With its foul-mouthed, sweaty badass men (and women), anti-government attitude, and casualty-heavy set pieces, the 1980s’ wave of outrageous action movies had a specific vibe that has become affectionately known in some circles as ‘absurd macho bullshit,’ making this the subgenre that best channeled a zeitgeist of military buildup and coked-up neoliberal excess. The greatest films of the lot seamlessly fused various dimensions: besides delivering streamlined, relentless narratives packed with ‘fuck yeah’ moments, Predator, The Terminator, Aliens, and The Thing actually provided a catharsis to Cold War anxieties through displacement, projecting the conflict against ruthless sci-fi entities.
Comics at the time sought – and often managed – to emulate these movies’ testosterone-fueled brand of storytelling. Mark Verheiden and John Arcudi, in particular, spent much of their early careers writing comic book spin-offs of these licensed properties for the recently created publisher Dark Horse and, for the most part, they did a hell of a job at it.
Aliens: Outbreak
It all started when Verheiden penned a bunch of follow-ups to Aliens, beginning with 1988’s Outbreak, about a mission targeting the xenomorphs’ home planet. That comic perfectly nailed the franchise’s misanthropic spirit, with the protagonists screwed both by viciously deadly extraterrestrial creatures and by corporate yuppie douchebags in a dystopic vision of an industrial, rapaciously capitalist future. Thematically, it extrapolated from a variety of trends of the Reagan years, including a great bit with predictions about the evolution of commercial television (‘In a resurgence similar to that seen during the mid-1980s, religious programming became a television staple, outnumbering non-doctrinal programs nearly 100 to 1.’).
Outbreak showed that comics could feel like proper sequels to this type of films, compellingly expanding their world while being way cheaper to produce. Much like James Cameron’s blockbuster, here was a very cool science fiction/horror/war yarn – one with seriously high stakes and worthy additions to the series’ lore (as we learned about new facets of the xenomorphs’ odd biology).
Indeed, for all those disappointed and frustrated souls let down by the way the 1992 movie Alien3quickly dismissed the set-up at the end of Aliens, this is the story you want to read. The survivors from that second film actually get some solid character development, building on their understandable PTSD, and the plot structure is much more original than in any of the ensuing films… Let’s face it, apart from Prometheus, the movies are all more or less inspired close variations of the same formula and familiar elements (recently remixed once again in Romulus, which Fede Álvarez effectively approached with the sort of unpretentious ‘b-movie’ fun of his Don’t Breathe), but Outbreak actually moves things forward rather than merely repeat the wash cycle. The same goes for the book’s own direct sequel, Nightmare Asylum, which further developed some of these characters – and advanced the series’ posthuman motifs – by placing them in a whole other scenario, before the equally riveting third installment, Earth War.
(When Alien3 came out, Dark Horse preposterously tried to keep these comics in continuity by changing the characters’ names, which significantly reduced the story’s power. Stupidly, that weirdly retrofitted version got republished in Aliens: Omnibus vol. 1, which is why I recommend getting the collection Aliens: The Essential Comics instead… or, you know, just ignore the new names as you read.)
Aliens: Earth War
I also appreciate that these early Aliens spin-offs don’t just read like illustrated screenplays, but rather like damn comics, complete with a clever use of characters’ internal voices. Following Mark A. Nelson on Outbreak, artist Denis Beauvais brought a more impressionistic approach to Nightmare Asylum. Thus, while Mark Verheiden’s narrative struck a fine balance between innovation and familiarity, Beauvais’ stylized painted artwork helped gradually turn the book into even more of its own beast rather than a mere afterimage of the movies.
With the same spirit – but a with very different style – the awesome Sam Kieth then pushed horror to a whole other level when he was brought in for the massively epic conclusion of Verheiden’s trilogy. By the time we got to Earth War, gone was any lingering sense of storyboarding: as you can see above and below, Kieth’s cartooning splattered each page with defiantly unrealistic anatomy and challenging, highly creative layouts.
Aliens: Earth War
In turn, if what you want from this subgenre of licensed properties is a greater sense of aesthetic recognition and fluid continuity from the screen to the page, then the team to beat is penciller Chris Warner and colorist Chris Chalenor, who showed a real knack for transposing the films’ visual style into comic books. Reading their mini-series The Terminator: Tempest and Predator: Concrete Jungle (which originally came out around 1989-1990) really does feel like you’re watching what could’ve been perfectly satisfying sequels to the original Terminator and Predator movies.
The Terminator: Tempest #2
I’m especially fond of Concrete Jungle.
Although John McTiernan’s Predator is one of those near-perfect epics that inevitably loses something by becoming part of a franchise (as its seemingly unbeatable villain is banalized and gradually diminished, softening the initial impact), it still managed to produce plenty of fun sequels on the screen and one the page… A few are really strong (the first Batman versus Predator comic, Nimród Antal’s delightfully schlocky Predators, Dan Trachtenberg’s back-to-basics, revenge-of-the-Comanche prequel Prey) and even some of the ones that are kind of a mess (1990’s Predator 2, 2018’s The Predator) have their fair share of neat moments and ideas.
