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Nonvalueadded User posted:I suppose the reason why these two modes work well together only for some superheroes is because the superhero’s origin must be directly tied to the first dramatic development of the character — with great power comes great responsibility (if Peter Parker didn’t have his powers when Uncle Ben was killed, there’d be no opportunity for growth) or atonement requires action (Tony Stark builds the Iron Man suit not only to free himself but as a first step toward correcting the mistake he realizes he’s been making again and again). I'd also say that Batman is a character who no longer needs to have an origin story retold any time he gets rebooted, whether in comics or in film. Unless you're doing a work that specifically changes the origin story (which usually means a fundamental change of his character, like that one where he instead got the Green Lantern ring at the same moment and started killing all the bad guys), Bruce Wayne will always become Batman because his parents were murdered in Crime Alley on their way home from the movies. There's no greater complexity. If Batman never existed, you could make the first ever Batman story and cover his origin with a few lines of dialogue revealing what happened to his parents. The only character that matters for Batman is his persona as Batman, not Bruce Wayne's journey that turned him into what he is today. Every iteration is the same at the start, so the good Batman stories take place when he's already a vigilante (possibly for quite a long time) and instead cover how the Batman and Bruce Wayne personas intermingle or potentially risk being overwritten by the other, how the trauma of his parents' death still affects him as an adult, a challenge to his code of ethics, an opportunity to show how he strictly adheres to his code of ethics to stay an inherently good person, or a time where he breaks his code of ethics and deals with the resulting fallout and cognitive dissonance.
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Apr 18, 2018 14:43
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ecavalli posted:drat. That's way more correct than not. 
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Apr 18, 2018 14:44
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ecavalli posted:drat. That's way more correct than not. Because it's really easy for anyone to cosplay.
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Apr 18, 2018 14:46
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ecavalli posted:But it raises an important question: Why is "guy in loincloth" one of the most beloved, defining images of our species? It's that whole man dominating nature. Even when orphaned, in the wild, as a baby and raised by apes, Tarzan overcame and became the master of all in his domain.
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Apr 18, 2018 14:51
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Well, you see, Tarzan actually had mutated genes because, decades earlier, outside a small Yorkshire village called Wold Newton... I'm actually curious - what's the earliest example of a character who adopts a masked identity to fight crime while masquerading as a layabout playboy? The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro are the ones that occur to me but there may be earlier examples. Wheat Loaf fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 14:53
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Wheat Loaf posted:Well, you see, Tarzan actually had mutated genes because, decades earlier, outside a small Yorkshire village called Wold Newton... I think canonically the Disney version of Tarzan is the son of the King and Queen of Arendelle from Frozen, so maybe Elsa wasn't the only member of the family to get magical abilities. That would make for an interesting twist on Wold Newton. The Arendelle royal family just has this tendency to produce mutants with a wide range of unusual abilities, from animal speech to super strength to cryokinesis.
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Apr 18, 2018 15:12
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... what?  Chitoryu, I think all those lovely books have finally melted your brain.
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Apr 18, 2018 15:21
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 From Detective Comics #571, "Fear for Sale!".
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Apr 18, 2018 15:22
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Malachite_Dragon posted:... what? http://hollywoodlife.com/2017/01/04/tarzan-anna-elsa-brother-frozen-connection-theory/
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Apr 18, 2018 15:28
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That's the dumbest goddamn thing I've read all week. I'm going to bed.
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Apr 18, 2018 15:32
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Wheat Loaf posted:Well, you see, Tarzan actually had mutated genes because, decades earlier, outside a small Yorkshire village called Wold Newton... I'm pretty sure the Pimpernel was the first. Raffles predates the Pimpernel by a few years, but he was a criminal (if a principled one), not a crime-fighter.
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Apr 18, 2018 16:16
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prefect posted:Did Umberto Eco ever write specifically about comic books? I'd read that. I don’t know of it specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised considering that he wrote about American wax musea in Adventures in Hyperreality. Agreed on Batman’s origin and a few lines of dialog. In fact, that’s how the Batman ‘66 TV show handled it. Thought experiment: assume that half of Batman Begins wasn’t cribbed from Batman: Year One so the trappings of the story aren’t in the public conscious. Could a mass market Batman movie be made following the basic story of Year One? It’s an origin story but not an origin per se. Or would that fit into the dramatic + iconic mix discussed earlier? ETA: Android Blues posted:
Plus I think BTAS did an episode based on it but it wasn’t memorable enough to remember any specifics except Robin tying Bats up with a Batarang to keep him out of trouble. Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 16:26
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Year One is a fantastic story and would make a great movie, but it's not because of the Batman origin story it tells, it's the Jim Gordon story it tells. It's not actually a Batman story despite his name on the cover.
