Trancers (1985), directed by Charles Band & Dollman (1991), directed by Albert Pyun

Originally written for the Tricycle Offense

I’d say that a significant amount of time has passed since my last Double Feature article, so how about a new one?

At several points during my musings on film I’ve brought up the idea of the auteur director, the concept of a director as the supreme creative force over a film. While this is true to an extent, and certainly it was auteurs like Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola that defined American cinema in the 70s, the idea that directors are always the most important voice in the room. Studio execs, producers, the guys with the money basically, have always had a say in what goes on when it comes to films (and everything else, really), for better or for worse.

It was on the word of Dino de Laurentiis that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s project for Dune, the most famous film never made was scrapped, its team sent to the winds and its concept eventually handed off to David Lynch to spread his spice all over it. It was on the word of a producer that the Wild Wild West is now infamous for its gigantic mechanical steampunk spider (which was originally going to be shoehorned into Kevin Smith’s ill-fated script for a Superman film). Obviously the word of the director is not absolute, and in plenty of cases a different point of view is great for the creative process (god knows Troy Duffy could’ve used it), it’s also true that people in the film industry of things are generally only interested in making money or inflating their own egos, and I know that can just as easily apply to the creative side of film just as it does the business side. I’m not against people wanting to make money, I wish I was making money right now myself, but my interests have always lied in the strange, the bizarre and the not necessarily lucrative, which typically places me on the side of the director. Too many interesting ideas have been homogenized to death in an attempt to make a buck for my tastes.

None of that really has anything to do with what I was trying to say, which is this: Much like record labels, comic companies and the like, movie studios can be a haven for the bizarre and the strange and not just the bureaucratic machine that congeals itself around art. Troma is perhaps the most famous example, home of The Toxic Avenger and such, where even the serious dramas (what little there are of them seem to be steeped in Z-list sleaze and ultraviolence. Old school studios like Hammer and Amicus also did the lion’s share of the work in reinventing and reinvigorating the horror movie genre in the 1950s and 60s, taking cues from the Universal monster movies of the the 30s and 40s. Despite being on the wrong side of a payday most of the time, these studios, much like Geffen, or Zap! Comix, have succeeded in establishing a distinctive ‘brand’ or style that other mainstream businesses lack. The average moviegoer probably couldn’t tell you what studio made what movie that’s released today, unless it’s a Marvel movie of course, but anyone with a passing movie knowledge can tell a Troma movie or a Hammer Horror film at a glance. You won’t see any Academy Awards floating their way, but you can’t deny their influence.

This time on the Double Feature I’ve decided to follow through on that reasoning and shine the spotlight on one of these alt-rock studios: Full Moon Features/Studios/Productions/Entertainment/Pictures, who just so happen to have a couple films on hulu at the moment, which kinda spurred this whole thing in the first place. Founded in 1989 and headed by persistent B-movie director Charles Band, FMF have produced a number of films in the schlocky B-movie horror and sci-fi genres, many of which have spun off into schlocky horror and sci-fi movie franchises. There’s Puppet Master (dedicated readers will know my connection with the original film) and its legions of sequels, which I think number in the dozens at this point. Killjoy, the adventures of the titular murderous clown. Subspecies, FMF’s required vampire series. The Gingerdead Man, which featured the voice of the infamous Gary Busey as the malevolent baked good,  and which eventually crossed over with The Evil Bong (true story). And of course The Demonic Toys, a ripoff of their own Puppet Master franchise, with an almost equal amount of subpar sequels. Hopefully the two films I’ve chosen this time around give us a sense of what they’re all about.

First up is…

Trancers (1985), directed by Charles Band

A holdover from Charles Band during his time in Empire, Trancers is one of the earliest FMF franchises, having spawned at least three sequels during its lifespan. Not to be confused with Scanners, which spawned two sequels of its own, none of which people actually remember but which can be found on hulu. Also not to be confused with trance, an electronica sub genre that got its start sometime in the 1990s. Did you know that Cronenberg's remake of The Fly also had a sequel, three years afterwards? Things are weird sometimes.

