Suite101: Disney and Marvel

A History of Disney Acquisitions 1966-1996

A History of Disney Acquisitions 1997 - Now

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Suite101: Marvelman

Here's my latest articles for Suite 101, on the history and legal complications surrounding the legendary Marvelman/Miracleman.

The History of Marvelman: The Return of Comic Books' Greatest Forgotten Hero

The Legal History of Marvelman: The Case of One of Comic Books' Greatest Heroes Read more!

I, For One, Welcome Our Holofoil Overlords

Seriously. You people love cynical nostalgia when it's backed by the worst screenplay ever written, but you can't manage a chuckle for the return of Holofoil covers?

The nineties are better than the eighties, and that's a scientific fact. You know what would have made this better?

If it looked more like this:

You know what the worst part is, though? The Ultimate Comics Holofoil will sell, no matter how much the internet whines. Why?

Because people bought a hundred thousand copies of fucking Ultimates 3, that's why.

Welcome back, Nineties. Now back to the top of the charts, Gin Blossoms:

* The amount of emo YouTube kids covering "Til I Hear It From You" on their acoustic guitars is obnoxious.

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Where I've Been

I've been working for real money*, rather than the no money I was making here. Content here resumes soon, however, since I can't say Fuck on my other site.

Check out my other job here:

Michael Davidson @ Suite 101.com

Until I wake up from my Honor Nap** and resume posting, you'll have to be happy with this video cut by Internet Genius Chris Hardwicke:



* Current Total: $0.38. IMA BUY A DONUT.
** Kim Possible reference you didn't get. Read more!

Adaptation and Compromise: "Watchmen (2009)"

There’s not much more to talk about regarding “Watchmen”, which is actually kind of interesting. It seems that no one can agree on anything.

The one thing they can agree on isn’t the music, the costumes, the dialogue, the sex scene, or the acting. It’s only that it certainly was… adapted, wasn’t it? “Watchmen” is slavishly devoted to the source material, with director Zack Snyder hanging off Alan Moore’s beard like he’s trying to rescue Rapunzel.

(I’d be remiss to not mention artist Dave Gibbon’s equal contribution to making the novel great, but he doesn’t have a beard).

List of items in Alan Moore's Beard: Battle Armor, Zack Snyder's throat, The Complete Peanuts

Also, finding the movie’s pulse is difficult because the way viewers consumed the film differs so wildly. Fans of the graphic novel essentially saw their beloved story translated panel-for-panel, making it impossible to differentiate how they felt about the film versus the original text. For non-fans, they seem to be either wrapped up in the eye candy of it all, or sinking under the weight of an incomprehensible film filled with scenes that only work if you know how they fit into the source.

I’ve struggled to write about “Watchmen” because I consumed it like a crazy person. I love the graphic novel, I’ve discussed it in a college course, and read a ton of differing opinions on it. I still have no clue how I felt about the film as a film… minute to minute I either loved it or hated it.

If I loved it, it was because of the reasons the original novel works. It really hasn’t lost its luster as a deconstruction of the superhero in both of its major forms: lone vigilante and iconic team. Major comic book stories usually follow in one of two ways, continuing the theme of superheroes as apocalyptic harbingers, constantly playing out their little human dramas amidst gunfights and atom bombs. Or, they take the opposite tactic and crawl tooth and nail away from anything serious, like “The Umbrella Academy”. If you haven’t read it, there’s a dude with a gorilla body, an insane orchestra attempting to play a song to invoke the apocalypse, and Zombie Gustave Eiffel with his rocket ship Eiffel Tower.

Unfortunately, movie fans have really only seen the former. The movies that come closest to approximating the joy of superheroics are certainly the Spider-Man films, and even those are mostly mired in angst. Somewhere along the line, film quality got largely associated with darkness and drama. “Watchmen”, then, means very little because non-fans have nothing to relate it to. All they know is the exact thing that “Watchmen” gave birth to, not the essential context it was born out of. They’re the “underwear perverts” Warren Ellis always talks about, unable to comment on anything in a world were “The Dark Knight” makes a billion dollars.