Concrete Jungle is one of the best. Instead of just relocating the original high concept, it throws everything but the kitchen sink at the reader, as the brother of Dutch Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character), who happens to be a cynical NYC homicide detective, also finds himself being hunted down. The thing is that this is only the tip of the iceberg: before the end of the story, he has to fight off not just a large-scale alien invasion, but also the CIA *and* a Colombian cartel…
Predator: Concrete Jungle #2
There are the obligatory nods to Predator’s most famous moments (‘If it could bleed, it could die.’), but also a handful of looser riffs on stuff like They Live (‘All you have to do is look’) and Rambo: First Blood – Part II (‘Should have guessed, you’re giving me to them.’).
Plus, as you can see, along the way you get all sorts of generic eighties’ action tropes, from New York street gangs to slimy drug pushers, from brutal torture to massive explosions, from awkward Latin American stereotypes to cynical government conspiracies. You even get one of those over-the-top arguments between a police detective and his chief:
Predator: Concrete Jungle #2
Mark Verheiden’s script is pretty tongue-in-cheek (at one point, a couple of yuppies in the subway discuss the ratings of a show hosted by Charles Manson), but it also delivers the goods, with plenty of badass one-liners and thrilling set pieces.
Verheiden went on to write a couple of follow-ups to Concrete Jungle, with art by Ron Randall. In the same balls-to-the-wall style, Cold War has predators attack a Soviet base in Siberia, gradually generating a geopolitical crisis in a tale that oozes with late-Cold War cynicism (in a classic sci-fi twist, it depicts humans as viciously self-destructive, regardless of the extraterrestrial monsters). Less inspired, Dark River goes back to the American jungle and it even resorts to the lame trope of bringing back characters killed in earlier stories…
The latter misstep may be explained by the fact that, for once, Dark River wasn’t edited by either Randy Stradley or Diana Schutz, two people who clearly knew exactly what to do in order to achieve *just the right vibe*. Fortunately, they did continue to work on this sort of material for a while. In the ‘90s, Stradley penned the first Alien vs. Predator comics (which, needless to say, are much niftier than the subsequent films) and Schutz edited, among others, John Arcudi’s and Evan Dorkin’s grimy mini Predator: Big Game, which went even further in terms of ferociously nailing the first movie’s unabashed rawness:
Predator: Big Game
That said, along with licensed properties, there were also plenty of original series that had the same *tone* as Hollywood’s high-octane movies. I’ll be looking at those in a future post…
One of the main joys in superhero narratives is, once a character’s power set has been established, to see it put to different uses. In a genre that’s often close to speculative sci-fi, there is something particularly gratifying when writers and artists (whether it’s the original creators or guns-for-hire working on a decades-old franchise) come up with clever, innovative, and sometimes surprising approaches to familiar powers. And just as it can be quite fun to have them extrapolate imaginative applications (and consequences and evolutions…) of super-powers, the same goes for having them reverse-engineer explanations for why and how those powers operate in the first place.
Not that there is a universal need to know the origins or specific logistics of each power – I’m certainly willing to accept physics-defying magic in fantasy yarns without feeling the urge to break down and rationally understand all the mechanics in order to wrap my head around it. Indeed, for every instance of satisfyingly mind-blowing revisionism (most famously Alan Moore’s work on Swamp Thing), there are probably twice as many cases where providing a pseudo-scientific grounding for super-powers just ended up ruining their mystical appeal (here the most infamous example is the reduction of the Force to measurable midi-chlorians in the Star Wars prequels).
With that in mind, today I want to highlight some takes on this sort of thought experiments which I found especially inventive, by two masters of the field.
Let’s start with Mark Waid, the guy who has probably spent more time than anyone else on Earth-Prime trying to figure out what makes superheroes tick and how to approach them from new angles without breaking the mold… Hell, recently, in Batman/Superman:World’s Finest #18-19, he has even managed to come up with an interesting version of the first team-up between the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel, packed with nice little character bits. Even better was his amazing team-up between the Joker and Lex Luthor (in #25, easily one of my favorite issues this year), where the two villains got to beautifully synthesize their motivations in a single page:
Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #25
Between 2009 and 2012, Waid stretched his writing muscles by penning one of the most delightfully nasty superhero comics on the stands. The premise of Irredeemable was that a thinly veiled ersatz-Superman – called Plutonian – turned from being the world’s greatest superhero into its most terrifying supervillain. The unsettling first issue opens with him using his heat vision to disintegrate a mother and a child and it’s all rampage and forward momentum from then on, combining nifty concepts (like an ultrasonic virus) with a fair bit of satire (the scene at the UN where John Bolton desperately tries to form a global nuclear alliance is priceless!).
Irredeemable’s relatively bland art is largely compensated by the smart scripts, which trust you to know enough superhero tropes to get by without needlessly elaborating about every character’s abilities and basic characterization… Instead, Waid builds on top of widespread conventions and recognizable lore, gleefully subverting them along the way.