In the far flung dystopian future, in strange new land built near the sunken ruins of ‘Lost’ Angeles, Jack Deth (played by Tim Thomerson, and that is indeed his real name) is a grizzled, badass Trooper who plays by nobodies rules but his own, and who looks like Thomas Jane cosplaying at a Buckaroo Banzai convention. Deth has been a grizzled badass Trooper who plays by nobodies rules but his own ever since his wife was killed by Whistler (Michael Stefani), the most vile of villains in dystopian California. Due to some ill-explained bit of future science, Whistler has the ability to turn people of weak will into Trancers, mind controlled slaves to his will , which have proven to be an enormous issue in this beef-less, coffee-less new land. Mind controlled slaves in the Trancerverse seems to translate into ‘extras from Day of the Dead’ who evaporate into red light when they die’ by the way, which probably made sense to someone down the line but doesn’t in the actual film. Just an excuse to have ‘monsters’ without having to put too much work into it.

Jack Deth is a day into his early retirement (after a case gone sour, of course) when he is suddenly recruited back to the Troopers for a mission of grave importance. It turns out Whistler was not deceased, as had previously been assumed, but is instead...back in time! 300 years in fact, his spirit inhabiting the body of his ancestor, a prominent police chief who resided in the not-sunken city of Los Angeles. His plan: Murder the ancestors of the three members of the post-apocalyptic Californian government, thus wiping them out of existence and allowing his Trancer army to take over. It’s up to Jack to travel back to ancient Los Angeles, inhabiting the body of his ancestor Phil, and take care of Whistler and his Trancers once and for all. All the while having sex with Phil’s one-night stand Leena (Helen Hunt) of course, which is a bit of implied incestous romance worthy of a skit on Futurama. Doesn’t matter if it was 300 years ago, dude is basically fucking his grandma.

I’ll say this for Trancers: it had a lot of potential, even if it doesn’t reach it. When I saw the opening and I thought it was going to be some sort of Blade Runner neo-noir kind of thing, I was really into it. When it got into the main plot, and I thought it would be some kinda Terminator by way of Quantum Leap kind of thing, I was really into it. It’s not any of those things, and maybe the feeling of dissatisfaction is unwarranted, given the heights to which my imagination soared at the possibilities of the concept. It is a B-movie from the mid-80s after all, and expecting some sort of sci-fi masterpiece from the folks that made Puppet Master vs. The Demonic Toys and The Gingerdead Man is perhaps asking for too much. Not that it can’t be done, the 80s might’ve been the pinnacle of B-movies after all, but it’s not the case here.

Trancers is the kind of movie that falls apart if you look at it too hard, and in this case ‘hard’ means ‘a light breeze’. Why does Whistler having mind control powers make people into ‘yellow’ zombies (they constantly refer to Trancers as being yellow in color, but I can remember only one scene in which a Trancer actually have yellow coloration) and why do they disintegrate in red light. If Whistler’s mind is 300 years in the past, how is he still able to control a Trancer army in the future? If Whistler does eliminate the ancestors of these councilmen and they cease to exist, shouldn’t the folks in the future not remember them or why they’re sending Jack to the first place. Why doesn’t Whistler just take over the world in the past, since it’s proven in the film that he can control the police and politicians, which would affect the future in his favor much more easily and efficiently than his original plan? Why does the film gloss over the fact that Phil, Jack’s ancestor, is either ostensibly dead or trapped in a strange future due a plan he was never included in, in an unfamiliar body? When Jack’s superior arrives at Leena’s apartment in the body of a young girl (his nearest ancestor, and actually a decent bit of writing), he antidotes both of them back to the future almost immediately afterward. How the fuck does that girl get home? Are we to assume this kid lives just down the street in Chinatown, that there weren’t kidnappers or pederasts in L.A. in the 80s, and that finding her way home from wherever the fuck she was abducted from in nothing but her nightgown is no big deal with Trancer cops patrolling the streets? I could be accused of over thinking these kinds of things, it wouldn’t be the first time, but when you’re watching a movie like this your mind is naturally drawn to such questions. Gotta do something to distract yourself whenever they try to have awkward romantic scenes after all.

