Moviebob's Superhero Cinema: Comics & Superhero Writing from Bob Chipman

By Bob Chipman

Once upon a time, comic book superheroes were obscure figures hidden from mainstream culture by dense, convoluted continuities. Today, they've dominated the world for almost two decades through blockbuster movies and hit TV shows that have turned that continuity into something like a new global religion. Film critic Bob Chipman watched this all unfold firsthand, and now he brings you a selection of his writing on all things Marvel and DC plus hidden gems and forgotten classics sure to delight any fan of caped crimefighting.

While perhaps best known as the creator and star of classic Web Video series like Escape to The Movies, The Big Picture and The Game OverThinker; Bob Chipman has also published numerous volumes of written reviews, commentaries, thinkpieces and features covering the worlds of film, television, video games and the broader breadth of popular culture. Now, through The MovieBob Anthology, a selection of his best work is yours to own - selected and organized by theme by Bob Chipman himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Chipman
• Release date: Feb 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781495195020

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Moviebob's Superhero Cinema: Comics & Superhero Writing from Bob Chipman

SUPERHERO CINEMA

Copyright © 2016 by Bob Chipman

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4951-9502-0

Revere, Massachusetts

www.moviebob.blogspot.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe my success, which includes the opportunity to write these pieces in the first place and the ability to share them with you again, to many fine people who’ve enabled my career to this point: Stuttering Craig Skitsimas of ScrewAttack and Fullscreen, who was among the first to discover my work, Russ Pitts, who first reached out to me about reviewing movies professionally, and Susan Arendt, who was the original editor of a great deal of the work included here. I offer them all my sincere thanks for their help, encouragement and (most of all) their friendship.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Patricia & Peter Chipman.

The original pieces contained in this volume are culled from a variety of sources. The majority originated on The Escapist (www.escapistmagazine.com) and the MovieBob Blog (moviebob.blogspot.com)

INDEX OF TOPICS

SEWING FOR SUPERHEROES

On Superhero costumes in movie adaptations

SPIDER-MAN NO MORE

Sam Raimi’s canceled Spider-Man 4 and the then-upcoming reboot

ADVICE FROM A FANBOY: SPIDER-MAN REBOOT

How to make a not-terrible Spider-Man movie

FORGOTTEN HEROES (WHO KICKED ASS)

Original superhero movies you may have forgotten

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH HIT-GIRL?

Defense of a controversial Kick-Ass character

THREE REASONS FOR ROBIN

Why Robin should be in the Batman films by now

FILM THESE HEROES!

Classic heroes who deserve movies, finally

ADVICE FROM A FANBOY: SUPERMAN

How to make a not-awful Superman movie

MEET THE NEW BAT-GUYS

Who are Bane and Catwoman, historically?

WHAT’S WHAT IN THOR

The Marvel Universe easter eggs of Thor

X-MEN: NEXT CLASS

What could possibly follow First Class?

GREEN LANTERN: A FANBOY-FREE BREAKDOWN

Green Lantern was a terrible movie even if you don’t care about Green Lantern

WHAT’S WHAT IN CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

The Marvel Universe easter eggs of the first Captain America

THE BIG TEASE

Comparing superhero teaser-trailers

LOWERING THE BAT-BAR

Will The Dark Knight Rises live up to the hype?

EARTH’S WHITEY-EST HEROES

Marvel’s diversity problem

SHOULD THE AVENGERS BE AT THE OSCARS

Why are superheroes constantly shut out of the awards scene?

RE-BAT

How to hit the refresh-button on Batman movies

AVENGERS: THE DOWN SIDE OF UP

The unplanned side-effects of Marvel’s big Hollywood success

AND WHO, DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT…

How Man of Steel can succeed

ADVICE FROM A FANBOY: JUSTICE LEAGUE

How not to screw up a Justice League movie

SUPER DARK

Was Man of Steel too dark for a Superman movie?

WORLD’S FINEST

Batman versus Superman – what does it mean?

TOO MANY HEROES

Are we making too many superhero movies?

