So the second season of Wonder Woman is out on DVD this week. If you are around my age, you perhaps had your puberty jump-started by Lynda Carter. I too appreciated Ms. Carter's rather obvious charms, but more, she was clearly put on Earth by the TV Gods to play Wonder Woman. I got to thinking, how many comics have been translated to other media, but then my mind wandered elsewhere to wonder how much other media has been translated to comics?
Quite a few comics have gone on to success elsewhere from Superman to Peanuts to, my personal favorite, the Hulk. And some of those translations have done pretty well. "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" is a wonderful musical. Julie Newmar made a fabulous Catwoman. The Fleisher Cartoons are spectacular adaptations of Superman from the relevant period.
I am less impressed by the attempts of comics to do stuff with properties originating elsewhere. I like Archie Goodwin's Star Wars. I like some of the Star Trek stuff. And I guess, from what Tom Galloway has said, the Jerry Lewis comic book was okay. But "Welcome Back, Kotter?"
When I was a child, we'd have comics adaptations of every just about every genre movie from "Battlestar Gallactica" to "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The home video industry has made that rather redundant. I have been generally unimpressed by the Aliens comics. The Stargate comics haven't managed to match the show. Even the Bugs Bunny comics don't do anything for me. (Is Uncle Scrooge an attempt to make the Disney cartoons translate to comics, or an original? You make the call.)
Anyway, I guess I'm just curious: what projects do people think made the jump to comics well?
Some of my favorite comics series have only lasted a few issues. I thought I would share them with you because they are generally cheap enough to pick up in the back issue bins, and I am curious as to whether anyone else read them.
Archer and Armstrong. This was fabulous under Barry Windsor-Smith, then Mike Baron or someone took over, and it was okay to pretty good, then Valiant decided to relaunch it in an unreadable fashion, but the 12 or so initial issues were excellent.
Brain Boy. There were no credits to this Dell 4 Color Series, but I tracked down all 7 issues. If I become a famous writer, and some company letsd me do anything, I have a Brain Boy series all mapped out.
Aquaman by Shaun McLaughlin. Not the best series in the world, but a nice, solid superhero series. The issue with Batman as guest star is a true classic of bronze age characterization placed in a post-Crisis context.
Nth Man, the Ultimate Ninja by Larry Hama. This series was both wacky and rather tragic. It crossed over with Excaliber, and ended rather well all things considered.
Ambush Bug by Levitz, Giffen, Fleming and others. Not strictly a series, but an inspired character who invaded the DC Universe for a time in the mid-1980's.
Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes by Mindy Newll. Okay, this is a kind of a cheat, but I don't think Ms. Newell has ever received proper credit. She scripted (over Levitz plots, apparently) several issues of a hugely popular team book. She was doing this while Paul Levitz himself, one of the greatest writers in the history of the medium, was writing the exact same characters during an era where devotion to the comic was at a peak, and she held up perfectly including solid stories with Dev Em and Supergirl. I think that's pretty impressive. I mean, imagine if if you hire Bobby Flay or Jean Jaha or cook a twelve course meal for a group of fanatical gourmets. But he also picks someone else to cook half the meal, and none of the diners complain that six of the courses aren't up to snuff even by comparison. That's Mindy Newell on Legion.
Quantum and Woody by Priest and Bright. This series is pretty well known, and among the regular readers of this blog I know several are fans. I had an idea for a story which I offered to priest. He liked the idea so much that he asked me to write it up as a fill in. I had the perfect pen name planned out: Phil N'Gai. (I wanted to use "Jim Owsley," but he told me not to. I remember when Paul Monitor moved to the Toronto Blue Jays. Someone was using his number, so Paul took Robin Yount's number. Then when the other guy was traded, they offered him his old number. Paul said, "I'm keeping this one until Robin comes here and wants it back.")
Okay, reading The Filth just as you enter into a depressive state is probably the single worst idea I have ever had. The paricular Morrisonian take on Phillip K. Dick's tropes of isolation and identity including his usual flourishes, like finding a metaphor for identity in a kind of fluid that can be injected into a person or excreted out of them, a laboratory-grown porn star with pheremone-based influence and black semen that can be grown to use as man-sized weapons, a gigantic derelict vessel full of identity-vacant hordes, and a man who wants to be a super-hero... not to mention microscopic I-Life and the Hand that holds the Pen that leaks the Ink... perhaps Morrison hit my own temporal lobe Buddha button at the wrong moment, because when you meet the Buddha on the road you're supposed to kill him, not have him kill you.
