DuckTales has been rebooted as a new ongoing comic book from Kaboom!, and guess who’s read the first four issues? Guess? It’s me. I read them.

What’d you do today? Did you go to work? Read an article about Ryan Gosling? Have sex with another human in real life? Not me — I read the DuckTales comic book. If it has anthropomorphic ducks running around in people clothes, I’m probably going to invest an inordinate amount of time examining it, and DuckTales has that shit on every page. You see, this is how I’ve chosen to devote a small portion of my finite time on this planet — looking at images of ducks in airplanes, ducks yelling at yetis, and ducks eating top hats. Like dressing Kate Moss in clothes from the Gap or feeding Anthony Bourdain a plateful of McNuggets, so I treat my intellectually malnourished brain to an illustrated narrative concerning duck people.

Scrooge McDuck, to me, is arguably the most morally ambiguous character in the Disney cartoon oeuvre. On the one hand, he takes care of his nephew’s children, he abhors cheating, and his success is one built on self-reliance and hard work. On the other hand, he often resorts to exploitation, cruelty, and selfishness. While nearly every other Disney character is always portrayed with huge vacant grins, Scrooge McDuck’s face is perpetually frozen in a bitter hateful scowl. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Carl Rosa is a goddamn masterpiece and the quintessential exploration of Scrooge’s development from ambitious young duck in a poor Scottish village to someone who swims in a money bin. It’s a well researched lushly plotted 12-issue series, and it won an Eisner award for best serialized story. Pixar should adapt it. Children should read it in school. It’s a fucking classic, you philistines.

When Warren Spector set out to write a DuckTales series, he faced a difficult dilemma. How do you make a rich old miser the hero of a comic book following a stock market crash, a bank bailout, and a recession? Greedy CEOs and their (white people) problems don’t exactly appeal to the young demographic Kaboom! seeks to attract, even if they are talking ducks. So for his first storyline, Spector pulled a brilliant move by centering the plot on a bet between Scrooge and his rival John D. Rockerduck over who can return the most plundered treasures to their original native owners. This comes about after Webby calls out Scrooge for either A) tricking natives out of their cultural treasures or B) exploiting their desperation. At first, true to form, Scrooge dismisses her cries for social justice as a fat load of hippie bullshit (in not so many words). Then Rockerduck appears on TV, declaring that he will return all of the plundered artifacts he’s collected to their original owners, galling Scrooge’s ego and the stage is set for the globetrotting plot.

Although the expedition itself is an altruistic one, truculent old Scrooge’s motivations come down to his inflated ego and his need to be the best — even if it’s at charity. Throughout the series, he orders his nephews around (“Lead on, double time! Neh, there are three of ye, so let’s make it triple time!” He treats a character named Farquardt like human — or whatever species he is — garbage. He demands that Launchpad pay for the airplanes he’s crashed and asks for a 30% cut of the tourism revenue for one of the items he returns. Yet despite these ethical failings, he has a brief realization toward the end: “Doing the right thing, even when it’s hard, is one of life’s most rewarding experiences,” he tells Webbie. Hmm, it feels disingenuous I think.

Interesting to note is Webbie’s expanded role in this series. Past depictions have portrayed her as a sort of caricature of a girl rather than a fully realized character. Here, however, she’s the only female sibling of boy triplets who have largely ostracized her. She’s presumed to be an asinine little girl, and thus, patronized and disregarded. Because of this, she’s forced to work extra hard to prove herself. One of her brothers says at one point, “This is man’s work,” to which she replies, “What does a girl have to do to up her status with you boys?” and proceeds to list all the ways she’s demonstrated her superior intelligence and audacity. Huey, Dewey, and Louie look at her like their balls are in a vice. Later, she gives her iconic pink bow to a yeti in what I would assert is a feminist gesture symbolic of the stripping away of cultural conventions concerning gender, but is more likely an excuse to see her bow on the evil dog guy cause it’s funny and stuff.

This series does not approach Don Rosa’s standard of quality in terms of writing although the art approximates the look of the cartoon fairly well. At times, the pacing feels rushed, but then there are long stretches of agonizingly dull dialogue about museum revenue and such. I think the problem was that the stakes weren’t high enough, and John D. Rockerduck just isn’t a threatening villain. If it were up to me, this wouldn’t be a light and breezy comic, but a haunting character study exploring the depths of Scrooge’s cruelty as he busts unions and lays off workers, but it’s for kids or whatever so fuck me, right? I did however enjoy all the references to past episodes of DuckTales as well as to the Don Rosa series. There’s even a cameo from a certain Darkwing Duck villain in there.

