Friday, April 24, 2015

Furthering My Education....

This is the type of weird shit you get when I'm a student in your bullshit grad lit class.  




The Subversion and Celebration of Philip K. Dick in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days

           
Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days explores the political, social and emotional aftermath of 9/11 through a meditation on and exercise in genre, a work that manipulates reader expectations of genre tropes and conventions to ultimately comment on the future of America following the attacks of 9/11. Structured as a triptych of novellas, each dealing in a different genre, Specimen Days unifies its three sections into a singular whole through the use of reoccurring character names, objects, themes and, perhaps most notably, the running thread of Walt Whitman’s poetry that cuts through the center of the work.  And while Specimen Days’ first two sections, the gothic ghost story “In the Machine” and the noir thriller “The Children’s Crusade”, manipulate and comment on their respective genres in important and revealing ways, Cunningham’s third section, the science fiction tale “Like Beauty,” ultimately serves as the delivery device for the author’s thematic and moral statement on America Post-9/11. It is through “Like Beauty,” and its open dialogue with and clever manipulation of the tropes and themes of Philip K. Dick’s seminal science fiction work Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, that Cunningham’s unified message about the modern political and social climate ultimately surfaces. Indeed, by engaging so directly with Dick’s science fiction masterpiece, Cunningham’s Specimen Days is able to re-contextualize and subvert Dick’s Cold War-era themes of paranoia, alienation and technophobia to deliver a surprisingly hopeful and positive message about the fate of America and the human race following 9/11.
            To understand just how Cunningham’s Specimen Days, and more specifically “Like Beauty”, subverts and comments on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for its own means, it is first important to understand the thematic nature of Dick’s overall work as well as the aforementioned novel’s significance to the Cold War-era science fiction genre. More so than any other science fiction writer of his generation, Dick’s work is deeply rooted in explorations of paranoia, which, in its simplest form, can be understood as one’s unreasonable suspicion that other people and forces are out to do one harm. Beyond simply rooting his work in the paranoiac climate of Cold War-era America, however, Dick in real life found himself wrestling with the same paranoid feelings – some real, some imagined – with which his protagonists would so often grapple. In his essay “The Two Faces of Philip K. Dick”, Robert M. Philmus details the bizarre overlap between Dick’s real-world and fictional flights of paranoia, describing a relationship with the FBI that only recently came to light with the release of FBI documents: “Yet until very recently, even most students of Dick would have taken “contact” to be euphemistically vague way of referring to a relationship thought to be wholly one-sided and largely on the order of that between torturer and victim. During the era of McCarthyism, the FBI evidently tried (once) to recruit Dick as an informer; and (quite) otherwise, there is good reason to think (as Dick certainly did) that the Bureau came to look upon him as the object rather than the means of “investigation”” (Philmus, 91). Furthermore, not only did Dick find himself as a target of the FBI’s oppressive Cold War-era policies, but he also fancied himself at the center of a KGB-led conspiracy to discredit his work. As Philmus writes, “ Dick saw or represented himself as the prime object of attention on the part of a worldwide Marxist conspiracy whose far-flung operatives and agencies included any number of academics interested in him along with various publishing outlets” (93).  It is these paranoid thoughts – both real and imagined – that dictated both Dick’s life and his fictional work, driving him to write such powerful meditations on alienation and paranoia as Ublik, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly and, most important to the sake of this paper, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? By paying homage to and engaging so directly with that latter work, Cunningham’s “Like Beauty” seeks to call attention to the similar feelings of paranoia permeating the Post-9/11 American landscape before ultimately subverting them for his own, more positive and hopeful moral ends. Next, however, a more in-depth look at Dick’s specific brand of thematic paranoia – what we will call “object-based, technophobic paranoia” – is necessary to understand just how Cunningham is able to pull off his effective subversion of Dick’s work.
            Carl Freedman, in his essay “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” describes the predominant theme of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as being “the practical difficulty of distinguishing between human beings and one variety of objects” (Freedman, 15). Furthermore, Freedman quotes Dick himself as defining “the ultimate in paranoia [as being] not when everyone is against you but when everything is again you. Instead of ‘My boss is plotting against me,’ it would be ‘my boss’s phone is plotting against me.’ Objects sometimes seem to possess a will of their own anyhow, to the normal mind; they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they get in the way, they show an unnatural resistance to change” (15). Nowhere is this thematic motif more apparent in Dick’s work than in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which casts protagonist bounty hunter Rick Deckard on a mission to exterminate six humanoid androids that are indistinguishable from the human population inhabiting a post-apocalyptic Earth save for their inability to feel empathy. Cunningham’s most important and clever reversal of Dick’s recognizable motif of the android-gone-rogue comes with the third novella’s critical reversal of the trope: Cunningham casts Simon, a “Simulo” android with a striking resemblance to Dick’s Nexus-6 models in that he too is a fugitive running from an oppressive society determined to exterminate all artificial intelligences, as his hero. By casting one of Dick’s antagonists as his story’s protagonist and then detailing Simon’s journey to flee his would-be executors while gaining empathic and emotional sentience, Cunningham turns Dick’s paranoia on its head, asking us to sympathize with the very “object” Dick seemingly urges us to fear. The dramatic and thematic effects of this reversal are profound and will be detailed in more depth later in this paper. First, it is equally as important to examine a popular fundamental misreading of Dick’s novel, one in which Cunningham likewise calls to light by more subtle subversions of Androids.
            Arguing against the popular critical notion of Androids as a novel that “registers its protest against the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracies and technology,” Christopher A. Sims’ “The Dangers of Individualism and the Human Relationship to Technology in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” puts forth a more nuanced and important reading of the novel as one that “registers its protest against the dehumanizing effects of individualism and demonstrates how technology can be used as a means to reclaim the essence of humanity” (Sims, 67). The novel, Sims argues, asks audiences (as well as its main character), to consider the increasingly difficult-to-distinguish differences of the human and the technological or artificial, asking the following:


