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Joined: May 30, 2002 Posts: 487 Location: Ohio - USA
Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2005 8:05 am Post subject: The Big Leagues - Round Table
This one is for all the "little guys" out there, the ones who get picked on, bullied, shunned, not invited to any reindeer games, you know the ones. (kinda like myself)
What do you feel some of the non "A-List" characters need in order to be bumped up into the big leagues .. or at least be included in books these days?
For example (now I'm not a big DC follower so I could be wrong about this) Blue Beetle wasn't a very big character, but they built him up, made him "cool" in a way, then of course killed him off. Which brings up another thought, should B-List characters be bumped up/reworked to be more popular just so they can kill them off with a bang?
(And don't forget, if there's a topic you would like to discuss PM me and I'll add it to the list)
Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2005 5:23 pm Post subject: Re: The Big Leagues - Round Table
Sharby wrote:
What do you feel some of the non "A-List" characters need in order to be bumped up into the big leagues .. or at least be included in books these days?
A marketing campain to raise public awareness, and suitabl merchandising.
Auqaman was made an A-Lister because was on Super Friends and he will be as long as that image sticks in our minds.
Blue Beatle may have been raised in value recently, but ask your average Joe Schmoe NON-Comic book fan about it him.
I barely know about his revamp and only know the character because the character was one of MY DAD's favorites in the 40's.
A-List value is simple a rating of public knowledge and popularity.
The B-Listers can and should get their own books. They can be done well. Kevin Smith did a great job making Green Arrow from something of a joke into a character with some depth. But he STILL hasn't made him an "A" lister.
I think B-listers have the potential for much better drama and story telling. Their stength is that they can evolve with the times, and eventually die and stay dead. For all his powers, Superman can't do that. As an Icon he is forced to forever be the man in tights with a red cape. Will Superman Red and Blue ever be remebered as anything but a emabarasment? When Supes was killed, did we have ANY doubt he would one day come back to life. We all knew DC's bottom line wouldn't let him stay dead, and that is his TRUE Kryptonite.
Superman's greatest enemy is his "A" list status. The fame that will never allow him to become something else not more, not less. We KNOW he's always going to win, and always going to come back as long as he's a saleable property.
That's why we don't NEED to read his book.
The only hope he has to ever "Rest in Peice" is a change in copyright and Trademark Law.
When all our current "A" listers enter the public domain and become our communial property, we may see a chance for "B" listers to take their place.
Until then, the Icons will continue to self perpetuate, and as archetypes everyone will becompared to them.
Every super powered man with a cape is Superman. (Shazam!'s Capt. Marvel is a perfect example.)
He's 2 to 5 years younger than Supes. Why is he not an "A" lister? Because his Archtype was filled by Superman.
Capt. Mar-Vel was "strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilites far beyond mortal men." Because he wasn't Superman he was allowed to die and stay dead. In fact... the fact he HAS stayed dead is what defined him.
Ever hero without powers is Batman.
Ever female is Wonder Woman.
On JLA can anyone say that Flash's personality is almost the same as Spider-man's?
Want to make an "A" lister? Find an Archtype that hasn't been filled in the public's mind.
But honestly, I like my "B" listers where they are. Far enough outside the main steam to stay interesting and human enough for me to releate too.
Joined: May 31, 2002 Posts: 637 Location: Planet Mongo
Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2005 10:29 pm Post subject: Re: The Big Leagues - Round Table
Hey Mar-Vel ain't dead! He got trapped inside a soul gem once, which means they can bring him back anytime the editors can remember part of him is still inside the gem.
I'd start buying that series again, if someone could torture Jim Starlin enough to make it happen.
Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 10:05 am Post subject: Re: The Big Leagues - Round Table
Ratteler wrote:
Want to make an "A" lister? Find an Archtype that hasn't been filled in the public's mind.
This is the most effective way to do so. It is not the only way, but a strong, solid archetype is the most effective way to burn oneself into the collective memory and try to keep hold there.
Ratteler wrote:
A marketing campain to raise public awareness, and suitabl merchandising.
Absolutely. A solid marketing campaign won't sell just anything if it turns out it's total garbage, but even just a moderately good tale can be turned into a monster hit with big dollars and smart marketing behind it. And while there's lots to be said about word-of-mouth, you can't reach A-list status without lots of money and someone who knows what they're doing promoting the character.
Ratteler wrote:
Blue Beatle may have been raised in value recently, but ask your average Joe Schmoe NON-Comic book fan about it him.
I barely know about his revamp and only know the character because the character was one of MY DAD's favorites in the 40's.
Some of the names brought up here are actually former A-listers whose legacy has been squandered. But perhaps you young'uns might not remember the status they once had.
