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Daredevil.

This one was tough. I really wanted to like it, but you can’t always get what you want. Still, with the Daredevil Netflix series now streaming on Netflix, I think it’s time for a look back at the first time Marvel tried to launch a live-action Man Without Fear tale.

At the risk of sounding like a grandpa, I think it will be hard for future generations to fathom that we lived in a world without really good comic book movies for a long time. Ok, so there were the Batman movies, which started out promising with Tim Burton at the helm, and really went downhill in under Joel Schumacher’s direction (like, really downhill.) Christopher Reeves as Superman also had about two watchable movies in him before the third and fourth installments fizzled pretty badly. Plus, that series ended, mercifully, by the late 80’s. It wasn’t until Marvel started making a real effort with the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises that fans could get their hopes up.

And then, Daredevil came out in 2003. #Hopes dashed.

It was a sad case, really. When I first started reading comics, Daredevil was sort of Spider-Man’s bastard cousin. You know, a guy in red who swings around the city fighting bad guys. Plus, his nemesis was the Kingpin, whom I had first seen in Spider-Man comics and who I assumed was actually Spidey’s main baddie. I guess I thought nemeses were like spouses; you should really only have one, even if you mess around a little. As I grew older and read more Daredevil books, I realized he was his own man, and he had a rich history, despite not being what you might call an “A-lister.” Still, seeing DD on the big screen would legitimize the character and put him in that top tier. Still below Spidey perhaps, but definitely above Moon Knight.

Instead, this film may have set the character back a decade (since it took twelve years to get this series, and without Netflix, well… who knows?). It’s hard to even pinpoint the exact point where the movie went bad, because when I think back, it was pretty much all bad. Ben Affleck was in full-on super-hero mode, all brooding and intense, while Colin Farrell was in full-on super-villain mode, meaning he spoke in a raspy voice and generally acted all crazy (I literally thought he was going to twist his moustache at one point.) It was kind of weird when Jennifer Garner, as DD’s love interest, Elektra, became the highlight of the movie. Except for that classic see-saw scene. That was the real highlight. Pure, unintentional, comedic gold!

“I’ll impress her with my Blind-See-Saw-dance. The chicks really dig it.”

Strangely enough, Garner apparently impressed the studio execs so much, and they must have thought that there was money to be made, that they gave her a spin-off, despite the fact that she died in Daredevil. This being comics, nobody really cared about that bit, but I have heard that Elektra was actually worse than Daredevil, so that one must be pretty bad. I never bothered to watch it. Time being precious and all.

If that introduction didn’t get you fired up to watch this movie, here’s the skinny on Daredevil: Matt Murdock is a blind, grumpy attorney by day, but by night he puts on a costume and plays hero on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, ostensibly to avenge the death of his father, boxer Jack Murdock, who I guess was screwed over by somebody at some point. How does a blind person fight crime, you ask? Well, the same toxic chemical accident that robbed him of his sight also heightened his other senses, so Matt can hear and smell things that no normal person can. He also has a heightened radar sense (related, apparently, to his super-hearing) that allows him to sort of “map out” structures and people and basically sense where everything is, so he gets around pretty good, all things considered. The downside is that he has to sleep in an isolation tank or else the city noise would keep him up all night. That’s probably why he’s so grumpy.

Through his exploits, Matt meets Elektra Natchios, a ninja assassin who is also trying to avenge the death of her father. The crime lord that they are both after, Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. “The Kingpin,” played with generous moxie by the late Michael Clarke Duncan, hires Bulls-eye (Farrell) to take the good guys out. Farrell’s power is, shockingly, really good aim, so he throws things at his foes. Shouldn’t he have just been a major league pitcher? He could have made millions and not gone to jail. Anyway, he succeeds in taking out Elektra, but Daredevil defeats him, and then goes on to defeat Fisk, as well, and justice is served. Yay! Good guys win!

I realize that no one goes to see Daredevil expecting Shakespeare, but that’s a pretty meager plot. I summed it up in just a couple sentences, and that was with that bad joke about Bulls-eye thrown in. This leads one to believe that the writing is bad, and it is. Even a glance at the quotes on IMDB reveals some horrid writing:

Daredevil: You killed the only two people I ever loved. Why?

