THE WONDERS OF THE FRANCHISE COMIC - PART TWO

Note to the readers: The best laid plans of mice and men. As you might remember, I provided a list of upcoming articles at the end of my first post. Unfortunately real life limitations means I can’t give the time I’d like to researching some of these topics. So instead of abandoning thing, I’ve said “screw it” and decided to provide what I can. So expect some surprises with upcoming articles…even I might not know what they are yet.

The Pitfalls Of The Franchise Comic: “Gritty” reboots – A feline case study
The basic concept of a franchise comic is pretty simple. You adapt an existing concept into a comic format and market it to people interest in said concept. What could be simpler? Well if it was so simple, adaptations wouldn’t have the reputation they do. See it turns out that in order to succeed a franchise comic has to dodge a veritable minefield of common problems which range from the marketing to the creative team. So in the second of our little series of articles I thought it’d be fun to check out some of my all-time favourite common pitfalls the franchise comic has to try (and frequently fail at) avoiding.

Beware of spoilers!
If there is one thing the early naughties taught us, it’s that we should be VERY careful about what we wish for. The children of the eighties were hitting their teens and their twenties. Nostalgia called them back to those wonderful franchises of their youth. Surely they would enjoy them as much now as they did then! Well, it turned out that Thundercats was kinda terrible and He-man had all of 6 cells of animation recycled ad infinitum. The rose-tinted glasses fell off with a resounding crash. But the nostalgic affection remained. We still loved our alien cats, and our giant robots, and our western military bizarrely reliant on ninjas. We still wanted to experience those franchises we remember so fondly. And thus the eighties nostalgic reboot was born in full. For a few years, comics based on eighties cartoons were as common as weeds. Not only were comics used as a medium for the revival of your childhood heroes but the companies knew who they were marketing to. A sincere effort was made to make the fans the major audience. This resulted in stories far darker and more mature in tone aimed at us! It was the golden time of our nerdy age.

Nothing can POSSIBLY go wrong!

THING IS…most of those franchises we’d begged to come back in a format the nostalgic adult could enjoy…kinda disappeared without providing us with a proper framework to be portrayed in a mature fashion while still maintaining their endearing identities. The big exceptions, Transformers and G.I. Joe, were blessed with series which lasted far longer than most of their competitors. In that extra time the stories grew with their audience, adding to a continuous whole without losing who they were. The Dreamwave Transformers series may be retroactively atrocious but at its core it was true to the heart of what we loved about the story. Devil’s Due produced a teen-adult oriented G.I. Joe series which managed to balance ridiculous ninja antics and some actual depth in no small part because G.I. Joe had perfected that approach years before. But the revivals of the naughties were not only based on cloudy memories from 20 years before but lacked the continuous growth seen in the big two. This lead to some of the most atrocious attempts at “gritty” comics since…the majority of the nineties.

Swap Batman with Lion-O, and you basically have the 2002 Thundercats comic.

  Yes, in trying to appeal to us franchise comics took your awesome endearing childhood heroes and beat the ever-living snot out of them. The best example has GOT to be the 2002 Thundercat comic, published by Wildstorm. Written by Ford Gilmore, the series attempted to appeal to older readers by upping the darkness of the series. We’re placed in a post-series world where the cats have lost and Lion-O attempts to save the planet from the evil Mumm-ra. Rather than the goofiness of the cartoon, the series has a heavy repressive tone full of hopelessness. Even after the inevitable victory of our hero things stay pretty damn heavy. At first glance, this seems like an intriguing concept that a talented writer could build on. Maybe focus on how in this horrible world, Lion-O is truly a mental child who has to be guided by his older friends or deal with being attracted to Cheetara physically when mentally he just doesn’t get it. Maybe have the tragic death of Tygra fuel his growth into a true man? Something that went “we’re trying to take things to a new level while respect your affection for these characters”.

Or, you know rape. Lots and lots of rape.

Whatever you think is happening here is EXACTLY what is happening here.

Yes, Mr. Gilmore and Wildstorm were told “Mature version of childhood favourite” and heard “ALL THE RAPE”. The first two series put HEAVY focus on the fact that Cheetara spends YEARS chained up in a dungeon and repeatedly raped by the mutants in what are hinted to be exceptionally disturbing ways. She spends most of the second series REALLY hating Lion-O because she thinks he abandoned her to HORRIFIC sexual torture. But our creative juggernaut wasn’t done there, oh no. Another large part of the story is the continuous rape and psychological devolution of Wily Kit and Wily Kat. Yes, Mumm-ra turned both into his concubines and raped them to the point where he actually broke their brains in a very creepy “specialist Japanese medium” kinda way. Kat’s mental trauma leads him to being one of the main antagonists later on. And no, you don’t get a screencap of those panels because they freak me the eff out!

  Now, SHOCKINGLY, this series did not stand up well to repeat reading. Once the dust settled, readers paused and realised what the hell they were reading. This lead people to STOP reading, because as someone who really liked Cheetara and the cubs growing up I absolutely did not need that mental image thank you VERY much. The series ultimately had lower than desired sales and went the way of all flesh. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wildstorm itself wouldn’t survive into the second decade of the Millennium.

Let the adorableness of the 2011 series cleanse your soul. They’re so wee.

Thundercats wasn’t alone of course; numerous franchises have undergone such reboots (most recently DCs atrocious He-man comics). Personally though, the cats are the epitome of everything wrong with the approach. The writer confused darker tones and mature story-telling with violence and shocking imagery. He confused the word “adult” with “unpleasant”. Because that’s what people THINK they want and comic companies frequently think they should make. Bar a base framework, all that you love about a series is stripped away and replaced with poorly thought out and usually poorly executed murder-porn. I often wonder if these stories are written simply because they are easy to produce, when something with greater depth requires greater effort.

I’m not coming down and you can’t make me!

The rather rambling point I’m trying to make is that because of their nature of frequently being adaptations intended to appeal to a nostalgic older audience, franchise comics are often lazily turned into heavy, ultra-violent and deeply disturbing reads which are decidedly unpleasant to read.

In the long term, the series doesn’t sell and is dropped. At best the series just barely sells enough to warrant continued publication, critics annihilate it and people who own a copy are either super quiet or super loud about it. The final result – franchise comics get a terrible reputation and to be completely honest deservedly so. Fortunately the last five years has seen several adapatations that have grasped the difference between depth of story and dark for the sake of dark. We’ll get to those stories eventually but just because we’re in better times…

Michael O'Sullivan has co-hosted the Moonbase 2 Podcast for three whole years, no small feat for the longest running continuous Transformers Podcast. He also Paleontologist, much like a suave, irish Sam Neil.
He also has killed, many, many times.