In one of the coolest passages, the series delves into the nature of Plutonian’s powers, thus offering a fascinating reinterpretation of the workings of the Man of Steel. Arguing that no humanoid form of that size would be capable of storing enough energy to do what Superman/Plutonian does, the comic explains this iconic set of super-powers as psionic rather than physical (i.e. ‘mind over muscle’), positing that they all stem from the same capacity to affect matter:
Irredeemable #25
This was not entirely new territory for Mark Waid, who had explored the notion of perverted superheroes in the past (most notably in Kingdom Come) and who remains one of the all-time greatest Superman writers, so he knows exactly which beats to hit for maximum effect.
That said, I recall Waid publicly deriding the end of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel – in fact, one of the many, many Easter Eggs in the opening issue of Batman/Superman:World’s Finest was the brief insinuation that destroying Metropolis in a slugfest with Zod could only be the behavior of a Superman driven insane by red kryptonite (since then, the efforts to drag powerful supervillains away from populated cities has remained a recurring motif in the series). The decision to demystify these powers through a stand-in rather than through the original Superman is perhaps revealing of Waid’s respect for the character (and not just of DC’s editorial protection of its intellectual property).
In turn, just a few years before, Marvel gave Warren Ellis free rein to deconstruct the powers of the company’s official cast, albeit in its ‘edgier’ alternative line, the Ultimate universe. I really like how he approached the Fantastic Four, a super team that had always had a shine of science fiction to them, even though their stories tended to verge more into all-out fantasy… Ellis helped the series live up to its ‘weird sci-fi’ reputation, putting his skill for technobabble and his sharp sense of humor to good use:
Ultimate Fantastic Four #7
These comics are full of neat considerations about the characters’ biology, especially when it comes to the Thing (‘He weighs, like, half a ton. How does he inflate his lungs?’). I’m guessing some of these ideas were leftovers from Ruins, Warren Ellis’ parody of Marvels in which he had imagined the worst possible version of the Marvel Universe, one where anything that could’ve gone wrong did go wrong, including with the mutations at the core of most heroes…
While the most grotesque design is probably the tumor-ridden Hulk (viciously brought to the page by Terese Nielsen’s painted artwork), the twisted take on the Fantastic Four shows that Ellis also put quite a bit of thought into their powers’ potential implications for their bodies (rendered by Chris Moeller, in a more restrained style than Nilsen’s).
Ruins #2
My favorite instances of Warren Ellis playing around with the nuts and bolts of superheroes’ powers, though, actually go back to his seminal run on StormWatch, in the mid-to-late 1990s.
In one of the funniest issues – and a masterclass of entertaining characterization – the members of the titular UN team gathered around Clark’s Bar & Grill (WildStorm Universe’s main superhero hangout place, possibly situated in a multiversal nexus – a la Munden’s Bar from GrimJack – given the amount of background cameos) and exchanged anecdotes about their various transfigurations…
StormWatch #46
Warren Ellis didn’t create Swift, who is telling the story above, but he put an amusing twist on the workings of her wings which didn’t contradict what we’d seen before (even though later writers and artists pretty much ignored this).
It was such an awesome set up that Ellis reworked it less than a year later, once again using the banter at Clark’s Bar & Grill to offhandedly explore the possibilities of the heroes’ unusual physical characteristics, with hilarious results:
StormWatch (v2) #2
Depressingly, we now know that the reason Warren Ellis came up with this specific bit of effective sci-fi comedy may have been because his own sexual drive appears to be quite compulsive and out-of-control… which lends a whole self-deprecating layer to the rest of the conversation:
StormWatch (v2) #2
It’s such a solid gag that the sex jokes don’t have to be read as autobiographical. Still, revisiting this scene did bring to mind another Ellis comic – one where it’s become harder to ignore a creepy subtext about the writer’s proclivities.
In the second issue of 2002’s cult series Global Frequency, ‘Big Wheel,’ an international team is sent to deal with a deranged USAF captain ‘with five hundred million dollars’ worth of enhancement technology inside him,’ who has gone on a killing spree. When they finally come face to face with the murderous cyborg, we get this memorable exchange:
Global Frequency #2
I’m not saying Warren Ellis was consciously thinking of himself or conveying any clear self-loathing when he created a terrifying villain whose uncontrollable horniness made him choose to harm others rather than to restrain his sexual desire… Given Ellis’ infatuation with cyberpunk, body horror, and surrealism, perhaps he had just rewatched Tetsuo: The Iron Man for the millionth time and then came with this story in his nightmares.
Global Frequency #2
As far as I know, Ellis didn’t necessarily consider himself a dangerous monster hurting others. However, as an intelligent writer, he has always known how to tap into deep fears and personal obsessions in order to develop disturbing ideas that shake up the readers… and so, I can’t help but wonder to what extent this fatalistic payoff could mean more than an efficiently cathartic conclusion to a kickass thriller:
This week’s reminder that comic books can be awesome is a tribute to the meticulous and effective composition in the covers of the series Secret Hearts (1949-1971):
I started this blog a decade ago in the spirit of entertainment – for others as much as for myself. I spent much of my life reading and thinking about Batman comics, so I wanted to share some of the most interesting or amusing things I’d found with those who had devoted their time to wiser pursuits.
