Archive for March 1st, 2003

Permission to Speak Franklin

Posted March 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

The image of Benjamin Franklin looms large over Philadelphia – residents and visitors to the city can drive on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to visit the Franklin Institute, perhaps after driving across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge from New Jersey. A half hour from Center City sits Franklin Mills Mall, which uses a number of Franklin icons to reinforce its regional identity, including a kite and lightning bolt and an enormous mechanical replica of Franklin’s head in the mall’s center court. Clearly, Franklin has a strong hold over his adopted home; the Smithsonian Institution’s Inventory of American Sculpture says that there are 41 statues of Franklin in the city. No other public figure has nearly that many statues devoted to him or her in any American city. There are 16 statues of George Washington in the nation’s capital; 14 of Abraham Lincoln in his home town.

To a Philadelphia native, Franklin’s near omnipresence seems perfectly natural – but as Philadelphia Inquirer writer Carrie Rickey commented in an October 10, 1999 article, “some of us who come from elsewhere are initially overwhelmed by Ben. We suffer from Benphobia. Philadelphia artist Flash Rosenberg dubbed this syndrome “the Bends.’â€? The comment was in part tongue-in-cheek, but it does raise questions. On what is our admiration of Franklin based? What do the images of Franklin convey to those who are unfamiliar? And does the abundance of portrayals of Franklin help give Philadelphians an understanding of the nature of the man and his accomplishments, as well as the revolutionary period in which he lived? A few years ago, I did a bit of a walking tour of the most prominent Franklin displays; I could go on at great length on the subject, but for now I want to focus on the portrayals of Franklin at two major Philadelphia institutions: the Franklin Institute, and the University of Pennsylvania. While certainly not a representative sample, they do illustrate some of the pitfalls of using public art as a means to create public awareness of history. Read the remainder of this entry »

Watching and Warning

Posted March 1, 2003 By Earl Green

Dear Tom Ridge,

I hear you’re talking about adding another “alert level” to our national terror alert system, something between orange and red. Burnt sienna, maybe. Or ochre. Maybe fuschia. Well, Mr. Ridge, let me tell you, your system is never really going to have the visceral, “call-to-action” effect on me that you’d like. Not that it’s a deeply flawed system whose “alert levels” occasionally get bumped up as knee-jerk reactions to hearsay or just paranoia – no, I’m not implying that at all. It’s just that your terror alert scale can never quite compete for the cumulative dread that can be instilled in my heart by two simple words.

Tornado warning. Read the remainder of this entry »

Swimming Up Mainstream

Posted March 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

A few weeks ago I was channel surfing and came across a showing of Braveheart. This is not all that surprising; the movie’s been on cable for a while now. What was more than a little surprising was that the movie was playing on the Sci Fi Channel. Now, I’ve heard that Braveheart plays fast and loose with historical fact, but that alone doesn’t qualify something as science fiction, does it?

As it turns out, the Braveheart showing was just part of a general strategy by Sci Fi to try to broaden its programming. Alleged psychics, dream interpreters, and scary hoax-meisters have all been added to the network’s schedule over the last few years, and network head Bonnie Hammer has given numerous quotes in interviews that suggest the network wants to be less oriented to spaceships, technology and other things that people might think of as science fiction. That change in direction has probably contributed to the cancellation of (what used to be) Sci Fi’s flagship series Farscape, along with Sci Fi’s decision to pass on two possible series by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. Needless to say, there are quite a few disgruntled fans out there who wonder why a network called the Sci Fi Channel would abandon science fiction in order to pursue the mainstream.

Me, I have another question: how did we ever get to the point where science fiction isn’t considered the mainstream? Read the remainder of this entry »

Icons and Ignorance

Posted March 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

So, have you heard about Wonder Woman’s haircut yet?

If you haven’t, here’s the story in a nutshell: In the current storyline by writer Walt Simonson and artist Jerry Ordway, Wonder Woman’s suffering from amnesia, but that’s not stopping any number of dangerous folks from trying to kill her. WW’s held off her attackers thus far, but she wants to get to the bottom of this. So with the aid of a dedicated fan, she adopts a brilliant disguise – she cuts her hair and puts on a pair of glasses. The issue in question comes out this week, and the story has hit the Associated Press and other media outlets. (Glad there’s nothing else going on in the world.)

