Last week Gucci debuted the trailer for the TV spot advertising its new fragrance, Gucci Guilty, and revealed that the commercial is being directed by none other than Frank Miller, cinematicauteur of the comic book world.

Frank Miller’s work is consistently, offensively, shockingly misogynistic.

I say this as someone whose first graphic novel was a copy of Batman: Year One, and I say this as a girl who has been in love with comics from the age of eleven.  There are two kinds of women in Frank Miller stories:

1. Women who are employed in the sex industry.
2. Women who are beaten and/or brutally murdered by the end of the piece.

Frank Miller likes Noir, a genre which is rife with virgin/whore dichotomies, but there comes a point when one must draw the line.  Take the stories selected for the Sin City movie.  The only woman who is not a prostitute or a stripper is a lesbian parole officer who likes to walk around her apartment naked.  Elijah Wood amputates her arm and eats it in front of her.  She is then gunned down by corrupt cops.

Frank Miller introduced us to Catwoman as a former prostitute.  He created the first female Robin and the formidable assassin Elektra, only to eventually torture and kill them, respectively.  Wonder Woman in The Dark Knight Strikes Back is mostly just around for Superman to have sex with. Successful print reporter Viki Vale in All Star Batman and Robin dictates a story about idiotic playboy Bruce Wayne while lounging around in her underwear, but drops her evening plans immediately when Bruce Wayne requests that she join him in five minutes with all possible excitement and not a trace of bother.  And then there’s this cover.  Note the placement of his signature.

It seems that the only woman Frank Miller feels safe with is one who is dependent on a man’s attention for her survival.

>>>Read the full essay at Styleite.

Blame Kevin Smith: The sixth issue of Batman: The Widening Gyre, a twelve-part, official DC miniseries written by the Clerks director and illustrated by Walt Flanagan, features this charmer of a panel, which etches Batman's avowed bladder spasm in the annals of comics history. What's worse, this is actually a flashback to Frank Miller's path-setting Batman: Year One -- to Batman's pivotal first speech to the corrupt gangsters who control Gotham, which TVTropes identifies as the comic's "Crowning Moment of Awesome." Not anymore.

In an interview with the LA Times and in a Twitter based Q&A session, Frank Miller has revealed some details of his upcoming Xerxes, a graphic novel prequel to the groundbreaking 300 with a decent shot at becoming another movie if all goes according to plan.  For example, while Xerxes is the title character, the "lead character" is Themistocles, whose historical role is actually super interesting.  Even Miller admits that the intellectual Athenian statesman Themistocles is the polar opposite of the Spartan war-king Leonidas.  The story will begin at the Battle of Marathon and cover ten years' time, presumably wrapping up somewhere around the Battle of Thermopylae (i.e., 300).  Both Leonidas and Ephialtes will appear.

Well, that's all the facts.  But we'd be remiss if we didn't point out the details in there that stirred the sleeping beast of our nerdrage.  Stirred it, but did not rouse it to full wakefulness.

Also, why is it that even unaltered stills from 300 look like bad Photoshop mock-ups?

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In an interview with the LA Times and in a Twitter based Q&A session, Frank Miller has revealed some details of his upcoming Xerxes, a graphic novel prequel to the groundbreaking 300 with a decent shot at becoming another movie if all goes according to plan.  For example, while Xerxes is the title character, the “lead character” is Themistocles, whose historical role is actually super interesting.  Even Miller admits that the intellectual Athenian statesman Themistocles is the polar opposite of the Spartan war-king Leonidas.  The story will begin at the Battle of Marathon and cover ten years’ time, presumably wrapping up somewhere around the Battle of Thermopylae (i.e., 300).  Both Leonidas and Ephialtes will appear.

Well, that’s all the facts.  But we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out the details in there that stirred the sleeping beast of our nerdrage.  Stirred it, but did not rouse it to full wakefulness.

Also, why is it that even unaltered stills from 300 look like bad Photoshop mock-ups?

The 300 movie caused something of an international stir due to its depiction of Xerxes and other Persians.  Iranian officials considered it “a cultural slur of the highest order.”  I too, find myself disturbed by Frank Miller’s penchant for making his villains “creepy” by giving them feminine characteristics, but that is another post.  In their interview, the LA Times asked him to respond to these accusations.

He said:

My intent was misunderstood because in many ways ’300′ was a deliberate propaganda piece.

What is this I don’t even.