There are a lot of wild ideas in The Filth but in the end, to my mind anyway, it's far less engaging and well-executed than Seaguy, which held a classical Gormenghast meets Lord Dunsany structural skeleton of whimsical fantasy that it built around and over. The Filth reads like Valis crashing headlong into comic books and each issue feels like the shockwaves of that kind of collapse, as though Soviet Cosmonaut Assassin Monkeys were rattling the cages of the Iron Prison House, but in the end we stay locked behind the bars and the Emperor is still on the throne. Seaguy promises a kind of tension between recursive and dynamic, whereas The Filth felt like being pushed face-first through the 'squicky bits' in an attempt to demonstrate that kind of tension. Like Max Thunderstone with his visible thoughts manifested in a cloud over his head, I find myself unable to find the 'enemy' if you would in this particular story... I'm not sure what in The Filth are the really gripping ideas that energize and drive the story and what's just re-heated tropes. For instance, Greg Feely/Ned Slade could well come straight out of A Scanner Darkly with its tale of Substance D, Fred, and Bob Arctor, but Morrison's an extremely clever bloke: is that deliberate, considering he calls this series his reaction to having gone out to L.A. and having had the city wash over him? It's hard to say... as I said, Morrison's an extremely clever bloke, even though at times, it feels like he wants you to know that more than he wants to tell a story.
I think what I need to do is sit down with both Seaguy and The Filth again and bounce them off each other. Yes, that's what I'll do, I think.
Scientists have found the Black Galaxy. No word on whether Thor, Hercules and Thunderstrike are going to turn it into a new Celestial.
Hunter Thompson wrote this obituary of Nixon.
If you liked Office Space and Superfriends, see them both togther.
I have actually seen "Constantine." I was struck by one thing, or rather two things, Rachel Weisz had more cleavage and wet shirt shots (though she had a black bra on) in this movie than I have ever seen. It became kind of distracting after a while. I mean it's not like Rachel Weisz hasn't done nudity. Just do a Google iamge search and you'll see what her doctor does. So what's the story?
I don't know. I do know that Tilda Swinton is not the androgynous waif she is typecast as. Do a google image search on her as well. In any event, it's not important (same to you, fella), but it struck me as rather odd. I suspect that either they couldn't afford Weisz' nudity fee and just went as far as they could or they were hoping to salvage a PG-13 despite the Satanism, gore and violence.
I just got the first two volumes of The Complete Peanuts for 30 clams on Amazon marketplace. I was struck by how handsome a set of books they are. I might pick up a set for my parents on the relevant day.
I happened to be doing a google search on Alan Moore, and I found this picture. Karen Berger is quite the babe. Alan Moore looks like he could play Hagrid in a Harry Potter Movies, though.
Suspension of Disbelief, a new group comics blog dedicated to fact-checking, in the spirit of The Law Is a Ass.
The current topmost article, about archery, is pretty impressive in its command of detail.
Hunter S. Thompson the inspiration for Doonesbury's Uncle Duke has taken the Ernest Hemingway route. Duke was one of my favorites. I gather he was also an influence on Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem, though I didn't read that even semi-religiously. Thompson was a true pioneer in "gonzo journalism." I think he is responsible for the philosophy behind blogging as journalism. Which is not to say that he created underground newspapers or blogs or even the thin line between truth and reality that blogging and the web as whole represents. But rather that ol' Hunter softened up the public scrutiny of journalism as a concept to the point where it is now possible for blogs to make a serious contribution to journalism. (Same to you, Singer.)
Well, Hitch just edged out Constantine for the top spot. Here's hoping I'm wrong about the effect Wes Craven's Cursed will have on matters this coming weekend. If you do have a jones for werewolf stuff, however, let me plug Rick Jone's novel.
Also, here's the International Trailer for the
Fantastic Four. Personally, I like the Inivisible Girl effect. The stretching, well, maybe I'll grow like it, so to speak. I don't think there was any way they could have made the Thing look good. I'm of two minds about that. He does look kinda dumb. On the other hand, looking that stupid does give Ben an excuse to whine about his appearance for the next couple decades.
Okay, Greg, we get the point about Adam Strange, you can stop with the examples.
Congratulations to Brian K. Vaughn, who in Ultimate X-Men 55 (last page) and 56 managed to go through an entire fight, fifteen or eighteen pages, with the six-armed woman from the old Longshot series without once mentioning her name.
