BW Media Spotlight

Don’t get me wrong. I know fictional people aren’t real. That should be obvious to the people who send death threats over things that happen to fictional people to the real people trying to tell a good story. So at no point assume I think Superman is a real-life breathing space human being. But you are supposed to see him that way. The studios executives and publishers are supposed to see him that way. You know who isn’t? The creators telling his story.

Why do some characters stand out in our mind? Why do we still remember Captain Kirk, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman when other heroes who were quite popular around their time, sometimes even more popular, disappear from our culture? I don’t mean pop culture; that changes from generation to generation anyway, occasionally crossing the divide if it continues long enough or gets a proper revival. And yes, proper is kind of the important word here because it fits into a problem I have with modern comic and movie creators who are continuing long-standing characters.

There was a time when writers, directors, showrunners, and actors treated characters as if they were people. They weren’t just telling a story, they were bringing characters to life and telling their amazing adventures or humorous misadventures. At some point down the trail however, this has changed for the creative staff. Oh, they’re trying to create characters, but it’s no longer about bringing a current character to life and continue a story, continue the lives of those characters as if it was a long-running life story, as if they were telling their own adventures only they live on a spaceship. Because characters have now been reduced to concepts, to be molded however the current staff wants. They want to tell a story and they’ll use these names because they’re popular. But that’s what they want, the popular name and not the character, and that’s where a lot of problems in modern stories and adaptations are coming from.

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