New series for old heroes

Thanks for the info.

What is it about those 1940s superheroes? Most of them weren't worth reading in the first place, and the market eventually rejected them anyway. The '40s were a "golden age" only in the sense of spawning a lot of superheroes, not in a sense of high quality. I've never thought an efflorescence of a single genre made anything "golden", but that does seem like the generally-accepted term for the period.

But people still go for new adventures of those old characters. don't they? I'm sure Dynamite Comics will have a winner in this. I hope the fans enjoy it.

Quack, Don

I can understand reprints of old series,we all tend to romanticize the past, but when they change the appearance,setting, etc. are there no original ideas left? if I want to see Mr. Jinx, I don't want him rapping, and breakdancing, same goes for movies,Bewitched, Get Smart, not the same without original actors are these producers that lazy, or uncreative or is tis want the public wants?

tent57;

It is just because some of these movie remakes actually worked and drew at least a decent size audience that they are making more. The problem is many of these remakes didn't really work. The Nicole Kidman
Bewitched,the Steve Martin Sgt. Bilko were among those that were at least decent works.
The Honeymooners movie was among those that didn't work.
As for the forthcoming Get Smart movie, the trailer makes it look like it's faithful to the original, as to how good it is, how audiences will react to it, we'll have to wait and see.

I guess it depends on what era you think of as your own,I think of the flash as having red suit yellow lightening bolt, but also enjoy the earlier version, there again the latter wasn't claiming to be the helmet guy in a new suit

Samantha was Elisabeth Montgomery, a young boy's fantasy,perhaps Kidman does it for a new generation, I don't know. We accept a new James Bond, but they are not trying to retell the same story each time. TO my point hollywood is lazy "people liked Bewitched, Hogan's Heroes let's just do that again"

I'm with you, tent57, on reviving old comics characters and revamping them from the ground up until there's nothing left of the original except the name -- if that! Sometimes they even change that, like Miss Masque becoming Masquerade. What's the point? It's not even new wine in old bottles, tho sometimes you want to get drunk when you see them.

Are fans really that desperate to see stuff that vaguely reminds them of heroes who've been defunct since before they were born? Surely, the stuff wouldn't sell noticeably worse if they simply acknowledge it's new.

But when you talk about movies made from old TV shows, with new actors -- that's just using part of the cultural milieu, like adapting a novel or making a movie out of an historical event. I have a friend who has long decried the mere act of adapting anything from one medium to another. How, he asks, can it possibly improve a novel to be made into a movie? Why not simply do original stuff in the first place?

I won't go that far, but when a TV show is made into a movie a quarter-century after it originally ran, I think it's okay to use new actors in the roles. Sometimes they die or simply don't want to reprise their old work. And the aging process often makes them inappropriate for the role.

But comics characters don't have that problem. Reviving old characters may make sense to some people, but if they look and act different from how they did -- why bother?

Quack, Don

A large part of the problem from what I've read (at least regarding comics) is that people are absolutely hung up on the holy writ of DC and Marvel comics' properties. I think there's a subconscious inferiority complex there. You look at works like, say, "Watchmen." That's based on analogues to Charleton comics characters, easily enough traced back to their source if you know what the source is. The difference being that Moore owned those characters. He understood that the Question does such and such this way and thinks this and that about the other, but Rorscach (sic) extrapolates on those premises and then takes wild side-trips coming purely from Moore's imagination, what he needs in the story, and the evolution of an original character. When you reach the end of that process you have the Question and you have Rorscach and they're similar (mainly because DC later cannibalized Rorscach for their interpretation of the Question), but they're also similar to Mr. A, the Green Hornet, and any number of other borderline lunatics in fedoras and trench coats stalking the back alleys all the way back to Central City. Comic writers tend to hold Alan Moore in inimitable respect, but what he's doing isn't something phenomenal. What he's doing is something that anyone can do (granted, results may vary). If Alan Moore wanted to include a character like Batman in "Watchmen" (which you can argue he did through the Blue Beetle/Night Owl) that character would not have been Bruce Wayne. He might have started with Bruce Wayne, but he would have thought that character through so intimately that he naturally became a different person. But the fact still remains that Superman and Batman are the templates of the entire genre and they're cash cows. Most people writing in comics are not really all that good at writing and they're pigeonholed by the fact that comics aren't really allowed to be art (in the sense that art has to have a margin of failure equal to the margin for success in order to breathe) so they pick up a character like the Black Terror and they show him to the public. "Hmmm. He's dressed all in black," thinks person who buys things hoping they'll be worth more than they're bought for, "he must be kind of like Batman." "No," says the writer, "he's like pirate Superman." Which would be Batman. Analogues are great if you know how to use them, but I think you have to be able and be allowed to write before they're of any real, sustainable use. Forty Batman knock-offs will not sell indefinitely. Batman has. And he is ingrained in the culture. Every comic fan knows his name. Everyone knows his name. You can write Batman. Just change "Robin" to "Tim" and throw him in a story with Dr. Fate (I mean, the Green Lama) and you can write that and no one but Bob Haney (who's long been forgotten in the offices of the Warner family because he's not chic) will ever say a word because, you know, "That's cool! Man, this is great. He's like Batman, but better. What's that? There's a Batman movie out now? Screw this!" It's like no one even paid attention to Stan and Jack. It will only get worse now that kids don't do anything involving imagination when a computer processor does it for them but with more flashing lights.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but I agree that most writing in comics isn't all that great, and that maybe people pick up on old characters because being already there, they require less creative energy.