 “But does artificial intelligence qualify as independent agency or is it merely a simulation of individual existence? Again we arrive at the opposition of natural and artificial and the cultural predisposition to value the natural over the artificial. Androids, I would argue, works at inverting this evaluation, or at least at deconstructing it, by eroding the boundaries between the real and the artificial, between humanity and technology…as the novel progresses, Rick slowly loses confidence in the significance and morality of his work, because he begins to realize that the androids themselves are not inherently dangerous, but that the real danger stems from losing our human empathy by guiltlessly enslaving the androids through the moral loophole of antiquated technological hierarchies that privilege the user over the instrument (69-70).”
           
Sims’ appraisal that the novel condemns a human lack of empathy towards technology rather than condemning technology itself as dangerous is compelling, and Cunningham is able to unearth and draw into sharp focus this reading of Androids by casting an empathic android as his lead. Whereas Deckard rediscovers his own humanity through the interaction – both social and sexual – with the Nexus-6 androids, Simon slowly realizes his own humanness – in the form of newfound understandings of beauty and empathy – through the interaction with living beings (a mutated human boy and an extra-terrestrial, granted, but still living). Again, this inversion is critical to delivering Specimen Day’s final, hopeful message – one that is only made possible through its dialogue with Androids.
            Another fascinating link between Sims’ reading of Androids and Cunningham’s purposeful engagement with the text is related to Dick’s subtle condemnation of individualism and human isolation. As Sims puts it, “the lonely isolation inherent in [the human condition] is the essence of Dick’s novel. The problem of humankind in this speculated future is not hatred or the dehumanization of technology, but rather that humans have moved so deeply into their own individuality that they no longer experience the reality of other humans (71).” Like the rest of the human populace left behind on a war-ravaged Earth, Deckard suffers from a deep loneliness, taking solace only in his job, a technological “Empathy Box” that connects him with other humans in a religious ceremony, and the meager companionship of an artificial pet sheep. However, it is that very job – to hunt down and exterminate the Nexus-6 androids – that puts him into contact with the artificial beings that will awaken his humanity and his need for meaningful relationships. As Sims explains, “another fascinating aspect of the treatment of the relationship of humans and androids in the novel is that it supposes that not only is technology an utterly human endeavor that brings humans closer to their essence, but that technology itself can become human (85).” Again, here the similarities between Sims’ reading of Androids and Cunningham’s “Like Beauty” couldn’t be more apparent, as it is Simon who serves as the ultimate representation of humanity in the latter book, one who facilitates relationships between other beings and discovers his own very human appreciations of beauty and emotions.
            At this point it is crucial to finally underline the distinct and very purposeful parallels between Androids and “Like Beauty” to highlight the ways in which Cunningham is in dialogue with Dick’s work. For starters, both stories are set in a world ravaged by war – World War Terminus in the case of Androids and an ambiguous series of catastrophes in “Like Beauty.” In Androids, the Nexus-6 artificial intelligences were created by the Rosen Association to serve first as soldiers in World War Terminus and later as companions and slaves to the human colonists of Mars, only to themselves flee Mars to find solace and anonymous freedom in Earth amongst the surviving humans. Cunningham’s Simulos are similar enough to the Nexus-6 to the point in which it’s impossible to deny the purposeful parallels: like Dick’s androids, Simon is the most advance form of the Simulos, bio-mechanical androids designed at first to serve as soldiers and slaves before eventually being condemned