Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Comics in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett talks about nostalgia and comic movies.

A couple of weeks ago John August, the latest screenwriter attached to the threatened movie version of Shazam, got the undivided attention of fans everywhere when he posted the following on his blog johnaugust.com:

If I were writing a dissertation on the evolution of the Captain Marvel character (hardcover anthologies) would be invaluable.  But I'm not.  So every time I read one of these, I'm stuck with the same realization I encounter trying to watch the Honeymooners or a black-and-white movie: Wow.  Old things suck.

 

Yes, I know that will piss off the vintage comic fans, who insist that the original incarnations are the purest forms of a character.  But what you quickly realize is that old-time comic books were awkwardly written, crudely drawn and bewilderingly inconsistent with their rules.  They were making up the art form as they went along and today's comic books are better for the accumulated wisdom.

In later postings he admitted he exaggerated to make a point and to bait his readers, but it's clear he also kind of means it.  And it's that simple sentence probably explains why the studio decided to pass on a script by William Goldman, the man who gave us The Princess Bride; it probably didn't have enough of a Nickelodeon feel for today's kids.

Of course that's just an assumption on my part; as we all know from past experience I'm frequently wrong and could be again. And I'm really not trying to denigrate Mr. August's writing skills--anyone who wrote the scripts for the films Go and Big Fish is OK by me. But I checked his biography and learned he's about ten years younger than I am, and maybe that's an important decade.

Because I love old stuff.  As a real 'child of the 60's,' these days I find myself a lot more interested in watching an episode of The Addams Family than Two and a Half Men.  And I also seem to have inherited my father's nostalgia for popular culture from the '30s and '40s; I was genuinely thrilled when Turner Classic Movies showed marathons of b-movie series I'd never seen before like Boston Blackie and The Lone Wolf.

And, as I've made abundantly clear, I love Golden Age comics--love them because they are awkwardly written and crudely drawn...not to mention wildly imaginative and frequently unpredictable.

So of course my first reaction to his statement was utter indignation.

My second was, 'You know, he kind of has a point'.

When you actually go to johnaugust.com (and you might really want to) and read some of his later posts it becomes clear the last thing he (and no doubt the studio) wants is for the Shazam movie to be in any way a 'period piece.'  And I really can't blame them for that; we all know what happened to that first burst of superhero movies that came immediately after Batman (The Phantom, The Shadow, and The Rocketeer)--nothing.

Even today it can be difficult hooking an audience with a high fantasy premise, but giving a film a 'retro' look or, heaven forbid, actually setting it decades before the key eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic was born is just asking for trouble.

Last week wasn't the first time I've strongly suggested that both Disney and Time-Warner were having trouble getting today's crop of tots to connect to their classic (i.e. really, really old) cartoon characters.  Between the two, Disney is doing the better job, what with the success of their CGI pre-school series Mickey's Clubhouse.  But again I have to ask, where oh where is an anime style Kingdom Hearts animated series?  It would be just the thing to grab the attention of tweens who'd never bother with Mickey Mouse and are geeking out to Nickelodeon's Avatar:  The Last Airbender.

As to why, well the trouble with classic characters is on the one hand they've got great brand name recognition, but on the other they carry with them the stink of age.  And apparently the one thing 'kids today' will not tolerate is ...you guessed it, old stuff.  Which is why companies feel compelled to (and here's another word you'll need in your vocabulary) 'contemporize' classic characters; which is what brings forth abominations like Loonatiks Unleashed.

You might rightfully be asking yourselves, 'Why am I going on about this?'  I mean it doesn't have much to do with us; we don't sell a lot (if any) funny animal comics in our shops.  It's because, as I've also said too often in the past, comic book shops are built on a foundation of nostalgia--fans wanting back the comic books they used to have or wanting to revisit the characters they used to love.

The thing is; nostalgia isn't what it used to be.  I'll actually get to my point next week.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.