If someone asked me what my favorite comic book company was, and for some reason I wasn’t allowed to mention Image or Dark Horse, I’d have to go with DC. I don’t particularly hate Marvel, I’ve read a decent amount of comics from them in my day, I’ve just always found myself more interested in the DC line. Perhaps it was that DC Comics seemed to trend more towards the fantastical and the abstract, rather than the more ‘realistic’ tone that Marvel claims to be going for, and I’ve always preferred that direction when it came to superhero comics. Although nowadays DC is trying to get on the ‘gritty, realistic’ kick with their nu52 universe, which would explain why I don’t really read modern comics at all. Apart from Image, which has gotten better since the wild & wonderful 1990’s.
Comic books don’t really matter anymore though. It’s all about the multi-media franchising these days, and in that regard the two biggest superhero companies have been almost dead equal. Marvel has undoubtedly had the upper hand in movies recently, as their Cinematic Universe has bore a great harvest of money fruit, which WB has been desperately trying to replicate by retooling Batman v. Superman into a Justice League movie. Marvel has the famous fighting game series Marvel vs. Capcom, and DC has the Arkham series. Marvel has Wolverine Blues by Entombed, DC has Pocket Full of Kryptonite by Spin Doctors. Equal.
TV appears to have become the next major conflict in the ongoing superhero wars, and while Marvel has taken the initiative in the movie industry, DC has traditionally had a much better track record when it comes to television. Just in a year or so we’ve had the critically lauded Arrow, the Flash, Gotham, Constantine, and the upcoming Supergirl series on CBS, not to mention previous success with series like Smallville and Lois & Clark. DC also has a history of fantastic animated series as well, including the infamous Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, which are some of the best action cartoons ever made. Marvel has Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which I will likely never watch) and did have a pretty well received Spider-Man and Avengers cartoon going on (before they canceled them, naturally), but in this regard they are the ones playing catch-up. Not equal.
The point is I wanted an excuse to make a new list, and since DC is apparently much more comfortable adapting their properties to television rather than on the silver screen, I came up with five comic books/superheroes that I wouldn’t mind seeing on a primetime slot on cable or showing up on netflix or amazon prime at some point. If you have your own personal preferences, feel free to state them in the comment section.
Let’s Begin...
5. The Question
I believe it fits the definition of irony that a character that was created entirely as a thinly veiled replacement for a different character completely surpassed the original in terms of popularity. The copy I’m referring to is Rorschach, the breakout character of Alan Moore’s landmark comic book series Watchmen, and the original is The Question. In fact, for all you non-comic fans out there, several of the characters in Watchmen were based on characters from the then-recently required Charlton Comics properties that DC refused to let Moore use for the series, Nite Owl was a stand-in for Blue Beetle, Doctor Manhattan was a retooled Captain Atom and so. One became the darling of casual comic readers and got to star in a lackluster movie (not uncommon for an adaptation of a Moore work), and the other got a couple moments on Justice League Unlimited, was ultimately killed off and replaced by a woman (Renee Montoya actually, whom I know chiefly from B:TAS), who also seems to have been forgotten in the shuffle of the company’s ongoing explosive diarrhea of the mouth. A sad twist of fate, but not really surprising at this point.
The Question, otherwise known as Vic Sage or Vic Szasz was originally created by the legendary Steve Ditko, who you might know as one of the artists to some obscure book called Spider-Man. A riff on one of Ditko’s earlier creations, Mr. A, replacing A’s mask with his now signature faceless mask, The Question was a reflection of Ditko’s passion for Objectivism, of which he was an ardent follower. A being of cold, unflinching logic (which Objectivists like to believe themselves to be), Vic Sage is not interested in the bloated bureaucracy of society or the laws it pretends to follow. The only answer the Question cares about is justice, and when the police are ill-equipped or too incompetent to act, he is all-too-willing to enforce it himself. Not a far cry from that to the hyper-conservative, sociopathic nature of Rorschach in Watchmen really, although viewed through the lens of a dystopian 80’s future and Moore’s own beliefs on the subject.
