Dracula: CEO and Loving It

The minute I finished this I was sure what I wanted to say about it. Then another minute went by and I thought, “Wait a minute. Why the hell did I read a Dracula comic in the first place?”

Credit where credit is due, I have to take some of the blame for reading this one. Because there is really no excuse for reading another Dracula book. There just isn’t. Mark Waid did his best to try and invent one for me, but that might have only made things worse.

We all know Dracula as the guy who kicked ass, impaled mofos, and did a bunch of evil magic shit to turn himself into a vampire. Until now, however, we didn’t really appreciate him as a shrewd businessman, because after all, what is a medieval country if not the equivalent of a modern-day big company?

Therefore, the characters conclude, if we want to instigate the hostile takeover of another company, the easiest way of going about it would be to resurrect Dracula and use his powers of magical persuasion to convince CEO’s to sell their companies to us, an extremely costly and dangerous endeavor that will force us to close a bunch of plants in order to shore up enough cash to get everything rolling.

With that reasonable, well thought-out, foolproof, unambitious, clearly defined plan with no real endgame, I don’t see how anything could go wrong.

It reads a little bit like one of those weird business books where we try to learn business plans from the unlikeliest of sources. Like “How to Manage Like Oscar the Grouch” with chapter titles like “Managing in the Can: the Essence of Hands-Off Management.” Dracula is presented as being a good manager because he worked out a small country and fought battles with swords and shit. I’m no historian, and I am certainly no city planner, however I would say that a city surrounded by people staked on large poles that were intentionally blunted and greased to increase both the pain and the sliding action is not a city that is operating in a sustainable, realistic fashion that is enjoyable for all. Just a hunch.

Even if I were convinced that Dracula was a great middle manager at heart, I think it’s still a tough sell to convince me that we really should bring him back to life in order to solve some kind of problem. For starters, trying to create what sounds like a great business plan out of sheer craziness is a little hard to swallow. It would be like watching the Social Network, and halfway through the Mark Zuckerberg character decides that they need a great mathematician to help out, and because Egyptians were known to be very mathematical, they decide to resurrect a mummy. Or maybe we take it in an Air Bud sort of direction and bring back a lagoon creature to be on the high school swim team. It’ll be a great laugh when he’s filling in his age on the form and has to say 4389, huh?

And of course, we have our crew of vampire hunters which consists of the standard formula: hot babe, crazy person, and one guy who seems sort of effective, or at least big.

It’s partially my fault for picking it up, but rarely does a book combine so fluidly two of my strong disinterests: business and vampires.

This last part goes out to CEO’s, business people, and anyone in a movie, book, or whatever who comes up with a crazy scheme involving evil forces or super-powered robots or anything of the such:

Whatever you do, just kill the thing the second it starts fooling around. Don’t give into its demands for a nighttime rooftop meeting, don’t give it a telephone that it rewires into a deadly taser, none of that shit. Just make it do what you want and then throw it in a goddamn volcano.

Superhero Movies and the Cloud

Having not seen Green Lantern, I just learned a disturbing fact:Parallax, the main bad guy, is a cloud.

Now, just so we're clear, "Cloud" is not some kind of slur that I invented for a racial group or something, although doing so would be a wise decision if you talk a lot about putting down races. Nobody disagrees when you talk about how those "damn Pine Beetles" are always ruining the environment, and most would share
your shock and dismay when you said that Pine Beetles were always expected to provide tech support despite a complete non-grasp of your language.

No, when I say Cloud, I mean he's a Cloud. I'm not an expert at cloud identification, but I did take a Meteorology class in college because it was the only lab science that didn't require a field trip (the weather is all around us!). Based on that knowledge, I would say this cloud appears to be a Cumulo Skullshits.

That's an amateur opinion, however.

What's really fucked up, to me, is that this is not the first time a cloud has appeared and claimed the spot as main bad guy in a comic book movie. There may be more, but by my count, this is the third.

Wha?

Fantastic Four: 2, aka Fantastic Fourtwo.

Yes, instead of being a giant purple guy, Galactus appeared as a cloud. A space cloud, to be more correcter.

Okay, I understand that some things have to be changed in comic book movies in order to have everything make sense. And sometimes it's a good idea. I don't really need to watch Peter Parker construct mechanical web shooters, devices that would certainly net him hundreds of thousands of dollars, let alone his web formula. But I digress. The point is, some things change for the sake of making a movie make a little sense, and sometimes those choices are good ones.

And sometimes, it means that a giant purple guy turns into a big space cloud.

Now, this might sound like a sensible change, and it does on paper. But let's also consider that this is a film in which we have a silver man who rides through space on a surfboard, and a Fantasticar that was apparently cobbled together from a Dodge. Reality is broken, and I am prepared to accept some form of...well, I'm ready to accept a form.

The problem is that we've got a flame man, a stretch man, a rock man, and an invisible man who is a woman. Oh, and a silver man who surfs. These are visually interesting if nothing else, but we don't get to see them do anything cool. Punching, stretching, flaming, invisibiling, and hanging 10.5, minimum. Which brings us to our good friend the Hulk.


Hulk aka Not That One, The Shitty One. Shittier One.

(note: cloud bad guy in Hulk may have looked a little different. I only saw it once, okay?)

Again, we have a big bad guy, and it's a goddamn cloud. It's a weird electric cloud, but there is something very important I learned about clouds in my meteorologic education:

They cannot, per se, be smashed.

This is a quality that is not terribly important day to day, and we should all be thankful that clouds don't smash into shit all day, or fall down and smash. But in the Hulk movie, it would be nice to see him smash some shit.

It would be only five years later when we discovered that a bad guy who can be smashed still can't really save a movie. But it helps.

I would like to suggest things that the Hulk could fight as opposed to a cloud man.

-Giant man made of glass.
-Giant man made of wood.
-Evil car that comes to life.
-Giant evil car that comes to life.

Basically, anything that can come to life and be smashed should be just fine.




On the plus side, at least the Green Lantern folks figured out how to make a cloud into a toy so that we didn't have to go toyless. Thank god.