A new so-called family movie came out shortly ago, called Hoot, and it seems that the emphasis is on eco-terrorism. (and at the box office). But what’s really a shame is that the * clearly didn’t ever read a thing about Ra’s al Ghul, the Bat-nemesis who was quite an eco-terrorist in his time. of one of Batman’s most craftiest foes:

Ra’s’s goal is a world in perfect balance, a goal he will achieve at any cost. Since he believes that the best way to do so is to eliminate most of , he may be regarded as an bent upon global . That he has the means to achieve his goal makes him extremely dangerous and brings him into frequent conflict with Batman. Ra’s usually tries to assault the world’s human populace with a , such as a .

The Hoot movie, pried from a Carl Hiaasen novel, may not go quite as far as Ra’s did, but ecoterror is still ecoterror, and what a shame that these days, putting emphasis on lawbreaking is the attempted norm of the moviemakers. After all, isn’t threatening people with deadly weapons, whether or not they be alligators, and kidnapping, among the many crimes Ra’s specialized in? Indeed. And the director of Hoot should be ashamed of himself for promoting acts of violence in the movie almost like what Ra’s did to his innocent targets years ago.

It’s true that animals, even owls, have rights, but it pales in comparison with the subject of human rights. And promoting violation of human rights for the sake of animal rights, not to mention breaking the law, which superheroes wouldn’t approve of, is a bad example.

More on the movie from: , , .

* Argh, why must the browser window narrow itself whenever I access that page!

has a writer who talks about the long-running debate on if Superman is better than Batman. But, as expected, it really misses a lot of deeper points that can be made.

Superman’s hold on the world is that his existence deals with being. How do you live with your gifts? You cover them up with a dull suit, head off to an ordinary job, and wake up every day knowing that the fate of the world rests in your hands. He’s can’t help but be super–his arsenal of superpowers coast in his blood and permanently set themselves in his ways. He cannot cease to be Superman.

Batman, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. While Superman tends to be a symbol of things to strive for, Batman is a symbol of what people can become if they work really hard. He’s dark and deeply conflicted. He chose his fate as a crime-fighter, destiny did not choose him. He transformed himself into a rubber-wearing crime fighter with a cool car that gets scandalously good gas mileage, and chose to stock his basement with cool gadgets. His disguise is to hide the fact that he is ordinary, with no superpowers, and with which he covers with his souped-up doodads. With the presence or Robin, they become a crime-fighting team–although the little green underwear-wearing orphan makes Batman look like a crime-fighting baby-sitter.

According to an online poll, if you are a Superman fan, your favorite colors are bright, bold and primary. You travel alone. You revere with strength and grace. You believe in truth and justice. Your favorite gadget is–again, who needs gadgets? You think Hollywood doesn’t understand the purity of heart or the nobility of purpose. You are shallow, but sincere, and your favorite time of day is morning.

If you are a Batman fan, your favorite colors are muted, murky and muddy. You travel with a sidekick. You revere intelligence and canniness. You believe in vengeance and skullduggery. Your favorite gadget is–well, who can name them all? You think Hollywood gets it, and you are a deep and ironic person. Your favorite time of day is midnight.

So again, I ask, which is better?

You want to know, Ms. Elizabeth Gist? Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s not which character I’m going to argue here, it’s the approach to characterization I’m going to. And until, I dunno, maybe the early 1990s, Batman had plenty of that, namely, humanity and sincerity, courtesy of stellar writers like Denny O’Neil, Steve Englehart, and Gerry Conway. But then, courtesy of the obsession with imitating Frank Miller’s storyline in The Dark Knight Returns, just about every writer for about a decade started to turn Batman into a self-righteous joke of a crimefighter, saddling him with half-baked, half-hearted storylines, and then, just when Ed Brubaker tried to fix things by restoring some humanity, DC made it worse by shunning all that in favor of coming up with a persecution of their own properties in Identity Crisis, Superman included, that claimed that the reason he became such a somber mess with very little humanity, if at all, was because his very own fellow crimefighters caused it to him. And at the same time, they confused everything by showing Batman getting all worked up over what the Justice League was doing to Dr. Light, while ignoring the crime the said supervillain inflicted upon Sue Dibny.

