Why does anyone create anything?

Netflix vs. Amazon: Two Comic-Book Takes on the Post-9/11 World

Adorable shorts are cool. (Change my mind.)

It turns out 2019 was quite the year for dramas based on comic books. On the big screen we saw Disney's MCU series finally come to a gorgeous, decades-long climax with Avengers' Happy Ending Avengers: Endgame. On the small screen meanwhile Netflix and Amazon found themselves going head-to-head (although head-to-knee might be more appropriate given the disparity between the two) with two surprisingly watchable adaptions of comics from the late 2000s...

The Umbrella Academy

Tweenage superheroes in goofy prep-school uniforms (including kinky eye-masks, Argyle sweaters, knee-length socks and adorable little shorts) ought to be a genuinely fun idea. X-Men go full Hogwarts? Why not? Mix in time-travelling men in black assassins from Doctor Who (or at least from the 1990s "wilderness years" novels and comics versions of the franchise) and you should almost by definition have a kick-ass (if not quite Kick-Ass) comic book and a very serviceably fun but fucked-up TV show.

So! Did it work?

Well I've never read the comic, so I can't possibly say whether the Netflix people did a good job of adapting the source material. As a show though it's... OK. As I said, the main gimmick is sound, being mostly tried and tested, and the back-up time travel gimmick has of course been tried and tested to destruction (even if I use the phrase advisedly).

Just as Stan Lee taught us that superheroes can have their human sides, and Watchmen taught us that if Batman were real he'd have more in common with Nathan Bedford Forrest (or at least Bernhard Goetz) than he would with Sherlock Holmes, now we're invited to imagine that not all super schools are quite so "enlightened" as Charles Xavier's. In fact there's nothing like being brought up with your fellow (alien) septuplets in a big house in New York, with an emotionally distant authoritarian Englishman (also an alien though!) for an adoptive father and an android Stepford housewife for a mother and, er, an augmented chimpanzee for a butler to leave you... an angry, embittered, emotionally needy, "dysfunctional", and generally just typically obnoxious millennial. Only with superpowers!

If the X-Men were written to appeal to teenagers not too cool for school but definitely too cool to fight in Vietnam, the Umbrella Academy were evidently supposed to be channeling the angst of a generation that couldn't quite cope with 9/11, Bush and Iraq. Now they've been repackaged in time for the Great Awokening, I'd suggest that updating them by the better part of two decades wasn't such a great idea.

For one thing, they don't really fit into the post-2008 era, let alone the world post-2016. It's hard to sympathise with the marital problems of a super-powered Hollywood celebrity (for example) if you're a 40-year-old man who can't afford to move out of his mother's spare room, and when teenagers are being sacked from university and having their lives ruined for expressing the "wrong" opinions on WhatsApp it's a bit much to suggest they should be angry at their 'rents for having been too strict. (Then again, the total failure of the entire media establishment to come to terms with either the Great Recession or the post-Obama revolutions of Brexit and Trump is an ongoing cultural problem. So perhaps one shouldn't judge Netflix too harshly for failing adequately to adapt a 2000s comic-book to a late 2010s zeitgeist.)

Thomas Hoepker's "most controversial photo" of 9/11

Rather more important is that The Umbrella Academy has a very distinct post-9/11 vibe to it. When Mohamed Atta and his chums brought down the World Trade Centre, they also challenged many of the Baby-Boomers' and Generation X's previously devoutly held beliefs (even if in the end they didn't quite manage to bury them). Thomas Hoeopker's infamous photograph in fact illustrated not so much the indifference of young Americans' to their fellow citizens' suffering but their complete inability to comprehend what was going on. "I don't get it, dude. Why would anyone want to attack us? We're cool, aren't we?" Because whereas previously multiculturalism had been seen only as a Good Thing and America's role on the world stage had only ever (or at least since 'Nam) been seen as "a force for good", suddenly young Americans were invited to re-imagine both America's relationship with the world beyond their borders and their own relationship(s) with the American government itself.

