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      Ed Piskor, Comics Artist, Dies After Sexual Misconduct Accusations

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      Ed Piskor, 41, was known for his detailed “Hip Hop Family Tree” and “X-Men: Grand Design.” A Pittsburgh gallery canceled an exhibition of his work after the initial allegation.The comics artist Ed Piskor, who was best known for his multivolume “Hip Hop Family Tree,” died last week after posting a lengthy note to social media about an accusation of sexual misconduct that led a gallery in Pittsburgh to indefinitely postpone an exhibition of his work.The death of Piskor, who lived in Munhall, Pa., was confirmed by a funeral home, but no cause was given. Many people read his note on social media — in which he repeatedly spoke of his death — as a suicide note.Two of Piskor’s relatives declined to comment. The chief of the Munhall Police Department said Piskor died outside of Pennsylvania.The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a nonprofit arts group, announced last month that it would not open the five-month exhibition as planned after a woman accused Piskor of trying to “groom” her in 2020, when she was in high school, and posted screenshots from their online conversations.Piskor, 41, apologized for the messages in his note and said he never should have communicated with the teenager. He also addressed separate allegations from another artist, saying that they had a consensual sexual relationship.His agent, Bob Mecoy, said the artist had defined himself by his work and was devastated by what the future had held.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lifelong ‘Star Trek’ Fan Leaves Behind a Massive Trove of Memorabilia

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      Troy Nelson and his younger brother Andrew were almost inseparable.The two youngest of six, they were born two years apart. They lived together in their childhood home in Bremerton, Wash., for more than half a century. Near their home, there is a park bench on which they carved their initials as young boys.The Nelson brothers never married or had children. They worked together at the same senior home. They even once, as teenagers, dated the same girl at the same time while working different shifts at the same pizza shop. This lasted a week until they realized it.“Two parts of one body,” Evan Browne, their older sister, said of their relationship in an interview.On Feb. 28, Andrew Nelson, who had been treated for cancer for years, went to feed the chickens and ducks that were gifts from Ms. Browne to her brothers. He had a heart attack and died. He was 55. Just hours later, Troy Nelson, who was stricken with grief, took his own life. He was 57.“He had talked about it before,” Browne, 66, said, tearfully. “He said, ‘Hey, if Andrew goes, I’m out of here. I’m checking out.’ Andrew would say the same thing, and then it really happened.”The collection of “Star Trek” memorabilia left by Mr. Nelson is among the largest known, according to the president of a nonprofit that focuses on the franchise.Connie Aramaki for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Crew Member Working on Marvel’s ‘Wonder Man’ Dies in Fall

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      The worker fell from a catwalk at Radford Studios early Tuesday, officials said.A crew member working on the set of Marvel Studios’ “Wonder Man” TV series at Radford Studios in Los Angeles died on Tuesday after falling from a catwalk, officials said.The man who died worked as a rigger, Deadline reported, and he died on set. A Marvel spokesperson confirmed those details in a statement, adding that “our thoughts and deepest condolences are with his family and friends, and our support is behind the investigation into the circumstances of this accident.”Members of the Los Angeles Police Department responded to Radford Street for a death investigation at about 6:55 a.m., said Officer Tony Im, a police spokesman.The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees said in a statement posted on social media that the organization was “shocked and deeply saddened by this tragic loss.”“We are working to support our member’s family and his fellow members and colleagues,” the union said.“Wonder Man,” a Disney+ series that is set to star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, was not filming at the time of the incident. More

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      It Was a Year of Superhero Fatigue on the Big Screen