Kingpin: Business. That’s all it ever is, is business. I was working for Fallon at the time, your father was supposed to throw a fight. And your girl was in the wrong family at the wrong time. It’s all business… and you’ve been in my business for too long!

As riveting as all that sounds on paper, I am sure that Affleck played it with his usual aplomb, the kind of line-reading that is usually reserved for Simpsons’-style movie parodies (“You killed… the only two people… I ever loved… Now, get… Mendoza.”). And Colin Farrell, as mentioned above, must have been taking cues directly from Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s “How to Play a Super-Villain.” Or maybe just playing himself. Hard to tell.

“Mendooozzzzaaaaaa!”

Simply put, the script was bad. The story was flimsy. The acting was over-the-top. There were no eye-popping special effects. There wasn’t even any nudity. I can’t think of any reason to actually watch this movie. Other than the fact that it was called “Daredevil” and I’m a comic book geek, I don’t even know why I saw it. Even a grumpy, blind lawyer could see that this isn’t worth your time. Thankfully, Disney has resurrected the character with the Netflix series, because nobody dies in comics. Although after this movie, I almost wished I was.

About 4 million years ago (give or take), I used Kickstarter to fund a little comic book I had written. It was a sort of retroactive funding, since I had already paid for most of the artwork on the thing, but still a much-needed boost, because I soon learned that creating your own comic when no one knows who you are is not a get-rich-quick endeavor. Or a get-rich-at-all one.

Anyway, I paid all the collaborators and printed a couple hundred issues, some as rewards for the donors and some because I had this silly notion that people might actually buy them at conventions and things. But the goal all along was to get on Comixology.com, pretty much the biggest dog in the world of digital comics. They carry Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, and even a have small section for little weenies like me called Comixology Submit. The great thing about this business model is that there are no printing costs. Comixology takes a percentage of each sale (if I actually sell any), but otherwise I take home the rest.

Now, technically, the book is already available on several websites, including Amazon, Indyplanet and even a little place I found called Robinhoodcomic.com (which, of course, I only recently discovered had a broken shopping cart link. Sorry, folks. It’s totally working now, by the way, in case you’re interested.) However, I have all of .69 cents in my Indyplanet account, and have made three whole bucks from Amazon digital sales. Remember what I said earlier about the “big dog?” That wasn’t idle chatter.

So, I submitted to Comixology some time ago, and was delighted when I received an email stating that the book had been accepted… kind of. I had a few technical corrections to make first. Apparently, the problem was something the Comixology people called “artifacting.” Naturally, as I typed that, there is a red, squiggly line under that word, because it doesn’t actually exist. I asked several graphic designer friends, and people in comics, and Google, and finally figured out what the issue was. I thought I had fixed the problem and submitted again, only to receive the exact same email from Comixology telling me that that there was a problem with “artifacting.” After exhausting all of my friends, both computer-y smart and creative, and three attempts, which were all separated by about three months of waiting for a response, I got the email officially congratulating me and saying that my book was going to be carried on Comixology, starting December 31st.

I don’t know if this date is cool foreshadowing for 2015, or an amazing coincidence, but either way, it’s good news. This idea that I started way back when now seems more official. Not that it wasn’t “official” before, but to me, it seems nice and real now, mostly because I am my own harshest critic. It also means I actually have to come through with issue #2 now.

If you made it this far into the post, you obviously have some interest, so let me apologize to you,loyal friends and colleagues, because starting at 10:00 a.m., December 31st (tomorrow, as I write this), I am going to bombard all of you on social media with links and shares and tweets and smoke signals, reminding you that this is a thing and that it’s a cool book and you should buy it, and if you don’t want to buy it (which is understandable), you should at least tell your friends and your friends-of-friends. Because let’s face it, that’s how this shit works these days. And thank God, because I wouldn’t be here, otherwise.

Thanks in advance, and happy New Year!

