Max Jenke Is DOOMED!

As yet another comic book adaptation rules the box office landscape with Man of Steel's opening bow this weekend, turn your attention to one of the most famous failures in that sub-genre - 1994's legendary Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four. Never given an official release, the Corman FF remains a popular item on the bootleg circuit.

Filmmakers Marty Langford and Mark Sikes are seeking to expose the story behind this fascinating misfire, a film that struggled with very limited means to do justice to the characters that formed the foundation of the mighty Marvel Universe.



Despite the movie's shortcomings, there's a sweetness and an earnestness that shines through and a clear desire to honor the essence of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's fabulous foursome. And when you're talking about trying to mount an adaptation of a comic that features characters who can stretch their body at will, burst into flame, turn invisible and project force fields, and transform into orange rock all on a $1 million budget, you're talking about working some real miracles! As a film and comic book fan, that's a story that I'd love to hear, told in the words of the people who were there.

Marty and Mark are currently raising funds for their film, entitled Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's Fantastic Four at this link. Give it a look and see if you'd like to contribute to their cause.

Help make sure this film is not 4-gotten! It's Documentin' Time!

The Megalomanical Spider-Man

In 2002, Marvel gave indie comic icon Peter Bagge (Hate) a one-shot issue, outside of normal continuity, to poke subversive fun at their flagship character, imagining everybody's friendly neighborhood Spider-Man as an angry misanthrope, out to cash in on his fame. It was a funny tweaking of the Spidey story, the kind of "What If?" that can only occur off to the side of the carefully shepherded status quo.

Companies like Marvel and DC are always mindful not to alter their core characters too much as so much rides on their ready familiarity. In comics - mainstream superhero comics, at least - creativity must always be juggled with the overriding directive to protect the brand.

That push and pull of art and commerce makes the never-ending tapestry of superhero narratives irksome to some and fascinating to others. As characters like Spider-Man, Hulk, Batman, and Superman are forever denied a definitive end to their stories, there has to be the illusion of change in order to maintain interest.

They'll get married, or be injured (seemingly permanently), or be killed (again, seemingly permanently), or something dire will happen to a key cast member (over at DC, for example, the latest Robin just perished), or gain a new costume (in Spider-Man's case, a costume he gained on a distant planet turned out to be a sentinent lifeform). But no matter how seismic the event might seem, fans know that in time it will somehow be reversed, or glossed over, or something.

This circling back to status quo (or a close proximity of it) is accepted as the only way these characters can have ongoing adventures for decades upon decades. They have to change but yet still stay evergreen.

In the pages of Superior Spider-Man, Marvel is currently telling perhaps the most fascinating example of this type of status quo upset yet seen in superhero comics. Under the pen of longtime Spidey scribe Dan Slott, Spider-Man's enduring arch-foe Doctor Octopus, found a souped-up scientific solution to the impending death of his withering body - he switched brainwaves with Spider-Man. In one wild stroke, Peter Parker found himself trapped in the dying body of his enemy while Doc Ock had a new lease on life in Peter Parker's body.

In Amazing Spider-Man #700, Ock prevented Peter from reclaiming his own body and let Peter pass away inside of Ock's dying shell. The saving grace was that, in a Hail Mary pass, Peter unleashed a last-gasp info dump into Ock - forcing the melgalomaniacal villain to experience the various life lessons that had made Peter into a hero.

A transformed Ock vowed not just to carry on Peter's legacy, but to find a way to be a better Spider-Man - a superior Spider-Man, hence the launch of Superior Spider-Man #1.

I loved the perversity of the concept from the start. The idea of putting Doc Ock, even a slightly less amoral one, in the driver's seat of Marvel's most beloved hero - their "everyman" character - seemed like wicked fun. And it has been. But five issues in, it's also been so much more than I expected. The thing with these status quo upsets is that they always seem very easy for future writers to wiggle out of, so their long term impact on the character is never much in question.

This, however, is trickier to resolve. Whenever Peter is able to return from the dead and wrest back control of his body, Slott has it set up so it won't be a simple matter of triumphantly popping back in.