WRIGHTS AND WRONGS

On Edgar Wright’s abrupt departure from Ant-Man

MARVEL TV: THE INCREDIBLE HULK

Retrospective on the classic 70s Bixby/Ferrigno TV series

MARVEL TV: THE INCREDIBLE HULK TV MOVIE TRILOGY

A look back at Marvel’s three made-for-TV Hulk movies

THE NOT-SO AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

On the 1970s Spider-Man live-action television series

SPIDER-MAN SWINGS EAST

The strange history of the live-action Japanese Spider-Man series

DOCTOR STRANGE – BUT NOT DOCTOR INTERESTING

Review of the obscure 1970s made-for-TV Doctor Strange movie

WHEN CAPTAIN AMERICA THROWS HIS CRAPPY SHIELD

Retrospective of the two made-for-TV Captain America movies in the 70s

X-MEN: WORST CLASS

Generation X: The live-action X-Men movie Marvel wants to forget

SECRET AGENT HAM

A look back at David Hasselhoff as Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

THE BEST (AND WORST) MARVEL CARTOONS OF THE 60s & 70s

Highs and lows from Marvel’s first foray into TV animation

MARVEL’S NOT-SO-AWFUL ANIMATION OF THE 80s

The classic Marvel Comics cartoons of the 1980s

BATMAN V SUPERMAN V CAPTAIN AMERICA

Two versus movies, one box-office

WHY IS FOX HIDING THE FANTASTIC FOUR?

Did Fox already know how bad their movie was?

THE MARVEL-OUS CARTOONS OF THE 90s

Marvel’s hit animated shows of the 1990s

THE NOT-SO MARVEL-OUS CARTOONS OF THE 90s

The other, less fortunate Marvel animated series of the 1990s

MODERN (CARTOON) MARVELS

The newest animated offerings from the House of Ideas

END OF THE IRON AGE?

What does Marvel do when Robert Downey Jr. is done with Tony Stark?

CAPTAIN AMERICA 3 IS ABOUT WHAT!?

Explaining the significance of Marvel’s Civil War

STOP! HAMMER TIME

Why is it a big deal who can and can’t lift Thor’s hammer?

TOLD YOU SO

Sony cancels the Amazing Spider-Man series and finally agrees to share with Marvel

INTRODUCTION

It’s been both blessing and also worrisome to be a film critic whose career has largely dovetailed with the rise of geek-era Hollywood in general and the superhero genre in particular.

The blessing part is obvious: Though I’ll stack my film education against any of my peers gladly (particularly in the realm of independent/post-academic study) there’s no denying that I owe a great deal of my success to also being well-versed in the realms of classic science fiction, anime, obscure cartoons, toys, comic books and all the other nostalgic ephemera blockbusters are made of these days. Let’s face it: Grab the nearest tree on any college campus near the film department and shake it if you want twenty kids to fall out who can all write you the same identical reappraisal of Hitchock’s VERTIGO; but if you need someone who can review DEADPOOL without having to look up any of the references guys like me sure come in handy – and being handy in that way has opened a lot of doors for me.

The worrisome part is that there’s always a chance these things will pass out of style – though today, nearly two decades and counting since the original SPIDER-MAN and the franchise now heading for its third (likely successful) reboot, it’s harder to imagine the ever. Still, I worry that at some point there will be a backlash to all of this cultural-transformation wrought by my particular subset of my generation taking over the machinery of popular culture and installing our comic, cartoon and video-game icons as secular gods; and suddenly there’ll be a whole generation of critics and commentators brushed aside by history because our resumes show too much time writing too knowledgably about comics and superheroes.

But that’s for another day. For now, it’s undeniable that my career to this point has spilled a lot of ink covering superheroes, superhero movies, superhero TV shows and the comics they all came from. And now, as part of The MovieBob Anthology, I’m bringing the specially-curated collection of my superhero-themed writing into one volume for you to own.

For awhile, I was worried that I’d lack for still-relevant material on this volume, since so much of what I wrote over the last several years (the material for this book largely having been culled from my personal blog and my columns during my tenure at The Escapist) was often focused on developing projects that changed from week to week. And while I regrettably did find a solid chunk of material that just wasn’t suitable for republication, I was happy to discover that there was more than enough I was more than proud to re-present to you in this convenient, collected volume.

