It could be a scene from any teen drama in which a romantically challenged high school boy asks the object of his unrequited affections why she stays with her jock boyfriend.
The beauty considers the question for a moment, before carefully replying, “He’s always there for me.”
She walks away, leaving him forlorn. The viewers know it is he, not the jock, who’s always there for her. And though this conversation could be taken from “Dawson’s Creek,” it’s actually an exchange between Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) and Clark Kent (Tom Welling) from an episode of the WB’s “Smallville.”
Flannels and sneakers are his uniform, and “Smallville’s” Clark will probably never fly. But the show soars as one of the weblet’s top-rated offerings, second only to “7th Heaven” in the season’s ratings to date. What’s the appeal? It could be the notion that the Boy of Steel seems more like one of us.
“In Clark’s case, we look at him as a person. We took away the costume and just had his powers emerging. With these powers, it’s the same thing as people going through puberty,” explained Alfred Gough, one of “Smallville’s” co-creators.
A dose of reality
So it goes for the latest treatments of superheroes on television and, more prominently, at the movies, where grounding the fantastic in reality has made comic-book stories more acceptable. Plus, those young comic-book fans of yesteryear are now writers and directors who see their first loves as stylish, artistic literary works. Contrast that with the campy romps epitomized by Adam West’s “Batman” television adventures.
However you slice it, this looks to be comic-book entertainment’s golden age.
There’s TNT’s “Witchblade, “a cop series in which detective Sara Pezzini (Yancy Butler) battles corruption and crime with a mystical gauntlet. The series’ backdoor pilot movie won the channel one of its highest ratings ever. Its second season begins this summer.
In multiplexes, director Brian Singer brilliantly humanized his superheroes in “X-Men,” accenting their status as society’s outcasts by showing a young Magneto being torn from his parents by Nazis. Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming film “Batman: Year One” will be less concerned about the high-tech gadgetry of the supervillains; instead, we’ll get the raw origins of the Dark Knight himself. Ang Lee’s rendering of “The Hulk,” scheduled to hit theaters in June 2003, will be a treatise on inner rage, an article on Zap2It.com promises.
One can trace this trend to a number of modern sources, such as Tim Burton’s “Batman” in 1989, which focused more on Bruce Wayne’s millionaire psychology than that of his obsessed alter-ego.
The roots of realism
The true pioneer of modern comic-book realism, however, is Marvel Comics guru Stan Lee. Lee’s Spider-Man has lived in Queens since his creation in 1963. His alter-ego, Peter Parker, gets zits and isn’t particularly amped about facing down demented criminals, though he knows he’s the only one who can do it.
“Spider-Man’s” appeal, along with Lee’s other characters, lies in the notion that superpowers can happen to anybody.
“People have always loved stories and characters that are bigger than life. And you just have to do them so that they seem credible, so that the viewer can suspend disbelief and go along with the fantasy part of it,” Lee said.
Lee’s reinvention colored the way heroes and villains would be rendered for decades to come. No longer were comics just kid stuff, as high school and college students began following heroic franchises, particularly “X-Men.”
(Among those Lee influenced: “Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” Joss Whedon and “The Matrix’s” Wachowski brothers, as well as comic-book champion Kevin Smith.)
And yet, aside from Richard Donner’s realization of “Superman” in 1978 or Burton’s first “Batman,” persuading studios and networks to bet on comic books has been about as tough as toppling Galactus.
The ink-and-panel heroes that attempted to succeed in the “Batman” franchise’s wake, “The Punisher,” “Captain America” and “Fantastic Four,” died deaths so horrible you’d be hard-pressed to find the things on video. Comics were branded a hard sell by studios — expensive and unwieldy to film and, executives thought, without a broad audience.
Or were they? Michael Uslan, the producer behind the “Batman” franchise, begs to differ. There has always been a huge market for films about comic-book heroes, he argues. Spider-Man’s Marvel cohort Blade was the first character to demonstrate that; made for $45 million, 1998’s “Blade” has grossed $124 million worldwide to date. “Blade II” opens March 29.
But the vampire hunter’s story required more in the way of fight choreography than visual magic; Blade doesn’t fly. Though Spider-Man may be far more popular than Blade as a brand, he couldn’t hit the big screen until the audience could buy Spidey web-slinging his way through the glass and steel canyons of Manhattan.
“Up until the technology of really just the last couple of years in particular, it was tough to translate a comic book well into movies and TV. The effects just weren’t there, it looked too cheesy, it didn’t look believable,” Uslan said. “Thanks to your friendly neighborhood computer, comic books that nobody dreamed could ever be successfully translated can be done.”
The new superhero
The first movie to prove this point and open the floodgates wasn’t the “X-Men,” but “The Matrix,” a 1999 movie Uslan and Lee call the best comic-book film that wasn’t based on a comic book. Here was a flick that realistically showed its actors defying gravity — running laps on walls, even flying. Neo, Trinity and Morpheus embody the new superhero, even wearing clothes that were outrageous but nothing a person couldn’t conceive of seeing on the street.
“But for `Matrix,’ I don’t think there would have been an `X-Men,'” Uslan said. “`Matrix’ helped make comic-book superheroes hip. The breakthrough there was that they showed you don’t need the spandex.”
Costume designers for the “X-Men” must have taken the hint, trading in the yellow stretchy suits for smarter-looking leather. In Raimi’s “Spider-Man,” the Green Goblin will get a similar overhaul to look far less impish, more believably sinister than he comes across on paper. Whether Ben Affleck will cut a more realistic figure as “Daredevil” or Nicolas Cage in “Constantine” (based on Vertigo’s popular “Hellblazer” series), or whether Ashley Judd’s “Catwoman” will follow suit remains to be seen. All have the green light, though production hasn’t begun.
This is not to say the classic images of comic-book characters are gone forever. On Cartoon Network, animator Bruce Timm’s updated “Justice League” shows are among the cable channel’s top-rated offerings, and the characters look the same as they ever did.
“I was a little worried that when the show first came on that people would just look at it and think it was too old-fashioned-looking.” Timm said jokingly. “But for the most part, I think people want to have good-hearted, true-blue superheroes, that there’s kind of a need for that.”
True-blue, yes, although their attitudes are anything but vintage. Example: As Wonder Woman watches people rioting in the premiere, she muses aloud as to whether humanity is even worth defending.
Timm isn’t phased. “It’s the modern world, you know?”
