Why So Serious? Batman Versus the Avengers

I've now seen Batman: The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man three times each, which means The Avengers officially still holds my heart. If I had to rank the three films, I'd say The Avengers is my favorite, The Amazing Spider-Man (while still enjoyable) is my least favorite, and Batman is somewhere in the middle.

I'm not entirely surprised by this, since I've been a geek for The Avengers for roughly thirty years. But maybe I should be surprised. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is entirely unique in the catalog of superhero films; it's the only set of films that's had a fighting chance at winning Oscars for acting or directing. (Heath Ledger, for example, won best supporting actor for his portrayal of the Joker.) Superhero films are in a class all by themselves, judged by their own peculiar merits, but among superhero films the Batman trilogy is in a class all by itself. And yet this year I prefer The Avengers, which, for as much as I like it, is pretty standard comic book fare.

I find myself wondering, What if? What if Batman had been released first? It's possible that, as much as Batman Begins was hailed as a "game changer" at the time of its release in 2005, resetting the bar for what a superhero film should be, The Avengers was this year's game changer, and The Dark Knight Rises suffered in our estimation as a result.

I've written elsewhere about what might be called the "sine wave of silliness" in Batman storytelling. To wit: Stories about Batman are either serious or silly, and they trend toward the one or the other for long periods of time until the pendulum swings back. The 1960s Batman TV show was unabashedly campy, and it defined the character for the better part of a decade. Then the serious side of Batman came back with a vengeance, until Saturday morning cartoons demanded a kinder, gentler and smileyer Bruce Wayne--until Frank Miller envisioned a dystopian future when a retired Dark Knight Returns. And then, George Clooney put on the tights for Joel Schumacher's homage to 1960s camp in 1997's Batman & Robin, killing a film franchise that under Tim Burton's watch had effectively reconciled Batman's silly and serious sides.

And then, in 2005, Batman Begins made us take superheroes seriously. The film was dark and sober, penetrating and poignant. Everything since then, from Superman Returns to Ghost Rider, has been judged by it. Only Batman: The Dark Knight eclipsed it, with Heath Ledger creating a portrait of the Joker that is still haunting.

Just because nothing compares to Batman films, however, doesn't mean that we won't drop good money on other superheroes. Iron Man benefited from our good faith, presenting us with a lesser-known character portrayed by an actor whose career had stalled. Robert Downey Jr. delivered a comically care-free and cool performance, a billionaire playboy whose superpowers are not natural but manufactured,--a less heroic but more relatable alternative to Batman's uber-serious, mopey Bruce Wayne.

The success of Iron Man set into motion the release of The Avengers, which retained Downey's cavalier and larger-than-life attitude, and extrapolated it out into a team/community setting. The Avengers was the culmination of five films showcasing four characters (six, if you include the cameo by Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye in Thor and Samuel L. Jackson's appearance in Iron Man and Captain America). Over the course of those films (all of which, with the exception of the first Iron Man, were released in between the final two films in the Batman trilogy), our expectations have been changed: we've come to ask of our superhero films--with Heath Ledger's disturbing Joker, ironically enough--"Why so serious?"

If Batman: The Dark Knight Rises had come out in April, we would have thought of The Avengers quite differently come May. But in some respects the die had already been cast: whereas Batman is a trilogy, The Avengers has been, in a manner of speaking, a quintilogy. Five against three in the battle between serious and silly: the odds favor silly.

Fair warning, Batman fans: your next Bruce Wayne, I predict, will look much less like Christian Bale and much more like Adam West.

NOTHING LEFT OUT! My Review of R. Crumb's Book of Genesis Illustrated

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My Year of Overdue Books continues with The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, a legend in underground/indie comics from the late 1960s and 1970s, who has long been fascinated by Jewish history and heritage, and who thus took on this 2009 book as something of a passion project. I was a bit dubious, frankly. I don't remember the circumstance, but someone in the media contacted me about it before its release--likely because of my 2004 book Comic Book Character, which made me an expert in the eyes of some (though surely not in the eyes of God or R. Crumb). I looked through some of the frames that had been pre-released to the public, including the opening frame, in which an impossibly white old man with a timelessly flowing beard held the gestating universe in his hands. I thought--and tried to communicate to the media as respectfully and professionally as possible--Give me a break.

Then I got the book for Christmas from my mother-in-law, who is very generous and attentive to the kinds of things that I might like. I received it with a thank-you, then took it to my office, where I work as an editor for a religious publisher. I thought my coworkers would get a kick out of it; they did--the entire academic editorial staff (a systematic theologian, a philosopher, a historical theologian and a biblical scholar) flipped through it for what seemed like hours while I tried to get work done. Then a visiting author saw it on my shelf and borrowed it, returning it about a month later with nothing but praise for it. Two years later I decided, Maybe I should finally read this thing.

