Two other items: I rarely post about the outcomes of contests on this blog, and really, I should do that more often. I've been lucky enough to earn two distinctions of note in the last year or so. Last fall, I was listed as a semi-finalist in the Capital Repertory Next Act! New Play Summit, with my full-length play The Magnificent Masked Hearing Aid. Last March, that same script was listed as a semi-finalist in the Actor's Theatre of Charlotte's nuVoices Festival. It's fun to see this script in particular advance at least part-way in contests, as I work on newer material. The play means a lot to me, and the only reason it's getting this far is because of the many hard-working actors, designers, directors, and writers who helped me shape its story. So, thanks to all my collaborators! I'm hoping to get back in the rehearsal room sooner rather than later.
It's been an exciting week for this humble playwright. I am happy to announce that I will be serving as an adjunct instructor for Prairie State College for its theatre programming in the 2014-2015 academic year. This summer, I will be teaching Introduction To Theatre, which involves script analysis, viewing theatre performance, a smattering of theatre history, and a heavy dose of dramatic structure -- and more courses will materialize in the fall. It's going to be a wild ride, and I'm excited to get back in the classroom next week!
Two other items: I rarely post about the outcomes of contests on this blog, and really, I should do that more often. I've been lucky enough to earn two distinctions of note in the last year or so. Last fall, I was listed as a semi-finalist in the Capital Repertory Next Act! New Play Summit, with my full-length play The Magnificent Masked Hearing Aid. Last March, that same script was listed as a semi-finalist in the Actor's Theatre of Charlotte's nuVoices Festival. It's fun to see this script in particular advance at least part-way in contests, as I work on newer material. The play means a lot to me, and the only reason it's getting this far is because of the many hard-working actors, designers, directors, and writers who helped me shape its story. So, thanks to all my collaborators! I'm hoping to get back in the rehearsal room sooner rather than later.
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As I initially understood it, The New 52 was created to streamline years of confusing history, to feature only the iconic versions of DC characters, and to give new readers a fresh starting point for their heroes' adventures. In light of recent reappearances, I am no longer so sure I buy the company's line, if I ever did to begin with; I wailed and moaned about the disappearance of characters I loved -- among them Wally West and Stephanie Brown. Well, now they're back, and my third favorite vanished character will walk back into comics soon: Helena Bertinelli. This should be cause for rejoicing, and indeed, I am pleased to learn Helena will be a super-spy who's better at her job than former Robin/Nightwing Dick Grayson. But with my DC boycott running strong, give or take an issue of Astro City, I doubt I'll be persuaded to pick up Grayson later this year. Why is that? And why haven't I bought or really celebrated the return of any of the other characters I love? I think the answer lies in history, or, using the more dreaded term, continuity. Serialized storytelling is a tough nut to crack, and years of back stories can bog down an ongoing plot, and keep new readers from understanding the hero being championed within a superhero comic. Them's been the breaks, I suppose, as readership gets older and plots get darker, and a body can't figure out what caused Superman to lose his powers for the billionth time. DC had a point in rebooting their continuity, much as I decried the loss of fun legacy characters and marriages and decades-old histories at the start of the New 52. A lot of great things were lost when continuity was thrown out the window, but a lot of cool potential could have remained. Except there was a lot of abandoned history tugging its way back into the DC Universe from the reboot's beginning. Most of what had happened in the Green Lantern and Batman books had still happened, including that one big zombie nightmare, and Batman having five Robins somehow in five years. Add to that Barbara Gordon finding time to be both Oracle and Batgirl, and it doesn't feel like DC wants you to ignore its previous continuity. Perhaps more puzzling was DC's insistence that different books be set in different time periods. For example, Superman told present-day stories about Superman, but Action Comics told the story of his early career. This is certainly a wiser decision than throwing immediate crossovers across all the Superman books, but crossovers invaded anyway, fairly early on in the new continuity. So even if you were reading one book, its story would continue in another. You'd end up just as confused as in a pre-New 52 world, with multiple timelines thrashing you about. Clearly, continuity is still a problem for DC, and the reintroduction of Helena Bertinelli only highlights this for me. Helena started out as an intriguing extension of Batman. She began as a what-if on DC's Earth 2, where heroes are allowed to get married (pre-New 52, of course). Known on that Earth as Helena Wayne, she was the daughter of Batman and Catwoman, and she fought crime under the name Huntress. Here's where a cool and confusing wrinkle sets in. Helena Bertinelli was ALSO introduced as Huntress, but in the mainstream DC Universe, where Batman and Catwoman are nowhere close, and