Crit Sells... But Who's Buying?
You've seen the news, as well as I have: Hollywood is getting absolutely desperate for some of that hot hot hot intellectual property. They just signed a movie based on the meme based on those Spirit Halloween stores. As someone who's forced to pay attention to the entertainment industry because of the ways in which it intersects with the one artform that's actually worth a damn, I smelled such developments from a mile away, and so I have spent the last couple of weeks in discussion with deciders in the higher echelons of several well-respected film studios -as well as Warner Brothers- in order to sell the rights to a filmed adaptation of this very newsletter, with views to develop a universe around it, which could be spun-off into its own streaming television show.
It's been a long, hard, and often soul-sucking experience, going through all of these meetings, but at the end of it all, I'm happy to report the good news. A deal was signed, and while I can't reveal the name of the buyer just yet, I am at liberty to divulge some elements of the pitch document we have been working on. I hope you will be looking forward to this about as much as I am looking forward to it. It's going to be great, or at the very least it's going to make me exactly one million dollars, which is all anyone can ask for in the face of total societal collapse.
THE TIME IS MIDNIGHT, AND THE PLACE IS HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, WHERE THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH DREAMS AND COVERED IN GRIME BUT ALSO LUST. THE CRITIC (I'm thinking a Paul Dano type, someone who can really act possessed) looks out the window of his apartment, quaffing down one of those pomegranate and orange San Pellegrinos, mourning the man that he once was. In another life, he was the greatest goddamn comic book critic on God's green Earth, an iconoclast, a revolutionary. But the wrong take, at the wrong time, sent it all tumbling down. Made a pariah for his belief that Heroes in Crisis was great, actually, he was sent down to hell, or something that feels eerily close to it. (He is shockingly pale and deathly afraid of getting sunburns from the California sun) Men and women (whoever's hot right now, doesn't really matter) throw themselves at him in the hopes of even one night of romance with him, but his heart belongs only to one: TRUTH (I'm picturing Mila Kunis in Black Swan for this, you need to find the closest equivalent). When she cries out his name in a lonely night, THE CRITIC knows he has to journey to save her. He's got a brain full of takes, a heart full of revenge, and hands full of 9mm handguns. It's an epic of comic book crit and heroic bloodshed in classic 90s John Woo fashion from there. Our hero wins, but the cost of his vengeance is too terrible. Full-on rated R.
So, yeah, that's the whole film there. It's going to rule. Can't say who's attached yet but let's just say it's someone I've been wanting to work with my entire life. In a time where it's becoming harder and harder to have credibility in the field of comic book criticism, it's good to know that Hollywood will fund anything.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: AIMING TO BE THE FIRST NEWSLETTER WITH A BUDGET FOR SQUIBS
I don't think there is enough buzz about this week's Captain America #0 out there, so allow me to return to the melee with a white-hot take: this is the first real post-Superman and the Authority comic to get launched by any of the big two. It is, in my mind, truer to the spirit of what was one of my favorite comics of 2021 than even its direct continuation as depicted in the pages of Action Comics. In some ways, this makes sense: Captain America is the only superhero other than Superman to have carried the symbolic weight of America and of Comics for so long and through so many eras, that the notions have become synonyms of one another. In most, it doesn't, because, come on, why would I expect anyone, much less a team of newcomers mostly known for doing aggressively "pretty good" work to operate on a level anywhere near one of comics' most celebrated geniuses? It's not as good, obviously, and I do not want to oversell it, but the ways in which this single issue comic teasing out the two upcoming Captain America comics exists in the context of Morrison's embrace of the radical New are interesting enough to make it worth my while to talk about it.
The tale at the core of it is as simple and as ludicrous as a good comic should be. It goes like this: Captain America (Steve Rogers) and Captain America (Sam Wilson) must team up to prevent Arnim Zola (Arnim Zola) from exploding a rocket over New York that will turn everyone into dinosaurs. Along the way, they get into call-and-response scrapes that highlight both their differences and their similarities and directly call back to their respective histories (admittedly, this is moreso the case for Steve, but that's a good thing, when you remember that the bulk of Sam's history as Captain America took place in comics written by Nick Spencer). By the end of the issue, the day is saved, and our heroes are ready to face the days ahead, each in their own forthcoming periodical. It's timeless fun, with extra emphasis on the timeless, as interior artist Mattia de Iulis pulls out all the stops to deliver images that are at least 90% as definitive as Alex Ross' cover, delivering the icons with all the pomp, sweat, and easy-going action that they deserve, plus that little bit of digital trickery adding extra motion and focus to put it over the top.
And then, there is the game being played beyond the game. This is a comic in which the past, in Steve Rogers, teams up with the present, in Sam Wilson, to fight a future that is set on looking backwards, in Arnim Zola and his dinosaur-based designs. Throughout, it reinforces the idea that the two are complimentary, that the idealism of the past cannot succeed without the honesty of the present, and that the victories of the present cannot stand without the foundation of the past, through its carefully deployed action beats. The iconography, meanwhile, unites the characters, and what they represent, in that ever-shared set of ideals that America has claimed as its own for so long. Maybe it's too enamored with the stars and the stripes, and the Statue of Liberty, and all the ticker tape parades, to match the sheer imagination of Morrison's final word on the Superhero as a political object. But dang it, it's clever enough to hang in the conversation. So many Captain America comics seem burdened by nostalgia for some kind of evergreen past. This one doesn't, and it is all the better for it.
We're getting back on the horse! I've been having a tough go at it lately, because the world kinda got in the way of my plans, but this week I had something and I thought I'd pass it along. It's shorter than usual, but I am more interested in "making something interesting" than I am in "forcing myself to stretch to a word count". The important thing is: the newsletter is not dead. I want to keep doing this, and I want to keep doing it better than anybody else doing it right now. If you believed in me so far, thanks, I'll try to not disappear for a month anymore. If you didn't, I know, and you will pay for this. On the way soon-ish we'll do a State of the X-Men address; until then, I'm not writing about NFTs ever again, so don't even ask. Until then, I remain your faithful servant, so long as you HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.