|
It's a sad fact. Comics make network television look like a font of originality and innovation.
Take a look at last month's Top 300, if you need the hard numbers. The only non-supers comic in the Top 50 is Dark Horse Comics' Serenity. Look at the Top 100, and you can still count the non-supers on one hand.
Heck, you could count the non-supers on BART SIMPSON'S hand.
There's a lot of bad TV out
there, but I will say this: television is not a one-trick pony. Five
trick? Ten trick? Maybe. So let's count:
You've got your reality
shows; your news magazines; your soap operas; your wacky family
sitcoms; your workplace sitcom; your rom-com sitcom; your outrageous
stream-of-conscious cartoons; your lawyer, doctor, and police shows--in
wacky or deadly serious flavors; your police profiler show--hopefully
just serious; your political shows; your spy shows; your weird mystery
shows; your regular mystery shows; your all-out sci-fi shows; your
modern fantasy shows, and... um... Okay, there's that one show about a
superhero, but he doesn't even wear a costume OR fly!
And that's just primetime on the networks.
I lost count, but suffice it to
say that TV is one surprisingly versatile pony. Okay, maybe a lot of TV
isn't very good. And sure, when they do hit on a cool, new idea they
tend to immediately run it into the ground by creating ninety million
spin-offs or knock-offs or knock-offs of spin-offs of knock-offs.
But they do have cool, new ideas now and again.
Superheroes are great. I love superheroes. Superheroes were once a cool, new idea. But that was nearly seventy years ago.
So. In honor of the new TV season, I offer you three knock-off ideas that would be
cool and new if someone made them into comics:
The Weird Mystery.
 Apparently Lost was so successful last season that this fall we've got a whole spate of sci-fi ensemble shows premiering this fall: CBS brings us Threshold, NBC brings us Surface, and ABC pairs Lost with their new series, Invasion, on Wednesdays. The formula? A broad, colorful ensemble tries to solve a bizarre, open-ended mystery. (Ideally, the mystery should take at least seven years to solve.) The new shows are all slow-burn alien invasion stories. In comics form, call it "Mars Attacks... Eventually."
The Expert Profiler.
You've seen these shows. They have their roots in movies like Silence of the Lambs and the original Profiler. This year, we've got Inigo Montoya in The Criminal Mind. These are the shows about detectives that are so good that they can literally think like a serial killer. It's a perfect fit for comics, with one killer per issue or one killer per trade, depending on how decompressed you feel like getting. Imagine what an artist like David Mack would do with the concept of "getting inside a killer's mind."
Oddball Law.
Courtroom drama is tough to pull off in comics for two reasons: first, courtroom scenes are talky and take up lots of space; and two, most comic book writers can't afford the legal consultants necessary to pull a courtroom drama off. Thankfully, television has introduced the oddball lawyer genre. In the tradition of David E. Kelly's Ally McBeal and Boston Legal come this season's Head Cases and Just Legal. With crazy characters and crazy cases, suddenly the courtroom scenes seem less boring, and accuracy seems less the point. Imagine Warren Ellis writing a chain-smoking legal shaman, defending the gutterpunks from corporations and beauracrats.
Derivative? Sure. But so is Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. And somewhere around 100 times as many people saw Lost this week than will read a Spider-Man comic this month.
So honestly? A show about crime scene investigators who catch criminals and the lawyers who prosecute them?
Might be worth a shot.
That's it for this week. See you all next time.
Till then... I've got some "research" to do.
This month, Drew Melbourne is an
extremely busy teacher who's finding very little time to write. He
blames "reality." If you see this "reality," please club it with a big
stick and bring it to him to mount upon his wall. He will pay as much
as $3.27. Visit his website at DrewMelbourne.com.
|
