The Guardians of Justice (Will Save Superhero Mass-Media!) (Someday! One Hopes!)
Welcome back folks! Been a bit longer than I was trying to establish as the usual, but I spent a good little while putting the final touches on my latest CBH piece, and then rewatching the subject of this alongside my dad for his first viewing. Remaining as usual however, first:
Misc.
As announced on Twitter recently for those who haven't seen, the first two ongoing columns of the newsletter will be beginning sometime this summer - a watchthrough of modern Doctor Who as overseen by the tender mercies(?) of Sean Dillon with the aim of getting me caught up in time for the 60th anniversary, and an ACAB readthrough of many of the various Gotham cop-centric Batbooks and arcs over the years alongside Elizabeth Edwards reflecting on their substantial impact on the franchise across the decades. I'm very excited for both, despite that the latter will involve going into and picking apart some heavy shit, and the former will mean I will now have to have opinions about Doctor Who which from what I've seen will probably result in people being very mad at me about my thematic interpretation of the Cybermen or who my favorite companion is or somesuch nonsense.
My latest book was Sean's own Tower Through the Trees, their first novel; it took me awhile to start to hum along to the rhythm of the prose, but I ended up enjoying it a lot as it got going and can certainly recommend it. Unfortunately the next book in my queue has become David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, an acknowledged major influence on Gotham Central and likely to be gut-churningly useful.
One of the two movies I've seen since last time was The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the epitome of a fun, stupid-but-not-too-stupid midbudget action comedy that made me realize that if Grant Morrison and Nic Cage were ever to collaborate, each would probably get what the other was laying down. I was, however, beaten to this conclusion.
(RRR was playing in a mall 40 minutes away from me last month, but I was waiting and hoping the wave of popularity would carry it closer, a decision it seems I will be regretting forever and which is why it's two movies instead of three. I did just read Ritesh Babu's excellent piece on it though.)
I've seen some before, but now watched a few more episodes of Love Death + Robots with Justin Martin. I introduced him to my one rewatch of the evening in Zima Blue - still my favorite of what I've seen - Alternate Histories was pretty fun if not as good as I'd hoped, Fish Night was lovely, and Ice Age was a hoot.
Between my birthday, FCBD, grabbing some trades while on vacation, and a few items on display on my LCS that caught my eye, I've read quite a few trades in the last couple months slightly outside my typical purview:
Tales Designed to Thrizzle Vol. 1: Oh my god so THIS is where so much stuff I've seen floating around online over the years came from. My kind of maximum effort for the dumbest-if-comprehensible-at-all punchlines.
Ody-C Vol. 1: So apparently this got cut way short once upon a time due to lack of sales or attention, and as someone who picked up the first issue when I was 19 and immediately fell off it seems I'm the problem, because reading it at 27 it's exactly my shit.
Sex Criminals Vol. 3: Still good but I definitely don't remember who any of these people are.
A Red Mass for Mars: I've had this on ComiXology for a long time, but with that now borderline useless I figured it wouldn't hurt to have this physically. A disappointment as Hickman's big creator-owned superhero book, but still a solid read from that era of his and of course peak work by Bodenheim.
The Shadow Hero: I'd been curious about this for awhile, as a major early comic of Gene Yang's and loving Sonny Liew's work on Eternity Girl. This was an incredibly charming read, that became a stunning one when the text piece in the back provided the context for why this was being done and what they managed to build it off of.
Judge Dredd: Blaze of Glory: A collection of a bunch of Al Ewing's Judge Dredd stories, and I wanna say I get and like Judge Dredd now, but I could say that for any character Ewing's ever written even if I've never liked them elsewhere so that doesn't necessarily count. In any case it's Ewing at his maximalist best, if you enjoy his shitpost energy he rarely gets to exercise these days this is a must-have.
Batman and the Justice League Vol. 3: Having just read most 21st century Justice League comics for my most recent paid work I can say for certain this manga is in their uppermost echelon, and I wish there was any sign of that fourth and final volume coming out in the US.
Colorless Vol. 1: The writing doesn't live up to its style or handful of neat formal tricks, but the latter were impressive enough that I'm glad I picked it up. This was also I think the first time I've read something published by Seven Seas Entertainment, right before the announcement of the formation of the United Workers of Seven Seas.
Stepping Stones/Apple Crush: I've been wanting to read more by Lucy Knisley for awhile since grabbing Something New and Kid Gloves; the storytelling in these were a lot more conventional as they're aimed for a younger audience, but they were still both terrific little reads.
