Are cool! Classic superheroes are historic literary characters, but they are also visual icons. The distinctive shapes and attributes of the great superheroes can serve as powerful shortcuts to thoughts and feelings about the ideals they represent. I found these posters by Macedonian artist Marko Manev today on Gizmodo. Both the artist and Gizmodo blogger Andrew Tarantola identify the images as noir, and Tarantola describes them as images of social isolation. But what intrigues me about the best of these posters is their minimalism. How far can you simplify the image of a superhero while ensuring that the character is not just recognizable, but retains his full symbolic power? The answer is, a whole lot.
Superman is almost too easy.
But Iron Man is a bit more subtle. I would love to see this image without the border and caption.
The quality of these posters is obviously a result of Marvec’s skill as an artist and designer, but they’re also a tribute to all the great Golden Age artists who did the original character and costume designs for the iconic heroes. These are designs that have survived the test of time and come out stronger at the other end. Not only are these characters still making lots of money for the companies that own them, but they actually mean something to people. They’ve gotten into our collective soul to the point where even highly simplified icons of them still hit us right in the spiritual gut.
See the rest of the posters (The Silver Surfer, Wolverine, Dr. Manhattan and more) on Marvec’s Behance page here. They are all interesting, and some are strikingly beautiful. (All images © Marko Marvec.)
Cynical, superhero-hating Wolfie here, checking in.
“(The posters are)…a tribute to all the great Golden Age artists who did the original character and costume designs for the iconic heroes. These are designs that have survived the test of time and come out stronger at the other end. Not only are these characters still making lots of money for the companies that own them, but they actually mean something to people.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have a ton of respect for the Golden Age artists who worked for peanuts, living in drafty garrets, working impossible deadlines and often not getting any credit.
What happened afterwards, though, is no tribute to anyone. Big corporations appropriated the creations of others, paid them pennies on the millions, and started a production mill. The reason these heroes are “iconic” today is not due to the quality of their designs or origins or backstory or anything that new generations of writers have done with them- it’s simply the result of shoving them out there so often that they managed to stick.
It’s the disease that infects entertainment corporations and Hollywood today. It seems like every film out there is a re-make, a re-boot, or an adaptation of an existing product. Instead of producing new stuff that might have a chance of being good, Hollywood makes movies of every comic character in existence (including re-booting stuff that was made only a few years previously… Hulk, anyone?), every graphic novel ever, re-makes classic films they have no business touching with a twenty-foot pole, and now board games. Battleship was such a classic, can’t wait to see what they do with Candyland and Monopoly. What’s more frustrating is that the completely original stuff that does make it (District 9, Inception) is so vastly better than the crap, and is actually commercially successful, too. Learn anything, Hollywood? For one Battleship, you could have made six District 9s and introduced six new directing talents to the world. Did they really make more dough from Battleship than they would have from six smaller, vastly better films?
Applying this to comics- So the heroes of the past are regurgitated today, and we need more and more convoluted reasons for this unbelievable crap to work. In the end, it’s still just stupid. Batman stalks the night in a costume he couldn’t realistically see out of (at the least it would block his vision partially), wearing a cape that would restrict his movements, swinging between buildings in a way that would tear the flesh from a real person’s hands, magically able to find crimes wherever he looks (how many muggings and bank robberies does Gotham have, since Batman has personally stopped about 167,983 of them?) Iron Man does everything in a suit that, even if they could make it work, would fry him in an instant due to heat build-up. And Superman still wears his underwear on the outside- not because it’s iconic or awesome, but because the original artist drew a naked guy in a leotard to save time and couldn’t have a super-batch flashing in the eyes of the youth of America.
And you know what? It’s awesome if it’s just a fantasy, a goofy tale for kids. Superscience and superpowers are fun. But they couldn’t just keep it fun, and move on when the characters had played themselves out. Considering how they were written, they played themselves out pretty fast. Superman is Superman. Batman was a bazillionaire. So was Tony Stark. Thor was a god. Peter Parker at least was humble, as was Bruce Banner (if a super-genius can be considered humble). But they all could do so much, move heaven and earth, that they had to keep upping the ante, an endless Monty Hall escalation that produced more and more ridiculous stories. Superman couldn’t even fly at first, then they kept adding powers, and finally they had to give him a million weaknesses (rainbow kryptonite?) and introduce a new villain every week that could crack the world in half. So they had to kill him off, which predictably lasted all of a month or two. Bruce Wayne slept with his ward and had a cave full of goofy gadgets. Then someone realized that any guy who swings around dark alleys in a bat costume must be wrong in the head, so we got the tortured, angst-ridden Batman and tedious psychoanalysis of him and the Joker.
But those stories could never really convince because in the end we still had a guy, say, jumping around a city in a bat costume. Exchanging a utility belt of episode-specific deus ex machina gadgetry for Tibetan mysticism and modern psychology is just wrapping the turd in more and more layers of pretty paper. It’s still a turd. It’s time to retire, to consign to the annals of a simpler time, and create new stuff. Release the hardcover compilations. Show us the finest work of the artists of the past who worked in a particular time and place, both the grand and beautiful (CC Beck) and the so-atrocious-it’s-funny (Fletcher Hanks). But leave the leotards behind, okay? This is the 21st century. By flogging this dead horse so hard, the companies are ruining any goodwill and pleasant memories we had toward these characters. The Joker beating orphans to death with a lead pipe isn’t edgy and modern, it’s a horrible combination of exploitative and sick that goes completely against the Golden Age spirit. Having Tony Stark sound like Ayn Rand’s favorite disciple in the movies isn’t sticking it to the gubbmint, it’s making the screenwriter sound like a stupid mouth-breathing a-hole. Not to mention you’re dating your movie, Mr. Teabagger. But that’s okay, because according to the Hollywood schedule, the reboot is probably less than three years away, anyway.
But of course, it’s about money, not art. So instead of new heroes that truly are for our times, we get the recyclings of the trimmings of the table scraps of the dregs of the bottom of the barrel-scrapings of desperate re-imaginings and re-bootings and trying-to-make-this-relevant-ings by a bevy of talented artists and writers who are frankly wasting their talents.
To conclude, these stale old heroes are only “icons” and only “mean something to people” because they’ve been shoved down our throats by big media. If the original Golden Age heroes had been “Cardboard Box Man” and “The Incredible Flying Spork” and “Dr. Used Tissue Wad”, and if the companied peddled them as hard as they’ve pushed Batman and Superman and the rest of the tired old gang, we’d have “Dr. Used Tissue Wad IV in 3D” in the theaters instead of “The Avengers”.
I love Soup. Soup is a million times more interesting to me than Batman. Why? Because he’s a normal guy who found he could do extraordinary things, and his reaction to this was to try and become a superhero like in the comics, but he then finds that it’s not at all like that. He wears normal clothes that are an artistic challenge to draw, not merely tracing Charles Atlas in his skivvies. He has, to my knowledge, never stopped an actual crime, because crime is a rare thing. He uses his powers in creative ways, to help the people he cares for. And, unlike most superhero comics, there is a real, established story reason for there to be unusual things happening in his town, in your carefully-constructed background mythos, that gives Kekionga the grounded realism that Gotham and Metropolis will never have. If there were justice in the universe, Jack Swann would be on every comics fan’s lips instead of Bruce Frigging Tired-Ass Psycho Wayne.
End rant.