Comic Brans #2 – The Crow

“But every night I burn
Every night I call your name
Every night I burn
Every night I fall again
Every night I burn
Scream the animal scream
Every night I burn
Dream the crow black dream”

–Burn, The Cure

I don’t remember exactly how the 1994 superhero flick The Crow became an inside joke in my circle of friends, but it did. I vaguely recall watching it in my living room when I was about 12 or 13. Not quite sure if I had rented it or caught it on TV. I liked it, but it was just one action film in a sea of many others and eventually it faded from memory.

At some point, someone (not me, I swear) in my group of college friends brought up The Crow when we were reminiscing about melodramatic, dark, gritty ‘90s cinema. It slowly escalated from there over time. We found out about the awful sequels with hilarious names like “City of Angels” and “Wicked Prayer.” I started to share our ironic love with my internet friends. I rewatched the movie and watched the sequels. My ex accidentally bought me these while she was drunk:

 

Over time, like with many ironic loves, I started to sincerely appreciate how over-the-top and angsty this entire franchise is. I always thought the movie was a fun time, and while it’s a lot harder to take it seriously as an adult, I still think it’s one of the better ’90s action movies I’ve seen.

If anything, there is one good reason for checking out The Crow: Brandon Lee’s excellent performance as the titular character was almost certainly an influence on Heath Ledger’s take on the Joker. Just so I can say I’m not entirely talking out of my ass, I did do some digging. While it’s never been directly confirmed, many an internet post has been dedicated to comparing the mannerisms and speech patterns of both performers. There’s a good chance Ledger looked at Lee’s Crow to some degree.

That’s not to say there isn’t more fun to be had with the movie. The soundtrack is unashamedly ‘90s and has some great tracks I’ve found myself driving to more often than I’d like to admit. The fight choreography is solid, though perhaps lacking a sense of impact. It even has a slapped-together theme that the film practically spells out with a closing narration: “Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.”

Brandon Lee is truly the heart of the piece, though. He fights, he waxes poetic, he angsts, he empathizes, and carries himself with such conviction that you can’t help but be drawn in. This scene is incredibly stupid, but Lee’s delivery is so goddamn fantastic it’s become one of my favorite bits of the whole film:

It’s a shame then that the real reason people remember the movie isn’t any of the above, but the fact that Brandon Lee was shot and killed as the result of a firearm accident during filming. It’s a dark cloud that overshadows an otherwise decent superhero romp with a gothic aesthetic. Lee was 28, and it’s hard to watch The Crow without wondering what he could have accomplished if his life wasn’t tragically cut short.

It only gets worse when you learn about the history of The Crow as a comic. Creator James O’Barr crafted The Crow to express and cope with his emotions following the death of his fiancée to a drunk driver. While the details of the story are obviously fictional, the lamentations of the protagonist have an uncomfortable honesty to them. According to the copy of the book I have, The Crow managed to become a cult hit and its success helped pave the way for more indie-published comics. And, of course, it became popular enough to get the attention of Hollywood.

As it turns out (again, according to O’Barr himself, in his author’s note) O’Barr and Lee ended up becoming good friends on set. It’s a shame that he had to once again come face-to-face with the death of someone he cared about, but he does note that he did befriend Lee’s fiancée, Eliza Hutton, as time went on. It sucks that this work is so associated with untimely death, but it’s also nice to know that if anything, sometimes those hardships can bring people closer together, too.

I think that’s why I’ve developed the bizarre respect I have for the book and the film. Through all the silly costumes, moody soundtrack, and hammy melodrama, there’s an earnest tale of mourning and recovery beneath it all.

O’Barr doesn’t seem to get out into the public spotlight too often, and indeed, doesn’t seemed to have worked on much else outside of The Crow, but I wish he did. I genuinely like reading what the man has to say. In truth, part of that is because I can identify with using emotional pain as a mechanism for creative output. Even if I’m not necessarily pouring my feelings into my work like O’Barr did with The Crow, I share a lot of his feelings regarding creativity’s usefulness as a way to vent… even if sometimes, that venting leaves you feeling even worse.

But enough introduction. Let’s talk about the book. I first read it a few months back (about the time of that tweet linked above) but reread it just yesterday so that it’s fresh in my mind. Forgive me for comparisons to the movie, but I think the ways in which the two compare and contrast are fascinating.

The first thing that stood out to me about The Crow compared to its movie counterpart is how messy it feels. In a note at the front of the book, O’Barr proudly states that no computers were used in the creation of his book. Everything from the art to the dialogue was done by hand. You can definitely tell. The book’s black and white, always-night world is harsh and dangerous. I don’t know enough about comic production to know if the lack of color was a stylistic choice or one necessary for an indie project with little budget, but nevertheless the black and white compliments the book’s absolutist good vs evil perspective well. While I’m normally one who cringes at boasts of “doing things the ol’ fashioned way,” I have to admit the beautiful yet often crude art by O’Barr carries with it a sense of personal investment and humanity I can’t say I’ve always felt in other comics I’ve read.

Both versions of the story share the basic plot outline. Young couple Eric Draven (get it? D-RAVEN? Har har) and Shelly Webster are brutally attacked by Detroit gangsters. Eric watches powerless as his fiancée is raped and the two are murdered. One year later, Eric is brought back to life with superpowers by a mysterious crow entity and can’t pass on into the afterlife until he takes his revenge on the hoodlums who took away everything from him.

