of gamma radiation that mutated Bruce’s altered genes. All of this to try to explain the Hulk’s superhuman biology.

And none of this explains a very big question. When Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk, where does all the extra mass come from? This is a question that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby could more easily duck, since in his original stories, the Hulk was bigger than Banner, but not much bigger than a normal man. In one early story, the Hulk even disguises himself with a hat (pulled down over his brow) and coat (with the jacket turned up) and rides undetected on a passenger airplane in those long ago days before security made people take their shoes off to check for bombs. Of course the stewardesses and other passengers would all have to be color blind not to notice the Hulk’s visible body parts were green, but my point is that the Hulk was originally depicted as the same size as a tall, brawny man. (See, Lou Ferrigno was indeed well cast in the 1980s TV show.) But over time in the comics, especially since the coming of the Image Comics founders, the Hulk has gotten increasingly taller and more massive. Peter David did a story arc in which the Hulk, then intelligent, and Betty lived undercover in a small Southern town, with the Hulk disguising his face and hands with bandages. Hence, like H. G. Wells’s “Invisible Man,” he could pass himself off as someone undergoing medical treatment. Okay, but then how do you explain the fact that the artist draws him looking ten feet tall?

The movie makes matters worse by showing the Hulk growing bigger under provocation. It’s an interesting visual method of dramatizing the principle that the madder the Hulk gets, the stronger he gets: now he gets bigger, too. And seeing Betty with the gigantic Hulk made numerous film critics liken the Hulk to King Kong, a comparison I had never thought of until this movie.

But the problem is now even more glaring: where does all the extra mass come from? And when the Hulk transforms back into Banner, literally shrinking on camera at one point, where does all the extra mass go?

This isn’t a new problem for sci-fi films. During Turner Classic Movies’ recent weekend of films with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, I watched 20 Million Miles to Earth. Comics history buffs take note: the creature in this movie appears to be the inspiration that Roy Thomas and Gil Kane used for Gog, the rapidly growing, visually similar monster that Kraven the Hunter finds in the Savage Land in Amazing Spider-Man #103-104. In the movie, this Harryhausen critter hatches and is about the same size as a child’s doll, but then rapidly grows, becoming nearly man-sized within less than a day, without eating anything! (We later learn he eats sulfur, which is impossible since it’s not organic, but he hasn’t eaten anything leading up to these initial growth spurts.) Ah, well, you say, that’s just a quaint 1950s sci-fi movie; more recent moviemakers wouldn’t violate scientific laws so blatantly. Then how about this: in Alien the title character bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach and slithers off. When we see the Alien only a short time later, it has become bigger than Hurt! And there’s no explanation. (Did the baby Alien get into the food supplies and metabolize it really, really fast? Is that even possible? But no, there’s no effort to make this rapid growth credible. And the rest of the movie, as we know, shows how the Alien defines “food supplies.”)

As many of you know, I was one of the main writers of the late Mark Gruenwald’s The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Aided in large part by the technological expertise of another Marvel staffer, Eliot Brown, Mark sought to make the Marvel characters’ super-powers as firm a basis in real science as possible. After the first version of the Handbook, Mark decided that some of the explanations had grown too complicated, and asked me to simplify them. There’s a lesson right there: less is more, and don’t make matters unnecessarily complex.

When it came to the Hulk, a matter like the Hulk’s increase in strength as he grew angrier was easy enough to explain: obviously, it was like the way a surge of adrenaline can boost a normal human’s physical abilities. But as for the Hulk’s increases and decreases in mass, Mark effectively threw up his hands. The explanation he used was that the extra mass came from an “otherdimensional source” and returned to that other dimension when the Hulk reverted to Banner.

In other words, there is no explanation in terms of real science. It’s like when science fiction writers use hyperspace to explain faster-than-light travel. No one has discovered hyperspace, it’s just a hypothetical concept, but it solves the problem.

In an earlier time if storytellers had created the Hulk, he might have been a normal man who fell under a curse that magically changed him into a monster and back. (The Hulk is, after all, also a variation on the werewolf archetype, so it’s no wonder that in the early stories he changes into the monster at nightfall.) In modern times, magic has been displaced by science in the popular mind as the source of wonders (leaving major exceptions like Harry Potter and Buffy Summers aside). So it behooves writers to give a creature like the Hulk ““ or any super-powered character ““ a facade of scientific credibility. My sense is that ideally the scientific explanation for the powers should be convincing enough to satisfy the layman. Of course, in real life super-powers don’t exist so a trained scientist could eventually find the holes in the explanation.

Then there’s Bruce’s crazy father, David, whose experiments on himself ended up giving him the powers of the Absorbing Man. And there is no possible scientific explanation for being able to “absorb” the properties of materials one touches! In the Thor comics in which the Absorbing Man debuts (and shouldn’t he be part of the Thor license, not the Hulk’s?), he gets his powers from a spell cast by Loki, so the powers explicitly work by magic. Having turned David Banner into the Absorbing Man, the moviemakers don’t even seem to realize what the powers are for. Here’s David Banner held prisoner in handcuffs. Okay, so why doesn’t he absorb the properties of the steel in the handcuffs and escape? Come to think of it, since he is in contact with air, couldn’t he just turn into a gas and escape?

So, to explain the Hulk, Ang Lee and writer James Schamus come up with nanotechnology AND the mutagenic effects of gamma radiation AND the hereditary effects of genetic engineering performed by Banner’s father on himself. And this complicated chain of catalysts still cannot explain how Bruce Banner becomes, in effect, a rampaging storybook giant. Maybe they just should have stuck with one simple pseudo-scientific cause rather than tiresomely establishing all three. To some degree the scientific explanations for how Banner became the Hulk are MacGuffins, to use Alfred Hitchcock’s term, plot devices that fill necessary functions in the mechanics of the narrative but are not important to the real thrust of the story.

But from another perspective, the source of Bruce Banner’s super-powers is thematically very important indeed. Stan Lee has long said that he based the Hulk on Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein’s Monster.