Of course, in a comparatively short period of time the fantasies of the past all bounced back in the shape of conspiracy theories about Bush, oil, evangelical Christianity and (of course) racism. But for a short while the kids who'd grown up watching John Hughes movies and listening to the sonic sewage of MTV felt vulnerable both physically and intellectually. Having finished the first season of The Umbrella Academy therefore, I was interested to discover that it was the brainchild of Gerard Way, who was of course (with My Chemical Romance and in particular 'The Black Parade') one of the very, very few creative talents to have tried in any way to come to terms with 9/11 artistically. And whereas 'The Black Parade' was an unusual and (at least in some ways) original reflection on how young people should think about death, the first Umbrella Academy story gives the dysfunctional early 2000s generation their own comic-book avatars, who are supposed to overcome their own dysfunctionality and bickering in order to stop the End of the World.*

Admittedly, it's hard to make dysfunctional people dramatically engaging, let alone sympathetic. There aren't many people in The Umbrella Academy that we can really be expected to root for. But then one presumes that's the point. Deep down, each one of them is a beautiful damaged human being, and in the end they all love each other, and we learn to love them as they reconnect and rediscover what they have in common. Or... something like that.

The only really good thing about the Netflix adaption is of course Aidan Gallagher. Robert Sheehan finishes comfortably but still distantly in second place, playing a gay character who hardly develops at all. (He goes to 'Nam - having travelled back through time to get there - and comes back not significantly affected by the experience beyond having had a boyfriend who then died. Which makes one wonder if that's really all the significance that war can have to a X-gen/millennial audience.) And unfortunately it also has one really, genuinely bad thing going on, and that of course is the abysmal Ellen Page. And it is unfortunate because she's really, really, really bad. She's clearly supposed to be an "interesting" baddy. But alas, she really, really isn't.

And on the subject of interesting baddies, that brings us neatly to...

The Boys

Should one feel disappointed that a TV streaming series called The Boys hardly has any actual boys in it?†

Only joking! The Boys is glorious, and so gloriously fucked-up it should be on one of Russell Brand's 12-point rehab programs.

Simon Pegg gives it a big daddy kiss of approval. In the original comic book he was actually the inspiration for the main character, and he even wrote a foreword to one of the trade paperbacks by way of a wink and a thank-you. Here he literally plays the daddy of the main character, albeit with a slightly ropy Noo Yawk accent. Karl Urban sports an if anything even ropier London accent, though he goes on more or less to save the series on a character level just by projecting sheer scary bear charisma. Less successful is the actual main character, played tolerably but almost entirely without charisma or insight by Jack Quaid, as is his similarly one-dimensional super-powered girlfriend played by Erin Moriarty. (I just had to google their names, so trust me they're forgettable.)

In fact the series titular heroes - a slightly screwy squad of CIA gunslingers who are dedicated to "bringing down" (politically, legally and literally) the world's superheroes (who in general terms are asshole versions of DC's Justice League) - are surprisingly dull. There's a token black man (of course), who believes in Jesus and lies to his wife. There's a comedy token Frenchman (for some reason), who tortures people to death and then fusses about his baguettes and so on. And then there's Karl Urban's character Butcher, who's out for revenge, and we definitely feel his pain, but then he flies into a homicidal rage and murders Haley Joel Osment (whose guest appearance as a psychic washed-up former child prodigy is quite fabulously dark) in a public lavatory.

And that's sort of it for the goodies. Yes, obviously the series was trying to go down the now well trodden GoT route of not really having goodies and baddies. But there's a sense in which that wasn't quite what was wanted. It's clearly supposed to be "challenging", but if one really wanted to challenge modern norms one could easily have flagged up (for example) why a man and a woman who aren't married to each other should think it's OK to fornicate. Quaid's nerd and Moriarty's feisty blonde are supposed to be the goodies, but they're only goodies in that they both have utterly cliched story-arcs. Her "rebel without a clue" arc is even lamp-shaded by the Wonder Woman character. His arc looks as if he might be a new Breaking Bad-type character in the making, but as of the end of the first seasons he's nowhere near there yet. (In the last episode he shouts "Sorry!" whilst murdering private security guards. Is that supposed to be darkly funny? I'm not even sure that it was.)

"Post-modern? Moi?"

What saves the series rather than the Boys themselves is the baddies, who are of course the not-so-super superheroes. And boy, what wonderful baddies they are! If the X-Men comics humanised heroes and Watchmen and its followers meditated on the dehumanizing effects of having great power and great responsibility, The Boys takes the latter concept one stage further and asks what sort of people superheroes would be in the "real" world of rolling news channels, Hollywood blockbusters and media-savvy politicians.

