Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-in #61

Hey Comic Book-a-rinos,

I saw the Avengers movie because I was told it was good. It was not good. I liked looking at Scarlet Johansson because she's pretty and I liked when the Hulk beat people up. Otherwise it was unwatchably dull and full of technobabble and bullshit. Nothing was relatable or looked good. It just was boring and empty from beginning to end. For me, the joy of a superhero movie is that you see a person with some inner conflict and then they become a superhero and figure out the parameters of their newfound abilities and then they fight some villain that embodies a differing philosophy or has some sort of complementary psychosis. Iron Man, Spiderman, and Batman all work great as movies because they have these elements. Characters like the Hulk don't because the Hulk is more like a horror movie villain. The Hulk is just a superhero based on Frankenstein. Dr. Strange wouldn't be a strong comic book movie because there are no limitations or rules to his magic powers. Superhero team movies just can't work because there isn't enough time to develop all of the characters and care about them in a two-hour movie. There is no main character in the Avengers. None of the characters we see are ever given an internal world. The dialogue ranges from boring to cliché. When the movie ended I only felt relief and drunk because I'd snuck booze into the theater.

If I were to have made this movie the first thing I would have decided was whose story it was. The obvious character to focus on is Nick Fury. It should have been the story of Nick Fury's struggle to make this team work. It should have dealt with his past, how he lost his eye, the things that drive him, that stuff. The story should have either had a similar path as Star Wars, where the cast of characters join on to Luke's adventure while the story's already in motion or like Chinatown, where Jack Nicholson already has his operatives and how they came into his employ isn't explained.

Look at this blog about the beautifully designed Braun electronics from the 60s.

It looks like Jonny Negron's doing some good experimenting over at his blog.

DC is making one of their direct-to-video animated movies based on The Dark Knight Returns. It seems like they would have done this earlier since they've been doing it for a lot of their better superhero stories that have a beginning, middle, and end. The preview images look nice but just a little too clean. I wish this had been made in the 80s by Ralph Bakshi. If it sucks we'll still have that Bruce Timm animated DKR sequence from the Animated Series.

The Jem cartoon show is on Netflix Instant and I've gotten Jem fever. My inability to think about things that aren't related to Jem is really fucking me up. It's a crummy Saturday morning cartoon show from the 80s that was made to help sell a line of fashion dolls, but it's also kind of beautiful.

The show is about a girl named Jerrica Benton who seems to hit bottom when her father dies. Control of her father's record company is being wrested from her by a crooked business partner of her dad's while the home she runs for runaway girls is running out of money. Right as things look bleakest Jerrica learns that her deceased father had created a disembodied computer mommy named Synergy that could create believable holographic images and allow her to appear to become a mysterious rock singer named Jem. He had also set aside a cache of awesome new wave outfits, instruments, and a car for her. No one recognizes that Jem and Jerrica are the same person despite the only difference in their appearance being Jem's pink hair and eye make-up. It's never fully explained why Jerrica needs to have a secret alter ego either and trying to keep this pointless secret drives a lot of the show's plots. As Jem, Jerrica becomes a big rock n' roll star while also being a record label CEO and running her charitable orphanage.

The main villains of the show is another all girl-band called the Misfits. They sing awesome songs about self-adoration and crass morals with titles like "Winning is Everything" and "Makin' Mischief." They carelessly attempt to kill Jem in almost every episode but even when they do it in front of people no one ever thinks to have them arrested. The bizarre nonsense universe conflicts with the realistically drawn characters in a way that I really like. Jem is set in a universe that makes no sense, except that it does because it mixes a little girl's understanding of the what the adult world is with the fantasies that a child of the 80s might have had.

The best thing about the show is that everyone has awesome new wave fashions, even the squares. Everyone's got multi-colored hair and weird makeup. The Jem dolls are so fucking beautiful. I've been collecting them ever since I lost my mind a couple months back. Recently a collection of dolls belonging to a former Kenner employee went up on Ebay. He had every outfit displayed on a pristine doll and some of them went for a lot of money. I won only one of my bids. Desperate times. I'd like to share photos of these dolls because I think they're so beautiful.

So fucking pretty, right?

And here's the Moebius image of the week.

Previously - Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-in #60

@nicholasgazin