At the end of ASM #700, Peter realized that in trying to kill Ock (desperate not to let his body be used for evil, and with only seconds left to live, he threw both himself and Ock out a skyscraper window in a death plunge) he crossed a line that he swore he never would and that, even if he got his body back, that he could never be Spider-Man again. So even if he physically returns, his life as Spider-Man is over.

The real masterstroke of what Slott's been up to, though, is that Ock's attempts at being a better hero (and even a better Peter Parker, one that's more attentive to his Aunt May) are not all bad. Far from it. In fact, it's hard to argue that he isn't the superior Spider-Man as he puts his brilliant scientific mind as well as his gift for meticulous planning towards being more efficient in guarding NYC than Peter ever was. The catch is that even while working towards goals that are beneficial to others, Ock's core nature can't help but seep through. He is working towards the greater good but this is someone who can't hold his ego in check and who doesn't doubt his right to implement any strategy as long as it produces the results he's looking for.

This is a man who has been a global threat in the past. What will he do in order to be the absolute best in the superhero set? Based on what's transpired so far - including the shocking events of SSM #5, it's enough to make any sensible Spidey foe surrender on the spot. And it seems like we've only seen the tip of the iceberg so far.

While Slott had been dutiful in tending to Spidey's legacy in his solo tenure on ASM, the kind of gentle caretaker that comic writers are expected to be - keeping the book and the character as intact as possible until it's time to pass the torch again - SSM has him in terrorist takeover mode. Not knowing what this Spider-Man (dubbed "SpOck" by some online fans) will do next or whether Ock will be redeemed or be further damned has made the character of Doc Ock (usually simply the target of fat jokes) more compelling than he ever has been - a gripping, impossible to pin, bundle of contradictions.

And it should be noted that he's funny, too. Not in the smart alecky way usually associated with Spidey but in his impatient condescension towards those he considers less than his equal (virtually everybody).

In recent years, we've become more comfortable with villains as protagonists. Maybe it's a growing embrace of moral relativism that lets us be ok with a character like, say, Dexter. Or maybe we just find it hard to dislike goal-orientated characters who are really good at what they do. Whatever the case, Slott has still done something remarkably subversive - he's not only had a villain kill a beloved hero and take over their life but in the process turned them into someone that we're able to root for.

It's that kind of audacity that makes Superior Spider-Man the best roller coaster in comics right now - a status quo change that might just stick (for awhile, at least) as well as its title character sticks to walls.

A Heaping Helping Of Venom

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I'm as much a comic fanatic as I am a horror junkie so I'd like to take a second to give a shout-out to the current series Venom, which features Peter Parker's high school nemesis (and later friend) Flash Thompson joined together with Spidey's arch-foe, the Venom symbiote (aka The Black Costume).

In Venom, Flash, now a war vet who lost both his legs below the knees while performing an act of heroism in action, is given a unique but peril-frought opportunity by the military - join with the alien symbiote known as Venom and perform various black ops duties as directed. The military has contained the symboite and wants to exploit its potential as a weapon. Under close monitoring, Flash will be allowed to bond with the oozing black menace for limited periods of time (while merged, the symboite's morphing form will fill in Flash's missing legs) and the symboite will be removed after the end of each operation before the physical and psychological bond becomes permanent. Of course, this plan is not without problems and soon Flash is much closer to the symboite than his military superiors had planned for.

As written by Rick Remender, Venom was modeled as a twisted reflection of the early years of The Amazing Spider-Man. Remender took the angst and turmoil that Peter Parker endured under the direction of writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko and raised it to nuclear shitstorm levels. Remender took the ironic premise of Spider-Man's biggest fan (Flash's heroism in combat was shown to be largely inspired by Spider-Man's never-say-die attitude) being turned into the dark mirror of his idol and really ran with it.

Lee and Ditko ensured that their teen hero had it rough in those early ASM issues (one constant thorn in Peter's side then being Flash) and it was the ongoing emotional gauntlet that Peter had to endure that made the book so groundbreaking and distinctive. Angst-ridden heroes are no longer a novelty, thanks to Spidey paving the way, but Venom has the distinction of having to cope with a world of hurt that would've made Peter Parker want to hide behind Aunt May's dress.