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      Audiences are showing fatigue when it comes to Marvel’s box office behemoths of recent years. Based on what they were served in 2023, it’s hard to blame them.At the center of 2023’s “The Marvels” is Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel, who, if you’ll recall from the 2019 film “Captain Marvel,” destroyed the all-powerful A.I. leading the Kree empire. Joining Carol Danvers is Monica Rambeau, a.k.a. Photon a.k.a. Pulsar a.k.a. Spectrum, who was first introduced in “Captain Marvel,” then later featured in the Disney+ series “WandaVision,” where she was granted superpowers after an encounter with reality-altering witches. And joining these two Marvels is the teenage New Jersey native Kamala Khan, a.k.a. the titular character of the Disney+ series “Ms. Marvel.”That’s a lot to take in, which is why the first few minutes of “The Marvels” is just a series of flashbacks designed to catch the audience up before the action even begins. Even for dedicated fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the amount of prerequisite knowledge required to watch any M.C.U. movie or show nowadays is tantamount to a college course.And it seems like audiences are tiring of the constant homework assignments. A year of diminishing box office returns is more proof that the casual superhero moviegoer is becoming more and more of a rarity given how much is being asked of them, which is full, multiplatform investment.These franchises are spelling their own downfalls, as the price of entry into the fandoms has become frustratingly high for the dedicated disciples of these worlds, and not at all worth it for casual viewers or prospective new fans. This year has been a prime of example of what happens when a pop-culture movement takes hold of an industry and then overreaches. We’re witnessing Ragnarok.The barrage of offerings and the uniform, assembly-line quality of the plot structures make it easy to forget that the M.C.U. used to excel at providing entryways for those too intimidated or simply not enticed by the grand Avengers throughline. In the series’ Phase One, “Captain America: The First Avenger” jumped to the past for a World War II period piece and “Thor” offered a mystical world of Norse gods. “Guardians of the Galaxy” ventured out even further, to a universe larger than what was happening in Avengers central, with its own funky soundtrack, and “Ant-Man” fittingly zoomed in to a more playful, humbler superhero story. These films not only allowed prospective fans more opportunities to step into the mythology but also added texture to the franchise, diversifying the tones and genres of the films so every new one didn’t feel redundant or strangled into a larger plot.Opening weekends became cultural watershed moments, with the box office numbers to back them up. A-list stars, thrilling action sequences — summers were defined by the superhero blockbuster, with audiences glued to their seats through the M.C.U.’s signature mid- and post-credits scenes, as the films insisted on holding fans at attention until the very last word. The 2010s were defined by the likes of “Black Panther,” “Guardians” and the “Avengers” movies, which for the most part were warmly received by critics and enthusiastically devoured by fans.But Marvel’s narrative fatigue has been building for a while now; in fact, I wrote about this creeping danger as “Avengers: Endgame” and its three-hour runtime landed in theaters. But it isn’t just the storytelling structure that’s been hurting; it’s that middle “c” in the acronym, the cinematic element, that has also declined.“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” was the highest grossing superhero movie of the year. Marvel Studios/DisneyConsider the latest batch of superhero offerings: Of this year’s films, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” made the most money, but was dour, off-putting and didn’t offer the closure that the trilogy had seemed to move toward; this sequel was ultimately meant to serve as a changing of the guard, introducing a new lineup of Guardians. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” was widely panned, and for good reason; it got tangled up in its psychedelic pseudoscience with no payoff but a mishmash of poorly executed visual effects. On the DC Comics side, the most impressive feat “The Flash” managed was casting a problematic lead actor as not one but two versions of the same character in a tedious time-travel plot that had already been pulled off more successfully in the TV series of the same name.And though “The Marvels” was set up to be the big superhero blockbuster of the fall, it was a rote example of the form — unimaginative, unremarkable and purely targeted to audiences already in the know. It has performed miserably since its November release, with Disney president Bob Iger (who oversees Marvel Studios) taking the rare step of publicly admitting the movie’s shortcomings. It’s the worst-performing M.C.U. film so far, and a perfect representation of the exhaustion on both the creative side and audience side.Back when these superheroes were still on print pages and not big and little screens, Stan Lee, the godfather of American comics and the creator of many of these characters, used to include what he called “Bullpen Bulletins” in his issues. These informal letters to readers, including announcements, promotions and context for and commentary on his work, were indicative of Lee’s relationship to the fandom. He fostered a community around his heroes, built from the ground up: He maintained a dialogue with fans, treating them as not mindless consumers but highbrow connoisseurs of the art form.Whatever “Bullpen Bulletin” factor may have ever existed with today’s superhero consumers seems to be fading fast. As franchises — particularly the M.C.U., fueled by Disney’s multibillion-dollar appetite — continue to grow and threaten ever more, ever greater crossovers, it’s becoming more difficult to understand what their endgame is (pun intended) when it comes to their fans. Who wants to watch 30 films and 10 TV series to engage with a franchise that continues to spread itself too thin at the expense of quality filmmaking?Nostalgia alert: Michael Keaton dons the Batman suit once again, with Ezra Miller in “The Flash.”Warner Bros. PicturesThat will be left only to the completionists, who have invested this much time and effort and will see these stories through to the end, and to the fans held hostage by their own nostalgia. There’s a reason the latest go-to cinematic gimmick is callbacks to decades-old incarnations of heroes: the trifecta of Spider-Men in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and the alternate Batmen from “The Flash.”These cameos don’t serve the ambivalent 10-year-old who never saw Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies or Michael Keaton’s Batman. Neither do the several minutes of catch-up flashbacks explaining all the story lines leading into a new movie.The franchises continue to risk fatiguing their current fans and alienating potential ones. More stand-alone films, more inventiveness, more diversions from the grand plots and cookie-cutter setups would give these stories and their fans room to explore, but instead we’re stuck in a cycle of ever-expanding multiverses, narratives and timelines that even the best S.H.I.E.L.D. agents would find impossible to keep straight.The ultimate irony? These commercial superhero machines know exactly how their approaches can be self-sabotage … because they keep offering stories in which their heroes fall into the same trap. The antagonist of “The Marvels” opens rifts that tear through space and time, introducing other realities that can collide and destroy everything. In “The Flash,” Barry Allen (the hero’s alter ego) has to explain to an alternate version of himself that they can’t keep manipulating the time stream. “These worlds,” Barry says, looking at the C.G.I. representations of space and time around him, “they’re colliding and collapsing.” “We did this,” he continues. “We’re destroying the fabric of everything.”Superhero movies changed the industry. No matter what you think about them as art, the upswing of these comic book stories from the margins to the drivers of popular culture was swift and remarkable. But now these Clark Kents and Bruce Waynes and Rocket Raccoons and various Marvels risk orchestrating the end of this Age of Heroes.But like in every superhero movie, there’s hope yet: Stories that end. Characters who die. Universes where the stakes are real and cameos and meta-commentaries aren’t just crutches to bait audiences. Stories that don’t cling to a crumbling concept but perhaps start fresh in another corner of the universe.Superhero movies used to be super. The heroes are still as strong as before. They just need the movies to match. More

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      ‘The Archies’ Review: A Masala Milkshake at Pop’s, Anyone?