Because your script made us?

Looking at it purely as a film, Zack Snyder did a mostly admiral job. He was given a terrible dichotomy to work with, taking a dense graphic novel and translating it into a watchable, mainstream movie. The almost three hour running time is long, in the traditional sense, but it’s not bloated. The pacing is fantastic, with very little bulky fan service. Unfortunately, the story as it’s presented, due to lack of cinematic breath is a little Hot Topic. It’s all joyless violence and vapid friction.

I hope your pile of money makes you happy, Gibbons

Although Snyder did a great job adapting the material, he still manages to show how limited he is as a director. It’s not that the story is perfect, because it’s far from it. It lacks nuance as a stand alone piece. So we’re left with something bright, gothic, and violent, which tends to cover any message the film has. Being a fan of it will be associated with some methodologies mainstream audiences simply refuse to subscribe to. Without the context, it loses part of the message, and we’re left with something more traditional than comic fans would’ve liked.

The few failings of “Watchmen” as a film are due to Snyder’s lack of vision. His music cues only work part of the time, and when they don’t it’s pretty dramatic thud, audience immersion tumbling further down a well like a discarded penny. “99 Luftballoons” draws a laugh when it shouldn’t, then promptly goes away. It’s not that Snyder shouldn’t have used it at all, it’s that he really had no sense of why he was using it. We understand it’s the 80s from contextual cues and the brilliant art direction. We don’t need fifteen seconds of Nena playing as someone enters an upscale restaurant. The failure of the non-score soundtrack couldn’t be helped in the way Snyder was intent on using it, because he’s substituting the music for visual representation, and that’s a difficult balancing act. He’s forced into using things with immediate recognizability, which means that someone brings a lifetime of their own experiences to the viewing. “Sounds of Silence” during a funeral, it’s not a deft underscoring of the scene. It’s obvious pandering, the audience knows it, and they react accordingly by laughing during your dramatic scene.

Garfunkel is just happy people are laughing at things that aren't his name and/or hair.

Some reviewers are saying that Snyder shows an inability to direct actors in “Watchmen”, but the acting is almost uniformly great. Jackie Earle Haley has gotten all the good press for his flawless Rorschach, but he’s only part of a fantastic ensemble. Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson and Jeffrey Dean Morgan all have star-making turns, and the two actors who stumble through the movie, Matthew Goode and Malin Ackerman simply aren’t asked to do anything requiring any talent. The script really lets down Goode’s Ozymandias, robbing the character of its subtly and telegraphing his decisions from miles away. Ackerman simply doesn’t elevate her material, and she’s not helped by being in the goofiest sex scene in the history of film.

Yes, goofier than this.

So what we have, as a film, is a story people have been inundated with for around five months now that can’t really deliver. “Watchmen” is as much a celebration of the form as it is a critique of the ethos behind it. “Watchmen” brought cinematic techniques to comics, like parallelism and panel/frame transitions, and that’s something that cannot be approximated. No matter what some professionals are trying to say (I love you like a chubby Yoda, Brian Michael Bendis, but shut the fuck up) a comic fan’s experience with “Watchmen” is intensely personal. In that way, “Watchmen” is a great film. It stirs up all the old feelings, and all the big moments have the same emotional effects. Even committing the nerd adaptation cardinal sin, changing the ending, may actually work better. Yet by giving the existing fans what they wanted, a note for note retelling, it robbed the film of a unique existence, making a brilliant companion piece to the superior novel rather than a powerful film in its own right.
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Apples And Oranges Review: "Network (1976)" and "Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li (2009)"

We’re not meant to compare apples to oranges, which is usually pretty fair. We can learn nothing from studying them together – Oranges are delicious (when mixed with vanilla), and apples turn GIRLS INTO WHORES. They’re mutually exclusive things, and old people who reaffirm the adage from their porch swings should be respected above the law, and properly awed.

This is your fault, perditious fruit.