Genetic engineering even reinforces the Frankenstein theme: David Banner is Frankenstein himself and his son Bruce is the monster. Add Betty Ross into the equation, and the Hulk also ties into the Beauty and the Beast archetype, including that classic variation on the theme, King Kong.And Bruce Banner fits another classic archetype: he is also Faust. In the comics version of his origin, Bruce Banner figuratively makes a deal with the devil. There he is, the impassive nuclear scientist, calmly presiding over the testing of his invention, the gamma bomb, a terrible weapon indeed, designed to slaughter the enemy through lethal amounts of radiation. Who is Banner doing this for? The United States government, as represented by General “Thunderbolt” Ross, arrogant, blustering, and contemptuous of civilians who do not live up to his standards of rampant machismo. Banner just takes Ross’s verbal abuse, not bothering to stand up against him. Does Banner ask himself about the morality of creating this weapon for Ross? No, he doesn’t, and seems to regard himself as just pursuing his scientific interests regardless of the consequences. Did Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, creating the Hulk in the midst of the Cold War, consciously disapprove of Banner’s project? I don’t know, and ultimately it does not matter. As in the case of scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the question of the morality of using scientific discoveries to create such destructive weapons was a subject of debate in the early 1960s.

And then Banner sights a trespasser on the test site, young Rick Jones, and suddenly it is as if the potential victims of the gamma bomb are no longer a theoretical concept but a real person in the here and now. It is as if Banner’s conscience has been awakened, and he rushes out to the test site to rescue Rick. But it is too late to halt the destruction Banner has complacently set into motion. Banner’s assistant Igor is actually a spy and disobeys his order to stop the countdown: Igor intends that Banner’s weapon will consume its creator’s life. And in a sense it does: Banner hurls Rick into a trench for safety (in those “duck and cover” days this apparently was sufficient) but is himself caught in the blast of gamma radiation.

Banner survives, but now he is cursed to continually transform into the Hulk, embodies man’s dark side, his capacity for rage and destruction.

Moreover, the Hulk is, in effect, the power of the nuclear bomb in a monstrous human form. In Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jensen linked the Hulk to another green monster, Godzilla, who has long been regarded as a metaphor for the power of the atomic bomb that resonated with Japanese audiences after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus it makes sense that in the comics the Hulk swiftly evolved into a being strong enough to toss around tanks or to create small earthquakes or even to topple a mountain.

Recently longtime Hulk writer Peter David wrote the brilliant one shot The Incredible Hulk: The End, depicting a possible future in which the Hulk is the last living creature (aside from mutated cockroaches, to no one’s surprise) on an Earth covered by lethal radiation after a nuclear war. David explicitly portrays the Hulk as a dark version of Prometheus, the Titan of Greek mythology who brought fire from the heavens to mankind.

As punishment for so empowering man, the god Zeus had Prometheus chained to a mountain, and every day a great vulture would attack him, feeding on his inner organs. Overnight, the immortal Titan’s injuries would heal, and the torment would begin anew the next day. In The End Banner/The Hulk represents all those who brought nuclear fire ““ nuclear weaponry ““ to Earth, a force that in this story destroyed humanity. And now the Hulk suffers the punishment of Prometheus: each day assaulted by a swarm of mutated insects that he cannot fight, for whom he is their only source of food, and left virtually dead, only to regenerate and undergo the same horrors the next day. In this way the Hulk is humanity’s scapegoat, eternally undergoing punishment for man’s inhumanity to man, and never fully expiating humanity’s crimes.

This apocalyptic vision is really an extension of some of the basic concepts underlying the Hulk: The Hulk of The End suffers for humanity’s sins (yes, a strange kind of sinister Christ figure), just as Banner suffers in large degree because of his role in creating the gamma bomb. Peter David skillfully dramatizes these themes into an affecting tragedy in The End, something at which the Hulk moviemakers fell short.

In part, Banner is a victim ““ of fate, of his dysfunctional childhood, and of the cruelty of his fellow men. But in part, Banner also brought his curse upon himself: he created the weapon of destruction that destroyed his life. And now as the Hulk, he is a vastly powerful menace to humanity, just as his bomb would have been.

In Ang Lee’s Hulk, though, Bruce Banner is entirely a victim in becoming the Hulk. His father experimented with genetic engineering on himself, and Bruce inherited the genetic results. (And aren’t you tired, too, of the cliche of the scientist who tests his potentially dangerous new discovery on himself? What scientist in real life would be foolish enough to do that?) His father also murdered his mother, traumatizing the young Bruce, filling him with the inner rage that would later explode forth in the Hulk. The movie’s Bruce and Betty Ross are working in “nuclear biotechnology” (What does that mean? Can that possibly be a real scientific field?), working on a method of regenerating animal cells. Glenn Talbot wants to buy Bruce’s and Betty’s discovery so he can turn it to military uses, rendering armies immune to lasting injury. Bruce and Betty don’t want to sell out. In other words, the movie’s Bruce is not embarked on a morally questionable project: Talbot may be the Mephistopheles figure, but there is no Faustian bargain here, nor any attempt at redemption through Banner’s sacrificing himself to save Rick. Ang Lee complained to the Times (June 22, 2003) that in the comics Bruce Banner is a “wimp,” but the movie Bruce seems more acted upon than an active force himself.

In the Hulk’s origin story in his very first comic in 1962, Bruce’s race to rescue Rick, and the subsequent nuclear blast, are highly dramatic: imagine how vivid such a sequence would be on film. In the Hulk movie, Bruce gets an unprepossessing lab worker out of the way of a nuclear device in his lab and gets exposed to a burst of gamma radiation himself. It’s staged so undramatically as to seem like a throwaway scene. “That’s it?” I thought, watching it. And the character who is saved just disappears from the movie. How significant that Lee and Schamus use all of the 1960 Hulk’s core supporting cast ““ Betty Ross, “Thunderbolt” Ross, Glenn Talbot ““ and not Rick Jones, through whose friendship and loyalty the readers could better empathize with Banner. Moreover, if Rick were in the movie, and they did him right (like hiring Peter David as dialogue consultant?), no one would have accused the film of being humorless.

The Hulk’s strength and rage are in part metaphors for the psychological power of the repressed emotions within Bruce Banner, which date back to his dysfunctional childhood. In the movie, those emotions seem to consist of rage and pain over the murder of Bruce’s mother by his father, and presumably also anger over the child Bruce’s inability to prevent the murder. In the comic, however, Bruce’s father, (there given the alliterative name Brian Banner in traditional comics style) is also physically, emotionally and verbally abusive to young Bruce.

Somehow it makes more dramatic sense to me that the Hulk is the reaction to the baby Bruce’s inability to protect himself from harm, as well as his mother, rather than just the latter. (In comics terms, if you witness your parents’ deaths as a child, you become the vengeful Batman, not the irrational, uncontrollable Hulk!) To baby Bruce, Brian Banner was the violent, irrational giant with unlimited strength with which to hurt him; as the Hulk, the adult Bruce has effectively become that giant himself (and, as we know, the Hulk still hates Bruce, his other self).