It wasn’t until the late 80s that The Question reached what is at this point is its greatest critical success. The new creative team headed by Denny O'Neil, who had previously done some fabulous work on Batman and Marvel’s Moon Knight, decided to take the character in a new and ultimately worthwhile direction. Vic Sage is the biggest and best reporter in Hub City, the biggest and worst hive of scum and villainy in the United States that doesn’t have a murderous clown as a resident, and he’s also The Question, the faceless vigilante waging a one-man war on the forces of crime and corruption. After a botched job leaves him better off dead, Sage is taken in by martial arts master Richard Dragon, who nurses him back to health. One year later The Question is back in Hub City, stronger and more Zen than ever before, ready to right what once went wrong. But if one year was all it took to make Vic Sage reinvent himself, imagine what a year without The Question has done to Hub City…
While I’m sure that a character that has no facial features likely sounds like anathema to TV execs, who deal in recognizable faces, a crime drama with a suitable enough twist is worth at least a couple of seasons nowadays. The Denny O’Neil iteration would be the obvious show focus, but you could either jump into that era right off the bat or spend some time building up the Ditko Question before you make the transition. No heavy superhero stuff to scare people away (but the ability to crossover if necessary), no need for a huge special effects budget, there doesn’t really seem to be a reason not to do it. Maybe put it somewhere other than the CW though, somewhere a bit more suited to ‘hard boiled’ than ‘teen drama’. No offense to the CW, but a show striving to be the True Detective of superhero fiction would look a bit silly placed next to Jane the Virgin and True Blood.
4. Blue Beetle
If you ever wanted to see an example of superhero comics fear of change, check out legacy characters. It seems like a legitimate idea, you like a concept of a superhero or even team but feel like you’ve done all you can with the specific character, so you take the concept and place it onto a new character, with presumably a whole bunch of new angles to work from. Occasionally it doesn’t work out very well (you won’t see much praise for Kupperberg’s Doom Patrol from me), but some of the most popular characters in comic books are in fact legacy characters. The Flash, the various Green Lanterns, Captain Marvel (the Marvel Comics version, not the real one), the Human Torch, Starman, all are updated models of older superheroes.
Whether it’s due to persistent fan outrage, executive stubbornness, a pathological hoarding mentality or simple greed however, no one seems to be able to let go. Barry Allen had about as poignant death as superheroes comics get, setting up Wally West’s terrific tenure as The Flash, and now Wally West doesn’t even exist in-universe and Barry Allen is the new corporate mandate. Ben Reilly wasn’t allowed to be Spider-Man, and since the Ultimate Universe is likely going to be ending it means that Miles Morales isn’t allowed either. Et cetera. I know that a lot of these characters are iconic, and that when money talks it’s usually for the status quo, but it does lead to some muddled continuity and idiotic decisions. It’s how Batman has trained three orphans from childhood into highly trained vigilantes and had preteen son by his mid 30’s, and Peter Parker sold his marriage to Mary Jane to the Devil to save the life of an octogenarian. It feels less like interesting creative directions and more like life support. Maybe I’m just not cut out for comics.
Although not as star-studded as The Flash or GL, a good case of legacy character can be found in the Blue Beetle. Originally the mystically powered Dan Garret, a basic meat & potatoes type hero back in the Golden Age, the Blue Beetle was later revived by Charlton (and eventually DC) as Ted Kord, wise-cracking technical wizard protecting the city of Chicago from all types of creeps and otherwise. Kord had a good couple of years, with his own solo runs, his stuff with Booster Gold and Justice League International, but eventually DC apparently decided the character had run its course. Eventually they kill Ted, rather unceremoniously sad to say, and replaced him with wise-cracking teenager Jaime Reyes and his awesome techno-organic bug suit, to have wacky adventures in space and/or El Paso (at least in his short-lived solo series, I think they threw him onto the Teen Titans for a while after that). Each generation takes the idea and the history of Blue Beetle and manages to interpret it in new ways while still standing on its own two feet. I like Ted. I like Jaime. Jaime is a interesting enough character and a good enough Blue Beetle that bringing Ted back didn’t feel necessary. That’s how it should work.
That being said, for a Blue Beetle show I wouldn’t mind seeing either Ted or Jaime, although corporate mandate would likely lean toward Reyes. A Jaime Reyes led show would obviously be a teen drama with action thrown in for kicks, hispanic Buffy with more genocidal scarab suits and a doubtlessly prohibitive budget for what the show would require. A Ted Kord show would be, I can only hope, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose without the high school and extra supervillains. We’d probably end up getting a Wonder Twins miniseries before DC would even touch a Blue Beetle show, but if it was anything like those two ideas, I’d be a happy man.
3. Jonah Hex
When you think of comic books, it’s natural to associate it with the thought of superheroes. After all, superheroes are billion dollar properties now, and comic books are where such things are normally found. However, it would be wrong to think that the comic book industry is strictly based around superheros, or even that superheroes were always in vogue when it comes to comic books. In fact, during the early years of comic books up until the Silver Age, characters like Superman or Wonder Woman had to share the spotlight or even step down as the medium broadened its horizons in an attempt to follow the trends or snag a couple more readers. You had your war comics like Sgt. Rock, comedy mags based on Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, romance comics, and of course comics based on that most American of genres: Westerns. And the one character to come out of the western comics boom to survive to the modern day is Jonah Hex.