While Peter was guided by the memory by his loving Uncle Ben, Flash is haunted by the childhood abuse he suffered under the hand of his violent, alcoholic father (who ends up being diagnosed with cancer during the course of Remender's Venom run, making Flash come to terms with his angry relationship with his dad). Thanks to that sour relationship and his brutal upbringing, Flash himself is a recovering alcoholic - a struggle that's only compounded by his new partnership with the symbiote, which represents an almost irresistable addiction of its own.

Remender also delibrately mirrored early ASM by having Flash's girlfriend be Peter's original girlfriend - one time Daily Bugle secretary and now reporter Betty Brant. Like Peter once did, Flash finds himself having to hide his secret identity from Betty and with his history of addiction, Betty is naturally suspicious that Flash has fallen off the wagon every time he vanishes for days while on a mission as Venom only to come back with a half-hearted excuse. Remender also included one of the most memorable foes from the Lee/Ditko days as Flash's key antagonist, a new incarnation of the masked villain known as Crime Master - making the new Crime Master's identity an ongoing mystery in keeping with the Lee/Ditko style. And where Spider-Man had to contend with the combined force of his greatest enemies when they teamed as The Sinister Six, Remender put Flash up against his own group of villains, The Savage Six.

Each issue of ASM would typically end with Peter brooding over his problems and lamenting his failures and in step with that, an issue of Venom would similarly end with Flash obsessing over his latest round of troubles - only they'd be much more grim than, say, coping with Aunt May's latest fainting spell. An ending to an issue of Venom would likely have Flash off the wagon and sleeping in an alley.

Remender just completed his run on Venom with issue #22, a story dealing with Flash's ongoing daddy issues in a tale titled "Father's Day." It's a great end to a great run - in my opinion, one of the sharpest runs in modern comics. Neither Flash nor Venom ever struck me as being particularly interesting before and I have to hand it to Remender for making Venom into such a strong book. He had some great artistic collaborators on board with him the whole way, with the likes Tony Moore, Stefano Caselli, Lan Mednia, Kev Walker, Declan Shalvey and others all taking turns making the book look incredible.

Remender's star has been rising at Marvel (thanks not just to his work on Venom but on Uncanny X-Force and other titles) so he's moving on to more high-profile gigs this fall penning Uncanny Avengers (a new flagship title for the company) as well as taking over writing duties on Captain America. I expect those books with be outstanding and I look forward to them but I'll sure miss him on Venom. I'll be giving incoming scribe (and former FANGORIA contributor) Cullen Bunn a fair shake but even if the quality doesn't keep up, the run Remender created is worth keeping and revisiting.

The Greatest American Hero

Captain America has always been something of an anomaly in the Marvel Comics universe. Created in the '40s by Jack Kirby and Jack Simon while at Marvel's predecessor, Timely Comics, Cap was not an obvious fit with the heroes that Marvel made its name on in the '60s - the troubled, flawed, angst-ridden super-beings created by writer Stan Lee along with artists such as Kirby and Steve Ditko.

When Lee brought Cap into the Marvel fold, he had Cap enter the '60s as a character who had been literally frozen since the days of WWII. Cap came into the turbulent '60s as a man out of time, a Living Legend. This was not a counter-culture icon, this was an embodiment of the self-sacrificing ethics of the so-called Greatest Generation, the generation that stopped the spread of fascism.

Lee wisely perceived that Cap must remain a man of his era. Simiarly, director Joe Johnston and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely succeed with Captain America: The First Avenger by staying true to Cap's roots and by not putting his character in any ironic context. Save for its bookending segments in the modern day, the entirety of Captain America is set during WWII, charting the journey of sickly Steve Rogers as he desperately looks for a way to serve his country and finally finds it as a guinea pig for a newly developed Super Soldier serum. Intended to be the first of an army of super soldiers, Steve instead ends up being the last person to undergo the miraculous transformation as an act of enemy sabotage kills inventor Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) and sees the final batch of serum spilled on the grounds of a Brooklyn shipyard.

