Superman
was first. Then Batman. Later came Spidey, the Hulk, the Flash, and others.
All came to see justice done, far from the place of their birth: The comic
book page. And none of them, in the end, could truly defeat their most
nefarious foe: The small screen.
Television
is like kryptonite to comic-book heroes. It's strange, seeing as how TV
and comics share so much: a strong visual element, the ability to pull
off high-concept material well, and a common audience to boot. But TV just
can't do most heroes justice. Superman, for all his vaunted strength, was
limited to bopping two-bit crooks in the nose. Batman, for all the fun
of his '60s series, dealt a campy blow to an otherwise classic film-noir
character that is still trying to shuffle off the Adam West deadpan effect.
Even Bill Bixby's Hulk was little more than a muscled guy in green paint,
wandering maudlin from one nameless town to the next. It just didn't work.
None of it ever did.
Which
is why we can't be surprised that "Witchblade" doesn't quite make the grade,
either. The show is the first from the Top Cow stable of properties, famous
in the comic book world for creating some of the most visually arresting
(if not the most well-written) characters today. What this translates to,
for all of you out there who aren't fanboys, is this: T and A, and lots
of it. While I'm not a fan of Top Cow's work (I appreciate story a little
too much to accept their all-style, no-substance attitude), "Witchblade"
was one of their titles that actually had a plot: Police detective Sara
Pezzini finds the titular ancient gauntlet that gives her super-powers,
and uses them to fight crime. What's even cooler is that the Witchblade
only works for women with superior strength of mind, body, and will (Joan
of Arc is one of its former owners), and the weapon comes with a price:
the eternal struggle between the Witchblade and its wielder for control.
So
OK, it's not Shakespeare. It's not even Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Bob Kane,
or Siegel and Schuster, four giants from the comic book realm who gave
us some of the best characters in popular culture. But what it is won't
make any TV producers go running back to the comic book shop for ideas
anytime soon. Like most of its predecessors, it goes wrong somewhere, coming
off as a sort of combination of "Law & Order" without the good acting
and "The Greatest American Hero" without the light touch. It is, to put
it simply, the usual comic book movie: silly, overblown, and weightless.
Don't
fault the cast: Yancy Butler makes for a sufficiently sultry Sara Pezzini,
the cop with a little something extra. But what she's missing is something
that she couldn't bring to the role: the look of it all. Maybe that's why
comics don't translate well to TV or even movies: because you can draw
things that you just can't re-create on film. In the comics, Spiderman
looks agile and lithe, and Batman looks dark and menacing. On TV, Spiderman
looks like a guy in red-and-blue jammies, and Batman looks like a member
of some bondage-ballet troupe. And here, too, the visual aspect of "Witchblade"
is blunted. The comic embraces its T&A roots with barely-there skin-tight
outfits. The TV movie gives us jeans and a leather jacket. But it's not
just about sex, it's about realism, about the suspension of disbelief.
Film
is just now catching up to comics in terms of ability, which is why we've
only seen the beginning of comic translations. "X-Men" just hit it big
with a script that played both to comic book purists and neophytes. Sure,
they took a few liberties (changing the costumes from yellow spandex to
black leather, for example), but the spirit was there. The difference is
that film generally has the budget that TV lacks, and money is what it
takes to do these CGI effects right. Otherwise, you get something like
"Witchblade" a "Xena"-level production taking on a "Star Wars: Episode
I"-level challenge. And with an equation like that, the best result you
can hope for is entertaining kitsch. No less, but certainly no more.
We
all had heroes when we were kids. We all read a comic or two in our day.
We were all True Believers, even if it was only in the mute, thought-ballooned
Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman from "The Electric Company." On the page,
we believed a man could fly. On the screen, it's tougher to make us believers.
