Tag: Catwoman

With Further Ado #188: Seeing Gulacy On Screen in The Batman

With Further Ado #188: Seeing Gulacy On Screen in The Batman

As is often the case, fandom at large is hip deep in analyzing, and arguing about, The Caped Crusader’s latest cinematic outing.  I saw The Batman on opening night, and one of the best aspects was how energized the audience was.  It’s invigorating when “everyone” gets excited for a movie about a favorite character.   For me, it’s less important whether I loved it or hated it. I get happy when everyone else gets happy about it.

Another one of the most amazing things about this movie, upon reflection, was how the cinematic Catwoman seemed like a Paul Gulacy illustration come to life.

Gulacy, a brilliant, prolific comics artist – burst on the scene in the 70s in groundbreaking series like Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu and, with Don McGregor, Epic’s Sabre – one of the first/earliest graphic novels (as we define the term today).   Paul Gulacy’s slick compositions, cinematic layouts, gorgeous leading ladies, and fast paced storytelling was always a treat.

When there’s a scene with a fire in a Gulacy story, you can almost feel the heat on your face.

Gulacy was no stranger to Batman either, having illustrated many bat-stories over the years. Of note, he was always pushing himself, often developing new Batmobile designs and costume tweaks with each outing.

Gulacy also was an artist on DC’s Catwoman. He followed Darwyn Cooke’s memorable run on that series.  Cooke was a tough act to follow, but somehow Gulacy managed to do it.

Paul Gulacy’s Catwoman is sexy and sly.  She moves like a cat, even though comics art is, of course, static. She’s tough and enduring and likeable. And she looks a lot like The Batman’s Zoë Kravitz! Or maybe Zoë Kravitz looks a lot like Gulacy’s version of the Feline Felon.

Today, anyone who makes a super-hero movie has a wealth of source material to reference. I’m glad Matt Reeves and The Batman folks like Paul Gulacy art so much.

This should’ve happened last year. Marvel’ s Shang Chi movie, which seems to be referred to now as Legend of the 10 Rings, was based on a character that really hit his stride when writer Doug Moench partnered with artist Paul Gulacy to create a globetrotting spy adventure.  In the 70s and early 80s, Master of Kung Fu was one of the most epic series, with larger-than-life plots, beautiful women, incredible fight scenes and cameos by favorite movies stars (Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx, etc.) No, really.  Paul Gulacy made his mark on the series and was followed by several other brilliant artists, but it always seemed like “his” series to me.

The cinematic Shang Chi didn’t bear much resemblance to the comic version. That’s fine, I suppose, for the world at large. But it was a disappointment for some long-time readers.  I wish Gulacy’s version of the character, and the fascinating supporting cast, had made it to the screen.

So, I’m grateful to see so many of Gulacy’s brilliant concepts and illustrations on-screen in this new Darknight Detective movie.  And I hope to see more.

Oh, and I must say, the Batmobile video game was in the movie theater lobby was outrageously fantastic too.


Editor’s Notes:
If you are not familiar with Paul Gulacy or interested in seeing what he is up to, he is on Twitter at pgulacy1.

Also, this is not the first time that the world has reminded Pop Culture Squad writers about Paul Gulacy’s art.

With Further Ado #176: Getting Chatty (and Catty) with Cliff Chiang

With Further Ado #176: Getting Chatty (and Catty) with Cliff Chiang

Cliff Chiang is a gifted artist, a boundary pushing creator and a helluva nice guy. He’s smart, upbeat and laser-focused on producing the best work possible. I’ve always enjoyed time his work and our conversations.  With all that in mind, I found myself enjoying the first issue of his latest, Catwoman: Lonely City, more than I thought I would.  I should note this oversized, four-issue comic series is from the DC Black Label imprint. There’s been a lot of Batman stories published lately (as Mike Gold pointed out here), and I worried I had had my fill of the character for a while.

Chiang has pleasantly surprised me yet again. I was so impressed with this book. I had to reach out to the artist, now writer-artist, to find out more. Here are the highlights from our conversation:


Ed Catto: I feel like right now, there’s a lot of Batman product out there. There’s a bunch of different projects coming out and part of me was like, “I think I’m reading too much Batman.” But somehow you broke through that clutter and really delivered something fresh with Catwoman: Lonely City.