At first, it looks like Steve might be consigned to a lab to be studied but the intervention of a PR-savvy senator puts Steve in his first Captain America garb as the star of travelling USO show to sell bonds. Here we see Steve's confidence develop as he becomes accustomed to being a public figure but yet he yearns to be in battle. When his best friend Bucky (Sebastian Shaw) is taken prisoner by the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) along with the rest of his platoon, Steve, while overseas on behalf of the USO tour, takes it upon himself to launch a solo rescue mission. After his first real success as "Captain America," his future as a fighting member of the U.S. forces is guaranteed. Whereas the storyline of Marvel Studio's recent Thor took place over the span of a few days, Captain America tells the tale of Steve Roger's entire WWII career (with the opportunity left for any period-set sequels to fill in some blanks, if desired).

Director Joe Johnston has been a valued player in geek cinema for many decades since his days as a designer and art director on the original Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark but as a filmmaker he's never quite had that one movie where it all came together for him...until now. This is where a lifetime of experience combines with the right material and the right resources and the result is escapism of the highest order. Captain America is not a cinematic game-changer; it's not a reinvention of the action or superhero genres. What it is is a lovingly crafted call-back to an earlier brand of pop cinema. This is an old-fashioned film in all the right ways. It embraces not only Steve Rogers' old-fashioned morality but also old-fashioned ideas about moviemaking.

Johnston doesn't eschew CGI but this is the rare modern blockbuster to be largely rooted in the physical. CG has its place and it has afforded filmmakers incredible opportunities but sometimes the eye craves reality - even amidst fantasy scenarios - and that's what Captain America delivers. From Cap's shield with its battle-scuffed paint job to the silver Hyrda hood ornament on the Red Skull's ride, Captain America shows an exhaustive attention to making every detail matter - a testament to Johnson's background in design.

Johnston also shows his allegiance to older values when it comes to his action scenes. Johnston will never be considered a visionary but he knows how to get scenes on screen the right way and the action here stands out in the way that it's filmed and edited with clarity, sans any shaky camera moves or incoherent editing. When Cap faces off with the Red Skull, or with the Skull's numerous Hydra henchmen, it's not just a meaningless blur of movement. We actually see Cap's fighting skills and just how handy his iconic shield can be. Too often in modern movies, the work of stuntmen is not properly showcased - but not here.

The casting of Chris Evans met with some initial flak from fans due to his previous turn as cocky Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four movies and the belief that his often wise-cracking screen persona wouldn't be the right fit for Steve Rogers. But Evans clearly understood how to play this role. He's decent to his core without being smug or self-righteous. He's a man of innate goodness but rather than preach, he simply leads by example. Humor comes into the film through other characters, like Tommy Lee Jones as Col. Phillips, but there's not a trace of smart ass in Steve.

Steve's love interest here is played by Hayley Atwell as Agent Peggy Carter and for the first time in a Marvel Studios movie, there's a romantic subplot that carries some weight. Steve's relationship with his sidekick Bucky Barnes is somewhat altered from comic lore but the changes work for the better. Instead of meeting during the war, the two are now boyhood friends from Brooklyn. It's a more efficient way of getting them together and giving them the shared history that they need to have. It also presents an effective irony when the once-weak Steve, who had always been pulled out of back alley scrapes by Bucky, becomes the man leading Bucky into battle. It would've been nice to see more of Bucky and Steve together but, in the end, we get enough (including just a hint of Bucky's dark future as The Winter Soldier). That the pair's eventual separation comes in a different way than in the comics might rankle some fans but it's a variation that preserves what's important and smartly leaves the emotional climax of the movie to be between Steve and Peggy.

As the last Marvel Studios movie prior to next summer's The Avengers, a lot is riding on the shoulders of Captain America but unlike, say, Iron Man 2 it doesn't feel like its running time is overly devoted to setting up future plot points. I expect that some unfamiliar with the comics will assume that the consequences of Cap's final face-off with the Red Skull just represents a means of getting everything in place for The Avengers but it's just following the trajectory of the comics.

