2009-03-30

Project Rooftop

Maybe if you've been reading Building Batman for a long time you've started to notice that not all the picture of Batman are canonical-ish. If there is one thing I love more than comics, it's fans taking a character and making it their own.

The Man of SteelThere's a conflict in the stories that we might call "modern myths". Maybe the biggest modern myth stories are Luke Skywalker's hero quest to save the galaxy or the paradox of an all-america savior who does no wrong while fighting the never-ending-good-fight yet is equally just a mild man who struggled for years to get the girl across the desk from him to notice. The conflict is this: as "myths" theseLuke and Leia stories must be widely owned by many people but as "modern" they are actaully copyrighted controlled material owned by someone. The less centralized Superman franchize may be more myth than Star Wars because of the army of creative people who have all added or perturbed his story in their own way over the years but it still makes me extremely happy when fans stand up and make the myths their own. It's why I check Wayne Manor everyday even though I know he only updates near holidays (come on April Fools day, come on April Fools day) and why I wish BBWW would start posting again.

Batman 2.0AND it's why I really wanted to tell you about Project Rooftop. This is a website that hosts contests for redesigning superheroes' costumes. They were inspired by Andi Watson's Batgirl meme. With Battle for the Cowl going on in the Bat-verse, they started this contest asking for people to redesign the Batman costume for "his most likely successor, Dick". They claim they got over 100 entries (I would love to scroll through all those) and their finalists are super cool.
But they haven't just done Batman. Check-out the righthand side links to past contests and then answer me this: why is it so easy to find really cool, really good redesigns of Wonder Woman by fans but DC still fails day by day to do anything worthwhile with the character?
Wonder Woman the amazon

5 comments:

Saranga said...

Wow. that's a beautiful Diana.

Bruce said...

For sure. The other WW that I think is just so cool is Just Imagine: Wonder Woman. I have no idea if the "Just Imagine..." stories are any good (I haven't ever bought or read them) but the look is really sharp.

SK said...

The run of WW by writer Gail Simone has been an interesting read. Worth checking out. DC has recently released a DVD movie of the origin which was actually better than expected. Worth checking out. :)

Bruce said...

I'll definitely look into it.

I so disparately want Wonder Woman to be my favorite character.

Saranga said...

I'd be getting the WW DVD if it was actually available in the UK...boooo..