A Note From your Author: Hello! Sorry it’s been forever since I wrote anything. Between grad school and the ever present job hunt, I’ve been busy. I’ve tried a few times, but nothing ever stuck. Until. Well…this.

I have no idea how to begin writing this review. I’ll start by saying that I very rarely “binge” watch anything on Netflix. I like to savor most of the TV Shows I watch on the service. I’ll put on an episode of Chef’s Table while cooking or watch some old anime I’ve never seen for an hour before bed. There are, however exceptions to every rule. Bojack Horseman, for example. I binged through entire seasons of that show when they first debuted. Another example is the impeccable comedy, American Vandal, which I watched completely in one sitting, twice. Given those two prior properties, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that I watched all 5 plus hours of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness in one sitting. It’s the most surreal, and bizarre true crime series I’ve ever come across and I really want to talk about it.

Author’s Note: I didn’t mean for both of my first two comic book pieces to cover the work of Tom King, but here we are I suppose…

Event comics are tricky things. In one regard, they’re the primordial soup of the modern superhero film. For instance, while most of Avengers: Endgame was an original story, it drew heavily from Kurt Busiek’s 1998 Avengers Forever. On the other hand, in a medium as played out and prone to repetition as the modern superhero comic, how do you keep the audience engaged? For that matter, what’s left to say?

Boy, I sure am writing a lot about superhero movies aren’t I….

Harley Granville-Barker once succinctly summarized Romeo and Juliet as “a tragedy of youth, as youth sees it.” It’s important to remember that even in its time, Shakespeare’s version of Romeo and Juliet was not an original work. It was an adaptation of a poem called The Tragical Historye of Romeus and Iuliet by Arthur Brooke. What’s more, there’s enough evidence to suggest that even Brooke’s version was an adaptation of a story that had been around since at least the Roman Empire. There’s even a similar story in Dante’s Inferno. But Shakespeare’s adaptation changed a key aspect of the play. In previous versions of the story, the “tragedy” of the two lovers was their needless deaths. If they’d only listened to their parents and respected the feud between their houses, they’d still be alive. It was a morality tale, about the dangers of lust and how it played fickle hell on those it afflicted. Shakespeare didn’t see it that way, instead focusing on the triviality of the Capulet and Montague feud, and elevating the longings of his two protagonists to the center stage. By changing the perspective, Shakespeare captured the sympathies of the audience and created one of the greatest love stories ever written. So what does this have to do with a 2019 DC Comics superhero movie?