Batman, Superman and Bugs Bunny are all geezers.

Yesterday I saw a link about the new mural being put up at the Warner Bros lot in California. I’ve never really paid attention to the geography of the buildings that the studios operate in, so I was unaware of the fact that there had been up until recently a semi-famous mural celebrating Warner Bros various properties. At some point it was taken down, and while there was intiially much concern that such an historic piece of product placement would die and stay dead forever, such concern was all for not, as, the other day, they unveiled their brand-new mural.

WB wasn’t destroying their mural; they were updating it.

This is what it looks like now:

This will likely be another post where I come off as somewhat stodgy and cantankerous, but what the hell; to thine own self be true, and all that.

This mural makes me sad.

Why would a mural make me sad? It’s got a nice composition, I suppose, it’s got some cool glow-in-the-dark action going on, and hey, I like Batman as much as the next guy, so what’s not to like?

Some of the initial reaction to the mural is a bemoaning the lack of spotlight for the Looney Tunes characters. As you can tell, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and others have been relegated to the second row, while the hipper characters are in front. There is talk of a lack of history, and all the rest, because characters made in the 40′s were usurped by characters who, while currently more popular, are actually older. I look at this mural and I wonder if WB is even in the business of creating new characters anymore. Is a wily rabbit and a bunch of underwear perverts all they are? Sure, the Blue Beetle featured on the mural is by FAR the newest character, but he’s based on a character decades older; he’s a shiny new suit on another old character.

This mural makes me wonder about the growth of culture, of typecasting, of the desire for companies to lazily squeeze properties for all their worth, and for the desire of consumers to lap it all up. I’m a big fan of the idea of firmly stepping away from the old and creating the new. Will the new necessarily be better? No, but fetishisizing the old is a poor thing to do, in my estimation.

The mural makes me think about DC: their marquee characters now have been their marquee characters for sixty years; how much of an incentive do they have to innovate when people still line up to read about Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne?  Whither innovation?

If DC tries to innovate (as I know that they do, even though so much of their effort seems to be an exercise in remixing), will the fans be up for it? This is hardly an issue unique to comic books, but while consumers claim they want the new, the sales charts reflect a firm desire to stay in the past, in the known, in the familiar. This tendency isn’t helped by the near-obsessive desire of comic creators to write “their” take on Batman, Superman and the like, but how co-dependent is the relationship?

I’m at work still on a season 2 of dotBoom, but I have no desire to keep it going forever. Even if I could come up with a decade full of great stories for those characters, why would I want to? We each have such a thin slice of time in which to make things (to make anything), and I want to try as many thing as I can. Certainly I can try more and more things within the framework of a dotBoom (just as other creators can tell more stories with Superman the more they try), but there’s still a ceiling there which feels, to me, to be quite low. I’ve got a laundry list of ideas for bits, puppets, shows, movies, novels, and other things, and I want to get as far into that list as I can.

I suppose the concern I have with the WB mural is that of apathy: is everyone okay with making and consuming the same things over and over again? Why? From an evolutionary standpoint I understand the desire to stick to the known — if it works, we can do that again, without fear that it won’t work — but at the same time, the strength of a thing is in its ability to adapt to the environment, and that involves embracing the new, as long as it makes sense to. And considering the fact that both the old and the new are appealing to us, why are we so often so content to sit and revel in things already done and gone?