as unnatural abominations. Even the alien Catareen, Simon’s companion in flight, has parallels to the Nexus-6, as she and her fellow Nebulans are also refugees from the stars, forced to flee to Earth and serve as a labor force. The Nexus-6, Simon and Catareen are all driven by a paranoid fear they will be discovered and killed by their human oppressors, a paranoia that drives Simon and the Nexus (and to a lesser extent Deckard) to seek out their creators in the form of Emory Lowell and the Rosen Association, respectively. The important distinction between the two works, however, is not just that Cunningham casts his android as his hero, but also that Simon realizes emotional and empathic sentience where the Nexus-6 ultimately fail. And it is with this distinction, as alluded to before, that Cunningham reveals and delivers his ultimate moral message of hope in the face of extinction.
            As noted before, Cunningham’s bio-mechanical Simon is arguably the most human character in his novel in that he eventually dreams, hopes, loves and cares for others around him. Juxtaposed against the first novella’s lead, Lucas, an autistic young boy who lacks social graces and spouts Walt Whitman poetry like a nervous tick, and the second novella’s protagonist, Cat, who struggles with alienation and naivety in New York immediately following 9/11, Simon is the most fully formed character. It is Simon, after all, who, through the vehicle of Whitman’s poetry and a growing need to connect with others, leads his surrogate family across the desolate wasteland of post-apocalyptic America towards happiness. In this regard, Cunningham essentially undercuts the anti-industrialization, technophobic undercurrents of “In the Machine” – a gothic ghost story that details a machine’s desire to devour humans – to deliver a markedly more positive message about humanity’s relationship with technology. In his essay “Uncanny Repetition, Trauma, and Displacement in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days,” Aris Mousoutzanis recognized this thematic reversal between “In the Machine” and “Like Beauty” while also unknowingly connecting Cunningham’s depiction of Simon and Sims’ reading of Androids when he states, “Neither is it entirely certain if a sustained critique of industrialization may be carried through with an attitude that focuses almost exclusively on the ill of technology and verges on the uncritically technophobic – especially when one of the book’s last images of transcendence and rebirth, the departure of Lowell’s group, is facilitated by technology” (Mousoutzanis, 139-40). Mousountzanis further underscores the poignant message of Simon delivering the emotional finale of “Like Beauty” and Specimen Days when he states, “it is not [the encounter with his creator] that gives [Simon] a sense of fulfillment but his evolving relationship with Catareen, with whom he decides to stay till the last moment of her life and miss the departing spaceship for another planet that Lowell, Luke and his followers embark on.”  Again, whether one chooses to agree with Sims’ reading of Android or accept the popular reading of Androids as paranoid and technophobic, Cunningham effectively reverses any notions of technophobia to deliver a message of technology as a possible path to happiness and a natural state in the wake of a modern catastrophe.
            Mousoutzanis further illuminates the importance of the thematic parallels between Androids and ‘Last Beauty’ in his examination of Simon as not only Cunningham’s depiction of the technological-turned-human, but also as “the other.” As he writes,

“Cunningham chooses to turn to [the] complementary genre of science fiction in the third story, ‘Like Beauty’ in order to rely on its metaphor of the alien to signify themes of racial otherness, spatial displacement, and colonization…It is not the alien, the ‘other’, that is technologically advanced colonizer, as might be the case in conventional mainstream genre science fiction. It is the humans, the ‘self’, whose project of space exploration turned into exploitation. The general importance of ‘unhomeliness’ for the novel extends beyond its psychological sense at this point and finds itself associated with discourses of colonization and slavery” (136-37).