In my opinion, fans of the Uncle Scrooge comics will be disappointed by this series while those who feel nostalgia for the cartoon might glean some mild amusement from it. Me, I’ll keep reading regardless because I’m possessed by a rapacious appetite for images of ducks doing people things. It started in daycare when the teachers would turn on DuckTales after they’d run out of activities, and the images metastasized through my brain like an insidious weed. Sometimes late at night, I lie awake, humming the theme song. It’s probably the best theme song in the history of television.

And let me conclude with this little nugget: Scrooge McDuck died in 1967.

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I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve never been much of a comic book freak. I had childhood flirtations with X-Men, Spiderman, and, of course, Wolverine, but it didn’t take long for me to grow out of them. The rampant use of dues ex machina, the soap opera relationships, and the sometimes unintelligible back-stories and tie-ins quickly had me throwing up my hands in despair at the superhero genre altogether. It was actually William Blake that wooed me back, half-unwilling, to the pages of story told with pictures. So, now I’m discovering late a bunch of comics that lots of people like me probably never discovered at all.

Transmetropolitan Vol. 2

One of the first books I read upon returning to the fold was Transmetropolitan, and it’s still one of the best. Think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Blade Runner. Spider Jerusalem, a drug-addled gonzo journalist of the future is forced out of seclusion by his publishers. Armed only with his laptop, a pair of camera-glasses and a ray-gun called “the bowel disruptor” (which does pretty much what it sounds like) Jerusalem proceeds to rampage all over the dystopian city of the future, culminating in a battle of words with two corrupt presidents.

The story, characters, and art are simultaneously engrossing and gross; I think there’s more vomit than sex in the series, which I know isn’t selling it, but there’s something less cheap about vomit in a comic book. I mean, I don’t often hear people exclaim, “That’s just how it is: vomit sells! We need more vomit!”  But bowel-disruptors and other ejaculations from various orifices aside, the story pulls you in with a coherent over-arching plot bedecked now and again with amusing side-shows that are expertly interwoven back into the main line by the end of the series. Oh, and that’s another thing going for it: this series knew how to end. I don’t know if the creators had the ending in mind from the beginning, but it reads like they did, like a satisfying novel rather than a rambling attempt to end every little stint with a cliffhanger and see how long they could drag me along.

Jerusalem himself is also surprisingly coherent (as a character, not as a person). He’s a little schizophrenic, but one passably assumes that this is due to his steady diet of unnamed narcotics and not due to unimaginative writers forcing their characters into bizarre molds to fit whatever absurd story happened to occur to them on that particular day. And, though he’s not even super-likable, which I always found likable in hero, you still find yourself rooting for him most of the time.

Meanwhile, throughout the series the writers use their darkly comical vision of the future to deal ironically with issues both real and invented. Corporate corruption allows the use of information pollen, a kind of biological advertising agent that causes incurable degenerative mental diseases. The perpetual absurdity of our party system is personified in the Evil and Eviler Presidential candidates, one of whom is modeled after Nixon, the other of whom masturbates into an American flag while editing the Constitution. Gender issues are dealt with by way of the transient movement, a group of social outcasts who splice their genes with that of aliens to transform their bodies. The preservation of culture in the face of progress is accomplished through a system of “Reservations” in which people sacrifice modernity to constantly reenact otherwise extinct forms of human culture. And, perhaps most hilariously, the apathetic attempts to rehabilitate thawed cryogenic refugees mock our desire to forget our cities’ least desirable occupants.  It’s all there, and it’s all funny, and most of it is pretty smart.

Perhaps the coup of this book, though, was the fact that Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise, bitches!) expressed an interest to the writers in playing the aging Jerusalem in an as-yet-undeveloped movie adaptation. I don’t know about anyone else, but the thought of Stewart playing a sex-crazed, drug addled, cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson gets my geekdar pinging… Although, with our luck, the movie would just be picked up by JJ Abrams, Stewart replaced with Tom Cruise, and all the vomit would just be CGI glittering with lens flare. But we can still dream.

