#john crye

In Anne Thompson's May 9th Indiewire blog about Marvel Studio's "The Avengers" super-powered opening weekend (click on the awesome "Avengers" issue #1 cover art for the link), she praises both the film and Marvel Studio’s Kevin Feige, writing:

“Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has with single-minded, dogged focus executed the long-term Marvel plan, which serves to support the Marvel universe and not the usual short-sighted Wall Street-conscious myopia of major studio execs, who think mainly of holding onto their jobs and power by taking as few risks and making as few mistakes as possible. Fear and caution tend to rule the day.  Not with Feige. He knows what Marvel fans want and he gives it to them. While studios usually sell their pictures to quadrants of moviegoers, few of them UNDERSTAND their audiences the way Marvel does.”

I absolutely agree with that statement, but understanding one’s audience is only part of the equation that sums up Marvel’s success.  What they also do exceptionally well is understand the Marvel universe, all of its characters and histories, and why they work, not just how.  Kevin Feige and the fine folks at Marvel don’t have to try to appeal to fans, they are fans, displaying the kind of knowledge and care that is born of geek love.

Whether or not every member of every department of the enterprise that is Marvel today is actually a True Believer, geek love is already there in Marvel’s DNA.  From its earliest days, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby put their hearts, souls, and imaginations into telling stories in a medium that was widely demeaned and undervalued.  I’m sure Stan and Jack would agreed that there were easier ways to make money, but that is clearly not the only motivating factor for their work.  Nobody told them that their comic book about a kid who gets superpowers when he’s bitten by a radioactive spider would sell more copies if they invested the character with depth, pathos, or that made-up Hollywood word, “relatability” (which always sounds like the character is able to relate to the audience, not the intended reverse.)  Nobody told Lee and Kirby to do that because nobody could.  Besides the fact that nobody had ever done it before, the very idea ran counter to the conventional wisdom that comic book readers were mouth-breathers who just liked to look at colorful pictures.  Lee and Kirby created such an amazing array of iconic characters and stories because they cared about the characters and they wanted us to care about them, too.  And we did, and still do.  Lee and Kirby’s work inspired a generation of readers to care about Marvel’s characters, and many of those inspired readers now work for Marvel and carry the torch.  Their love and care for the Marvel universe keeps shining through.

For the second of our four-part Halloween series of posts about Fewdio, we'd like to direct your attention to "Door 17."  We have a feeling that you'll wish we hadn't, though the place is quite inviting at first glance...

"Door 17" is an almost entirely dialogue-free episode of Fewdio's "Nightmare House" web series.   Although the series initially appears to be an anthology of unrelated horror shorts, further viewing reveals a hidden world suggested by interlocking context clues.

As we noted in the last post, "Door 17" opens with a shot of its handsome young protagonist making his way down a crowded hallway in a sinister after-hours club.  One of the people he pushes past is no ordinary party-goer; it's Preacher Phil, the erstwhile protagonist of "Curse."  This is not just a tip of the hat to a previous film, but the first suggestion that these characters co-exist in a persistent world.  In fact, even the creepy settings make a reappearance; the club also features in "The Tap," and the private room in which Phil conducts his Cursed business is later occupied by a guilt-consumed killer in a short called "Smoke."

Once our hero escapes the noisy corridor and slips in the peepshow booth, his fate is sealed... and the world reveals itself further.  The beautiful dancer in the go-go booth wears a strange silver pendant, a symbol of the dark cult to which she belongs.

While this is never expressed in "Door 17," the sharp-eyed viewer may notice when the pendant appears again in "The Tap," worn by Lily, the dominating alpha in what is probably best described as a drug den / S&M club / coven.

If only our hero could pull his eyes away from the dancing beauty, he might realize that yet more clues point to the sinister nature of this place.  A poster on the wall of the peepshow booth hypes a show by a go-go dancer named Fey, who also happens to be the seductive villain of "The Tap."

Fey's eyes watch without sympathy from a shred of an old poster as "Door 17's" unfortunate protagonist reaches the end of his sanity.

Fey's impassive stare also presides over the death of the iconic Fewdio character, Haunted Mike.  More on that in part three of the Fewdio posts.

The internal references and shared imagery construct an otherwise unseen world, one creepy building block at a time, and once that world is seen it cannot be unseen.  Fans of the "Nightmare House" series continue to discover more links between the material and, in doing so, engage with the phantom universe in ways that make it more and more real.  Like the unlucky protagonists of "Curse" and "Door 17," the viewer is seduced into making discoveries that reveal the true nature of the world.