Cliff Chiang: I wasn’t going to spend all this time on a throw-away story. I think you might be able to tell by the first issue, certainly by the second, that I’m trying to pay homage to those classic Batman stories, The Dark Knight Returns and Year One. You know, I almost hesitate to say “my take” take on it.  But I’m just looking to show the parts of Gotham and that don’t necessarily get shown.

Catwoman is such a perfect vehicle for that. She’s really a great character, but she’s also kind of not necessarily as rigidly defined as Batman . Certainly not the Batman that is popular today. I thought there was a lot of gray area to her that would be interesting, especially in the context of a more “crime story” showcase.

EC: Somehow it all seems very fresh. Visually I feel you tagged all the bases for fans, with all the old costumes and whatnot, and then you kind of faked us all out, with “here’s something new”.

CC: And that’s deliberate. Part of me wants to acknowledge all the publishing history that’s come before. That’s part of the mystery of the character. That’s part of what makes you feel her age as well. Because you’re like, “Oh wow she’s done this, and she’s done that. And this is the costume that she wore that time when she did this.

There’s a way in which all the publishing history, our character can be leveraged to make it feel the weight of the years.  And to celebrate that stuff to you know. A big part of this story is about is about getting older. Gotham gotten rid of superheroes, and sort of grown-up in the process.

And to take a look at how city like Gotham might function in the modern world. I wanted to play with that stuff as well.

So, you’ve got you the older stuff that we’re all fans of on one hand, and on the other hand, you can bring in new ideas. I didn’t want to throw away the old stuff.  I wanted to keep it and kind of look at different eyes and make you appreciate it again. And then bring in these other concepts to so that the whole thing is richer.

EC: This your first big venture as both writer and artist, Cliff. How was it working with a new writer (you) for “Cliff the artist”? How did that process change for you?

CC: You know, it’s funny. I started this two years ago, and the interesting thing about it is that, in order to get a handle on it all, because it’s such a big story and it’s a big job, I had to compartmentalize.  The writing –  it was a year of writing – included an outline and the full script.

I wrote in full script because I know how much information is there on the page. I’ve read so many scripts from other people, too. It allows me to kind of evaluate the story on an abstract level.

Whereas, by thumbnailing stuff (and not developing a full script- EC) ,you kind of get seduced by it because it’s a drawing.  It’s a comic all of sudden.  I wrote it all, and then I thumbnailed it and lettered it so it could be read by myself and the editors.

A lot of the writing was done, super focused, at the beginning.  Now as I’m drawing, I am thinking “Oh yeah, I knew this part was going to be a bear to draw.”

There’s so much stuff going on in every panel. Even for the city itself.  One of my goals is to make it feel really like New York City, and you can’t do that in a minimal way. Unfortunately. I wish I found shortcuts for this stuff, but at the same time, it’s what the story is. There were times when I cursed “the writer” a little bit. But it’s all going more or less “on plan”. It is taking longer than I ever expected.

EC: Do you think you would like to continue to create in this Black Label oversized the format for a while?

CC:  I do enjoy it. I think it needs the right kind of project. And I think you have to adjust your pacing for that.  That being said, I do enjoy the storytelling opportunities you get with the Black Label line.  It wasn’t until I held the thing in my and I realized the physical size of the page does have an impact.

EC: I was speaking with a local comic owner (Ash Gray from Comics for Collectors in Ithaca, NY) as I was preparing for our talk. It seems he under-ordered your series. He said that the orders were low initially on the first issue. Then there was a big buzz and it immediately sold out. Now he’s having trouble getting more copies to sell.

CC:  I was at the Baltimore Comic-Con. I met a lot of people there who are excited to read it. I met a lot of shop owners. Some of them knew to order heavy on it. [They had the opportunity] to read previews of it. They had two issues to read if they checked it out.  Some knew that, based on their store, based on their readers, that they could order “Batman numbers” on it.

Things do get lost in the shuffle.  Hopefully the buzz on it is that it sold out, and people bought it and that people came around asking for it.  Hopefully for the second issue people won’t be caught without it.

I just wanted to tell a story. I just want people to read it, and I think there’s a big audience for it. I think that’s the kind of book that you can, when all is said and done, hand it to somebody how might not be at the stores every week.  It could be someone who’s last Batman movie they watched was Batman Returns in 1992. What you need is just a basic pop culture knowledge of Batman and Catwoman. Everything else just falls into place.

It is a blank slate situation: Her name’s Catwoman.  She’s a cat burglar and she wears a cat costume. And sometimes she’s involved with Batman. And that’s all you need going into it.