Sometimes the adages can be bent to better understand something larger than the singular items being compared. Say, with films. If you compare, say, “Citizen Kane” with “Meet Dave”, it’s easier to see why the inferior film doesn’t work. When the components of film break down, it’s far easier to learn specific things about individual pieces that largely remain subterranean in a good film. If an Oscar-winner is great because of its ability to completely draw you in, then a Razzie-winner is great because it’s lack of ability shines a light on the mechanical and psychological building blocks of film.

“Network (1976)” and “Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li (2009)” couldn’t be more different. One was nominated for 10 Oscars, winning 4 – including an unprecedented 3 for acting. The other has Chris Klein in it. I’ll leave it to you and Google to figure out the rest.

Hello, Nurse

It may be unfair to compare “Chun-Li” to a dialogue driven classic, because comparing two films is always “unfair” to the inferior piece. I’m going to take a stand and say that it’s actually impossible to be unfair to “Street Fighter” in any way, not because it fails as a great film, rather because it misses even the low-hanging target it was aiming at.

When it was announced the buzz for “Chun-Li” was cautiously optimistic, due to the fact that the original attempt at adapting Capcom’s brawler opus was terribly ill-received. It seems that “Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li” is so bad that it has achieved the impossible – it’s complete failure has led to a swelling community of “Street Fighter (1994)” apologists. That’s right… “Chun-Li” is so bad it tricks the mind into believing Jean-Claude Van Damme spinkicking Raul Julia qualifies as a film.

Simultaneously the closest Van Damme will ever be to an Oscar, and the farthest Julia has been away.

This is where “Network” comes in. Although “Network” aspired to be a quite different film, it can be held as an example of the correct way to create a movie. “Chun-Li” largely fails because it is unable to make viewers believe in the internal logic of it’s world. It’s a film that clearly doesn’t know what it wants to be. The plot is a Bataan Death March of clichés, each predictable second unfolding in the most lifeless way possible. Chun-Li is essentially an orphan fighting another orphan (because thematic mirrors are art), with a mystical mentor who is taken from her at the most damaging time, eventually teaming up with a dogged foreign agent, who’s been chasing the villain for leads with little success.

“Network” unfolds in a similar way, at least in terms of the predictability of its plot. There are points in “Network” where an aware viewer can easily guess where the film is going next, but the mechanics of the film are fantastic. You can guess where the movie is headed not because it’s clichéd, but because the characters are written so beautifully everyone of their actions make sense. Peter Finch’s character Howard Beale is the most unbelievable when framed in reality, but Finch’s portrayal is committed, and the script is constantly reinforcing his right to exist. By the end of the film, Howard Beale is a modern-day Moses, preaching from his electric mountain. Every second he’s on screen he becomes more of a raw, exposed nerve and every line of Paddy Chayefsky’s script peels more of Beale’s sanity and humanity away. It makes the illogical logical by allowing the script, and the characters in it, to believe it.

Paddy Chayefsky could make you believe this happened.

“Chun-Li” seems to believe that it can be a meaningful film, but there’s not an ounce of talent on screen to back it up. You cold make a fun “Street Fighter” movie easily, with over-the-top fight scenes, witty dialogue, and an emphasis on visuals rather than character and plot. “Chun-Li” tries to make the viewer care about the plot and the characters but there’s nothing there. If Kristen Kreuk’s Chun-Li was an engaging heroine, or Neil McDonough’s Bison a charismatic villain, the lackluster plot would be easily forgiven, but neither really work. Nothing here really works, though, least of all the fighting. The fight scenes are universally tepid, devoid of both imagination and talent. If a fight scene begins, or moves, to an interesting location (such as the wooden jungle gym structure in the climactic battle) it will almost automatically leave, returning to static images of two people standing still, kicking each other.

Magic has a definite place in most films, as far as “magic” is understood to be “things that normally don’t exist.” “Network” uses the idea wonderfully, upping the tension of the script to the point that the film’s final act – seemingly beyond the film’s original scope – occurs as naturally as anything else. It’s a gradual thing. “Network” has a definite message that is achieved by softly moving the viewer from gritty normalcy to Technicolor unreality, all the while concealing the mechanical hand of plot in wonderfully unaffected dialogue.