But Alan Moore doesn't own the Watchmen characters. He has certain contractual rights in DC's use of them, which is why we don't see sequels all over the place, but he doesn't own them. (His original proposal was to use the actual Charlton characters, which DC had recently purchased, but Dick Giordano, who had been in charge at Charlton back when they originally ran and was in charge of DC at the time of the proposal, didn't want to see his old characters undergo that.

Quack, Don

"Owned" in the sense that they were his original concepts (granted, they were taken and augmented and developed from Charleton-- I was aware of the wanting to use Charleton thing, just didn't bring it in). What I meant was that, whereas "Popular Writer A" just picks up a continuing cash-cow character and characterizes them based on what went on in the previous story arc, what the company mandates, what "Old Writer B" did forty years ago, Alan Moore actually came out with characters that (while not in any way original) were at least written through the lens of his own creativity. Had he written a Green Lantern Alan Scott character into the mix, "Alan" could have done anything as mundane as wear a beard or as far out as crawling under his porch and praying to a snake god like Moore himself. Moore was allowed to insert his own vision. That was my point. (I'm addled from all areas right this minute back in the miserable real world). Moore (and I was meaning him as an example, you could easily replace him with Eisner or whoever you wish) wrote what Popular Writer A, B, C, ad infinitum consider to be the comics bible, but none of them (or hardly any) have ever paid any attention to HOW he did it. Taking the Black Terror and characterizing him as "Pirate Superman" isn't the same thing as taking an analogous character to Superman and writing him as a combination of influences utterly disparate from two Jewish kids from Cleveland or a major media outlet in NYC. Every idea has been done, most people know this, and they've stopped trying to even find a fresh perspective when they've trapped themselves inside the box.

Sorry I'm so damn scattered this week.
Hope I'm making myself clearer.
My apologies.

I see.  Ever since Miracleman, Moore has been taking old, familiar characters and turning them inside-out. Lots of writers have tried to do that, but nobody has done it better. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was just an attempt to do the same thing while still breaking out of comic books, where stuff like that is more-or-less normal.

Quack, Don

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a superlative example of reworking old characters, because Moore has really, really thought about it. One panel might contain twenty references, and failing to get them doesn't ruin the story, but getting them infinitely adds to it.

Having said that, Moore was recently behind a revival of a load of old British comic characters in a series called Albion. He wasn't actually the writer, his daughter was, so I'm not sure how much involvement he had. The whole thing was a bit of a mess - it relied too much on people's knowledge of long-gone comics. While the likes of Captain Nemo and the Invisible Man inspire instant recognition, the sudden appearance of Grimly Feendish or Robot Archie doesn't quite. And, of course, they got reinvented in a way that was supposed to be subversive but frankly felt like someone trying desperately to read too much into a comic intended for 7-12 year olds. Still, it seems to have done reasonably well, so maybe I'm in a minority here.

Hullo, by the way, long-time reader, first time poster.