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Marvel and DC are preparing to duke it out for a place in your hearts in a 21st century revival of the superhero movie genre. For those unfamiliar with the distinction, Marvel is responsible for characters like X-Men, Spiderman, and Wolverine while DC’s most famous are Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Both have an expansive pantheon of characters and stories, and both are taking remarkably different strategies with their current franchises.

Marvel’s strategy, to create an internally consistent universe in which each of the characters can interact with each other, is really coming together this summer. The last two Iron Man movies have been quite successful, largely because of Robert Downey Jr.’s smarmy portrayal of the titular role. This summer, they’ll be adding Captain America and Thor to their world, and they’ll be purposefully interweaving these two characters and Iron Man by means of less-than-subtle allusions to previous and future films across these and future franchises. These three characters and more will then share the big screen in an adaption of Marvel’s superhero team the Avengers, which will be directed by Joss Whedon of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame.

DC’s strategy is markedly different. Its big contemporary success is, of course, Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise. His re-imagining of the Dark Knight is arguably the best thing done in mainstream superhero movies to date. It is certainly the most financially successful, having exceeded a billion dollars in revenue, with the closest runner ups hundreds of millions of dollars behind. With the profound success of Batman, Warner Brothers has asked its Producer/Director to play an advisory role in their re-imagining of Superman, which will be directed by Zach Snyder; but Nolan’s Batman and Synder’s Superman will not inhabit the same world. They will not crossover, and, according to the studio and the filmmakers, they will never meet and shake hands. Even where DC is discussing a potential Justice League movie, a superhero team roughly equivalent to Marvel’s Avengers, we’re hearing that the Batman and the Superman in such a movie would stand alone. They would not be Nolan’s Batman, or Synder’s Superman, but a new take on each character appropriate for a movie in which they cohabit.

Herein lies the gulf: Marvel is trying to interweave some of their key characters into an internally consistent world, whereas DC is comfortable allowing each of their characters to stand alone, and even be simultaneously re-imagined by different directors. The former is a fanboy’s paradise, but the latter allows for better storytelling.

The problem is about suspension of disbelief, and letting the story, rather than consistency, dictate the world.

In the Marvel world, for example, we’ve already got Iron Man. We suspend our disbelief about technology, genius and the limits of private wealth to believe that one man could single-handedly design, build, and operate a super-powered flying suit of armor. It works. It’s cool.

This summer, we’ll have Thor, a Norse god banished from his heavenly realm to Earth where he becomes a hero, directed by the Shakespeare-loving Kenneth Bragnaugh. That’s not half bad, and in a story about Norse gods, I feel confident that I could suspend my disbelief and get involved in this supernatural world.

In Iron Man we’re getting movies exploring themes about a man reforming himself, trying to balance this massive ego with a competing desire to do good; it’s about a man who may well be an alcoholic with a super-powered military weapon. Not the subtlest of themes, but they’ve done entertaining things with them. If Thor is a good movie, I presume we will see a host of very different themes— themes that are more readily explored in a world populated with Norse gods who are, themselves, the embodiments of dark, primal archetypes.

But if you mix these two characters together, could I suspend my disbelief about both at once, and even if I could, does the addition of a supernatural Norse god to a story about Iron Man actually add anything? When you mix them, you get a theme clash. A story about a superhero whose power derives from magic and a superhero whose power derives from technology thrown into the same world could have interesting themes. You could take up a kind of naturalism versus supernaturalism, or the ingenuity of man over the unexplainable super-power of a god. But it sort of stalls, with the grinding sound of a teenager learning to drive stick, against the themes you might explore (and in this case already have explored) in movies about either of those characters on their own. We get Iron Man, Interrupted. It only gets worse when more characters are added.

Worse, the potential for fanboy absurdity is heightened by the choice of Joss Whedon as the director to bring all of these characters together. I know that this guy has a loyal, die-hard fan base, but he’s not the man to hand halfway-decently developed characters to develop further. From previous Whedon films we can expect what he has given us before: half daytime soap opera and half people looking really cool while they blow things up, but it seems to me that what really sells the superhero genre to a wider base is substance and some attempt at a meaningful story. See the one billion dollar profit of The Dark Knight. Sure, we expect action from Iron Man, but when the ego versus morality theme is explored in a half-way decent manner, it’s a pleasant surprise that makes us remember the movie and come back for more when it’s time for a sequel.

