Everything the New DC Universe Needs to Define a Generation, Trounce Marvel, and Make All the Money

[WARNING: Here there be SPOILERS for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Flash, and also the latest Doctor Who Christmas special!]

Previously on DC's half-assed attempts at film adaptations...

Look, we all know the score, but just to recap: Marvel made a shared Universe of cinematic brilliance, made all of the money and defined a generation. DC did the exact opposite and it predictably imploded. Marvel hit the 15-year limitation on good stories with homogenous casts. Disney refused to let them make stories about people who aren't straight white men, so Marvel imploded. Then DC gave Marvel's fourth-best and most progressive writer the reins, so now DC is doing a cinematic Universe that will also make all of the money and, since, again, most progressive, probably define at least three generations. But first, DC needs to not explode immediately upon taking off, so let's go over what DC's gotten wrong, what they've gotten right, and what's still up in the air (or up in the sky, as it were. Sorry, couldn't resist).

The Eyes Have It

 

We'll get to Superman in a second, but when the big blue boy scout is put aside, any discussion around DC has to begin and end with Batman. There are no shortage of brilliant actors who could bring the role to life (including my personal pick, Cillian Murphy). But I'm going to focus on the single most important reason no live-action Batman, from Wilson to Pattinson, has ever lived up to Kevin Conroy: Batman does not have visible pupils.

Tom Holland's Spider-Man proves it can be done in live-action, and I think the smart thing for DC to do here is to just copy that (Don't be afraid to copy what works; A contemporary review of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven read: "Here comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge", or in the Q Brothers' slightly earthier phrase, "Good storytellers borrow, but great ones steal").

Batman's eyes, that defy logic but that Judianna Makovsky somehow found a way to make work, are a defining characteristic. The ones that get bigger and smaller, but never change shape. The ones that look alive, but not human. That is my main point here. If you don't think you'll be able to remember more than one thing, leave now, because if you remember one thing, let it be that. If you don't think you'll be able to remember more than two things, do a page search for "Joker", because the second-most important thing is who should play the Joker, but as promised, we're doing Superman first.

Up in the Sky

There's a lot that needs to be done right when it comes to Superman, the majority of which most people who are not Zack Snyder already know intuitively: Superman has a spitcurl in the shape of an "S", and his suit, if you licked it, would be blue raspberry, not blueberry.

But I will give Snyder (or possibly Goyer? It's hard to tell who should get the credit for visual effects like these) credit for this: Superman doesn't *propel himself through the air*, that doesn't make sense. What he does is manipulate gravitons so he falls up, or forward, or sideways. So, Goyer and/or Snyder had rocks float around him, which just makes sense. Hopefully Gunn can bring over his special effects team from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

The Man Who Lies

Remember when I said the next-most important thing after Batman was my Joker casting? Well, get ready to have your mind blown.

BOOM! Now, if James Gunn is reading this, let me say, I assume you're a Doctor Who fan, you've worked with Peter Capaldi and Karen Gillan, and more importantly, you're a white fifty-something music nerd with spiky hair that goes back and forth, seemingly at will, between brown and snow white, you're what would happen if someone put "Doctor Who fan" into an AI image generator, but on the off-chance you read that and didn't immediately see why it was right, then... And I wouldn't suggest it if it weren't the only way... You're gonna have to rewatch Morbius. Yeah, I know. I know. But with great power comes great responsibility, and this is your burden.

Back Against the Wall

Alright, here we go. I know that when you sign up to work for DC, they make you swear on the Watchmen TPB that you will never deviate from two crucial things (three, if you count not mentioning Wonder Woman's canonical bisexuality): One, that whatever bad thing any villain does, Amanda Waller must do something at least 5% worse, and two, that none of the heroes, all of whom are fully aware of her actions, are allowed to confront her.

While I'm glad Waller will presumably be getting more depth as the protagonist of her own self-titled MAX series (although maybe it'll be like James Tynion IV's "The Joker" series, where the Joker barely appears because it's really about Jim Gordon), "having depth" should not be an excuse for all of the heroes to die on the hill of "moral ambiguity exists, therefore it applies to unamiguously bad actions".