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      Archie and pals get radicalized when their hometown, now conveniently relocated in India, is threatened by corporate overlords.Namaste from Riverdale! In “The Archies,” the director Zoya Akhtar transplants the all-American comic book hamlet to India, where the Anglo-Indian teenager Archie Andrews (Agastya Nanda) is up to his usual tricks, dating both Betty (Khushi Kapoor) and Veronica (Suhana Khan).Set in 1964, this inessential Bollywood-tinged fantasia is two and a half hours of soda shops, chaste dates, candy-colored petticoats, and athletic musical numbers choreographed to a mix of modern-ish new tunes and classics like “Wooly Bully.” Akhtar, who wrote the script with Ayesha Devitre Dhillon and Reema Kagti, is fearless in her fanciful reorientation. Why not?It’s an extravagant stunt perked up by moments of absurdity. Reggie (Vedang Raina) invents beat-boxing; the kids applaud a quote from Jean-Luc Godard: “Cinema is truth 24 times a second.” Mostly, however, it’s rote shtick. Jughead (Mihir Ahuja) chows down on some kind of burgers while Archie and his girlfriends flirt, fight and flirt some more.Suddenly, the focus shifts from how much Riverdale hasn’t changed to how much it might under threat of a corporate takeover. This wheezy old save-the-town plot only holds our interest because of our long acquaintance with the characters who are now being radicalized. It’s strangely compelling to watch Archie transform into an anticapitalist activist. “I can’t just live my life for kicks,” he sings, “Everything is politics — hey, hey!”The cast is tasked solely with looking chipper and gyrating enthusiastically. The ladies do a saucy number on roller skates; later, Khan’s vampy Veronica lands a back flip. The film does its darnedest to dazzle from its lavish production design to its showboating cinematography. For good measure, Akhtar slaps cartoon-style exclamations on the screen: “Smack!” “Pow!” and, for Hindi speakers, “Dhishoom!”The ArchiesNot rated. In Hindi and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 21 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Television

      ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Reunites the Movie Cast, Now in Anime Form

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      “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” revives the bassist who battles his romantic rivals. In an interview, the creators discuss the next chapter, for Netflix.Let’s get ready to rumble … again! Friday brings the premiere of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” an anime series based on the comic book about a young, lollygagging amateur bass player battling seven of his new love’s exes.It is the second major screen adaptation of the six-volume “Scott Pilgrim” series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, which were published from 2004-10. A live-action film by Edgar Wright titled “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” (2010), was a critical favorite, and the eight-episode anime reunites most of the movie cast including Michael Cera as Scott; Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his girlfriend, Ramona Flowers; Kieran Culkin as Scott’s pal Wallace Wells; and Chris Evans and Brandon Routh as two of the former flames.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” was written and developed by O’Malley and the writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (“Happily”), a longtime friend. It is produced by Netflix, Universal Content Productions and Science Saru, a Japanese animation studio. At a panel about the show at New York Comic Con last month, the creators said scheduling a cast of actors who have gotten much more famous since the film was one of the most difficult aspects of making the series.“You end up with this weird game of Tetris trying to get everybody,” Grabinski told the audience.From left, Kieran Culkin, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” They all signed on to voice the new series.Universal PicturesEven for those who have read the comic, seen the film or played the video game version, the anime will hold surprises. (There was a robust list of topics and guest voice actors that reporters were asked not to spoil.) O’Malley and Grabinski came to the New York Times offices last month to discuss the new series, reuniting the movie cast and what comes next for Scott Pilgrim. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did the anime come about?BENDAVID GRABINSKI Bryan found out that Netflix and Science Saru were interested. We went to dinner to talk about the pros and cons of doing a straight adaptation.BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY This was like a year after they asked. So I was a little reticent because I didn’t have a great idea. But then BenDavid had a series of great ideas at this dinner. He’s a traditional Hollywood screenwriter who will just walk into a room and make up a bunch of stuff.Were there specific characters you knew you wanted to focus on in this version?GRABINSKI I wanted to spend as much time as I could with the ensemble. The main appeal of the show to me was to dig deeper with the exes, with Scott’s friends, with Ramona.O’MALLEY