That, IMO, is what’s wrong with Batman today. It’s not that his world is dark and bleak, in contrast to Superman’s bright and optimistic one. It’s that the characterization is way below par, and further damaged through PC tampering.

With that kind of problem at hand, is it any wonder I’ve bought so much more Superman books than Batman books?

In any case, I do enjoy the optimism of Superman better than the darkness of Batman. Mainly because there’s so much wider a range for adventure provided, certainly in the solo books.

I’ll have to disagree with the reporter though, on the notion that being Batman means having a sidekick, or that being Superman means working alone - because Bats has worked alone, and effectively, while Supes has worked on many an occasion with his teen cousin Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, she being his sidekick. Wherever anyone got the idea that Bats only works with sidekicks while Supes doesn’t is beyond me.

talks about the manga and anime clubs in the big city, and the 2006 Anime Boston convention that’s coming up.

, has some difficulty understanding what the Hulk is about while reviewing one of the recent Loeb/Sale miniseries for the green goliath.

I ‘ve never really been able to figure out most people’s attraction to the Hulk. Sure, he’s big, green, indestructible and in the recent “Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine” he ripped Logan in half, but I just never got it. What can you do with the Hulk besides smash things?

Answer: you can have him go after communist and fascist villains, as he first did during the 1960s, when the Cold War was raging on. (And from the looks of things today, it just might be coming back!) The whole fun of the Incredible Hulk to begin with was that the 7-foot tall anti-hero would find himself on the trail of all sorts of commie criminals, one who created him (Igor Drenkov) when he hoped for a chance to get Bruce Banner out of the way so he could steal his classified files (changing into the Hulk at night, Bruce went on his first Hulk rampage, heading for his living quarters where he found Drenkov trying to burglarize the house, and knocked him senseless). And of course, there was the nifty rogues gallery, one of the first being Gargoyle(?), and most certainly the Leader, whose main challenge was that he relied more on brains than on strength.

But with the names Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale on it I couldn’t resist picking up “Hulk: Gray.”

There is something about the team of Loeb and Sale that in my experience produces nothing but greatness. Some of my favorite comic books are those they have written which revisit the origins of some of the greatest comic book heroes in the industry and I eagerly anticipate any work they put out together.

It’s easy to judge the Hulk by the vast majority of the stories that have been written about him. He is big, dumb and he smashes things, end of story. On the other hand, when in the hands of a writer capable of nuance and depth we find more to the character than ever might have been imagined. Utilizing the much maligned device of the flashback Loeb grants us insight into the Hulk and those characters that surround him. He is no longer a Jekyll and Hyde stand in and Betty Ross takes on immense psychological import. The character of the Hulk takes a back seat in “Hulk: Gray” and becomes a plot device for exploring all those that revolve around him.

Well, I wish he’d think to mention the fact that the Hulk actually did become more than we might imagine when Peter David took up the writing in 1987, after Al Milgrom left (and I just went and bought two of David’s Visionaries collections last week!) That aside, what’s that about the Hulk being “dumb”? Not really. He did get his intellect lowered for a time shortly after his first appearances, but over the years, he regained some of the intelligence that he lost.

To me, Hulk remains in the same category where I placed such characters as, Punisher and Ghost Rider. They make interesting sub characters in the greater comic book universe they dwell in but have little merit on their own over an extended title. Starring in mini-series which explores the depth of their extreme psyches though, we see their true colors. These characters have more to offer literature than the mayhem they may commit - it’s possible that they can tell us a little something about what it means to be human.

Yeah, but there’s a difference: while I can’t think of anything to say about Ghost Rider, Punisher, as some have argued, is a one-trick pony because he - or the writers - leave no room for recurring adversaries: Frank Castle slays them all. For the Hulk, his own adversaries, like the Leader, for example, are just too smart to be destroyed. The Punisher’s also got almost no supporting cast, if at all, whereas Bruce Banner’s had plenty, whether Betty Banner, her father, Thunderbolt Ross, Rick Jones, Dr. Leonard Samson and maybe even the Avengers as well.