Since these pieces have been organized into rough chronological order, you’ll find a sense of real time observance of the evolving superhero genre permeates the resulting narrative: One of the first pieces is a gobsmacked report on the (then) shocking blow-up of Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN 4 and Sony’s subsequent launch of the (then) awful-sounding AMAZING SPIDER-MAN reboot franchise; while the last piece (also my last column for The Escapist, incidentally) is a report on the subsequent scuttling of that godawful iteration in favor of ceding partial-custody back to Marvel – a full-circle transformation. And that’s just the most obvious example.

You’ll also find multiple Advice From a Fanboy columns, elucidating on how not to ruin classic characters. Comprehensive breakdowns of Marvel Cinematic Universe easter eggs. A defense of KICK-ASS’s Hit-Girl – still controversial after all these years. My call for Robin to finally re-join the BATMAN movies. Even analysis of teaser trailers.

But that’s not all: I spent one half-Summer’s worth of columns on weekly retrospectives of the early TV efforts from Marvel, and that whole series is collected here: That means a detailed overview of THE INCREDIBLE HULK series, the trilogy of made-for-TV HULK movies that followed, the American and Japanese live-action SPIDER-MAN shows, the forgotten GENERATION X and DOCTOR STRANGE features, the oh-that-they-could-be-forgotten CAPTAIN AMERICA telefilms, David Hasselhoff’s infamous NICK FURY pilot and complete breakdowns of the nostalgic Marvel cartoons of the 70s, 80s, 90s and early-2000s.

It’s not just relentless positivity, either: Several pieces are featured that criticize the overly-dark turn of MAN OF STEEL, the complete breakdown of GREEN LANTERN, Marvel’s big-screen diversity problem and the unintended negative effects of THE AVENGERS’ success. Original superhero features unfairly forgotten by history like METEOR MAN, BLANKMAN and Takeshi Miike’s gonzo ZEBRAMAN also get the spotlight, as does what was then only a hypothetical prospect of rebooting BATMAN again.

Every effort has been made to get these pieces properly organized, cleaned up and made as readable as possible both for old fans re-experiencing their favorites and new readers who somehow stumble on this while leafing through the chronically-understocked Film Studies shelf at their local chain book store. However, you may notice some stray issues popping up here and there. For one thing, since these pieces appeared on multiple different sites over many years, you may notice abrupt shifts in quality and style; given that these reviews were written on a (largely) weekly basis amid an evolving career and posted to multiple platforms – which often meant a change to style-guide, a change in editorial staff or both. In the interest of preserving what were often design-oriented choices in writing, I elected to not impose a singular stylization over the entire book; which means these pieces appear largely as they originally did online, though there has been some minimal editing to remove or reword references that were originally designed to work in-tandem with HTML hyperlinks.

I sincerely hope you enjoy this collection of comics and superhero writing. It represents an exciting time in my life, as I took my first real steps into writing about film professionally and became the man I am today. I hope you get as much value out of reading these pieces as I did writing them. Most of all, I hope that you find at least one film in here that you either hadn’t heard of or hadn’t taken time to see yet that you are compelled to watch and enjoy. If I’ve helped to facilitate that, I’m still doing my job.

Thank you for reading,

Bob Chipman.

SEWING FOR SUPERHEROES

(Originally published October 2009 on The Escapist)

This was the first piece for The Escapist published under the MovieBob: Intermission banner. At the time, I didn’t quite realize exactly how much writing I’d end up doing on the topic of comic-book movie costuming.

I'm so tired of seeing perfectly-good movies stop so that I can watch a superhero sew.

There's a moment of near-perfect visual storytelling in G.I. Joe (not technically a superhero movie, but trust me this is going somewhere) that encapsulates the entire film: Silly, yet sort of amazing. Amidst a massive conflagration in the good guys' subterranean lair, Storm Shadow - the Evil Ninja - goes in to strike the killing blow on a helpless enemy, only to have his blade stopped mid-sweep by that of Snake Eyes - the Good Ninja. Caught by surprise, Storm Shadow instantly recognizes his opponent; triggering a flashback in which we see two young boys in Japanese-style martial arts training. Brother! exclaims the present-day Storm Shadow.

