Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett looks at Dynamite Entertainment's re-imagining of the King Features characters.
Honest, I hadn't planned to write about Dynamite Entertainment picking up the rights to Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician which with the already announced The Phantom makes for a King Features trifecta for the publisher. To be honest I tried really hard to not have an opinion on the subject, seeing as how I've written so much recently about reviving a storied comic franchise. But heaven help me I did think about it and, darn the luck, discovered I did have an opinion and since it seems a shame to just waste it and I do have a deadline…
Frankly if the solicitations for The Phantom are any indication of how they'll handle the other characters it looks like this will be yet another attempt to make classic characters appeal to the direct sales market by strip-mining most of their content until all that's left is "the black box" (i.e., "it's about this magician," "it's about this guy that gets sent to an alien world," etc.). I mean, sure it's pretty much guaranteed to alienate fans of the original comic strips, but really we're only talking about some really old guys and a negligible number of comic strip aficionados.
Ultimately moves like these probably don't hurt the property and if you can get access to the mainstream press on a real slow news days you might even able to plug your comics while alerting Hollywood the property is still alive. But it sure doesn't help them much either. In the very short term you can probably move X amount of comics by taking a concept with brand name recognition (i.e. everyone knows who they are but nobody knows all that much about them) and giving it an "extreme" twist. You could conceivably even produce a kind of interesting one-off, but will it reinvent, say, The Phantom for a whole new generation? Not surprisingly, I have my doubts.
Not that I think there's anything inherently wrong with the premise of a member of the Walker family deciding to opt out of the family business, it's the execution where these sort of things tend to fall apart. I like Alex Ross Artist but have got real problems with Alex Ross Re-imaginer -- as someone who absolutely loves Golden Age superheroes I've never been much more than lukewarm over Project Superpowers seeing as it's populated with characters that are Golden Age superheroes in name only. From him we'll be getting a Phantom sans jungle, sans pirates and with the much ridiculed outfit replaced with dripping blood and face paint; in short, he's essentially been turned into just another generic urban contemporary revenger.
What they'll do with Flash Gordon is really more of a matter of what they can do with it. Sure, it's mostly how pretty the comic is going to be (something you have to contend when you're openly inviting constant comparison with Alex Raymond), but it's also important to decide just who Flash is, since the original version is pretty much a blank slate. Plus, they'll really have to come up with a reason why Flash resists being seduced by Princess Aura -- it's hard to imagine a contemporary heterosexual American dodging that particular bullet.
And when it comes to Mandrake the Magician… as much as I love the Mandrake comic strip (and really wish someone would collect it) I really don't how you could make a contemporary version without completely changing his signature visual. And of course you have to figure out what to do with Mandrake's friend African Prince Lothar who in less enlightened times carried his luggage and spoke in broken English.
Of course before he settled down and became a serious crime fighter Mandrake was actually kind of a jerk, turning (thanks to the power of illusions) into pigs and whatnot just for fun, so they might just as well re-imagine him as Russell Brand (who, when you think of it, kind of looks like the late magician Doug Henning). There you go, do a version of Mandrake where he's half Tony Stark (loveable rogue) and half young Alan Moore ("actual" magician). Oooh, I've just given myself a nauseating idea - I hate when that happens.
And finally while we're on the subject when I checked the entry for Mandrake the Magician on the TV Tropes website I discovered this factoid under the category of DID NOT DO THE RESEARCH:
(Mandrake creator) Lee Falk was once asked if he knew that Lothar is in fact a German name. He admitted that no, he didn't. He "just thought it sounded like a good African name."
Here's a startling confession; I am fifty years old and have known about Mandrake and Lothar for a solid forty of them and this never occurred to me.
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.
Column by Steve Bennett
Posted by ICv2 on June 2, 2010 @ 12:00 am CT
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