THINGS COMICKAL AND RANDOM

America Jr (Episode 283), or, as I like to think of it, A Boy Like That: I hit the punchline and laughed myself sick. Which is probably terribly wrong of me, but it's Just So Perfect.

The Onion AV Club: Bill Willingham

As Bill Willingham tells it, when he was younger, he chased all across the U.S., trying to break into comics as a writer and an artist, creating barely remembered titles like Ironwood, Coventry, and Elementals. Over the past seven years, he's worked largely for DC Comics, scripting Robin and Shadowpact, writing the limited series Proposition Player and the Sandman spin-off Thessaly: Witch For Hire, and contributing to DC's recent Infinite Crisis crossover. But Willingham became a force to be reckoned with in comics five years ago, when his ongoing series Fables launched. An epic, beautifully written story that places "Fables," familiar characters from folklore, in the mundane world after a mysterious Adversary conquers their homelands, the series has proved tremendously popular, spawning (to date) 10 graphic novels and the ongoing spin-off series Jack Of Fables, co-written with Matt Sturges. Just before the San Diego ComicCon, where DC announced the upcoming Sturges/Willingham project House Of Mystery, Willingham spoke to The A.V. Club about his history, his future, his terrible attempts at pitching projects, and how growing up as an Army brat prepared him for a lifetime of chasing soon-to-be-defunct comics companies across the country.

[Willingham:] [...]My personal theory is that we've all got this bucket full of good ideas, and if you just hold onto them, your bucket never gets fuller. There's only so many you can hold at a time, but as fast as you use them up, it fills up again with more good ideas. My notion is to spend everything you've got coming through your head as fast as you can, and you're guaranteed to get more good stuff. So while writing Robin and stuff like that, if I had good ideas, I'd try to pitch them and run with them. Sometimes it backfired. It was my idea to make Spoiler into Robin, just before she died horribly. I thought that would be a good thing for the character, but it turns out that legions of female fans now detest me for doing that....

...OK, no. They don't detest you for making Spoiler into Robin, they detest you for the horrible death itself, as well as the hamhanded storywriting that led into it; if she had stayed Spoiler, and died the same way, with Batman contributing to it in the same way and Leslie acting so severely out of character at the end of it, the people who detest you for that death would still feel the same way about it. Said terribly vicious murder, as you and Didio have said many times in other places, was editorially mandated, so that, at least, wasn't your fault, but going on about it like this and not understanding what precisely people were upset about somehow doesn't help. (And there is, of course, the open question of whose fault the story details leading into the murder were.) But really, you know, most people have moved on, and now hate Dan Didio, because it's clearly his opinion that Stephanie wasn't really a Robin -- and even allowing that she wasn't Robin when she was killed, allowing Bruce to present the attitude about it that he has makes him seem unusually callous, even for him.

The Onion AV Club: Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon has had a long and storied history in Hollywood as a screenwriter, on television as the writer-creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, and back in Hollywood as the writer-director of Serenity. As an enthusiastic, unabashed fan of all things smart and geeky, it was inevitable that he'd find his way into comics, where (among other things) he's written the far-future Buffy spin-off Fray, a well-received run on Astonishing X-Men, and the Firefly miniseries Serenity: Those Left Behind. Currently, he's wrapping up his X-Men run, taking over writing duties for Brian K. Vaughan on Runaways, and scripting future issues of Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Eight, the official comics continuation of his beloved first show.

Recently, Whedon took the spotlight at the San Diego ComicCon, where he announced that he's in negotiations to bring the Buffy spin-off Ripper to the BBC, showcased his online Dark Horse comic Sugarshock, and took five charity auction-winners to dinner, raising more than $60,000 for the worldwide women's-rights organization Equality Now. Just before heading to San Diego, Whedon spoke with The A.V. Club about his current and upcoming comics projects, his film project Goners, the status of Serenity, why spoilers are ruining our culture, and his much-publicized work on—and break from—the Wonder Woman film project. [...]

[...] AVC: Is your Wonder Woman film adaptation irrevocably dead, or is there any possibility of going back?

JW: I loved what I was doing. I mean, it was really hard. It took me a long time to break the story structurally to my satisfaction. When I did that, it was in an outline, and not in a draft, and they didn't like it. So I never got to write a draft where I got to work out exactly what I wanted to do. In terms of the meaning, the feeling, the look, the emotion, the character, the relationship with Steve Trevor, all of that stuff, I never wavered for a second. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. It was really just a question of housing it. I would go back in a heartbeat if I believed that anybody believed in what I was doing. The lack of enthusiasm was overwhelming. It was almost staggering, and that was kind of from the beginning. I just don't think my take on Wonder Woman was ever to their liking.

I wasn't getting them to feel what they wanted to feel. They couldn't describe what that was to me. We're talking about a huge investment. To ask somebody to jump on that, what is going to be a few hundred million dollars these days, if they just don't have that feeling… I had that feeling. I got chills when I think of some of this stuff, but apparently I was the only one who was chilly. Everybody was very gracious about it. It was a blind date, and everybody thought we'd get married, but let's just leave it at the door.