Practically, it shouldn't work: How can anyone sneak up on someone during a fight in an open area the size of a small city? How can you recognize someone through a head-to-toe rubber body-stocking just by his ability to counter a sword maneuver? What does them training together as kids have to do with why they're fighting now?

Of course, you and I and damn near everyone in the theater knows the answer: Because they're ninjas. Ninjas are always invisible until they no longer want to be; ninjas can recognize people by minor body language; ninjas hold honor-grudges forever. If a math teacher or a short-order cook behaved this way in a fight (or any other situation, really) we'd likely not accept it. But ninjas? Not a second thought. Everybody knows that's how things work for ninjas. In other words, the visual-storytelling works because it plays on the audience's collective pre-acceptance of Ninja formula or, if you like, tropes. This is also why no one asks questions when two characters walk to the center of a street for an impromptu gentlemanly pistol-duel - so long as it's happening in a cowboy movie; and why no one even bothers to remind you that zombies need to be shot in the head anymore.

Tropes have been with us forever (though the word has only come to mean that pretty recently.) In the wrong hands, they're a way for the careless to pad a plot (see: Bay, Michael.) In the right hands, they're a way to communicate information to the audience without having to break the rhythm for an explanation (oh! He must be a bad guy, got it!) In a master's hands, it's a way to execute a perfect fake out: No way! The nicest guy in the group never gets murdered first! You can tell that a genre is here to stay when it begins to have elements unique to itself that no one feels the need to explain anymore - when it begins to have its own tropes.

Much has been made recently of the oversaturation of movies based on comic book superheroes. While I certainly wish more of them were better, I welcome this oversaturation precisely because of the above-described concepts: I want the movie-going public to become saturated in superheroes so that the ability to utilize tropes will kick in - which, from where I sit, will help all superhero movies to streamline their narratives and deliver richer and more complex storytelling.

For me, nothing slows down even a good superhero movie than the constant need to explain recurring elements of the genre to the non comic-fluent mainstream audience; specifically, things like costumes, nicknames and gimmicks. In the comics, almost no explanation is necessary for such things because readers have been marinating in the tropes of the genre for about eighty years and already know the score: That in a Superhero Story, the first thing one does upon embarking on a vigilante or super-criminal career is to choose a nickname for oneself and construct a flamboyant costume. Hm, I can jump pretty high... from now on call me RABBITMAN! This sort of thing usually takes a single page, sometimes less than that. Why does Maxwell Dillon, upon gaining the power to throw lightning from his fingertips, decide to don a green and yellow costume and dub himself Electro? Because it's a superhero story (Amazing Spider-Man #9, to be precise) and that's how it works in those.

Superhero movie stories, on the other hand, have only become a (seemingly) permanent fixture of film and TV within the last decade, so the tropes haven't quite caught on with everybody. As such, whenever a costumed character turns up whose thing isn't self-explanatory (see: The Joker, Sandman) you're almost guaranteed that the film is going to take time out to explain via background detail and plot-contortion exactly why they've opted to dress up.

Consider Catwoman. In the comics, there's never really been a lot of time spent explaining why she dresses up like a cat. She's a cat burglar, she's a lady and she's an antagonist in a superhero story, thusly she puts on a cat suit. Simple, basic, cut, print. In the movies? No such luck: Batman Returns piles heaps of cats and cat iconography onto everything surrounding poor Selina Kyle's life until it becomes frankly ridiculous - all to make absolutely sure that no one in the audience can possibly ask Where'd she get the idea for the outfit? Oh, and despite being a frumpy cat-lady, she happens to own a stylish coat of reflective black rubber and possesses concussion-defying sewing skills so that no one wonders where'd she buy that thing, another question no one asks in comics.