My first proper Technicolor horizons post was on a sense of burnout for the contemporary state of the cape and tights crowd, and on the comics end, that's begun to rectify itself a bit. Marvel's been getting its act together to such a point that I'm excited for its summer crossover; with some of my resentment over the fate of 5G exorcised with a recent Tumblr writeup, I can better appreciate the slate of interesting books coming out of DC soon in and (mostly) out of the main line; my conviction that the comics landscape is always missing something without a proper eye-catching non-big-2 superhero book is being more than met by the upcoming 20th Century Men from Deniz Camp, S. Morian, and Aditya Bidikar, as well as my recent discovery of the 'New Brooklyn' world of superhero serials on Webtoon.
But rising up to meet me on a far larger stage was Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and folks...this one isn't it. A few of my friends ended up liking it pretty well, and I'm glad for them; I do appreciate that Feige let Sam Raimi Sam Raimi all over the place. But to me it felt like the embodiment of everything I'm growing exhausted with in the setup: a few slices and signifiers of "a REAL movie!" awkwardly bolted onto raw Content, the pretense of a story bolstered by guest-appearances by those people you've heard of as needed until the narrative flags have all been waved and a single key unlocking a piece of the next one that you're actually supposed to care about has been turned. There were some cool bits I popped for, for sure - that's what they live on now - but this sterile, inertia-thriving outgrowth of every downfall of the source material's template is just not what I want out of these anymore. I've fully accepted Scorsese's diagnosis of these as theme park rides, and I recognize that's mostly what I go to movies for then, but damn, I'm not even cheering at the loop-de-loops anymore. The distinguished competition isn't doing much to win me over either: The Batman's followup and spinoffs are a distant promise; the immediate slate of DC movies ranges from 'eh, I'll see that' to 'who thinks any human being wants this'; Superman & Lois is for the most part horrendously shitting the bed; the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Superman film, Batman: Caped Crusader, My Adventures With Superman, and the early production Legion of Super-Heroes cartoon are all potentially imperiled by the Discovery merger. Even in the shadow of the giants, Jupiter's Legacy landed with a (for me birthday-defining) splat, The Boys is from all I've seen great but I can't shake the half-baked Marshal Law stink attached to any remotely serious Ennis critique of superheroes, and Invincible season two looks to remain a misty dream for quite a ways to come.
But scrolling through Twitter one night I saw someone I follow (I think pal J.Y. - whose TTRPG Up! Up! And Beyond! you should pay attention to as it develops - but cannot be certain) referring to their feelings of curiosity on an odd new superhero series they'd come across. I looked it up, and it was by that guy who did that Power Rangers fan-film where I heard one of them had a threesome. I figured the trailer would be a hoot, it actually looked kinda interesting, I saw the episodes were short and I booted it up.
And friends, it was like a knight in purest gleaming armor astride a mighty steed riding over the hilltop in my hour of direst need. Because for me at least, the title spoke true: The Guardians of Justice (Will Save You!)
In strictest terms a lot of this is stuff we've seen before, although clearly by people who've read a ton of superhero comics as opposed to calling it a day after Watchmen; you got your blunt icon pastiches, you got your conspiracies, you got your feet of clay, you got your revelations that superheroism is too simplistic an ideal to productively face the systemic issues humanity truly cries out for deliverance from. If you explained the plot to me in broad strokes without context, I'd assume it was some kind of dopey indie faux-DKR, faux-Squadron Supreme comic, probably from the 90s and from a publisher you couldn't find any record of online. The sort of authentically amateur trash I vaguely recall Scott Reed's Saga of a Doomed Universe managed to capture something of the flavor of. But in practice, with no idea what I was in for and adrift at sea looking for purchase as I was? The Guardians of Justice felt like God leaning down from Heaven to slap the blood out of my mouth.