Even so, it seems to me that Bruce Banner’s repressed childhood rage at his father, and even at the world, still does not entirely justify the sheer power of the Hulk in dramatic terms. It is when one adds the dimension that the Hulk represents modern man’s capacity for violence, his contemporary weapons of mass destruction, that the epic scale of the Hulk’s one-man battles against armies, and his capacity to level a city, seems completely appropriate. Keep in mind, too, that Bruce Banner’s dysfunctional childhood is a relatively recent addition to the Hulk continuity, but the atom bomb theme was there from the very start. (And hey, how come the movie shows the Hulk rampaging through San Francisco, and it never occurs to anyone that he could inadvertently trigger one of the city’s many underground faults?)

Here is a lesson: one tampers with classic comic book continuity at the severe risk of diminishing the mythic subtext that makes the stories work. By changing the Hulk’s origin, Ang Lee, James Schamus and company have made it more contemporary, but they have stripped it of much of its thematic significance and weakened its dramatic impact.

There are other things I like about the Hulk movie. For example, once the Hulk bursts free of captivity, the film brilliantly captures the Hulk in action as the comics artists have portrayed him; the Hulk picking up and tossing away tanks, the Hulk soaring over the countryside in enormous leaps, the Hulk pictured against vast desert landscapes, making me realize that the Hulk is, in his own way, a new version of the archetypal antihero of the American West, an outlaw of a different sort.

I don’t think that the Hulk movie works overall as an action-adventure film, principally because Lee’s storytelling style is to a large degree unsuited to the source material. It is not because Ang Lee and company have taken the material so seriously. They may worry needlessly about justifying the Hulk’s powers in terms of hard science, but I do not fault them for wanting to explore the thematic meanings of the Hulk series. In part, indeed, their errors lie in not entirely understanding the themes of the comics, as I have attempted to show. Understanding what motivates the characters should help bring those characters to dramatic life, aid the audience in identifying and empathizing with them, give the viewers something to engage their minds and their interests, and make this more than a one-dimensional monster movie to be forgotten as soon as one leaves the theater. Why shouldn’t these fantasy adventure movies be entertaining AND smart?

Last week my column dealt with the way many movie critics condescend to mainstream comics, and in some cases insist that superhero movies should consist of “dumb big fun.” The opening of the movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen presents us with even more evidence. Take a look at these contrasting reviews of League.

Collin Levey in The Wall Street Journal (July 11, 2003):”League is surprisingly good fun … The movie is based on the comic books of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, whose wit is dedicated to the sort of questions that have nagged eight-year-olds through the ages: for instance, who would win if Superman and Batman had it out?”But The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen succeeds the same way the original comic books did, by making the conflicts and dilemmas basic enough for a five-year-old, while giving the heroes and villains layers glamorous outfits and layers of complexity, to thicken the broth.

“Pirates of the Caribbean operates in the same spirit, by taking a cut-and-paste adventure script and making it campy.”

Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times (July 11, 2003):

“It’s a formidable task, bringing the comics’ dank, coruscating vision to the screen …. Mr. Moore’s melancholic and apocalyptic stories have a dour, murderous humor drizzling through the depressive clouds. … in his stories ““ from The [sic] Watchmen and V for Vendetta through League ““ the world is awash in brutality and ugliness, deserving of doom. Mr. Moore’s pleasure comes in serving up Old Testament balance …. Mr. Norrington and Mr. Robinson show glimmers of faith in Mr. Moore’s vision ““ that paranoia, suspicion and resentment as well as other major character flaws are more a part of the league’s bond than fighting for king and country.”

Which of these two critics actually read and gained some understanding of Alan Moore’s League comic books? And which one either didn’t read the comics or, if he did, didn’t begin to get what they were about, but confidently acts as if he did? The answer is downright obvious, and I will be tackling the subject of the comics and film versions of Moore’s League in a future column.

Presumably by sheer coincidence, within less than a week after my last column, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section published a piece by critic A. O. Scott entitled “The Pretentious Summer Superhero” (Sunday, June 13, 2003). Scott mentions Freud, Homer, and other “giants of Western thought” whose works influenced the makers of the Hulk movie and the latest Matrix film. Scott writes, “The Hulk and The Matrix Reloaded … are the latest, and perhaps the most extreme, examples of a new Hollywood subgenre, the summer reading-list blockbuster. This summer, millions of teenagers have been invited to experience the tedium and pedantry of graduate school in Dolby surround. … As someone who dropped out of real graduate school to spend my life going to the movies, I have to admit I’m a little perplexed…”

As someone who attended graduate school and earned two graduate degrees, I’m a little perplexed, too. I look back on grad school as one of the best, most tedium-free times in my life, with intellectually stimulating teachers and bright, good-humored fellow students, some of whom became my lifelong friends. And I saw plenty of films on the side. Maybe Scott was simply enrolled in the wrong subject.

Anyway, Scott raises the same question I addressed in my previous column: “If we risk taking certain pictures too seriously, are there others we don’t take seriously enough? The latter accusation tends to come from the more scholarly precincts of pop-culture fandom, from the comic-book, fantasy, and science-fiction aficionados … whose sensibilities have come to dominate large-scale, humor-deficient moviemaking in recent years. And they may have a point. But it has been a long time since anyone but a few unreconstructed culture snobs has denied that sci-fi and superhero stories can be illuminating, even profound, as well as entertaining. That argument is long settled….” I wonder what the writers for The Comics Journal, which has long dismissed the super hero genre as utter junk, will think of that. (Why do I get the sense that, in their eyes, Mr. Scott has just figuratively hung a bullseye around his neck.)

I’ve spoken to a couple of comics pros who tell me that absolutely everyone they meet who learns they work in comics thinks that’s “cool.” Perhaps they live in the same alternate reality as A. O. Scott, where comics, even superhero comics, have won nearly universal acceptance as genuine art! Why, in a world like that, the comics industry would not be in severe financial straits, comics critics and historians like me and many others would be writing regular reviews and columns for major mainstream newspapers and magazines (just as film critics do!), The New York Times would frequently profile leading writers and artists in the comics field (as it does for creative figures in film, theatre, television, classical and pop music, and other fine arts), its book critics would review new graphic novels every week, and its Arts and Leisure section would not give articles dismissive, contemptuous titles like “The Pretentious Summer Superhero”! Ah, to live in the dream world of A. O. Scott! If only it were real.

