Pop culture can be a funny thing. I don’t mean “Ha ha” funny, although that is also sometimes true. I mean funny as in a head-shaking “Ain’t that a bitch,” kind of way.

For example, yesterday I went to see Ted. I didn’t want to, but it was the Number One box office hit this weekend and my son, the genius, is doing a blog on the subject, and he was in town for the Del Close Marathon. It’s not a very good movie, in my opinion, but I’m not a huge fan of Seth McFarlane. He’s okay, and I will always support him because his work points out the blistering hypocrisy of our shared alma mater . And I like fart jokes more than the average little old Jewish lady.

Still, I found myself tearing up. Did the film have unexpected emotional depth? No. What it had was a million references to Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon is a terrible movie I saw in 1980 when it was released, with co-columnist Denny O’Neil. It was so deliberately and hilariously bad that I dragged my husband to see it immediately. We own it in at least two different formats. I got him a signed photo of Melody Anderson for an anniversary present. Over the years, we found more opportunities to exclaim “Not the bore worms!” than you would think could credibly arise.

We find each other through shared interests. I met my husband because we both admired Paul Krassner. We laughed at a lot of the same things. He wasn’t into comics, but we found common ground in our appreciation of R. Crumb and Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Our tastes weren’t the same, but I was not surprised when he liked Scott McCloud’s Zot! at least as much as I did.

What really bonded us, however, was seeing Pinocchio together at the Annecy Animation Festival. It was 1979, our first trip to Europe together. Annecy is a lovely little town in the French Alps. We were staying in a room in a charming small hotel that, when we went to take a nap with the window open, filled with cats.

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson were guests of the festival, and we got to hang out with them. I hadn’t seen Pinocchio since I was a child, and couldn’t remember the way it ended at all (too frightening). Watching it with John, seeing what a perfect film it was, made me love him even more.

Love is about a lot of things, but if you can’t share pleasure, there’s not much point to it.

Thank you, Seth McFarlane, for reminding me of those fun times. And also, the Ryan Reynolds cameo. That was great.

Saturday: Marc Alan Fishman Flames On!

In December, I had the pleasure of teaching fairy tales to seniors and we explored how the basic stories have been told and retold around the world and through the ages. The core concepts remain vital and can withstand wildly varying interpretations. Before Walt Disney began cementing a single version of each tale in the global consciousness, they were adapted time and again based on the culture and need of the ages.

I was reminded of this all over again when prime time offered us both Once Upon a Time and Grimm, which were vastly different takes on some of the most beloved fairy tales. The former obviously owes a lot to its corporate masters, Walt Disney, but even so, the versions of Snow White, the Queen, Pinocchio, and so on do not identically match their animated counterparts. Grimm uses the fairy tales as a launching point and goes in a wildly different direction.

Similarly, there are the competing Snow White epics that were released this year. The clear winner was the box office smash Snow White and the Huntsman, which is already spawning a sequel despite having some of the worst storytelling gaps I’ve seen in ages. At the other end of the spectrum was Mirror Mirror, which opened first and flopped badly despite having Julia Roberts as the Queen. Now out on DVD from 20^th Century Home Entertainment, Mirror Mirror suffers poorly in comparison with its competitor and worse, with its own trailers.

The trailers showed us a slyly funny interpretation of the classic story and promised more but what we got was something silly and over the top and not especially clever. Tarsem Singh once more shows us, as he did in Immortals, that story is secondary to imagery. Marc Klein and Jason Keller tell a story that makes somewhat more sense than The Huntsman but they fail to make any of the characters particularly memorable nor does Singh elicit interesting performances allowing the cast to rise above the material.

Instead, a particularly strong cast is wasted looking fabulous in utterly absurd costuming. Roberts flounces about, vain and petty, but without real motivation. Lily Collins is a prettier Snow than Kristin Stewart and at least gets to train before fighting but has so little of note to do. Nathan Lane heads a supporting cast that is entirely flat and unoriginal. Even the seven dwarves are stereotypical and not especially funny. Having Lord Stark, that is Sean Bean, play the King in a wintry land invites poor comparisons with A Game of Thrones.

The movie lies flat and remains not particularly entertaining nor does it surprise us even once. And that’s a shame since the story could be played nicely for laughs, poking some gentle fun at the many interpretations or psychological motivations but it attempts nothing so interesting. There’s no motivation for the Queen’s cruel rule or explanation offered as the nature of the magic mirror and her more staid persona within the glass.

On the other hand, the Blu-ray edition looks particularly nice, so the costuming and sets look swell. It’s great to watch at home along with excellent sound.

The disc comes with a bunch of perfunctory extras such as the five deleted scenes which are not missed, including the alternate opening. Looking through the Mirror (12:58) tries to make you believe the cast and crew really think they’re making a good film. The end credits are accompanied with an over-the-top Bollywood production number and I Believe I Can Dance (11:01) is an overlong look at how choreographer Paul Becker taught Collins, Mare Winning ham, Michael Lerner, and others to dance. The silliest bonus is Prince and Puppies (1:59) as real puppies review Armie Hammer’s romantic side. The most interesting featurette is Mirror, Mirror Storybook, a remote-controlled “storybook” version of the film.

Given the potential in the cast and the source material, and knowing there was a competing version also in production, you would have thought Singh would have risen to the occasion, making this film all the more disappointing.