Obviously the whole world at some point is going to have to come to terms with why we're currently spending the same sort of money at the cinema to see Iron Man thump Thanos as we used to spend on Gone with the Wind (or at any rate on a pseudo-sci-fi Gesamtkunstwerk like Star Wars - or even an American homemade neo-Marxist mythological masterpiece like Titanic). Personally I think there are perfectly legitimate economic reasons why we do. (Patriotic epics are all very well, but by definition they have limited international appeal. And yes, that includes Bondage.) And it's possible that even kiddie wizards and neo-mediaevalism may simply have had their day (especially now that China is opening up to Hollywood). But there's also a clear sense in which the 21st century world has both forgotten the past (the historical epic is currently beyond resuscitation) and lost faith in the future (because sci-fi as a genre isn't much better off), and so it contents itself with a fantastical version of the world of the present day. The question is, does it dare from such a vantage point to say anything about (let alone to) that present-day world. And does it have anything to say?

Like The Umbrella Academy, The Boys does indeed "deal" with 9/11, but having been written by a Brit rather than an actual resident of New York it does so far less obliquely, far more cynically and (arguably) more observantly.†† In fact it has an actual 9/11 calque in the shape of a 'plane hijacking that the heroes then make a hundred times worse when they intervene. And the character who fails to save the day but who then goes on to save virtually the entire show is of course Anthony Starr's Homelander. In the current golden age of television, when writers write to character rather than plot and then write their characters to the actors playing them (even when it means they end up with character-arcs that make no sense in the context of the plot - witness Jaime Lannister and Daenerys for a couple of good examples!) it was perhaps inevitable that having cast somebody really good as their main baddie they would end up whether intentionally or not making him the most "interesting" character of all. Because Anthony Starr, to employ a phrase, absolutely kills it.

Homelander on screen is cleverer, more charming, more three-dimensional, more devious and more ruthless, and altogether more interesting than he was in the comics. Is this just a problem with writing to a genuinely good actor? (And the Great Awokening has certainly sorted the men from, er, the boys in that regard. With fewer white heterosexual roles out there, even a thorough-going scary villain like Homelander, much like Smith in MitHC, will end up becoming a deeply compelling antihero.) He's cynical enough to bring a baby into a room with a bomb just because he wants to know if it will survive the blast - because he wants to know whether it's his or not. And the scene when he finally gets the measure of evil domineering single-mother lipstick-feminist nympho Hillary-clone Madelyn Stillwell and lasers her brain out of her head must have raised a cheer from every God-fearing toxic masculinist throughout the English-speaking world.†††

Umbrella Academy went to town on the idea of superheroes being emotionally immature adults, but The Boys goes all the way to the big city on it. And in doing so it doesn't just dip into a somewhat hackneyed critique of what a liberal American might consider to be a cold-showers boarding school-style of education. Perhaps inadvertently The Boys holds up what a leftist Ulsterman might consider a mirror to America itself. Yes, it turns out that Homelander was brought up in a laboratory. But then "real-life" modern America is itself just as much an artificial being. After all, what other sort of country could ever be satisfied with such an utterly banal version of protestant "Christianity", in which religion is reduced to pop music, scriptural slogans and foreign aid campaigns? (Give me dogmas and incense any day!) In what other sort of country is it considered sexually mainstream for teenage boys to lust over women's mammary glands. (Over here, even straight men prefer their hindquarters.) If America were a superhero it would be Superman, and if Superman were real he'd a smug but neurotic evangelical obsessed with tits.

One final thing that The Umbrella Academy and The Boys have in common is that each breaks with its comic book source by giving its first season a cliffhanger ending, and one indeed that holds out a glimpse of a possible "nostalgic" resolution. The Umbrella Academy's is fairly simple. Even if is about to "get messy", we're still invited to imagine the characters are on the verge of going back through time and having a Quantum Leap-type second chance, with childhood innocence, order and beauty restored. The Boys on the other hand ends with a humdinger of a twist, when we find out that both Butcher's wife and Homelander's son are alive and well and living in a leafy suburb somewhere - though not how any of them will really react to their discovery.