First off, it's not for everyone. My comic book book offers a brief orientation guide for new readers of the genre; you can get an excerpt here. But if you've not read a lot of comic books, the progression from frame to frame, from text box to text box, might seem a bit intimidating at first. With the advent of reading online, of course, such reading is less alien now, but even so you might be further thrown by Crumb's graphic style and text treatment--thick, heavy lines that feel positively antique, which would seem appropriate given the text if the text weren't peppered so generously with exclamation points, the punctuation of late modernity. As much as this is the sacred text of Scripture (NOTHING LEFT OUT!), it is also unabashedly a work of R. Crumb.

So I entered this book dubious, but I came out of it a true believer. Crumb is as reverent as someone who takes his content to be mythology could be, and his reverence carries over even into the earthiest parts of the book of Genesis--which is, as it happens, quite earthy. There's lots of sex, graphically depicted; a fair bit of murder, graphically depicted; and a variety of other images you may never have allowed yourself to imagine, graphically depicted. (The world outside of Noah's ark is a stark case in point.) Crumb drives home a point that pastors sometimes make with a wink: the Bible is a grown-up book. The jacket for The Book of Genesis Illustrated says it straightforwardly: "ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS.

So yeah, it's graphic. It's also reverent and insightful. Genesis has a lot of sex and violence, but it also has a lot of genealogies--begetting and begetting and begetting. Crumb's approach to that is remarkably human; sections of Scripture I often skip over in this case I read with pleasure, as Crumb presented distinct human beings with their loved ones in their element. The various altars of remembrance built throughout Genesis are made more real, more meaningful, by seeing not only what they may have looked like but how they may have been built (Jacob's pillar in Genesis 31 is an image that has stuck with me.) The tensions between people who are blood related but sworn enemies (Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and his brothers) are palpable, and consequently whatever resolution takes place between them is greatly satisfying.

Crumb has done his research; his text notes are worth reading, although I give Genesis more authority than he does. For me Genesis is a sacred text, the first account of God interacting with human beings, establishing his posture toward the world he created, which involves love and frustration and self-sacrifice and redemptive action. For Crumb it is the earliest artifact of the Jewish people, an identity marker that explains much and little at the same time. For Crumb, Genesis is what it is; I suppose it is for me as well. Whatever that is, The Book of Genesis Illustrated was a delight to read and worth the wait.

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A little Barbra Streisand to lighten our moods and light our paths:

Hegemonies light the corners of my mind . . .

Misty water-colored memories of the way we were . . .

Scattered pictures of the power we're now denied

Power we used on one another for the way we were.

Can it be that it all was so simple then,

Or has time rewritten every line . . .

If we had the chance to do it all again

Tell me: would we? Could we?

Hegemony may be useful. And yet

What's embarrassing to remember we may choose to forget.

It's self-righteousness we remember

Whenever we remember

The way we were.

***

Or, if you prefer, from the Who:

Meet the new boss . . . same as the old boss.

Team Haymitch: My Review of The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, I finally did it. Having resisted this latest youth culture icon for a couple of years, I saw the preview for the movie The Hunger Games and decided it looked pretty awesome, actually. So I dragged my wife, who uncharacteristically loved it, couldn't get enough of it. We left the theater with Hunger Games fever, and since you feed a fever (you starve a cold; I think that's how it works), we hurried ourselves over to Barnes & Noble and bought ourselves the first volume in the trilogy, adding books two and three in rapid succession. And now, five months after seeing the movie, I've finished all three books. And my fever has faded.

The Hunger Games is a clever book; anyone who can pull off a dystopian trilogy for kids and write in the first-person for a thousand pages and not lose me should be congratulated. Suzanne Collins creates some truly compelling characters, from Katniss the lead to the two boys vying silently and longingly for her affection, and the supporting cast from Cinna Kravitz to Elizabeth Trinket, Collins mad me care about a full canvas of characters, to mourn the deaths of some and wish for the deaths of others. At a time when the 99 percent and the 1 percent are already portrayed in stark contrast, Collins effectively exaggerates the divide while demonstrating effectively how people can be unknowingly complicit in horrific treatment of other human beings. Panem is the most stylized dystopia I've ever pictured in my head.

My wife is not as well read in dystopian fiction as I am; she was in it for the love triangle: Katniss and Peeta and Gale. I won't spoil anyone's fun by revealing the identity of the boy who gets the girl, but I will say that Collins handles the triangle well and resolves it in a satisfying way--by which I mainly mean that she put her with my preferred him, but also that she makes Katniss's choice not only sensible but wise and tender. That being said, I think that by writing to the lovers of love (like my wife) and to the lovers of societal decay (like me), Collins attempts too much. I suspect she wrote with the movies in mind, and in so doing failed to do justice to the books.

Love, internecine conflict and adolescence can occasionally work: Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story and all that. And it works in The Hunger Games to a point. But the big picture is too important, in Collins's telling, for a proper love story; I'm reminded of (spoiler alert) Rick's farewell to Ilsa in Casablanca: "The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." The further into the trilogy I got, the less a triangle made sense. Even as I sorted through Katniss's feelings from the vantage point of her inner dialogue in the dramatic present, I found it hard to believe she was really aching for Gale or falling for Peeta. She was too busy, in my mind, trying not to get killed.

