The object of all slot games for players is to arrive at the bonus round. In Superman, the player gets a chance to save the world when they are in the bonus round, much like the title character does in the comics and in the movies.

Part of saving the world in the bonus round will revolve around destroying missiles and players working their way around meteor fields. In the end, the ultimate goal is to go as far through the bonus round, picking up extra cash along the way.

The popular superheroes have made their rounds in movie theatres and competed for entertainment dollars on the big screen. Now, they will be competing for online players' money. Superman joins the Silver Surfer and the Incredible Hulk as comic icons who now have their own online slot game.

I can see the Hulk being a good icon for Internet gambling, what with the poor impulse control. According to another gambling industry site, besides Superman, the other new characters who've just joined the world of online gambling include Forrest Gump, Braveheart, Batman... and Wonder Woman. Great Hera!

Says a press release:

"Big brands drive player popularity, and that is why CryptoLogic is excited to launch a game based on Superman, one of the most iconic brands of the entertainment world," said Brian Hadfield, CryptoLogic's President and CEO. "By also adding Forrest Gump and Braveheart, CryptoLogic continues its industry leadership in launching branded games that resonate with both the casual and serious player. We aim for these games to be both popular and profitable."

We won't even comment on the fact that we can't get a Superman movie, but we can get Superman slots.

Looking over a decade of superhero storylines, it's easy to see two things: The repetition of ideas, and the genre trying to come to grips with what's happening in the real world (and often failing badly); just look at the increase of terrorist attacks post-9/11. The headlines below - matched to publication date where possible - may not be exactly how the last ten years played out in the real world, but it's possibly the way it happened in our collective subconscious. Well, apart from restarting reality four times, of course.

2000
January - Part of America literally becomes city of the future thanks to time-traveling evil robot (Superman: Y2K storyline).

February - Humanity defeats, kills "God," who is revealed to be a gigantic organic pyramid responsible for life on Earth. 20th Century ends late/early depending on who you talk to with death of Jenny Sparks (The Authority #12).

February - All of humanity temporarily gains superpowers as result of superhero from another dimension powering miracle machine that enables humanity en masse to defeat extra-dimensional being driving the world to the brink of destruction (JLA #41).

June - Earth is hit by artificially-induced natural disasters (New York hit by giant tidal wave, San Francisco partially destroyed by volcano, areas of Africa and Australia face plague of insects, etc.) as result of insane criminal with godlike power (The Authority, "Earth Inferno" storyline).

June-July - World transformed into alternate reality ruled by cartoon laws of physics as result of insane criminal receiving godlike power (Superman: Emperor Joker storyline).

July - New York attacked by alien terrorist whose path of destruction, when viewed from above, spells out "Fuck You" (Marvel Boy #2).

October-November - Earth temporarily designated a prison planet by consortium of alien races, becomes overwhelmed by amount of extra-terrestrial criminals (Maximum Security storyline).

November: Lex Luthor becomes President of the United States of America (Superman: Lex 2000 storyline).

2001
May - A time-traveling despot reveals horrific future if he is not given control of Earth, resulting in international wars as nations disagree on response (Avengers #42).

June - A terrorist attack decimates the homo superior population of Earth, killing hundreds of thousands in one sweep (New X-Men #115).

June-August - Earth becomes centerpoint for alien attempt to destroy the universe, resulting in universe-wide war (Our Worlds At War storyline).

September - The World Trade Center and Pentagon are targeted by terrorists, resulting in the destruction of the former and a worldwide reaction and rescue effort (Amazing Spider-Man #36).

September - A time-traveling despot declares war on humanity (Avengers #46).

October - Large numbers of people/animals become infected by "Joker" virus temporarily, resulting in worldwide insanity (Joker: The Last Laugh storyline).

2002
January - Earth surrenders control to time-traveling despot; large numbers of humanity placed within concentration camps (Avengers #50).

June - The mythical realm of Norse Gods, Asgard, takes up temporary residence above New York City (Thor #50).

July - Every male of every species on Earth dies suddenly. Well, almost every male (Y: The Last Man #1).

August - Capital cities across the globe disappear, only to be revealed to have become part of a giant uber-city as the result of a cosmic entity representing the concept of order (Avengers #57).

October - LA is attacked by giant black sperm as the result of a terrorist attack on behalf of an insane former pornstar (The Filth #5).

December - Mutant terrorists attack New York City, destroy the Brooklyn Bridge and kill eight hundred (Ultimate War #1).

2003
January - Norse Gods invade European nation to ensure religious freedoms (Thor, Iron Man, Avengers: Standoff storyline).

March - 1 in 1000 Americans gains superpowers due to alien virus (Action Comics #801).

March - Mount Rushmore and other areas of South Dakota are attacked by biological weapons (Avengers #65).

May - The island of Micronesia is destroyed in a nuclear explosion, an act that launches an invasion on Earth by alien forces (The Ultimates #10).

September - World transformed into alternate reality with alternate history merging it with parallel Earth as result of godlike beings indulging in wager (JLA/Avengers #3).

September - Mutant terrorists attack New York City, killing thousands and also manage to reverse the polarity of Earth's magnetic poles (New X-Men #147).

2004
February - San Diego plunges into Pacific Ocean, renamed "Sub Diego" after some inhabitants survive as mer-people (Aquaman #15).

February - The White House is attacked by superpowered terrorists (Ultimate Six #5).

February - American Government overthrown by superpowered terrorists (Coup D'Etat storyline).

April - One million people mysteriously vanish from Earth suddenly (Superman #204).

June - Superpowered beings invade Arab nation of Mazikhandar, depose ruler and install new democratic government (Avengers #83).

July-October - New York is attacked by indestructible robots, terrorist organizations and aliens as the result of a delusional superhero with godlike powers (Avengers: Disassembled storyline).

August - New York is invaded by aliens (Fantastic Four #517).

August - Thousands of people kill themselves as result of international broadcast from unknown source (Ultimate Nightmare #1).

2005
March - Europe erupts into riots against a newly announced European Union plan to create super-powered soldiers (Ultimates 2 #5).

March - Military installation is attacked by aliens seeking to prevent humanity from achieving space travel (Ultimate Secret #1).

April - Tens of thousands of people discovered to be nanotech-controlled drones in service to evil satellite orbiting the Earth (The OMAC Project #1).

June-October - World temporarily transformed into alternate reality as result of insane superhero with godlike powers (House of M storyline).

October - Genetic evolution is reversed worldwide by insane superhero with godlike powers, undoing homo superior strain granting superhuman abilities to thousands of people worldwide (House of M #8).

November - Tokyo is attacked by a collection of giant monsters (Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big In Japan #1).

December - Earth overrun by zombie plague (Marvel Zombies #1).

2006
January - Multiple Earths appear in orbit around Earth (Infinite Crisis #4).

April - Reality is restarted, resulting in a new Earth with altered history (Infinite Crisis #7).

May - Humanity defeats "Galactus," a swarm of alien ships known for destroying planets (Ultimate Extinction #5).

May - Hundreds die in Stamford, Connecticut as a result of superhero negligence; in response, the US Government announces the Superhero Registration Act which will regulate superhuman activity (Civil War #1).

June - Reality is restarted, resulting in a new Earth with altered history (Captain Atom: Armageddon #9).

September - "The Everyman Project" is announced, which can give people synthetic superpowers (52 #21).

October - A cosmic event known as "The White Event" occurs, resulting in people around the world manifesting superpowers (newuniversal #1).

2007
January - All participants in "The Everyman Project" simultaneously lose their powers, resulting in worldwide destruction and death (52 #35).

February - The 50-State Initiative is unveiled, with each state of America given its own superhero team (Civil War: The Initiative #1).

April - Washington DC is invaded by mythical, warlike women (Amazons Attack! #1).

May - Earth is discovered to be one of 52 parallel Earths with alternate histories (52 #52).

August - Earth is invaded by alien gladiators led by the Hulk, returning from interplanetary exile (World War Hulk #1).

August - The mythical realm of Norse Gods, Asgard, takes up temporary residence above the state of Oklahoma (Thor #2).

September - November: Earth is invaded by aliens with magical rings (Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War storyline).

December - History is altered after ill-considered pact between satanic demon and naive superhero and wife (Amazing Spider-Man #545).

December - Alien body-snatching conspiracy is uncovered (New Avengers #37).

2008
April - Alien body-snatching conspiracy turns into full-blown invasion of Earth by shape-changing aliens (Secret Invasion #1).

July - Earth becomes a post-nuclear wasteland (Number Of The Beast #8).

July - Humanity loses free will as result of arrival of godlike entity on Earth (Final Crisis #3).

August-November - World temporarily transformed into alternate reality with alternate history as result of criminals assuming godlike power (Trinity series).

August - Now an endangered species, homo superiors declare San Francisco, CA, to be their new home (Uncanny X-Men #500).

October - Earth becomes home to 1,000,000 refugee aliens (Action Comics #870).

November - Alien shapechanging invasion is finally repelled, ushering in a new era of corrupted authority in incredibly ill-timed political metaphor (Secret Invasion #8).

November - The world is hit by multiple seemingly-natural disasters, including a tidal wave that floods and partially destroys New York City, as first wave of attack by superpowered terrorists (Ultimatum #1).

2009
January - Reality is restarted, resulting in a new Earth with altered history (Final Crisis #7).

March - The United Kingdom is invaded by a vampire army (Captain Britain and MI-13 #11).

August - (ongoing): Earth becomes overrun by reanimated corpses of the dead (Blackest Night storyline)

Greg Cox is one of the most prolific, and successful, authors of media tie-in novels, and he's won a loyal following for his many Star Trek books, including a trilogy filling in the backstory of much-loved villain Khan Noonien Singh. He's also written tie-in novels based on Alias, The 4400, Roswell, Underworld, Fantastic Four and Iron Man. He's also novelized the movies Ghost Rider, Daredevil and several others, plus DC Comics' big crossovers.

We talked to him about his new Terminator Salvation tie-in novel Cold War, out now from Titan Books, plus some of his other recent projects.

Cold War uses the same timeline as McG's recent movie, but only includes a couple of characters from the film: The main character is Losenko, the Russian general who appears briefly in the film, mentioning that Skynet is looking for Kyle Reese, and we learn all about Lysenko's backstory. Says Cox, "When I watched the movie, I was probably the only person who was mentally hanging on every scene with general Losenko," watching for every detail about the character to include in the book. Also in the book is General Ashdown (Michael Ironsides), the resistance leader who lives on a submarine. John Connor only pops in the book as a sort of mythological figure, giving inspirational speeches over the radio.

The new book takes place in Alaska and Russia, in two different time frames: 2003, right after Judgment Day, and then 2018. In 2003, the survivors are coping with the aftermath of the nuclear war, and Skynet is attacking them with really primitive Terminators, and the technology is close to what really existed in 2003. And then in 2018, Skynet has all the same tech it has in the movie — plus snowmobile Terminators, to navigate those frozen northern areas. It sounds like Cox had a lot of fun with the frosty settings:

My big gimmick was snowmobile Terminators. There's also a giant Terminator train. The trick is to try to find stuff in the [same] universe, that's slightly different. What haven't we seen yet? We haven't seen a Terminator train. The main reason for setting it in Alaska [was to include things like] dogsled chases, grizzly bears, avalanches, volcanos... We've seen so many chases on California highways, with fire trucks and emergency vehicles. I was looking for a whole different environment, not just recapitulating what people had done before.

Cox is somewhat surprised that the Terminator/grizzly bear fight has been the main thing people have talked about in his novel. "You can't have a Terminator in Alaska and not have him fight a grizzly bear. Okay, it's gratuitous, but how can I resist having a grizzly bear fight a Terminator?" And now that people have been so excited by it, "from now on, I put a grizzly bear in all my books." Spoiler alert: The bear doesn't stand a chance against a Terminator, says Cox.

There's also a Western-style train heist and loads of detail on a Russian submarine, plus lots of gritty war-movie-style action. Cox watched tons of World War II movies on TCM, read every Tom Clancy novel for the submarine details, and did loads of research on the world right after a nuclear war.

Cox says he watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles "religiously," but Titan Books and Halcyon were adamant that his book couldn't contain any references to T:SCC continuity. So don't expect Cameron to show up, but if anyone ever green-lights SCC novels, Cox will be first in line. The Terminator people were very keen to make sure Cox's book fit in with their vision of the universe, including making sure Skynet wasn't developing high technology too early after Judgment Day — and that meant loads of conference calls, notes and intensive feedback at every stage of the process.

Wrapping up The 4400

The amount of feedback you get from the licensors on a licensed property depends heavily on whether it's an ongoing concern, says Cox. With The 4400, for example, Cox wrote one tie-in novel while the series was on the air, and went through four different drafts in response to feedback. But when Cox wrote the first of two novels wrapping up the series after it ended, Welcome To Promise City, he got a more-or-less free hand. (The other novel, available now, is written by David Mack.) Cox, Mack and their editor cooked up an ending to the series together.

Except for tons of feedback from the fans. Cox says as soon as it was announced that he was writing a 4400 novel explaining what happened after the show's cancellation, he was bombarded with emails from fans all over the world demanding to know what he was going to do with their favorite subplots and characters. "I can't claim we wrapped up every loose end, but we tried to wrap up the important one," says Cox. He and Mack debated with their editor whether to tie up the end of the series with a neat bow, or leave a few things slightly open-ended in case they ended up doing more novels. They settled on the second approach, so if the books sell amazingly well, you might see further continuations of the story.

Novelizing Final Crisis

Cox novelized Infinite Crisis, 52 and Countdown for DC Comics, and now he's novelized Final Crisis, Grant Morrison's narrative-shredding uber-crossover starring the evil Darkseid. How on earth do you take Morrison's loopy storytelling and convert it into a single novel?

There was a lot of condensing involved, Cox admits:

There's not a lot of connective tissue in that series. [There are] a lot of scenes that jump from place to place. I've got to admit, the book is probably a bit more linear than the comic book, especially issue seven, which was jumping all over time. I actually just tried to tell it a bit more in chronological order, and maybe simplify it a bit.

The biggest problem with novelizing one of these sprawling DC crossovers is figuring out what subplots and tie-ins to leave out. The first week Cox was working on the Infinite Crisis novelization, he was trying to include all of the spin-off issues, including things like Rann-Thanagar War One-Shot, and every other miniseries and crossover issue, "and I realized this book is going to take me ten years, and it's going to be the size of The Wheel Of Time." So he began paring things down. Similarly, the Final Crisis book ignores a lot of tie-ins, sadly including the 3-D Superman tie-in series. "I apologize if your favorite scene is not in this book, but there's no way I can get in the 3-D tie in superman issue and the Batman issues and the special tie-in issue of Secret Six."

With novelizations of comics crossovers, "it's all about streamlining." It's the opposite of novelizing movie scripts, which is all about fleshing out the story and characters and adding new stuff to turn a 90-page script into a 300-to-400-page novel. "The script for Ghost Rider was not a terribly long script," notes Cox. He recalls coming across the novelization for Snakes On A Plane and marveling that Christa Faust had managed to get 400 pages out of that film. He felt like sending her fan mail.

Should Khan Come Back?

As the author of three Khan books, Cox is conflicted about whether Khan should appear in the next Star Trek movie. On the one hand, recasting Khan seems almost impossible, given how much Ricardo Montalban put his stamp on the character. On the other, Cox might have said the same thing about recasting Kirk, Spock and McCoy — and J.J. Abrams and crew pulled that off. The real question is, "do you do Botany Bay Khan, or crazy burned-out Wrath Of Khan Khan? There's the young virile but not quite crazy Khan, and then there's the obsessed spent-15-years-in-Hell Khan. And then there's the whole messy [subject of the] Eugenics Wars — when exactly did they take place? Did they take place during the Bill Clinton years?"

Cox is writing one of four new novels that take place in the movie's continuity, picking up where the movie left off. He's written a draft of his novel, but hasn't gotten feedback from Paramount yet, so everything is subject to change. But at least for now, his novel takes place six months after the end of the movie, and follows Captain Kirk and his crew on a stand-alone adventure. And he hints that, if Paramount approves, the fact that the Vulcans are refugees scattered across the universe will play a part in his novel's plot.

The line will start with Superman: Earth One, by J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis, and Batman: Earth One by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. Not unlike Marvel's similar Ultimate line of new continuity (or, for that matter, DC's earlier All Star attempt at the same), these new books look set to try and create a movie-friendly entry point for curious readers.

Both books will debut at some point in 2010, which co-incidentally happens to be not only the first year of DC Entertainment, the new cross-media incarnation of DC Comics, but also the 75th anniversary of the publication of the first DC comic, New Fun.

DCU in 2010: Welcome To Earth One [The Source]

Star Wars
Whether it's Han Solo's unseen girlfriend, Anakin preparing for a podrace or a very human Jabba, these ten clips show that George Lucas' space opera was more fun before it was edited.

Star Trek
Klingon torture! William Shatner's original death! Skydiving Captains! Ten clips to give you a good feeling about what you've missed so far.

Robot Movies
Never mind the Transformers, it's the Terminator material amongst these five clips that are must-sees. Especially the Arnold bit from T3.

Super-Heroes Can Save Us
Fifteen clips from Iron Man, Hulk, the X-Men movies as well as Batman and Superman's long careers on celluloid to remind you that sometimes, deleted scenes can add little to a movie - and sometimes, they can add an entire character. Go check out the Superman clone you've never met before.

Batman Takes A Wrong Turn from Batman Forever:

Alfred Explains The Secret Of The Batcave from Batman Forever:

Dick Lives Up To His Name in Batman Forever:

Gotham Television Has The Greatest Announcers in Batman Forever:

Original Superman The Movie Ending:

Luthor's First Superman Clone From Superman IV: The Quest For Peace:

Frankly, We're Not Too Sure, But It's from Spider-Man 2:

Bruce Banner Finds Alternate Employment from The Incredible Hulk:

Bruce Turns Emotions Into Science from The Incredible Hulk:

Full Length Version of Ambush from Iron Man:

Full Length Version of Finale from Iron Man:

Storm and Jean Bond in X2: X-Men United:

Beast Recites Shakespeare from X-Men: The Last Stand:

Jubilee At The Museum from X2: X-Men United:

Spock
Died: Sacrificing himself by bringing the warp engines back online at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, leading to his dying from exposure to radiation.
Undied: His body was resurrected in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock thanks to the Deus Ex Machina powers of the Genesis Planet, and it turned out that his soul had lived on all along thanks to mind melding with Bones.
Cause of Undeath: Mind-meld and blatant plot ridiculousness in order to keep the fans happy. Admittedly, it was all set up in Star Trek II, but still.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, his soul was alive the entire time in Bones, but his body had enough time to go through a funeral and being shot off into space, so... 50/50? But not really, let's face it.

Ellen Tigh
Died: Poisoned by her husband after (in his eyes) betraying humanity in "Exodus, Part II" at the start of Battlestar Galactica's third season.
Undied: Instantly downloaded into a new body as part of the Fifth Cylon retcon, as revealed in the fourth season's "Sometimes A Great Notion."
Cause of Undeath: Traditional cylon download/rebirth.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, she was instantly reborn, which suggests that she was never actually dead as such, but the whole Fifth Cylon thing muddies the waters... especially when she was reborn as someone who wasn't exactly the Ellen she was when she died. We're going with "Kinda, but not really."

Boba Fett
Died: Falling into the Sarlacc's mouth in Return Of The Jedi.
Undied: Climbing back out of the Sarlacc's mouth in comic sequel Star Wars: Dark Empire.
Cause of Undeath: He was swallowed by apparently never chewed or digested and climbed his way out, apparently.
Does It Count As Death?: If you believe Dark Empire, not in the slightest. George Lucas apparently disagrees, however; it's said that he edited Fett's last appearance in the special edition of Return Of The Jedi to make it clearer that it's meant to be the end of the character.

John Sheridan
Died: Avoiding certain death by nuclear explosion at the end of Babylon 5's third season finale, "Z'ha'dum," by jumping into a pit so deep that it was impossible to survive. Oh, and then there was that nuclear explosion, which presumably would've destroyed the pit and everything within it anyway.
Undied: At the start of the show's fourth season, Sheridan was revealed to be in a limbo between life and death because of his love for Delenn. With the help of - and 20 years worth of lifeforce from - helpful fellow limbo-ite Lorien, he comes back to the land of the living.
Cause of Undeath: As Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting would say, choosing life. Who knew it was that simple?
Does It Count As Death?: Nope. Think of it as getting as far as death's foyer, before deciding to turn back because you'd changed your mind.

Tasha Yar
Died: Wanting out of her Starfleet contract early, Denise Crosby got her character killed at the hands of a gloopy, ooky oil monster in the first season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation "Skin of Evil."
Undied: Thanks to time travel shenanigans, turns out never to have died in the alternate timeline of third season episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," and then manages to return to the past of the original timeline at the end of the episode in a way that still doesn't make a lot of sense.
Cause of Undeath: Alternate timelines having prevented her from dying in the first place.
Does It Count As Death?: Well, a Tasha Yar definitely died. In fact, as we learn upon the appearance of the second Yar's daughter Sela, the other Tasha was killed unsuccessfully trying to escape from the Romulans, so it looks as if any and all Tashas would end up dead one way or another.

Superman
Died: At the hands of the apparently unstoppable Doomsday in 1993's The Death of Superman storyline.
Undied: Midway through the follow-on The Return of Superman storyline, when it's been revealed that none of the four characters who've taken up the mantle are the real thing.
Cause of Undeath: He woke up. No, really; the audience is pretty much told that he'd never died in the first place, he'd just gone into superhibernation in order to heal from the fight.
Does It Count As Death?: Not at all, but it definitely counted as a moneyspinner for DC Comics, who went on to kill Green Arrow and Green Lantern within the next couple of years, as well as teasing deaths for the Flash and breaking Batman's back.

Bucky
Died: Trapped on a bomb that mentor and Nazi-fighting partner Captain America had managed to jump off of before it exploded, as explained way back in 1963's Avengers series.
Undied: In 2005's "Winter Soldier" storyline of Captain America, where he got reintroduced and prepped to become the new Captain America in 2007.
Cause of Undeath: Turns out that Bucky was, in fact, blown to bits by the exploding bomb... It's just that they were pretty large bits. Large enough to rebuild him into a brainwashed no-good commie assassin who gets put on ice between missions, until he meets Cap, goes rogue, remembers who he is, and then uses his mighty Russian technology for the good of American mankind.
Does It Count As Death?: What's brainwashed Russian assassin for no?

The Flash
Died: Which one? Barry Allen died in 1985's Crisis On Infinite Earths. Wally West disappeared and was, at various times, presumed dead/missing/no-one could make up their mind in 2004's Infinite Crisis, and Bart Allen kicked the bucket in 2007's The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #13.
Undied: Wally came back in 2007's Justice League of America #10, Barry in 2008's Final Crisis #1 and Bart in 2009's Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #4.
Cause of Undeath: Both Barry and Wally had, it turns out, never died. Barry had been swallowed into the Speed Force, which is the cosmic... thing... that gives all super-speed characters their powers in the DC Universe, while Wally's fate was ultimately (after a couple of failed attempts that were quickly contradicted) decided upon a variation of "He took his family on vacation to an alien planet and didn't tell anyone." Don't ask. Bart, meanwhile, did die, kind of... but his teenage self was trapped in a futuristic lightning rod and then magically released in the 31st century to fight Superboy Prime. Again, it's probably better if you didn't ask.
Does It Count As Death?: No question for either Barry or Wally (No), but Bart... I have no idea. I've read Legion of Three Worlds multiple times, and still don't understand the explanation that's given there; let's just never mention it again and pretend it didn't happen.

Jason Todd
Died: As the result of a real-life phone vote to see if Todd, the second Robin (as in Batman and), should be killed at the hands of the Joker. Seriously, 1988's comic industry, what the hell were you thinking?
Undied: 2004's Batman revealed that Todd was not only not dead, but had magically aged more than most other characters in the DC Universe in his off-panel absence.
Cause of Undeath: Superboy was punching the walls of reality, and things went a bit weird. You know how it is with these superheroes and their punching the walls of reality; history gets rewritten all over the place. Just be glad that Batman didn't end up as Batdinosaur. Although, now that we think about it, that'd be awesome.
Does It Count As Death?: Magically contradicting Schrodinger and his cat, Jason Todd both did and didn't die. His official history has it that he died, and then just came back to life thanks to the punching of reality, meaning that he was still alive. So, while it ultimately doesn't count as permanent death, there was a death in there somewhere.

Jean Grey
Died: In 1980's famous Uncanny X-Men #137, where she sacrifices herself for the good of the universe to stop herself from becoming overwhelmed by the godlike power she possessed that might lead her to eat a couple of planets if she got peckish.
Undied: It's revealed in 1986's Fantastic Four #286 that the Jean Grey who killed herself was never actually Jean Grey at all, but the Phoenix force, who's been cosmically imprinted with Jean's personality. Don't worry; the Phoenix force was already back by that point anyway.
Cause of Undeath: Jean hadn't died (at that point), and the resurrection of the Phoenix force was somewhat implied by the name - The official explanation was that the Phoenix force hadn't actually died either, just lain dormant until someone else (Jean's daughter from an alternate timeline. If you don't already know, don't ask) claimed it.
Does It Count As Death?: Before the retcon and ruined Chris Claremont's X-Men once and for all you bastards, it did. Now? No-one died until years later, when Jean really got the Phoenix power and then ended up dying anyway. Guess there's something unlucky about the name or something.

I can't help it; I know that zombies are/were the big thing, but there's something about the current trend for undead superheroics that leaves me more than a little bored. I've got nothing against genres mixing and matching, but the original Marvel Zombies - with its horror movie logic and sense of humor, and its lack of need to have to deal with regular continuity allowing it to actually act as a complete story as opposed to something that pretty much needs to reset to the status quo by its conclusion - aside, there's something disappointing about this particular take on the walking (and flying, and running at superspeed) dead. Namely...

None Of Them Are Real Zombies
Again, Marvel Zombies excepted, the reanimated in Blackest Night and Necrosha aren't really zombies, exactly (Something that Blackest Night's creators, to their credit, keep saying in interviews. Even so, calling them Black Lanterns feels like a dodge, because they're dead characters come back to life as undead monsters - They're so clearly zombie-influenced that the actual name doesn't matter). They're magically animated by the power of death itself, or by a psychic vampire (Don't ask), or whatever, and they don't conform to what we'd consider zombie rules: They're not slow, they don't eat brains, they're intelligent - and, in fact, generally have the personalities of their living selves - and they're all under the command of some central intelligence or leader with a specific mission. What kind of zombies are that organized, you might ask yourself? Which brings us to...

We've Seen This All Before
The dead being brought back as pawns to use against our brave heroes? Old hat for superhero comics - In fact, Marvel even has multiple characters based around this concept (the Grim Reaper, the Black Talon... You could even argue that Brother - now Doctor - Voodoo would have some familiarity on the subject). The only thing that's new about this latest wave is the overwhelming scale of the risings... which is one of the few things legitimately taken from zombie culture. Which reminds me.

Enough With The Magic Cures Already
Zombies should be pretty easy to beat. If Simon Pegg and Nick Frost can take care of some, after all, how hard can it be? But not these superhero zombies; no, they're not only gifted with magical regenerative powers that somehow don't take them to a fully regenerated state, but they also have very specific ways to be defeated, apparently: Blowing their heads off? Not going to work, it seems. Setting fire to them? Well, it keeps them busy for awhile, but otherwise... Nah. But keep calm and show no signs of emotion and they shut down (All of that from Blackest Night, which, in its defense is not only a fun superhero story but, in Blackest Night: Superman and Blackest Night: Batman has some really great examples of superhero comics ripping off some well-known horror movie cliches - If you've not seen Martha Kent be chased through a cornfield at night by an undead Lois Lane, or Commissioner Gordon use a double-barreled shotgun against an army of the undead while carrying his crippled daughter over his shoulder, you've missed out on some wonderfully enjoyable over-the-top moments of recent comics). Seriously, comic creators: what's that all about?

Death Is Never The End In Superhero Comics, Anyway
Ultimately, the problem with superheroic zombies is that the rules of death don't work the same way in superhero comics as they do in almost every other fiction. We're used to resurrection in superhero comics, and that works against the story from the very beginning; Blackest Night, for example, has to not only make the reader believe that the dead rising is not only a horrific thing, but also an unusual one - Which, considering that Superman, Green Lantern, Flash, Green Arrow, Hawkman and Robin have all "died" and been resurrected at some point in their careers, is a pretty tricky thing to do; Necrosha takes place in the X-Men series of titles, which has become so full of resurrected characters that characters within the story joke about the pearly gates having been replaced by a revolving door. Without the belief that death is the end - that it means that the person or character is gone and will never be seen again - the very idea of an army of the undead is weakened, because the possibility of a return is always there, and in many cases, expected to happen.

Mixing zombies with superheroes doesn't automatically mean failure - Despite all my "I know you've said they're not zombies and they're not acting like zombies, but come on, they're weird zombie-esque creatures, just admit it" problems with Blackest Night, it's full enough of melodrama, derring-do and humor to make me kind of love it - but of all the horror genres to bring superheroes into, it's one of the most problematic. I can get why comic publishers would want to jump onboard the bandwagon, but... Aren't there other horror monsters better suited to this kind of thing? I mean, Marvel: Paul Cornell gave you Dracula on the moon. That's a great gift right there...

TOYIB's Gallery [DeviantArt via Nerdcore]

Greenham Airfield,June 5, 1944
Neuschwanstein 1945
Yalta Conference 1945
Cherbourg 1944
Unknown Location, 1945

I was thinking about this the other day, when I was watching Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II TV movie. I was wondering why this post-apocalyptic story of tyrannical dominatrices and mutants was less interesting than Star Trek, and I couldn't escape the conclusion: Genesis II was less interesting because it was less fun — and especially less escapist. Instead of cool people on an awesome spaceship packed with fantastic toys, like Communicators and Tricorders, you had a guy trapped in Planet Of The Apes without any apes. And with an extra helping of Roddenberry's signature preachiness.

And I started thinking about escapism, and why we tend to look down on it. We have a bias — myself included, on occasion — against works that allow people to burst out of the bonds of unpleasant reality. They're automatically less smart or interesting than works which seek to confront you with the real world's unpleasantness, to impress on you how unsavory our world really is.

Escapism is the candy-coated pill, the sedative designed to lull you away from realizing quite how messed up things are — and how much culpability you, as a no-doubt middle-class person, have for the situation. Escapism is opium, soma.

The distinction between escapist and "realist" fiction isn't even a matter of utopian versus dystopian narratives — after all, much escapist fiction is dystopian, and plenty of realistic fiction has an utopian impulse at its core. But when movies or books depict someone escaping from the world's unpleantness, or just offer a vision which allows the watcher or reader to escape through their imagination, then we deplore the cowardice of anyone who seeks to run away from their problems in this way. Most of all, escapism is inherently just not serious.

Escapism: pulpy and tacky

Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case against escapism very potently in her essay "Escape Routes," gathered in the collection The Language Of The Night: Essays On Fantasy And Science Fiction:

What if we're escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simple cozy place where heroes don't have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured — like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn't take us in the direction of the great myths and legends, which is always towards an intensification of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness: infantile regression or paranoid delusion, or schizoid insulation. The movement is retrograde, autistic. We have escaped by locking ourselves in jail.

And inside the padded cell people say, Gee wow have you read the latest Belch the Barbarian story? It's the greatest.

They don't care if nobody outside is listening. They don't want to know there is an outside.

Because the most famous works of SF are socially and culturally speculative, the field has got a reputation for being inherently "relevant." Accused of escapism, it defends itself by pointing to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Capek, Stapeldon, Zamyatin. But that won't wash: not for us. Not one of those writers was an American. My feeling is that American SF, while riding on the tradition of great European works, still clings to the pulp tradition of escapism.

That's overstated, and perhaps unfair. Recent American SF has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, overpopulation, pollution, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on: all of the "relevant" problems.

She was writing this back in the 1970s, so the specific accusations about SF are outdated. But as a summation of the "escapism is childish and not literary" viewpoint, it's pretty much perfect. And as you can tell, a big part of the hatred for escapism comes from a desire to be literary, and to be taken seriously by the upper echelons of the (supposedly monolithic) literary world. Writing in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1976, Barry N. Maltzberg raged that the literary/cultural establishment "either does not know we exist or patronizes us as pulp hacks for escapist kids."

One more quote. In his book On SF, Thomas M. Disch characterizes escapism as a "security blanket," and adds:

There are times when all of us would rather flee our problems than confront them head-on with the heightened awareness that genuine art forces on us. For such times, nothing will serve but escapism.

He goes on to say that certain trashy SF authors are as bad as Star Trek or Magnum P.I. (even though the latter show constantly bombarded us with Magnum's Vietnam War flashbacks.)

If you read these quotes carefully, a few things jump out at you. First of all, there's the equation of escapism with "pulp" traditions — which was obviously a big deal for authors like Le Guin and Maltzberg, who were trying to escape (sorry!) from the "pulp" label and prove that they deserved a higher grade of paper stock. And then there's the idea that escapism prevents your SF from being "relevant" or commenting on real-world issues — when, in fact, the most escapist narratives are often the most topical. (Just watch the original Star Trek.) There's the idea, which was way more prevalent in the 1970s, that explicit social commentary automatically made your work better or smarter.

There's also a certain feeling of disapproval, even dismay, that people are having too much fun. If I hadn't read tons of books by Le Guin and Disch, and discovered first hand how enjoyable (and frequently, how escapist) their work can be, I would think both authors wrote dry Socialist Realist works, in which their protagonists were born and died in the same gutter.

There has been a move to re-embrace escapism in recent years — Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay was about the fictional creation of a Golden Age superhero who was actually called The Escapist. And Chabon shows us exactly how The Escapist's real-world origins reflected the political and social trends of the 1930s and early 1940s, and how much his adventures reflect the struggles and traumas Sammy and Joey are going through in their real lives — everything from Sammy's secret homosexuality to Clay's family trapped in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe becomes part of the secret backstory of the Escapist and the League of the Golden Key. In Chabon's novel, backstory is the story — when you try to strip the League of the Golden Key and the other details from the Escapist's origin, you chip away at what makes the Escapist who he is, and the reasons why he does what he does.

It's no coincidence, of course, that Chabon has also been a champion of bringing the pulps back into the sphere of the literary — he edited two anthologies of mock-pulp science fiction stories for McSweeney's a few years ago, chock full of literary and genre superstars doing pastiches and homages to the plot-heavy stories of the past. Authors like Chabon and Dave Eggers are able to celebrate the pulpy and retro in a way that Maltzberg never could back in the 1970s, because they're already assured of their literary status, and need not fear being marginalized. (And meanwhile, the "new space opera" and posthuman SF novels that throng on our shelves are the very picture of escapism, with their heroes who live for zillions of years and can port themselves into new customized bodies whenever they feel like it.)

But in any case, we're now far enough from the pulp era that the "pulpy" label has lost much of its sting, even as unabashedly pulpy urban fantasy heroines in tight pleather pants are eating science fiction's market share for lunch. So maybe it really is time to reclaim the word "escapism" and transform it into a paean to works that liberate and illuminate us.

A theory of escapist art

So I promised you an explanation of why escapism is the highest form of art — and yes, there may be a slight amount of hyperbole involved there. At the same time, escapism has given us some of our greatest speculative art works, and has the potential to spawn even greater ones in the future, if we recognize it for what it is.

First of all, let's dispose of this false dichotomy between "escapism" and "realism." Neither of those things is ever entirely pure, and each always contains elements of the other. Any time you have a flight of fancy, or a grace note, or an elivening metaphor, in a "realist" work, you are engaging in escapism. Because whenever you invoke the imagination, or suggest another world (made out of thought, or images) beyond your protagonist's "real" world, you're allowing the reader a brief escape. And in fact, if you look at "real life," some of our "realest" experiences involve escape.

Think about that old literary standby, the "coming of age" narrative — it is the most pure escapist story you can have, even if it doesn't always have a happy ending. (More on happy endings later.) The "coming of age" tale is about someone outgrowing his or her childhood, and casting off the stifling restrictions of parents, school and conformist expectations. It is a story about reaching escape velocity, and bursting out of childhood's gravity well. This is never a tidy process in real life, nor is it often in literature. But it's the original escapist tale, and in many ways, it's the template on which all other escapist tales build.

The reverse is also true — escapist elements don't automatically make a work less realistic. Just as the "coming of age" story is about escape in the "real" world, it's more than possible to tell a realistic story about a world that repesents an escape from our reality. We've all accepted, by now, that you can tell a realistic story about that ultimate avatar of escapism, Batman. (Batman is in many ways a more escapist figure than Superman, because Batman is just like us — except that his amazing training and gadgets turn him into an unstoppable force.) Look at Paul Pope's amazing, stark graphic novel Batman: Year 100. And if you want SF that comments on real-world issues, it's hard to get more topical than the first few seasons of the Battlestar Galactica remake.

And that leads to another point — escapism can be incredibly dark. I said earlier that many escapist works are dystopian, and it's clearly true. The "last survivors of a post-apocalyptic world" story is full of escapism — for one thing, you're one of the chosen few, and you're incredibly special and wonderful as a result. You no longer have to pay taxes (like Le Guin's heroes), and you live in a world where the worst has already happened. And many escapist films are show someone escaping from an incredibly dark world, even if it's only through the power of the imagination. Think of Guillermo Del Toro's beautiful Pan's Labyrinth, which is at its core a work about the escape into fantasy. Even if both the real world and the fantasy are dark and disturbing. Or Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which takes place in a dystopian world and shows us Sam Lowry's flights of the imagination as well as his attempts to escape in real life. Did I mention that escapist works don't have to have happy endings?

At the same time, who says that realism is the best thing a literary work can aspire to? It really is true, as many SF writers have said lately, that we live in a world that's changing so quickly, that any attempt at pure realism will become historicism instead. And then there's the subjective nature of "reality." But most of all, realism is like art that attempts to be purely representational: it can't show any deeper reality beneath the surface, nor can it reflect all of the stuff that's happening just beyond the frame of our perceptions. We've all lived through historical moments where a new meme or phenomenon seemed to "come out of nowhere," only to look inevitable in retrospect, once we see all of the early indicators that we ignored at the time, because they were outside of the narrative we were telling ourselves about "reality."

If the goal of a literary work (and remember, "literary" is not synonymous with "good." More on that here) is to reflect "reality," then "realism" is one tool among many for doing so. And escapism is another.

I already suggested, above, that metaphors are inherently escapist because they take us away from the strict view of what the thing "is." And the reverse is also true: escapism is a metaphor. TV shows like Lost In Space and Star Trek are so transparently metaphors for the hopes and fears of the Space Age that it's impossible to watch them now without thinking about what people were living through at the time. You get as revealing a mirror into the Space Age, Cold-War psyche from Star Trek as you do, say, from John Updike's Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux. The stuff Star Trek tries to say about the politics of the 1960s is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the stuff that it says without meaning to, about Manifest Destiny and the post-colonial project of redeeming the Third World.

We tend to think of escapism as a childish impulse, but that's by no means always true — like Brazil, or The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, many great escapist works are about adults, who are trapped as only adults can be, in prisons partly of their own making, and look for a way out.

Escapism also shows what we're trying to escape from — this seems like an obvious point, but it's one that often seems to be overlooked. This changes over time, and also varies from creator to creator. Some escapist works are concerned about breaking out of a totalitarian, oppressive state, others are more concerned with running away from middle-class American life. There's escapism from war, from conformity, from individualism, from failure, from success. Whether or not an escapist work explicitly shows us what we're escaping, it's still always there, revealed by what the escapist elements aren't. Escapism always reveals what we're escaping, and serves as a mirror of whatever the artist (or corporate overlord, as the case may be) views as the most horrendous elements of current reality. It's convex where dire reality is concave, like a plaster cast mold. If your goal is to get the clearest possible picture of "reality," looking at that reflection may be your best shot.

And yes, escapist entertainment does reflect the era that spawned it. The Space Age gave us lots and lots of space heroes, but today's escapist avatars are much more likely to be superheroes — who existed during the Space Age, but were much more confined to comics and the occasional weak TV series. Actually, thinking about it some more, our most escapist works currently seem to fall neatly into three categories: superheroes, vampires and post-apocalyptic survivors. All of whom share a few categories that seem emblematic of our times: they're individualistic, they're special, and they're often at odds with a world that doesn't understand how special and great they are. In other words, they're the perfect heroes for a time when we're no longer involved in a collossal economic struggle like the Cold War, but instead are facing a crumbling middle class and a number of insoluble global struggles, in North Korea, Iraq and Iran, among others. Escapism illuminates our times.

Escapism also does go hand in hand with the epic, the same impulse to celebrate great heroes that gave us the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Returning to the Le Guin quote, it strikes me that what she's describing as escapism is actually better described as "weak story-telling." Stories in which there are no consequences, in which the choices are easy and the heroes always right, aren't escapist — they're just bad.

If escapism is frequently tawdry and dull — if our culture gives us Transformers 2 instead of Superman II — blame the creators, don't blame escapism itself. In fact, holding a low opinion of escapism (and saying things like "It's just a movie about explosions and robots, don't expect too much from it") lets the Michael Bays of this world off the hook too easily.

Let's give the last word to C.S. Lewis, who's quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as having once said, "Who are the people who are most opposed to escapism? Jailors!"

I'm not terribly optimistic that comic books will ever regain the kind of popular readership, particularly among young people, that the medium enjoyed in decades past, but Wednesday Comics seems like the sort of thing that has the best shot of reaching new readers. With so many different characters and creative teams to choose from, even the most skeptical readers will likely find at least a few stories that pique their interests, and the (mostly) continuity-free stories provide an ideal entry point for those just discovering the DC universe.

That said, Wednesday Comics is more than just a clever gimmick. DC has put together some great writers and artists for the stories, including Neil Gaiman and Michael Allred on "Metamorpho", Kurt Busiek and Joe Quinones on "Green Lantern", and the current Power Girl team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner on "Supergirl". Throughout, there is a palpable sense that these stories are labors of love for the writers and artists; even the stories that don't work seem to be made with more care than some perfunctory fill-in book, and I'm more likely to revisit these stories to see if I missed something than some gratuitous, pointless event tie-in. (Countdown: Arena, I am, as always, looking at you.)

The best stories in this anthology are those that make the best of their unique format. Gaiman and Allred's "Metamorpho" makes great use of the 14" X 20" dimensions the broadsheet pages give them, crafting entire days as a single panel that its characters then wander through. Such a trick might be jarring on a smaller page, but it works brilliantly here. "Metamorpho" also features a support feature where three children answer what they claim to be reader questions about the Element Man. The fact that these children seem to come from a strange alternate universe where Metamorpho is absurdly popular only adds to the charm.

Similar structural trickery can be seen in "The Flash." Under the banner of "Flash Comics", we see multiple small comics in the various issues, including "The Flash", "Iris West", and "Gorilla Grodd". Karl Kerschl and Brenden Fletcher have put together an entire world within a world here; there's a real sense that "Flash Comics" has run in the Sunday newspapers for years, largely unchanged since the 1960's, and this is simply the first time we've noticed. It's a fun device, particularly when much of its story relies on some of the wackiest comic book science this side of the Silver Age.

There are a bunch of other stories in Wednesday Comics that I would recommend without hesitation. John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo's "Superman" is both gorgeous to look at and manages to tell its story in the grandest, most iconic brushstrokes possible. It's a story that feels huge, even if the story only moves forward at a pace of three or four panels per week. My personal favorite, however, might just be "Supergirl", if only because there's something so gloriously, deliriously awesome about devoting most of the story to Kara chasing after her misbehaving pets. The fact that Streaky and Krypto are absolutely adorable probably helps, too.

Not every story is a triumph, though. Ben Caldwell's "Wonder Woman" is probably guilty of overreaching, trying to cram a cryptic, lyrical take on the Amazonian princess into such a small amount of space. The fact that each week features twenty to thirty panels on just one broadsheet page is probably the most obvious indication that he is trying to do too much in not enough space. I didn't really care for Paul Pope's take on "Strange Adventures", but part of the point of something like Wednesday Comics is to try out a wide variety of creative styles; I suppose it would be unlikely that I would be a fan of all of them.

Wednesday Comics is a breath of fresh air in an industry where superhero stories are increasingly stuck inside some fairly well-defined strictures. Its anthology approach and innovative format make sure that Wednesday Comics is quite unlike anything we've seen in quite some time, which should be more than enough to earn it a recommendation. The fact that the stories inside are actually quite good feels almost like a bonus.

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is available On Demand and via Digital Download, and it also comes out on DVD and BluRay today. You can get it from the WBSHOP.com here. (You can read our review here.)

Here are some more clips, that have been posted on Youtube:

And here's some promotional artwork:

Shazam! (1974)
With one word, Billy Batson becomes the World's Mightiest Mortal... but that's about the most believable thing in this series, which creepily featured the underage Billy traveling around the country in an RV accompanied by his "mentor" and occasionally talking to the gods who gave him his powers, who all happened to be badly-animated cartoons. Add in Billy or Captain Marvel helpfully telling you the moral of the episode at the end each week, and you've got a recipe for a dull show enlivened only by the size of Billy's hair.

Electra-Woman and Dyna-Girl (1976)
I'm not really sure this one needs any explanation as to why it's on the list, once you've watched the video.

The Amazing Spider-Man (1977)
In which television revealed the truth about Marvel's favorite superhero: He looked kind of ridiculous. This short-lived series also missed the point of the comic book altogether by not using any of the character's famous supervillains, instead giving him ninjas and terrorists to fight. What was the point of that?

Legends Of The Superheroes (1978)
No expense was spared on bringing DC's biggest name superheroes to the small screen in this live action version of Super Friends - well, unless you count the money that would've been spent on a good script. Again, proving that bad writing and poor special effects can overcome even the best intentions, this two-part series (The second episode of which was a celebrity roast of the heroes led by Ed McMahon. No, really) also featured a villain more diabolical than Lex Luthor: A laugh track.

Those Terrible Captain America TV Movies (1979)
We can just imagine the pitch meeting for these two TV movies: "So, we have the rights to Captain America - You know, the guy who embodies the American Dream and fought in World War II against Hitler? I've got a great take on him: We turn him into Evel Kinivel. And let's get rid of that mask, too. Make it into a motorcycle helmet - That's much more hep." It could've been worse, we guess... We're just not sure how.

The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)
The original Hulk series was, if you ask us, one of the few superhero shows that worked - and that's because they didn't really treat it as a superhero show at all. When they revived the series a decade later and started pairing him with guest stars from the Marvel Universe, though...? Not a good idea:

(The Daredevil appearance in the next special, Trial of The Incredible Hulk, may be even worse; especially because they seem to have gotten the character mixed up with a generic ninja who happened to be blind.)

Superboy (1988)
An attempt to spin the Superman movies into a weekly format, the Superboy series had sincerity going for it - Sincerity and the seeming inability to not try and drastically rework the series between seasons every year (Including recasting the lead role after the original Superboy asked for a raise around the same time as getting arrested for drunk driving), leading to a schizophrenic, uneven show let down by shoddy special effects.

The Flash (1990)
The Flash comic book may be populated with colorful villains, but the television show didn't have the same luck (Mark Hamill's Trickster, in the clip below, aside), presumably for budgetary reasons. Add in a leading man as stiff as his ridiculously over-sculpted costume, and it's no surprise that this show only lasted one season.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993)
Secret identities, colorful outfits, super powers, fighting crime... These guys count as superheroes, right? Maybe it's our age, maybe our dedication to things like plot, dialogue and nuance, or perhaps it's just our aversion to cheap monsters in anything that doesn't actually involve Godzilla, but the long-running (and multiple-show-spanning: It's on its fifteenth different title right now) series always seemed... well, almost unwatchably bad to us.

Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993)
It's a judgment call as to whether this show really deserves to be here. On the one hand, the Moonlighting-esque relationship between its leads was cute, and John Shea's Lex Luthor was a lot of fun... But on the other, it was a show that struggled to come up with good ideas each week and often failed, leading to an episode where Clark married a clone of Lois, who needed to eat frogs in order to survive. Or something. And what was with essentially writing Lex out after one season, anyway?

Generation X (1996)
A pilot adapting Marvel's X-Men spin-off, Generation X made it to air but never to full-series, meaning that the world was spared the low-budget high-concept struggle of teens having to live with their mutant abilities in a world that hated and feared them... because they couldn't act.

Justice League of America (1997)
Possibly the ultimate proof that TV and superheroes don't mix, this is another unsuccessful pilot that aired nonetheless, and features bad writing, bad acting, bad special effects, and some of the most literal - and most embarrassing - superhero costumes ever seen on screen. It's like a landmark of fail.

Mutant X (2001)
Marvel's short-lived television series about mutants that isn't related to the X-Men at all oh no please don't sue us Fox (They did, nonetheless) tried to swerve away from comparisons to the publisher's successful mutant franchise by underplaying everything to the point of boredom. Even Generation X would've been better than this.

Birds of Prey (2002)
It had so much potential - Batman and Catwoman's daughter teaming up with the former Batgirl to fight crime? Hello, high concept - but the execution let it down badly with shoddy writing, lack of direction and the mistaken idea that camp was better than character development. When something makes Smallville look subtle and nuanced, you know you're in trouble.

The Ones That Didn't Suck
Batman (1966)
Almost everything about it is wrong - The cheap jokes! The ill-fitting costumes! Replacing Julie Newmar with Eartha Kitt! - but it all works nonetheless; Batman's 1960s incarnation may not be the best translation from page to screen, but as a weird totem of the era, it remains a classic.

Wonder Woman (1975)
We love Wonder Woman as a character, and this show may be a lot to do with that. While the comic version was having identity issues at the time this series was being made, the TV show took her back to her heyday, added the "let me twirl into my costume" and fittingly made Lynda Carter the star she should've been all along.

The Incredible Hulk (1978)
As we said above, the Hulk show worked despite its title character - Riffing on The Fugitive with an occasional need for a giant silent strongman, the show offered a completely different take on the character from the comics, and one that was arguably better.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1996)
When it comes to television series about people with magical powers, we don't think we're alone in thinking that Joss Whedon did everything right. Mixing just the right amounts of humor and tragedy into the supernatural and superpowered stories, Buffy is everything that superhero shows like Smallville and Heroes should be trying to emulate... if only they could drag themselves away from the superficial special effects and overcooked dialogue.