When I work on a story I choose a point of view. For this story, the approach was to tell this story the way the Spartans told it around the campfire. That’s the reason they were fighting against 80-foot elephants and that’s why Xerxes was portrayed as much larger-than-life figure and given these traits that the Spartans would [project on to] their enemies.

OK, that’s all well and fine, but if you’re going to tell a story from a point of view that you don’t want your audience to personally adopt, the onus is on you as the writer to show your readers that the narrator is unreliable.  I realize that this would probably make the Spartans who swallow this propaganda look a bit mindless, but hey, wouldn’t it be nice to depict both sides realistically?  That would be really interesting.  But I guess if we were going to do that, we’d have to talk about how the Spartans were totally gay.  So that’s out.

From his Twitter Q&A:

RT @iloverobliefeld What work of your are you most proud of and why? // “300″ It’s the best damn story I’ve ever gotten my hands on.

Well, yeah.  It’s the most direct adaptation you’ve ever done.  It’s not your story.  Also, there’s really nothing I can add to the fact that a Twitter user named @iloverobliefeld follows Frank Miller.

RT @NickandDooie what motivated you to “go back to the well” on Xerxes? / Are you kidding? I get to do Ancient Greek Battle Stories!

Okay, we’ve got no rage for this. We knew classics majors in college.  Yes.  The ancient Greeks were superlatively awesome.  Speaking of which, I also know that there are two kinds of classics majors.  Those who love the ancient world for the sex, and those who love it for the violence.  Which one is Frank Miller, I wonder?

Thank you all so much, this has been fun! I gotta go back to drawing people killing each other.

In Conclusion, I Offer Almost Without Comment

Frank Miller’s Xerxes cover:

A Chain Devil from D&D 3.5e:

(via Robot 6.)

This weekend is Wondercon and of course announcements are rolling out to let us know what to expect from the world of comics, movies, and science fiction. The two that have caught our eye are not exactly what we would call reassuring.

DC Comics has announced that Frank Miller and Jim Lee are still dedicated to the long running "deadline challenged" series of All-Star Batman and Robin, and will be starting up a new series Dark Knight: Boy Wonder, to begin running in February 2011. They promise that these issues will ship on time. Without, you know, switching to a bi-monthly schedule halfway through. And then a five month delay on the last issue which ultimately has to be recalled.

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This weekend is Wondercon and of course announcements are rolling out to let us know what to expect from the world of comics, movies, and science fiction.  The two that have caught our eye are not exactly what we would call reassuring.

DC Comics has announced that Frank Miller and Jim Lee are still dedicated to the long running “deadline challenged” series of All-Star Batman and Robin, and will be starting up a new series Dark Knight: Boy Wonder, to begin running in February 2011.  They promise that these issues will ship on time.  Without, you know, switching to a bi-monthly schedule halfway through.  And then a five month delay on the last issue which ultimately has to be recalled.

I… I can’t even muster the strength for a ಠ_ಠ .  If there was an emoticon for taking your glasses off and rubbing your face, that might be appropriate.

I thought we were done with All-Star Batman and Robin, the series that gave us “I’m the goddamn Batman” and was laced with so much profanity (revealed by a hilarious printing mistake) that the c-word was used four times in two pages, but apparently… we’re not.  Dark Knight: Boy Wonder will continue the story started in All-Star, and make it clear that they both take place in the same universe as Miller’s 1986 The Dark Knight Returns.  So we can look forward to more offensively gay Joker and the hyper-sexualization and/or use of brutal violence towards every female character.

But enough about Frank Miller.

Greg Rucka also took a moment at Wondercon to announce that he will be leaving DC now that his award winning run on Detective Comics has been truncated.

From Comics Alliance:

He just turned in the last of his DC work for the foreseeable future, and his time with [Batwoman] is done. He reiterated his love for the character, saying that walking away from her was an incredibly hard decision to make, but one that was necessary…

Originally, “Elegy” was supposed to be 4 issues, “Go” 3 issues, and then a 5 part story with JH Williams III, his collaborator on “Detective Comics.”Due to a variety of things in-house at DC, they were moved off of “Detective Comics” and couldn’t tell the story there.

Rucka plans to focus on his ongoing series Queen & Country and other personal projects, saying that he “needs to [tell] the stories he wants to tell again.”

As the guy who has written some of the best Batman comics that have been published since I started regularly reading them, including work on Gotham Central, Detective Comics, Death and the Maidens, 52, and the story arc that got me to start reading monthly comics, Bruce Wayne: Murderer? and Bruce Wayne: Fugitive; I wish him well.