So, have we seen the last of Ellen Page? Will the Umbrella Academy now be able to move on from that quirky, slightly convoluted time-travel story and continue having new wacky adventures for years to come? Will Butcher be able to come to terms with the probability that he was legitimately cuckolded by Homelander and certainly not widowed? Will Homelander give his long-lost son the chance to become the emotionally developed human being he could never be? (Because even being brought up by a single mom beats growing up as a super-powered lab rat.)

With second seasons in the pipeline for both shows, each has plenty to play for.

"No! I am Darth Vader."

*Interestingly there are several musical choices in The Umbrella Academy that tonally feel quite out of place. Generally speaking if I recognize a song in a show's soundtrack the chances are that it's too mainstream for the drama. So 'Run Boy Run' may have briefly fitted the mood for the opening of the second episode. But 'Don't Stop Me Now', though in many ways excellent, certainly didn't. The idea of having any Black Parade songs in there may sound in and of itself incestuous, but given that a Black Parade atmosphere pervades The Umbrella Academy the fact that it wouldn't have fit the tone of the drama rather makes one wonder what tone exactly the show-makers were aiming for.
†There is one, as it happens, and he's mouth-watering.
††Having been brought up on legends about Dunkirk, Brits are perhaps more familiar with the ability government spin-doctors have to turn a monumental establishment fuck-up into first a national tragedy, then a national parable, and finally into a foundational myth for whatever the Government wanted to do in the first place. (As a WWII nerd, one suspects Garth Ennis would appreciate the parallel.)
†††They did repeat Brightburn's goof though - i.e. when Superman's heat vision blasts straight through the back of your skull it's unlikely you'll have time to wince and say "ouch".

Doctor Who: The Cartmel Legacy

It's been said recently (and with some justification!) that the recent rebooting of Doctor Who's backstory in Auntie's latest (and wokest yet) series of her sometime top show was little more than an attempt to revive the old so-called "Cartmel Masterplan". And yes, there is a very obvious sense in which as the current 21st-century version of Doctor Who flags with viewers (albeit not so much with the critics) it is not just making the same mistakes as its 20th-century predecessor (i.e. alienating its core audience, being too on-the-nose with its leftist politics, changing but not in a good way, etc.) but also reaching for the same solutions (i.e. trying to inject a bit more magic into the mythos, not to mention some morally questionable attempts at "darkness" and ham-fisted stabs at social realism).

So how long actually is a generation? It's an important enough question in Doctor Who, and the Doctor's own answer of "twenty-five years" (in Four to Doomsday, if you don't believe me) is one that for a long time I've used subconsciously as a rule of thumb. Looking back over Doctor Who at the (finally!) respectable age of fifty, it was startling quite how easily the division between "old" Who and "new" Who became a generational one. What was startling about it though was quite how old "new" Who really was.

The truth of course is that far from being a twenty-first century phenomenon, the "new" version of Doctor Who that we know today in the shape of the post-2005 TV-series was very clearly conceived in the last few years of the pre-1989 one. Though it may come as a shock to some, the "modern" version of Doctor Who is to a large extent the Sylv McCoy/Andrew Cartmel-version (or, to put it yet another way, the Cartmel/Ben Aaronovitch/Marc Platt-version). Or at any rate it was up until Peter Capaldi's ill-advised passing on of the torch to the Lady Doctor, but then since I have never watched Jodie Whittaker's take on the Time Lord (and have no desire to either) I'll let that slide.

To put it another way, to a large extent it was Sylvester McCoy's Doctor who was the turning-point - the half-way house between the Edwardian Doctor of old and the hip, cool, "modern" space Gandalf we know today, between the TV-plays of yesterday that used to go out in time for tea and the slick mini feature films that nowadays get broadcast in the early-evening slot. He's an oddly mid-Atlantic figure too, stuck halfway between the nonchalant tea-and-crumpets Britishness of the first half-a-dozen Doctors and the gun-toting, finger-wagging Americanism of the 2000s bunch.

Indeed, even things that we now think of as being standard, such as the Doctor speaking really quickly and being vaguely manic, were inventions of the McCoy era. Before Sophie Aldred, the female companion was there to look pretty and to scream. Ace was genuinely the first one who didn't. The broad, subtle story-arc as a concept never really existed before Fenric*, but in the RTD and Moffat eras it was part of the very fabric of the show. And perhaps most importantly there emerged the idea of the Doctor as not just a mythological hero - or at any rate as a Merlin/Odin figure - but as a comic-book superhero-type one at that.