AVC: What would you do on a set with $100 million dollars, having never worked with a budget like that before?

JW: It's the exact same job. The money has never mattered. If you have $100 million, if you have $100,000, you're trying to hit someone in the gut with an emotional moment. If you can back that up with an awesome visual, that's really neat. If you can back that up with a visual that's not awesome, but at least gets it done, tells them what they need to know to hit them in the gut emotionally, that's neat too. If the characters can only talk about it in a room, then the emotional moment has to be really, really good, but it's still neat. That's never really worried me. I've always thought way too big, and then people have gone, "Great. Now you have to scale this way back." In this case, I didn't have to scale it way back, I just had to stop doing it.

AVC: Can you say anything about the plot you had in mind for your version of the film?

JW: Well, I'll tell you one thing that sort of exemplifies my feelings. The idea was always that she's awesome, she's fabulous, she's strong, she's beautiful, she's well-intentioned, she thinks she's a great big hero, and it's Steve Trevor's job to go, "You don't understand human weakness, therefore you are not a hero, and you never will be until you're as helpless as we are. Fight through that, and then I'll be impressed. Until then, I'm just going to give you shit in a romantic-comedy kind of way."

There was talk about what city she was in and stuff, but by the end, she had never actually set foot in America. Wonder Woman isn't Spider-man or Batman. She doesn't have a town, she has a world. That was more interesting to me than a kind of contained, rote superhero franchise. I think ultimately the best way I can describe the kind of movie I was wanting to make—it was a fun adventure, not gritty, or insanely political, or anything like that. There was meat to the idea of, "Well, why aren't you guys better? What's up with that?" Her lack of understanding of how this world has come to this pass.

My favorite thing was the bracelets. I mean, the bracelets are cool, but how do I make that work? In the original comic book, they needed them because they fire guns on Paradise Island. I don't think I'm going there. So, I thought about it for a while, and I realized, "Oh, right, this is how this works." So in my version, she left Paradise Island with Steve, who was a world-relief guy bringing medical supplies to refugees, which is why he was so desperate to get off the island. She goes with him, and the moment she sets foot on land outside of Paradise Island, somebody shoots her in the chest. And it hurts. [Laughs.] She's just so appalled. And obviously, she heals within a few hours. She pulls the bullet out herself, and kind of looks at it like, "What the hell is this?" She heals, but she's appalled and humiliated, and the next time someone shoots at her, she puts her bracelet in the way because she's terrified of getting shot. It's just a reflexive thing. She has these bands that they all wear, just a piece of armor, and she puts it up. And then she gets good at it. By the end, it's kind of her thing, but it's because she got shot one time and didn't think that it was awesome. I think that is probably not the feeling the producers wanted to have. Though honestly, that could have been their favorite thing. I don't know, because when I asked Joel Silver, point blank, "Well, if they don't want what I'm doing, what do they want?" he said, "They don't know." [...]

...You know, here's the thing: they may not have known what they wanted, but it may well be that they knew what they didn't want when they heard it. I'd be willing to bet that the suits were somehow thinking, "Big iconic take on the character," only not really knowing that was what they wanted. And then one of the first things Joss said was, "There will be no star spangled panties." And, well, love them or loathe them (and lately, they seem to be a star spangled thong, so kind of one with the loathing), the star spangled panties really are iconic Wonder Woman, along with the golden eagle clutching her chest, the bracelets and tiara. The only times you get away from them are very early on, when it was in fact a star spangled skirt with star spangled panties underneath, and in the 70s one-piece period. Combine that with her not setting foot in the country, which, frankly, is just a very odd concept, since early WW is really all about the culture clash between her island of origin (I'm assuming they'd have used Themiscyra and not Paradise Island) and the outside world. Thing is, if you look at what's worked with recent superhero movies (Spiderman, Batman Begins, Fantastic Four), what has been done is to reinterpret the characters for the medium, mostly if not entirely as defined by the current comics -- or in the case of Batman, as defined by Miller's "Year One" story. Knowing that he was planning to get away from one iconic thing and the early definition of the iconic character may have predisposed the executives to not liking his ideas, regardless of their merits. Combine that with them not really knowing what they wanted... well. (It's probably worth noting, in this context, that Superman Returns was failing to be the spectacular they wanted just as this was all going down, and that one of the things that the film does is that it takes off as an air on the film series, rather than simply rebooting as a new film, using the comics as a takeoff point. It asks, in short, for the viewer to bring two sets of continuity porn to the table -- and two sets of 20 year old continuity porn, at that -- which is asking one hell of a lot.)

And also: The Terrible Secret of Livejournal: in which the partial and quite savage disconnect between Livejournal and what some of its customers want -- clarity, primarily -- is explained by someone else in a way that makes sense of it.