Trancers is a cheesy sci-fi-action flick with a somewhat interesting concept. That’s enough to form a cult following, and that following was apparently enough to wring three more movies out of the concept. I can certainly see the appeal, but as far as cheesy flicks go I’ve seen funnier and better executed movies than this. Still it’s kinda funny, so I’d say it’s worth a watch or a MST3K if you’re into that kind of thing. A solid C+, I’d say.

RESULT: RECOMMENDED

Dollman (1991), directed by Albert Pyun

It used to be in the days of film’s past that all you needed for a sci-fi/horror movie was a random animal and a bit of camera trickery. So much of the genre has been built upon people being attacked by things being larger than they should be (Them, The Deadly Mantis, Bert I. Gordon’s entire filmography), people being attacked by things that are small and originally thought harmless (Gremlins, Small Soldiers, Puppet Master), or people being reduced in size and attacked by things that are small (Fantastic Voyage, Honey I Shrunk the Kids) that it’s hard to say where sci-fi or the film industry would be without it. It’s so cheap to make these kinds of movies, just splice some B-roll of an iguana next to screaming girl and you got yourself a movie, that a studio can’t help but make a profit off of them, which in turn allows them to spend it on making more movies. We’ve ended up with a lot of crappy movies because of it, just look at the MST3K episode list for confirmation, but as long as making crappy movie A gives us a chance to do good movie B, I’d say that it’s an even trade.

Out of the three possibilities I’ve listed, it seems that the ‘shrinking person’ movie has been one that has been more or less forgotten over the years. Sure, we have giant monsters in movies all the time, Godzilla, Pacific Rim, Cloverfield, that one giant worm monster in Avengers, yet movies about tiny people seem to be a dying art in Hollywood these days. Perhaps Marvel’s upcoming Ant-Man movie and Arrow’s apparent inclusion of Ray Palmer, aka The Atom to the series will help return the idea of shrinking to the public consciousness, but for now it seems relegated to films of the of the past. Films like Full Moon Entertainment’s 1991 classic Dollman, which happens to be the second film of our FMF Double Feature.

Not to be confused with the DC superhero Doll Man, which I almost did. Although Dollman did get his own comic book back in the 90’s, which just confuses the matter.

10,000 light years from Earth on the futuristic planet of Arturos, where the lifeforms look human and speak perfect English for some reason, Brick Bardo (played by Trancers star Tim Thomerson) is a grizzled badass cop who plays by nobody’s rules but his own. A space-age Dirty Harry, quick with a witty one-liner and even quicker with his fancy future gun, Bardo has been a loose-cannon kind of guy ever since his family and about 35 other civilians were killed in a police action gone wrong. Apparently if you’re a cop in the Full Mooniverse, you’re better off staying single, it seems. Much smaller body count, and you’re pretty much assured to get a hot piece of tail at some point. Especially if you’re Tim Thomerson.

While in pursuit of his arch-nemesis Sprug (what he lacks in a body below his neck he makes up for in planet-destroying fusion bombs), Brick hits the ‘energy band’ and is transported across the universe, crash landing in the then present-day South Bronx. Unfortunately for Brick his ship is broken, leaving him stranded on a similar-yet-alien world, forcing him to rely on the kindness of single mother Debbie (Kamala Lopez, no relation to the Ugandan Giant) for shelter. Also unfortunately for Brick, Sprug and the fusion bomb are still intact and under the protection of Braxton (Jackie Earle Haley in an early role, probably the biggest actor to ever be in an FMF movie), leader of the deadly South Bronx street gang. It’s up to Brick Bardo and his fancy future gun to stop Sprug once and for all, recover/disarm the fusion bomb, and take out Braxton and his gang, thus solving the problems endemic in the inner-city once and for all. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

Oh, also he’s 13 inches tall now, for some reason. Hence the name.

