Comics / Cult Favorite

Timeless Heroes

By Philip Schweier
August 11, 2009 - 10:20

In a recent column, I wrote about the value of keeping characters in their specific times – Lone Ranger in the Old West and Sherlock Holmes in Victorian England.

But recently while watching a short feature on the DC animated movie Justice League: The New Frontier, a friend turned to me and commented that he didn't care for that movie so much. Okay, fair enough, but I asked why. His response was that he didn't appreciate that the setting – the early to mid-1960s – was so dated. He would have preferred a more contemporary setting.

Knowing him to be a big James Bond fan, especially of the Sean Connery era, I asked him to reconcile the difference between the two. He really couldn't do that to my satisfaction, and had he simply stated that New Frontier just wasn't his cup of tea, I would've let it go. Not every movie is going to please everybody; I myself didn't care for Batman: Gotham Knights.

What I did appreciate about New Frontier – both the animated movie and the comic book on which it is based – is that it set the DC Universe in a very specific time and place, in which real world events have a direct influence on the characters, both in action and in thought. To me it's similar to setting the Justice Society during World War II; it is the era in which the concept was originally born.

On the DVD commentary for New Frontier, writer/artist Darwyn Cooke says, “I thought of taking all the real-world events, that had gone into shaping that moment in history, and then overlaying the timeline of DC’s publishing history, I found there were these uncanny, really unexpected intersections that led me into these wonderful areas of ‘Well, what if this, what if these characters had been involved in this? What if Superman and Wonder Woman had been sent into China?’”

But it's a tricky thing for any writer or artist to immerse the story and characters in a specific time and place. The most common pitfall is for the writer to get inside the head of a character who is a product of an entirely different environment. Sometimes, the errors kind of jump out at you.

For instance, in the film L.A. Confidential, (1997) James Cromwell advises Guy Pierce to "lose the glasses," suggesting he stop wearing his glasses if he's expected to be taken seriously as an ass-kicking cop. But the movie is set in the 1950s, so the phrase "lose the glasses" has too much of a modern tone and is therefore out of place.

Conversely, archaic thoughts and ideas may seem out-dated and sometimes un-evolved, and therefore unappealing to some audiences. The best example of this is in Howard Chaykin's Shadow mini-series of the mid-1980s. In it, an un-aged Lamont Cranston returns after several decades. Having served in World War I, he is a product of a time when men and women had very clearly defined roles in society. His male chauvinist attitude is a product of those times.

In defending such an attitude, writer/artist Howard Chaykin said in a 2004 interview, “When I do period work, I try to convey period sensibility, and buyer be damned. And I'm frequently damned by the buyer because they want presentism, and they can find it elsewhere.”

So I believe it must be understood by writers and readers alike that any character, whether they are era specific or not, must inhabit the time in which the story takes place. Subtle nuances may be applied, like seasoning to a meat dish, but ultimately the purpose is to bring out a variety of flavor without overpowering the basic ingredient. Doing so enables creators to tell a much broader variety of stories.

Praise and adulation? Scorn and ridicule? E-mail me at philip@comicbookbin.com.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12