This is What a Terrible Comic Book Show Looks Like

By Shawn Deena

Let’s see. . .

• Start the show with a dude who’s a cop fighting crime and becomes the hero — check (Punisher)
• Stupid city name – check ( Palm City)
• Comic book intro with complete Danny Elfman ripoff score — check (combo Spiderman and Tim Burton’s Batman score)
• Villain with accent – check. Peter Fleming/Chess (True Blood and Audrey’s boyfriend from 24 James Frain ). And another negative point for the evil, well armed diabolical Ark corporation – really?
• Stealing from its own canceled show – check. Comic book with hero in it and real hero who is like the comic book (see Heroes)
• Good talent reduced to sidekick – check. Summer Glau as Orwell (Batman nerds see Oracle)
• Hero ends up working for villain then finds out plus family vengeance motivation – check. Except this family isn’t actually killed or anything like that. Spiderman has his mate dropped off a bridge and hooked up to a collapsing building, Batman has his blown up, Lois Lane dies in an earthquake (once). The Cape’s family is  in … assumed peril.
• Hero framed, assumed dead, and now must restore name /save family by becoming hero — check, check and check. At some point there will be the potential I gather of “someone” realizing he’s not dead.
• •Throw in baritone sage- check. Keith David (taking a break from videogame voice overs) as the Obi-Wan/Morpheus guy. Add a bunch of circus freaks,  magic poofy/ninja smoke, terrible CG and there you go. The Cape.
• Oh and by the way, the carnival of crime? AYFKM?????

I made no bones about thinking this show was going to suck in advance of its premiere but when I watched the montage of the Vince Farraday (a.k.a. Cape) messing around with a discovered cape in the “magical circus tent” that was it. Bring on the suck.

With lines like “You watch it, punk” it was headed for cheese right from that point through the training montage with the small person and Keith David’s full bellied laugh. I really just couldn’t understand how they could make something so inherently bad. I understand this cape has unique “abilities” like Spawn’s or Batman’s but here’s the thing …  In the case of the Dark Knight – his cape does not look fake,  it does cool stuff and it does the one thing a cool cape should do, it billows. I just couldn’t get past the overly fake CG effects that made this cape so wondrous. It just looked as stupid as the lame CG monster movies that SyFy drums up every month. Absolutely ridiculous. Yeah I know many heroes have useless capes but so many don’t. The only thing missing was the pose on top of a skyscraper/gargoyle while looking over the city. Oh wait – that’s how they ended the second episode. Except he was standing up on a skyscraper.

I am a professed comic book and superhero movie nerd. I have a vast, nerdy knowledge about comics, have quite a few of them taking up space in my house and I’ve seen just about all the movies and shows based on comics – even the bad ones. Somewhere between the Ben Affleck craptacular Daredevil and Swamp Thing there’s a level of comic-book crap that us nerds have to deal with. Heck we even relish some of the bad ones. The problem is that The Cape falls way below that level. I mean when you get lines like; “You’re the one wearing long underwear and a cape,” and “You could be a symbol,” ; villains that look like they’re from Stan Lee’s reject pile; and the dramatic level of Keanu Reeves at his best “Whoa” there’s no saving this TV travesty.

It’s infuriating to see a show try so hard to different that it ends up being a bad copy of everything else. It wants to be a show with a fresh new take on the superhero genre but it doesn’t even pay homage to comic book movies — it downright plagiarizes them – and not even in a good way. Their idea of changing things up? Let’s flip it around by having the  sidekick be a hottie and let have the Iron Man computer geek lair.  Oh and let’s add the circus twist, even with a small person – that’s never been done before (Robin’s parents were acrobats by the way …  in the circus, The Joker is a clown, there’s Harley Quinn, Marvel’s Circus of Crime, The Ringmaster, etc.)

And you know none of these issues I have would be so bad if they actually took the time to make the show entertaining and campy like the old classic TV Batman series. That was good bad because they did it on purpose, this is just bad bad because they’re trying soooooo hard. The performances by the lead actors make this even worse. David Lyons is trying so hard to be this everyday guy who becomes a hero he misses the one thing you really want in a character like this (inner conflict, moral ambiguity, a bit of darkness that could very easily turn him into one seriously scary badass). Summer Glau has skills. I’ve seen them on her other two canceled shows. On this show, she seems so strained as the Robin/Alfred/Cyber Geek role that her delivery is painful to watch. Keith David and the circus freaks? The crew of the Nebuchadnezzar they are not. Keith David has been reduced to a catchy line-spouting sage and the freaks – well they’re kind of pointless. And then there are the requisite one-dimensional, one-named villains who come with their own theme music, bad hair or physical deformity.

Overly melodramatic, The Cape it takes it to a whole new level especially the stuff with Faraday’s wife and the kid, the stupid pling pling flashbacks and the interactions Farrady has with either of them. You can almost see the sap coming out of the screen. Look I know there are those out there who welcome the non dark, gritty Nolan style hero film or the super polished slick feel of Favreau’s Iron Man but there’s a reason those movies are as good as they are. They take the reference material and the make a visual comic that captures a lot of the nuances we’ve gotten with some of the stellar writing that has been done in graphic novels from the last decade.

Trying to step away from that and make for us viewers a small screen hero like Wonder Woman or the Hulk from years and years ago, but without the actual comic book back-story, The Cape fails on every level. It’s not even funny or snarky enough to give the goofiness of a cheesy Spiderman one-liner. I watched the pilot and the second episode and I have to say I give this show as much a chance of succeeding as Lady Gaga does of winning an Oscar.

A really big issue here is sustainability. Eventually The Cape will have to either kill the main villain, the villain will discover who he his then really put his family in danger, his family will discover he’s not dead,  or all of the above. Then what? It’s almost as if this was  serial comic, you could see this getting wrapped up after five issues. Beyond that it really offers very little because the whole story rested on him getting back at the main villain and clearing his name. When you start of with a villain that basically wants to run the whole city and has unlimited power to do so, any new baddie that shows up is kind of lame.

For those of you who like it, feel free to revel in this sub-par comic book potpourri. For anyone who enjoys quality comic book films or shows, stay away from this like it’s the black alien goo that turned Eddie Brock into Venom. In the second episode of The Cape, Farraday says about his dedication, “My family is not my weakness, they’re my strength.” My strength is in my remote when I turn this off.

Shawn Deena is a writer, musician, gamer and all around comic book and sci-fi nerd. As lover of films and television he has entirely useless library of knowledge that has now been increased thanks to the large volume of movies and TV shows Netflix offers on their instant play. As someone who likes to share his opinion, having a forum where he can rant incessantly about things in entertainment that bother him, make him laugh or make him want to hit himself in the face with a DVD box is a good thing. Having written about everything from Office Depot chairs to the page turning excitement of CPA guidebooks nothing pleases him more than writing about the stuff he loves and knows.

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