Despite involving alien planets and tiny men, it feels like Dollman isn’t trying to reach quite as far as Trancers was, and in so doing manages to be a lot less stupid and a lot more palatable as a film. Still incredibly simplistic of course, in fact it’s even more of a one-note film than Trancers was, for better or worse. Brick Bardo is pretty much the exact same character as Jack Deth, right down to the deceased love ones, except with even less character depth. Braxton and his gang are the stereotypical early 90’s style street gang, cartoonishly evil that shoot liquor store owners without actually stealing anything and try to burn people alive for shits and giggles. Braxton has a bit of charm to him, possibly the talent of Haley shining through, but otherwise he’s a low-rent Clarence Boddicker. Debbie is...well, Debbie is the female lead, and I found it hard to give a shit about her. Not because I didn’t sympathize with her plight, since I’m the result of a single-parent household in a poor/shitty area,  but because even though she had a large chunk of screentime I couldn’t give a shit about her character. The discount mayonnaise to Bardo’s plain white bread, if you will.  

Also worth bringing up is the criminal lack of tiny shenanigans in this film. The movie is called Dollman for christ’s sake, the main character is barely a foot long, but you never get a sense that he’s actually that size. Sure, you have kids gawk at him, he hangs from a car window once, but never once is the illusion of size ever achieved in my opinion. Where’s Bardo trying to make his way across a gigantic room, or fighting off rats with a fork, or riding to the rescue on a housecat that he made a tiny saddle for? I know they are budget constraints, but if you’re going down the well-trod road of Lilliput and Brobdingnag then there needs to be some sort of payoff in that regard. With the way this film is edited and the explosive power of Bardo’s gun, there isn’t that much difference between ‘Brick Bardo: Dollman’ and ‘Brick Bardo: Jump-cut Man’. What’s the damn point of watching a man called fucking Dollman if he’s barely a stranger in a strange land? At least Jack Deth is confused by stuff when he travels back to the past; Brick Bardo seems barely inconvenienced to be stranded on a world of giants. Don’t make a movie about a tiny protagonist if you aren’t going to have tiny shenanigans Full Moon Entertainment. Otherwise it’s just embarrassing.

So neither Dollman or Trancers are going to be threatening Citizen Kane on any ‘greatest movie of all time’ list, but both movies had an interesting premise and in my opinion had the potential to be better than they were with a bit of retooling and reworking. As far as viewing experiences go I suppose I’d recommend Trancers, going by the ‘stupid=entertaining’ school of thought, but as for what I thought worked better as a film and what I thought could be taken in more interesting directions, I’d probably go with Dollman. It’s kinda simple and kinda stupid, but I think that makes it a sort of tabula rasa type scenario, where something great could spring from a basic foundation. Much like Alan Moore with Marvelman or Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, to give really obvious examples. I’m not saying I’m the guy who could take Dollman (or Trancers, by the way)  to new heights of drama, making it the cult phenomenon it was always meant to be, but if Full Moon Features would be willing to send me some cash to find out, I wouldn’t be against it.

Hint hint, Mr. Band.

RESULT: RECOMMENDED

Some more news

I've been doing some retrospective write ups on the films I've already done here for the Tricycle Offense. Basically just rewatching my backlog and giving new thoughts and such. Those will be exclusive to the T.O. for the time being; might update the entries here later. So if you're interested in that shit, check it out.

New article coming up in the new future.

The War of the Worlds (1953), directed by Byron Haskin

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Thunder Child", by Jeff Wayne

Or, The Martians Crave Our Delicious Hamburger Sandwiches

     I’ve already talked in spades about the influential figures in my life when it comes to comic books, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore etc., but let’s spend a paragraph or two talking about some non-graphic novelists who I enjoyed in my youth. Way back in the day, when the Syfy Channel was still Sci-Fi and internet pornography was an as-yet inexact science I was an avid reader of books (physical copies of ebooks printed onto sheets of paper, for you younger readers out there), and when it wasn’t Harry Potter or Animorphs, it was classical literature. Dumas, Cervantes, Verne, Doyle, from the Elizabethan to the Victorian I took my fill of the best that the written word had to offer. I couldn’t say for sure what it was that inspired such a consuming interest, whether it was the act of a (so-called) intelligent child searching for reading material beyond the level of his peers or a fascination with the ill-fated League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film and the far, far better comic original, but if it was old it was interesting to me. Which helps to explain my choice in movies as well.