likely never will be close, to putting a ring on it. So, if she wasn't Batman's daughter, who could she be? In the mainline DC comics, she became the daughter of a mafia family, whose parents were gunned down before her eyes. While Batman vowed to pursue justice in the wake of his parents' murder, Helena B. vows revenge, and makes a name for herself in Gotham City through the use of brutal and often murderous tactics. One Helena comes from a stable if adventurous home; the other comes from the same dark place as Bruce Wayne's Caped Crusader. Imagine the different stories that can be told with these two! Imagine how confounding it would be for a new reader to see two Huntresses now, as both Helenas apparently exist in the New 52 mainstream universe! Of course, the creators of Grayson are keeping Helena Bertinelli out of the Huntress garb. She is a super-spy and not a superheroine in their series. Which, fair enough. That's a simple way to solve the problem of having two Helenas running around. But if you want to write stories featuring Helena Bertinelli, can you really disassociate her from her past life as a crime fighter? If you can, why bother calling her Helena Bertinelli, since she's clearly meant to be a completely new, not simply refreshed, person? Why not create an original character, with limitless potential, and leave Helena B. retired? Such questions spoil my excitement at her New 52 return. Initially, I'd wanted everyone who had vanished back in DC's comics, playing the roles I remembered them in: Wally the smart-mouth Flash; Stephanie the second chances Batgirl; Helena the hothead Huntress. But that was all the way back in 2011 and 2012, before it became clear that the New 52 was a sour, humorless exercise in shuffle-boarding. What do I mean by shuffle-boarding? Essentially, DC has built its new universe on a series of incidents that still call back to previous continuity, while editors reintroduce characters as more SUPER-HARDCORE, EXTREME versions of themselves. See: Superman as a murderer, Wonder Woman as his God of War girlfriend, and lesser characters as cannon fodder. Nobody has really changed, just shuffled to the more bombastic sides of their personalities in a cynical cash grab meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. For example, Stephanie Brown was originally created to spoil her father the Cluemaster's crimes. In Batman Eternal, she is ... still working to spoil her father's crimes, except now it looks like her mother might also be in on his dastardly plots? QUELLE SURPRISE! EXTREME TO THE MAX! What is the use of telling the same stories, with like-minded characters, but with the outcomes slightly altered to provide a cynical rather than hopeful aftertaste? Is DC so scared of its own continuity, its own history, and its own stable of optimistic icons, that the only way to get compelling material greenlit is to ensure its essential hopelessness? Hopelessness has its place in storytelling, but that's where Helena Bertinelli started. She grew from cynical loner to team player, team leader, and friend. The way current continuity is going at DC, hopelessness is where readers start, and where they land. Without variation of outlook and outcome, how will these stories stand the test of time? Potential is the bonus inherent in launching a reboot. But pinning characters with old names, alluding to exhausted back stories, and doling out tragic endgames? That washes all the potential away, leaving only stale crumbs for writers to collect and serve back to us. I want more for readers, though I hope for better for Helena Bertinelli, super-spy. Huntress Artist: Nicola Scott. "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" opened this past weekend to an unsurprisingly big box office, which is lucky for Sony Pictures! The company needs to keep making movies about the old web-head, or his story rights will revert back to Marvel and its own film studio. Sony's 2012 reboot of the superhero's adventures ensured there's money to be money made off Spider-Man ad-infinitum -- he's easily one of Marvel's most popular and recognizable characters -- and Sony is smartly expanding the franchise to cover later films about Venom and Spidey's rogue's gallery, the Sinister Six. How much longer people will flock to see superhero movies is up in the air at this point, but studios doubling down on the properties is a certainty through the 2020s. I found "The Amazing Spider-Man" unnecessary, as its rehashing of Peter Parker's origin story felt unoriginal enough to merit claims the movie was a cash grab and nothing more. Its redeeming factor was the charming romance between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone (both on- and off-screen). But at the end of the day, I don't have much desire to head to the theaters for "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" because I've seen a bunch of Spidey stories already. I know Peter Parker, I know his world, I know who lives and dies in that world, and I understand that "with great power comes great responsibility." To be fair, the "ASM" franchise has been tweaking the wall-crawler's formula somewhat. In the first film, Peter Parker learned that his separation from his parents was less a tragic accident and more a motivated act of villainy by corporate forces. Such revelations made his own spider-bitten journey towards heroism less the result of a freak accident, and more a moment to be atoned for and reckoned with. Gone was the idea that Peter was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Entering was the thought that his responsibilities