People always ask, “What’s your one regret?” I wish I could have done more with the evil exes, partly because I didn’t fully understand them. The first thing I think of when I think of anime is villain scenes. That was my first way in, and then BenDavid blew the doors off after that.The idea for the show began with Netflix and the Japanese anime studio Science Saru. which jointly approached O’Malley about the concept.NetflixWhat’s new about the series?GRABINSKI We will say that there are some big twists and turns that no other adaptation of this story has done yet. The great thing about making this show and having Bryan sitting five feet away is I have the guy who can veto things and say, “I never would have written that joke,” or “I don’t think that guy would do that.” As much as I would like to feel like every single thing in there is my idea, there’s an equal amount of ideas that I pitched where Bryan would politely text me back and say, “That’s not ‘Scott Pilgrim.’”O’MALLEY And sometimes less politely.GRABINSKI Yeah, I’m just trying to be nice about it. That’s the benefit of knowing each other for so long: You can be a little bit more blunt. This would not have worked if we didn’t know each other very well, because we’re both incredibly opinionated people. We just had a rule from the beginning that nothing could go on the show that either of us hated.O’MALLEY You want it to be unpredictable, but the surprises have to be satisfying. That’s the goal every single time.Were there conflicts?GRABINSKI Our episodes are very different, as the audience will see once they watch it. We never want it to feel stale, but it does need to feel consistent.O’MALLEY We both love episodic TV, so we wanted to embrace that.GRABINSKI I didn’t want to have something like, “Oh, it’s a four-hour movie that’s split into chunks.” We wanted the episodes to feel like episodes, but the season is one story with a beginning, middle and end.What was it like getting the film cast back together?O’MALLEY They’ve all blown up.GRABINSKI I have to give thanks to Edgar Wright. One, he put together one of the best ensemble casts of all time. And two, they all loved the experience so much that we benefited from that. After we started making the show, he reached out to the cast. He sent them the scripts and they immediately all said yes. We can’t take credit for the returning cast members. Guest stars, yes.O’MALLEY I had some involvement casting back then. He showed me every casting tape. So it’s really cool to have seen all those people flower so much and to get a chance for them to come back and revisit that work with their newfound maturity. The same way I feel about it, looking back and revisiting and finding new shading, the way we were finding it in the writing, they found in the acting. There’s a profound feeling to it and I love that.The creators said the series diverges from previous “Scott Pilgrim” stories in multiple ways.NetflixIs it the art that makes it an anime? Or is it more about the sensibility?O’MALLEY For me it’s just because we’re working with Science Saru: They are an anime studio. There’s a certain method of production and we had to slot ourselves into that. We’re not telling them what to do, other than giving them scripts. They are very autonomous.GRABINSKI Our feedback is about emotion or plot points. We wanted it to feel specific to their sensibilities. A lot of the time it became like a feedback loop where we would rewrite our scripts to match the things they were doing.O’MALLEY Abel Góngora is the director, so we wanted to give him all the autonomy. Each episode is storyboarded by different artists. They’re all Japanese artists, other than him.GRABINSKI The music and the cast, we’re extremely involved with.O’MALLEY That was the one aspect we wanted to control, because it’s so crucial to the tone of “Scott Pilgrim” to get that music correct.Are any of the characters more fun to write than the others?GRABINSKI I love Lucas Lee [played by Chris Evans] just because I’m pretty obsessive about action movies. There’s a tone to that character that is so fun to me. But honestly, the great thing is that they’re all so different. I’ve worked with Brandon Routh a lot and I knew he could be really funny, and we got him to do a bunch of stuff that I think is unexpected and very silly, and he embraced it.O’MALLEY It’s like each of the exes has their own genre, and it lets you mix it up.GRABINSKI That was the thing that was most exciting to me: pairing up characters who had never been seen together. What if they fought or what if they became best friends?O’MALLEY But not making it feel like fan fiction. Really bringing weight to it.GRABINSKI The difficult thing is trying to make sure it all feels like an organic part of the story. As much as we think, “Oh it would be really fun to have these two characters fight,” we can’t do that unless there’s a real reason that they want to fight that comes from the story.