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So a friend of mine called me last week and invited me out to go see Transformers 2 with him and some friends from SVA.  Usually I’m so starved for human contact that I’ll find any excuse to leave the house, but this time I had to turn him down for moral reasons—which I’ll get to in a second.

Rob is a really nice guy.  I mean really nice.  You ever meet that person in life who’s happy, well adjusted and seems to be at peace with the world no matter how negative it seems, and you look at him and think to yourself “why can’t I be happy like this guy?”  That’s Rob.  Even when he’s negative he’s smiling.

Usually that type of person drives me nuts.  I want to grab them by the lobes and scream “HUMANS ARE ON A CRASH COURSE TO WIPE OUT THE SPECIES!  WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SO HAPPY ABOUT?”  But Rob is different because he’s AWARE of the bad stuff, but chooses to remain positive.  And when we hang out I try my hardest not to get all negative and taint him.

So Rob wants to see Transformers 2 and I’m invited.  Awesome.  Glad I fooled him into thinking I was fun enough to hang out, “chillax”, and bask in memories of how awesome it was to be a kid when movies were purely for enjoyment and not to be taken too seriously.

The problem is—and some of you will agree—we’re not kids anymore and movies like Transformers insult people’s intelligence.  No one is expecting Casablanca with robots, but it would be nice if moronic blockbusters like Transformers and GI Joe could be a LITTLE intelligent and clever (like the first TMNT, the newest Trek and T2).  Just because it’s for kids doesn’t mean you have to treat your viewer like a child.

Now that I draw comics for a living and have my own scripts on the side, I think a lot about what the word “entertainment” really means when it comes to plot, story, character, and truth.  What’s in our DNA that responds to deeply to stories, myths and legends over thousands of years and during millions of campfires?  When I die, what am I going to look back on as a storyteller?  Did I contribute to something with meaning and elevate the form of comics and storytelling, or did I just draw Teen Titans over 40 years?  This is the shit that keeps me awake at night.

And then I think of Michael Bay, a guy who demands that everything be “awesome” with lots of explosions and guns, a guy who’s wet dream is probably a project called Aerosmith’s-Exploding-Machine-Gun-Rock-Factory, a grown man who would dedicate himself to—not one—but TWO movies about toys.

So I wrote Rob a long email that he never got, because I never sent it.  And it went something like this:

“Hey man.  Thanks for inviting me out tonight to see Bay’s new opus.  I feel like an asshole for saying this, but my new goal in life is to not see bad movies.  I don’t like supporting them, and—as lame as this sounds—I don’t want to give Hollywood my hard earned money just to perpetuate its goal of retarding the planet.  If a dollar is a vote, then I’m only voting for movies that deserve that vote, thus helping to send Hollywood a message that says “I don’t approve of your bastardization of CGI, your lack of script and your lack of respect for the human brain.”  For some reason I tried seeing the first Transformers and couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing for half the movie.  It looked like someone took two piles of garbage and tossed them into each other at 50 mph, filmed it, then slapped a sticker on it and called it “Optimus Prime fights Megatron”.  And then, when all the scenes were shot, they took those scenes and put them in another trash bag and threw it at an audience and called it Transformers.  Don’t mean to judge, it’s cool that you want to see it, but it’s just not for me.  PS: I hope this doesn’t end our friendship.”

Remember what I said about poisoning Rob’s happiness?  I’m pretty sure this email would have done it.  So I didn’t send it and I didn’t go to see the movie.  And Rob had a better time sans Sean.

The interesting thing about Hollywood is that, even though they treat us like morons, people still seem to go.  How many times have you heard a friend complain about a movie that he went to see more than once?  The more we support bad entertainment, the more we’re going to get.  So as tempting as it is to run off and see Wolverine, we’re better off in the long run if we take a stand against being treated as “the nerdy comic book demographic that can be fooled with CGI and cameos”.

And I know a lot of the ratings are due to the general public seeing the movie as well, and we can’t control that.  But—when it comes to sci fi—WE ARE THE EXPERTS. They should be listening to us, and (in many ways) they do listen to us.  And the biggest way they listen is when they count the dollars.  The future of entertainment is up to us, whether it’s helping support good entertainment or helping to create our OWN properties one day that helps raise the bar for the entertainers around us.

Don’t mean to turn people off by sounding high and mighty.  It’s just that if you and I don’t fight the good fight for art, story, and entertainment then no one will.