October 09, 2009|By Michael Sragow
Let us now praise Comic-Con. On the occasion of the 10th annual Baltimore Comic-Con, it's time to celebrate comic-book fans and what they've wrought. By providing an audience for comic books that shared the concerns and upheld the standards of literary yarn-spinners as different as J.R.R. Tolkien and Jim Thompson, it expanded critical and popular recognition across the board for the richness and pertinence of escapism.
In particular, this audience helped revitalize the fantasy heritage of moviemaking, compelling filmmakers such as Peter Jackson to renew the expansionist and inventive impulses of early masters from Fritz Lang to Ray Harryhausen. Demanding the same quality from moviemakers as they did from graphic novelists, fans upped the expectations of what regular filmgoers could expect from the entire sci-fi/fantasy realm.
It's easy to blame fan-boys and fan-girls for the pop tyranny that rules the marketplace and for special-effects debauchery such as the second "Transformers" movie. Easy, and unfair. Fans are not responsible for studio chiefs who over-spend on spectacle and leave storytelling to independents or specialty companies.
If anything, the comic-book fan base has encouraged moviemakers to grow ever more serious in their action-packed reveries, embracing films as relentlessly grim as Christopher Nolan's Batman movies and as aggressively chaotic as "District 9." I think those films, and others like them, sink under the weight of their ambitions. But comic-book movies now contain a diversity of pleasures, as endearing and silly as the first "Fantastic Four" and as haunting as the best parts of the "Hellboy" series.
I love the way Sam Raimi turned "Spider-Man 2" into a romantic opera and Bryan Singer turned "X-2: X-Men United" into a comic-book gloss on overreaction to terrorism as well as a new testament of teen angst.
Steve Geppi, president and CEO of the Baltimore-based giant, Diamond Comic Distributors, says that movie culture is reaping the benefit of a comic-book readership full of people "who are very discerning, who know good stories and art from bad stories and art."
Geppi, a comic-book maven from boyhood, says there's an element of rough justice in the influence these fans now wield over decision-makers in New York and Los Angeles. As someone who grew up loving comic books and began selling them retail in the early 1970s, he remembers when comic-book readers were derided as the worst sort of misfit nerds and geeks.
They grew thankful for any crumb the studios threw them, just as the comic-book publishers themselves accepted the conventional wisdom that their stories required "the Hollywood treatment" to be ready for prime time or the big screen.
"We were used to having someone from Hollywood optioning a Marvel character for $100,000 and the film never getting made or being made very poorly," says Geppi. Whatever you think of the campy 1960s TV Batman (I was fond of it), Geppi is right to say, "We were still paying for that Batman decades later, from people who only thought of comic books as 'Bam!' or 'Kapow' " - or Robin's "Holy [fill in the blank] Batman" trope.
But with the widespread critical and popular acceptance, in comic-book circles and beyond, of comic-book creators like Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, Geppi thinks the fans "are finally getting the credit and respect they deserve." (Some other marvelous innovators, including Chris Claremont, who brought an unselfconscious depth to the X-Men series, will appear at Baltimore Comic-Con.)
For the evolutionary leaps comic books have made over the past few decades, Geppi credits Phil Seuling, the Brooklyn teacher who created New York's Comic Art Convention (1968-1983) and trailblazed comic-book direct marketing.
The communal gatherings he generated were "definitely a coming-out-of-the-closet experience," Geppi says. Comic-book stores such as Geppi's Comic World chain created "a clubhouse atmosphere" - a real-life equivalent of comic-book letter pages. They allowed astute retailers and fans to exchange views and cutting-edge information. By the time Frank Miller came up with "The Dark Knight" he had an audience primed to appreciate it - including the film director Tim Burton, who with screenwriter Sam Hamm created the epochal 1989 "Batman." But Geppi thinks the no-turning-back moment for Hollywood's commitment to comic books came after "Spider-Man' opened in 2002 and cleared $100 million at the box office in three days, more quickly than any other movie to date.
The outcome has reshaped the pop environment, with inspiration going both ways. For example, with the "Iron Man" movie, director Jon Favreau gave new meaning to a Marvel title on screen the way Claremont had with X-Men in print or Miller had done with DC's Batman.
As Favreau told me before the film opened last year, he knew that comic-book movies were now a form that had to be honored - but they were also sturdy enough to be played with. "With superhero movies, you very much have a Joseph Campbell rise-of-the-hero story; you also have to provide the fantasy of a very simple solution to very complex problems and still express the anxiety of the day. But you want to do that in an unexpected way." Favreau's instincts paid off in "Iron Man," a surprise international blockbuster. Now "Iron Man 2" is the monster attraction all the other studios will scurry away from when it premieres May 7. With the casting of Mickey Rourke as the villain Whiplash and Scarlett Johansson as Stark's new assistant, Favreau appears to have made all the right moves. But the proof will be in the playing. As Steve Geppi says, "You can't fool comic-book fans with a bum story."