I can't think of a better exemplar of modern appreciation for comic book storytelling fundamentals.
Now, since your official editor is nothing more than a production manager with an inaccurate title, I suggest you invest yourself in finding an actual story editor who's willing to actually do the actual job of actually editing story.
Now, don’t get me wrong: “Constantine” might bomb. The trailer makes it look like a horror flick. This look wouldn’t be a problem except that they have taken what could be a positive and removed all the help that such a positive might bring. How so? The movie is based on a pre-existing, comic-book property, as everyone reading this article already knows. The name of the comic book, “Hellblazer,” is actually a better name for a horror flick than “Constantine” is. The name thing goes double when you consider that in the last several years we have had several high profile movies such as “Gladiator,” “Troy,” “Luther,” “Alexander,” and “The Passion of the Christ” set against both historical times and religion. “Constantine” invokes both these connections for people, so that my father’s wife thought it was about the Roman emperor. Well, so what? There are people who are not going to realize what this movie is about just based on the title. Comics fans might not automatically associate “Constantine” with 'Hellblazer' given that we’ve had several high profile movies on religious and historical subjects recently.
Now, another thing, “Hellblazer” is a spin off from ”Swamp Thing.” “Swamp Thing” is already an established horror franchise. Most movies try to tie into prior movies if they can, a la “Aliens v. Predator” or “Predator 2” or even “Once Upon a Time in America” which Sergio Leone named so because his most famous movie was “Once Upon a Time in the West.” It is not unknown for movies to ignore a tie-in, but it can hurt a flick. Look at “Catwoman” and “Elektra.” Additionally, the director of “Swamp Thing” was horror legend Wes Craven. Had this been pitched as a “Swamp Thing” movie, they might have gotten Wes, who is not a moron. I saw the actual director speak at Wizard World and he didn’t know Tilda Swinton and Rachel Weisz were British. Wes would have gotten Sting. The other advantage that having Wes Craven on board would have given is that he would not have then directed “Cursed” which sounds like a horror movie, uses the kind of cast that made Wes hot in the “Scream” trilogy (Shannon Elizabeth, Christina Ricci, Portia De Rossi, like that) and opens the week after “Constantine” thus siphoning off the teen horror audience which one assumes “Constantine” might have been hoping to reach.
Also, while "Constantine" is being promoted more heavily than Don King would hype a match between Michael Moore and Pat Robertson, it's not alone. It's not even the only comic book movie opening that week. “Son of the Mask” is also a February 18, movie, and it is not confusing people about its comic book provenance. So the opening weekend is giving it competition for the comics reading audience. Also, this week, “Hitch” opens starring Will Smith, the greatest box office draw in the world. And his movies always have a fairly big second weekend as well. Plus, “Hitch” is opening on 3500 screens plus Rotten Tomatoes has it at 67% positive reviews, so it looks like it might be good. So, “Constantine” will have to fight with the Will Smith romantic comedy hangover crowd, fight with another comics related movie which is actually letting people know it’s a comics movie in the Mask sequel, and then on its second weekend, it has a Wes Craven horror flick to contend with.
So, I’m not saying it’s not going to bomb. It might bomb. I hope it does not.
What I’m saying is it might be pretty good. Here’s why:
It has Keanu Reeves. Keanu has never risen above his material, which is why Dracula and the Matrix sequels sucked. But Keanu does have a knack for picking classic movies. He’s like a low rent Humphrey Bogart in that regard. Nobody except Bogie thought “Casablanca” or “The Treasure of the Sierra Madres” or “The Petrified Forest” was going anywhere. These movies were made because the director was under contract, the studio owned the material and what the hell. But Bogie could smell a classic. He’d just keep making these great, masterpiece movies one after the other. “Beat the Devil” is my personal favorite in that regard. Keanu isn’t Bogie, but he does have a knack for picking entertaining projects inlcuding “The Matrix,” “Speed,” “Point Break,” “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (Same to you, fella.) and “The Watcher.” The fact that he liked the script might mean something.
The source material is pretty good. It appears to be based a little on “Dangerous Habits.” Dangerous Habits was a nifty little story which did have enough theological nonsense in it to let me know Preacher would be a waste of time. (My favorite part is the bit wherein Garth Ennis has never read the Bible. He has John Constantine go to the Archangel Gabriel to cure his lung cancer. Gabriel refuses. Nuh-uh. The mere fact that John asks practically obligates God’s divine healing powers. The New Testament says so.) But it was pretty keen, so at least the movie has some of that going for it.