This premise is fairly apparent a few minutes into the film adaptation, so I was a little taken aback when I read the comic and found that the source material plays things a bit more mysteriously. Who The Crow is, what he wants, and even the nature of his powers are all slowly revealed to us over time. The movie shows us glimpses of the night of the murder at the beginning of the film. The book dwells on it over its entire length, until finally showing us the incident in full near the end of the book.

Whereas we only see a few quick cuts of what Eric’s life was like prior to dying in the film, the book has far more scenes of him reminiscing and mourning on the life that was taken from him. Eric’s internal struggle to come to terms with what has happened is the forefront of the book, messy emotions and all. The movie makes up for this by featuring more interaction with a police officer and little girl, both minor characters in the book itself. Indeed, Eric in the movie is played far more traditionally as a hero. Comic-Eric is far more willing to torture and draw out the deaths of the criminals than Movie-Eric. While both have a love of theatrics, Comic-Eric seems obsessed with reciting poetry while mowing down his victims, giving him an air of detached madness as he takes his revenge. Movie-Eric is a few degrees less dramatic and is given more room for levity.

It feels right to call the book a more introverted piece while the movie is more extraverted, something common to many literature-to-film adaptations. The comic’s Detroit is a stage for murder, while the movie takes time to flesh out the setting as an actual city full of people from all walks of life. In the book, that time is spent exploring Eric’s memories of his love of Shelly. I was surprised how effective it was. Her rape and death in the movie, I hate to say, often feels like a shocking-yet-sorta-exploitative motivation to drive our protagonist to kill as many bad guys as possible. It feels a lot less cheap in the book, despite the scene itself being far more graphically rendered. We get to know Shelly a lot more in the comics. She doesn’t feel so much like a plot device. The flashback sequences between her and Eric are shockingly well-written. O’Barr’s depiction of a young couple goofing around and trying to get started with their lives hit a lot closer to my personal life experiences than many other stories that attempt the same.

I was surprised, then, to learn that the chapter titled “An August Noel” was not featured in the original printing of the book. It, alongside another sequence titled “Sparklehorse,” were added for the 2011 Special Edition of the book. It’s a short segment featuring a moment of playful teasing and intimacy between Eric and Shelly. It’s easily the best written of any of the flashback sequences, and really portrays how perfect the couple was together before their deaths. It wasn’t until I reread the author’s note at the beginning that I learned it wasn’t featured in the story until recently. O’Barr felt the scene was maybe a little too personal to put into a publicly-released comic book, but eventually became more comfortable with the idea as time passed.

The other segment, “Sparklehorse,” was never intended to be released in the original version of the story. Near the beginning of the book, Eric has a vision of a beautiful horse getting horrifically tangled in barbed wire. “Sparklehorse” was added into the closing pages of the book and features Eric shooting the horse and putting it out of its misery. According to O’Barr (though it’s easily gathered by the material itself) the horse is Eric’s guilt, and he’s finally putting his foot down and saying that he’s ready to move on.

“The resolution isn’t about justice or revenge,” Eric’s crow companion explains. “It’s about forgiveness.”

“Are you mad?!! I could NEVER forgive them!!!” Eric responds.

The crow caws: “Not them, idiot! Yourself!!”

Dear God, if that ain’t the truth. “Sparklehorse” feels like something that could have only been written later on in life, after many years of compartmentalization, acceptance, and moving the fuck on. Both it and “August Noel” are fantastic additions to the book and I could never recommend reading the older editions lacking them.

Unfortunately, what the book has going for it in thematic and emotional storytelling often feels lacking when the book goes back to its action. Eric is never in any real danger, unlike the third act of the film. The book follows him as he carries out his murder spree, criminal by criminal.

I think the movie made a lot of smart choices as an adaptation in this regard. In the book, we don’t know how many people Eric is after. In the movie, we know there’s four specific gangsters he plans to kill before going back to the grave – the four directly responsible for Shelly’s and his deaths. The gang in the book is a nebulous organization of Bad People Doing Bad Things, but the movie’s gang has a clearer hierarchy and strategic approach to what they do. The movie plays with this – Eric walks into a meeting with many of the city’s leading crime figures, only to ask them to give up the one specific gangster he wants revenge on. Naturally, the scene ends up being a chaotic shoot-out anyways, but it reveals quite a bit about the nature of Eric’s quest.

After killing the fourth gang member and feeling at peace with himself, Eric is startled to learn that the gang’s leader, Top Dollar, has kidnapped a little girl he and Shelly previously looked after as a way to draw him out. During the ensuing fight scene, Eric’s powers (specifically his invulnerability) start to fade. I always felt like this was a subtle, smart way of showing Eric’s short-sightedness. It’s all but stated that Eric was given powers to carry out his revenge. However, he never took the time to consider the greater systemic problems that factored into his and Shelly’s death in the first place. As his desire for revenge fades, so does his power, and he’s punished by being forced to face the true cause of his suffering without being able to rely on his true strength. Throughout the movie, there’s a clear escalation as Eric fights his way all the way to the top of the criminal underground food chain. In the comic… it just feels like he’s fighting more and more criminals.

Like I said, the comic is a messier work, and in more ways than one. While I’m sad the film doesn’t have the same level of emotional nuance, I’m glad it exists as a more refined and accessible take on the original story. They’re doing another film adaptation, slated to come out October 11, 2019 (hilariously enough, my 26th birthday) and I hope that version of the story manages to find a balance between the strengths and weaknesses of the original comic and the first film.

Though, knowing Hollywood, it’ll probably just suck.

 

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