And never mind just slowing down the movies, this need to over-explain these things means that some superhero stories just flat-out cannot be told: I'll probably never see the current cinematic Spider-Man battle one of my favorite villains, The Rhino, because there's simply no matter-of-fact reason for a man to dress up like a rhinoceros other than he's a supervillain, and that's what they do. And you can probably forget seeing folks like Mad Hatter or Mr. Freeze in Christopher Nolan's ultra-realistic re-imagining of Batman.

But, slowly yet surely, things on this front seem to be changing. As superheroes spread themselves out over more and more of the action-movie landscape, you can see more films telling their stories confident that most of the audience will get that certain offbeat things happen in superhero movies just because: A cursory glance from his own stitched-up face to a billboard displaying puzzle-pieces is all it takes for Punisher: Warzone's Billy Russoti to rechristen himself Jigsaw. Dr. Jonathan Crane is The Scarecrow because... well, he's a weirdo and likes to do things in a scarecrow mask. Tony Stark paints his Iron Man armor hot-rod red because it'll look more cool that way. The Incredible Hulk doesn't know a lot of things, but he knows his name is The Hulk. This is why I'll take stinkers like X-Men Origins: Wolverine or the Fantastic Four movies on-balance if it means that superheroes and their respective formulas become as ubiquitous to the modern moviegoer as Mismatched Buddy Cops or Hookers With Hearts of Gold.

Maybe it'll never happen, but I've got a dream that one day I'll sit down to watch a Spider-Man (or whoever) movie that opens with a big ol' bank robbery carried off by guys like The Rhino, Scorpion, The Beetle, Shocker, Vulture... those kinda guys - and maybe The Ringmaster & His Circus of Crime for good measure - and after this brief in media res introduction we jump immediately into the kind of big, sprawling story we saw in "The Dark Knight"(not-coincidentally featuring the no-explanation-necessary Joker.) And everyone will be cool with that, because nobody will be wondering what traumatic event in Rhino's early life involved an actual rhino, or where Shocker picked up his fabric samples.

Because they're supervillains and it's a Spider-Man movie and that's just how things work in those.

And it will be awesome.

SPIDER-MAN NO MORE

(Originally published January 2010 on The Escapist)

Covering the tumultuous post-Sam Raimi life of the Spider-Man movies would ultimately come to define a bigger part of my output (particularly on the news reporting front) for The Escapist than I could have imagined. Movie projects fall apart and change shape all the time, but the idea that Sony Pictures (amid the biggest moment that the superhero genre had ever had up to that point) would cancel an in-production sequel to the franchise that had defined the studio for years, scrap the filmmakers and cast behind it, reboot with two of the worst films ever produced in the genre and tank so badly that they’d ultimately be forced by their parent company to abandon course again and go hat-in-hand to Marvel/Disney to bail them out with a second reboot and a Captain America: Civil War cameo - all within barely 5 years! – is still incredible to me.

Writing these forewords, there’s a lot I look back on and cringe in terms of short-term views I held and wrong predictions I made. But when it came to this, I’m proud to say I had called it right from the get-go.

I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man, and loved it. But now that dream is over, and the insect is awake. - Seth Brundle, The Fly.

Though barely two weeks-and-change old, the 2010 entertainment news scene already seems to have found its theme: Major talent being - to put it mildly - royally screwed over by seemingly clueless studio bosses in shockingly public displays. On the TV side, Conan O'Brien finds himself paying for NBC's earth-shattering Jay Leno Show blunder, somehow being treated even more disrespectfully than even Letterman was the last time the Tonight Show changed hands.

On the film side, director Sam Raimi - under whose stewardship the Spider-Man movies set scads of box office records and likely spearheaded the creation of the superhero-dominated blockbuster landscape of 21st Century Hollywood - got into a highly-covered fight with Sony Pictures over the choice of bad guys for the upcoming Spider-Man 4. When it became clear he wasn't going to budge (at least, not in time to meet a schedule start-date) Sony's response was...decisive, to say the least. Sony killed the movie and the series - announcing that not only would they replace Raimi but completely re-start the entire franchise, with a new origin, a story following a teenaged Peter Parker in high school and - of course - an entirely new cast and continuity. Deadline Hollywood broke the story...

...and then the story