And yet, all that lovey-dovey stuff distracted Collins, I think, from fully forming the universe she presents to us. I found myself wondering almost immediately, Where's Russia? I can hardly recall a civil war, let alone seventy-five years of the worst kinds of human rights abuses, that every other country in the world left alone. And yet Collins very deliberately sets The Hunger Games in the near-future of our very own world, with no intervention, no mention of even bordering countries like Canada and Mexico. She could have put Panem on its own planet, in its own universe, and still powerfully communicated her commentary on the plight of the poor in a world that is slanted toward the rich. But our world doesn't operate like this--rampant human rights abuses in every corner of it notwithstanding. Our world thinks that killing kids for sport is wrong, that no government or rebel force should be ignored. I kept waiting for news from beyond District 13, to learn that Panem was the tip of a tyrannical iceberg waiting to thaw, that there were persecuted peoples throughout the earth waiting to catch fire. I kept waiting, but Collins never delivered.

Here's what I think I would like, something for Collins to consider: a trilogy for a younger (or at least more lovelorn) audience that downplayed the games and the revolution and the death; and a trilogy for a grown-up (or at least more jaded) audience that puts Haymitch at the center of Panem's universe.

Haymitch, after all, is the most enigmatic and yet most fully-conceived character: We know that he's suffered, we know that he's stared the absurdity of existence in the face, we know that he still has the capacity to love but can't quite bring himself to do it. We know that Haymitch is capable of ferocity and heroism and wisdom. We know that Haymitch wouldn't be satisfied with one district or even one country having the right to self-determination while the rest of the world suffers tyranny or neglect. At least I know it: I'm Team Haymitch, all the way.

It's probably expecting too much from a book to ask for a different protagonist, or a different universe. And I like Katniss and liked an awful lot about this trio of books. But the author is expecting a lot from me: she wants me to drop good money on three books and four movies. She probably wouldn't mind if I bought an action figure or two. In exchange, I only ask for some focus: you can write a love story, or you can write a war story, but think long and hard before you write both at once.

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Neil Gaiman Is a Genius: My Review of American Gods

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You should congratulate me. I just got an e-reader. It's a Nook tablet, because what I really wanted to do was play games and watch movies, but it's nice to be able to read books too. My first download, my first read on the Nook, was Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Bottom line: good choice.

I've always been sort of a fan from afar of Gaiman. I read some of his comics and had a hard time understanding him. Then I read Neverwhere and found it stunning. I follow him on Twitter and enjoy his tweets. But it's been a while since I dipped my toe back into his literary pool. American Gods was a whim, but it fit pretty nicely into my recent reading and made me eager to read more of his work and genre. The conceit of the book is based on the reality that the United States of America is (if you set aside for a moment the native peoples who predate Europe's expansion into the new world) a nation of immigrants. All these people came from somewhere else, and the places they came from had their gods and legends and mythologies. Immigrants brought those gods with them, but time and dislocation have taken their toll on people's devotion, such that those transplanted gods are now forced to eke out a meager existence and scare up worship and sacrifice wherever they can find it.

The hero of the book, Shadow, knows none of this. He only knows that he's thisclose to being released from jail, a place he survived by keeping his nose clean and making a friend of his celly, Low Key Lyesmith. A tragedy secures Shadow an early release by a matter of days, and we discover that Shadow survives life by accepting the reality that he's presented with and doing what he feels is right and responsible from one moment to the next. That makes him a good lackey/understudy to Wednesday, an enigmatic and charismatic traveler he meets on the outside. Wednesday leads Shadow into the middle of a brewing war between the old, immigrant gods and the new breeds of the New World: gods of gadgetry and image and spectacle, gods that hardly earn the title but that pose a real threat to the gods of the ages.

We're meant to identify with Shadow, and if he weren't so endearingly adaptable and even keeled that would be nearly impossible: I'm a wee little man, raised on the easy life, whereas Shadow's had it hard his whole life. He's a big guy with good reason to be angry and lash out, and yet he never does. It's impressive, but hardly resonant. It becomes easier to identify with Shadow, however, when you go looking for someone else to identify with. They're all gods, it turns out (so, strike one); they're also all sort of sad and pathetic, and almost none of them approaches anything resembling nobility.

I understand Gaiman (and by extension his comics and even some of his tweets) a little better having read American Gods. He's a mystic and a mythologist, and the way he looks at the world and his underlying melancholy are in view throughout this book. Not that it hurts the storytelling; there were many times when I could not bring myself to stop reading--even though, because I was reading an ebook instead of a paperback, committing to another chapter could sometimes mean committing to another forty to fifty pages. But it's not just the epic that enthralled me; Gaiman tells a great story, but he also paints great scenes and portrays great characters. I did have a hard time keeping the pantheon straight, but that didn't matter as I pictured Easter, for example, the type of girl you'd do anything for and never take your eyes off of; or Czernobog, whose Eastern European accent rang in my ears even as I winced at the thought of his taking a sledgehammer to Shadow's/my head.