The key to the entire thing is that it seems cheap as hell, until you realize it cannot possibly be. The suits and effects and sets aren't any kind of slick or 'realistic', more interested in capturing the sprawling soft sci-fi kitchen sink sensibilities of the comics where your dark avenger type will bark out in all seriousness from his high-tech mountain headquarters that an invasion of cyborg velociraptors must be stopped. When not even that lose grip on physical tangibility will cover what the creators have in mind, the show will flip on a dime to claymation, or a beat 'em up arcade game, or one of a half-dozen flavors of animation. None of them look particularly fancy, until you realize the obscene amount of effort it must have taken to coordinate and create a multimedia project with that many spinning plates. Yes, the fantasy worlds and bleak cityscapes don't look 'real', but when you're seeing an Adam West tribute filmed in bonebreaking Sin City black and white with splashes of red - a sequence that can only be described as 'what if Frank Miller did Batman, but in a completely different way than how Frank Miller doing Batman actually looked' - any illusion immediately fades that this is being put together by people who don't know what they're doing, assembling it with a cocaine-rush breakneck velocity and fervor, and frantic commitment to never losing its weirdo momentum.
A few years ago, we all saw Captain America use Thor's hammer to fight Thanos, and that was pretty damn great, but Cap had a chinstrap so that his costume would make sense and Thanos had his dopey desire to literally fuck death removed so as to make him a more mainstream palatable figure. Moving from that landscape to a pilot that on its own covers about 10 completely different visual styles, a batshit superheroically-reshaped alternate history of mid-20th century America culminating in its most profound collective trauma, and an actual plot once set in motion with shades of Irredeemable, Dr. Strangelove, 90s Batman and JLA, G.I. Joe, Marshal Law and its varied descendants, and every social satire 80s VHS action movie ever made? The whiplash damn near cracked my neck, and it kept me in my seat until long after I'd noticed seemingly throwaway ideas coalesce and registered how much effort was going into hammering this thing together and I realized that oh, this isn't trash, self-aware or otherwise. This rules.
A lot of what I wanna say here I have to bite my tongue on, because there's so much bound up in discussing the show that would kill it narratively to give away the game on, and I want to convince people to see the thing. Stylistically though I have more to say comparing it to my first post on here, because in a lot of ways this is the realization of my hope of applying Tokusatsu's style > verisimilitude sensibilities to American superheroes. This isn't out to appear plausible, this is meant to look like a superhero universe, and that's something fundamentally different from ours. But with Kamen Rider Build for instance, you get the feeling you've been granted a window into another reality; one with physical and social rules entirely askew from our own, but internally consistent and comprehensible ones. Here on the other hand the entire notion of a consensus reality warps and breaks scene-to-scene: Not-Batman will wreck shop and then get '66-style sound effects for his painfully wet-sounding coughing as he reaches for his pills; Not-Flash and Not-Captain Marvel's charmingly awkward date will cut before it gets too spicy to an animated brawl with a pair of baaaaaaarely allegorical kaiju; two shitty cops will casually talk shop for a two or three minute uninterrupted take before dramatically cutting to the grizzly tableaux the bloody crime scene they were sent to illustrates, with maniacal laughter laid overtop it. I wasn't at all surprised to see series creator Adi Shankar describe the show as "like living in (his) mind"; there isn't a singular world communicated here but the janky, fuzzy mish-mash of a dozen perspectives on a hundred events warped through the mood and perceptions of a given moment's observers, a story wider than any reality can contain.
I'm not gonna sell this as unimpeachable. Besides a tone that's gonna put a lot of people off, there's an extended weird attempted riff on(?)/parody of(?) mid-00s lady protag filmic hypersexualization in one of the later episodes that mostly seems to absolutely love that shit, episode two's 'Doctor Ravencroft' is utterly inexplicable and uncomfortable, and you're either gonna vibe with what Diamond Dallas Page is doing as The Knight-Hawk or you are very much not. But god do I want this to have an impact. Not in terms of lighting the world on fire and DC and Marvel stuff looking like this from now on (though if by some miracle this obtained the season two the team reportedly has in the tank I'd be over the moon), but in terms of someone, anyone, watching this and internalizing just how askew you can go with the treatment of this subgenre. I want a hundred worlds born from this as unhinged and iconoclastic and personal. The MCU can go until the sun goes out or folks other than snobs like me start to get tired of it, whichever comes last. WB can flail forever so long as they have Batman and Superman at the end of the day. But in 20 or 30 years I want something to come out of left field that blows my damn face off, and when the creator is interviewed about their influences, I want them to say "Well, when I was bored and much too young I was scrolling through Netflix and saw there was this weird-looking superhero show..."
So watch it! At the very least you'll surely have some kind of a take rather than walking away totally enervated, and I didn't know how badly I was missing these Doing A Thing until I had the odd couple one-two punch of The Batman and this in front of me. Next time on Technicolor horizons, hopefully sooner than this time: something not about capes.
-- David Mann, 6/6/2022