On hindsight, I guess I also wanted a place to talk about these books because nobody around me cared to listen… I had fun overanalyzingthem and recontextualizing them. Occasionally, I gently mocked them or complained about certain creative choices, but the general spirit was one of celebration – I sought to reflect about why I enjoyed these works in the first place and to explain how they could be appreciated in spite of their flaws or even because of them (after all, the most problematic aspects could actually make them more fascinating, in some way).
As it turned out, my main audience were not the uninitiated, as I had expected, but fans (and even a couple of pros) who were also into Batman and already eager to engage with his stories. Or, at least, those were the ones who posted comments and got in touch with me through the blog’s email (which I always appreciated, even though I often failed to reply).
Gotham Knights #39
As time went on, Gotham Calling became more and more a means of escape – a corner of my crowded world where I could write freely, sometimes almost thoughtlessly, for an audience of unknowns, about things that were far from my job, from my love and family life, from all kinds of everyday struggles as well as from larger political and existential questions (although, of course, these would inevitably linger in the background). As it became a compartment to store my thoughts and feelings on my lonelier leisure activities, the blog actually grew more expansive, going more and more into non-Batman comics, films, and picture-less novels.
In part, this was a reflection of the fact that I was growing disenchanted with the current direction of Batman comics, so when I wrote about those I mostly looked at previous works that I remembered or reread. Much of the stuff I was drawn to at the time (including older comics) wasn’t related to the Dark Knight – and that was the stuff I felt the urge to share and discuss. Gotham Calling became a site for exploring various storytelling traditions that appealed to me, which I realized could be relatively eclectic and therefore, after five years, I broke down the blog into genre-oriented categories – so that even readers who were not into, say, crime yarns or international intrigue knew where they could find posts about superheroes or other types of fantasy…
The Savage Sword of Conan #7
Five years later, things have continued to change. I’ve somehow managed to incorporate many of these objects and concerns into my professional life, which is satisfying for me although harmful for the blog – since I blog to escape, I don’t always feel like blogging about something I’m writing about for work anyway. Still, Gotham Calling has remained a testing ground for ideas, a pretext to delve into peripheral material, and a cathartic forum where I can express myself impulsively and creatively, without the formal rules (and careful rigor) of academia.
The thing is that, because my professional work has tended to focus on audiovisual history, films (and, to a lesser extent, TV and streaming) have come to occupy more and more of my time and thoughts… and, consequently, to occupy a sizeable part of this blog. It has gotten to a point that I’ve decided to actually change Gotham Calling’s tagline/mission statement to encompass both comics *and* cinema, the two visual media that have profoundly shaped my brain.
Not that they will have equal representation, necessarily… For one thing, I intend to continue posting weekly reminders that comics can be awesome every Monday. More structurally, I doubt I’ll do more than a couple of film-related posts per month, since – like I said – I already research and write enough about cinema for work, so this is just a gateway to vent informal, unpolished considerations and to recommend curious stuff I’ve come across. By contrast, whenever I have free time, I often spend it reading, thinking, and writing about comics, so there’s bound to be an endless supply of material (as long as the rest of my life doesn’t get in the way). I’m constantly fascinated by this medium’s history and potential to visually communicate not only narrative, but also intense mood and abstract ideas.
Shubeik Lubeik
Since Gotham Calling is no longer a blog just about the Batman franchise, or even just about comics, then what kind of unifying focus can readers expect? Well, the honest answer is that the running thread is my own personal sensibility, but I realize that is not particularly helpful… After all, I am now ten years older than when I started the blog and, let’s face it, my tastes and interests have evolved, even if I continue to have a passion for genre fiction and for what used to be considered the nerdier side of pop culture (which has become much more mainstream in the past two decades), especially older stuff from throughout the 20th century.
I like fun tales, but my idea of ‘fun’ can be quite broad, ranging from middlebrow fictionto ultra-trashy exploitation. Every once in a while, a book comes along that redefines my understanding of what a genre yarn can be (how it can look like, how it can approach storytelling from different angles) and I may spotlight it as Gotham Calling’sBook of the Year, although I’m more often drawn to run-of-the-mill products, showing how far you can go and what you can pull off even if you color inside the lines.
While it helps if the creators’ enthusiasm shines through, I’m not too big on analyzing intent… I suspect many of my favorite creators are probably assholes in their personal lives (indeed, some have been outed publicly). In any case, I find it more stimulating to think about the ways in which works can be read *regardless* of the intended message.
That said, I think I can single out four motifs that tend to determine most of the stories I consume, enjoy, and wish to write about.
The Nice House on the Lake #11
The first one is violence. Although I don’t dig all depictions of violence, per se, most of the works I dig do tend to have violent elements, whether physical (action, killings, gore) or psychological (abusive language, broken taboos, disturbing dilemmas), from revenge thrillers to body horror.