From what we can gather from rumors, though, Joss Whedon’s movie is essentially: “What if Iron Man, Thor and Captain America team up with Josh Renner and Scarlett Johanson to fight the Hulk and a group of green-faced alien invaders called the Skrulls?!?!?!”

If you find yourself replying, “Awwwwwwesome!” then you might be a fanboy. I can imagine people walking out of the movie:

“Oh man, what about the part where Iron Man was mind-controlled by the Skrull Commander and he fired a missile at Thor, and Thor smashed it with his hammer?!”

“Phtt. There’s no way Captain America could stand up in a fist-fight to the Hulk. That was so lame. They covered this in The Incredible Hulk number 892!”

“Oh Em Gee (OMG) did you see that outfit?! I can’t wait for them to give ScarJo her own Black Widow movie!”

Imagine if Marvel decides to tie the solo movies for these characters in with their “team up” movie. What if they start throwing magic into Iron Man just because they can, or alluding to things that happened three movies ago in a different character’s storyline? It’s going to be as bad as Batman and Robin. People who don’t care about that shit are going to be sitting in the movie theater asking, “What is happening?” and behind them, someone will whisper, “It was in Thor 2, don’t you remember the Asgaardian golden duck of power?”

It’s going to suck for everyone who isn’t a fanboy. It’ll probably sell some tickets, but it’s not going to compete with DC. When Nolan has finished with Batman, we’re getting indications that the franchise will be passed on to another director who will take the character in a new direction. Perhaps we’ll get an exploration of Batman that is darker, or perhaps one that is more over-the-top. Perhaps we’ll see a world in which Batman hunts supernatural and super-powered villains, taking the emphasis away from the madmen of his rouge’s gallery. Hopefully we’ll see a new look and feel. Nolan’s Batman will stand alone, and whoever comes next will have their own opportunity to make something that stands alone. Think of it as graphic novel trilogies or one-shots, rather than a serialization that becomes increasingly unbelievable and incoherent as you add episodes, writers and revisions. We get to explore the many potential themes around Batman, instead of trying to mash them all together into the same world.

This makes more sense from a damage-control perspective as well. Snyder is currently re-imagining Superman. Maybe it will be good, maybe it won’t. If it’s not good, you just give the job to someone else and see how they can imagine Superman. You’re not bound to interweave the fuck-ups with the good stuff, and the good stuff doesn’t need to pigeon-hole later revisions of the characters. The stories are free to stand and breathe on their own; they can be changed, explored and developed down different tracks.

When and if DC decide to bring their characters together in a superhero “team-up” movie, it’s much smarter for that movie, too, to stand alone. The Batman in the Justice League doesn’t have to be as hyper-realistic as Nolan’s Batman, but his lack of realism doesn’t have to go back and infect future interpretations of him. The Superman in the Justice League can have a heavily developed friendship with Batman, but that doesn’t mean we have to play it up or even mention it in movies that are just about Superman. This kind of cross-over work, in even a three hour movie, is distracting and irrelevant at the very least, and DC’s being very wise in its decision to avoid it.

By avoiding tie-ins and crossovers, DC is really going to show us how this genre can come into its own. At their best, these superheroes have the seeds of an iconic exploration of contemporary culture, a sort of modern Mount Olympus populated with gods and monsters that distill questions of sanity, power, justice, and morality into potent archetypes. The Greeks weren’t afraid to remake their stories, and neither should we be. The “remake” has been slammed as being unoriginal, but what makes an archetype interesting is its power to represent different things and evoke different emotions in various stories and settings that are not concerned with internal consistency. And that’s what makes sense if this genre is going to make good movies. I like the popcorn, the beautiful men and women in spandex blowing things up, and the epic music, but we need something more if these movies are going to be relevant not just to the fanboys, but to the rest of us.