The character of the Doctor has of course always been evolving. William Hartnell gave us the serious scientist/aloof sage with the mischievous inner child, and in fact in doing so laid down most of the groundwork for his successors. Patrick Troughton added the idea that the Doctor was funny. Jon Pertwee added the action man (in part because, thanks to budget cuts, the male companion character had by his time been ditched by the producers). Tom Baker cobbled on the idea that the Doctor should be slightly crazy. Peter Davison's Doctor saw an ill-advised attempt to strip away the Doctor's darker, alien side and make him "nicer", and Colin Baker's saw an even more cack-handed attempt to make him "nastier" again. But it was Sylvester McCoy, who carefully and deliberately modeled himself on the Troughton Doctor but with aspects of Hartnell and Tom Baker thrown in for good measure, who went on to redefine the role of the Doctor was that of the actual protagonist.

He didn't do it alone, of course, and in fact he did it much less than the modern Whovian race memory relates. Just as popular mythology remembers William Hartnell's Doctor as "grumpy" and "crotchety" (when in fact he was perfectly likable in a surprisingly childlike, giggly sort of way), and just as according to media cliches we all watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa (when in fact we watched it with our noses pressed against the screen, drinking in every magical moment), so it's become an established assumption that in every story of the Seventh Doctor's era the Doctor knows everything that's going on from the outset and he's always playing some sinister psychological chess-match at his companions' expense. In reality, of course, the manipulative Seventh Doctor only really arrived on the scene in Remembrance of the Daleks, which worked well enough for him to re-emerge in Silver Nemesis - albeit belatedly, as it's inferred that in that story he's really only following through on a plot that he originally set up in his second incarnation. After that, with the one genuine exception of Fenric, all of the Sylvester McCoy stories proceed in pretty much the same way Doctor Who stories always used to: by and large, the Doctor and Ace arrive in the middle of a mysterious situation and then set about investigating and sorting things out. There are a couple of Seventh Doctor stories such as Dragonfire and The Happiness Patrol where the Doctor has heard about strange things going on somewhere and wants to find out more. Ghost Light even slightly deconstructs this in that when the TARDIS materialises at Gabriel Chase the Doctor knows where they are but hasn't told Ace, but then by the end of 'Part One' Ace has found out where they are, and then thereafter until the story's climax she actually knows more than the Doctor does. But the fundamental dramatic principle remains the same.

Despite these quibbles though, the point stands that before 1988 the Doctor was always very much the catalyst in his adventures, as he had originally been intended to be by Sydney Newman back in 1963. From 1988 onward though he started actively to take charge of the stories. Looking back, that was a big change, and it was Cartmel and his team who did it. And so when confronting the Daleks in 1963 (in 1988), the Cybermen in 1988 (same year), and Fenric in 1943 (in 1989), the Doctor was very much the man with a plan, leading the action from the word go in a way that he never had before, not just with a trick up his sleeve but with a veritable "masterplan" that he would only allow the viewer (and, by extension, his companion) to see bit by bit. He set out to defeat his enemies from the start, and when he did so he showed an uncompromising ruthlessness that had never been seen before.

It would have been unthinkable for any Doctor before McCoy, for example, to win the day by blowing up an entire planet (Thals and all, by implication!), let alone deliberately† committing genocide - much less follow this up by talking his arch-enemy into committing suicide, or go on intentionally to break his companion's faith in him. But since 2005 the writers have been quite comfortable with the idea of the Doctor being bad-ass, not to mention functioning on a higher, more epic moral scale than his human companions. Back in the 1970s it was the Doctor who acted as a civilising nay "moralising" influence on his companions††, but by the late 1980s, although ostensibly the Doctor disapproved of Ace's constant resorts to violence, as often as not it was he who would call on her firepower to blow up Daleks, spaceships and even an archaeological dig when the greater good required it. By the time the Tennant Doctor was finally reunited with UNIT it was taken as standard practice for the Doctor to turn children into warriors.