EC: Upon reflection, of course, Catwoman is oftentimes portrayed as a sexy, young woman in a skintight suit. In Catwoman: Lonely City she’s not a young woman. I think it may have been a brave decision for you to have an older protagonist in this book.

CC:  Yes, I thought it immediately makes you reassess her. It puts both the reader and the character in a different place. It’s a pendulum. There’s a history of her as the sexy ingenue and then her involved in more hard-boiled crime.

For me, I felt making her older and having her grapple with ageism and sexism would force you to see her differently.  And in some ways, to tone that down, so you could see her as a person. Much of the story depends on you relating to her and to her losses and indignities and how she suffers. And you can’t do that with someone slinking around and purring and all that stuff.

I think that’s all part of her history. You see that in a couple of issues, too, but she’s not that person anymore. It’s a little bit of playing a part at one point in your life and moving past it.

EC: Working with your editors, was there every a point where you were told “watch out someone else is doing something similar?” Doing something with characters like Catwoman or Killer Croc?  Or was this separate enough from everything else.

CC: A little of both. My editors were worried about something being similar to what just happened. But then, once we squared that away, everybody was really happy with the story. I think the realization was that: there’s an audience for this book is separate from the audience for other books.

And that’s okay. It’s a bigger project and it’s kind of more evergreen than whatever it is happening in the monthly book. There are things I wish, maybe, that had more novelty to them.  But we’ve seen that happen.  When I wrote this story – I came up with this story two years ago – there were elements that hadn’t appeared yet. That’s just the nature of the beast.

You think you are ahead of the curve. But you are not. You are just part of the Zeitgeist like everyone else. You can think you’re clever doing a book about adolescents in 1988 and then, two months later, after your book, Stranger Things comes out.

EC: This is more of a technical question.  You are a very thoughtful artist and you’ve been doing this for a long time. Do you feel as if you deal with editors differently now than you would have years ago?

CC: Probably. I’m on the same wavelength as the editors. And Black Label is open to creators taking changes and thinking about things differently.  So, it’s a pleasure. All the interactions and all the notes and suggestions from the editors make the story better. As an artist I can appreciate that end of it. It’s so great that I can’t complain about it.

EC:  Well, Cliff this has been fantastic.  Good chatting with you, I hope to see you in person real soon. Good luck with everything and best your family during this Yuletide Season.

CC: Okay, all right. Hey, thanks a lot and take care now.


Issue #2 of Cliff Chiang’s Catwoman: Lonely City, a DC Black Label book, is on sale December 22nd.

 

 

Brainiac On Banjo: No Lunch For Batman

Brainiac On Banjo: No Lunch For Batman

“Down on me, down on me; looks like everybody in this whole round world, they’re down on me.” Janis Joplin, Down On Me, 1967

Many years ago, the late and truly great Dennis O’Neil said that neither Bruce Wayne nor Batman had a sex life; he/they sublimated all such compulsions, folding them into the mission. Denny said that in the office that we shared, and, damn, it made sense to me. In fact, it explained a lot about the guy.

Mind you, as the writer or editor of a great, great many top-rank Batman stories over the course of five decades, I believe Denny knew more about what made Batman tick than Bruce Wayne ever could. However, this particular observation was not canonical. Bruce even fostered a son with his frenemy Talia al Ghul, and that child became the latest Robin — as of this writing, of course.

Let us now flash forward to the late summer of 2018 and the release of DC’s Black Label adults-only series, Batman – Damned. Created by writer Brian Azzarello and artist Lee Bermejo, the story ran three issues. It was the first volume that upset some people, as it had the briefest glimpse of a small part of Bruce’s penis. To be fair, it really wasn’t enough to be perceived as salacious by anybody but the most pathetically repressed — not unlike Janet Jackson’s nipple which evidently blinded tens of thousands of small children who were watching the Super Bowl but were thinking of dinner.

Oh, yes: it also bothered the bean counters at DC/Warner Bros/WarnerMedia/AT&T/Lucky Charms or whatever the hell they were calling themselves that week. Bean counters are the most paranoid people in the media businesses; it’s in their job description. People made such a big deal of it that the Batwang was, well, overly circumcised in the digital editions and in later reprintings. The parent companies were so offended that the whole thing had an impact on several careers. The whole thing had a short shelf-life as the object of snickering jokes on late-night television.

