Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Media Properties

Yesterday, I picked up Hellblazer #300.   The final issue. 

I'm sad.  John Constantine, the archetypal Sweary British Mage, has been a fixture for more than half of my life.  I've got more comics featuring the character than I can comfortably lift.  The most popular section of my website is dedicated to John Constantine. And now he's gone, subsumed into a younger, blander version of himself without any sort of ties to the culture that he grew up in.

That's the John Constantine in the DCUniverse, the new 52.  He's younger and nobs around with Zatanna, the Phantom Stranger, Frankenstein's creature.  But he's not much of a character.  Original John Constantine was rooted in the punk of the 70's and 80's.  He was a member of a spectacularly failed band (Mucous Membrane).  This gave him a center, a starting point.  His disrespect for authority, his iconoclasm and cynicism made perfect sense, because I understood the movement he came from, the zeitgeist from which he was born.  The desperate 70's were his formative years.  

This depth came from the minds of Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch and John Totleben.  They looked around and created a character that was from their time.  And people responded to John Constantine.  He was something new--a working-class mage.  Until Constantine, comics magic weilders have been remote mages, men with towers, women with witches terrible powers.  John was different.  He was a magical mechanic, not getting involved in the ritual of magic, but doing the necessary things in order to get the desired result.  If the words are the thing, then why not just say them, rather than intoning them?  Was a copper-inlaid pentacle really necessary, or would a quick chalk one on a linoleum floor be just as useful?  This practical approach was unique, stripping away the mysticism and obfuscation, as well as the overblown speeches.  Dr. Strange has all sorts of charms and talismans, the Specter is the Veneance of God, Dr. Fate channels the power of whichever Egyptian god through his helmet, the Phantom Stanger has some strange origin story.  John as none of these.  He wasn't a doctor, a mystic, or Judas.  He was a self-made sorcerer who got into magic as a way to impress the girls.  He came from a poor family, ran away when he was 16.  Never went to college. 

As such, he was always an iconoclast, and a smart one.  He has never been a hero, because heroes do the right thing.  John was a ruthless bastard who looked at the big picture and kept his eye on it, often at a personal cost, or to the cost of a friend.  That said, what he did always needed doing.  And after the price was paid, he usually got drunk.  We've even seem him cry a time or two.  Constantine was that small person who moved the wheels of the world because they had to.  Not because they were getting fame or glory.  He was easy to relate to, because he wore his faults and vices on his sleeve.  He smoked, he drank, he cursed. All of these motions and emotions made him human, someone I could relate to. 

He changed as different writers wrote him differently.  Jamie Delano's Constantine was very different from Garth Ennis's Irish Rebel, Mike Carey's masterful manipulator.  All these were different and yet recognizeable as the same person.  But there were some authors who didn't get it, who didn't understand the point of planting your feet, and flipping off God, the Devil, and the police simply because it needed to be done.  And ultimately, this was Constantine's downfall. 

Because Constantine was a media property.  The media he appeared in was produced on a deadline, and that had to be hit, whether the writer had a good idea or not.  And since the creators weren't willing to write him for more than a decade, the chore had to be passed on to someone else.  And so there were John stories that were from individuals who didn't really understand what he was about.  Certainly the film that used the Constantine name was pretty clueless.  As, sadly, was the last man to write the comic.  But that's what happens when a character is a media property.   

And so one of my favorite favoirte media properties flicks his ciggie into the bushes and heads out for Pubs Unknown.  There's going to be a hole in my life for a while.  But I'll always have those brilliant issues, and when I want, I can open up a box of comics and visit the good old days. 

I think I Needed a Little Time Off...

I still do. The school semester's over, and I've got to test out of something to get a class I've already taken (don't ask). I'm working more, and I have less time to write than I want because it's Spring, and in the Spring I get all ambitious and want to actually go do things.

Last night, for example, we went out to see a movie for the first time in months. We don't go out to the movies much. There's a lot of crap being produced. As a friend said, Hollywood has the reverse of the usual business model. You can see the good parts of a movie for free in the trailer, but you have to pay to see the crap.

Part of a movie's charm is the ambiance in which you see it. For this reason, and because we were hopeful but not expecting greatness, we went to the drive-in.



Mostly there for Thor, which could easily have been an enormous disaster, and Rango, which was only of vague interest.

But hey, Hathaway's drive-in! I've blogged about it before, but this time, I brought the camera. It was a mild Spring day, the sunset was lovely, and the bugs were outside the car. You kind of bring your own environment when you see a movie from the comfort of your own car. Families were there, and kids were throwing a ball around before the show. It was just that sort of bucolic, rural scene that does happen every now and then, not just in peoples' nostalgic biographies.



We used our radio for sound this time, and it sounded a lot better than using the provided speaker. We also visited the snack bar for tasty local burgers, pretty good fries (they provide vinegar for those of us who like them that way) and surprisingly tasty popcorn.