I learned a few things as I read, about mythology but also about technology, most notably that there's an outer limit to the number of characters from an ebook you can share on Twitter or Facebook. Gaiman offers lots of aphorisms cleverly contained in dialogue or circumspection or even simply narration. I highlighted a lot and wanted to share more than intellectual property laws and conventions apparently allow. So I guess you'll just have to read it for yourself--or, if you have a Nook, I could loan it to you, highlighting and all. Apparently you can do that sort of thing.

Every year I attend a retreat at which we circle up and share with one another our favorite book of the year. I always get a little anxious, because it's a room full of editors, and they are generally compelled by different genres than I am. But this year, when it comes to my turn to share, I will smile proudly and hold up my Nook tablet and click on the icon for American Gods. And I will tell them that it's my favorite book of the year and that they should read it. And I suppose here I'm telling you the very same thing.

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Bat-Canon: Must Reads for the Wholly Perplexed

My mind continues to return to The Dark Knight Rises, which is, in my mind, a good thing. I imagine there are people of other opinions; I read, for example, a strong case against the myth of redemptive violence by Shane Claiborne that, while not referencing Batman stories, probably could have if Shane had wanted a few more hits. I know that violence begets violence and that peace should be our pursuit; still, I like a good Batman movie, and I'm not particularly embarrassed by it.

I suspect that some folks are a little bewildered by the Batman mythology that makes up the trilogy of films. Assuming that to be the case, and assuming that people still have some energy for the subject matter, here are some good books, comics and graphic novels to help you enjoy the movies better.

First off, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. This has nothing to do with Batman, but everything to do with the primary medium through which Batman stories have been told. McCloud is a genius, and in this book he offers a McLuhanite understanding of comics as a medium, and all the possibilities that open up when we open ourselves to it. (If you're a little comic-timid, I'm sure this Ted Talk that I haven't watched is quite good.)

Next, Batman Unmasked by Will Brooker. This cultural history of the Caped Crusader (in straight prose--the only non-comic in this list) brilliantly offers meaning and continuity between a Batman who is occasionally campy (as in the 1960s TV show) and occasionally rightly asked "Why so serious?"

OK, now on to the Batman comics. Two are obvious and bookend the crimefighter's career; they're also both written by the same person: Frank Miller, who does dystopia better than pretty much anyone. Batman: Year One is an origin story that emphasizes Bruce Wayne's early wrestling with the nature of crime and the ethics of punishment. It's here that Batman says "I'm no killer" and eschews guns, so all fisticuffs aside, Shane Claiborne ought to like it. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is probably one of the two or three most influential comics ever written and the primary source material, I suspect, for Christopher Nolan's cinematic vision. It's set some years after Batman's retirement, and shows a world gone horribly bleak. In such a world, a humorless, anachronistic vigilante can actually inspire greatness. It's more violent than Year One, so Shane, don't say I didn't warn you. By the way, they're better read in reverse order; Dark Knight Returns was written first, and Year One is better read with it in mind.

Alan Moore's The Killing Joke is a particularly good and insightful look at the Joker and his relationship to Batman. I don't love the art, but as a story it's tragic and genius. Very disturbing, just so you know; probably a chief source for the second Batman film, featuring Heath Ledger as the Joker. For a helpful insight into Batman's complicated relationship with Ra's al Ghul (and family), check out Batman: Son of the Demon. It's been a while since I read it, but everything I know about Ra's I got from it--and that seemed to be enough.

Finally (nothing on Bane, sorry), because I'm really into Neil Gaiman right now, you should read his piece "When Is a Door" in Secret Origins Special #1, an otherwise missable one-off comic. Like Brooker, Gaiman brilliantly connects the dots between the campy and the caustic in Batman's various mythologies; "When is a door" is a philosophical statement, a suggestion that our context shapes our ability to understand what is good and true, or something like that.

Honorable mention to Jeph Loeb's Catwoman: When in Rome, a short story following Selina Kyle on an intriguing caper. Batman: Year One gives us a similarly insightful look into the Catwoman, but I always liked this one.

That's it. Happy Bat-reading!

Heroes of the Everyday Sort: The Dark Knight Rises

Don't tell my friends, but last night I saw The Dark Knight Rises, the third in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. I don't want my friends to know, since next Saturday I'll be seeing it (again) with them, in glorious iMax, at Navy Pier on Chicago's lakefront. It'll be the first time I've seen one of the films on iMax, and I'm pretty excited, but I don't want to ruin the experience of the film for my friends. So I'm keeping it secret.

I would have been content to wait, I think. But my wife thought it almost criminal that, after seeing The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man on their respective opening nights, I would let this most important superhero movie of the year languish unwatched on screens for more than a week. So she mustered up her courage and went to opening night with me.