The above quote reveals added depth to Cunningham’s subversion of Dick’s android-as-fugitive-and-outsider trope to paint a picture that is simultaneously pro-technology and celebratory of the “other” in a post-colonial landscape of post 9/11 America.  Just as he recasts the paranoid android as his heroic lead, so too does he recast the racial or colonial outsider as the center of the new, Post-9/11 American landscape. Consider this passage, in which Simon contemplates the ragtag group of aliens and outsiders who set out to restart the human race in the stars:

“Crazy, Simon thought. They’re all crazy. Though of course the passengers on the Mayflower had probably been like this, too: zealots and oddballs and n’er-do-wells, setting out to colonize a new world because the known world wasn’t much interested in their furtive and quirky passions. It had probably always been thus, not only aboard the mayflower but on the Viking ships; on the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria; on the first convoys sent off to explore Nadia, about which the people of Earth had harbored such extravagant hopes. It was nut jobs. It was hysterics and visionaries and petty criminals. The odes and monuments, the plaques and pageants, came later” (Cunningham, 293).

In his essay, “Ghosts of Gotham: 9/11 mourning in Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days”, writer Robert Duggan illuminates the post-colonial significance of the above excerpt when he states, “Cunningham re-evaluates the great founding narratives of the nation as accomplished by unconventional but hopeful people in very difficult circumstances” (Duggan, 390). Or, as Mousoutzanis so succinctly puts it, “the very last image of the novel, where Simon is riding off across the grass towards the mountains, may be also read in this way since it indicates…that ‘the American myth of rugged individualism has been handed to the outcast and shorn of its association with power’” (Mousoutzanis, 138).  This message, that the future of America should be cast back into the hands of the “other”, is just one hopeful thematic layer to “Like Beauty” made possible by its dialogue with Dick’s Androids.
            By engaging head on with the paranoid, Cold War-era works of Philip K. Dick and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? in particular, Cunningham’s Specimen Days and “Like Beauty” asks his reader to first consider Dick’s themes of alienation and paranoia in a technophobic dystopia before then subverting those themes for a more hopeful and positive ends. In Cunningham’s vision of the Post-9/11 America, the all-inclusive mysticism of Walt Whitman meets a future in which technology can be both the destroyer of worlds and the savior of mankind, facilitating death as much as relationships and redemption. It is through that technology, Cunningham argues, that we can return to our roots as a nation of outsiders that are one with nature and each other. Or, as Duggan so eloquently summarizes Cunningham’s message:

“[Specimen Days] span[s] genre boundaries as well as temporal ones, particularly in Cunningham’s case with his use of the thriller and science fiction. The cumulative effect is one of multivalent presentations of suffering and disaster but also of hope and community in the face of such catastrophes…the unknown future of Specimen Days ends up becoming the territory of a damaged but still living America, and Cunningham develops the description of “the same old human race: from his Whitman epigraph into a technically inhuman set of characters who exhibit the same emotions and hopes and fears…Cunningham’s image of hope in the face of disaster is aimed at the present moment and is brought into being from both the past and the future. ..[it embodies[ the difficult but necessary twin tasks of mourning the dead and evoking and conserving hope for the…future” (Duggan,  382-92).

The present and future may seem as dim as the tumultuous and paranoid landscape of Dick’s Cold War-era America, but by engaging Dick’s work head on and then subverting its message, Cunningham is able to paint a scene that it is also bright and full of promise.














Works Cited

1)      Philmus, Robert M. “The Two Faces of Philip K. Dick.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 1991): 91-103. Web. 12 August. 2014
2)      Freedman, Carl. “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (March, 1984): 15-24. Web. 11 August. 2014
3)      Sims, Christopher A. “The Dangers of Individualism and the Human Relationship to Technology in Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (March 2009): 67-86. Web. 12 August. 2014
4)      Mousoutzanis, Arias.  “Uncanny Repetition, Trauma, and Displacement in Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days.” Critical Survey, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2009): pp. 129-141. Web. 13 August. 2014
5)      Duggan, Robert. “Ghosts of Gotham: 9/11 mourning in Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 46, No. 3-4 (June 2010): 381-393. Web. 14 August. 2014
6)      Cunningham, Michael. Specimen Days. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.
7)      Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.