I’m not a violent person and, in fact, I’m generally afraid of violence in real life, but it’s something that often appeals to me in fiction – perhaps as a compensation mechanism (I get to vicariously experience it without actual danger or consequences), perhaps as a catharsis (the liberating fantasy of mayhem and destruction for someone stuck in an ordered, if stressful, life), or perhaps just as a purely aesthetic experience (films and comics are ideal vehicles for sound and fury).
The energy of explosions, the choreography of fights, the dynamism of aggression… These are just so damn cool and visual and, well, cinematic. It’s not all that cinema can give, but the potential is there to thrill our senses, to give us a rush, to push our buttons at the most primeval level.
I also find it pretty funny.
Damn Them All #8
Shock, fear, and disgust are like spices prickling the tongue and making it feel alive, their lack of subtleness providing easy and instant gratification when I’m in a lazier, less sensitive mood (which isn’t always the case, but it’s usually the case with the sort of material that brings me to this blog).
Sure, violence itself can serve different purposes (whether in the stories or outside them) and have multiple types of impact. It can feel anarchic and revolutionary, but also fascistic, oppressive, and like a scary expression of toxic masculinity. So, laughing at violence can be a way to reinforce distance – to ridicule it and feed my contempt. Yet laughter can just as well be a more instinctive, joyful response to slapstick, since most of the violence that delights me does look blatantly silly. Hell,I’vepostedover 250 images of a guy dressed like a bat kicking (and kneeing) people (and monsters) in the head. Fun!
In any case, you can see why Gotham Calling keeps gravitating towards war, crime, superheroes, and westerns…
Lucky Luke versus Pat Poker
The other reason is that these are all genres that tie fairly neatly with my interest in history – by which I mean not just an interest in the past, but also in the various ways we imagine the past, from Garth Ennis’ attempts at realismin his comics about World War II all the way to Lucky Luke’s proudly absurdist caricature of the Old West. Since our translation of the past is always distorted to some degree (like all translations, by definition), I enjoy period pieces’ flagrant balancing act between such inevitable distortion and a more or less clever use of the raw material of history (or, at least, of the recognizable perceptions of history consolidated over time).
It doesn’t mean inaccuracies or anachronisms can’t be annoying, sometimes messing with my nitpicky impulses, but they’re ultimately part of the game – the game being to compare all these translations of the past and to keep envisioning history with new eyes. And so, as much as I can be moved and intrigued by accounts that make me reconsider how people used to live, I also love pulpy historical adventures that play fast and loose in the name of entertainment, approaching bygone eras as just another exotic setting to jazz up formulaic yarns while compensating for low production values with shameless verve, visual imagination, and a frantic pace, from the cardboard palace intrigue of Serpent of the Nile to the rollicking action of something like Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold or If You Meet Sartana… Pray for Your Death (or any episode ofXena: Warrior Princess, for that matter). They’re not ‘realistic,’ nor do they claim to be, but I don’t require full ‘realism’ from tales set in the present either, just enough coherence to anchor their version of ‘reality.’
And it’s not just narratives explicitly *about* the past that appeal to my historian tendencies… Ultimately, stories tend to channel the time of their own making, so they can all be historicized. Whether we’re talking about books and films made in the present or decades ago, I dig trying to discern what comes down to the creators’ own eccentricities and how much of it can actually be attributed to a wider zeitgeist. This is what typically draws me to older works: not some reactionary they-don’t-make-them-like-they-used-to mindset, but rather an appreciation for the extra layers those works acquire when looked at in hindsight. For instance, I suppose there are only so many cult thrillers from the early 1970s you can watch (Duel, Westworld, Deliverance…) before you spot a clear pattern of deconstructing male performativity and exposing masculinist fantasies as utterly disturbing, which you can then begin to explain by considering the rise of women’s rights movements in that era and how this must have informed new ways of looking at gender.
Batman #405 (1987)
Batman #652 (2006)
Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #28 (2024)
Similarly, I enjoy considering how texts fit in – and often engage with – the history of their own media. The fact that superhero comics and blockbuster movies have become so inward-looking and obsessed with revisiting or reworking what came before means they often come across like repetitive, predictable, creatively bankrupt fan-pandering, as mega-corporations eagerly mine their IPs for all their worth while cynically exploiting easy nostalgia and brand recognition, but I can’t wholly avoid the occasional pleasure in unpacking all this wide, rich tapestry of interlocked characters, narrative threads, and visual echoes (like the one above) across the decades – and the baggage I bring to each story as a reader. For better or worse, my head is chockful of geeky knowledge, particularly regarding the DCU, as if I’ve spent my whole life in preparation to be able to pick up every single allusion, cameo, gag, and revelation in the latest iteration of World’s Finest… so it feels kind of rewarding to sense decades of study paying off.
