Yahoo’s got an alternate look at what could have been the beginning of The Avengers, and what would have been a striking, and fascinatingly, different movie:

One of the most underdeveloped elements of The Avengers—or one of the most interesting pieces of setup for a future film, depending on how it’s played—was Nick Fury’s relationship with the S.H.I.E.L.D. Council, a shadowy, multi-national organization that apparently has access to nuclear weapons, and has some power to oversee his work. It wasn’t clear who they were or what authority they had, or what ability they have now to call The Avengers to account. Those tensions are all fascinating story engines that Fury essentially blew off or ignored simply by acting as he wished in the face of great danger. It’s one of the reasons that an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. show would be so interesting—it could fill in all the spaces between the big battles with smaller bureaucratic fights and the consequences that follow a throwdown like the one between Loki and his forces and the men and woman at Fury’s command.

And it would be a nice way to reckon with the actual costs of superhero throwdowns. The Avengers skips straight from the fear and devastation and the near-nuking of New York to a world where the city is restored and there’s a vigorous debate underway about what it means that superheroes exist. But so much of superheroism is about destroying the world to save it. That’s a terrible tension, and accepting it, and not just the prospect of people with abilities, is part of what living in a world with superheroes would relaly mean.

As much as I’d love to see Diana Prince be the subject of a movie franchise or a television show (though, of course, not one by David E. Kelley), that seems like a pretty remote possibility at this point. But at least I’m glad to hear that Fox is considering a tantalizing alternative, a story about Athena herself and not simply a riff on the goddess:

The project, which has received a script commitment, is based on Joy’s graphic novel, Headache, a coming-of-age drama about a 23 year-old woman who discovers she’s Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare. Each week she must maintain her secret identity while battling a slew of ancient monsters from Greek mythology and searching to uncover which of the other Greek gods is secretly plotting against her to take over the Earth.

I also really just like the idea of a contemporary woman suddenly finding out that she’s basically in charge of two areas of human life where men tend to assume they’re predominant today, even though gender obviously never held the ancient Greeks back any in terms of who they worshipped. Maybe we can have a mansplaining episode in which Athena fixes Will McAvoy.

The big comics news of the day is that DC Comics, having annulled Superman’s marriage to Lois Lane when it hit the reset button on the franchise with the New 52 have decided that the Man of Steel is going to start knocking aerial boots with Wonder Woman herself. I’ll have to wait and see how the story works out to decide how I feel about it, but the cover image released to promote the team-up is a reminder for all that comics can draw the female body in exaggeratedly sexual ways, they can be depressingly awful at making actual sexual contact between adult superheroes look remotely appealing. Take a look:

The fact that Superman is tied up in Wonder Woman’s lasso is a nice little nod to her fetish pin-up origins, and a way of playing with the power dynamic between them that lends the image a nice little frisson. Or it would if Superman and Wonder Woman’s actual bodies are posed so it looks like someone is smushing a Barbie and a Ken Doll together. These don’t look like humans who are attracted to each other and in the process of making actual sexual contact.

It’s not quite as bad as DC’s Batman-and-Catwoman-bang-on-a-roof panel, in which Batman’s abs look less like human’s than a stack of chicken cutlets and Catwoman’s expression is more slack-jawed than erotically intent. If you can leach the sex appeal out of Catwoman, you’re doing something wrong:

The same is true of Frank Miller’s Holy Terror. Everything about that comic is ugly, from its vicious Islamophobia to its illustrations, but its attempts at sexytimes are particularly inept:

This sort of rampant incompetence is part of what makes something like the current characterization of Namor as a stud who will hook up with anyone, irrespective of species, fun. Even if the panels themselves aren’t always alluring, the strips have an actual grown-up sense of humor about sex that doesn’t require me to risk headache via eye-roll:

The slam that comics are the provenance of slobbering teenaged boys is an irritating one, given the sophistication of the ideas superhero stories can explore when they’re at their best. But it would definitely help if comics artists started drawing superheroines like people instead of figurines, and superhero sexuality in a way that suggested some familiarity with intimacy and the functioning of the human body.

