Comic Animated Movie Fantasy Cast #1: Captain America in " Winter Soldier "

While there has yet to be a truly great direct-to-DVD Marvel or DC movie ( though the Last Frontier was pretty close ), the productions are steadily improving. Better yet, the production companies are bringing in some top-notch voice talent. In addition to the legendary voices for the characters ( Kevin Conroy for Batman, Clancy Brown for Luthor, Steve Blum for Wolverine, etc. ), we're seeing a great mix of B-List talent from TV and movies, and veteran voice actors. Who would've thought that David Boreanaz would make such a great Hal Jordan? Anyone who's seen a single episode of Bones, that's who. And the people who've watched Summer Glau on Firefly and Sarah Connor Chronicles know she'll be an excellent Supergirl. Of course, this isn't the leave out the veteran voice actors, but a solid mix of talent from diverse sources helps dispel the Animation Age Ghetto.

Since I spend a LOT of time thinking about who would voice which comic characters, both in my own readings and in my work, I've been doing fantasy voice casting for many years. The difference is, this time it's not too distant. So as I give my example voice casting list for the Winter Soldier story ( the first Ed Brubaker story with the character, and the one that immediately made me a fan of both Cap and Bru ), I feel good knowing the chance that this will appear as an OVA is closer to " slim " than " none ".

Anyway, the list...


STEVE ROGERS/CAPTAIN AMERICA: David Hayter. Hayter already played Steve Rogers in a flashback episode of X-Men Evolution, but he only had a few grunts. But he's qualified for the role because of his voice work as another legendary super-soldier-- Solid Snake of the ridiculously awesome Metal Gear Solid games. Brubaker writes Steve harder and rougher than most Captain America writers ( to his credit ), but keeps the heroic aspects of the character. If Hayter did a slightly less gravelly tone ( as he did with Naked Snake/Big Boss, Solid's clone-father, in MGS3 ), he'd be perfect for Cap.

BUCKY BARNES/WINTER SOLDIER: Yuri Lowenthal. Lowenthal has made a name for himself as the go-to guy for precocious boy heroes. He's done spunky, idealistic young men with Ben Tennyson, Iceman, and Superboy. He's also shown a darker side, as seen in his portrayal of troubled boy hero turned psychopathic man-child Sasuke in the English dub of Naruto. For Bucky Barnes, especially the twentysomething brainwashed cyborg Bucky, Lowenthal would do quite well.

FALCON/SAM WILSON: Phil LaMarr. LaMarr has a very strong hero voice, which can range from dead serious ( Samurai Jack, Green Lantern John Stewart, Vamp from Metal Gear, Hermes Conrad in a lovably uptight way ) to easy-going and jocular ( Virgil " Static " Hawkins, the Transformer Jazz, Wilt from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, the doofus Earth King from Avatar ). For Sam Wilson, unofficial heir to Bucky's sidekick mantle and the only man capable of being badass while dressing like a bird and talking to a hawk, he would do quite well.

SHARON CARTER: Tricia Helfer. A veteran actress of action heroines in both live action ( #6 from Battlestar Galactica ) and voice ( Black Cat from Spectacular Spider-Man, Boodika from the Green Lantern OVA, Sif from The Super Hero Squad Show ), Helfer could do exceptionally as Cap's on-again off-again girlfriend/ SHIELD liason. Both by being able to shoot bad guys and tell the Patriotic Super-Jesus things others wouldn't have the nerve to say to him.

NICK FURY: Paul Eiding. The Ultimates has ensured that all non-comic Furies will be played by Samuel L. Jackson or an effective imitator of Samuel L. Jackson, so picking the voice for an Ultimate-style Fury is about as difficult as breathing. For the MU Fury, I'd go with Eiding, Colonel Roy Campbell from ( again ) Metal Gear Solid as well as Grandpa Max from Ben 10. Though he has a wide vocal range, he's also master of the aged warhorse voice.

RED SKULL: Mark Hammil. Accents are tricky and can too often come across as stereotyped when voiced by English-speaking VAs, so I'm taking the Metal Gear approach of " Just Not Bothering ". Besides, Red Skull's evil has far outlasted Nazi Germany, making him his own insidious force. So who better than the master of animated villain voices-- former Luke Skywalker Mark Hammil, whose Joker voice out-evils even the late Heath Ledger, and who played the unparalleled paragon of wickedness that is Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar? It comes to my attention that he did voice the Skull in Super Hero Squad ( in an episode I didn't see ), but this isn't comedy Red Skull, but utterly depraved comic red skull.

ALEKSANDER LUKIN: Sir Ian McKellen. The master of the Cosmic Cube turned summer home for Red Skull's consciousness, Lukin is a suave but dangerous strategist, with experience as both a KGB soldier and the business oligarch head of the Kronas Corporation. Putting aside accents again, Ian McKellen could pull this off excellently-- he was a great Magneto in the X-Men movies, a menacing talking bear in the Golden Compass, and has a narrating voice that can easily shift from classy to dangerous.