The whole thing seems silly, of course. Who cares about a fictional character’s sense of style? Then again, we’re still digging out from Oscar night fashion coverage. So why shouldn’t the big stars of the comics world get the same treatment? But the coverage also highlights the odd relationship the media, and American society in general, have with comics’ major pop culture icons. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the Hulk – we know them all, but we barely know their stories and history.

The headline of the AP article, for example, is ‘After 60 years, Wonder Woman gets a makeover.’ Now, I think it’s probably true that this is the first time Wonder Woman’s been depicted in short hair. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, DC unveiled a new-look Wonder Woman, who eschewed her costume and most of her powers for a white jumpsuit and some crimefighting kung-fu action. In fact, the current amnesiac-out-of-costume storyline has included direct homages to those stories.

So this news isn’t really news. Even moreso because a new writer is taking over the series when this storyline is over, and it’s quite likely that everything will return to the status quo. It’s an odd pairing – the general media isn’t aware that change frequently occurs in long-running comics series, so when they do get wind of a (probably temporary) change in the status quo, they treat it as a groundbreaking alteration of our cultural landscape.

The biggest reason for this is probably that the major comics characters have transcended comics. Wonder Woman 190 was the 83rd-ranked comic for the month of March; industry analyst icv2 estimates that North American comic and pop culture stores ordered fewer than 25,000 copies. Super Friends reruns on Cartoon Network probably get more viewers; the network’s current Justice League series certainly does (to the tune of 1 million to 1.5 million). We may not remember what Wonder Woman was wearing in the comics in the 60s and 70s, but Lynda Carter’s TV version still lives on in reruns and the popular consciousness almost three decades after the fact.

It’s not just Wonder Woman, though. Batman is the top-selling title for March, with industry analyst icv2 estimating around 123,000 copies sold this month. Batman: The Animated Series drew millions of viewers when it aired on Fox and the WB in the early to mid 90s. At minimum, given Justice League’s ratings, ten times as many people are getting their notions about Batman, Superman and company from the cartoons as they are from the comics. Millions of people bought tickets to see X-Men, Spider-Man and Daredevil, but only thousands of people buy their comics.

Like Wonder Woman’s hair, this is not news. For decades, no one has really been paying much attention to the contemporary comic adventures – the comics helped establish an archetype in the pop culture consciousness once upon a time, but even by the 70s, they weren’t important enough to keep track of. This did allow for some experimentation in the comics of that time; for a while, Clark Kent was a TV reporter with no vulnerability to Kryptonite, Batman left stately Wayne Manor for a penthouse apartment in the city, and we’ve already mentioned Wonder Woman’s wardrobe changes.

In the 80s and 90s, publishers often tried to refocus attention on the comics themselves with major stunts. A reader poll led DC to kill off Robin to a hailstorm of media attention. This required mainstream journalists to grasp the difference between Dick Grayson – the Robin created in 1940 – and his 80s successor, Jason Todd. The Grayson character grew up, ditched the short pants, became Nightwing, and stars in his own series today. Todd found himself on the wrong end of an automatic dialer after only a few years. It was a difference likely lost on an audience raised on Adam West and Burt Ward, who just heard ‘Robin died’ and went crazy.

In 1993 and 1994, DC went for the whole enchilada and killed off Superman, broke Batman’s back, and turned Green Lantern into a homicidal maniac. The Death of Superman became a huge media phenomenon, as mainstream journalists somehow failed to pick up on the notion that very few characters in comics stay dead for long. But the shock events had diminishing returns, and often annoyed the existing readership without really changing the way the public at large thought of the characters. The other-media adaptations stuck to the same archetypes they always had.

Gradually, the comics publishers have decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, creating spinoff versions and alternate publishing lines whose purpose was to reflect the versions of the characters that a larger audience might be familiar with – in short, they began adapting to the adaptations. It remains to be seen if this will help draw in the mass audience that has eluded comics over the last few decades. In the worst case scenario, it could cause a stagnation in the major characters’ ongoing storylines and accelerate the sales decline as the last of the diehards leave and no new casual readers come in to replace them. In the end, comics has to find some way to change the fact that the public at large doesn’t really want to know what’s in the comics – they just want to know that they’re still there.