Beyond the encyclopedic mastery of the lore of specific sagas and universes, there is a more general satisfaction that comes from putting together the intertextual pieces of the larger puzzle, uncovering paths and links that connect different works: to spend years wondering about whether it was Len Wein’s Swamp Thing or Gerry Conway’s Man-Thing that first came up with the science-gone-wrong-in-the-swamp premise, only to realize they were both probably riffing on Al Feldstein’s ‘The Thing in the Swamp!’ (from way back in Haunt of Fear #15); or to identify the brief bathroom brawl in 2006’s Casino Royale as so instantly iconic that it served as blueprint for awesome expanded set pieces in both Mission: Impossible – Fallout and, more recently, Monkey Man. And this sort of communication can also happen across media: reading Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes this summer, I couldn’t help wondering to what extent it inspired the graphic novels Petrograd and Death to the Tsar, to name a couple of great books operating outside of the business logic of soulless franchises.
Whether I giddily map out what ties scattered cultural works together or tiringly roll my eyes at another ham-fisted callback may come down to my mood as much as to the spirit and skill of the works themselves. The thing is that, by now, many professional creators tend to also be geeks who are clearly into all of this stuff and who search for complicity with the audience, although some are more subtle about it while others wear it on their sleeve, like when Will Pfeifer and David López built of couple of Catwoman arcs around dozens of film references…
Catwoman (v2) #60
Tracing a line from these kooky comics to Kubrick’s satiric masterpiece can offer more than the mere validation of previously consumed pop culture. At their best, the niftiest works don’t just acknowledge each other but ingeniously build on a vast repository of shared references, prompting us to reconsider – and not just recognize – what we’ve seen before while providing fresh – rather than reheated – experiences.
Spotting connections can be particularly gratifying not only when it comes to metafictional tales that consciously reflect about the lineage of their genre or medium, but also when it comes to comedy, whose contrasts work better in context… In the case of Dr. Strangelove, a lot of the humor comes not so much out of the jokes themselves but out of the choice to shoot the film in a similar way to the kind of tense, self-important Cold War political thrillers of the time (including the brilliant trio Advise & Consent, Seven Days in May, and Fail Safe, not to mention the following year’s The Bedford Incident). Likewise, a big part of what made Airplane and Police Squad so hilarious was the fact that they starred character actors such as Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, and George Kennedy, whom audiences had seen playing a straight version of the spoofed situations about a million times in the previous decades (especially since they did it in such a deadpan way, delivering the lines in the same tone as before, without ever acknowledging their silliness).
52 #24
As much as I complain about the endlessly self-referential pop-eats-itself brand of postmodernism, I find something fresh and irreverent in the way some authors blow up iconic archetypes, formulas, and imagery, putting an idiosyncratic spin on them. I’m thinking of figures like trashmeister Jess Franco, who spliced pop culture with his own kitsch sensibility in Two Undercover Angels and Kiss Me Monster, a couple of utterly bizarre Spanish swinging sixties’ comedies with a hallucinatory web stringing together private detectives, masked thieves, secret agents, decadent dark magic cults, erotic dance numbers, a mad scientist, and a werewolf serial killer…
Which brings me to the third motif that recurrently pops up in the objects of Gotham Calling: surrealism. From Brendan McCarthy to Erica Henderson, I love it when artists cut loose and wildly express their kinks and visions unbound by a commitment to realism, even if I prefer it when there’s still a shred of recognition to hold on to, without going into full-blown abstract dream logic. In fact, it’s the mix that gets me – the offbeat combination of strangeness and familiarity can make a story creepy, funny, surprising, and, often, memorable.
Vanguard Illustrated #1
I’m not too much into drugs, so I look for trippy kicks somewhere else, onscreen and on the page. This even goes for works that weren’t necessarily meant to be odd but nevertheless came out that way due to their makers’ carefree attitude, whether as a result of an effervescent mind, like Jack Kirby’s eccentric cosmic operas, or just as a byproduct of stressed-out hacks throwing shit at the wall, like in several B-movies and Silver Age comics.
I suppose the allure is as much about the visceral ecstasy of losing one’s footing as it is about the cerebral challenge of understanding and adapting to new rules operating the world, embracing the very prospect of thinking and feeling differently… And if all this sounds quite vague, it is because, again, my fondness of surrealism spreads wide: it encompasses intelligent journeys into weirdness by creators who deliberately set out to expand our imagination and to disturb us out of our comfort zone, like the best works of Peter Milligan and Yorgos Lanthimos, but also to less pretentious fare, like the punk antics of Repo Man, the blaxploitation grindhouse horrorof Sugar Hill, or the psychedelic sci-fi fantasy of 2000 AD.
The latter magazine was the springboard for many of the writers and artists that keep reappearing in this blog, not least because several of them migrated from Mega-City One to Gotham City. Despite their markedly different editorial style, I’m quite the fan of both British and American comics, which I partly attribute to their surreal edge… While Batman and Judge Dredd can be fun characters by themselves, the major selling point for me has always been the mad cities they inhabit – they are very weird crimefighters in a cartoony world where crime itself is very, very weird.
2000AD #234
And then there’s politics. From Quino’s Mafalda and the punk-rock bands of my youth all through a lifetime of activism and academia, my brain is wired to think about the systems (in terms of both institutions and ideas) that organize much of our lives. As far as I’m concerned, power, strategic thinking, and/or clashes of ethical values are perfect ingredients for dramatically charged *and* thought-provoking narratives.