“The main appeal of the show to me was to dig deeper with the exes, with Scott’s friends, with Ramona,” Grabinski said.NetflixWhat’s next? Will there be a Season 2?GRABINSKI I can’t think about anything beyond this. I’m glad that we told a story that has an ending for all the thematic things that we’re exploring. So if TV stopped existing on Nov. 18th, I’d feel really proud of what we did.O’MALLEY We wanted to be satisfied with what we get if we never get more. I don’t love it when a show feels like a setup for Season 2. We just wanted to have a complete dramatic and comedic arc to everything.How long did the entire production process take?GRABINSKI It was a few years to go from the beginning of doing outlines to the finish.O’MALLEY But it was also fast. We started writing in January 2022. We met Science Saru in June 2022. We were seeing episodes by spring of this year. We were pretty much done recording the voices before the strike started. So it was like 18 months. Saru is very fast, which is part of the appeal of this whole process. That’s what they pitched me: “We’ll do a season a year!” It took a little longer than that, but it’s pretty magical to get something this beautiful this quickly.Will you revisit “Scott Pilgrim” in comic book form?O’MALLEY Even if I was super inspired, I wouldn’t have time for it right now. But I think it’s definitely possible. And we’ve talked about other episodes. If those never got to fruition as TV, then I would definitely consider doing a comic and co-writing with BenDavid.GRABINSKI I hope that someone, someday, does a manga adaptation of the show.O’MALLEY If someone in Japan would want to do their own adaptation without any input from us, that would be really cool. More

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      Book Review: ‘MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,’ by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards

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      “The Reign of Marvel Studios” captures how movies based on comic-book properties came to dominate pop culture. At least until now.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin EdwardsHollywood doesn’t believe in immortals. From Mary Pickford to the MGM musical, Golden Age cowboys to teenage wizards, the city worships its gods only until their box-office power dims. So it feels audacious — if not foolhardy — to open “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” and find its authors, Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards, declaring that it’s difficult to imagine a future where the Disney-owned superhero industrial complex “didn’t run forever.” Even Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, has yet to engineer a perpetual motion machine.Yet the three veteran pop culture journalists behind this detailed accounting of the company’s ascendancy have the numbers to support it. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, a constellation of solo superhero tales mixed with all-star team-ups, including four installments of “The Avengers,” is Hollywood’s most successful movie franchise of all time — 32 films that have grossed a combined $29.5 billion. By comparison, the book points out that the “Star Wars” series, Marvel’s nearest rival, has notched only 12 films and $10.3 billion.Turning the pages — which are devoid of the usual, and unnecessary, glossy photo spreads — one realizes that superheroes are an X-ray lens into the last decade and a half of Hollywood disruption. Every upheaval gets a mention: corporate mergers; profit-losing streaming services; Chinese censorship; digitally scanned actors; social media cancellations; #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite; the resurgence of a production-to-distribution vertical pipeline that hadn’t been legal since the 1948 Paramount Decree. Pity there’s no room to examine each in depth.First, the origin story. In the ’90s, the former overseer of Marvel Enterprises, Ike Perlmutter (let’s give him the comic book nickname “The Pennypincher”), empowered his entertainment division to license its biggest stars for cheap, scattering Spider-Man, Hulk and the X-Men across other studios in service of selling more toys. (“MCU” familiarizes us with the marketing term “toyetic.”)The saga of who and what changed the company’s direction involves chancy gambles, pivotal lunches at Mar-a-Lago, rivalrous committees and the waning of Perlmutter’s influence, amid the waxing of Kevin Feige, the book’s hero, a five-time U.S.C. Film School reject who started his production career teaching Meg Ryan to log in to AOL for the romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail.” To establish their independence, the writers mention at the top that Disney, now Marvel’s parent company, asked people not to give them an interview. Many already had, or chose to anyway, although most shy away from on-the-record quotes about the really salacious stuff. No one will say that the rumored $400-million-plus Robert Downey Jr. earned across nine films factored into the decision to kill off Tony Stark, but the innuendo is thicker than Iron Man’s armored exoskeleton.Signs that the Marvel era is nearing the end of its cultural dominance are everywhere, including in this book. Despite the authors’ rah-rah intro (there are no bad Marvel films, they claim, only “a mix of entertaining diversions and inarguable masterpieces”), they wisely sense that the library’s cinema history section will eventually file Feige next to John Ford as filmmakers who defined the spirit of a moment.