Did J. Michael Straczynski’s Wonder Woman and Superman break the D.C Comics Universe?

Over countless eons, across the vast expanses that seperate universes, an evil comes. An evil with the power to bring the greatest heroes low, to warp reality itself and unleash twisted versions of our greatest champions. This evil has a name: Straczynski, the World Breaker.

This terrifying cosmic force has struck once before, with devastating consequences. In 2005 the former Babylon 5 showrunner and sometimes screenwriter (flash fact: he also wrote episodes of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors) was given any comic fan’s dream job, to write Spider Man for Marvel comics. He wouldn’t just script a handful of episodes, but coordinate a game-changing crossover with veteran comics writer Peter David. This crossover would be called The Other and it would live in infamy. Never content to write stories in which heroes do the things that made generations of fans love them, Straczynski radically altered Spiderman’s origins and powers: Peter Parker no longer had the proportionate strength and speed of a spider after having been bitten by a radioactive arachnid- he was the chosen one of the spider god The Great Weaver and could now command spiders, had vastly increased strength, night vision and chitinous ‘stingers’ that slide out of his wrists like Wolverine’s claws. And he was dying of radiation poisoning. Then he ate somebody’s head. Then he is killed by a no-name villain invented just for this series (not Norman Osborne or Doc Ock, just some ill-defined energy vampire in a suit). Then he came back in a cacoon. Then he revealed his secret identity to the public. Then his Aunt May was shot.

Then he sold his soul to the devil to undo all of the above.

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Why isn’t AMC’s The Walking Dead as good as it should be?

I have kind of a thing for Zombie movies and Zombies as a trope in general. I won’t attempt to intellectualise it- I didn’t particularly care about the political messages in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead when I watched both films (though I was pretty young at the time), I just enjoyed watching a group of characters overcome (or fail to overcome) a unique challenge. For me Zombie films, books, comics, video games and so on are a subset of the ‘disaster’ genre, no different from volcanoes, killer bees or mega-sharks and giant octopi.
In particular, perhaps above all other depictions of the living dead in any medium, I love Robert Kirkman’s comic book The Walking Dead. When AMC announced that they would be filming it on a Hollywood budget with Frank Darabont directing I was understandably excited. Every issue printed since 2003 should have had a banner headline on the front that read ‘Soon to be a major series from whichever network can see an opportunity to make the greatest TV show ever’. I knew that, unlike the comic, it would be in color but otherwise assumed that the dark, difficult narrative was basically unfuckwithable. Frank Darabont may have helmed two of the more saccharine Stephen King adaptations, but they had visual flair and solid performances, and hey, the guy obviously knows supernatural horror and prisons (a large part of The Walking Dead is set in one, though the characters are more about staying inside than crawling through shit to get out, Pacific ocean or no.) With such strong source material there was no way it could be done badly.
But you see that idea was predicated on the belief that when somebody, say the Oscar-winning director of The Shawshank Redemption, wants to adapt something, like the Eisner-award winner for best ongoing series, he does so because he likes it. Sure, in the adaptation process scenes will be stretched or truncated and maybe the dialogue could be tightened up here or there but ultimately if you’ve got something as clearly cinematical as the Walking Dead already laid out in a serial format then, if you like it, there’s no reason to change a thing. If you go and add new characters and new situations then I guess that means that you don’t like the original, or that you liked the rough description given by your P.A’s assistant’s aide during your morning meeting and decided to shoot that instead of spending a whole afternoon reading comics.

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Cleveland comic-book legend Harvey Pekar dead at age 70 | cleveland.com.

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Makeover for Wonder Woman at 69.

Okay, anyone remember J. Michael Straczynski? Remember Babylon 5′s Atari-ST graphics back in the nineties? Did you read those Spiderman comics he did that were so bad that the whole of Spiderman’s history had to be rewritten just to make them go away? Did you see that movie ‘The Changeling’? The one with Angelina Jolie demanding to know where her son is for two hours while John Malkovich stumbles through his lines like he’s on Qaaludes? He wrote that.

DC comics have gone and let him have free rein on Superman and Wonder Woman. He gets to do whatever he likes with two of the biggest intellectual properties of all time.
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