Nanaue could see the logical fallacy there, but since we can't just do DC without Amanda Waller, enter my theodicy: Somewhere on Earth (or maybe the Moon, or some kind of pocket dimension; You never know with DC), there's a doohickey of some kind that, unless Waller provides 3-factor authentication (that's a DNA sample, the password, and probably, I don't know, the name of the first cat she strangled as a kid) every 52 hours, will torture, kill, and humiliate - in that order - every Justice League member's loved ones in fun and exciting ways. That is my grand plan, and it can be yours, DC, for the low, low price of a 10-minute phone call with Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies. Throw in Toby Whithouse and I'll tell you which song from Barbie: The Album each founding member of the Justice League is.

The All-Important Diversity Flags

Alright, let's do this. Let's talk about race. Now. It would be very disappointing if we had an all-white Justice League. No one who is morally or financially intelligent will dispute that. Having Cyborg in the Justice League is preferable to having an all-white Justice League. But while Cyborg is interesting as a Teen Titan and a member of the Doom Patrol, he is just, quite simply, not a member of the Justice League. There are other DC superheroes of color (and that's even if you keep all of the white characters white, which should not be a given anyway).

Since I also think it was exceedingly dumb for Snyder's Justice League to all but ignore the Green Lantern Corps, and Whedon's version to censor them altogether, I think the best way to solve both problems would be to include one of the many Green Lanterns who are people of color:

John Stewart (no relation to the comedian, who spells his name without an H) is already confirmed to appear in the Lanterns series. John was one of comics' first Black superheroes, an architect - and, as later installments would reveal, veteran - who the Guardians picked out as Earth's backup backup Green Lantern despite Hal Jordan's doubts, which they referred to as "petty bigotries". John became one of the first superheroes to eschew the traditional secret identity, because, and I quote, "this Black man lets it all hang out!" He was even already a founding member of the Justice League, in the early-'00s Justice League cartoon set on Earth 12. And I'll do you one better: If we aren't going to have any actors from the Arrowverse reprise their roles (another thing I don't think should be a given, which I'll touch on later), I think Arrow's David Ramsey would be an excellent choice for a live-action Lantern Stewart. (Edit: I'm quite a bit behind on the Arrowverse, but apparently I wasn't the only one who thought so. This is like that time I wrote a Doctor Who/Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. crossover, and then they made Ruby the Destroyer of Worlds Ncuti Gatwa's companion. Well, in any case, see my statement below on previous on-screen DC adaptations.)

Kyle Rayner was an Irish- and Mexican-American starving artist when Hal Jordan had a mental breakdown and briefly destroyed the Green Lantern Corps. Ganthet found Kyle and gave him the last remaining Green Lantern ring, making Kyle the only Green Lantern for a while. Kyle also holds the distinction of having appeared in the first DC comic book I ever checked out from a library. In that story, Kyle taught a fifth-dimensional court about basic colors, encouraging Johnny Thunder's genie to save the world by coming up with a mashup of his name and that of a warring fifth-dimensional prince. And if it somehow wasn't clear from every word in that sentence, the book was written by Grant Morrison, whose late-'00s writing formed the basis for the first Superman and Batman films in the new DCU.

Simon Baz, meanwhile, was one of comics' first Muslim superheroes. Simon was a man wrongly accused of terrorism and held captive and tortured in Guantanomo Bay; This forced him to accept the responsibility of Green Lantern 2814.5 with a waterboarding rag over his head. In his early career as a superhero, Simon carried an Earthly gun in case his willpower failed him, but he eventually overcame his fear and gave the gun to Commissioner Gordon.