In many ways then Russell T Davies himself just picked up where the authors of the Cartmel Masterplan left off, and this should of course come as no surprise. The reason why Davies's Ninth Doctor seems so much more like the Seventh Doctor than like any of his predecessors is probably because Davies had already written for Doctor Who for the Seventh Doctor (in his otherwise forgettable novel Damaged Goods). Sophie Aldred herself notes in the commentary on the DVD release of Survival that the tower blocks and council estates in 'Part Three' of that story directly influenced the setting of Rose sixteen years later. More importantly, Rose is very much Spearhead from Space for the post-Fenric generation: the Doctor knows exactly who the enemy is before he even appears on screen (it's the Nestene Consciousness) and exactly how he's going to defeat it (with a magic trick he's had up his sleeve the whole time, in a manner that would become all too familiar during Rusty Davies's tenure on the show).

So what caused the change? In my opinion the real pivot was surely Cartmel and his gang's new awareness of science-fiction lore generally and their interest in American comic-books in particular. Before Cartmel, most of the sci-fi stories in Doctor Who were determinedly British, whether they were fantasy versions of the the British Empire (Frontier in Space, and in fact all stories about the Earth "empire") or the Second World War (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) or pompous little disquisitions on anti-colonialism (The Sensorites, The Mutants, Kinda, etc.). Knock-off versions of Alien tended to be the exception (Dragonfire) rather than the rule. And with the notable exception of Chris Boucher's dual homage to Asimov's robots and Frank Herbert's Dune in Robots of Death, American science-fiction rarely got a look-in.

But then the comic-book geeks arrived and changed everything. The Time War was something of a hackneyed cliche long before the TV-series came back. Indeed the first Doctor Who time war in real life (and for all we know in the Whoniverse itself) appeared in one of the "back-up" comic-strips in Doctor Who Weekly - written, as it happens, by a little known scribbler geek called Alan Moore. More to the point though, it was the Time War that helped to complete the final transformation of the Doctor into the comic-book superhero that Cartmel and chums had seemingly wanted him to be all along. From the Ka Faraq Gatri to Time's Champion to the Destroyer of Worlds (etc. etc.), by the time David Tennant's Doctor eventually took his long overdue bow we had surely had too much of a Good Thing.Yes, it's exciting for the Doctor to have a "darker side". But the real Doctor is the eternal child rebel and runaway. He's not effing Superman.

One's hope towards the end of the Moffat era was that what with Auntie's inevitable budget cuts the Capaldi Doctor might end up being a bit more old school than maybe some of the Internet's Tennant-fanciers were used to. My view at the time in fact was that if you want the Doctor to be a geeky, swaggering, sarcastic teenage heart-throb then it's probably Peter Parker you should be fantasising about rather than a thousand-year-old Gallifreyan. After a generation's worth of comic-book exploits it was time for the Doctor to grow up a bit - and go back to being a children's character again. Alas, it wasn't to be! Capaldi's attempt at playing the Doctor as a lovable curmudgeon was arguably more successful than Colin Baker's, but those who predicted that, just as Rose was the new Spearhead from Space and Tennant was the new Tom (etc.), Capaldi would inherit Colin's short straw as the "screw-up" Doctor, ended up being more right than they could possibly have known. There was in the end something of an inevitability about Whittaker's bringing NuWho full circle (to coin a phrase) and pulling in the worst viewing figures since Battlefield 'Part One'.

For what it's worth, I suspect Whittaker will be the last TV Doctor we'll be seeing for some time, and any plans Auntie has for a brown-skinned version of David Tennant (which actually wouldn't be the worst idea in the universe) will come to nothing. After that, bar a possible 60th anniversary reunion special, it's unlikely there'll be much Doctor Who on British telly ever again.

And if anyone asks they'll blame Boris.

*The nearest attempt at a "subtle" story-arc before Fenric was of course Season 18's "entropy theme", though in practice it was a bit too subtle and the idea didn't catch on. Stories that just happen to segue into each other (all the stories between Planet of the Spiders and Planet of Evil, say) don't really count as arcs (much as one would love to make a pun about The Arc in Space), nor indeed do clumsy attempts to turn whole seasons into long-running serials (Seasons 16 and 23 being the prime offenders).
†The Trial of a Time Lord notwithstanding!
††The Doctor's infamous attempt to murder a sick cave man in 'The Forest of Fear' notwithstanding!