A companion rant to my previous mention (below) of Kick Ass…

…which is based on a comic book by writer Mark Millar and comic book artist royalty John Romita, Jr. and of which…

…I’m just not all that sure I really want to see. And certainly sure I don’t need to see it. I read the first two issues of the comic, based solely on the hype. It was… okay.  Not something I needed certainly. Talking about old ideas about people wanting to become larger than life and become super heroes. The film looks neon and crazy enough, but…

What’s the phrase from the 90s? Oh, right: “I’ll wait for video.”

Roger Ebert gave the movie one star and called it “morally reprehensible.”

He talks about the negative things that you witness in the movie and acknowledges that sometimes it requires context to place these horrible things, but sometimes the context isn’t enough to justify certain actions. I don’t fully agree with him, at least not in this case (especially having not seen the movie yet), but I can definitely understand his logic.

Though it’s a shame when the producers of a movie have to share an excuse for poor behavior with someone like Sarah Palin: “It’s satire!”

Nic Cage as Punisher/Batman? Yikes.

But that all runs parallel to my disinterest in this film, which partly falls back onto the writer of the comic it’s based on, Mark Millar. Millar’s an insane Scot, a writer caught up in the wake of much popular, more experienced European comics writers like Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, but someone desperate to make a splash. I mean, he’s already made the splash, but he wants to make it a wave, then a tsunami. He’s got genuinely interesting things to say and is talented, but goes for the shock value more often than not as a means to get ahead. His talent and the things he should be proud of in his writing tend to get lost in that mud. And that mud is sometimes the internet.

Remember back when Dane Cook was actually funny? Do you? Yeah, he actually was, for a brief time, a very brief time at the tail end of the 90s and spilling a little into the next one. But then something horrible happened: He saw a chance for a bigger grasp at fame, which is fine, and he wanted it. He wanted it too hard. Way too hard.

I guess Mark Millar has that quality that people in his position have to have, but one that’s only begin to really maturate on a street level accessible to every average Joe or average Joe Plumber type in the last ten years with the advent of the internet and Reality TV show stars: That dynamic ability to hype oneself as if oneself was Jesus.

Something I think I’ve always known but still learned the hard way in the past year: Everyone on the internet thinks that everyone else on the internet loves them.

Well, no, not everyone things that. But the internet celebs do. The internet “Personalities” are positive of that. Mark Millar reminds me of that, a little. While most internet celebs are more mouth than actual words or ideas, Millar has the words and ideas but they’re getting shamed the way he’s letting them loose.

Remember Wanted? The movie starring James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman and Angeline Jolie? It was based on a graphic novel by Millar. The graphic novel, if adapted straight, would’ve made an interesting movie. It was smart, solid comics storytelling. The movie was… lame. That’s putting it nicely. The gist of the story stayed the same, but altered for ridiculous non stop bullet time “action scenes” and a bizarre back story was incorporated about assassins of fate who were obsessed with looming or some such nonsense.

I’ll never forget Benjie Light’s one sentence review of the film to me: “It seemed to be auditioning to be ‘either the catalyst or take the blame’ for the next big school shooting.” Ha ha. And he’s right. I see a little of truth and concern about Kick Ass in that statement as well. It looks like it could have some interesting things to contribute to the dialogue about ridiculous cartoon things like super heroing and vigilantism and how people want those things, and can haul them into the real world, how fame can found and made and hardened in a low fi marketing scheme. Really, it could be a brand new Taxi Driver, just sillier and more neon. Or it could be a crazy action-driven movie. I hope it’s that, I do. It’d be nice to have something fun in the cinemas again. But I wouldn’t really say that I’m in a rush exactly to go see this movie.

Also, it feels like it’s just another extension of the wave by corporate America to cash in on the seemingly recent discovery that there’s possibly good stories in the medium of sequential art and comic bookery. You get a few major hits and then it’s followed by all the clones. See Scream, then see the bombardment of bad horror movie clones that followed it and slashed their way through the cinemas in the 90s. Oh, the moral rules for teenagers concerning sex and violence back then. The Final Girl in that situation was the average viewer, who just barely got out unscathed.

But, of course that decade wasn’t all bad slasher film copies rehashing the Scream formula, because at some point the 90s started producing ridiculous 70s-esque gritty torture horror. At some point the wave changes, becomes deadlier and more inept. And there’s probably a lot of theories there like, for example, in each decade, we’re supposed to look back fondly on what happened two decades earlier, right? So, in the 90s we were supposed to look back at the films of the 70s and want to emulate their ideas and style and copy their auteurs, right? It just seemed like rather than making films like Bullitt or properly over-glorifying a director like Scorsese, we looked back at the various niche genres of the 1970s and said, “Oh, my, that Texas Chainsaw Massacre was really something, wasn’t it?” Ugh.