O.K. So “Adults Only” in DCland doesn’t include, you know, adult stuff. Lesson learned. And lesson repeated this month.

For over a year, WarnerMedia (now called Warner Bros. Discovery, at least as of this writing) has had this very expensive streaming service called HBO Max. It’s got a lot of original material, and much of it is generated by DC comics properties. These shows are not G rated, nor are they PG. Sometimes there’s a fine line between R and X ratings, and a lot of HBO Max’s DC stuff inhabits that zip code. This pace was set in the first episode of their first series, Titans, where Dick Grayson (a.k.a. Robin the First) shouts “Fuck Batman!” Holy Wertham, Batfans! WTF??

Titans survived and the third season goes up in August. Their second show, The Doom Patrol, has had actual on-screen sex, with naughty bits and more about Brendon Fraser than you might want to know. Their other Batman related show, the adults-only animated series Harley Quinn, is the most adults-only of the bunch, and the third season is now in production. But at least one scene won’t be completed — the one where Batman has oral sex with Catwoman. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: No Lunch For Batman”

Brainiac On Banjo #035: Women Unite — But In Mongolia, Hold The Soda!

Brainiac On Banjo #035: Women Unite — But In Mongolia, Hold The Soda!

Avengers: Endgame passed the $2,100,000,000 mark ten days after release, so in honor of that momentous event, here is a photo of my all-time favorite superhero team-up, even though it has yet to happen on-screen.

Now that the Avengers movies have made about as much money as your average Wall Street cocaine dealer, I think we can say the “women heroes don’t sell movies” bullshit is behind us. It’s time to do the A-Force movie.

Seriously. It’s well past time, but before this weekend the banks might not have financed such a film. I think an A-Force movie will inspire more young girls than a woman president, though that is not an either/or proposition. And the prospect of women getting their boyfriends to take them to a big super-hero movie epic is the very meaning of “turnabout is fair play.” Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo #035: Women Unite — But In Mongolia, Hold The Soda!”

Everything We Read This Week – 7/4/2018

Everything We Read This Week – 7/4/2018

In this column, we make a quick trip through this weeks pull-list. It features mostly spoiler-free brief analysis and commentary of each book.

This week, Wednesday was on the Fourth of July, and many people were lucky enough to get to their LCS on the holiday. There were a lot of new significant books this week. Some ended stories, some were beginnings, and others were turning points. We tried to bring as many as we could here to give you our take on this weeks slate.

There is a 4 star rating system. It is simple and not to be taken too seriously as everyone gets their own impressions of art. These ratings are just to give our readers an idea of what we thought of the book, and they will be on the generous side normally. So don’t expect to see a lot of 1 Stars. After all, its not often that you have a bad book on your pull-list.

The rating system is as follows:

  • Great
  • Good
  • OK
  • Not Good

And here are the books we read in alphabetical order:

Continue reading “Everything We Read This Week – 7/4/2018”

Brainiac On Banjo #001: Back In The Saddle Again!

Brainiac On Banjo #001: Back In The Saddle Again!

For those who came in late: Well, hello there! After a nice half-year nap, I’ve gone back to the magic keyboard to unleash my innermost thoughts onto a weary public, now, here on this fabulous new site Pop Culture Squad! I have some concept of what’s likely to happen at PCS – we’re in “soft launch” mode right now and lots of weird and synapse-melting things are coming down the pike, particularly in the realm of multimedia.

If you’re new to my sundry waxings, you’ll catch on pretty quick. Brainiac On Banjo is a line the late great Vivian Stanshall uttered in the song “The Intro and the Outro” on the very first Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band album, and that’s the same record that gave Death Cab For Cutie its name.

As one might infer, Brainiac On Banjo is about the ever-broadening world of comic books and related media. I’ve had some experience laboring in those fields forever and ever – if we haven’t already, I’ll probably have something of a bio up on PCS soon, as in “after I’m told to write one.” I’m also involved in lotsa other shit, like the Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind radio show (see below), and I’ll indulging in my most offensive political fantasies right here on Pop Culture Squad starting this Thursday.

Be warned. It’s been quiet out there.

Too quiet.

I’m going to kick off the return of Brainiac On Banjo by doing something that might confuse or even startle long-time readers: I’m going to praise a DC Comics production without once writing about their unrequited passion for slapping the reboot button like a monkey in a crack experiment. Nope, not even once. Really.

Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo #001: Back In The Saddle Again!”