Riding a blazing saddle out of the pages of All-Star Western in the late 70s, Jonah Hex was the breakout character of DC’s attempt to cash in on the resurgence of popularity in the Western genre, which itself had received a shot in the arm thanks to the films of Sergio Leone and the other ‘spaghetti western’ directors of the day. Sporting a Confederate army uniform, trained in the ways of hunting and tracking by the Apache, looking like Clint Eastwood lost a fight with a belt sander, Jonah Hex is the premier bounty hunter of the late 19th century American territories. With a heart as cold as the revolvers on his holsters, Hex is a textbook anti-hero: Sympathetic to innocent and downtrodden, but perfectly willing and able to put a couple chunks of lead into any criminal, lowlife or douchebag that happens to get between him and his payday. Although his long and sordid career has taken him in bizarre directions, including a stint in the future and some weird westerns business, the core of the character has always been the same, which is more than you can see for a lot of other comic characters who have been around for a decade or two. Before Wolverine made being a gruff badass boring, there was Jonah Hex.
Jonah Hex has already had the misfortune of having its own lackluster feature-length film, which is notable only for being less a less notable modern western than The Lone Ranger. Assuming that DC hasn’t labeled the IP toxic for anything other than comic books, which given the brains over at WB is certainly a possibility, I see no reason why Hex couldn’t make for a decent TV show. Make it gritty and hard-boiled as hell, give it an hour and put it on HBO or Showtime, maybe FX, and I see no reason why it couldn’t succeed. Even cooler if it dipped into 'weird western' territories, like Brisco County Jr. directed by Sergio Leone or the Wild Wild West starring Clint Eastwood and Lee van Cleef, just because I can't think of any western shows since those that played with the formula like that. Which is likely what the Hex movie attempted to do and failed, but I guess movie audiences are still traumatized by Will Smith's Wild Wild West and Cowboys vs. Aliens. TV westerns are still an open frontier
2. The Doom Patrol
A noticeable bit of time before Marvel hit it big with their team of superpowered heroes that are shunned by the very society they strive to protect (the X-men, in case you couldn’t guess), DC was in fact the first to hit the newsstands with their own version of outcast avengers, The Doom Patrol. Rather than going for the ‘white people facing discrimination?!’ route of the original X-men comics however, DC decided to go a step further to make sure that their team was firmly in the social pariah camp. Cliff Steele, or Robotman, had his brain placed inside a robot body after his real one was destroyed in a racing accident. Larry Trainor, or Negative Man, was possessed by a being made of radio waves after a Army test flight went awry, but as a result had to be perpetually wrapped in specially treated bandages to keep his body from leaking deadly amounts of radiation. Movie star Rita Farr breathed in lethal doses of volcanic gases after a failed stunt leaves her stranded in those strange bits of land that potential superheroes always seem to find themselves in, which subsequently allow her to shift her size at will (the most ‘normal’ member of the Patrol, but then you can’t expect preteen boys to pleasure themselves to women who look funny now can you). Niles Caulder, otherwise known as the Doom Patrol’s leader The Chief, became paraplegic after botched surgery from a robot he programmed to remove a bomb placed inside his body by a guy who was attempting to steal his formula for eternal life (don’t ask). Alongside Rita’s rich douchebag husband Mento and their teen was Garfield ‘Beast Boy’ Logan (his debut appearance, years before he became famous as a member of the Teen Titans), The Doom Patrol took on some of the weirdest supervillains in the comic world, including The Brain and his talking gorilla sidekick Monsieur Mallah, alien conqueror Garguax and his Plastic Men, and the infamous Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man. The Hayes Code may have been in effect at the time, but somebody in the DC offices had to be taking some sort of illicit substances of some kind, and for a while it translated into great commercial success.
After a tepidly received (and not just by me) revival by Paul Kupperberg in the mid 80s, the creative reigns to the Patrol were handed over to Grant Morrison, who was just finishing with his amazing revival of Animal Man. Morrison proceeded to dump almost everything related to Kupperberg’s team and return to the original team’s psychedelic roots, only with a slick, modern, 80’s post-punk audience in mind. The team added Crazy Jane (a woman with a superpowered take on Dissociative Personality Disorder) and Dorothy Spinner (the girl with an ape face and a wild imagination) to their ranks, Larry Trainor was fully possessed by a spirit of Negative energy and became a hermaphrodite for some reason (ask Morrison), and they waged wars against such dastardly foes as imaginary cults, Jack the Ripper by way of God, and the Brotherhood of Dada. Like most comics by Grant Morrison, the intense ‘weirdness’ that oozes from its pages makes it a definite hit-or-miss, but it, along with Animal Man, Jamie Delano’s Hellblazer, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Alan Moore’s pretty much everything, and a couple others I’d find worth mentioning if I could recall them, helped to redefine superheroes and mainstream comics as a potential medium for artistic expression. Who knows what comics would be like today with those pioneering writers and artists, whether superhero movies would even exist as the billion dollar media franchise that is now. The 90’s certainly wouldn’t have been as grimdark, I’m sure.