This summer has produced something of a glut of comic book adaptations but on the Marvel end of things, quality was high across the board. While some argue that comic book adaptations have to go dark or ironic or to deconstruct the genre in order to continue their appeal to audiences, Captain America: The First Avenger proves that old-school heroism done right never goes out of style.

A Glutton For Punisher

With all the attention-getting news out of Comic-Con, it's hard to say what was most exciting. I mean, when you get a glimpse of The Infinity Gauntlet it's tough to focus on anything else. But I was especially stoked to learn that Marvel now controls the movie rights to The Punisher. I suspect most people would say that three Punisher movies were more than enough - maybe even two too many - but I'll respectfully disagree. I'm a nut for The Punisher and I'll welcome as many attempts to film the character as possible. I guess I feel the same way about any comic character (guess who's pumped for Ghost Rider 2?) but I really love seeing Frank Castle go to war with the scum of the Earth.

Starting with the 1989 Dolph Lungren Punisher, I've mostly dug how Marvel's vigilante has been depicted on screen. I mean, I did raise an eyebrow at such elements as Lungren's Frank Castle spending so much time naked in a sewer and the absence of his signature chest skull but overall, that first movie was true to The Punisher. That's the thing about The Punisher, he's hard to entirely screw up. The only thing that could make a Punisher movie utterly fail is if he decided to go soft on crime.

While Lungren's film was an adequate attempt (especially for the '80s, not a great time for Marvel characters on film), the 2004 reboot, with Thomas Jane, was an improvement. It wasn't quite perfect but it was solid. Jane was a nice pick as Castle and having Roy Scheider as his dad was cool. Not so cool was John Travolta as a weak adversary. Also not so cool was the sometimes curious tactics employed by this Punisher. I just can't wrap my head around why anyone involved with this film thought it'd be smart to have the Punisher bring down Travolta's character through an elaborate scheme involving a fake fire hydrant and a series of traffic tickets for his wife. It seems more like Ashton Kutcher's M.O. rather than Frank Castle's. Not very Punisher-y at all.

That said, most of the 2004 Punisher was commendable. The film didn't quite recapture the right darkly absurd tone from the Garth Ennis-penned comic tales that they lifted most of the supporting characters from (like Joan and Spacker Dave) but at least the movie acknowledged the comics and it felt like an old-school action movie so props to director Jonathan Hensleigh for that.

The real motherload came in 2008 with Punisher: War Zone. It would've been cool to see what would've happened had Hensleigh and Jane reunited. It would've been cool to see what a Punisher movie could've been like with a more layered, literate script. But none of those things happened on this troubled production. On the upside, director Lexi Alexander cast a total beast as Castle (the imposing Ray Stevenson), indulged in more stylized comic book visuals, gave the Punisher his most famous foe from the comics (the maimed and mutilated Jigsaw), and served up all-out violence. Even better, the MPAA let it all slide by with an R. Whereas previously this movie would've been hacked down to a twenty-minute short, Punisher: War Zone went to theaters apparently untouched by the ratings board. Nice!

The fact the movie tanked (not surprising, given Lionsgate's half-hearted marketing) didn't give me much hope of ever seeing The Punisher on film again but I'm glad to find out that won't be the case. I'm not sure how Marvel will handle a Punisher movie on their own that is substantially different than any of the three films that have come before it but I'm interested to find out. The obvious way to approach it would be to take some of Garth Ennis' stories (like "The Slavers") and really stick to them. Ennis' lengthy Punisher run is one of the all-time greats, a run I'd put up against Frank Miller's Daredevil or Walt Simonson's Thor.

If they stuck to Ennis' ultra-grim version of the character and its despicable roster of villains, you'd have something really special. It also might be too rough for most audiences but who knows?

As a fan, I have to say I don't much care how well the next movie is received by the general public. History tells me that even if it bombs, I can still look forward to much more punishment at the movies.

Go Frank, go!