Over at Topless Robot, Rob Bricken has some interesting speculations what could be happen if reports that Guardians of the Galaxy is “about a U.S. pilot who ends up in space in the middle of a universal conflict and goes on the run with futuristic ex-cons who have something everyone wants,” turn out to be true:

Now, I have no idea how accurate The Grid is, how good their sources are, if they even have sources, or who actually updates it. All I know is that if the above plot is true, then there’s a pretty good chance…

…Carol Danvers is the U.S. pilot in question. This is a phenomenal idea in many ways, and I’m going to list them: 1) As the Kree-powered Ms. Marvel, Carol already has ties to the cosmic Marvel-verse, and would work extremely well in a GotG movie. 2) The Marvel movie-verse could use a higher profile (and more powerful) superheroine than Black Widow. 3) She could immediately be added to the Avengers, which is another great way to tie the Marvel movie-verse together. 4) Carol is getting a pretty big push from Marvel right now as the new Captain Marvel, so there’s synergy there. 5) Carol Danvers/Ms. Marvel/Captain Marvel is awesome, and I would really, really like her to get her movie due and her movie debut.

It would also be encouraging to have a female member of the armed forces as a member of the core team for The Avengers, who thus far have fairly traditionally gendered occupations: Bruce Banner is a nerdy scientist, Tony Stark and inveterate tinkerer who gets with, and later promotes, the loyal woman who runs his life, Captain America is as archetypal a doughboy as has ever existed, while Natasha Romanov is a femme fatale. It would be fun to have a female fighter jock in that mix, particularly because adding Carol Danvers to the Marvel movie universe would give me a chance to agitate for Katee Sackhoff to play her.

Via Deadline, it looks like the rights to Daredevil are going to revert back to Marvel and to Disney after Fox killed an effort to reboot the franchise. The fact that the rights to certain key properties, including the blind Hell’s Kitchen lawyer, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men are held outside the company has always been one of the challenges to Marvel’s consolidation of its empire, and one of the reasons we saw a Spider-Man reboot this summer. Continuing to make use of the characters is the way outside companies keep their claim on Marvel characters live so the rights and the profits don’t revert back to Marvel and Disney.

I’ll be curious to see what, if anything, Marvel does with Daredevil. I’ve always thought the planned Marvel-ABC television show would be best off in a procedural format, both to lure in audiences who aren’t sold on superhero stories but are willing to test another lawyer, detective, or cop show, and to save money—if you can keep your hero in the office, courtroom, and street, you don’t have to invest quite as much in special effects and major action sequences. Daredevil, like She-Hulk, would be a fine contender for that kind of show, though I’d hope given the current Avengers lineup and Joss Whedon’s involvement with the television show, that they’ll choose a female character instead.

And I continue to think it would be smart of Marvel to develop a lower-budget, grittier run of hero movies, or a cable show that intersects them, a part of the market that’s open now that the adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis’s Powers appears in limbo at FX. With Daredevil back in the fold, you could have an overlapping New York universe that includes him, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones in Harlem, and Doctor Strange down in Greenwich Village. Marvel has always been woven deeply into the fabric of New York. The Avengers are disconnected by virtue of Tony Stark’s globetrotting, Bruce Banner’s time on the run, Black Widow’s missions, and the fact that Hawkeye and Captain America are buried in institutions. A lower-budget franchise, whether on the silver screen or the television, could root a separate set of characters deeply in a place, making their approaches and personalities facets of the city. That kind of storytelling always served the Law & Order franchise well, and with those shows cancelled or in their twilight years, there’s a place for a great new New York crime-solver, as well as for a different sort of superhero story.

The last year’s seen a lot of efforts to interrogate the way superheroines’ bodies are posed and presented, whether it’s artists drawing male superheroes in the same skin-revealing costumes and poses as Wonder Woman or Jim C. Hines’ series of pictures where he posed like heroines on the cover of urban fantasy novels. Now, Ultraculture, as an illustration of its Captain America: The First Avenger review, has taken to Photoshop to show us what it would look like if a superhero’s comic physique could actually be expressed by a live human being. The results are…unsettling:

If depictions of superheroines reduce them to their breasts, buttocks and vaginas, this kind of illustration turns a human being into a vast, undifferentiated cut of meat. The effects are different, of course. Our positive association with musculature means we can still praise the person who acquired it, which is how we ended up with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a major cultural and political figure, rather than reducing him to parts of his wildly-enhanced body, while a tight focus on accentuated female body parts tends to minimize the humanity of the woman they belong to. But this kind of distortion is still unsettling, whether the person it’s done to is male or female. An overemphasis on traits society have decided are positive and admirable can be limiting and overwhelming, too.