Also, I saw twenty minutes of various scenes at Wizard World. Clips are on the net. So the parts of the movie I have seen actually look pretty good. It has a score of 50% percent on TomatoMeter, but the three guys who didn’t like it appear to be morons.
Having now just read The Filth, Sleeper, Age of Bronze volumes one and two and Seaguy today (Amazon giveth!) I wanted to discuss the similarity between the adventures of Morrison's oceanic hero and Cabell's Jurgen. Both start out wanting things to change (Seaguy wants an adventure, Jurgen wants to be young again to win the love of the girl he lost as a young man), both range from strange experience to strange experience that ultimately end in a somewhat morose statement about love (in Seaguy we have Lotharius say The sooner romance and love and all that rot's wiped out, the happier we'll be round here and Jurgen himself chooses the comfort of his familiar life over passion and romance in his encounter with Koschei, the ultimate force behind all that Jurgen has experienced... indeed, it's interesting to note how Lotharius serves the same role as Koschei in Jurgen, both setting the series of adventures into place as a prime mover behind the scenes who has an encounter with the hero and setting the status quo back into place at the end) that seems both gloomy and a touch unsettled, as Seaguy ends up in the chess game he begins the story at, minus his pal Chubby Da Choona and Jurgen finds himself in the exact second he stepped up in conversation to defend evil as part of creation, minus his poetic sense of rebellion.
Obviously Morrison uses the common Superheroic tropes as part of his tale, if twisted into new and slightly unfamiliar forms (the Anti-Dad slamming into Antarctia, forming the Thousand and One Islands of Lostralia) but the trip to the artifical moon, built as a tomb by a demented pharoah and blasted into space by Chinese fireworks is almost of a piece with Jurgen's trip to Heaven, constructed by a God who was Himself the dream of an old woman set into motion by Koschei. Seaguy seems on my first couple of readings to be an almost perfect slice of the fantastic as it was often rendered by writers like Cabell, Dunsany, Eddison and Peake. Seaguy's trip to the moon in the huge buckets dropped down into the desert or Jurgen's descent into Hell and his entry into the Satanic camp with its bemused demons, badgered into torturing the damned that they never asked for in the first place and who demand eternal suffering and thus, cause both their own and that of the demons both have a similarity to them, while Jurgen's fruitless pursuit of sexual pleasure and worldly greatness reminds me of Seaguy's naive desire to impress She-Beard which ends up leading him into an encounter with a bio-engineered foodstuff named Xoo, a trip to Atlantis (a trip Jurgen himself engages in, although in his case he gets to have sex with the Lady of the Lake while he's there) and ultimately a painful and humiliating return to conformity that's a touch more sinister than Jurgen's wearied acceptance. They're hardly mirrors of each other by any means but the general shape is so similar that I do find myself wondering if it's deliberate.
I was astonished to see so untrammeledly fantastic a story in comic book form: I'll doubtlessly have more to say about Seaguy in the near future. Of the books I've read today, Seaguy was undoubtedly my favorite.
I bought 18 monthly comics in January. Of those 18:
8 were limited series;
4 were new ongoing series;
6 were older ongoing series.
I arbitrarily defined "new" as "on issue 6 or less"; if you set that number at, say, 12, then the numbers for the older series would be even lower. And one of those new monthlies was JLA Classified, which I'll probably treat as a series of miniseries, only buying certain arcs.
Some of the older ongoing series are, to be frank, a pretty tired bunch, with a good series facing cancellation (Human Target) and a couple of underperformers (Y the Last Man and JLA, which I just started buying again for this arc, apparently because I am fascinated by Qwardian politics and I don't actually like reading about the JLA).
JLA has reached issue #110; Y is at #30; nothing else has cracked the two-year mark.
What's most interesting, though, is that the best work is coming out of the limited series - Adam Strange, Deadshot, The Question, and of course We3. The final issue of Mark Millar's Wanted does its damnedest to lower the curve, but still. Most of the mainstream work that catches my interest right now is either conceived as a standalone story or, perhaps, is deemed unable to support an ongoing series. And most of the monthly series I do enjoy have been launched within the last two years (and some won't live to see the two-year mark).
It looks like DC and Marvel either can't keep their long-running franchises going without frequent restarts, or they can't interest me in their current creative approaches on them at all.