Our 90s love for the 70s didn’t last long though. Soon we started dry humping the coked out memory of the 80s. Not shocking. The 90s was the generation that maybe got tired of being self referential and tired of pondering the subtext of a thing over the text, and should have gotten tired of a remix artist director like Tarantino. And, possibly still striving to find the definition of irony, this was the generation that was perhaps not put on display in a movie like Reality Bites, but rather the generation that approved of a movie like Reality Bites. Back then we were fed by the Me Generation, our heads in a coke daze, and were slowly waking up in the future with no thoughts in our head, one foot in the post modern and another foot firmly placed in… nothing.

I wonder what aspects of the 00s we’ll be nostalgic for when the time comes. I look back at a lot of the music and other forms of art I’ve liked from the past ten years and some of it feels very 80s (honoring the twenty year rule) but the rest of it doesn’t fit into anything larger other than an overlying paranoid vibe that started in the 90s and continued into the Terrorized Today post-9/11. So much of the stuff I’ve liked lately has felt like a fluke, a happy accident, a refugee from the zeitgeist.

That’s as far as I’ll go with the philosophy of history and talk of memes and the noosphere and the chains by which each decade finds itself tied to the past. In film and music and other forms of art, it’s all theory, it’s all academic. It becomes more substantial though in comics. Critics can debate when the Golden Age of comics ends and when the Silver Age starts. Things like the death of Gwen Stacy and the “Flash Of Two Worlds” become totems on a timeline, but everyone has a different theory about where those totems lay and what their significance is and you get into a lot of big talk about the birth and death of aeons.

That changes with comics though. One definitive point in the world of graphic art was 1985.

That was the year that saw the publication of both Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Both essentially “What if?” takes and analogue sequels. And, in their respective ways, both sophisticated and brilliant. They did something amazing with the past work in the medium but also were a clear notice: This age is over. A new one is begun.

And in that new one we saw the rise of grim and gritty comics. Women in refrigerators and rampant adventures in rape. We saw the meteoric rise of characters like Wolverine, Cable, Punisher, Ghost Rider, and Deadpool, or the introduction of the word “anti-hero” into the average comic reader’s lexicon. Characters with questionable morals or no morals at all and anyone who clawed, knifed, burned, or shot up the “bad guys” became the one you rooted for, or were supposed to root for.

Continuing out of the Dark Age: The speculator market died. Independent publishers sprung up left and right and tore at the whole. Trade paperbacks become more popular and essentially killed the single issue format, or “floppy.” Or, as some writers tend to refer to comics in music terms: It was the end of the perfect 3 1/2 minute pop single. The mega influence of manga and other Japanese art stylings. Celebrity writers and artists started making more appearances, trying to lure in readers that were falling away disenchanted and disenfranchised, and the existing writers all remade themselves as celebrities.

They tried to call this age the “Copper Age” or the “Iron Age,” or, romantically, the “Modern Age,” but the name that has stuck the strongest is the most accurate: The Dark Age. Perhaps the dawn is right around the corner…

But Millar knows all about how things changed back in 1985 when he was just a wee boy in Scotland. Half of his career, and probably more than that, is based around that year, ideas springing out of “What If?” stories dreamed up in his youth or literally set in that year. In fact, that’s the general plot of the comic version of Wanted: That the villains won back in ’85. His upcoming Nemesis basically asks the question, “What if Batman was actually the Joker?” His Superman: Red Son storyline asks “What if, instead of the farmlands of Kansas with their American ideals, the Man Of Steel had landed as an infant behind the Iron Curtain.” It’s a good storyline, but the best part is the end, which I won’t spoil, but was given to Millar by Grant Morrison.

Hell, Millar even has a comic out there called 1985, about a boy in that time period, in the “real world,” and how the heroes of the Marvel universe cross over.

Marvel is currently trying to start up something called “The Heroic Age,” which could possibly be a new mindset when it comes to comics, and it’s similar to stuff Morrison has been doing over the “Distinguished Competition” for years now: Carving out a new bridge of ways of doing things and approaching these stories, one that respects and can reference the past and it’s ways of doing things, but is new, and is heading somewhere different. (Super hero) Comics are tales of the ways that gods and man can interact and should be fantastic and colorful and crazy and fun. It doesn’t have to be all tales of villains bested (and besting) in sexual conquest or perverts who wear their underwear outside of their clothes.

The worst sin of the “Dark Age” to me is that it stopped super hero comics from being written for the intelligent 14 year olds in the audience and then only started telling stories to the jaded adult nerds out there. It stopped being about reliving the neon parts of your childhood and become all insipid revenge fantasies. Sure, you may want super powers or to even be a super hero, but that doesn’t have to be why you like super heroes or read their adventures. Perhaps that’s the thing that Kick Ass misses, I don’t know, but I don’t necessarily care to live vicariously through any fantasies I may have about beating people up or kicking the shit out of anyone.

And if I do, that’s why I have video games, ha ha!

But we’re way past the period where comic book movies are happening because they’re stories that need to be told or deserve to be told. These things happen now just because you’ve bought them in the past, you’ll buy them now, and you’re probably going to buy them in the future too.

from here.

We’re dancing with the metaphysical here and tripping over our own feet on the faultline between the cracks in the multiverse. Do we want to drag the world of four color super heroes into in our world or do we want to keep dumping the baggage from our world into theirs?