After sloshing through countless sewer-quality articles in the mainstream press about Identity Crisis, that sugarcoated, sensationalized and pandered on and on about the whole mess, I finally found that someone gave a real, genuine opinion on it , and it’s Douglas Wolk, who created the . Might as well see if I can comment on it here, and give a few expansions…

Identity Crisis, now reprinted in a single hardcover volume (from DC), was a big event in mainstream comics by any standards. Written by bestselling novelist Brad Meltzer and drawn by Rags Morales and Michael Bair, it topped the comics sales charts for most of its seven-issue run last year, largely because it was presented as Really Important — its repercussions are continuing to spill out into DC Comics’ superhero titles. (It’s a predecessor to the hugely hyped Infinite Crisis, whose first issue DC released on October 12.) But this is pretty much the worst comic book ever to be so heavily promoted. Smoothly if blandly scripted, glitzily if undistinctively drawn, Identity Crisis is a gilded turd of a book, abusing its characters’ history and meaning for cheap, sordid shock value and giving nothing in return. It typifies everything that’s wrong with contemporary comics.

Amen. It’s also a thinly veiled political bias, and I highly doubt that that many people would want to tune in to something that shows a cute kid vomiting after being punched in the stomach.

The plot involves a terrible secret from the Justice League of America’s past that comes to light in the wake of the shocking murder of Sue Dibny. What’s that? You don’t know who Sue Dibny is? Why, she’s the beloved wife of the Elongated Man! The wisecracking down-to-earth soul of Justice League Europe in the ’80s! . . .

Still confused? If you haven’t already read hundreds of mediocre superhero comics, Sue’s death will have no emotional resonance for you. If you have, seeing her raped and murdered is at best a gross misuse of everything that was interesting about the character. Identity Crisis is almost incomprehensible to readers who aren’t already intimate with its dozens of characters and their relationships.

And enough to make one want to join Zatanna on the floor belching. That said, what’s good about this article here is that this is the right way to explain things as they should be to people not familiar with comics, who do read mainstream papers, even if there’s still more that could be told about, such as the way the writer of the book seems more interested in how the heroes brainwash Dr. Light, yet no interest if at all in Sue herself and the question of if Dr. Light was asking for punishment because of his crime. Although, the part about the brainwash is alluded to here:

Even so, it might work as an adventure story if its plot weren’t riddled with implausibilities. Among other things, you’re asked to believe that a grotesquely out-of-shape man who’s just been shot, fatally, three times in the chest can still throw a razor-edged boomerang hard enough to pierce his assailant’s heart; that a one-eyed man with a sword can stab someone who moves at the speed of light; and that a happy-go-lucky supporting character of 40 years’ standing can turn into a psychotic serial killer without anyone’s noticing. And the entire story hinges on the idea that its heroes have secretly acted nastily and venally, in their own interest, and covered it up, again and again, for years.

It’s possible to make a great story by bringing out a familiar character’s dark side as long as you seem to be raising the stakes rather than changing the rules. But Meltzer’s story is just a mess. There’s no pleasure in it, no sense of adventure or triumph or fun — only violence, betrayal, and witless flailing. It’s relentlessly grim and melodramatic, from Superman’s shedding a tear on the original cover of the first issue to the dribbling pathos of its ending.

Yep, that’s the problem with it. It’s joyless, crude to the core, and more interested in cruelty than anything else.

Near the end, Meltzer quotes Arthur Miller: “An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” His intention here seems to hammer the final coffin nails (or razor-sharp boomerangs) into the Silver Age of superhero comics, the era when troubled and flawed characters could nonetheless be relied upon to do right in a crisis, when making characters believable and consistent counted for more than horrifying jolts. But what Identity Crisis is presenting as exhausted illusions are the idea of heroism itself — the ethical compass that orients superhero comics — and the notion that major comics stories should speak to an audience greater than long-devoted fanatics. Without those principles, the superhero genre is itself exhausted of everything but an endless loop of brightly colored brutality.

Which brings us to a most interesting question: did DC ever actually intend to even so much as whisper to a wider audience? Seeing how none of this hype about newcomers to comics seemed to revolve around Infinite Crisis, I think that puts the lie to any claims that newcomers were picking up Identity Crisis in droves, and shows that in truth, the majority of buyers were really only the veteran audience.

Although it’s possible that, any newcomers who were stung by this trash may have abandoned it in such large quantites, left with a really bad impression of what comics are all about, that in the end, not many were left to give Infinite Crisis as big an audience.