The debut was marred, of course, by the horrific shooting in a theater outside Denver, a shooting that some think was inspired by the trilogy. And in one sense they're probably right: dark themes can evoke dark thoughts and correspondingly dark deeds. And the Batman trilogy is, in fact, dark and gothic. There are moments in each film that might well haunt some people, might inspire others to indulge their sociopathy. In fact, much of the canon of Batman itself explores these ideas--whether our heroes fight pre-existent evils or provide fuel and a forum for evil to perpetuate itself. It's this kind of circumspection that lifts Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy above the pack of other superhero films, what makes these random acts of violence that seem to trace back to the films incidental rather than essential. The Dark Knight Rises is completing a Batman story but it's telling our story--a story of fear and what we do with it.

I could talk about the details of the story, of arch-villain Bane's concealed origin story and startling swagger; of cat burglar Selina Kyle's perfect blend of self-assurance, guilt and thinly veiled panic; of the guarded disappointment from Bruce Wayne's proxy parents Lucius Fox, Jim Gordon and Alfred Pennyworth; of the knowing reverence and yet cynical judgment of orphaned rookie cop John Blake. I could even talk about the surprising omissions--most notably the silence surrounding Heath Ledger's Joker, who was the apparent center of the second film, and whose memory Christopher Nolan chose to honor by leaving out of the third. I could talk about the profound aphorisms that snuck their way into the film's dialogue or the action that shook my seat from start to finish. But I'd rather talk about the Scarecrow.

Jonathan Crane, criminal psychiatrist, figured prominently in Batman Begins, the first film in the trilogy, and has minor roles in the second and third. Whereas in the first film he was menacing, he has since provided something closer to comic relief--at least as comic as a film can be in which a billionaire dresses in tights and fights crime, while his city is terrorized by a clown. A student of fear, Crane dressed himself in the first film as a scarecrow and terrorized people for fun while making his living as a proxy for Ra's al Ghul's incursion into Gotham City. In the second film he was reduced to a petty criminal. In this film he serves as a judge of the new Gotham, the Gotham "liberated" by Bane so that the powerful, who for so long had tyrannized the poor, now are themselves subjects of tyranny. The people of Christopher Nolan's Batman universe, as a result, are judged by fear.

Fear runs through all three films like a current, and by the end of every film we think we understand it. In this third installment we learn the truth: we've been wrong. Fear is not the enemy to be mastered, not the thing to be conquered in pursuit of immortality; fear is in fact our friend, who properly understood energizes our right pursuits and turns us away from our wrong pursuits. Accepting fear as our friend opens us up to another friend: humility, which teaches us to accept the things we cannot change, change the things we can, and to know the difference betwen the two. All along we've been misdirected by our understanding of fear (misdirection is another theme of the film), but in this film an older, wiser Bruce Wayne can learn lessons that eluded him in earlier installments. We're older and wiser too--more than ten years removed from the terrorist attacks of September 11 that made us so confused about a proper sense of fear. Events like the shooting in Aurora, Colorado, threaten to drag us back into confusion, but I do hope we learn the lessons Batman learns in The Dark Knight Rises. What we need, year after year, are not heroes like Batman, whose abilities are beyond reality. We need heroes of the everyday sort, heroes who take notice of the everyday sorts of injustices and indignities that we far too easily neglect, who accept fear as part of life, and who let it push them to rise above it.

Whatever a Spider Can: Two Reviews and a Gift

It's really a great time to be me. Honestly, if you had told me when I was ten that in thirty years or so all my favorite superheroes would be topping the box office charts, I would have looked down at the ground, shrugged, said nothing and prayed silently that our conversation would soon end. If you had told me fifteen years ago that Marvel Entertainment Group, then languishing at less than a dollar a share on the DJIC, would soon be making a billion-dollar movie about the Avengers, I would have grinned awkwardly and shuffled away at my earliest convenience. But here we are, in 2012, and every few weeks or so I march out to the theater and watch all my heroes come to life.Like I say, it's a good time to be me.

The latest turn at the box office goes to The Amazing Spider-Man, which suffered a fair bit of incredulity thanks to the short span of time between its debut and the close of an earlier Spider-Man film franchise. Toby Maguire's Peter Parker has been supplanted by Andrew Garfield's take on the same; in place of Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane Watson we've been introduced to Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy. Norman Osborne, so prominent in the first franchise, has slipped to the shadows in 2012--still an ominous presence, but so far we haven't seen his face.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) is now, officially, my wife's favorite superhero movie. The chemistry between Garfield and Stone is great, and they pull off a nice awkward teen love vibe, despite both actors being firmly ensconced in their twenties. The quality of acting in this film is, however, not an improvement on the acting in the first franchise. I rewatched Spider-Man (2002) shortly after seeing The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) for the second time. Maguire, Dunst, Willem DaFoe as Norman Osborne and James Franco as his conflicted son Harry lead a strong cast of familiar character actors in that one, and while the leads seem less convincing in some respects as teenagers than Garfield and Stone, the former film is far more plausible. (Come on, a high school student is the lead intern at a multinational biotechnology company?) And as a coming of age film (trilogy of films, really), the first franchise is actually a better piece.

The key distinctives, for me, are the fight scenes, the villain, and the relationship of Peter Parker to the audience.

