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

Comments: 1 Comment