     Of all the old-timey wordsmiths in history however, the one that stuck with me the most was undoubtedly H.G. Wells. Jules Verne was pretty good, especially if you were a fan of people traveling to various places in exotic vehicles, but it was Wells, oft-regarded as one of the earliest ‘science fiction’ writers, that really dug its claws into the imaginative portion of my mind. There’s just something about that turn-of-the-century fiction that I’ve always loved, when science was still a work-in-progress and there was a sense of wonder and discovery in the air, or at least that’s how it reads after the fact when folks aren’t dying of tuberculosis. “The Time Machine”, “The Island of Doctor Moreau”, ‘The Invisible Man”, stories that have managed to survive the test of time to be endlessly repackaged by studio executives looking to profit from a dead man’s work. No wonder poor people turn into lemurs in the future.

     Out of all the stories by Mr. Wells, there is one that affected me as much as it affected pop culture at large: The War of the Worlds. The premier alien invasion story, a concept that has been repeated endlessly throughout the 20th and 21st century, which itself has been revisited numerous times over the years. There was the infamous radio broadcast by Orson Welles in the 30s, which caused far less mass hysteria than we like to pretend it did, likely because no one in New Jersey would’ve been able to tell the difference. There was a subpar film by the great Steven Spielberg in 2005, starring a Tom Cruise not yet ostracized from society and a Dakota Fanning not quite old enough to be forgotten, which you might (not) remember being parodied in one of those shitty Scary Movie sequels. There was a TV series that ran 2 seasons in 1988, which was a continuation of our subject today. There was a D-list movie released the same year as the Spielberg film, which spawned an equally D-list sequel three years later. There was even a War of the Worlds musical produced for the stage that played throughout London, which despite being about murderous alien death machine probably had a smaller body count than that Spider-Man show on Broadway (#topicalreference). We won’t be talking about those things today though, obviously since I’ve already listed in an off-handed and casual manner. Instead, we’ll take a look at what is probably the second most famous take on The War of the Worlds, the 1953 film adaptation directed by Byron Haskin and released through Paramount. Whether these aliens are a thinly-veiled metaphor of the Communist menace or not is up to you to decide.

     The plot of The War of the Worlds is literally over a century old at this point, so you’ll have to forgive me if I spoil some things plotwise. Basically, it turns out that there is life on other planets (specifically Mars), and the lifeforms on that planet are jealous of the temperate climate and the fine-ass hoes that we have here on Earth. So in typical human fashion they decide to invade our planet, first appearing in a small town but quickly spreading throughout the rest of the world. Aforementioned militaries of the world attempt to curtail the extra-terrestrial attacks to no avail, and just when it seems that humanity is destined to be a footnote in the pages of history, the Martians are killed by what is essentially a deus ex machina. Apparently Martians were smart enough to master space travel and enormous war machines but just forget to get their booster shots before making the trip. I mean Great Britain didn’t even figure out typhoid wasn’t caused by farts until a decade or so prior, but the highly advanced alien race couldn’t put two and two together? But of course internet critics didn’t exist back then, so these sorts of things get a pass.

     For now…

     The 53’ Paramount adaptation, as you might expect from a film adaptation, keeps the basic framework of the original idea but makes a substantial amount of changes. The setting is changed, taking place in Smalltown California, USA in the early 1950s rather than Tinyton Glen, Great Britain in the late 1900s. The iconic ‘tripods’ in the original story are replaced with sleek silver flying machines (which have become iconic in their own right), and the black smoke and red weed of the tripods are replaced with generic laser beams and force fields. Most substantial of all perhaps is the addition of a protagonist and leading lady, for that romantic subplot that all films are required to have and such, rather than the ‘lone survivor’ angle that the story went for. Ann Robinson plays Sylvia van Buren, who is supposedly very intelligent but does nothing but look attractive and scream, as is the nature of female characters in sci-fi, and Gene Barry plays Dr. Clayton Forrester (absolutely mind-blowing to a MST3K fan like me), the the consistently unflappable scientist at Pacific Tech who just so happens to be near ground zero at the start of the whole deal. Retro TV fans will know Gene Barry for his role as the pimp of the Old West, Bat Masterson, from the show of the same name. Give Clayton a derby and a cane and there wouldn’t be any difference, which is either a knock against Mr. Barry’s dramatic range or a testament to his Colt .45 levels of badassery.