Over at IFC, Terri Schwartz reports that Ben Affleck’s been approached about directing DC’s Justice League movie, and has a smart assessment of his strengths and weaknesses in the position that also suggests a way DC, as it tries to build a viable movie franchise to match The Avengers, could distinguish itself from Marvel’s approach:

For now, we’re just intrigued by the possibility of Affleck. He has some experience with superhero films, but we’ll be the first to admit that “Daredevil” wasn’t great. Fortunately Affleck has greatly matured as an actor and a director since then, which is good for this project. However, Affleck doesn’t have any experience directing with CGI, which could be a boon or a curse. He filmed some great realistic action scenes in “The Town,” which could make a “Justice League” film more in line stylistically with Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” trilogy. To us, the more realistic this film is, the better, though we know there’s no way to make characters like the Green Lantern and the Flash work without some semblance of computer assistance. Hopefully Affleck is up to the task.

Mike Fleming at Deadline is more skeptical of the prospect that Affleck is going to happen:

This is a story I checked out days ago, and didn’t run when Affleck’s reps stated that it was not going to happen with him. Now, it makes sense that Warner Bros would offer Affleck the project. Chris Nolan is top man over there, but after three Batfilms and after producing the Superman reboot Man of Steel, he’s gotten spandex-clad protagonists out of his system. After Nolan, the studio then offers everything else to Harry Potter director David Yates (who is now keen on Tarzan) and Affleck, who has become a major director with Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and the upcoming Argo. Just because the studio wants Affleck doesn’t mean he will do the movie, and several sources tell me he might take a meeting, but that’s it.

After putting his acting career in the dumper with questionable choices like Gigli, Affleck admirably scripted a second act for himself with his writing and directing skills, and did it by taking on unexpected, thoughtful films. His reps clearly denied he would take this, and why would he want to direct a Justice League movie, unless he himself had figured out a way to make one that would compare favorably with Joss Whedon’s billion dollar Marvel smash The Avengers? I don’t see it.

Whether or not Affleck ends up being the man to do it, I think that DC would be strategically and creatively smart to create a franchise that’s less cosmic and more realistic than Marvel’s, and that maintains at least the gloss of ideas from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Given that Whedon’s locked in for Avengers 2, it probably doesn’t make sense to get into an witty arms race with him. Similarly, Marvel is, I think, potentially going to test audiences’ tolerance for cosmic characters and conflicts with Guardians of the Galaxy, and DC could distinguish itself by grounding its conflicts in the real world, and potentially even in real issues. Even if I think the politics of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies were ultimately flimsy and inconsistent , they got people talking without getting in the way of the movies’ blockbuster status, and that’s not a terrible brand if you can find directors and writers who can walk that line intelligently. It may not be possible to do emotional connection and dialogue better than Whedon, but given the way The Avengers has been set up so far, I think it’s possible for DC to come off build a more grounded world that gets audiences to connect to the characters and conflicts in a more serious way. We’ll see whether that’s Zack Snyder’s actual approach in Man of Steel, but DC’s certainly selling the initial hero’s journey as deeply rooted in the American experience and landscape rather than foregrounding the cosmic elements of it.

I also think that a more grounded, naturalistic (in so much as these things can be naturalistic) approach to the DC Comics universe might be a smart hedge against the day that mass audiences get a little tired of superhero movies. If you don’t need to to use Skrull spaceships and giant space lizard fish in the climax of your action sequences, you can make excellent action movies on smaller budgets. In boom times, that can mean bigger profits. If trends slow, it can mean preserving a margin. I don’t really expect DC to think that strategically, given the general death of the mid-budget action picture. But the company needs some smart insight to distinguish itself if it wants to do more than tag after Marvel’s coattails.

Per the good folks at ComicBookMovie.com, who base their reporting on a Disney investors’ call, Joss Whedon, who co-wrote and directed The Avengers, will return for the movie’s sequel for Marvel, and also will be developing the planned ABC Marvel superhero show. It’s about as perfect a fit as I can imagine, giving the artistic and commercial success of The Avengers. And if the ABC show centers on a woman, it would fit beautifully with Whedon’s brand, given his success with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, arguably the best successful superhero show of the last two decades, and his terrific expansion of Black Widow in The Avengers. Such a move would also help expand make Marvel’s on-screen universe more balanced, making this continued pairing an especially good fit.