I recently got “Hip To Be Square” by Huey Lewis & the News stuck in my head. For some reason, I started to think a little about the lyrics, and got inspired to write about it. So, here goes:

First, a little paragraph for the background of the song: it was the second single off of the band’s multi-platinum album Fore!, released in 1986, and was written by drummer Bill Gibson, keyboardist Sean Hopper and Lewis himself, so it wasn’t like some guy in a board room wrote it for them. It reached #1 on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks, and 3 on their Top 100 list. Now, I won’t even pretend to really know what all that means, but in 1986, it’s safe to say that it was pretty popular.

Still, that was almost three decades ago, so it’s also safe to say that almost anyone who knows the song at all these days and is under the age of 35 only knows it from the famous scene in American Psycho. For those of you who are not familiar with the scene, it’s the one where Christian Bale recites a sermon about “Hip to be Square” being Huey’s “undisputed masterpiece” just before brutally murdering Jared Leto with an ax, screaming “Try getting a table at Dorsia now you $%#&-ing, stupid bastard!” It’s actually quite hilarious. I remember seeing the movie in the theater during it’s initial run, and being slightly disturbed, but appreciating the message. In the years since, I feel the movie (and I guess, by proxy, the song) has garnered a bit of a cult following. The ambiguity of the ending is debated on message boards and forums, so much so that when I Googled “Hip to be Square” to find the actual lyrics, I found websites with people debating whether or not Bale’s Patrick Bateman is a sociopath, a narcissist or completely blank. But one poster mentioned that he had never met anyone that knew of the song at all before the movie. Well, sir, you’ve never met me.

I have been a fan of the song since forever, so when I saw the scene, I appreciated its craziness (if you want to call it that) on a whole different level. But only this week did I appreciate the song on yet another level. In the movie, and I think also the book it’s based on, but I’ve never read it, Bateman says that the song “is not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends, but it’s also a personal statement about the band itself.” It’s taken me a long time to figure out what that statement is, and it’s not just about the band. It’s a statement for a broader audience.

According to Wikipedia (which is always right!), the song was written about “an individual who was once a free-spirited member of the 1960s’ hippie movement, but who has now embraced the “square” yuppie lifestyle of the 1980s.”  That may have been what they were thinking when they wrote it, but songs can change their meaning over time, and I myself was never a hippie or a yuppie, but I still feel a personal attachment to this song. Like the narrator of the song, I used to “fool around, but I couldn’t take the punishment, and had to settle down.” I don’t think he’s saying that he fooled around on loved ones, or “settled down” meaning he got married, although, maybe that’s what they intended when they wrote it, but that’s not how my interpretation sees it. It’s that “couldn’t take the punishment” line that gets me. When I was younger and trying to impress women and trying to be cool (and drinking a lot), I used to get into some weird situations, and when I would tell people about them, they would laugh and ask me when I was going to write a book. I was certainly happy to entertain my friends, but as Rush drummer Neil Peart wrote, “Adventures suck when you’re having them.” I finally got to a point (or maybe an age) when I just couldn’t do that crap anymore, because basically “I couldn’t take the punishment.”

The narrator (Or Huey, or me, if you prefer) goes on to describe some of the things he does now that are better than before (working out, eating healthier), and then posits that, while all that stuff is good for you, he doesn’t care because it doesn’t matter what people say or think. There’s simply “no denying that” this new way is better. I think that line speaks for itself, really. Yeah, it’s fun to be part of something, and to be that guy who entertains people with his bad dating stories, but in the end, having a job and a girlfriend and friends to have a drink with is way better.

In fact, the final verse drives this home even more when he sings, “Don’t you try to fight it; ‘An idea who’s time has come.'” This actually a Victor Hugo quote, so Huey was flexing his literary muscles, but what it really means to me is that you get to a point when you have to grow up, and you actually want to conform (the “pleasures of conformity” that Patrick Bateman ranted about) and resistance is futile. But I don’t think that it’s a bad thing, and it’s not like I had to go through something awful to lead me to this great epiphany, because it’s just an “idea who’s time has come.” And being a grown-up is actually cool. Hip, even. I find myself a lot less stressed now than I was when I was younger and I worried about every little thing I did and whether or not it was right or wrong or cool or if chicks would dig it. Sure, I have to worry about finances and stuff like that, but isn’t that a lot easier than worrying about what everybody thinks of you? And the best part is, “You might think I’m crazy, but I don’t even care.” And that indifference is what makes life so much easier.