An enjoyable way to watch a couple of films. It's not really the way to watch a film you really want to pay attention to, because there's people walking around, drivers entering and exiting, and overall a fair mount of distractions. But the average film doesn't require you to pay attention to every frame, so it's fine. I will want to pay attention to every frame of On Stranger Tides, so I'll be seeing it in a more traditional theater. But I'm hoping we'll catch another double-feature before it closes for the winter.

Oh,the movie? Kim Newman was right, and Thor was well done especially considering the comic. The perfect drive-in film. Entertaining, pretty to look at (that the costume designer managed to turn Kirby's designs into wearable clothing is Oscar-worthy), with just the right amount of things blowing up. Rango was an amiable film, neither knocking my socks off nor wasting my time.

20 Minutes into the Present

Max Headroom is finally on DVD. And we have it.



I like to think that I remember the show because of the writing. Max was one of the first shows about the media, and how the modern life has become more and more entwined with television. The plots were fairly standard (Ace reporter Edison Carter discovers an injustice, and gets on the air at the last moment to right the wrong). But the MacGuffins that drive the stories are very perceptive and unusual.

The conflation of television and politics is particularly relevant today, when we have television personalities holding political rallies, and getting the nation whipped up over this molehill or that. While we have not reached the point of Max Headroom where it is illegal to turn the television off, there is precious little difference between someone who can't turn their television off, and someone who won't.

The plots also usually depend on there being someone moral in a chain of events that will say "no" to the murder or imprisonment of an innocent person. For every monster out there, there is a moral individual who is able to stop them. Considering that the show is remembered for being very 'cynical' Max Headroom held the positive view that someone in the chain of command can stop an atrocity.

Part of the fascination with the show, twenty years later, is how close it comes to being real. The episode "Academy" features a show trial on Network 23, which is rather creepily reminiscent of the OJ Simpson trial.

Amazingly, in the dark future, there are few guns, and no one gets shot. I wonder if this is primarily because the writes of the show were English, rather than American. None of the show's problems have yet been solved through violence. It's the tool of terrorists and fascists.

The characters spend a lot of time watching screens and watching people interacting with screens. And not just because Max, the titular character, is confined to one. It's rather disconcerting... there's about as much face time as there is someone talking to someone over a screen. And there's more tapping on keyboards than Jessica Fletcher ever did.

Max should also be remembered for the contradiction he was. A prime-time show that critiques the media it was on. An anti-media icon that shilled for Coca-Cola. Did the producers and writers of Max sell out? Or were they cleverly co-opting a media to get their message out? It's hard to tell, but it's a lot of fun to analyze.

Watching Movies, the Old-Fashioned Way...

Hathaway's Drive-In in North Hoosick had a end-of the season closer we couldn't resist: Up followed by Star Trek.

We aren't really drive-in people. The heyday of cars and movies was a bit before our time, and we're not really that in love with our car. It's a small, efficient box that gets us from point A to point B. But it's fun to go and see a film in a venue that is past its prime, to get a whiff of the way things used to be.

The intermission video was particularly interesting. The animated bits looked like they came from Jay Ward Productions (of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame). The non-animated parts were also interesting. Mostly, they were an exhortation to visit the snack bar (where the drive-in makes most of its money). Offering hot dogs and burgers was one thing, but watching a 60s-era bag of popcorn get a small pail of butter poured over it was horrifying.

Hathaway's utilizes the two traditional methods of getting the sound to the customer: stands with wired speakers on them (you hang them on your door) and a low-wattage broadcast that can be picked up on the car radio. The speakers are clearly the original material, large aluminum boxes the size an internal DVD drive. We hung it on the steering wheel, it was too chilly to keep the window open. The drive-in is not, incidentally, the best place to see a film with a lot of audio magic. The speaker is mono, so unless your car radio is awesome you're going to lose the audio designed for Dolby Digital or THX.

Fun was had. We cuddled under blankets to keep warm, watched Star Trek for the fourth time on the big screen.

It's 2007, and I’m not going to my 20th high school reunion

In a misguided fit of nostalgia, I joined classmates dot com last year. This was partially because one of my classmates, who I didn’t know particularly well, died in a snowmobile accident in my local county.

And so nostalgia reared its head. I signed up with classmates dot com, and viewed the profiles and a few pictures from people I hadn’t seen or heard from in nineteen years. I’ll point out here that I wasn’t your typical social outcast by the time I got to high school–I was voted ‘class individual’ by my graduating class. Or at least, one of four class individuals, which will tell the perceptive a great deal about the people I graduated with.

Anyway, I signed up with classmates dot com and checked out the other people who’d had fits of nostalgia. And I remember, very distinctly, running across someone and thinking “he learned how to use email?” That broke the nostalgia spell pretty well, especially as I remembered that I didn’t particularly like a lot of the people I graduated with.

Not that I hated them, but they are a total of four hundred people who are pretty much irrelevant to my life at this point in time. I don’t agonize about what I did in high school, nor am I tortured by the treatment I received. I break out the yearbook less than once every three years. High School is pretty much a non subject with me. I moved on. There were other things to do, other places to go and both were more interesting than Newington High.

Class of 1987. For the most part, I wish you well.