Captain Marvel was once nearly neck-and-neck with Superman for superhero supremacy. Copyright battles with Marvel, Archie-style direction, a lack of deep pockets are among the things that allowed the Shazam! legacy to erode.
Similarily, Blue Beetle had been a popular title for Fox Comics and then later became Charlton Comics' flagship hero, top favorite for those who enjoyed cornball, fun-loving superfolks (the closest we've had recently to this type would be Allred's Madman, although Spiderman sometimes ventured into this territory in the '70s and '80s). If all you remember about Charlton was the really bad knock-offs and licensed products from the '70s, then you don't remember Charlton. They were always low-budget, badly-written, poorly-edited comics (because the company loathed spending any money), but they did have their occasional runaway success, and the Beetle was chief of these.
Other A-listers who've been usurped or forgotten:
The Shadow. Batman has all but eradicated this fellow, despite the fact that The Shadow has a longer legacy that reached far outside the comic world into serialized radio plays and classic pulp novels. Now, we have what exactly? Vague images of Alec Baldwin doing a pantomime?
The Phantom Lady. Before Wonder Woman made the streets safe for female superheroes again, The Phantom Lady invented and then popularized the notion (Harvey's The Black Cat debuted the same month but was short-lived; these two were the very first). But where The Phantom Lady excelled was in bringing peril and T&A to comics (much due to Matt Baker's reworking of her), spawning a large number of now-classic bondage covers and achieving a notoriety that added fuel to Frederic Wertham's anti-comics crusade (one of her covers is possibly the most frequently cited one in reviews of his "Seduction of the Innocent"). The comics code legacy and Fox Comics' bankruptcy virtually ended her published life, and she could arguably be said to have achieved A-list status after her published reign, rather than during. AC Comics and DC both claim ownership of the copyright (AC's version is known as Nightveil), and while she appears in DC occasionally, she is somewhat stalemated creatively.
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle: where is she now?
Flash Gordon
Plastic Man
The Spectre: The Spectre was as close to a true archetype as you could get -- the total embodiment of vengeance. John Ostrander understood this when trying to resurrect his legacy in the '90s, but while somewhat successful, will never reach that former glory, let alone the character's full potential. The same thing is gradually happening with Neil Gaiman's Sandman (embodiment of dreams).
Achieving A-list status is one thing; maintaining it is quite another.
Ratteler wrote:
The B-Listers can and should get their own books. They can be done well. Kevin Smith did a great job making Green Arrow from something of a joke into a character with some depth. But he STILL hasn't made him an "A" lister.
Green Arrow has had his moments. The trouble with G.A. is that he works best as a foil for everyone else. He is necessarily a team character, even though his persona pushes him to be a "lone wolf" type. He set the direction that Wolverine followed and then bettered. You always want a good, cynical muckraker in a team, unless you want them to turn into the Care Bears.
Ratteler wrote:
I think B-listers have the potential for much better drama and story telling...
I will agree there, particularily because if you don't have a conglomerate looking to make a lot of money off of an A-list venture and sinking big marketing bucks into it, if you don't have everyone breathing down your neck on that, then you can produce something far more creative, experimental and risky. There are so many storylines that the editors / writers / artists of the top names will never touch. Green Lantern had to drop back to B-list status for some time before it became viable to turn Hal into an alcoholic.
Ratteler wrote:
When all our current "A" listers enter the public domain and become our communial property, we may see a chance for "B" listers to take their place.
Don't expect this to happen in our lifetimes.
Aside from the archetype, marketing and continual maintenance, something that a character needs to reach the A-list is a solid "moment" (although this moment can cover a period of time, as long as it's not an ongoing storyline) for people to latch onto. A single mental image to apply the archetype to. The pivotal moment when Peter Parker's Uncle Ben dies, the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, the launch of the last son of Krypton with hope that he will outlive his dying planet -- these are powerful emotional moments that etch their way into our subconscious and take hold there. They are never rewritten, but are often revisited. The more powerful it is, the more potentially enduring the character will be. Of the current "A-listers," Wonder Woman's is the most tenuous, and even that origin still has some power.
One key ingredient has got to be good writing. Grant Morrison made Animal Man matter, only for other writers to try to turn him into Swamp Thing: we already had a Swamp Thing.
Good writing might well be wasted without marketing, but however well you market crap, sooner or later someone'll notice it's crap.
Character most deserving of A-list status but lacking it? Wonder Woman. Everyone knows the TV series, but who reads the comic? For that matter, who writes and draws it? Since Perez and then Byrne, God knows. All you notice are the most beautiful covers in mainstream comics. This character is already known to the general public: she should get the investment Superman and Batman do, but first, she needs a writer with a vision.