As reported late yesterday, Christopher Eccleston will play Malekith The Accursed, the big bad in Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor’s first forary into the Marvel universe, Thor: The Dark World. Though he’s been eclipsed by David Tennant and Matt Smith, Eccleston’s melancholy turn as the Doctor was terrific, with a sense of brooding, cosmic scale that should fit supervillainy nicely. Both the character, a shape-shifting dark elf, and one of the most important arcs he’s associated with, an attempted coup by secrecy of the throne of Asgard, seem like an excellent fit for the world Marvel’s building, and to leverage Taylor’s Game of Thrones experience.

In that arc that sounds most promising, Malekith has Loki switch places with him in prison, something that might be easy to accomplish if Loki’s going to get thrown in Asgard Jail after Thor brings him home after the events of The Avengers. He then disguises himself as Balder, an ally of the Warriors Three (Thor’s main men), who wasn’t a character in Thor, who is apparently about to be crowned king of Asgard. It’s the kind of thing that could make for terrific nasty court politics and dramatic and unexpected showdowns in those settings. Taylor’s proved himself a nice hand in those sorts of emotional situations—he directed “Baelor,” the tremendous first-season episode of Game of Thrones in which King Joffrey orders the former hand of the King Ned Stark executed in front of his daughters, and “Fire and Blood,” in which Dany reveals herself with her dragons. The man knows how to stage an announcement of a new and dramatically different identity or worldview.

And a disguise story could also be a setup for a larger Avengers arc. One of the best-executed parts of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers was Hawkeye’s brianwashing by Loki, and the sense of betrayal his teammates experienced, the loss Black Widow felt, and his shame when he came back to himself. Similarly, if the Skrulls are going to play a role in future Avengers storylines, it would be a shame not to make use of their shape-shifting abilities in addition to those nifty ridged chins, a plot device that could gel nicely with that sense of uncertainty, loss, and hollowing-out that was present in Hawkeye’s storyline. And a Malekith conflict that also involved swapping and surrendering identities would be in keeping with those themes.

Much of the conflict in The Avengers—and the reason the finale was so satisfying—was driven by the characters attempts to come to truly know each other. Captain America wants to know if Tony Stark is sincere or a callow playboy. Tony wants to know if Cap’s a relic, and if Bruce Banner has gotten comfortable with his inner rage. Nick Fury has a role and an agenda he successfully conceals for the entire film while his men and women are busy figuring Loki out. When they all trusted each other, knew each other’s capabilities, and could work together instinctively, only then could they stop the invasion, working together at the top of their capabilities.

I’ve been enjoying animated superhero actions as much if not more than their live-action counterparts in recent years, so I was excited to see the trailer for The Dark Knight Returns, the animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s take on Bruce Wayne’s decision to come out of retirement as an older man:

Mostly, I think I’m excited to see Carrie Kelley as Robin, a self-made superheroine in glasses and with moxie to burn. I want grown-up female superheroes, of course, the female counterparts to Tony Stark’s midlife crises and Thor’s struggles to become a god worth taking seriously. But just as Spider-Man has given us superheroism as a metaphor for teenage awkwardness, and the process of self-definition through gadgets, costumes, and fights with petty criminals, it’ll be fun to see a girl take up the mantle herself. It’s been a long time since Rogue and Kitty Pryde in the X-Men movies, and there, they were a bit subsumed by the drama of the adults around them.

I’ll also be curious as to how the depiction of Carrie plays into some of the debates we’ve been having about the politics of Christopher Nolan’s Batman, and Batman in general. In Miller’s comics—unsurprisingly—Carrie’s parents are neglectful stoner hippies, representative of the rot of the activist impulse, and Bruce Wayne becomes her surrogate father, training her for adulthood. I’m not sure the production will stick with that, if only because hippie-punching isn’t likely to resonate much with the network’s target demographic. But this could be an even more cynical Batman than we’ve seen in Nolan’s movies, given that line about Batman’s having crippled a young man. How that hardbitten approach plays out in his larger battle with the mutants will be a fascinating question.