“But the fact that science fiction or comic book based movies are capable of exploring big themes does not mean that they do so automatically.” Who says that they do? No story genre does. “And in any genre it is dangerous to put the thematic cart before the narrative horse, which is what the makers of The Hulk and The Matrix Reloaded, so besotted with the allegorical dimensions of their stories, have begun to do.” Quite rightly, Scott points to The Lord of the Rings movies as successfully combining entertainment values with serious themes.

But I think it is wrong to write as if the filmmakers of Hulk and Matrix Reloaded are so “besotted” with the intellectual themes of their movies that they consciously downplay the importance of dramatizing them effectively. As noted above, Ang Lee made The Hulk in the same directorial style that he has made his past films, a style that critics have showered with praise in the past. I suspect that Lee was fully aware that he had to find an effective dramatic story structure for presenting the film’s themes. It is simply that his style happens not to be entirely suited to super hero action-adventure. The Wachowski Brothers fill The Matrix Reloaded with action scenes clearly intended to dazzle and enthrall the audience: it’s not that they have lost sight of the goal of entertaining, but that critics and much of their audience haven’t been satisfied with the results in their latest movie.

Moreover, whether or not a movie is “pretentious” has nothing to do with how successfully it works in dramatic terms. A movie is “pretentious” if the quality of the filmmakers’ ideas does not match up to their intellectual aspirations. And Scott is not addressing the ideas behind The Hulk, instead taking the pose that even a concept out of introductory-level Freud ““ the Hulk’s resentment towards father figures ““ is somehow one of those “unusually heavy intellectual demands” he dislikes.

Now Scott is worried that the success of Lord of the Rings will “increase the vogue for pretentious blockbusters. Their existence offers a convenient solution to the big studios whose craving for profit is accompanied by a nagging desire for prestige, and who market their movies in two categories: serious movies and summer movies. The advanced-placement blockbuster allows them to have it both ways ““ or it would, if the audience and the critics would only do their homework.”

Fear not, Mr. Scott. I suspect that the disappointing box office performance of The Hulk and The Matrix Reloaded (they’ve sold tons of tickets, but not as many tons as Hollywood’s powers perhaps unrealistically assumed that they would) will instead inspire Hollywood to dumb down future fantasy adventure movies. The real avatar of the future might be the dumbed-down The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, which critics hate because they see it as merely a loud, empty action flick with no ideas behind it.

It’s really rather sad that Scott, who every week writes eruditely about not only Hollywood movies but challenging independent and foreign films, seems to feel he has to engage in traditional American anti-intellectualism. Beneath his piece in the same Arts and Leisure section, another author, John Sellers, writing about a series involving gay people, assures us that he himself is a straight guy who has “been to Hooters more times than I’ve eaten sushi.” Sellers is making a joke out of claiming to be a “Regular Guy,” kidding cliches of male heterosexual life. Scott, though, seems dead serious in protesting that he too is a Regular Guy, defined in this case not in terms of sexuality but of intelligence. Scott didn’t like grad school, no sirree, so he dropped out to watch flicks! And he doesn’t want to see any “term-paper blockbuster” that makes him feel he has to do “homework.” He’s not one of them thar pointy-headed intellectuals, even if he does spend his career reviewing art house films.

No matter the lip service his article pays to the artistic potential of superhero and science fiction stories, I think Scott’s real feelings come out when he writes the following: “After the lukewarm notices for The Hulk and The Matrix [Reloaded], it has been interesting to note the praise heaped on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, for its refreshing (and relative) lack of pretension. The film … was hailed far and wide for its fidelity to the B-movie tradition of noisy, nonsensical spectacle … When I wrote that T3 was ‘loud, dumb and obvious.’ I, like many of my colleagues, meant that in a good way….” You see, in Scott’s view, Terminator 3 knows its place: it doesn’t aspire beyond being nonsensical and dumb.

While Scott worries as if having to think about themes in superhero movies might ruin the taste of his popcorn, only two days before (June 11), his Times colleague Elvis Mitchell wrote a review of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie that took for granted that adventure comics can have artistic merit and criticized the movie both for being an unsuccessful thriller and for not conveying enough of Alan Moore’s thematic vision. Mitchell notes that the “movie … suffers from its own anxieties ““ a dread of being too literate….” In the very same issue as Scott’s piece, the Times ran an article by Publishers Weekly critic Douglas Wolk, titled, “The Comic Book Was Better.” In it, Wolk not only skillfully analyzes Moore’s League comics but contends that the movie’s “greater flaw … is that it takes no notice of what Mr. Moore’s story is really about.” Indeed, one of Wolk’s points seems to be that the “fun” and “wit” of the comic book League is inextricably linked to its “delicious subtext,” however dark that proves to be. (It’s great that the Times ran a critique like this, even if it fails to mention Wolk’s article on the “Arts and Leisure” front page while making Scott’s disparaging piece a cover feature.)

Perhaps herein lies a lesson for filmmakers who delve into the comics-based fantasy adventure. In order to adapt source material from the comics, one must first more fully understand the themes and characterizations in the comics, and how the writers and artists bring them to dramatic life on the comics page. Once one understands the underlying meanings, he can better adapt them in cinematic terms.

Ang Lee told The New York Times (June 22, 2003) that “the reason the Hulk appealed to me is that I’ve never seen the comic-book genre as a movie genre; it’s not like film noir or screwball comedy. To me, there aren’t rules to follow.” First, of course, comics is not a genre but a medium, and it can be used for any genre, not just superheroes stories. However, superhero stories ARE a genre, and had Ang Lee paid more attention to its requirements, perhaps he might have adapted his filmmaking styles to the subject more effectively. In The New Yorker Lee is reported to have said, “I can’t make a comic book, but I can make a tragedy.” Had he understood the superhero genre more fully, he would have succeeded in both, as Peter David did in The End.

Ang Lee was well intentioned in seeking to use the Hulk movie to explore the underlying themes behind the character. It would be sad to think that because the Hulk movie did not meet commercial expectations, Ang Lee has actually thwarted other filmmakers from pursuing a similar path in comics-based movies. Not every comic or movie based on comics that attempts to deal with serious themes is going to succeed. Some will, and some won’t, but that is true of every genre. But just because some of these efforts fail is no reason to decree that the genre should not even aspire towards higher goals. For decades now comics have been maturing as an artistic medium, and that process cannot occur without mistakes being made along the way. To try to confine comics and comics-based movies to the confines of mindless escapist entertainments is like trying to stifle a baby in its cradle before it has a chance to grow.