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Apr 18, 2018 16:29
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Android Blues posted:
https://twitter.com/meakoopa/status/986397272987652096
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Apr 18, 2018 16:31
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purple death ray posted:Year One is a fantastic story and would make a great movie, but it's not because of the Batman origin story it tells, it's the Jim Gordon story it tells. It's not actually a Batman story despite his name on the cover. I mostly agree and I’m abashed to not have thought about that when posting. (Though a couple of moments like Bruce’s initial recon disaster or the fire escape fight are great details to add to his origin story. At first, he basically is “wearing hockey pads”.)
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Apr 18, 2018 16:38
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ecavalli posted:drat. That's way more correct than not. The point of Tarzan is his moral superiority. That is, it's supposed to be good and right that he be stronger than everyone around him, a paragon and even leader, because, uh, English civilization is great, Africa is there for us to tame it, and noble blood will tell. Obviously those reasons don't jive for Siegel and Shuster, they want a guy who will dangle arms dealers out a window, and Kirby wants someone who will knock out all of Hitler's teeth, but it's still fundamental to all superheroes: we have to be convinced they are good and right in some way in order to wholeheartedly enjoy them doing things we can't.
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Apr 18, 2018 16:59
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prefect posted:Did Umberto Eco ever write specifically about comic books? I'd read that. He has an essay about Superman in 1979's The Role of the Reader. It's a nice demonstration of his methods but I think it's not a very interesting or thoroughgoing read of American superhero comics. Now, if you read his much later novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana he goes into a lot of the pulp and mystery stories and comics he read in the Italian press as a kid. It's not a formal study at all but it has a lovingness and a depth of specificity that the Superman essay lacks. It's like Fellini's fixation on Mandrake the Magician, Flash Gordon, etc. sort of.
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Apr 18, 2018 17:02
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Wheat Loaf posted:I'm actually curious - what's the earliest example of a character who adopts a masked identity to fight crime while masquerading as a layabout playboy? The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro are the ones that occur to me but there may be earlier examples. The Scarlet Pimpernel was the first masked unambiguous (er, to the author and intended audience at least) hero. The Count of Monte Cristo was nearly there, though. No mask, and at the end he's made to confront the corrupting emptiness of personal revenge, but you can't say the people he destroys aren't villains, he keeps his true identity secret by acting the part of a rich fop, and he's described as strong enough to straighten and re-bend horseshoes with his bare hands.
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Apr 18, 2018 17:13
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Mr. Grayson, won't you ride my white horse? Mr. Grayson, it's symbolic of course.
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Apr 18, 2018 17:26
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chitoryu12 posted:That would make for an interesting twist on Wold Newton. The Arendelle royal family just has this tendency to produce mutants with a wide range of unusual abilities, from animal speech to super strength to cryokinesis. A lot of the extended Wold Newton stuff is a bit tedious to me. Farmer's books are amusing enough but the legions of followers he picked up over the years trying to squeeze their favourites in were rarely as creative or as readable.
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Apr 18, 2018 17:40
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Doc Hawkins posted:The Count of Monte Cristo was nearly there, though. No mask, and at the end he's made to confront the corrupting emptiness of personal revenge, but you can't say the people he destroys aren't villains, he keeps his true identity secret by acting the part of a rich fop, and he's described as strong enough to straighten and re-bend horseshoes with his bare hands. I need to re-read that. I remember loving the poo poo out of that book when I was kid. Also The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After. Then bouncing *hard* off the The Vicomte de Bragelonne.
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Apr 18, 2018 17:48
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ecavalli posted:drat. That's way more correct than not. 
