World Building, by Christopher Derrick – Sympathy for the Devil #27 | @MDWorld

October 19, 2012 Chris Derrick 0 Comments

Face it, most of the time we don’t find anything too immediately actionable on the web, but I was reading a thought-provoking article the other day by Ivan Brandon (What Comic Book Movie Are Missing), which took to task Hollywood’s use of comic books as fodder for movies mainly because these films fail to capitalize on the gigantic nature of the vision of most comic book artists… particularly Jack “The King” Kirby. This got me thinking more and more about Kirby, who was super-instrumental in the creation or shaping of just about every character in the Marvel Universe and some substantial stuff in the DC Universe (most of which will probably never be turned into a movie? OMAC? Kimandi? Although they should…)

Kirby’s work, as these few images aptly demonstrate, is extremely distinct; his architecture alone is so stylized that it is in a class by itself. As a kid who devoured all the comic books I could, one of the things that I used as a measuring stick for great art (beyond the storytelling) was how a given artist rendered sci-fi architecture and technology – why? Who the hell knows, but that skill is what defines the fantastical world, doesn’t it?

So guys like John Byrne and Walt Simonson (and to an extent later on Mike Mignola) echoed Kirby’s extra-influential style in world creation and tech construction and implementation, and as I matured one of the components of cinema that meant a great deal to me is production design – especially in sci-fi films.

That’s when I got super-hip to Syd Meade… Syd Meade did work for the airlines and NASA and, if you didn’t know, did the production design sketches for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (he designed the V-Ger entity) and BLADE RUNNER… yeah, the still groundbreaking and influential scifi noir… so the look and feel of 2019 Los Angeles is basically the brain child of Meade, how much genuflecting are we going to do? He also designed the light cycle for TRON, so probably a lot more than we care to admit.

Outside of Ralph McQuarrie, who did the original conceptual and production design work for STAR WARS, I don’t think any single visual designer has had such an impact on how filmmakers see a certain type of “near future”… and this too me is somewhat detrimental. McQuarrie was tapped to do the designs for the original “Battlestar Galactica.”

It seems like too many post-BLADE RUNNER and post-STAR WARS can’t get far enough away from Meade and X’s work. When I struggled through the enjoyable, yet vapid remake of TOTAL RECALL, which is a Phillip K. Dick progeny, maybe we give it a pass, I couldn’t help but be rankled by the overarching influence of Meade’s work from BLADE RUNNER… especially with the flying cars and Colin Ferrell’s apartment.

Take a look at this trailer…

and tell me, where is the “new” vision? One of the things that I was cool about the first TOTAL RECALL is that it didn’t seem to borrow from Meade or McQuarrie… I wonder if that has to do with the fact that the director isn’t American and had already establish his artistic influences as a filmmaker prior to the release of BLADE RUNNER?

An artist like Jack Kirby, who was super-well versed in world building, has had barely any impact on the visual vocabulary of the Hollywood films that his creations have spawned. That’s a little criminal, don’t you think? The design of the S.H.I.E.L.D. flying car with its rotating down wheels (perhaps it’s a Steve Ditko design) is a little too cool not to be used more often (we used it in our award-winning short GRACE PERIOD), and the singular architectural design can ONLY see the light of day in a heavy-CGI laced film…

Look at the funky shapes and channeled architecture and imagined technological constructs of Kirby’s Universe… which ultimately is the Marvel Universe…

There’s a great lecture series on Vimeo called “Everything is a Remix“, which expertly breaks down how we “borrow” from previous entries into the creative space to shape our own work. But it just makes me wonder, why have Meade and McQuarrie’s images had the most dominating impact when a future world is built or referenced? Why are their designs and images a main ingredient in the Remix?

Even George Lucas couldn’t escape his own Frankenstein when he went back to the Well for the Prequels… if anything, those films should have had a decidedly different look. A Pre-Empire look, if you will, that essentially had a different visual design influence… sure, I know he wanted to keep his universe, well, unified, but in the 20 year period between Episode III and Episode IV technology, outside of the Imperial control, appeared to have devolved. So the world that was “built” prior to the rise of Vadar et al. could/should have looked and felt different… the same way Greece, Egypt and Persia looked different than the Roman Empire…

But I digress…

More Kirby-ian visions is what we should have in comic movies and scifi movies in general; a new (if old) vocabulary wouldn’t be a bad thing, right?