-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson

Late one night last June I watched PBS talk show host Charlie Rose sitting across from director Ang Lee, their table surrounded by an ominous black void. As usual, Rose’s direct gaze and the way his voice gives measured weight to each word signaled the deep importance of the topic at hand. Rose looked at Lee and asked, “Why is the Hulk green?”

With so many recent movies based on comic books, I find it interesting to see the mainstream media attempting to grapple with a subject that seems so familiar to those of us in the community of comics professionals and aficionados. Some might call this community a subculture, but I contend that there is a lot more knowledge and appreciation of comics in the general population than conventional wisdom ““ and opinion makers in the media ““ acknowledges. So I find it oddly gratifying to see The New York Times run an editorial entitled “Incredible Hulk of a Budget” (June 30, 2003) or to do a complimentary editorial about the Spider-Man movie (May 7, 2002). It’s fun seeing David Letterman dressing people up as Spider-Man, the Hulk, and even Daredevil and Nightcrawler, for comedy bits that seem affectionate rather than demeaning. And slowly but surely there is increasing critical respect for comics, not just alternatives but mainstream genre work as well, as in Entertainment Weekly‘s new irregular column of comics reviews.

But still, serious treatment of mainstream comics is the exception rather than the rule. Charlie Rose’s cluelessness on the subject is a rather benign and amusing variation of the phenomenon. (Could it be that the Hulk is green because he’s a monster and it helps make him look inhuman and scary?) Now that many journalists and critics are writing about the recent superhero movies, we can see everything from ignorance about mainstream comics to condescension to them to outright contempt and hostility.

Let me turn to another anecdote to help make my point. Months ago I was at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City for a screening of a film of the opera The Tales of Hoffmann that was introduced by George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead. Romero was being honored by the museum with a retrospective of his work, and Hoffmann, a fantasy film with sorcerers and a dancing robot, was one of his major influences. And I am sitting in the audience thinking: here is a guy who directs movies about zombies who gets more critical respect and acclaim than top creators in mainstream comics.

Over forty years ago, Westerns, film noir, screwball comedies, thrillers and other movie genres were not taken seriously, either by movie critics or by the film industry itself, and were regarded as empty-headed mass entertainments. (If you look back at the history of the Academy Awards and wonder why, say, John Ford’s The Searchers did not win Best Picture ““ or even get nominated ““ that’s why. Who takes Westerns seriously?) It took the new auteurist school of critics, first arising in France in the 1950s (like Francois Truffaut) and then in the 1960s in the United States (such as critic Andrew Sarris) who demonstrated that these popular entertainment genres were frameworks within which talented directors created enduring works of art. And thus in the 21st century even George Romero’s low-budget horror films can be recognized as personal artistic statements. (An article in the July 6, 2003 New York Times refers to “the spookily revitalized ghouls in the classic horror film Night of the Living Dead who were allegedly transformed by radiation from a Venus space probe, an emblem of the anxieties of the ’60s.”)

The same critical revolution hasn’t happened with comics in America. Oh, alternative comics are getting increasing respect, especially if they tie in to a Big Subject (the Holocaust, Bosnia, etc.). But mainstream comics, which deal in genres like fantasy, horror, science fiction, and, of course, superheroes, still tend to be regarded as junk.

Are any of you really surprised that The New York Times titled its review of the first X-Men movie “Pow! Misfit Heroes to the Rescue! Zap!”? The real surprise is that most articles I’ve read about this year’s comics-based movies don’t resort to the usual 1960s Batman TV show sound effects.

I am struck by the way that some reviewers and journalists feel free to make pronouncements on comics without having done sufficient research on the subject. Roger Ebert acknowledges having once been a Marvel Comics reader and seems to retain a genuine fondness for Spider-Man. However well-intentioned, Ebert seems to have forgotten a lot about them. He begins his Hulk movie review by stating that “The Hulk is rare among Marvel superheroes in that his powers are a curse, not an advantage … It is about the anguish of having powers you did not seek and do not desire.” And how does this make the Hulk different from the Fantastic Four’s Thing, trapped in a grotesque body, who predated the Hulk, or the persecuted X-Men, or even Spider-Man, who is regularly tempted to renounce his costumed career and the use of his powers?

In his New Yorker profile of Ang Lee (June 30, 2003), drama critic John Lahr writes that “in his comic-book incarnation, the Hulk had little in the way of motivation. Unlike other superheroes, who are agents for good, the Hulk was conceived as a mutant. Part Gargantua and part Green Man … he simply raged when provoked, smashing his world to smithereens.” Just how many things in these few lines are wrong? Let us leave aside the variant personalities that Peter David and other writers gave different comics incarnations of the Hulk. Even Stan Lee’s traditional version of the Hulk is more complex than simply a raging beast: for example, he is paradoxically driven by a need for peace of mind, forever longing for a solitude that his military pursuers refuse to grant him. Are all other superheroes forces for good? The Sub-Mariner, who effectively began as a one-man terrorist army, predated the Hulk by over two decades. What does Lahr mean that the Hulk was conceived as a “mutant”? Even apart from the question of whether the Hulk fits that definition, isn’t Lahr aware that the X-Men were “conceived as mutants”? And aren’t they forces for good?

I suspect that Lahr is actually assuming that the Lou Ferrigno TV version of the Hulk is the same as the comics version. I will give Lahr this, however: I like his comparison of the Hulk to the “Green Man” archetype of folklore, the man of nature, which lies behind such diverse characters as Robin Hood and Swamp Thing. No wonder the movie ends up with Banner in the green world of a rain forest. (So there really is a profound answer to the question of why the Hulk is green, even if neither Charlie Rose nor Ang Lee figured it out.)

If someone writing about a comics-based movie does not do research into the comics, it should be no surprise that they treat comics creators are nonpersons. In his New Yorker article Lahr refers to “the Hulk’s creators, Marvel Comics.” Now how could there be a more perfect expression of the work for hire theory of artistic creation? The company created the character, not any mere individuals. By the same logic, next time that Lahr reviews Hamlet, I should expect him to state that it was created by the Globe Theatre company.

If the creators of the comics are nonpersons, then by extension, there is the assumption that any intellectual substance in a film based on comics must be the work of the filmmakers. Lahr goes on to write in The New Yorker that “Onscreen. . .Lee has given the Hulk psychological depth; he has reimagined the Hulk’s history as part of the universal struggle between patriarchy, repression and desire, which Lee has spent much of his career exploring.” And so Ang Lee has, but, of course, Banner/Hulk’s struggle between repression and desire was inspired by Stan Lee’s acknowledged source for the character, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and every writer of the Hulk comic has dealt with the theme.