Friday, August 15, 2014

Hard Times

We've all been going through hard times, lately. 

Aint that right, Dusty?

Hard times, daddy.  

Stay strong, everyone.  

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Canvas, Comics, Pulp and Hulas

Return to EXTERNALUNDERPANTS.COM

Hey Now!

It's been a long, long time since my last post. Rather than spend too much time explaining where I've been, I figure I'll jump right into catching you up with what I'm into lately. Without further ado, here is what I'm digging:

1) Pro Wrestling


Not Sports Entertainment. Not terrible, poorly-acted male soap operas that occasionally involve a bodyslam or clothesline.  I'm talking about 'Rasslin. 




Vince McMahon is equal parts God and Devil when it comes to overseeing the evolution of the art of Pro Wrestling; most major innovations to the sport/art - both incredible and terrible - can be attributed to his reign as head honcho of "The Business."

 I fell in love with Wrestling thanks to Vince's vision, then grew to hate it thanks to that same heavy-handed creative touch. But recently, thanks in large part to a desire to relate to one of my students, I started watching again. A few Bray Wyatt interviews, Daniel Bryan matches and Dean Ambrose brawls later, I was back as a regular viewer. Then after I started reading the wrestling commentary of David "AkaTheMaskedMan" Shoemaker - a gifted writer who hits the perfect balance between genuine fan, artistic critic and historian - my appreciation of pro wrestling's pure, vaudevillian brilliance came back full force. I was hooked again.

Then The Network launched.

Suffice it to say that, for now at least, Vince can do no wrong in my eyes. Making all this footage - everything from Sammartino at Shea to The Wrestling Classic to the most recent Royal Rumble - available on demand and streaming in HD is the best apology note Vince could ever possibly write to a lapsed, bitter fan like me. 

I'm overwhelmed by the prospect of watching so many great, absurd performances. There was a time when I was absolutely obsessed with pro wrestling, and I now have unlimited access to reminders why. This really is one of my favorite forms of entertainment, behind only the blood, guts and tears of the blues and the  primeval perfection of the comic book. 

Anyway, I plan on writing a lot about Pro Rasslin in the coming months. If you liked my comic book commentary and like wrestling, I think you'll like my take on all things WWF/E.  Stay tuned.

 2) Joe Hill's Comics

20th Century Ghosts, Heart Shaped Box and Horns made it very apparent that Uncle Stevie's kid could boogie to a righteous beat - one that embraced and celebrated dad's legacy while folding a totally new and - dare I say it - literary voice into the mix.  When it debuted, Locke and Key continued Hill's rising-star reputation. That said, for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with the series' quality, I stopped reading it week-to-week after the second miniseries. I recently caught up and devoured the whole series, and I was absolutely delighted to see a tightly crafted horror comic evolve into a celebration of the comic book form that delivered satisfying single installments while maximizing the potential of serialization. Holy shit. Gabriel and Joe click and start turning out chapters that homage everything from Watterson to Steranko and Gaiman while never losing sight of their own vision.

I even loved IDW's adaptation of The Cape, which took the wickedly awesome high concept of Hill's 20th Century Ghosts short story and cranked it up to fifteen in a very disturbing meditation on the superhero concept. 

Hill is awesome. His NOS4A2 is high on my list of shit to read.

3)  Earth Abides


Those of you who know me know I love Post-Apocalyptic fiction.  I even made an original comic in the genre years ago. 

This is a classic that predates (and eventually inspired) Liebowitz and I Am Legend. Think Post-Apocolypse by way of Les Stroud and Robinson Cursoe. Good shit.  

 

4) Warren Zevon

The winter in New York has been horrible. I'm just getting over the flu. 

I'm ready for summer:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqviDAkNo48


Good looks, everyone. Sorry for the radio silence.