I remember sitting in the theater at my first viewing of the 2002 film and thinking how ridiculous the fight scenes looked, like an oversized episode of the Power Rangers. I had that same experience on my most recent viewing; the innovations in special effects over the ensuing decade are painfully obvious. That didn't have to be the case; other films around the same time, such as the 2000 film X-Men, didn't seem so overtly choreographed in their battles. Neither did they have the forced banter of Spider-Man calling the Green Goblin "Gobby" within a few minutes of their first encounter. The director pandered a bit too slavishly to the fanboy audience he hoped would drive ticket sales; or perhaps more likely, the director realized that Power Rangers fans would be looking for a film that delivered exactly what struck me as so silly. In that respect he was right: I remember a theater full of little kids freaking out over the action scenes that struck me as utterly ridiculous, laughing uproariously at the banter that was causing me to groan. The film scored $800 million-plus in global box office. Guess the director was right.

I've never been a huge Willem DaFoe fan, maybe because he played Jesus so unconvincingly in The Last Temptation of Christ. And in the clunky Green Goblin costume, with his heavily affected snarl, he looked and sounded ridiculous. But on my more recent viewing I was struck by how effective he was as Norman Osborne, at times utterly fragile, at times just barely containing the madness. In the new film the villain is much more sympathetic, as Curt Connors serves both as a link to Peter's past and as a stand-in for our own frustrations with weakness. His desire for "a world without weakness" is as absurd a premise to me as his selection of a high school student as his chief research aide, but I suppose you allow some absurdity in every superhero story. You root for him in his quixotic quest to grow back his arm (why not get a prosthetic?), and you suffer for him as you watch the madness gradually take over. Plus, when he fights, you actually can imagine someone getting hurt. So, like the fight scenes, the 2012 film wins out over the 2002 film in the villain department.

In the case of Peter's relationship to the audience, I declare a tie, only because I find the contrast so interesting. It's a vindication of the controversial reboot, I think; alternate visions of imagined characters don't have to compete with one another if each is fresh enough to stand on its own. In 2002 Peter was a narrator, filling the audience in as the story moved along. Maguire never quite winks at the camera a la Ferris Bueller, but you do feel an affinity with him, an almost conspiratorial relationship. By contrast, Garfield's Peter Parker doesn't know we're along for the ride--the director's goal of showing us the world through his eyes notwithstanding. We are voyeurs in this Parker's world, in part because he's a true teenager, and all worlds revolve around the teenagers in them but also because this Parker doesn't know himself well enough to narrate for us, to invite us in. I'm reminded by Maguire of the true original Spider-Man from the early 1960s, who let us in on the joke in every panel. Garfield's Spider-Man reminds me of the stories told by Brian Michael Bendis, which rely less on narration and vocalization and more on nonverbals. Maguire as Spider-Man is self-disclosing, and we love him for it. Garfield is brooding and inscrutable, and we love him for it.

Anyway, Spider-Man inspired a character, Night Vision, that I created in my book Comic Book Character to give a sense of the human drama in all superhero stories. I include that excerpt here as a gift to you. For the whole book, click here.

***

Consider a typical day for a junior-high-aged hero. In the tradition of matching initials (from Lois Lane to Bruce Banner), let’s call him Fritz Fryling. Fritz wakes up, tucks his wings into an oversized shirt and walks to school—even though he could fly. As he reaches his gym locker, he hears behind him the first of many taunts from the class bully: “There’s Owl-boy. I hope you don’t lose those Coke-bottle glasses of yours during dodge ball. Hoot hoot!” Then our mutant friend feels the sharp sting of a wet towel snapped against his legs.

He knows he could spin his head all the way around to face his attacker; he knows that he could easily fly out of reach of the towel; he even knows that his razor-sharp, retractable talons could quickly shred a bully whom no one would miss for long. He knows that he’s smarter and nicer to girls than the bully; he even knows that in reality he’s stronger and more dangerous than the bully. But he stays silent, and he keeps his secret.

That’s just gym class. We, the readers, know what our hero’s classmates, teachers and family don’t know, and we sympathize with his plight. And in a way, we share in his suffering because we are all too familiar with the pain of alienation, of victimization. We know that bullies call the shots in junior high and that one moment of satisfaction in returning violence against a popular, powerful nemesis would open the door to all kinds of trouble.

We know this whether we are the bullied or the bully. There are social forces at work in our lives, whatever season we find ourselves in. We are part of a pecking order because fallen human beings operate consciously and unconsciously in power dynamics. When we are weak, we wish we were strong. When we are strong, we fight to retain our strength.

I’d like to pretend, for example, that I was always the victim of such bullying and never the perpetrator, but I can’t. I certainly could have been: when I was a child, I was hardly ever in the in-crowd. I was a band geek who collected comic books, for heaven’s sake. As such, I was manipulated into helping pretty girls cheat on their finals, I was called a nerd and a loser to my face, and I was pointed out for public ridicule and threatened with a beating on more than one occasion.