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On August 11 of last year, the web comic Penny Arcade posted a strip called “The Sixth Slave,” which depicts a role-playing game warrior callously refusing the rescue pleas of a pitiful prisoner. In the second panel, the slave details his plight: “Every morning, we are roused by savage blows. Every night, we are raped to sleep by the dickwolves.” If, like me, you listened with fascination to each episode of PA’s old podcast Downloadable Content, in which we were treated to the process of two excitable nerds making their living by cracking inappropriate jokes on the internet, you’d know that, though the final panel of every strip contains a punch-line, they normally save their “money line” for the second panel. Just how this came to be their favored format is buried in the details of Mike “Gabe” Krahulik and Jerry “Tycho” Holkins’s thirteen-year-plus creative odyssey, but one imagines the spontaneous invention of two ambitious, capable twentysomethings riding the crest of a technological renaissance, invigorated by the innovation of their adopted medium. The second panel shocker works as a figurative formulaic marker of their role as cultural iconoclasts. If you flip through their archive—aided in its revelatory wealth by the presence of Holkins’s news posts (pre-dating the mainstream weblog culture) alongside almost every comic for the last decade—you watch the ascent of a couple of ‘net-age mavericks enthralled that nobody was telling them what to do.

On August 12, the feminist blog Shakesville ran an essay denouncing the comic’s use of rape as a comedic device. Penny Arcade’s response on the 13th, called “Breaking It Down,” tried to defuse the tension with snark: “We want to state in clear language, without ambiguity or room for interpretation: we hate rapers, and all the rapes they do. Seriously, though. Rapists are really the worst.” In the accompanying post, Mike and Jerry express their incredulity that anyone could take such offense, especially at such unprecedented volume after years of horribly sick content throughout their oeuvre.

The hubbub over “The Sixth Slave” may well have died down quickly had PA simply ignored the initial response, but its profile plainly exploded following this second comic. The subsequent series of combative/defensive reactions is chronicled exhaustively in a Tumblr simply called “Debacle Timeline” launched in early February, the original page citing the “unacceptable” way that actors on both sides of the debate were conducting their arguments as a reason to sift through the debris. (Krahulik tweeted the site, referring to it as “what crazy looks like.”)

Penny Arcade is neither the most popular web comic—Randall Munroe’s xkcd, for instance, gets far more traffic—nor the most acclaimed (that would probably be the infrequently updated Achewood by Chris Onstad), but it’s certainly the most influential. I don’t make that claim arbitrarily; last April, Time included Holkins and Krahulik among the one hundred on their annual list of “the people who most affect our world.” The substance of what makes Penny Arcade so important—how some representative content could have such an impact on the digital media realm where it is broadcasted—is sort of unclear.

Within six years of its inception PA had launched the two other bodies that comprise the platform of their empire apart from the comics-and-merchandise foundation. The Child’s Play charity, begun in 2003 to obtain toys for a local children’s hospital, has since raised some nine million dollars for hospitals worldwide. In 2004 they began a convention, the Penny Arcade Expo, which is now biannual and boasts tens of thousands of attendees. In September 2008, Holkins reflected: “Penny Arcade is an extension of gaming culture as well, certainly, but it’s more idiosyncratic and far less universal. PAX and Child’s Play will outlive it. Substantially.” Calling the strip “less universal” than the convention implies that they’re cut from the same cloth, just on a different scale. Certainly the company couldn’t have gained the traction to live so long and accomplish so much if their initial project hadn’t been so captivating. Time said that the authors “have become the tastemakers… of an industry the size of Hollywood,” but their work is clearly more in line with the hardcore niche than the increasingly vast mainstream audience—the archive shows them as inclined to obsess over some cult role-playing game or other bit of nerd esoterica as to comment on the latest front-page blockbuster. For the sake of a blurb, then, the magazine oversimplified the particular je ne sais quoi of PA’s sum product—the air of confident, privileged indulgence they exude so effortlessly. Watch their pointless, self-congratulatory documentary series, updated every Friday on “PATV,” and try not to be seduced by the modernist utopian charm of their operation.

The disruption of that ideal illusion is part of what makes the “debacle” so striking, and amplifies it. In October, PA made “Dickwolves” t-shirts available in their store, sporting an ironic athletic motif; the vulgarity of the concept is made into a joke by the plainness of its design. This, along with Krahulik’s habitual Twitter provocation (Holkins would refrain from comment until February stoked the ire of the various agitated parties. As detailed on the Tumblr, harsh words and sentiments flew freely. The items were removed from the store in late January. But Krahulik declared that he would be wearing his to the next PAX, and, encouraged, the Twitter account @teamrape announced plans for a “Dickwolves flashmob” at the convention’s opening.

PAX East 2011 begins on Friday at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The keynote speaker is Jane McGonigal, one of those annoyingly sunshiney tech idealists, who has been hyping the progressive power of games everywhere from the TED Talks to The Colbert Report. It’s hard not to suspect their choice of a prominent—and mainstream-intellectual crossover—female figure in the industry as the heralding speaker at their latest geek love-in to be a tacit appeal to the loudest voices in the dissent against their work, the feminist bloggers (many of whom claim to be former fans) who have roundly condemned the PA figureheads for their self-centered and flippant expressions of entitled, decidedly male-centric derision.

Their opponents’ accusations of insensitivity are pronounced in the light of Time’s designation of the Penny Arcade maestros as the “conscience” of the video game world. In the name of populism, and probably in the interest of commercial universality, they’ve shied away from real-world partisanship even as they take sharply defined sides in industry rabbles. (I remember an old Tycho post commenting on the absurdity of the 2000 election, and then assuring that politics would never be brought up on the page again.) The biting parody of the strip made its mark more via gleeful, anti-P.C. amorality than measured critique. It would seem that they’re anything but conscience. The Dickwolves imbroglio has served as a reminder that, especially in the democratic realm of internet media, not even a Geek God is safe from censure. Penny Arcade is still standing, but you can tell they’re shaken. Gamers are never more taken aback than when the battle’s not on a screen.

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A couple Mondays ago I was sitting at the kitchen table trying unsuccessfully to read when my roommate showed me the recently premiered AMC show The Walking Dead on his computer.  He mentioned that it was about zombies and said that I had probably seen the promotional posters in the NYC subways.  I did not expect it to be a show that I would find very intriguing. I expected it to be television’s usual attempt at transforming a classic cinematic genre to fit the T.V. format, such as how True Blood or Dexter each turn their respective (vampire and serial-killer) genres into fairly formulaic television.  I thought, “Zombie-movies themselves are usually—on the whole—unreliable, yet alone if they have to go through the kind of retarded format/formula of T.V.”

Surprisingly, The Walking Dead has not fallen into any such quagmire, and the show’s adeptness at developing long and cohesive story lines fits well with its 45-minute episodes.  While some of the dialogue is cliché and the acting is a bit weak, the show’s premise and plot quickly fed on my addiction-prone nature.  Pivoting around a small-town Georgia cop (played by a Liev Schreiber look-alike, whose actual name is Andrew Lincoln, who I guess was in the movie Love Actually), the show opens with him falling into a coma in the line of duty.  When he wakes from the coma he is in a deserted hospital and meets a plethora of zombies as he attempts to find survivors (in this respect, the show is suspiciously similar to the 28 Days Later film series, although I don’t know at whom exactly my suspicion should be directed).  The show also goes along similar lines as that film series’ through having a very blatant rural-urban juxtaposition in the progression from scene to scene (Atlanta being the featured city).

I don’t really understand how I have become so easily enthralled with this program; I guess the endless violence and delayed drama are my main attractions to it.  There have definitely been several times throughout each episode when my roommate and I have cheered, “YES!” or “FUCK….” as a human gets bitten by a zombie or a zombie gets their head chopped off by a human.  But the violence, while it gets me off, is nicely complemented by the show’s ability to delay drama and get me thinking not just about how explicit the violence is but about also the humans’ contribution to the insanity of its world.  The plot is pretty predictable, but such is television.  I think that the drama that the show is able to build each episode (as we repeatedly wonder how someone will survive death, or how far insane a survivor of the zombies can become) is effective not in surprising twists but on the suspense it builds as it goes through those twists. The cinematography is what most helps create the suspense: it shows great talent at lingering on single shots and scenes rather than fucking around with different angles and montages (this makes sense, as the show is adapted from an acclaimed comic book of the same name).  On the other hand, the show’s score is somewhat corny in a calculated fashion, but this fits the zombie-genre perfectly.  It creates a surreal atmosphere wherein the show’s talented depiction of an apocalyptic world is given a soundtrack that is so appallingly campy that it fits with the show’s genre perfectly.

But if you are already a zombie-lover, then you are probably going to check this show out, but you may be wondering what it adds to the genre itself.  In this respect, its main strength is that it follows the very realistic bent of films such as 28 Days Later, but that it doesn’t seem to take itself quite as seriously as a statement about politics or society.  That being said, there are a couple of white brothers (inadvertent pun) who are very racist and there are scenes dealing with gender issues, but the show doesn’t allow itself to get bogged down in making too many grand statements about the human race.  My usual thoughts during zombie movies of “are the survivors really any different than the zombies? (or ‘walkers’ as the characters call them)” have gone through my head as I’ve watched the first few episodes of this show.  I feel as if the show is honest that this was one of its thematic purposes yet also honest in that it realizes that people want to get sex and violence when they watch the show (because a show about zombies in which there is nothing edgy won’t make money, and would probably be very boring). Also, the television format actually aids the show in that it is able to develop sex and other dramatic tropes that would seem more ridiculous and less fitting if restricted to a 90-120 minute film.

The Walking Dead should fit well as part of the AMC brand.  The other “AMC original series,’” Mad Men and Breaking Bad, are also part of my small television show list, and I believe The Walking Dead will probably become and remain a “staple” of my limited television experiences (it should be noted that another AMC series, Rubicon, premiered this fall as well, but I found it utterly exhausting in its attempt to emulate 70s conspiracy-thrillers).  Of course, there have been many shows that I have watched for several episodes or so and then realized I was wasting time.  The Walking Dead is a show that will attract people who want to have a show that they can relax to as they watch but still be stimulated at the same time. Further, the show could very well join others dramas such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire as the evidence towards the promise that aspects of the current generation of television offers, and this hope may be its central draw.

As comic characters go, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of The Incredible Hulk. He’s big. He’s green. He’s scary. He’s hideous like The Thing, only with a better complexion. He lacks the sex appeal of Superman and Batman, and if I saw him coming in my direction, I’d pray for a swift, as-painless-as-possible demise.

Still, Hollywood and comic fans love the Incredible Hulk. In 2007, Empire magazine named him the 14th greatest comic book character ever. He’s had video games, an animated series, his own 1978-82 TV series, and several movie-of-the-week spin-offs. In 2003, there was the Ang Lee-directed Hulk, starring Eric Bana. I’ve never seen the entire film, but I recently caught 40 minutes of it on mute while running on the treadmill at the gym. Though I very much enjoyed looking at Bana, who deserves to be a bigger star, the entire affair seemed so gloom-and-doomy. When the Fifth Dimension’s “Let the Sunshine In” arrived on my iPod, they might as well have been singing about the film. No wonder it was a commercial disappointment, opening with $62.1 million, but dropping a hefty 70 per cent in weekend two, and ending its theatrical run with a North American gross that was only a little more than double its opening-weekend haul.

Edward Norton

Five years later, The Incredible Hulk was released as more of a reboot than a sequel, with Edward Norton taking over for Bana in the title role. The film’s box-office was comparable to Hulk‘s, but for some mysterious reason, it wasn’t considered a disappointment. Maybe it was the fact that critics expected less from director Louis Leterrier. Or maybe after the underperformance of Hulk, expectations were lower. Whatever the reason, the big-screen Hulks clearly weren’t inciting the fan fervor of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man or Wolverine.

Yet here we go again. We’re not getting a new Hulk movie, but a new Hulk is on the way. Norton is out, and Mark Ruffalo is in. He’ll have a go at the role in the upcoming The Avengers movie, directed by Joss Whedon and due May 4, 2012. The big difference is that in the film, which will feature assorted Marvel Comics superheroes, Ruffalo will play both David Banner and his big, green alter-ego, unlike Bana and Norton, who tackled Banner while CGI did the rest.

Ditching the computer generation for a flesh-and-blook Hulk might be key to reviving the character’s mass appeal, but I’m not quite sure why Ruffalo got the job. Nothing about him screams superheroic, and the majority of his screen roles thus far have emphasized emotion over action. I can see him pulling off a line like “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” beautifully, but it ain’t so easy being green. Few people can make the color work, and I’m not so sure that it will suit a delicate actor like Ruffalo, who probably looks a lot better in blue, or white.

But then again, if Robert Downey Jr. can nail Iron Man and sell his butt-kicking qualities, anything is possible.