Jessica Cruz is maybe my favorite DC Comics character of all time. The long-overdue first woman and second Hispanic person to wield a Green Lantern ring full-time, Jessica spent three years trapped in her own apartment due to debilitating anxiety. This led to her becoming possessed by the Ring of Volthoom - a twisted counterpart to the Green Lantern ring on Earth-3 that preyed on the weak-willed. But when the conflict between Earths-0 and -3 ended, the true Green Lantern Corps took her into their ranks, recognizing her ability to overcome the greatest fear of all. As space-cops assigned to the same precint, Jess was partnered with Simon Baz, with Hal Jordan imposing the rule that the two of them could only recharge their rings with the other one's participation. And while the importance of Jessica's identity as a debilitatingly anxious Hispanic woman is not up for debate, we should also not overlook the importance of her being an atheist; Atheism is the only identity I do not think we can trust James Gunn to do well, since the last two characters in his works to be explicitly referred to as atheists were a sociopathic genius who conducted horrible experiments on unwitting subjects and a sociopathic genius who conducted horrible experiments on unwitting subjects.

Sojourner "Jo" Mullein isn't the first Black person, the first woman, or the first LGBTQ+ person to wield a Green Lantern ring, but she was the first to be all three at once. She also shares a dubious honor with Star Wars: The Mandalorian: Probably the only two genuinely good things to come out of the last two months of 2019. Jo Mullein was a cop who was put on paid leave for reporting her partner's abuse of power and eventually straight-up fired for being tagged in a BLM post on social media. While trying to drown her sorrows at a bar, she was approached by a Guardian who offered her a new job as a cop: a space one. The exact nature of Jo's situation remains a mystery, but she is the first human Green Lantern assigned not to Earth, but to a bizarre structure known as the City Enduring, the home to 20 billion citizens across three wildly different species: The sentient flying fish known as the Nah, the cannibalistic plants known as the keh-Topli, and the meme-eating, sentient search engines known as the @At. And surprisingly, that wasn't written by Grant Morrison.

Earth Doesn't Have Just One Hero Anymore... 

I'm going to guess somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the people who saw The Flash had been wanting Michael Keaton back as Batman for longer than I or, and this is true, Sasha Calle, who was born two months after Batman Forever starring Val Kilmer was released, have existed. As a result, it's understandable that Calle's spectacular performance was, to some extent, lost in all that excitement. Understandable, but not okay, because if I had to pick three DCEU stars to continue in the new continuity, it would be Gal Gadot, Sasha Calle, and Margot Robbie, hands down.

Unfortunately, Gadot has already been kicked to the curb, and Robbie is probably already staying since she previously worked with Gunn in The Suicide Squad, but we need to talk about Sasha Calle. In a good way. Gunn has described his version of Supergirl as a more jaded character than Superman, one who watched the last embers of Krypton die, as opposed to Clark, for whom, as Kara pointed out in the second DC comic I ever checked out from a library, "Krypton is theoretical". And who better embodies that than Sasha Calle?

Additionally, another big part of the MCU's success was reimagining Marvel characters in a more modern way; Do you remember what Marvel looked like before the MCU? Hawkeye was purple, and Ant-Man had these weird-ass little feelers on top of his head. And while I hadn't previously thought of Supergirl as a character in need of a redesign, Alexandra Byrne changed my mind on that. DC should keep the short, dark hair and the lack of a skirt. The entire portrayal of Supergirl in The Flash - the actor, the costume, the writing - was just correct.

And in This Symphony o' Mine... 

According to James Gunn, the reset Burtonverse timeline in the end of The Flash isn't actually related to his new DCU, because, and I quote, "nothing is canon". I actually find that pretty disappointing, because it means we all pretended those weird-ass CGI zombies looked like Christopher Reeve and Helen Slater for nothing. But it also opens up a pretty exciting possibility: Viola Davis, John Cena, Steve Agee, Sean Gunn, and Xolo Maridueña will all be reprising their roles in the new continuity. So if it isn't a divergent timeline of their previous appearances, then there's no reason to limit the returning characters to the DCEU. So there's nothing stopping Gunn from bringing back anyone who appears on these lists.

Your Reign's Crumblin' Down

And lastly, my personal selections out of these designs of the Frankensteins: For the Bride, I'd go with the second full-body picture from the right, and for Eric, the furthest to the left.

So, that's it. That is the way the world could be. So, to quote a very obvious knockoff of the Green Lantern Corps Oath, "Seek the light, be the light, never stray from its path", and to complete my trilogy of quotes, maybe it will turn out this time.