As for the patriarchy theme, The New York Times‘s Elvis Mitchell, who seems to have considerably more knowledge of comics than most major film critics, states that Banner’s father issues derive from “the grim melodramatic scenes of the character’s childhood, introduced by the writer Peter David in the late 1980s” (June 22, 2003). In Entertainment Weekly (June 27-July 4, 2003), Jeff Jensen even points to a specific story in which, he says, Peter established Banner’s childhood horrors. And they are both wrong. It’s good to see Peter’s contributions to the Hulk mythos acknowledged in major publications (more than Marvel or Universal will do), and he certainly did more with Banner’s Oedipal traumas, but he did not invent Banner’s dysfunctional childhood. That was the work of Bill Mantlo in Incredible Hulk #312 (October, 1985), and perhaps Mantlo’s most significant contribution to Marvel lore.

Does assigning the proper credit matter? Let’s put it this way: I suspect Mitchell and Jensen might have been embarrassed to have made a similar mistake about film history. Perhaps they should be excused since Mantlo’s story is relatively obscure (though the History Channel’s recent documentary showed a panel from it without mentioning his name) and there are so few sources on comics history (though I mention it prominently in MY book). But that’s really the point: there should be more books and articles written about comics history!

Prejudices against comics also extend to their audience, real or perceived. It has been observed that various old-time Hollywood movie directors resisted being treated as artists by the new school of film critics and historians that rose in the 1960s. Perhaps that is because the conventional wisdom of their time was that the directors’ genre films were no more than well-crafted entertainments. And now one can see something of the same mindset at work. One of the producers of the Hulk movie, Gale Anne Hurd “jests” in The New York Times (June 16, 2003) that she has spent her career making fantasy adventure films, due to “arrested development.” It’s too bad that she has to feel she has to make a self-deprecatory joke about her life’s work, as if to apologize for it, which the rest of the article makes clear she takes seriously indeed. But it’s understandable considering the way people condescend to the genres she works in.Far worse is when insecure apology turns to offhanded contempt. It is clear from his interviews that Ang Lee takes the Hulk seriously, but nonetheless, referring to his sons in The New York Times (June 22, 2003), “‘They’re comic book geeks,’ Mr. Lee says, with an inflection that’s the aural version of a shrug.” Can Lee be unaware that he has just insulted his sons before The New York Times‘ vast readership, likening them to circus performers who bite the heads off chickens? Surely people at comics companies would not insult their audience this way. Here, for example, from last year (May 7, 2002) in the Times: “‘The community of Marvel Comics geeks, from the baby boomers to the newcomers, is a pretty huge community,’ said Avi Arad, president of Marvel Studios.” Hmm. And here I thought the phrase “Marvel zombie” was bad.If the audience is made up of “geeks,” then what they are reading or watching must be garbage. Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times (May 2, 2003) actually likes the second X-Men movie, but says, “It’s the kind of superhero movie we want if we have to have superhero movies at all.” In his own May 2 review in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert praises X2 with a not so faint damn ““ “I had a good time. Dumb, but good.” ““ and claims it is “made for (and possibly by) those with short attention spans,” a nasty knock at the filmmakers as well as their audience. Ebert also claims that X2 is true to the comics in its use of “perfunctory dialogue.” I’ve never heard, say, Roy Thomas’s, Chris Claremont’s, or Grant Morrison’s X-Men dialogue described as “perfunctory” before.

It may be that some reviewers are so put off by the outer trappings of the superhero genre ““ the costumes, the powers ““ that they do not expect the movies to have any value and therefore do not try to find any. Ebert contends that X2 is “not even trying to develop a story arc.” What, did he miss the overall plotline about Stryker’s attempt to turn the government against mutants and then wipe them all out? Or the character arcs such as Wolverine’s search for his past, Jean’s attempts to control her expanding powers, or Pyro’s defection from Xavier to Magneto? In his Chicago Sun-Times review of the Daredevil movie, Ebert seems bewildered by the fact that Daredevil is Catholic and belittles it, though this may simply be a measure of the film’s inability to dramatize Frank Miller’s themes of Catholic idealism, guilt, repression and redemption from the comics.

Ebert quite reasonably wonders how the movie’s Daredevil executes all those superhuman leaps. On the Ebert & Roeper TV show, fellow critic Richard Roeper argued that it was simple: Daredevil can leap great heights because his sense of touch is superhumanly sensitive. (Now what possible sense does that make?) In his Chicago Sun-Times review (Feb. 14, 2003), though, Ebert says that the explanation did not really matter, then adding a sneer at comics readers: “Comics fans, however, study the mythology and methodology with the intensity of academics. It is reassuring, in this world of inexplicabilities, to master a limited subject within a self-contained universe. Understand, truly understand, why Daredevil defies gravity, and the location of the missing matter making up 80 percent of the universe can wait for another day.” And perhaps decades ago, someone might have used a similar tactic to castigate Ebert for studying the history of Hollywood studio films.

In fact, in his reviews of superhero movies, Ebert continually wonders about silly things, the very sin he ascribes to comics fans. Why, he seems puzzled, is Wolverine a more prominent character in the movies than Cyclops or Pyro, when they are more powerful? (Because he has such a dramatic personality? Because slashing with claws ““ this film’s equivalent of Errol Flynn dueling with a sword ““ is more viscerally exciting to audiences?) “What would happen if Pyro and Iceman went head to head? I visualize the two of them in a pool of hot water.” I think we’re verging on “Who’s stronger, Thor or the Hulk?” territory here, but wait: there’s more. Ebert is puzzled by the X-Men’s sex lives. “How inconvenient if during sex your partner was accidentally teleported, frozen, slashed, etc. Does Cyclops wear his dark glasses to bed?” (And by the way, the real answer about Daredevil’s leaps, as Elvis Mitchell notes in his New York Times review, which does not condescend, is that Daredevil simply can’t move about like Spider-Man and the film made a mistake.)

Then there are the reviewers who seem to be arguing that they like movies based on mainstream comics, as long as they stay entertainingly trivial and do not dare aspire to any serious concerns. In his New York Times review of the Hulk movie A. O. Scott commends Ang Lee and company “for trying to push the musclebound superhero genre in new directions,” but argues that “They seem at once to be taking the material too seriously and condescending to it” leading to “mythomaniacal pretension.” Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly (June 27-July 4, 2003) complains that Ang Lee “anesthetizes the Marvel comics mutant with a mopey psychological back story that leaves little unanalyzed space for fun. . . a big-budget comic-book adaptation has rarely felt so humorless and intellectually defensive about its own pulpy roots.” Schwarzbaum says she’s “ready for some dumb big fun” and doesn’t get it.