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Information on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the “circus rock ‘n’ roll drama” whose Broadway premiere has now been pushed back to the fall, is scarce so far. What we know now, though, is that it’s directed by Julie Taymor, of Across the Universe and The Lion King fame; that its songs were written by U2′s Bono and The Edge; that its costume design is by Eiko Ishioka; and that it will involve Spider-Man fighting a host of villains: Electro, the Rhino, the Green Goblin, Carnage, Swarm, the Lizard, and Swiss Miss.

Wait–who was that last one? Swiss Miss is a new addition to the Spider-Man rogues’ gallery. Her Ishioka-designed costume has been described as white dominatrix gear, and apparently involves corkscrews and rotating knives. She’s also a genuine anomaly in the world of Spider-Man, who’s been fighting bad guys for close to half a century now. And they’re almost inevitably bad guys. Spider-Man has no villainesses from comic books interesting enough to put in a musical because, historically, his relationship with costumed villains is all about his alter ego Peter Parker looking for a replacement father and failing to find one. That doesn’t seem to have been an intentional theme–but it’s present anyway, and it’s turned up in the three hit Spider-Man movies, too.

The central canon of Spider-Man stories is the forty-odd comic books about the character by artist Steve Ditko and writer Stan Lee that were published between 1962 and 1966. An endlessly inventive and very odd cartoonist, Ditko gave Amazing Spider-Man a sense of constant motion and trembling tension. He had a remarkable knack for action and grotesquerie and urban landscapes and broad comedy. His spindly, contorted figures inspired the style of every subsequent Spider-Man cartoonist. And he drew almost all of the series’ villains as old men–much older men than Peter Parker, men old enough to be his father.

Peter’s father, in fact, is conspicuous by his absence in those early stories: he wasn’t named or even mentioned directly until 1968. As the first Spider-Man story begins, Peter is a teenage boy, living in Queens with his elderly aunt and uncle. Uncle Ben is murdered within a few pages, and the disaster that drives the rest of Spider-Man’s career is Peter’s realization that he could have saved his second father’s life.

After that, Peter’s blown it. Again and again, Spider-Man finds himself fighting men who represent one model or another of bad fatherhood. The Tinkerer, Electro, Dr. Octopus and the Lizard are all scientists, like Peter, but instead of mentoring him, they turn on him. (Before director Sam Raimi’s plans for Spider-Man 4 were scrapped a few months ago, he had been pushing for the Lizard and Electro to appear in it.) Kraven the Hunter is the bad father as alpha male, bloated with his own machismo and his need to prove his superiority. J. Jonah Jameson, the editor of the Daily Bugle, where Peter works, is a furious, pompous, unsatisfiable father who parcels out precious crumbs of respect amid torrents of abuse.

And then there’s the Green Goblin, Spider-Man’s chief enemy–but it wasn’t clear what kind of father he was until Ditko left the series. In their first issue together, Lee and new artist John Romita put the crown on the series’ bad-daddy motif. The Goblin, they revealed, is the wealthy, successful Norman Osborn, who seems at first to be a good father to Peter’s friend Harry–but turns out to be the worst kind of father, the kind who passes along his legacy of violence and lies to his son. The Green Goblin went on to murder Peter’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy a few years later. (By that point, Gwen’s own father, police captain George Stacy, had been killed off as well. In Spider-Man stories, bad fathers never stop coming back, but good fathers are doomed.)

Spidey occasionally got to fight women: he tussled with Medusa, a supporting character from Fantastic Four; he had a run-in with the Black Widow, who dropped in from the pages of The Avengers. (“How can I fight her?” he asked on that issue’s cover. “She’s a female copy of MYSELF!”) But he didn’t get an actual recurring villainess to call his own until the Black Cat first appeared in 1979. (In more recent comics, they’ve developed what can only be described as an enemies-with-benefits relationship.)

That brings us back to the curious case of Spidey’s new hot-chocolate-inspired, castrating-weapon-wielding adversary. It’s hard to imagine a Broadway extravaganza like Turn Off the Dark not featuring a woman as one of its central characters; unfortunately, the 48-year history of Spider-Man comic books simply doesn’t offer many options. Taymor and Ishioka have created an option of their own, and it sounds like Swiss Miss will be a visual spectacle in the tradition of Ditko and Romita’s inventions. But it’s the painful undercurrents of masculine identification in Spider-Man’s early battles–the sense that he was fighting the substitute fathers he could never again have–that made them more than just a spectacle.