Like with historical fiction, I’m a sucker for political thrillers not so much because of what they show about the world, but because of what they show about how we view the world. They can offer original takes, or efficiently manipulate the way an issue is framed so as to push me in uncomfortable directions, or reassuringly nail perspectives that I already believe in, or come up with something bafflingly outrageous… It can be a well-reasoned polemic, but it’s even better when there’s a stark contrast between the serious weight of the subject matter and the lowbrow goofiness of the material, like in Iron Man’s comics about the Vietnam War or in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984, which turned Maxwell Lord into Donald Trump (thus treating Lord even worse than Greg Rucka did!). I don’t have to agree with their discourse and, sometimes, I don’t even have to like the works themselves in order to have a great time engaging with what they’re saying. It’s a subject that speaks to me and which I love speaking about, so it’s one that will surely keep coming back to Gotham Calling.
Heart of Empire: The Legacy of Luther Arkwright #6
The politics don’t even have to be explicit. I also delight in digging through layers of subtext, identifying the hidden assumptions, paradoxes, and less obvious implications of the worldviews that inform of each story. Take Ozark, a gripping show that for the most part preyed on fears of Mexican drug dealers and MAGA-looking rednecks and white trash, but which ended up critically indicting its liberal protagonists and their family values. Breaking such products apart and scrutinizing their nuts and bolts may seem like a way to suck out their enjoyment, but it also serves to find new ways of enjoying them. So, the hyperlinks in the blog are just as likely to lead you to a rock song as to a discussion of the politics of corporate characters or the underlying philosophy of a post-apocalyptic franchise.
Not that every monster has to be a coherent metaphor or part of a complex allegory to elevate my interest in a book or film… I’m not looking to raise the symbolic capital of schlock – it’s just that interpreting what lies underneath the surface can often be as amusing as switching off all common sense and just letting the lizard brain take over (which I also like to do, but it’s less likely to lead to a blog post).
Don’t Spit in the Wind #2
And so, finally, a word on schlock.
Just as some elitists avoid and sneer at tasteless, unsophisticated works, hipsters have a blast ironically hate-watching or condescendingly laughing at the incompetence and low production values of what they call so-bad-it’s-good movies and books. In general, these are not the guiding attitudes of Gotham Calling. I don’t necessarily like all that is schlocky per se and I can certainly be as smug and scoffing as anyone else, but when I mention schlockiness in this blog it tends to be an appreciative term.
I know I’m not alone in discerning a certain endearing charm in ultra-cheap products that know their limitations but unapologetically invite you to play along. At their best, these can be pretty inventive and entertaining on their own intended level, whether it’s a moody chiller about an alien vampire or a bonkers treasure-hunting adventure shot in a few days in former Yugoslavia…
When I watch a movie like 1967’s Battle Beneath the Earth, where the US Navy realize a Chinese army has dug a whole complex of tunnels under the United Sates and is about to attack, I know the film is silly, cheesy, and shoddy-looking (not to mention militaristic, racist, etc), but merely mocking its obvious flaws feels so much less gratifying than appreciating what it can offer (a mind-bending adventure whose unique logic creates an exciting scenario in an original setting, including eerie sequences, like when the heroes try to lower the whole country’s noise levels so that they can listen better) or thinking about its possible meanings (the way the picture visualizes Cold War hysteria and paranoia… or the way British filmmakers mimic Hollywood schlock from the previous decade).
To quote a classic: ‘I genuinely love this stuff.’
Every once ina while, I like to spotlight films that, although they don’t feature the Dark Knight himself, share enough of Batman comics’ quirky vibe to be of interest for fans of that sort of stuff. This time, my choices are more mainstream, focusing on one of the most hegemonic genres, namely schlocky action movies about alpha males…
Here are half a dozen notable examples of pictures that combine different types of macho posturing with a disarming playfulness that verges on the Caped Crusader’s sweet spot of goofy-yet-exciting thrills:
SPEED (1994)
This is quite an obvious pick, but 30 years have passed since Speed first hit the screens, so perhaps some readers aren’t aware of how close this slick, adrenaline-charged blockbuster feels to a standard Dark Knight adventure. It’s almost like someone took an old Riddler or Joker comic and polished it into a high-budget thriller, generating a quip-heavy cat-and-mouse game between a terrorist madman (Dennis Hopper chewing so much scenery that he might as well be auditioning to play a Gotham-based rogue) and a quick-witted LAPD cop who has to use both agility and intelligence in order to circumvent the villain’s masterplan as he jumps from one deathtrap to the next. Yet the influence cuts both ways: you can also find traces of Speed in ensuing Batman yarns, with the likes of Chuck Dixon emulating the film’s pace and memorable set pieces (for instance, I see a lot of this in Dixon’s Nightwing and Detective Comics).