The other writer on the platform was Tony Bedard and he was getting most of the questions. We were at the Supercon in Miami and our topic was the Green Lantern.

What was Tony doing there? That’s easy. He was answering questions about the current status of GL and well suited to do it, was he, being the writer of The Green Lantern Corps, one of the GL spinoffs and a part of what has become, I guess, a franchise. Tony’s in the know.

Me? Well, let’s see…I wrote the character about 40 years ago, briefly, and I can retail a factoid or two regarding his early years, in the 1940s, and I saw the movie. But the recent stuff? Nah.

And that’s what our Miami audience was interested in, the current continuity, not the senescent blathering of a fossil about what was, to them, ancient history.

Be blessed, superconners. You were right.

The study of comics’ history is a legitimate discipline, and becoming more legitimate every day – as legitimate as the study of any, ahem, art form. But it has little to do with your enjoyment of the story that you’re looking at. And as Samuel R. Delany once suggested, neither does the discovery of “respectable” historic antecedents lend any valid respectability to the story you just bought. There’s a connection between comics and the German genius Goethe? (There is, isn’t there?) Well, okay. The expressionist painter Lyonel Feininger once did comic strips? Uh huh. Patricia Highsmith and Dashiell Hammet and Stanley Kauffman once did comics? Uh huh and uh huh and uh huh. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and modern Chinese and Japanese writing bear resemblances to comics? Okay, noted.

But what about the thing in front of you?

There are a couple of ways creative types might use the past: as examples of what not to do and as a source of ideas. They might also use it as examples of what to do, but that’s creeping toward dangerous territory. We don’t want to rehash what we loved when we were fans/readers, regardless of how many hours it brightened. Rather, we want to give our audiences the same kind of pleasure we got from our predecessors.

Let us nod in agreement with the great haiku writer Basho: Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the masters. Rather, seek what they sought.

So our friends in Florida were behaving properly when they focused on Tony Bedard and kind of ignored me and, you know, it was pretty darn hot outside that hotel – just how mythic is that global warming? – and it was not excellent weather for crying, but, heck, we take our tears where we find them…

RECOMMENDED READING: Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

Friday: Martha Thomases and Cuddly Li’l Ted

I’m not the world’s biggest Jason Bourne fan. Not by a long shot. I’ve seen and enjoyed the movies but I haven’t read any of the books. But two days ago, as I was sitting in the theater awaiting The Amazing Spider-Man (for the ComicMix Mixed Review), I saw a trailer for the latest chapter, The Bourne Legacy. It’s a continuation of the series… but without Jason. As I was watching the trailer, I was thinking in the terms of my trade.

 “Reboot! Reboot!”

We can argue if this is a genuine reboot or not, but let’s ride with the concept for a bit. My next thought was “why do the teevee and movie people do successful reboots of major properties, while in comics we butcher it every chance we get?” Which, by the way, is way too frequently.

Recent media reboots have included James Bond, Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes – the latter, twice. Other reboots have included Superman, Batman and the aforementioned Spider-Man. Only the former lacked enduring success. The Batboot was stellar, and we’ll have to wait and see about Spidey. So, of the five major characters, only one was a bust.

Allow me some jealous feelings here. To paraphrase Paul Simon (the singer, not the dead politician), after reboot upon reboot, the comics biz is more or less the same. Yes, there’s usually a solid sales bump and maybe it lasts long enough to make a difference, but that’s almost always short-lived. Is the Spider-Man marriage thing resolved? Is Jean Gray forever dead? What about Uncle Ben? Are you sure? Go ask Captain America and Bucky.

Over at DC, they’ve pressed the reboot button more often in the past 37 years than a lab monkey on an crystal meth test. How long should a reboot last before it’s deemed successful? I don’t know; we’ve never had one that lasted more than a couple years. Is the New 52 successful? Well, yes, in the sense that Dan DiDio still has his job. But they’ve only got sales figures in for the first year, and over a third of the titles have either been cancelled or have endured new creative teams. That doesn’t make it a failure, but if simply cancelling some titles and changing the crew on others is all it takes to make a character work for a contemporary audience, then we don’t need reboots.

In fact, this is the error message we get over each reboot. There’s no system upgrade here. We could have provided stability and growth by simply cancelling some titles and incubating those characters within their universes, and by changing creative teams on others – creators who will not restart history, but simply put it on an exciting path out of the woods. This may be the real “success” of the New 52. We’ll see in maybe five years or so.

The fact is, the media people haven’t pissed all over the trust of their audience. Despite public perception, most all of the pre-reboot movies and television shows featuring James Bond, Doctor Who, Superman, and Batman made money (I really can’t say about Sherlock Holmes; he seems to have made PBS a lot of money in the form of enhanced underwriting and public support). Maybe not enough to support the highest-ups’ eight figure salaries, maybe not as great a return on investment to make the stockholders happy, but in an industry where they put tens of millions of dollars on the line with each project – more than enough in each case to support a front-of-the-catalog comic book publisher – a five million dollar profit might not be a desired return on investment, but it’s still five million dollars.

Comics executives and, more important, their corporate masters need to give the four-color medium the same degree of patience and, quite frankly, they need to give their consumers the same amount of respect.

We need a comic book industry with an attention span.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil