http://groups.google.com/group/pgh.general/topics

That there really ruined the suspense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dukes_of_Hazzard

Consider foreign-language near-homophones for “Hazzard”, and the line from the Waylon Jennings theme song:
“Someday the mountain might get them, but the law never will.”

As for The Dark Knight, I’m making plans never to see it since I first heard of it.

Yes. So awesome. So great.

More to the point, the other day I explained to a friend that if you have been reading about Batman since your father bought you your first issue of Detective Comics when you were six years old, watching Batman Begins and, especially, The Dark Knight is a tricky business of adjusting the solitary, hiding-in-the-attic hermeneutic of reading comics created by two or three craftsmen ranging from journeymen to mad artists to address a complicated machine assembled by an army of skilled professionals.

To the contrary, the comics-about-comics genre is surprisingly resilient, for fascinating reasons I won’t go into right now.

During one long lazy discussion about the unfilmability of Don Quijote, I decided that probably the only way to make it work is to reinvent it as a superhero joint: Comic Book Guy cracks, ties a towel around his neck, and starts sucker-punching every villain he can find, while Christopher Nolan Benengeli follows him around with a steadycam and posts these sallies, the film itself, on YouTube. Now that’s comics-about-comics we can believe in!

Looking forward to the new version of pastoral, JH!

Trailer park heroes need opponents whose scorn and antipathy for common (white) people are carried to entertaining caricature.
In a better more honest world he could be a black man, scarred and made demented by racists in a vicious act that also took his family.
Trying to give himself superhuman strength in order to get revenge, he goes too far, becomes mad, retains super-powers. Work with a ‘roid analogy here.

In this lesser world though it’ll have to be one of the elite. Someone from say, the academy, mutated into a fanged and drooling fiend. A hard transition to write effectively.
Make him an intellectually gifted freak whose rationality has turned back on its master and eaten his soul. A math genius who figured out how to transcend space-time with the act of writing certain formulae in exactly the right order.

Goes into the future looking for untold wealth and power in the form of cross-temporal knowledge and comes back insane. He boomerangs off some singularity of forward momentum straight back to the very beginning, has to work his way forward life by life all the way from the primordial bacterial to get back to where he started, the near-future present. But it alters the world he’s born into. Billions of years of crawling. Picking up extra DNA. Mutating.
Reborn as himself in alternate universes, but each time through a little more Other. Develop something here about him trying to annihilate the world to get out of the loop he’s in, something like that. In this world the heroes have been told by mysterious presences he might succeed, causing great havoc in the universe. Earth as arena, again.

Professor Something.
Occupies a college campus that’s a front maintained by his worldwide financial empire, a fortress with invisible walls where he can experiment to his heart’s content. On students.
Tweed or a tweed pattern should figure in his costume.
Hates barbecue, canned beer, cheap tight clothes on good-looking women. The anarchy of fecund poverty. Country music gives him fits, actual convulsions and foaming at the mouth. Can be used as a weapon if he’s taken by surprise.
From the urban East Coast maybe. With an accent.

It seems as if we should be able simply to read this off from your classic Some Versions of Mock-Pastoral, Part I.

I.e. trailer park people are a microcosm of the nation, with all its potential communal strength but also its actual brainlessness. But even the brainlessness is endearing, in fact indispensable. While the communal victory is authorial sleight of hand, disguised as the right people being there at the right time and pulling out all their personal stops.

And it’s got to be fun; so it absolutely must be well-supplied with things for DW to whack, and things for Airstream to dodge and catch, while looking really good, in an artless sort of way.

I think the model you want is Tremors. Fight crime? What serious kinds of crime are there? Plain open murder? Murder concealed? Robbery? What do these people have that’s worth the trouble of stealing on a conspicuous scale? Criminal plots require so much contrivance and special-casing that the consistency overwhelms the appeal – and then your bastard readers take their sweet time picking it all apart.

Whereas, if you just straight-out make it that the town is under siege by prehistoric fauna and flying kachina-monsters, the heroes get all the righteous targets they need, and you can contrive away freely.