“Chun-Li” has elements of a magical reality that it never earns, because unrealistic things happen without proper set-up or thematic necessity. Magic is only worth using so far as it underlines a specific notion in the film’s message or premise. The fireball, a “Street Fighter” staple and a necessary evil, is set up with the mechanics of a community college screenwriting class. It appears exactly three times before it’s used in the finale. “The Rule of Three” is the mainstream film equivalent of the literary “Chekov’s Gun” (if a gun is on the table in Act 1, it must go off in Act 3). It’s a rule that exists for a reason, as nothing should happen without proper, filmed cause in a movie. The inverse it that it is easily spotted when abused, and most viewers will view it in condescending way, if only subconsciously. Furthermore, “Chun-Li” has no other magic. This one thing happens, without any one even trying to explain it in a moviescience, only because of a sense of duty to video game fans and the want for a big closing number.

Historical Fact: If this guy saw a gun, an hour later he would use it to shoot you in the fucking face.

“Chun-Li” and “Network” are different films, but they both succeed and fail for the same reasons. “Network” is a film textbook, as powerful as the more widely discerned and accepted “Chinatown”. It’s a mechanical marvel, a checklist of how to make a nearly perfect film. Sure, the plot doesn’t hold many twists or turns for the casual viewer, but nothing happens without a reason, and every scene builds on one another in important ways. “Chun-Li” is like a rock dropping down a well, landing with a resounding thud. Not only is it completely insubstantial, it constantly talks down to the viewer, unable to allow them to interact with the movie. Cynical cash grabs have there place, and can be exceptional films, but they have to commit to being entertainment rather than trying to be serious without any of the talent necessary to make it work.
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Thunderdome: "Scans_daily", Peter David, and the legality of the Internet

Today, a website was shut down on the internet.

If you ask why, I’d usually answer “Um… it’s a Saturday.” Yet this particular case has opened what is one of the biggest (non-sexual) Internet Pandora’s Boxes, which is the relationship between copyright holders, artists, and the Internet.

The site was in actuality a Livejournal community called “Scans_daily”, which as you may surmise was a discussion community for posting scans of Comic Books. The frequency at which this happened was, in fact, daily. It started as a slash fiction community, but grew to a discussion of all comics, then to what defenders of the site are now calling a “review site”.

In recent issues of Marvel Comics’ “X-Factor”, writer Peter David has begun a campaign of begging fans to refrain from spoiling the twist endings of the monthly installments on the internet, in hopes that the buzz it generates would help the title’s sagging sales. It seems that this extended beyond the comic page and resulted in David actually checking out major Comic sites to see if fans were listening. This led him to arguably the Internet’s most respected Comic News site, Comic Book Resources, where a fan on their forums linked back to a “Scans_daily” post about “X-Factor #40”.

What David found through the link is really the linchpin of the case. He not only found scans of the issue’s shock ending, but a disproportionate amount of the entire story. He deemed this in violation of the Fair Use Doctrine, and reported it to the copyright holder (Marvel Comics). When Marvel checked back, the scans were gone, pulled offline by Photobucket, the website being used to host the pictures. In the morning, Livejournal had deleted the community for violating it’s terms of use.

Although it seems a fairly regular occurrence, the difference is that the “Scans_daily” was popular in an under-the-radar way, numbering 8,000 Livejournal users. Some of them have emerged and dispersed into the rest of the online Comic community, a few with pitchforks and torches.

One has asked, politely, that Peter David die in a fire. On the man’s own website, no less.

The comic community is relatively small, when put head-to-head with let’s say Jonas Brothers fans and people trying to buy Hondas on Craigslist. What they are, however, are vocal and tightly knit. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody reads everything. The are nerds on the internet after all, and when something happens that affects them, they rally around a keyboard to talk about it.

In a relatively minor way, the “Scans_daily” situation speaks to the trouble the world has had adjusting to the ubiquitous rise of the Internet. Copyright holders are desperately trying to hold onto their professions in world where people are so smart they can reproduce and disseminate anything. Artists are trying to understand how they can continue to exist where everything can be had for free. Consumers are trying to keep in touch with a culture that is increasingly expensive while becoming increasingly broad in its reach. Finally, there is a gap between generations. Not necessarily “Old vs. Young”, rather a generation who had to adapt to the internet and one that’s only known a world with the internet in it.