(via Comics Alliance.)

Fresh on the heels of Alice in Wonderland's box office success, rumors are flying about not one, but two feature film remakes of The Wizard of Oz.  Now, there's more than one way to retell a story, and there are a few ways to redo Wizard that would probably work.  The odds of Hollywood actually finding those particular ways is unlikely.

More and more often these days, I find myself shouting at movie trailers and announcements: "WHY would you remake that?" Clash of the Titans?  The Karate Kid? My Fair Lady?

I'd like to take some time and explain when a remake generally isn't a good idea, and when it generally is, and whether or not this means that The Wizard of Oz is something we should revisit.]]>

Fresh on the heels of Alice in Wonderland‘s box office success, rumors are flying about not one, but two feature film remakes of The Wizard of Oz.  Now, there’s more than one way to retell a story, and there are a few ways to redo Wizard that would probably work.  The odds of Hollywood actually finding those particular ways is unlikely.

More and more often these days, I find myself shouting at movie trailers and announcements: “WHY would you remake that?” Clash of the Titans?  The Karate Kid? My Fair Lady?

I’d like to take some time and explain when a remake generally isn’t a good idea, and when it generally is, and whether or not this means that The Wizard of Oz is something we should revisit. 

For clarity’s sake, I’ll say that I don’t consider a transition from book to film to be a remake.  Only film to film.  Here are some rules, that I just made up:

Thou Shallt Remake for Any of These Reasons:

1. We can rebuild it. We have the technology.

In other words, the first one had special effects that, at the time, wowed audiences, but are now laughably primitive.  Peter Jackson‘s King Kong applies here, as does, though I hate to admit it, the upcoming Clash of the Titans.  The best way to do this is by remaining otherwise faithful to the original story.

I don’t feel that The Wizard of Oz has reached this point yet.  It’s still got some of the most stunning visual design in cinema history.  Even leaving aside the obvious (use of color), how many popular depictions of witches have you seen with a hooked, warty nose and green skin?  And where its special effects are truly strained, the apple trees, for example, the faulty illusion is still really charming.  Oz was made in the long era where if your effect wasn’t perfect you had to make up for it with acting and character, instead of simply throwing more CGI at the thing.

2. Ralph Bashki made the first one.

Remember Ralph Bashki’s Lord of the Rings Part I?  Boromir looked like this:

For more on the movie, check out the Tolkien Sarcasm Page, which I cannot believe still exists.  I mean… I found that site back when I read LotR for the first time.

But I digress.  Another way to word this rule: The last time they tried it it was bad.  So bad, we’d like to forget it ever happened and just start over.  Obviously this does not apply to The Wizard of Oz.  For further reading, see The Hulk and Joel Shumacher‘s Batman movies.  But, like, don’t actually go see them.

3. Let’s do it again, but this time…

It is a good idea to make a remake if you feel like there is a new and interesting take on the characters or story that was not explored by the original.  This also applies to movies that use the same idea but employ a change of tone.  For examples: Tim Burton‘s Planet of the Apes, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton’s Batman, and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

This rule also applies if our cultural idea of the subject of the movie has changed over time, which in the past half century has caused three generations of Batman film reboots as our cultural idea of Batman changed from Adam West‘s, to Frank Miller‘s, to Bruce Tim‘s.

This is the way in which a person might go about remaking The Wizard of Oz, even though we already have a number of dark, or steampunk, or “twisted” (kinda NSFW) interpretations of it, not to mention the success of Wicked.  It also might be interesting to see a movie adaptation that was closer to the source material.  However, even if you’re using rule 3, you will still run afoul of:

4. Thou Shalt Not Remake Cinema History

If a movie has become a cultural phenomenon, if there are bits of it enshrined in the Smithsonian, if it was a landmark film in American cinema history, you might not want to remake it.  Anyone remaking The Wizard of Oz is going to have to deal with casting someone else for the role that made Judy Garland famous, and having to decide whether or not to do it as a musical, and if you do a musical, how to get songs that even hold a candle to the originals.

Inevitably, unless you choose a REALLY divergent tone from the first (I’d say… a highly sexualized Wizard of Oz would probably fit the bill), people are going to compare your movie to the original.  If the original was something, for example, that ran regularly at Christmas throughout the early 50′s, you might want to think twice.

For those who are going ahead with their Wizard of Oz remakes anyway, we can say only this: godspeed, and good luck handling politically correct Munchkins in this day and age.