Comic Book: The Movie
January 16, 2011
Comic Book: The Movie
Release date: January 2004
Director: Mark Hammill
Stars: Mark Hamill, Donna D’Errico and Billy West
Cameos: Hugh Hefner, Stan Lee, and Kevin Smith
Run Time: 106 Minutes
Comic Book is a “mockumentary” along the lines of “This is Spinal Tap” or even “Trekkies”. Like “Trekkies” and it’s look at people who love Star Trek to the extreme, Comic Book: The Movie is a portrayal of comic books, their fans and their conventions that “normal” people will never be able to understand. You have to be a comic book fan and probably have to have attended at least one big comic book convention to “get” this movie. Otherwise, the whole thing comes off looking like a waste of time.
Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker of Star Wars fame) stars as Donald Swann (or as he’s called in the movie, “Don Swann”), an obsessive comic book collector, high school history teacher and fan of a (fabricated for the film) Golden Age super hero named Commander Courage. Swann is horrified to learn that a major motion picture studio plans to film an updated, ultra-violent version of his beloved “by the rules” hero, as well as replacing his young, male sidekick Liberty Lad with a young, curvaceous hottie known as Liberty Lass (played by Baywatch alum Donna D’Errico). As a well-known authority on the original Commander Courage, Swann is hired by the studio as a “consultant” in order to placate the fans (sound familiar?). To humor him and keep him busy, they send him off to the San Diego Comic Con, which is occurring just before the big announcement regarding the movie, to make a documentary short about Commander Courage that will be packaged as a DVD extra with their film. Swann takes every opportunity to rally support for the “classic” Commander Courage, which sets him on a collision course with the studio and leads to a showdown at the end of the Con.
The movie is full of inside jokes. In one scene, Swann gets a costume maker to design a Commander Courage costume complete with built-in muscles (ala Michael Keaton in the first Batman movie) and convinces him to take a “number one issue of the original Commander Courage comic worth $10,000″ as payment for the $1,000 costume. In a whispered aside to his assistant, we learn that it was nothing more than a reprint put out by “Toaster Pops”. In another scene at the convention, Swann asks to sit at a table that is full. The people sitting there mumble that there is no room and one man says “Move along, son” which means nothing unless you realize that the speaker is David Prowse who was the voice of Darth Vader and, in the Star Wars story line, Luke’s (Mark Hamill) father.
The story line involving the character Commander Courage and his “Hollywoodization” rings true for a lot of fans of comic book heroes. Hamill adds so many little “nuggets” that mirror real-life occurrences in the history of comic books, like the squabble over “who really created the character” and long-lost relatives claiming ownership of a character. He also gets genuine comic book industry icons like Stan Lee and Kevin Smith to make appearances that bolster the history of Commander Courage.
Granted, some parts of this film are just plain silly to the point of seeming stupid and convention attendees are looked upon as “freaks” who dress up as their favorite character, but if you’ve ever been to a comic book (or Star Trek) convention you know that those people are one of the coolest things about the gathering. I know that if I looked the part, I’d probably dress up as Superman.
If you’re a comic book fan, or even if you’ve just attended a convention or two, you’ll probably enjoy Comic Book: The Movie. If you’re not, it won’t appeal to you.
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