Similarly, writing about the new Charlie’s Angels movie in Time (July 7, 2003), critic Richard Schickel complains that “after The Matrix Reloaded and The Hulk. there’s something refreshing about this movie’s complete lack of intellectual pretense. No Freudian issues are explored. No reference is made to any philosophical systems, fashionable or not.” Note the loaded word: any attempt to give this kind of movie any intellectual depth is “pretense.” Similarly, on CBS Sunday Morning (July 5, 2003) critic John Leonard noted that while he sees Terminator 3 as a “mess,” he gave it credit for not being a “pretentious mess” like the Hulk movie.

Each one of these critics seems to be asking, why can’t these superhero movies be stupid like they’re supposed to be?

And then there is outright hostility to mainstream comics material. Frank Rich, a media critic for The New York Times, positively gloats in his June 29 column, “Harry Crushes the Hulk,” that the first day sales of 100 million for the fifth Harry Potter book far surpassed the entire 62 million brought in by the Hulk movie on its opening weekend.

“As Harry readers suffer no shortage of attention spans” ““ another jab that people who like comics movies suffer from ADD ““ “so they still love fantasy that does not come equipped with computer-generated special effects.” (One could point out that the comic books in which the Hulk has appeared for forty-one years don’t have CGI, but the Harry Potter movies have plenty of them.) Rich points out that Harry Potter’s initial popularity came about through word of mouth, and that even this year’s massive publicity for the book reflects “genuine demand for the next installment of Harry’s tale,” contrasting it with Universal’s marketing budget for the Hulk movie. Is it not possible, Mr. Rich, that much of the interest in the Hulk movie ““ or the Spider-Man and X-Men movies ““ came about because these characters have been published in comics for forty years, and generations of readers have discovered and developed affection for these characters without benefit of major media campaigns?

Rich predicts that “as you’re reading this, The Hulk, like other summer hits before it, will probably be on the skids, with a box-office falloff possibly as high as 60 percent for its second weekend, its first step to an oblivion that will end some months from now with its video or DVD being dumped in the sales bin at Wal-Mart.” Indeed, the film did have a 70 percent falloff in its second weekend, though I suspect there will be plenty of film and comics buffs buying the DVD. But can’t you sense Rich’s apparent glee in consigning the movie to “oblivion” without actually having any evidence or giving any indication that he has actually seen the movie in question. He says the Hulk movie will fail because he wants the Hulk movie to fail, because how could a movie based on a superhero comic be any good?

A particularly awful recent example of blind contempt for comics is writer Ned Martel’s review of the recent History Channel documentary, Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked (in the June 23, 2003 New York Times). Referring to the show’s middle-aged and elderly interviewees, Martel sneers that “grown men push the comic book’s importance up, up and away from reality.” To Martel comics are no more than “teenage treats.” The show did not make its case for Alan Moore’s Watchmen in Martel’s mind if he can write, “Now as ever the texts are unfailingly jingoistic and offer few plot options other than victory for truth, justice and the American way. With invincibility guaranteed,” Martel goes on, “the creators had extra brain space available to transmogrify the heroes in new and grotesque incarnations.” Wait, even apart from what he means by “grotesque incarnations” (Of Superman? Who does he mean?), is it my imagination or did Martel just imply that comics creators have rather limited brain capacity?

Not only does Martel give no indication he has bothered to look at any contemporary comics but, more damningly, he betrays no knowledge that today’s comics deal with genres other than superheroes. (He hasn’t even heard of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, as far as I can tell.) Judging by Martel’s reaction, the History Channel’s attempt to persuade people of the cultural value of comics failed miserably. Martel consigns all of comics not just to oblivion but to damnation: “However wearying the world may seem, the demimonde of comic books has long offered readers an enlivening freak show. Good might never seem so good, nor evil so evil, anywhere else, and one man can don a mask and some tights and protect all from peril. It’s just that simple, despite all high-flying arguments to the contrary. Ka-splat.” There’s no need to examine the evidence; Martel has made up his mind. Perhaps Martel thought Dr. Frederic Wertham, demagogic adversary of comics in the 1950s, was the hero of the documentary.Despite all of the above, there are also film critics who demonstrate their willingness and insight to recognize that comics-based fantasy films can successfully deal with serious matters. In The Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan seems to be surprised to have made this discovery: “One of the unexpected aspects of X2 is the way its concerns seem to be uncannily relevant today, starting with an opening observation that ‘sharing the world has never been humanity’s defining attribute.’ And the central theme of both the film and the comic ““ how relentlessly suspicious we are of those who are different ““ has equal resonance just now. X2 might nor be the place you’d think to look for any kind of message, but there you are.”Variety‘s lead film critic Todd McCarthy (in the June 16-22 issue) acclaims Ang Lee’s Hulk film as “this emotionally cool yet anguished tale of dual Oedipal conflicts of Greek tragedy stature.” Well, no, I wouldn’t say the Hulk movie is on the level of Sophocles, but I think it is wonderful that McCarthy does not put a limit on the artistry that a “comic book movie” can achieve. Indeed, McCarthy goes on to say that Lee and writer James Schamus “have used the Marvel comic … as a means to explore such weighty issues as the search for one’s true identity, the struggle of an everyday personality with a dark inner self, father-child legacies, repressed memories, lost love and transformative anger.” At times, McCarthy writes, the film succeeds in treating these themes in a way that is “genuinely expressive and worth taking seriously.” McCarthy sees Ang Lee’s Hulk as falling short of the genuine tragedy he finds in King Kong and concludes, “Hulk is, in the end, a noble, shrewd, skillful but still thwarted try at upgrading one of the preferred genres of the moment and of respecting the intelligence of the audience more than is the norm these days.”

Roger Ebert also admires the Hulk movie. He would probably say that it has not changed his views about other superhero movies, but I suspect that the Hulk movie has opened his eyes to the way of seeing superhero fantasy as metaphor for real psychological and social issues. In his review (June 20, 2003), Roger Ebert observes that “Ang Lee’s Hulk … is not so much about a green monster as about two wounded adult children of egomaniacs …. These two duelling oedipal conflicts [Banner’s and Betty’s] are at the heart of Hulk, and it’s touching how in many scenes we are essentially looking at damaged children …. The movie brings up issues about genetic experimentation, the misuse of scientific research and our instinctive dislike of misfits, and actually talks about them. [Ang Lee] is trying here to actually deal with the issues in the story of the Hulk ….” (And there Ebert seems to acknowledge that these themes may be present in the comics as well.)

Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times clearly not only knows a lot about comics but values the better works in the medium, whether they are in the superhero genre or not. Mitchell knows enough to criticize director/writer Mark Steven Johnson in his Daredevil movie review (February 14, 2003) for altering Daredevil’s origin and to explain credibly why the changes both matter and were mistaken. Mitchell also makes a point of paying tribute to Frank Miller as the creator of much of the source material for the movie. Mitchell’s principal complaint against the film seems to be that it treats the genuine depth of the source material in too superficial and unimaginative a fashion. “It turns the legendary Man Without Fear into something second-rate and ordinary, a fate he suffered too often in the comics until rescued with pulp elan by Mr. Miller.”

Most strikingly, Mitchell notes that “the picture lacks the wit to show the moral qualms an attorney might have over choosing a violent alternative. The movie’s simple-minded concept flattens the protagonist. How often must we note that the comic-book rendition of a character is more fully realized than the movie version?” Exactly! Mitchell goes down as something of a hero in my book just for making that point.

Film historian Neal Gabler, in an article called “American Dreams” in the May 12, 2002 New York Times, goes more deeply into the subject of superhero movies, persuasively arguing that Spider-Man‘s theme of power and responsibility extended not just to the adolescents perceived as the comics’ audience, but to adults (as shown in the story arc for Norman Osborn in the film), and, indeed, to the role of the United states in world affairs. Now, there’s one reason why the superhero is a specifically American mythic figure.

What I find even more gratifying is that Andrew Sarris, a pioneer in bringing critical attention to the film genres of previous generations, now finds himself starting to appreciate comic book fantasy as well.

In his review of the second X-Men movie, (New York Observer, May 30,2003) rather than making sweeping declarations on a subject he has not investigated, Sarris displays a winning humility on the subject, admitting he knows nothing of adventure comic books or contemporary graphic novels. To his own apparent surprise, Sarris says, “But having seen and enjoyed X2, I am now determined to catch up with X-Men the comic book, as well as Mr. Singer’s previous movie, X-Men (2000) ““ which is to say, in the ancient words of Jerry Lewis, ‘I liked it! I liked it!'” Interestingly, though Sarris has never read Chris Claremont’s X-Men comics or, it seems, even heard of him, he zeroes in on one of Claremont’s major contributions to the X-Men mythos, being particularly struck by the female characters: “Considering the macho fantasizing that traditionally goes on in the genre, the women make up as rich and varied an assortment of female characters ““ heart and mind, body and soul ““ as has been assembled in any movie this year.” Sarris enumerates several of the film’s plotlines that Ebert somehow missed, and when Sarris notes that “Faithful Marvel readers can explain all the subtexts better than I can,” seems to be sincerely respectful of the material, rather than condescending towards aficionados who take the genre seriously.

Sarris concludes, “Suffice it to say that I was steadily engrossed and entertained and ultimately moved by a drama that is, in the end, more human than mutant. Even if, like me, you consider yourself too serious-minded to sit through an already certified blockbuster not entirely of this world with a cryptic title like X2, give this prolonged splash of special effects a chance. It is better than its genre.”

Actually, no, it isn’t. X2 does not transcend its genre because it is good; it demonstrates the excellence of which the genre is capable. Why shouldn’t we judge a medium or a genre by the best material it can produce, or by its potential for greatness, rather than by its bad and mediocre examples? Is there a genre in literature or film or any creative medium that has not produced bad work as well as good?

Perhaps the real sign of progress is the increasing critical acclaim and acceptance for other works of adventure fantasy that are closely related to the kind of fantasy in American comics. It’s the masks and costumes, and the knowledge that a concept originated in comics, that seems to trigger the critical prejudices against comics. Look at the widespread critical acclaim and academic interest in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose final episode was honored with an editorial in The New York Times. Yet Buffy is a superhero series without the costumes: the frequent references on the show to Buffy as a “superhero” or as having “super powers” make clear to anyone paying attention. Although there is a growing critical backlash to The Matrix films, numerous journalists take seriously the reported philosophical underpinnings of the series. It too is a superhero series, with a hero with superhuman abilities, strong comics influences, and actual costumes (the black leather outfits, long coats, and sunglasses being the contemporary equivalents of tights, capes and masks). Note that Todd McCarthy, in reviewing The Hulk, acknowledges another fantasy adventure film, King Kong as a genuine work of tragedy!

Fantasy adventure films that use the supernatural rather than science fiction seem more likely to win critical acclaim, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Frank Rich attacks the Hulk movie by praising the Harry Potter books, which are widely acknowledged as being for adults as well as children. Yet the Potter books and films are in fact well written variations on the heroic quest in a fantasy world. (The occasional references I see critics make linking Voldemort to Darth Vader dimly recognize this point.) I have yet to read an article that points out that Harry Potter and X-Men both concern schools that teach “misfit” students how to use their paranormal powers. (But now you have.)

With all the movies and television series based on or influenced by comics, comics have more influence on the popular imagination than before. But, as I’ve shown above, there is too little informed criticism written about mainstream comics. And that’s why I’ve accepted the invitation to do this column, which I have dubbed “Comics in Context.”

Some of you may know of my work, going back to my critiques in comics letter pages, the articles I wrote and interviews I conducted for magazines like Amazing Heroes, The Comics Journal and Comic Buyer’s Guide, and my extensive contributions to The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and DC’s Who’s Who. More recently, I was Marvel’s archivist and wrote a coffee table book about the company’s characters for Harry N. Abrams, Marvel Universe. For the last year I have been collaborating with producer/director Constantine Valhouli on Sex, Lies and Super Heroes, an independent film about comics, which will have its West Coast premiere this month at San Diego’s Comic Con International.

What I intend to do in this column is to critique comics, both classic material and new, and adaptations of comics series into other media, from an informed historical perspective. I have researched and studied mainstream comics going back to 1935: I can trace the development and evolution of the great characters and important series over the decades, show why they are culturally significant, and identify the important work that major creators have done with them.

There’s a lot to talk about, starting with this year’s run of comics-based movies. So, here’s your invitation to come back for future installments of “Comics in Context”: I hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson