Kevin Smith’s Green Hornet

Pretty covers, eh? Dynamite Entertainment has the rights to the Green Hornet, with the first issue coming out in March. There will also be a Free Comic Book Day offering. There is an obvious connection to Seth Rogen’s upcoming movie, but the comic will be based on a previous version.

Kevin Smith, famed director (full disclosure: I’m not a fan by a long shot) and also known for having comics late by months (ask a Spider-Fan about Spider-Man/Black Cat, and that’s only the most mentioned example) will be writing this comic, and Comic Shop News (offered to comic book stores) interviewed Smith about his vision, based on the rejected movie script he wrote in 2004. So maybe this will actually come out time. 🙂

While I can’t link to an actual interview online, I do have the CSN interview before me, and as is typical of this blog, I have some thoughts on it. Wanna read them?

Well, you can’t back out now. Originally a radio drama, George Trendle’s characters (he’s also the creator of the Lone Ranger, and tied the characters together via ancestry) have moved into movie serials, comics, and the most well known version, the TV series with Van Williams as the Hornet and then unknown to the west Bruce Lee as his sidekick, Kato. Smith’s version was supposed to be a movie before it was ultimately turned down. It’s this script that he will be using. Luckily, Smith was able to get Miramax to allow Dynamite to use that script for the comic.

“The good folks at Miramax were very kind about letting us use the script for a movie that was never going to happen once Michelle Gongri and Seth Rogen started working on their Green Hornet movie…So Miramax was like ‘Yeah, even though Kevin wrote a script for a movie and we pain him a lot of money to do so a long time ago, it’s obviously not going to go anywhere, so if you guys want to do it here in the comics, feel free.’ That was might generous of them.”

And to Smith’s credit, he isn’t simply handing in the movie script to the artist and calling it good. (While a comic script and a movie script share certain shorthand, you’d be giving an artist a lot of leeway with the story. Try looking for a movie or TV script and a comic script online and compare the two sometime.)

Smith is bringing more to The Green Hornet than his original script, however; as he revisits the story, he’s making changes. “What could have started simply as, ‘here, take this script and let me see it when your done’  has become much more than that,” Smith said. “Things would kick in, like ‘I remember in a earlier draft I had a scene involving Brit and his wife, so is there enough space to fit that in?’ Suddenly, you’re bringing something to it that wouldn’t have been there had you made the movie. And it’s not like I can cut this out of the script because it was terrible. You can cut stuff for time, but in comic book form we’ve got time for character development, and that will enhance any story.”

At this point, I start getting concerned. When in the history did Brit Reed (the Green Hornet’s alter ego) have a wife? I’m not that well versed in Hornet History 101, but I’ve seen the TV show and looked online and saw no mention of her. In the interview, Smith claims that “it’s an homage to almost every age of comics: Golden, Silver, and modern” and that “it’s a comic book script for a comic book movie written by a guy who loves comics”. That’s all well and good, but is he a fan of the characters he’s writing or are we getting another version of The Spirit ala Frank Miller? (A question I have for Rogen’s movie, but based on his comedic background, it may end up more like Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four. Best not to ask an FF fan about that one)

There is one other concern that I have about this comic, and while I’m willing to let the rest of it go (remember that Dynamite’s Buck Rogers, another update, is one of my favorite current comics, despite the messing around with Buck’s world) this one gives me Starbuck shivers. Kato is now a woman.

“Anybody who’s been reading comics as long as I have isn’t going to be surprised by anything we do,” Smith said. (And ShadowWing Tronix notes that I’m not surprised at the stupidity that Dan Didio and Joe Quesada do at DC and Marvel, either. That doesn’t mean I agree with it.) “Back in the late 80’s, when Now had the license for Green Hornet, they introduced the notion of a female Kato. For the movie, we were going to use the female Kato as well

…

“Some people who are too young to remember the Now comics go, ‘Hey man, that’s groundbreaking, you made Kato a chick.’ But I didn’t do it. It happened years and years ago. I’m not that clever, believe me.”

Nah, too easy a set-up. Anyway, just because someone else has a bad idea doesn’t make it any less a bad idea when YOU do it! And a quick run to Wikipedia tells me that Now was playing games with continuity, attempting to put the radio show, the TV show, and their comic all in the same timeline. In their version the radio show was Brit Sr, the TV show was Brit 2 (the nephew of the original, just like James Bond, Jr.), and his nephew, Paul, took on the mantle in the Now stories. Kato was revealed to be the family name, and it was a daughter of one of these other Katos (it kind of got confusing to me at one point–hopefully it read better in the comics, I loved Now’s version of Speed Racer) that took over the unnamed assistant role. What I’m getting out of the interview, however, is that this is supposed to be the original Kato under Brit Reed, not a decedent. (Smith is, however, restoring the notion that Reed’s ancestor is the Lone Ranger from the radio dramas, which Trendle had alluded to, having created both masked avengers.) And then there’s this:

I’m picking up somebody else’s cool idea because there’s something sexier about drawing a woman in that outfit kickin’ #$# rather than seeing another dude in those clothes kickin’ #@#. (Yes, I censored the other word for butt–my blog, my prerogative 🙂 ) And there’s something sexy about the male/female relationship, the balance. What we used to call in the 80’s the David and Mattie of it all–the chemistry between those two characters tends to be a lot more electric when they’re male and female.”

At the risk of reading too much into Smith’s analogy, David and Mattie’s relationship was often confrontational (that was part of the comedy), and they didn’t get along. Moonlighting was a romantic comedy. Is that what were going to have here? The last paragraph gives me that impression as Smith talks more about “getting deeper into the Brit Reed/Kato relationship”, which reminds me of that Lone Ranger TV movie where Tonto was also given a sex change. (Thank God that pilot never made it to full series.) And what of the aforementioned addition of a Mrs. Reed? Reed and Kato got along rather well, and not just because Reed was otherwise Kato’s boss. They got along rather well in the show I saw.

I became a fan of the show when Encore started airing old episodes. (Before then I only knew about them because they guest-starred on a two-part episode of their counterpart, Batman, by the same producers.) So I don’t know what the die-hard Hornet fans think of this, but personally, I’m less than excited about this series. I may or may not get the Free Comic Book Day version to test my suspicions, but I have no plans to pick this comic up otherwise.