“MCU” concedes that three of Marvel’s worst-reviewed films were all made in the last three years, just as one of the studio’s cornerstone creatives, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn, decamped to run DC Studios, the home of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.Meanwhile, the churn of faster, cheaper superhero content for Disney+ has led the studio’s weary visual-effects workers (whose exhaustion is well documented here) to vote to unionize. Fandom has become a Sisyphean labor as never-ending spinoff series force a once-rapt audience to pick and choose which story lines they’ll bother to follow.To those seismic grumbles, I’ll add another: Today’s teenagers were toddlers when Marvel first seized the zeitgeist. What generation wants to dig the same stuff as their parents?Marvel’s inescapable obsolescence is the best argument for “MCU”; the genre should be studied with the same rigor as film noir. The book’s admiration for Marvel movies works in its favor, freeing the writers to skip straight to the gossip, like the relative who pulls you aside at Thanksgiving to whisper about your cousin’s divorce. If you didn’t understand the plot of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” before, they’re not wasting space explaining it here.Instead, the book will satisfy your appetite for Marvel’s endless contract negotiations with Sony over the character rights for Spider-Man, which is easy when one encounter climaxes with the former Sony Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal hurling a sandwich — and an expletive — at Feige. Battles over screenplay credits are even juicier. That’s where you’ll find the most inventive insults.Elsewhere, one has to read several paragraphs past a doctor willing to estimate that “50 to 75 percent” of Marvel’s stars are Hulked-out on performance-enhancing drugs to learn that he has not, in fact, treated any of the studio’s actors. While the hustle to wrap things up before the tome turns into “Captain America: Civil War and Peace” means racing through the most recent projects in a blur, earlier chapters are able to dish the dirt, like whose script notes triggered the collapse of Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man” and why Feige refused to continue collaborating with the original Bruce Banner, Edward Norton.After all, the authors know a saga is only as exciting as its villain.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios | By Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards | 528 pp. | Liveright | $35 More

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      How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Influenced the New ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Movie

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      The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and other C.G.I. cartoons are taking a looser, imperfect approach. The style represents a shift made possible by Spidey’s success.When “TMNT,” a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated film, was released in 2007, the critic Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The New York Times that it offered “an impressive lack of visual texture.” She was not wrong. The eponymous reptiles are rendered in an inert computer-generated form, as if they were modeled from plastic and then put on a screen. Their green skin is dull and smooth.The same cannot be said for the turtles in the latest incarnation of the ooze-filled tale: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.” In this new film, released Wednesday, our heroes — Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael — appear to spring from a (talented) high school doodler’s notebook. Their bodies and faces are rendered with an imperfect sketchy quality that makes their eyes vivid and their smiles vibrant. Their greenness is distinctive and gains extra contours when reflected in New York’s neon lights.“Mutant Mayhem,” directed by Jeff Rowe, is representative of a larger shift that has occurred in the 16 years since “TMNT” was released. It’s part of a wave of films that proves computer-generated animation doesn’t have to look quite so, well, boring.The turtle heroes in “TMNT,” from 2007, look as though they are molded from plastic.Imagi Animation StudiosThere’s an imperfect quality to the heroes in the new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.”Paramount PicturesSo what happened? Well, in 2018, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was released. “Into the Spider-Verse” — along with its even more technically virtuosic sequel, “Across the Spider-Verse” this summer — bucked the trend of modern animation by invoking its hero’s comic-book origins with Ben-Day dots and wild, hallucinogenic sequences.Since “Into the Spider-Verse” became a box office hit as well as an Oscar winner, major studios have grown less fearful of animation that diverges from the norm. The film proved that audiences wouldn’t reject projects that look markedly different from the house styles of Pixar (“Toy Story”) and DreamWorks (“Shrek”). Films like “Mutant Mayhem,” “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and “Nimona” all have distinctive looks that are visually sensational without