were determined long before birth, not chosen as a milestone of maturity. This scenario laid on the guilt for Peter (as if his Uncle Ben's death wasn't enough), giving him more motivation, and grounding the ridiculous idea of being bitten by a radioactive spider in something akin to reality. I find this change puzzling. The power in Spider-Man's narrative has always come from the fact that he was never destined to be anything great. He had terrible Peter Parker luck. Then an accident happened, and he needed to step up and do what he could to help others. This is a common structure for all classic Marvel tales. Bruce Banner is caught in a gamma bomb explosion; he becomes the Hulk. Matt Murdock is blinded while pushing an old man out of the way of an oncoming truck; he gains super-senses and dons the Daredevil costume. The Fantastic Four ride through space dust and get all invisible and stretchy and flame-covered and Thing-like. Contrast these "accidents happen" tales with the prevailing structure at DC, home to more iconic characters. Clark Kent is primed to save Earth because his parents sent him to a planet that would give him powers. Wonder Woman acts as ambassador to man's world because she proved herself the champion of the Amazons. Even in Batman, there exist stories where the mugger who killed his parents was hired to do so by a mob boss with ties to Thomas Wayne. Very little in DC's universe is random, whereas almost everything in Marvel's universe is -- or was, in the sixties when the company rose to prominence. Spider-Man's conceit is not that he is destined to be a hero, but that he is a nobody who becomes a hero. Take that to its furthest conclusion, to a child's fantasy world. If Peter Parker starts out as a nobody, that means Spider-Man could be ANYBODY, including the reader. That is what makes Spider-Man attractive, that is what makes his popularity endure. He's less about how the pieces fit together, and more about how the chips fall where they may, and he'll do the best he can to rescue a situation. That concluded, it's been interesting to track the PR campaign ramping up to the "ASM 2" release. Despite the essential changes already made to Peter Parker's story, the producers feel a strong loyalty to Spider-Man as a brand. In a recent interview, producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach vowed that only Peter Parker would don the footie pajamas and head sock in their series of "Amazing Spider-Man" movies. This promise was made after the two were asked whether or not Miles Morales, the Spider-Man of Marvel's Ultimate Comics line, would ever appear in their films. For those who don't know, Miles Morales is an African-American/Latino teenager, who received spider powers by accident after his felonious uncle deposited a stolen radioactive spider near him. Miles is scared when his powers emerge and hides his new-found abilities from his family. He only takes up the mantle of Spider-Man after witnessing Peter Parker's death. Upon his debut, Miles received praise and scorn. Some on the Internet cried "tokenism." Others appreciated Miles' sympathetic worries and guilt. In light of the 2008 presidential election, Marvel EIC Axel Alonso felt it was time to bring more diversity to comics, and believed starting with a flagship character made the most sense. I, for one, find Miles a great character; he is serious like Peter, and has two tons of integrity. His perspective is not one you see throughout mainstream comics. He lives in a predominantly non-white New York, and the pressure on him to succeed academically is enormous, far outweighing what Peter ever experienced. His tough relationships with his parents and amoral uncle were a big draw into his world for me, as was his relationship with his best friend Ganke Lee, a rabid Lego and superhero fan. Miles exists in a world that doesn't trust anybody in a costume, and his troubles are doubled when he crosses universes and meets the adult Peter Parker we know! The meeting of the two Spider-Men planted a corporate crossover seed I can't believe hasn't been harvested yet. What is the hold-up? That miniseries sold well; clearly, comics can support two Spider-Men. Why can't the movies? Shouldn't it be imperative they do so? Ultimate Spider-Man scribe Brian Michael Bendis recently pointed out that he hears stories all the time about how children of color were never allowed to "be" Superman or Batman when playing at superheroics with friends. They could, however, play Spider-Man, because his body is always covered head to toe; no one in the public knows his ethnicity in the way they know Superman's and Batman's. Again, Spider-Man can BE ANYBODY. So why would the producers shy away from that possibility, disastrous Clone Saga aside? There's a whole potential audience out there that would love to see a person of color as Spider-Man. And just because the brand's always been sold with a white dude, that doesn't mean it needs to stay that way. The make-up of America is changing rapidly, and our stories need to change with that make-up. If the fantasy inherent in Marvel tales is less about determinism and more about potential, there's no reason Miles Morales shouldn't get a shot at the big screen, too. Spider-Men #1: Brian Michael Bendis, Writer; Sara Pichelli, Artist; Justin Ponsor, Colorist; Cory Petit, Letterer. |
Playwright News & Musings on Comic Book CultureCheck this page for updates on Sarah's writing and thoughts on a great many topics, including but not limited to superheroes and disability. Archives
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