Air Force One’s high concept is pretty easy to pin down: if Speed was ‘Die Hard on a bus,’ this one is ‘Die Hard on Air Force One’ – but instead of John McClane (or Batman), the hero here is the POTUS himself… and played by a growling Harrison Ford! Meanwhile, the villain is a Soviet veteran who (not unlike the NKVDemon) seeks to make Russia a powerful antagonist once again (if only he had waited a couple of decades…), thus responding both to the new world order (where, even in the film, everybody took it for granted that the Russian government had pretty much become a US puppet) and, on a more meta level, to the Cold War nostalgia of a Hollywood longing for the clear and simple narratives of the bad old days (including a throwback to the fear of communism in the form of a stirring rendition of ‘The Internationale’). If taken too seriously, the result may come across like pure flag-waving chauvinism, but the corniness, the shameless display of might, and the exaggerated (if well-crafted) action build up to a sense of ridiculous awesomeness that you also find in many a Dark Knight comic.
This straight-up sequel to The Bourne Identity is where Matt Damon really came alive as a proto-Batman figure – that is to say, a cool, driven, resourceful man/force of nature playing by his own rules who’s always thinking three steps ahead and who generally prefers to use creativity and martial arts rather than guns. Once again, Damon’s no-nonsense amnesiac spy runs circles around his former bosses, but the first film’s sunny Paris is now mostly replaced by a nocturnal Berlin, where the darkly clad protagonist moves around with the fluidity of the Caped Crusader in Gotham, climbing buildings, jumping from trains, hanging from bridges, and even ingeniously using the city’s thriving anti-globalization protests as camouflage. Also, when he gets behind a wheel, he sure drives like hell.
A badass drifter gets involved in what at first appears to be a clear-cut investigation into a sniper shooting in Pittsburgh… but which soon turns out to be punctuated by convoluted twists and vicious violence. Yep, this is one of those vehicles that seems largely built around various ways of showcasing Tom Cruise’s supremacy, sex appeal, and mansplaining skills (writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has turned this into a career-long mission since then). The thing is that Cruise and McQuarrie push it so comically over the top that, for the most part, they turn the protagonist into the World’s Greatest Detective, complete with his mastery of kicks and zingers. That said, while I’m not sure how faithful Jack Reacher is to Lee Child’s novels (which always struck me as a brazen update of the type of 1970s’ hardboiled fiction that spawned the Punisher), this is certainly a taut, stylish crime thriller – one that riffs not only on the Dark Knight, but also on all sorts of macho action traditions, from the Hawksian blonde and the Mechanic-like silent opening to the Bruce Lee-ish fights and the Steve McQueen-esque car chase. And as a bonus, one of the villains is played by Werner Herzog, who clearly belongs in Batman’s rogues gallery.
(The sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, is pretty entertaining as well!)
After an insanely hyper-charged prelude packed with superhero-worthy action in (what is clearly meant to be) Tibet, we move on to an extended set piece about a theatrical terrorist – and his troupe of henchwomen – hijacking a Mumbai metro train… which is just as insanely hyper-charged! In fact, Jawan hardly ever slows down for almost three hours, filling the screen with relentless jump cuts, stylized explosions, cheesy slow motion, broad comedy, soap opera twists, the obligatory dance numbers, and anti-corruption populism (including, from what I can tell, several jabs at Modi). This is the only Bollywood production I’ve ever seen, so I can’t claim it is the closest in tone to Batman comics (although my expert friends swear to me this is a good one). What I can attest to is that Jawan involves secret identities, elaborate heists, and enough extravagant fight scenes and overblown emotions to feel like it was co-written by Scott Snyder and/or Jeph Loeb. (Hell, among the many, many swipes of western fiction, there are even a couple of figures who seem visually inspired by Hush!)
Jason Statham plays a beekeeper on a rampage against an internet phishing scheme, helped by the fact that he’s a former super-duper secret agent with a particular set of skills a la Taken/John Wick, raising a panic in sinister sectors of the intelligence community. As far as I’m concerned, The Beekeeper offers at least three layers of fun. First, there is the general silliness of the whole thing, no doubt done with tongue in cheek, as characters are constantly baffled by the sheer premise (‘A beekeeper beekeeper?!’) to the point that an FBI agent actually starts reading a book on bees to search for clues, extracting useful factoids. Even the first minutes, which are shot like straight-up drama, are worthy for Statham’s deadpan delivery of lines like ‘Taking from an elderly person is as bad as stealing from a child … maybe worse.’ Secondly, director David Ayer commits to my favorite elements of this type of schlock, with plenty of ludicrous violence in the form of fight scenes that amusingly use handy props (i.e. lots of tech bros’ heads bashed by call center phones) and a steady supply of bee-themed one-liners that culminates in a Shakespearean pun – which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if the sequel reveals this to have been a stealth origin story for a Batman villain… Finally, there’s the fact that the film is an outlandish MAGA fantasy, complete with a manly, hat-wearing, blue-collar vigilante slaughtering young white-collar douches, fighting the deep state, and exposing electoral fraud while spouting that his only allegiance is to justice, not the law. Given Ayer’s reactionary track record, I don’t think any of this is necessarily presented ironically, but the result nevertheless comes across like a hilariously bonkers reimagining of whatever was going through the heads of the Pizzagate guy or the January 6th crowd.