I’ve gone back and read the older runs nowadays, but as I’ve mentioned an annoyingly large amount of times, it’s the Grant Morrison run that I remember checking out from the library and reading as an impressionable youth. It’s Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol (and throw in Flex Mentallo too) that I love, and although it would probably be easier to work with the original, it’s that version that I would want to see adapted into a tv show.
I know for a fact that my ideal Doom Patrol series would never occur, because everything about it would be like money cancer for everyone attached to it. For example:
- It has to be animated. Or rather, the only way I think of that could properly convey the bizarre nature of the show (without using exorbitant amounts of CGI in live action) would be if it was animated. A cartoon that’s not aimed at children and is not a comedy is about as common in America as ethnic minorities at Neo-Nazi rally, so that’s one strike against it.
- It’d have to be on a channel (or digital streaming service I guess, since that’s a thing now) with a budget. HBO got into the cartoon game years ago with Spawn: The Animated Series, but I doubt they’d be interested in coming back, even in this superhero boom period. Basically I’d prefer it to be someplace that wouldn’t yank the money out from under the show and consequently fuck with the animation quality. I know it’s all about making money, but I’ve seen it enough times to know that it’s a good way to screw a show out of existence. Strike 2.
- It would be even weirder than the original material. As much as Morrison’s take on the Doom Patrol was a divergence from what came before it and comic books in general, that’s what I would want the animated series to be. A psychedelic, surrealistic, post-modern television show, the kind you’re not sure you’re sober enough to watch. Incorporate the entire history of the comic, from the 60s to today. Incorporate live-action sequences. The Venture Bros. by way of The Maxx by way of Twin Peaks. Just get Morrison, Paul Dini and Ralph Bakshi in a room with a team of Korean animators and a couple handfuls of mescaline and see what happens. Nobody looking to make money would accept that Jodorowsky’s Dune-esque pitch, no viewer looking to fill the void in their lives that How I Met Your Mother left would take this as a replacement, so that’s strike 3.
1.Transmetropolitan
I think it wasn’t until college, when my horizons were broadened by illicit substances, interesting new ideas and the ability to communicate with people on a basic level that my taste in writers started to veer directly into left field. William S. Burroughs. Kurt Vonnegut. Joseph Heller. And, for the purposes of this article, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. I was, and still am really, intensely interested in Hunter Thompson; not just with his writing, which I find to be as witty as it is insane,but with the entire mythos that he had built up around himself over the years. For better or worse, Hunter S. Thompson is the type of writer I wanted to be, and I’ve to take the best points of his writing and adapt it into my own. I’ve utterly failed, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
Right.
Warren Ellis, author of the excellent comic series Planetary, also has a healthy respect. So much so that he took the essence of the man and his love for technology, took a snort of coke, and mixed them together to create the turn-of-the-century cyberpunk political thriller Transmetropolitan. In Trans, the good doctor is reincarnated through the wonders of artistic license as Spider Jerusalem, outlaw journalist extraordinaire, enemy of children, animals and innocent passersby and social deviant of the highest order. After threat of legal action over neglected book deal forces him away from his self-imposed exile from his mountain paradise, Spider returns to The City, a disgustingly enormous (trans)metropolis in the far-flung future (which looks like Blade Runner had a butt baby with Futurama), in order to grab enough material for some books to fulfill his contractual obligations. It’s been a long time since the people had a voice to speak for them, a long time since the people realized they needed a voice, to give them an unflinchingly accurate account of police brutality against the transspecies community, the deplorable nature of the cloning industry, the child prostitution epidemic and all the other things that we’ve left to fester in our absence.
The folks in Washington have forgotten the power of the press. Spider Jerusalem is here to remind them. #tagline
Although wikipedia states that there were originally talks about making an animated series online years ago that fell through, which would have seen Patrick Stewart of all people providing the voice of Spider Jerusalem, I think that the increased content-production nature of the internet has made a Transmetropolitan adaptation much more of a possibility than it once was. Accurately depicting The City in all its chaotic glory would doubtlessly be a huge drain on production costs, and a comic book show without a brooding guy in spandex would likely find little love, but just to see how they would translate the hyper-violence, perversion and obscenity into a new medium would be quite the experience. I originally thought they would tone it down too much, but given what they’ve gotten away with on adult swim, Metalocalypse, Superjail! and so on, maybe it isn’t all that unbelievable after all. Get on it Hollywood.