And yet, I managed to find a way of asserting myself within the caste I found myself in. My friends and I invented ways of ostracizing people that would cause maximum pain—the most unimaginative being “the group” membership cards we passed out to those people we considered part of our A-list. (Imagine the humiliation of being rejected for membership in a group of nerds.) At my worst, I made a girl cry all the way home from school, and I beat up a boy for being too new to our town. I didn’t have much social power to defend, but I defended what little I did have with ferocity.

But back to our hero. Fritz trudges his way through a day filled with occasional humiliations and the constant awareness that at any moment he could overturn the power dynamics in place. That night he hits the streets, with wings spread wide open and talons extended. He is no longer Owl-boy; now he is Night Vision, ready to use his power without restraint against whatever forces of evil threaten the peace. And so are we. Just as our hero has escaped his everyday world to live free as his expanded self, so his readers leave behind the frustrations of paying bills and finishing homework and avoiding trouble and enduring rejection to play hero.

A Torrent of Suffering People: My Review of The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My job is something of a conversation piece. When I share with a new friend that I edit books for a living, I get one of a relatively predictable range of responses, from the look of bewilderment that books are still being published and people are still reading them (I've seen that look in the mirror a few times, I must confess), to the fast-pitch of a long fantasized but never acknowledged idea for a first book, to my favorite: the broad smile as my newfound friend recalls a favorite or recently read book and talks at length about what's so great (or so terrible) about it. People who read but don't write love to read, and they love to talk about what they're reading or what they have read, and they love to hear about what I'm editing and what editing is like. It's a fun window into a friend's personality and interests, and a great way to quickly strengthen ties and build trust with each other. Plus, I sound like a big shot.

My neighbor across the street is one of those third types; we honestly have nearly nothing in common besides a zip code, an area code and a common love of good books. We've been neighbors for a long time now, so the glamour of my profession has long worn off for him, but he still relishes the opportunity to share what he's reading, and in the case of The Worst Hard Time, he went so far as to loan me the book. I like history, and I was in the market for another book, so I took him up on it.

The Great American Dust Bowl, for me, has been a bit of an enigma. I've seen some of the photos from the Great Plains of the mid-1930s, heard the songs of the era, read the Cliffs Notes for The Grapes of Wrath, and imagined how hard life must have been at the close of the agrarian age in America, during a drought whose damage was compounded by a worldwide financial crisis. But I really had no idea how truly bad it was, how calamitous a man-made disaster started brewing almost as soon as the frontier closed. "Dust Bowl," under the dust of time, sounds cute and innocuous, like a football joke in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. In reality it was the comeuppance for decades of criminally negligent pillaging of land, an epic of devastation that left many people dead, many more physically compromised and psychologically traumatized, the effects of which can still be seen as you drive through Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle and other southern plains states.

So, to the extent that Timothy Egan paints a picture of devastation, his book is remarkable. You can almost taste the dirt swarming the sky, can almost feel the clumps of topsoil raining down on you. You sweat in the hot summers that Egan narrates; you close your eyes and picture dugout houses with earthworms and black widow spiders crawling the walls and filthy sheets vainly blocking the onslaught of dust. His characterizations of the storms that "Dust Bowl" so inadequately evokes are vivid and arresting. It's the people Egan writes about that I find to be a bit much.

Don't get me wrong; I feel great sympathy for each character--real people, I should say, some of whom Egan interviewed, some of whom he discovered secondhand, and one of whom he anthologizes from a nearly lost diary. It's just that there are so many of them. Town after town, household after household, person after person, they swirl around me like the plague of grasshoppers he reports toward the end of the book. No sooner do I begin to recall details already reported on the character of the moment--details that orient me to this latest scene--than I am disoriented by a shift of focus to someone else, in some other town, with some other network of relationships. It's a torrent of suffering people; I can't concentrate long enough to truly relate.

I'm reminded of a time I was in New Orleans, walking in the cool of the evening, following a dog for kicks. I encountered a homeless man and handed him a dollar and continued to follow the dog. I passed another homeless man and gave him a dollar and kept following the dog. Two or three more homeless people, two or three more dollars. The dog led me up and over a hill, where I found myself facing twenty or thirty homeless people warming themselves by a fire. They looked at me, and I looked at them, and I turned around and left.

That was visceral, face to face. The Worst Hard Time recounts a story that I am separated from by decades. I read it on mass-market paper at my leisure. Quite frankly, I find it hard to stay present to the story. For all the immense suffering these people endured--some of the worst in American history, at a time within two generations of this typing--I find it hard to care.

It's really too bad, and I can't blame Egan entirely for it. Compassion fatigue is a real thing, and I do a fair bit of reading about people today who desperately need my compassion. But as good a writer as Egan can be, he's better at writing about forces of nature than he is at writing about people. They come off as often as not as caricatures, bedecked with purplish prose and Americana. I endured their tales of woe, eager to encounter each new storm.