What do your current buying habits tell you about your relationship to the comics industry? (And if your current buying habits are "I stopped buying comics the day they turned Hank Hall into Extant but I'm still bitching about them," please spare us...)
Because I can't hold it in until I finish my Curmudgeonly Comments:
I picked up on Marc's earlier recommendation the first couple of issues of Adam Strange. I read them, as it happens, out of order, demonstrating that, among other things, the first issue is basically unnecessary.
But, mostly, what I can't hold in is this: Apparently, Alpha Centauri has gone supernova!
Leaving aside the fact that none of the Alpha Centauri stars (there are three of them) can go supernova, everyone on Earth should be preparing for our terrible death 4.3 years from now when the radiation front hits us.
This isn't subtle, it's not something you can handwave your way around. Life does not survive being 4.3 light-years from a supernova.
The Justice League knows about this; Superman told Adam it had happened. Where's the panic and despair?
GraphiContent, a new group comics blog, has posted an interesting essay on Grant Morrison and J. G. Jones's Marvel Boy.
(And while we're at it, Jog has posted a solid review of Morrison and Philip Bond's Vimanarama #1 that pretty much captures my reaction. Even if he did think it was set in India...?!?)
I watched Mystery Men last night on basic cable.
Apparently, five years ago, I watched an entirely different movie named Mystery Men, because the film I remembered I had considerable disdain for, for displaying its contempt for superheroes, its continual mockery thereof, and its dated and pretentious we're-better-than-this attitude toward its subject, and the movie I watched last night was, basically, a completely straight superhero movie about a group of entirely sincere, just not terribly effective, and in one case tragically ineffective, superheroes. (Albeit with pretty bad blocking.)
So now I'm puzzled. What the heck is this movie Mystery Men?
In the spirit of Mike's "Stan Lee on 60 Minutes" alert, I thought I'd let everyone know that there will be a comic-related commercial during the Superbowl. Don't click if you like to be surprised.
Visa's running a 30 second spot featuring a variety of Marvel Superheroes. It's supposed to run during the first half. Set your Tivos!
I kept meaning to post this, so here it is.
There is no justice. Why? Is it because of what happened in Identity Crisis or Avengers Dissassembled?
No. It's because The Crew got cancelled. Like I've posted before. I'm Trade Paperback Guy. I don't get a weekly hit off of the comics crack pipe. I wait for the trades because they are easier to read. I can grab a trade and read it while my three-year old is playing with trains. I can stuff a bookmark in it and go do something, and don't have to worry about taking them in and out of bags.
So, when I heard Priest was going to write a team book, I was stoked. I loved Quantum and Woody and Black Panther. I even was an old school fan who loved Falcon. But, it came out a few months after I cut the cord from weekly visits to the comics shop, so I said, "No problem. Marvel puts everything in trades."
Everything but series that they kill at issue 7. I waited and waited, but no trade. I sucked it up and bought the run on eBay.
I loved it. I loved suave Rhodey - equal parts Jim Phelps and Shaft. I loved the rookie Kasper Kole/White Tiger - a Peter Parker in his private life and Vin Diesel on the streets. I loved Danny Vincent/Junta - Matrix powers, Skeets' evil twin, and mouth. I loved Josiah X/Justice. He's Captain America in the way that Steve Rogers can never be.
The plot is simple. Rhodey's crack-whore sister dies and Rhodey, stewing in guilt and anger, decides not just to take apart the gang members responcible, but the entire gang, from the street runners to the corporate shell. To quote Danny Vincent - "They've got more lawyers than guns, and they have a lot of guns." As Rhodey goes on his Vengeance Quest (standard plot device #42), he stirs up a mess of trouble that pulls White Tiger, Junta and Justice into a team. Not a team like any other, because they have a reason to be there. It's not that Juggernaut robs a bank and they decide to be best buds afterwards. They've got reasons for getting involved, and I would have loved to see the next issue and see what the next step would be.
But what's important about the plot is that everyone in the book is smart. The bad guy is smart the way only Priest villains are. The heroes figure things out because they are smart too.
And they're funny. Not fart joke funny, but they're funny because they're witty.
The art was great, totally capturing what Priest was trying to say, and the mood of the book.
Anyway, there is no Justice. This book should still be on the shelves. I should have 3 trades worth of goodness. Because he made me care about these three guys, and that means something.
"60 Minutes Wednesday" is doing a feature on Stan Lee's legal battle with Marvel tonight, Feb. 2, 2005. Check local listings.