The Obvious Exceptions
Anything animated
Yes, all of the above shows were live-action, and yes, we know that superhero cartoons have a long and proud history on television as well; we're partial to some Justice League Unlimited, especially if Darkseid is the bad guy. But as much as adding animated series in here may have ruined the grade curve, let's not forget things like this:

or this:

I think you know what I'm saying.

To be fair, Public Enemies actually fixes a lot of the plot problems with the original comic it's adapting. We're given a better reason for Lex Luthor becoming President of the United States, and it's one that both ties in with the current economic climate and provides an unintentionally hilarious opening to the movie. Businessmen, so crushed by the collapse of the world's markets, smash up newspaper vending machines so that they can steal the coins contained within. (Really, animated moviemakers? Newspaper vending machines? We also get a denouement that actually offers closure, as opposed to the original series' more open-ended, to-be-continued-in-Infinite-Crisis, climax.

But in the process of fixing those issues, a lot of the (for want of a better way to put it) fun of the story feels skewed: When your story opens with global economic collapse prompting Americans to abandon the two-party political system in order to avoid devolving into riot-filled chaos, scenes of superheroes punching each other ad nauseum for the better part of half an hour in the middle of the movie seem somewhat... out of place. As does the climactic appearance of a rocket that looks like a giant Superman/Batman composite, with booster rockets for a cape.

The tonal dissonance is the movie's biggest problem; if you took out a couple of "bitch"s and comments about Power Girl's breasts, what you'd have left would be a great film for kids. What survives from the original comic is an ideal big, bold, childlike story: Lex Luthor becomes President, frames Superman for murder and all the other superheroes try to arrest him! And there's this massive kryptonite meteor that's headed to Earth that no-one can stop! Dude!!! (The meteor plot feels a bit unnecessary here; it's been pulled over from the original comic, where it was really a set-up for the next storyline, and without that context, becomes a little bit "We need a bigger ending — oh, why don't we use this meteor?").

But as it is, the movie is unsure of which audience it's aiming for - an adult audience who wants references to Power Girl's breast size and gets the weird quasi-Jon Stewart gag at the start of the movie (bleeped out, because... Well, I'm not entirely sure why, really?), or a kid audience for whom the idea of Hawkman, Captains Marvel and Atom, Katana, Power Girl, Black Lightning and Major Force going up against Superman and Batman is genuinely new and exciting.

On the plus side, the movie looks great; Director Sam Liu finds a way to translate original comic artist Ed McGuinness' distinctive, blocky style while keeping it familiar enough to fans of Batman: The Animated Series and the Justice League cartoons, and the voice work by old hands Kevin Conroy, Clancy Brown and Tim Daly (amongst many others) has just the right mix of sincerity and smirk.

Also enjoyable are the extras, which include a preview for the next DC Universe movie, Justice League: Crisis On Two Earths (which, despite the claims of it being all-original, seems to be a version of Grant Morrison's JLA: Earth 2 graphic novel), a fun Dinner for Five rip-off featuring animated mavens Bruce Timm, Andrea Romano, Gregory Novak and Batman himself Kevin Conroy, and extra episodes of the Superman animated series (on the DVD, at least; I believe the Blu Ray edition has different episodes in addition to everything else). While the movie itself is uneven but mostly enjoyable, when you factor in all the extras available on the DVD and Blu Ray editions, the package suddenly becomes a lot more attractive to fans of either the characters or animated superheroes in general.

Overall, Superman/Batman: Public Enemies doesn't necessarily measure up to earlier DC Universe animated movies (Wonder Woman and Justice League: The New Frontier are probably better, I'd argue), and some of the changes in the adaptation create new problems even as they fix old ones, but there are definitely worse ways to spend the couple of hours or so it'd take to watch this. Just don't expect more than a good old-fashioned superhero slugfest, with some added bells and whistles.

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is released September 29th.

Here's a list of all the movies with production budgets of $170 million and over, for the past ten years. (We chose the threshold of $170 million because there were a ton of movies clustered around the $150 million-$160 million mark.) Movies that failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office are underlined.

2009:

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince: $250 million

Avatar: $237 million (according to AP)

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: $225 million (according to NY Post)

Terminator Salvation: $200 million

G.I. Joe: The Rise Of COBRA: $175 million

Up: $175 million

2008:

Quantum Of Solace: $230.6 million

Prince Caspian: $225.6 million

Iron Man: 186.5 million

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull: $185.5 million

The Dark Knight: $185.5 million

Wall-E: $180.5 million

2007:

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End: $317.4 million

Spider-Man 3: $272.9 million

The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials: $213.4 million

Rush Hour 3: $187.4 million

2006:

Superman Returns: $295.3 million

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: $223.1 million

X-Men: The Last Stand: $209.3 million

Poseidon: $171.3 million

2005:

King Kong: $232.5 million

Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe: $197.6 million

Sahara: $176.8 million

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire: $150 million (2005 dollars)

2004:

Spider-Man 2: $232.2 million

Troy: $199.9 million

Van Helsing: $182.8 million

The Polar Express: $186.6 million

Alexander: $175.4 million

2003:

Terminator 3: $238.4 million

The Matrix: Reloaded: $176.7 million

Master And Commander: $175.6 million

The Matrix: Revolutions: $175.6 million

2000:

The Perfect Storm: $175.6 million

1999:

Wild Wild West: $221 million

The World Is Not Enough: $173.3 million

The 13th Warrior: $206.8 million

Notes: All figures are in 2009 dollars, adjusted for inflation. These figures are just production budgets, and are based on the most accurate figures we could find. They don't include marketing budgets. And of course, many of the films which failed to break even at the U.S. box office did make a profit when you factor in international box office.

Conclusions:

There hasn't been a movie as expensive as Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End since 2007, so you could argue that, over all, movies are not getting more expensive. However, after a few years where there were four mega-budgeted movies per year, the last two years have each seen six movies with budgets over $170 million (in inflation-adjusted dollars.) And as we mentioned above, this year had the most movies costing $200 million or more of any year, with next year likely to see even more films over $200 million.

And the listing above doesn't reflect this fact, but we also found a steep rise in the number of movies costing around $150 million every year — this seems to be the safe point for a film that is expected to do well, but may not be a blockbuster. Films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Batman Begins, Star Trek and many others all have production budgets in the magic $150 million zone.

At the same time, Hollywood seems slightly better at picking winners lately. We haven't had a year where most of the hugely expensive movies failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office since 2004, when two historical epics, The Polar Expressand Van Helsing all bombed. Or 2003, when one of two Matrix sequels underperformed, along with Terminator 3 and Master And Commander.

One thing jumps out at me: There were apparently no budget busting movies in 2000, 2001 or 2002. Apparently the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000, had a budget of only about $75 million. And the Star Wars prequels, hideous though they were, were apparently on the cheap side, costing around $120 million each (in non-adjusted dollars.)

Why would this be? Well, look at the three big-budget movies from 1999. Notice anything the three of them have in common? Hmmm... Other mega-expensive bombs in the late 1990s include Speed 2: Cruise Control, Lethal Weapon 4 and, of course, Waterworld. The only mega-budget movies to make money in the latter half of the 1990s were Armageddon and Titanic.

Sources: Know Your Money, Forbes.com, Listphobia, The Numbers, IMDB, Box Office Mojo, Wikipedia, and other sources as cited.