CROSSBONES/BROCK RUMLOW: David Boreanaz. Boreanaz hasn't had too many VA roles, but those he's done evoked the strongest parts of his TV career. As Hal Jordan in the New Frontier, he brought the cocky competence and haunted past of Seeley Booth from Bones. As Squall Leonhart in Kingdom Hearts, he utilized the dour angst appropriate to both Squall and Angel. And for the right hand man of the Red Skull, he would bring the naked sadism of Angel's dark side, Angelus. Both are good at being bad, and both are unabashed cradle robbers, after all.

Whew! Any I forgot?

New Avengers Five Years New Retrospective: Marvel's Wardrobe Malfunction

If there's one moment that I think defines Bendis' New Avengers for better or worse, it's the very first scene of the first issue, where a shadowy figure offers Max Dillion ( a.k.a. the villain Electro ) a job, and tells him that it's up to him how he wants to dress for it; costume or no costume. Dillon puts on his lightning mask, gives us an evil grin, and says " costume ".

This, in microcosm, set the stage for the way Marvel would be doing the next few years of stories, and the way they continue to write. Keep in mind that New Avengers came at a period when Marvel, under the direction of controversial ( and at that point, recently absent ) president Bill Jemas, had rebelled against their roots. Their biggest hit was the Ultimate Universe, which reinvented the characters from scratch in a more realistic and subdued context, dramatically simplifying or removing the costumes ( except Spidey ), largely avoiding stories about magic and gods and grounding everything in either the Super-Soldier Formula or the mutant gene. Many of their franchises had been made over to reject superhero genre tropes; the Grant Morrison X-Men most notoriously, having ditched costumes altogether and explicitly denying their superhero identities. But we also had the Bruce Jones Hulk, who simply wandered the countryside in a conspiracy theory variant of the old TV show; Captain America in the Marvel Knights imprint, spending more of his time fighting Islamic fundamentalists than costumed criminals; even Bendis' Daredevil, which used quite a bit of the old continuity, made the distinction between Matt Murdoch as superhero and Matt Murdoch as pulp vigilante. Marvel was not really publishing non-superhero material, but they weren't comfortable with their old characters.

Whatever your opinion is on this rebellion against Marvel history, it was not obvious in the Avengers of the time, and one has to admit that they suffered for it. The Avengers remained the traditional superhero team living in a posh mansion and fighting costumed criminals. The team had writers who kept them in that status quo, most notably Kurt Busiek, but also Geoff Johns and Chuck Austen. In the meantime, Marvel was also publishing the Ultimates, which gave us a strikingly warped version of the characters. And the market seemed to prefer the latter; Tony Stark as a repentant do-gooder in form-fitting metal tights wasn't as dynamic as Tony Stark as a decadent neo-liberal in a humanoid mech. Regardless of individual tastes, Ultimate-style comics were where the discussion was; to try and ignore it was folly.

So thus we get to what Bendis did, which wasn't to deny the superhero genre's trappings-- but not to embrace them, either. The way Bendis writes the Marvel characters, being a superhero or a supervillain is a statement; you wear a costume as a conscious choice about what identity you're projecting. Electro is a villain who does not need a costume; when he's powered up, he's spewing electric sparks everywhere, so wearing a green leotard with a yellow lightning mask is redundant as well as ridiculous. By putting on the costume, he's putting himself out there-- in that issue, he arrives at the metahuman prison called the Raft, breaks all the convicts out, and stands before them in his costume, dramatically telling them that they owe him. The costume isn't just a fact of the business for Max Dillon, it's an emblem of why he's in this business-- to look, feel, and act powerful. Even though they use their power to help instead of hurt, superheroes have the same motivation.

And this goes not just for costumes, but superhero genre trappings in general. Since New Avengers, Marvel's publishing landscape has swung back towards comics' historical excesses. Shared universe crossover has increased, with New Avengers and Mighty/Dark Avengers being the center and every other comic following their lead. Stories aren't written as much like done-in-one movies in trade paperback form, with long, subplot-filled sagas like the Death of Captain America back in vogue. And history is once more a motivator for contemporary stories, from Bucky coming back from the dead and eventually taking on his mentor's patriotic identity, to Spidey's dead ex Gwen Stacy having been impregnated with Norman Osborn's gobliny children ( the former being a good example, the latter being one of significantly lesser quality ). But they're doing this largely with the awareness that they're working with a very specific genre, and trying to expand or subvert it. I've talked about Bendis' Avengers being very conscious of their image, but even solo books, like Matt Fraction's sci-fi-driven Iron Man or Ed Brubaker's political thriller-inspired Captain America, have made the superhero heritage of their books more deliberate in the new era.

One could say that this mixture of old and new leads to greater work; one could also say that it's a faulty compromise that gets away from what makes superheroes work. But it's the way Marvel's been for years, and Bendis' New Avengers has led the charge.