- Dan



Sunday, October 21, 2012

What's Happening

It’s been a while since my last blog post – longer than I ever intended – and I feel like I owe you loyal readers an explanation. In short, I’ve been insanely busy these past couple of weeks in ways that are both tangentially and directly related to my writing. If you’re at all interested in learning why, read on:



To put it mildly, my writing career – and I admit calling anything I’ve done so far in my 28 years a “career” is a stretch – has taken two unexpected yet interesting turns of late.


Thursday, October 4, 2012

Thoughts on DC Animation's Dark Knight Returns, Part 1

The name Frank Miller has popped up a lot on this blog in its relatively young lifespan, which I suppose shouldn’t be a surprise even if I didn’t really set out to focus on him much when I launched this humble little home for my writing about comics. The man is a venerable Titan of the art form, and his vision and work has influenced nearly every mainstream comic from the past twenty-five years in some form or another. Whether it’s his integration of manga sensibilities into western comics, his reinvention of Batman into the emotionally tortured, Dark Knight avenger who has since starred in ninety-five percent of the Batman stories to follow in the wake of Year One and Dark Knight Returns, his sense of design and storytelling or any of the other myriad innovations he brought to the form, Miller’s touch can be felt everywhere in today’s comics.


Which I guess is why I find myself writing about him and his early comics so often, and why to this day I’ll buy, read and/or watch any project with his name on it even if he has gone more than a bit nutty in his old age. Even recent works like his highly controversial anti-terrorism polemic, Holy Terror, the insanely bizarre All-Star Batman and Robin and, yes, even his film bastardization of Will Eisner’s Spirit are worth watching if only as reminders that there’s still some artistic genius living in the eccentricities that have so clearly ballooned to cartoonish proportions in his later years. He remains an Artist in every sense of the word – one of the most important to ever work in the medium. And I’ll be damned if he’s still not one of the most interesting.

My love for Miller and his work, coupled with my general appreciation of anything produced by DC Entertainment’s animation division, made me eager to watch the animated adaptation of the Dark Knight Returns – the project that first established Miller as a comics master – from the moment it was first announced as two feature-length movies. Part 1 hit stores, online retailers and video-on-demand last week, and I recently sat down to find out whether the filmmakers succeeded in effectively capturing the revolutionary spirit of the original comics miniseries. My thoughts after the jump:

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Back to The City: Rereading Transmetropolitan by Ellis and Robertson

I’m a huge Warren Ellis fan. He’s one of my favorite writers working in any medium today, and lucky for us his medium of choice often happens to be comics.


Terrifyingly intelligent, insightful and scathingly hilarious, Ellis’ voice shines through whether he’s writing about technology, futurism or the craft of writing, or in genres such as hard sci-fi, horror, superheroes, political satire, black comedy, neo-noir, detective fiction or blockbuster action (often, as in the subject of this blog, he’s tackling all of the above). And although there might be better, more polished Ellis works out there, there’s no doubt in my mind that Transmetropolitan, his and artist Darick Robertson’s cyberpunk/gonzo-journalism mash-up, encompasses everything that’s great about the writer more so than any of his other projects. Transmet is quintessential Ellis, which is why it’s right up there with his and John Cassaday’s Planetary as one of my favorite comics of all time.

This being election season, when bullshit spews from both sides of the political spectrum with a nauseating intensity, I figured now was the perfect time for a Transmet reread, and another immersion into series hero Spider Jerusalem’s particular brand of Truth.



Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Frank Miller's Goddamn Justice League Movie

A good portion of comics fandom is currently up in arms thanks to this little piece of rumor and innuendo from the comics internet’s premier home for rumor and innuendo, Bleeding Cool. Apparently, a couple of poorly disguised market researchers wandered into a local comics shop asking the clientele various questions meant to gauge general geek interest in prospective big screen adaptations of DC Comics. One of those questions concerned the prospect of a Justice League movie with Frank Miller’s name attached to it in some capacity. Now, I touched upon DC and Warners’ crippling incompetence and overall inability to successfully adapt any of their iconic properties not named Batman to the big screen in my post about the company’s mishandling of Superman, but this episode – if true – might just sum up their overall ineptitude in that area even better than such laughable film missteps as Superman Returns and Greens Lantern already do. Why do I find this story so funny?