There’s really no one to blame if you wanted to, for a couple of reasons. One, it’s impossible to know who’s directly responsible for the site’s demise. Certainly, Livejournal is the one who took the community down directly, but it’s impossible to mount a case against them, even if its out of irrational rage. Consumers use Livejournal’s hosting and customization services for free as long as they comply with the terms of use, which are the farthest thing from fascist. Users have a pretty autonomous existence, as long as their not doing anything illegal, including violating copyright.

The users of “Scans_daily” are hurt, because in their minds, many have lost an important outlet for creative and critical expression. As the refugees have said on other sites, they had friends in the community and memories of discussions now gone. It may be a bit hard to understand how angry they are, because all though it’s pervasive, the depth of Internet-only friendships and events are still difficult to grasp. The only thing important to their side, however, is that they feel a powerful sense of loss.

They’re reacting in a normal way to loss – lashing out. With no one to truly blame but themselves, they’re attacking everybody else, but mostly Peter David. It must be stated, however, that no one is disputing David’s involvement was merely telling Marvel, and it became a non-issue when the specific “X-Factor #40” post was removed. He’s high-profile though, and he’s taking the blame for bringing “Scans_daily” down.

They’re taking a lot of different routes to try and justify their outrage, but unfortunately, they can’t win. They’ve tried to state that they weren’t violating Fair Use, which is untrue no matter how you look at it. The Fair Use Doctrine, like much of copyright and art-based laws, use a “balancing test” allowing for various interpretations:

1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2) The nature of the copyrighted work;
3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

If someone were to interpret that half an issue of a comic book was insubstantial in terms of Fair Use (you can’t, but the users sure are trying), it’d still be difficult to prove you were not harming the potential market for the work. It comes down to a single event being enough to cause legal ramifications. Sure, the site wasn’t always like that, and certain readers are crying that they only bought comics because they were spurred to by posts on the site. Yet, if one person didn’t buy a comic because they read the ending on “Scans_daily” or one member posted enough of an issue to defy Fair Use, then it’s illegal.
It’s been brought up that “Scans_daily” was providing a service like the previews companies release of upcoming titles. Intention doesn’t matter, however. Copyright laws don’t break down when you’re trying to help sell something you care about. Companies can release 5 or so preview pages of a comic book because they own the copyright. If they wanted to, they could send the entire issue to a specific website.

It’s a moral question, but stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family is still stealing.

Even though the Internet makes it easy to manipulate copyrighted material, doesn’t make it Thunderdome. It’s hard to police electronic media, but that doesn’t mean the rules no longer apply. If you want to consume pirated material, very few people, including myself, will cast a moral judgment on you. I understand that we all do it, but our collective action doesn't make it a new paradigm for copyright laws. We rationalize it as we will, but the price that comes along with it is this: if we get caught, we have no legal recourse.

No one in the “Scans_daily” situation is being brought up on legal charges, even though it’s in multiple people’s legal rights to do so. All that is happening is that they’ll move to a different location – nothing is even stopping them from moving somewhere else on Livejournal.

The reality of the Internet is that a new generation of fans has been given a place where they feel community based around things they may be mocked for in their everyday lives. We have dedicated fans who are constantly backed-up when it comes to their entitlement issues, and they’ve created a kind of a hive mind that tells them that they’re not merely consumers of their favorite media – they’re a substantial part of it. This is where legality breaks down, especially when stretched over the breadth of something as large and feral as the Internet.

“Scans_daily”, for some of these fans, was a daily part of their routine for five years. That shouldn’t be ignored – these people have lost something important. We also cannot ignore how many of them have reacted at its loss, though… if it was only the community, and not the free comics they felt so strongly about, then there are easy and obvious ways to keep that going.

None of those include setting one of Comics most passionate creators, and eloquent ambassadors, on fire.

Follow the discussion here, on Peter David's blog
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