goblin cartoons

In 1997, CBS produced a pilot for a Justice League of America TV show. It was apparently never aired in the US, which is probably one of the main reasons I only just recently even learned about it. I managed to get a copy of it and watched it last night.

Boy, am I glad it was never picked up as show!

To be fair, it’s not nearly as bad as I worried it would be. There are some nice bits to it, and all of the actors do a good enough job with what they’re given. But overall, it’s really, really bad, showing very little understanding of the Justice League, the original comics characters, or even superhero stories at all.

The Good:

• John Kassir is great as Ray Palmer. You could say I think that just because he wears glasses and bow ties, but no, Kassir plays Palmer as a sweet, earnest nerd and does a great job of it.
• David Ogden Stiers is good as J’onn J’onzz. No, his physique isn’t really, um, superheroic, especially around the middle. And the make-up he has to wear is…not good. But Stiers is one of those actors who could read the phonebook and make it sound incredibly compelling.
• Michelle Hurd and Matthew Settle are pretty good as Fire and Green Lantern, and I liked their interplay as once-involved-now-just-friends. OK, so the Guy Gardner in here is nothing like Guy in the comics (more like Kyle Rayner), so it’s beyond me why they called him Guy Gardner, but Settle makes him likeable.
• The overall plot isn’t all that bad, and the “Super Friends” take kind of works. It’s interesting, at least. It would’ve worked better if it weren’t the Justice League, though.

The Bad:

• The costumes suck hard, especially the Atom’s and the Flash’s. The Atom looks like a football quarterback in an outfit designed by Playskool. The Flash just looks like an idiot.
• Barry Allen as a jobless Joey Tribbiani really doesn’t work, and the actor (Kenny Johnston) doesn’t help by doing a lackluster job.
• It seems like the heroes mostly just save people from natural disasters (when not fighting Miguel Ferrer), which is really lame. They’re the Justice League! Why not show them actually fighting crime? Why not give them actual costumed supervillains to fight? As a villain, the “Weatherman” is lamer than lame. He’s no real threat to superheroes, except that the script keeps him away from the heroes until the very end (and then only Green Lantern goes up against him, in an exceptionally lame bit of “confronting the bad guy”).
• While the plot isn’t bad (except for a few massive holes), the show as a whole doesn’t even begin to live up to the history and potential of the Justice League. The old Batman show was camp, but at least it had style and vision. This is just a watered down version of what Hollywood imagines superhero comics are like.

Really, this pilot is tragic. It could’ve been quite good, but was utterly ruined by some incredibly boneheaded decisions. I took a bullet for you all by watching it. You can thank me with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

When I was a kid, I wrote and drew a lot of comics. It was one of my burning passions, and I still kick myself for giving up drawing. (I gave it up because it got too hard. I didn’t want to have to practice, I just wanted to be able to draw the things in my head. Giving things up because they got too hard was pretty common for me, I’m sad to say.) Through multiple moves and the usual purging of possessions, all the comics I did as a kid are lost–except for one, which I’ve somehow managed to hold on to. It’s deteriorating, though, so I scanned it in to preserve it.

And so I present…Swamp-Man #2! It’s crude, it’s goofy, but it’s all mine, and I’m still very proud of it.

(One of the main reasons why I’m doing NaNoWriMo this month is to reconnect with that comic-making mindset I had as a kid. Hence the posting of this now.)

I’ve been as skeptical as anyone about the upcoming Watchmen movie. Maybe I’ve been burned too many times, but I just don’t trust Hollywood to make a superhero movie, especially adapting an actual comic book story, without screwing it up. But with that in mind, I have to admit, the footage I’ve seen looks pretty amazing. I really hope it doesn’t turn out to suck.

When Heroes premiered two years ago, I was excited but cautious. Too many shows that appeared promising either failed to live up to their potential, or they were as good (or better) than I’d expected, only to be cancelled just as I got attached to them. Heroes didn’t disappoint me and it did surprisingly well in the ratings. Could it be? Could I get a visually stunning, well-acted, well-written, epic TV show about people with amazing powers?

Well…yes and no.

It seemed that the general consensus on the second season of Heroes was that the show had lost its way. The creators acknowledged this and promised the third season would get back on track. I watched the first two episodes of this season (shown back to back) with the same caution I’d watched the premiere, and I was again pleasantly surprised at how good it was. But now that we’re a few more episodes in, I’m feeling disappointed again.

Warning: Here There Be Spoilers!

I’m getting tired and frustrated with the constant shocking revelations that unrelated characters are, in fact, related. Sylar is a lost Petrelli, Nikki was really one of triplets, Claire is Nathan’s daughter. The time travel and alternate futures was fun in the first season, but having a new alternate future where the Earth is destroyed for each season is laughably bad. Characters have sacrificed themselves dramatically, only to be brought back from the dead (nullifying their heroic sacrifice), something that’s been done to death (pardon the pun) in superhero comics and is no less played out on TV. The plot from episode to episode and season to season is convoluted in a way that makes it seem obvious the writers are making it up as the go along. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but it’s gotten really messy in Heroes. The show has turned into the TV version of the worst years of the X-Men comics: too many characters, too many twisting plotlines and too much melodrama.

I’m going to keep watching the show for now. My daughter still loves it, and it’s something we watch together. I hope the show gets good again, but I’m losing hope.

The mid-to-late-1980s was the beginning of something new. I had been a comics fan as far back as I could remember, but I had always bought my comics from whatever drug store or convenience store was around. But in the mid-80s, I bought an issue of a magazine about comics (I can’t remember which one) that had a cover feature about “alternative comics.” I was living in Joliet, IL at the time, and I found a store there that was devoted to comics. Devoted to comics! I was amazed! I started buying comics that didn’t come from Marvel or DC: Cerebus, Nexus, The Badger, American Flagg!, DNAgents, normalman…and Zot!

All of these new comics impressed me and influenced me, expanded my notion of comics and stories. But Zot! was something else. At a time when I was growing up and finding the world to be a lot more complicated than I’d thought, Zot! took me back to my innocent youth. Zachary “Zot” Paleozogt was everything I wanted to be: confident, charming, relentlessly cheerful and optimistic. He lived in a world of my dreams, a parallel Earth filled with Art Deco buildings and retrofuturist flying cars. The 10-issue color series was one of my favorite comics of the time.

My friend Chad recently sent me a copy of Scott McCloud’s Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection, collecting issues #11-36. After a few years off, McCloud returned to writing and drawing Zot!, only this time the comics were in black and white, focusing more and more on complex stories and the “real world” of our Earth. In its entire run, Zot! went through a huge, impressive shift in plot, tone and storytelling.

My love for Zot! is intense. It’s not just the retrofuture world Zot comes from, although that does give me a huge kick. It’s not just the character of Zot, although I do love that guy. It’s the whole tapestry: Zot’s sort-of-girlfriend, Jenny, and her complicated inner feelings; Woody, the nerd blossoming into a really nice guy; the fun, loud supervillains Bellows, the Blotch and the Devoes; the tragic supervillain Dekko; the sinister, creepy 9-Jack-9; the mix of fairly traditional superheroics and down-to-earth realism, comedy and tragedy; the teen angst; the scenes of high school kids playing RPGs. Zot! touches on so many things that have been important to me, the fears and anxieties, the hopes and dreams. It fills me with joy and sings in my heart.

Thank you, Chad, for sending this collection to me and reminding me how much I love this comic. Thank you, Scott McCloud, for writing and drawing Zot! And for the rest of you: go read Zot! if you haven’t already. It probably won’t touch you the same way it touches me, but it really is quite wonderful.