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Apr 18, 2018 17:55
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Wheat Loaf posted:A lot of the extended Wold Newton stuff is a bit tedious to me. Farmer's books are amusing enough but the legions of followers he picked up over the years trying to squeeze their favourites in were rarely as creative or as readable. I was thinking it could just center around that family. It focuses on Tarzan at first, who doesn't realize that any of his talents (super strength and being able to understand and speak any language, including animals) are unusual until he meets other humans who are completely floored by him. He returns to England and has some adventures as he tries to figure out the cultural mores he now lives in, but starts running into other people with strange and potentially magical abilities. After some investigation, it's revealed that he's actually part of a genetic line that intermittently produces people with these powers, and his cryokinetic sister is now the Queen of Arendelle after their parents died at sea (and she doesn't know he's her brother because he was conceived on the island). And then they form the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and and and
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Apr 18, 2018 18:03
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Proteus Jones posted:I need to re-read that. I remember loving the poo poo out of that book when I was kid. Also The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After. Then bouncing *hard* off the The Vicomte de Bragelonne. I like the Richard Lester movies. Never seen the third one but I've heard it's pretty bad, though from the pictures I've Kim Cattrall was looking great in it with the leather trousers and the billowy shirt. chitoryu12 posted:And then they form the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and and and Does Disney own that yet? If they don't own it, who does? There's been chat about trying that again (this time as a "female-centric" venture, which I assume means "Mina will actually be the main character this time, like in the comic") for years at this point.
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Apr 18, 2018 18:43
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Wheat Loaf posted:Does Disney own that yet? If they don't own it, who does? There's been chat about trying that again (this time as a "female-centric" venture, which I assume means "Mina will actually be the main character this time, like in the comic") for years at this point.
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Apr 18, 2018 18:52
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Wheat Loaf posted:Does Disney own that yet? If they don't own it, who does? There's been chat about trying that again (this time as a "female-centric" venture, which I assume means "Mina will actually be the main character this time, like in the comic") for years at this point. 20th Century Fox and Davis Entertainment were making the reboot as of 2015.
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Apr 18, 2018 19:02
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chitoryu12 posted:And then they form the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and and and Planetary was a good comic.
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Apr 18, 2018 19:37
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Apr 18, 2018 19:57
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The most implausible thing about that, by an order of magnitude, is Mr. T's height.
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Apr 18, 2018 20:54
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Kelly LeBrock: 5'8" Mr. T: 5'10" Kurt Russell: 5'11" Christopher Lloyd: 6'1" Richard Dean Anderson: 6'2" 
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Apr 18, 2018 21:08
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Endless Mike posted:Kelly LeBrock: 5'8" The height of an actor doesn't have much to do with the height of a character. If there was a version of this with any character played by Tom Cruise I wouldn't want them to depict him with his actual height given how much work goes into hiding it in his movies. Alan Ladd was in a movie where they made the female lead stand in a ditch whenever they had a scene together.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:16
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Endless Mike posted:Kelly LeBrock: 5'8" I had guessed Jennifer Beals instead of Kelly LeBrock. 
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Apr 18, 2018 21:23
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Skwirl posted:Alan Ladd was in a movie where they made the female lead stand in a ditch whenever they had a scene together.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:31
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prefect posted:I had guessed Jennifer Beals instead of Kelly LeBrock. Yeah, it's totally a Flashdance reference, but she's also 5'8" according to Google.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:39
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Skwirl posted:The height of an actor doesn't have much to do with the height of a character. If there was a version of this with any character played by Tom Cruise I wouldn't want them to depict him with his actual height given how much work goes into hiding it in his movies. Alan Ladd was in a movie where they made the female lead stand in a ditch whenever they had a scene together.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:41
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Skwirl posted:Yeah, it's totally a Flashdance reference, but she's also 5'8" according to Google. 
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Apr 18, 2018 21:43
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Skwirl posted:Yeah, it's totally a Flashdance reference, but she's also 5'8" according to Google.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:43
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Endless Mike posted:What? It's REALLY OBVIOUSLY Kelly LeBrock from Weird Science. I haven't actually seen Weird Science and that shirt was apparently way more common in the 80's than I thought. This is where my mind went 
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Apr 18, 2018 21:44
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Skwirl posted:Yeah, it's totally a Flashdance reference, but she's also 5'8" according to Google. no. It’s Weird Science. I’m on mobile but go find a Weird Science movie poster.E: fg 
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Apr 18, 2018 21:44
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 from Batman #45
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