Yeah, I'm going there

[next_to_normal]

I've seen a couple posts now regarding Season 8 and Promethea and how they might be related. I'm not in any way qualified to talk about this, since I've never read Promethea, and my interest in Season 8 vanished long ago. But when has that stopped me from talking? lol

Anyway, the thing that got me thinking was eilowyn's comparison to Batman. The short version is this:

Season 8 : Promethea :: Batman and Robin : The Dark Knight

And it seemed like the criticism of that comparison is, "Batman and Robin wasn't meant to be serious, so you can't criticize it by saying, 'It's not serious enough.'" And that's where I started thinking (always dangerous, I know).

I think maybe the point isn't to say that Batman and Robin would've been better if it were more serious. I think it's to say that the source material (the story of Batman) is more suited to a serious, gritty tone than a cheesy, tongue-in-cheek one. And that's why The Dark Knight works better as a movie - because the storytelling matches the story.

I get that Batman and Robin wasn't meant to be serious, and that's exactly what's wrong with it. It's taking a serious story and telling it in an incompatible tone. The cheesiness undercuts the inherently tragic nature of Batman, which makes it neither a compelling drama nor a comedic romp. You can't make it better simply by cutting out the jokes. You have to tell a totally different story.

And that's the argument being made about Season 8, I think. It's not the appropriate tone for the source material. The bubblegum art doesn't fit the style of the TV series, the sentient Universe explanation doesn't fit the mythology of the TV series, the over-the-top space fucking doesn't fit the tone of the TV series, etc. And people are citing Promethea as an example of a similar story where they got those things right. The storytelling (art, mythology, tone, etc.) is suited to the story that Alan Moore is trying to tell (I'm assuming - like I said, I haven't actually read it). I think for a lot of people, Season 8's storytelling doesn't match the story of Buffy that we watched for seven years.

I don't think eilowyn or angearia are saying "Batman and Robin should be more like The Dark Knight." Batman and Robin was simply the wrong story to tell with that material. Season 8 is the wrong story to tell with this material. The take away I get isn't, "Season 8 should be more like Promethea!" but rather, "Season 8 should be more like Buffy... and a good way to do that is to examine how a really good comic with some notable similarities (Promethea) synthesizes the elements of its own story, and apply those techniques to the Buffyverse."

Redundant Disclaimer is Redundant: All art is subjective. That means that other people might think Season 8 is totally cut from the same cloth as the TV series. That doesn't mean the people who see a problem are wrong. It suggests that they latched onto different elements of the show, which may or may not have been carried over to the comics.

Now, y'all go ahead and argue. :) Except I don't really have enough knowledge to go deeper than that, and I'll be at class most of tonight anyway, so the arguing thing isn't likely to go anywhere, lol.

Comments

[angearia.livejournal.com]

You're an awesome translator. Indeed, indeed. I tend to ramble around the point, but you cut right to the quick.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

I followed that discussion and I completely agree. When you watch Batman and Robin you don't really get the essence of Batman as he was in the comics. And S8 is a similar case, you don't really get Buffy from it, just some pale parody of it.

I think the Promethea comparison primarily applies to the general quality of the comic ( art, worldbuilding, plot), because it illustrates so well what you can actually do with comics and that you could tell a story like S8 or like Buffy and make it brilliant in that medium. S8 just fails to do the trick. for the most part.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Well, to comment only on part of your post since I'm all whined out about Season 8, I'd say Batman and Robin doesn't fail because it's not serious enough (it's more a child of the Batman TV series than of of Miller's comics or Burton's movies) but simply because, well, it's not funny. One of my pet peeves when it comes to comedy is when people don't take their comedy seriously; as if they think that there's no such thing as good and bad comedy - if it's got X amount of jokes and silly puns, then it succeeds. Which is just not the case: comedy is a lot harder than drama.

/rant

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

Since I'm the one who made the argument you are critiquing, I guess I should reply.

1. Your clarification about B&R:DK is an improvement on the original formulation. But it continues to carry with it a strong assumption: namely that *the* way to tell any story about this material is to be serious. You rule out someone who might want to do a satire on that material, who might want to tell it the way the old series did -- which was a lot of fun for me as a kid, and so on. If the basic material is that rich, it ought to be capable of being treated from very different approaches. Basically you and the originators of this argument are taking ONE approach, canonizing it, and then measuring all comers by that standard. So I stand by my rejection of the argument. I'm happy to say with BGF that B&R fails by its own standards. I'm willing to say that if I could only chose one approach, my own preference would be DK. But I'm not willing to say that DK is the standard by which all other treatments of the batman myth should be measured. Like I say, I still have a soft spot for Adam West, and I'm not going to let Christian Bale make me renounce him. West does spoof/satire very well. Bale does brooding/serious very well. Happily, we live in a world where both are not only allowed, but positively celebrated.

2. I have no problem with an argument that confines itself to saying that season 8 isn't doing right by its own source material. Notice that Promethea doesn't need to come up in that argument. I'm not willing to say such arguments are right -- but they are fair arguments to make.

3. I don't see that Promethea is a similar story, since I'm not yet sure if the universe really is sentient and so on (preview page from #36 says we don't really know what's going on yet). Even if it is, critique #1 applies in full force. Like you I haven't read Promethea, but it sounds like it takes all these dimensions and fucking to new planes of existence *seriously*. Certainly that's implied in the critique that season 8 is too cartoonish for that subject matter. But what if that's exactly what Joss wants to do? He's saying -- look, you might believe in a world with kabbalah and mystical realms and what not, but I'm an atheist and I think at the end of the day all you have is a Daffy Duck cartoon. He's saying all this kabbalah stuff is a joke. He's allowed to mock Moore, if that is, indeed, what he's doing. I certainly think he is mocking here. Now, if it turns out that we are supposed to read this as a straight-up serious story about Buffy reuniting with her true love and bolting to a new dimension with said love and it's epic tragic because to have her true happiness, Buffy has to sacrifice the world, or to save the world she has to sacrifice her place in Shangri-la with Angel, then yeah -- the tone is not serious enough for the subject matter. But until I get Jossed in Last Gleaming, I think it's more straight-forward to take the tone as written. Y'all want epic true love for ever? Take that. Y'all want to think that Buffy can evolve to some knew plain and get some higher purchase on the human wisdom or whatever it is that the Moore characters get (judging from the wiki summary)? Take that. It is a joke. There is no higher truth. There's just the freedom to say fuck this and get back to the business of life. Which, in point of fact, is exactly what Buffy does here. There is a LOT of meta that works very well for the tone as given. Whether it works in story is another question. I want to know more about this new mythology and broiling oceans and what not. #36 gives us one preview page that suggests we are going to hear more about wheret that comes from. But IF Joss can tie this into the story, I think the meta stuff is terrific. And the tone is exactly right. BtVS has had cheesy monsters from the word go. That is and always has been one of the points. Having Buffy get to a Daffy Duck cartoon and say fuck this is so very Buffy. The pages I've seen from Promethea and the summary of that story are so very NOT Buffy. Season 8 may fail. But it'd fail worse if it tried to adopt the tone Promethea seems to adopt.

[mikeda.livejournal.com]

See I disagree with the basic premise of the criticism. I think S8 IS Buffy , in tone, in characterization, in everything that matters to me. What the characters are dealing with, and how they are reacting flows from the previous seasons as naturally as any of the previous seasons flowed from what came even earlier.

(The Retreat/Twilight arc in particular is much like Spiral/The Weight of the World writ large. Except that Buffy doesn't need Willow's help this time to leave her refuge.)

[lostboy-lj.livejournal.com]

Well, weirdly, it seems like I've read more Promethea then anyone else here arguing about it. I got an inside man (well, woman) at DC comics who hands me arseloads of comics to read every time I see her, because she has this screwy idea that I could write them. She seems to think I can write some good "Wonder Woman." Go figure...

Anyway, Promethea didn't impress me. It seemed high-hatted and cloying in its politics, and I just couldn't get that smelly, stinky awkward fix of humanity that I want in a story. I'm not a huge fan of Season 8, but comparing it unfavorably to Promeathea seems like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges. My $0.02.

[rahirah]

I think B&R fails not because it's trying to tell a comic story about a serious subject - comic superheroes in general and Batman in particular are ripe for parody. B&R's problem is not that it's comedy, but that it's just not that funny.