The most interesting thing about Comic-Con Episode
IV: A Fan’s Hope, a new documentary by Morgan Spurlock
(Super
Size Me), is how shy and even shamefaced its author is
about those ironies which, in his hands, would once have been
piquant if not slashing. Comic-Con, the annual gathering in San
Diego of the nation’s most fanatical aficionados of comic books and
the various forms of cartoon or cartoon-like entertainment that are
made from them, is a natural subject for satire, but Mr. Spurlock’s
satirical sword appears to be blunted and his lance broken. Never
hitherto reluctant to push himself in front of his own camera, here
he hides from it like a nymph surprised at her toilette. We may
deduce from this unaccustomed reticence that he is himself enough
of a comix geek — or else he is so much in need of the cooperation
of those who are — that he has to treat with the utmost sympathy
and affection grown-up people who dress as superheroes or who
travel thousands of miles to buy an “action figure” doll or those
with real jobs who aspire, mostly in vain, to draw comic books for
a living.
Satire, it’s true, is often at its most effective when the
satirist can reveal a sneaking sympathy with his victim, but
there’s nothing sneaking about Mr Spurlock’s sympathy. It’s rather
the satire that sneaks. Having reined in his sense of the
ridiculous for most of the film, he lets it have its head only very
briefly at the very end in a series of interview comments made by
some of those who have appeared, up until this point, as geek-like
as himself. The film ends with a comment by Kevin Smith, the
barefoot and obese director of Clerks, Chasing
Amy, Dogma,
Jersey
Girl et cetera, who could also be the prototype of
Comic Book Guy on “The Simpsons,” to the effect that, if he had
been alive in the 1940s, he would perforce have had to concern
himself in some way with the fact that the world was at war. Not
anymore. “Now it’s: ‘Did you see they changed Wonder Woman’s
pants?’ That’s f***** up.” Not that there’s anything wrong with
that. F***** up it may be, but one suspects that that’s sort of
what he likes about comic fandom. The same goes for Morgan
Spurlock.
Mr. Smith’s comment also casts an ironic light back on the
little skit presented by Holly Conrad, a costume designer from San
Bernardino, California, who has created an animatronic lizard-man
as henchman to herself, dressed in a Catwoman suit, as the two of
them perform for convention-goers an abbreviated drama called
“Suicide Mission.” Their sketch, like that of others who are more
or less skilled at bringing cartoon figures to life, is mainly
designed to show off the lizard-man, but it begins with an
actor-announcer’s walking on stage and saying: “We’re at war. No
one wants to admit it, but humanity is under attack.” Yeah it is —
and the alien enemy has already occupied San Diego.
Holly is one of some half dozen attendees of the convention whom
Mr. Spurlock’s camera follows from their homes in places like
Columbia, Missouri or Minot, North Dakota to the conventional Mecca
in Southern California. Besides her there are a couple of aspiring
cartoonists, one of whom gets a job at the convention, a collector
of action figures, and a young couple who met at Comic-Con the year
before and now want to get engaged there in front of Kevin Smith
and a crowd of his fans. Then there is Chuck Rozanski, the
60-something proprietor of Mile-High Comics in Denver who comes to
San Diego in the hopes of bailing out his business by the sale of
an extremely rare, mint-condition copy of the first edition of the
vintage Marvel Comic “Red Raven” of 1940 for half a million
dollars. He doesn’t sell it there, but he sells enough of his other
comic inventory to keep Mile High in business for a bit longer.
Chuck seems to me the saddest of Mr. Spurlock’s subjects because
he is the oldest, but he is determined to remain a comic-book fan
to the last. At one point he says, complaining of Nicolas Cage’s
reportedly selling his comic collection at the behest of a fiancée,
that “When a woman tells you to grow up, that’s God’s way of
telling you to get a new woman. Especially if it means getting rid
of your comics. There are three billion women on the planet, but
only so many good comics, so the choice is an easy one.” That would
be the same God, I guess, who Chuck hopes will send him not to
heaven but to Comic-Con when he dies. We also see Chuck in a brief
scene with his wife, before he goes off to the convention in the
company of an assistant, a young girl with piercings. She, the
wife, seems exactly the sort of woman who must have suggested to
him on multiple occasions that it was time for him to grow up.
She’s still around, too, though not at Comic-Con.
“Any entertainment property that has a passionate following now
belongs to Comic-Con,” says Joss Whedon, one of the film’s
writer-producers and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
among other entertainment properties. As he sums up the commercial
imperative for guys like Chuck and, perhaps, himself, it’s: “Let’s
dig into the love and get the money out.” I think it is also Mr.
Whedon who offers another of those late and played-down critical
comments by characterizing the convention as an occasion to “get
all the people who think everything’s going to be great and put
them in the same room and have them say ‘Everything’s Going to be
Great.’” Then he adds: “It’s the most depressing place on earth if
you look at it that way.” Needless to say, nobody here, least of
all Morgan Spurlock, does look at it that way. But he and Mr.
Whedon are unlikely to be the only ones who have an inkling about
that way of looking at it — and who must, therefore, feel
obscurely guilty for living their lives in the realms of
fantasy.