When I was in college a dust storm blew through our campus. I'd never experienced anything like it: blinding and painful dust, blowing fast and relentlessly, finding its way onto every surface and messing everything up. My friend had borrowed my first-edition compilation of The Dark Knight Returns, one of my prized possessions, and tossed it under his bed; I got it back utterly coated in dirt and grime, most of which (though not nearly all of it) tracing back to this storm. I think of that night on my campus and I imagine waking up every day for the better part of a decade waiting for the storm to come, going to bed every night after surveying the day's damage; I imagine breathing the dust in and coughing the dust up till my ribs cracked from the exertion of it. I imagine those things and I feel for the people who endured it. I read The Worst Hard Time and then I move on to the next book. It's not all Egan's fault, but I wish for the sake of the memory of those people that he'd held my attention better.

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Siri's Prayer

Has anyone done this yet? Seems like someone would have by now; Apple even set us up by running an ad with a kid telling Siri to "call me Rock God."

My Siri, which is in the cloud,
Hallowed be my name.

My kingdom come,
My will be done,
On my phone as it is in my head.

Give me right this minute everything I want,
Translate my malaprops,
Even as I barely tolerate your misinterpretations.

And lead me not into bad information,
But deliver me the goods.

For mine is your kingdom,
Your glory,
And your power forever.

The Eternal Destiny of the Cool: My Review of Love Wins

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was sympathetic, but I was skeptical, when I first heard of Love Wins, a hipster treatise on Jesus and human destiny. I've appreciated Rob Bell the several times I've seen him speak; I liked his cadence and his rhythm and his horn rims and color scheme, but I also liked his way of thinking about the Bible. As evangelical as he is--he was raised in Michigan and educated at Wheaton College, for pete's sake--he manages to step back from evangelical subcultural ways of seeing and find a new angle that is nonetheless evangelical. And hipster. Bell makes it cool to be nerdy about the Ancient Near East. Without Rob Bell I'd not be hip to Jesus' Hebrew identity and its implications for how I read the New Testament. I'd probably also still be wearing lame round Harry Potter glasses instead of these cool boxy black frames. I owe Rob Bell a lot.

But given all that, perhaps you can understand my skepticism about Love Wins, which was, barely a year ago, aggressively promoted and derided as a book rejecting the cosmic reality of hell and the eternal, conscious punishment of the wicked. My skepticism was, frankly, partly due to my sympathies. It's neither fun nor cool to think or talk about the fate of people who don't believe that Jesus is Messiah, the Way, the Truth and the Life, that his cross and resurrection secure our eternities for us. Hell is a major buzzkill, and I'm sympathetic to any argument against it. But I had my doubts that someone as stylized as Bell could write a strong enough case for setting aside the well-vested evangelical tradition about hell. Those three-, two- and one-line paragraphs, those vast blank spaces between thoughts, this mere 35,000-word book could hardly knock hell off its privileged perch. Could it?

I owe Rob Bell an apology because I've made style and substance mutually exclusive, and Bell has shown that they don't need to be. As fast a phenomenon as Love Wins was (it's been in print fourteen months and had two books refuting it within four months of its release, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about it?), I'm now imagining that it took Bell years to write. In some ways it consolidates years' worth of themes that he's traveled around speaking on--he almost slips and tells us on more than one occasion that "the gods aren't angry," and each chapter could be easily reimagined as one of his popular Nooma videos--but it also reflects a whole lot of reading and digesting and thinking, and writing and revising and refining and distilling. Love Wins is simplicity on the far, far side of complexity.

That's good, because Rob Bell needed to do his homework on this one. It's not just hell he's playing with, his critics would argue; it's the very nature of God. And Bell knows it: in fact he writes Love Wins because of what a more hell-happy worldview has insinuated about God's character. Bell includes a nice, albeit too brief, list of further reading at the end of the book; I'm not sure it's an adequate list, because while Bell has clearly done his homework, his book is really only the Cliffs Notes on the subject of hell for the rest of us. There's no rigorous debate with his opponents; you could read this book and imagine that any such opponents are on the fringes of society and the verge of extinction. Trust me, they're not: I'm a little nervous to click send on this review for fear of how people near and far will react to the number of stars I gave it. My initial reaction when Love Wins came out was (and I think I posted this somewhere), "If I'm going to read about something as significant as the fate of every person who ever lived, I'm not going to read about it from Rob Bell." I'm glad I did, and I think he did a great job with it, but I'm not going to debate anybody about it till I've read a lot more on the subject.

In this respect, Rob Bell reminds me of Miles Davis. Not the greatest trumpet player who ever lived, Miles Davis was nevertheless a musical genius, understanding the evolution and interplay of multiple genres more acutely than almost anyone. He was also a great popularizer, tracking emerging trends and new insights on the jazz scene and bringing them to a wider audience. Given the hegemony of more traditional evangelical perspectives on the fate of those who have not professed faith in Jesus, and given how freely the dominant culture-makers in contemporary evangelicalism use their power to maintain that hegemony, and given the trauma that such a view of hell can induce on people of good will and fragile souls, I'd say a little Miles Davis might be the best thing for us. So thanks, Rob Bell, for Love Wins and my glasses and for giving me new ways of thinking about the eternal destiny of the cool. And I'm sorry I've not given more respect to your particular genius, your particular coolness.

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