     I’m finding it a bit difficult to rip into The War of the Worlds, because at the end of the day it is a sci-fi movie made in the 50s, and so was limited as all genre films generally were during that time. But I can certainly list a few issues. As much as I love Gene Barry, Clayton Forrester isn’t so much a protagonist as he is a guy the camera focuses on a lot of the time, and even then he occasionally gets lost in the shuffle. Sylvia is a women in the 50s, and so isn’t allowed to do anything or develop a real personality, thus making the romance between her and Forrester feel as hollow as most 1950’s marriages. The Martians just look stupid as hell, limitations of costuming in that era be damned, and I feel like the film would have benefited from showing as little of their physical form as possible. Nothing that comes about due to their appearance is really vital to the plot in my opinion, beyond acting as a cheap scare after an already suspenseful scene, and it could just as easily have been excised or altered with no dip in quality. There’s nothing scarier than what spawns our own imagination, after all. Also, not quite sure what the God deal is going on with this movie, as if Bruce Almighty ‘saved’ mankind because bacteria killed the Martians. Pretty sure if a Human-loving deity of a Christian persuasion really existed or cared, he probably wouldn’t have let a priest get flash-fried in the first half of the movie. Or let a enormous amount of Earth’s population die, have their homes and property destroyed and descend into mass hysteria. Or at least let those deadly bacteria that he created kill off the Martians before they almost destroyed the planet. As I said at the beginning though, this is a sci-fi flick from the 50’s, and science fiction in film was a much slower beast in terms of experimentation and philosophical exploration as it was in literature. Rubber suits and screaming girls were what sold the tickets back then, and that’s what we got.

     Plot problems, characterization problems and thematic problems aside, there is one area where The War of the Worlds excels: special effects. Much like fellow sci-fi classic The Blob, which also involves an alien creature falling to Earth in Smalltown USA by the way, WotW is practically bursting with bright lights and color, and you persistent readers know how much I love generous helpings of color in movies. Every scene that features the alien ships fucking up the landscape, blasting everything to hell with their multi-colored death beams, engenders a visceral, childlike joy in destruction that you only ever get when a Godzilla movie is doing things right. While I generally tend to prefer the tripod designs for the Martian war machines, I have to admit that that flying machines used here; sleek, near featureless silver aircrafts with their tri-colored electronic eyes slowly drifting over the ruins of civilization, have their own appeal, and I think they’ve got the potential to become one of my favorite spacecraft designs.They quickly and firmly establish the inhumanity of the alien threat right from the outset, cold, inscrutable, much more so than the actual Martians do. It looks like either the T-1000 eating the head of ED-209 or a Yes album cover, in a good way.

     If you’re interested in getting into old school sci-fi, The War of the Worlds should be right up on the top of your list, along with The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Blob, and The Thing From Another World. They can be cheesy and the stories can be a bit spotty (which isn’t really restricted to sci-fi films of that era, is it Mr. Emmerich?) but it accomplishes exactly what good science fiction is meant to do: It inspires the imagination, gives light to new ideas and new ways of looking at things, that you might create something as strange and exciting in the future. Maybe it doesn’t succeed as well as H.G. Wells did in 1897, but as far as film adaptations go it’s manages to stand on its own two feet, which is more than you can say for I Am Legend. Worth a watch.

RESULT: RECOMMENDED

5 DC Comic Books That Would Make Pretty Good TV Shows

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. 

I’m out.

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.