IMP. _________________ RIVER: skin on the outside. First chapter FREE from www.ianmpalmer.com
Posted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 2:09 pm Post subject: Re: The Big Leagues - Round Table
I agree that the b-list people can have more room to grow and change. They also don't suffer from overload. Honestly, since Wolverine is in every book out there I am bit sick of seeing him. But there can be a good book that gets back to the root of him and interests me.
Wolverine is a symptom of the disease. He used to be interesting because he had this impulse just to cut everyone, and suppressed it. Now he doesn't suppress it, he's no longer interesting, and he's the biggest superhero on the planet. I've seen talk that DC wants to get some brightness back when infinite Crisis is over, and I look forward to that if it happens. If it does, perhaps Marvel will follow.
Chasart, did you read Kyle Baker's Plastic Man? Hardly traditional, but brilliant and the most adventurous thing from the major publishers for years. Terminated now, of course: did nobody buy it?
IMP. _________________ RIVER: skin on the outside. First chapter FREE from www.ianmpalmer.com
One key ingredient has got to be good writing. Grant Morrison made Animal Man matter, only for other writers to try to turn him into Swamp Thing: we already had a Swamp Thing...
With far more potential was his reinvention of the Doom Patrol. That was truly definitive IMO, but it was poorly marketed (it was just before Vertigo got the green light), so those who did buy it were too young and too X-men -hungry to "get it."
It takes more than good writing to reach that pinnacle, but point taken.
palmers wrote:
Character most deserving of A-list status but lacking it? Wonder Woman... she should get the investment Superman and Batman do, but first, she needs a writer with a vision...
She was definitely an A-lister, but that status has not been maintained well.
The trouble with WW is that she's had several often-wimpy reinventions already and even the best of these is hamstrung by her origin. DC is too afraid to deviate from what they think gives her longevity (the ties to Greek myth), but there are also several aspects of that current origin that DC is too afraid to explore.
The power of myth is something that resonates powerfully in fiction, but mythology on the other hand can get too wrapped up in its trappings to speak to the modern world (ultimately, this even dragged down Perez, who was by far the best writer on the title). The objective of any central character is that they have to be relevant. Everything else is window dressing.
Probably the best thing someone could do for WW is to mostly pull her out of the Greek Mythology, redevelop Amazon culture with a careful eye as to what a nation of female-exclusive peoples would be in our modern world, and spawn WW off as a product of that, perhaps occasionally torn between a distaste toward mankind and a deep-rooted curiosity. You'd have a lot of other elements to tackle in there, equality of the sexes, possible lesbianism in the Amazon culture... and you can start to see why DC wouldn't touch this. They're not going to take an A-lister and throw her into moral controversies. Death, good -- morality, bad. Mike Grell courted character suicide with Green Arrow... he did well enough to keep the title afloat at the time, but where does that leave GA now?
Ironically, WW is a character whose very nature wants to throw her into moral issues.
The other do-able concept would be to throw her way back into the past, perhaps during the Roman occupation, pre-diluvian Atlantis, medieval ages, whatever, and if it fails, call it an Elseworlds or whatever those are now. But then, you could still have the relevancy problem.
palmers wrote:
Chasart, did you read Kyle Baker's Plastic Man? Hardly traditional, but brilliant and the most adventurous thing from the major publishers for years. Terminated now, of course: did nobody buy it?
Kyle did a Plastic Man?!? Aside from Kabuki and some of Moore's work, I've been mostly away from the comic store for the better part of 12 years. But this, I know, has got to be good....
Plastic Man's just finished, about twenty issues. Very funny, pretty subversive for a superhero title, and I'm missing it already. I don't think Kyle's ever put a foot wrong: I've loved everything he's done, and Why I Hate Saturn is one of my favourite books. Publishers should be climbing over each other to use this man to get comics into mainstream bookshops bigtime.
I sort of agree with you over Wonder Woman, except that I think they should ignore the origin. Everyone keeps trying to fix it, when they could be giving it no more attention than Superman's Krypton: it just was. For the most part, WW seems to have been either uber-feminist or Superman in a bra: I'd like to see someone thinking about what an iconic superheroine might really be like.
Quite separately, it would be interesting to see your more-faithful interpretation of the mythological origin and character developed. You'd think it would still be too close to WW to get away with, except that they got away with Glory.
Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol was interesting, but a bit too far-out for me. Sentient streets and so on are okay as long as I can see the point, but if there's no point, then it's just random crazy ideas. My kids do that all the time. I put up with a lot of oddness from Morrison in the hope that one day he'll do to my head again what he did with The Coyote Gospel.
IMP. _________________ RIVER: skin on the outside. First chapter FREE from www.ianmpalmer.com
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