conforming to established playbooks.It’s exciting for the filmmakers, too. “All animators ever did before that was have lunch with each other and bitch about how all animated movies look the same,” Mike Rianda, director of “The Mitchells,” told me in an interview. (Rianda is a member of SAG-AFTRA and spoke before the strike.)Rianda — who worked on that movie alongside Rowe, its co-director — was developing it at Sony Pictures Animation while “Into the Spider-Verse” was in the works. (Both were produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; “The Mitchells” was eventually released on Netflix in 2021.) “The Mitchells,” about a kooky family’s road trip during an A.I. takeover, looks like a window into the overstimulated mind of its teenage heroine, Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), an exuberant film geek — and Rianda and Rowe wanted the animation to have all of her quirks. They felt that the humans should look imperfect and asymmetrical rather than like Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” because the plot concerned a battle between Homo sapiens weirdos and regulated robots. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” blended techniques from 3-D C.G.I. with hand-drawn animated looks.Sony PicturesStill, there was pressure from the studio to go the standard route. “That’s easy,” Rianda said. “The computer knows how to do that. It’s already been taught that. It was wonderful to have ‘Spider-Verse’ going on in the next room so we could point to it and say, ‘Look, they’re doing it. We can do it too, right?’”Films like “Into the Spider-Verse,” and those that have followed in its footsteps, blend animation techniques that are common in 3-D computer-generated movies with those that were commonplace in the 2-D hand-drawn animation that preceded it. It’s not just that the images are less photorealistic, the movements of the characters are as well. The results are more broadly impressionistic in the ways that Looney Tunes cartoons, Disney classics or decades of anime have been.For instance, when the cat hero of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” sticks his sword into the thumbnail of a giant in the bravura musical opening sequence, the sky goes yellow as the giant gasps with pain. The giant’s thumb turns red, and white lines reverberate in the background mimicking the throbbing.“The Last Wish,” directed by Joel Crawford, is linked to the era of animation dominated by C.G.I.; it is a spinoff of “Shrek,” a hallmark of that time. For Crawford, “Into the Spider-Verse” showed studios that “audiences were not only accepting of different styles but craved it because you get the same thing over and over.”Crawford wanted to keep Puss recognizable to fans, but put him in the context of a “fairy tale painting.” That meant rendering his fur more as brushstrokes rather than strands. Fur is actually a good barometer of the shift. In the 2022 DreamWorks caper “The Bad Guys,” which follows a group of animal criminals, the wolf ringleader’s coat looks like it has been shaped by pen strokes, a change from the way his fuzzier lupine brethren were crafted in Disney’s 2016 comedy “Zootopia.”With “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” the director Joel Crawford aimed for a “fairy tale painting.”DreamWorks AnimationBut all the animation directors I spoke with argued that the art has to come from a thematically relevant place. For “Nimona,” now on Netflix, the directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno landed on what they described as a “two-and-a-half-D” style that evoked medieval paintings, a fitting look for their graphic-novel adaptation set in a futuristic world with the chivalrous customs of the Middle Ages. A trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Wish” has an illustrated quality in line with its storybook fable plot about a star descending from the sky. The effect is something out of an Arthur Rackham illustration or a Beatrix Potter book mashed up with “Frozen.”Rowe’s initial goal for “Mutant Mayhem” was just to be as bold as possible, excising any timidity he had felt about pushing boundaries on “The Mitchells.” As he spent more time working on the world of the Turtles, he figured out where those impulses were coming from and how they’d fit into the story. He and the production designer, Yashar Kassai, rediscovered drawings they had done as teenagers. “There’s just this unmitigated expression and honesty to those kinds of drawings,” Rowe said. “It’s a movie about teenagers; that’s our North Star. Let’s commit to the art style looking like it was made by teenagers. Ideally the world and the characters will look like they drew themselves.”As a viewer, I find it’s invigorating to see the animators on “Mutant Mayhem” quite literally coloring outside the lines. When the turtles jump across rooftops, the moon behind them appears to be vibrating scribbles. You can see (digital) pen lines in explosions and expressions.“At first ‘Spider-Verse’ gave people permission,” Rowe said. “And now I think with ‘Spider-Verse 2,’ it’s made it a mandate. I think if anyone makes a film that looks like a C.G. 3-D film from the last 30 years now, it’s going to feel dated.” For audiences, that’s great news. More