Some time ago, I mentioned there was an exhaustive collection of “Bloom County” comic strips coming soon to a bookstore near you. I think I’ve also mentioned that I adore Berke Breathed’s masterwork, but — despite the fact the book is out now and that I covet it like a certain hobbit-y thing covets a certain piece of gaudy jewelry — I have yet to lay claim to a copy. Ain’t it Cool News has seen fit to torment me by running an interview with Scott Dunbier, the editor of the new collections. The piece is surprisingly lengthy and also quite interesting.
Tag Archive for 'Comics'
Wow, it felt really weird finally polishing off this collection…
I scored The Complete Calvin and Hobbes on eBay a couple of months back (at a significantly reduced cover price, of course) and it’s been my bedside companion ever since. I would knock out twenty or thirty pages a night, in no real hurry at all to finish. The collection is the very definition of “light reading” and it always felt like a good way to end my day. An hour or two ago, I read the last ever strip — a Sunday comic from December of 1995. Three hardcover volumes, nearly fifteen hundred pages at a total weight of roughly twenty two pounds (including the fancy slipcase). Now that it’s over, I’m sorry to see it go.
I think I may have commented a time or two on this blog that I didn’t give cartoonist Bill Watterson his proper due back when “Calvin” was still running in newspapers. At the time — to me at least — the strip felt repetitive and dry. Now, having consumed the whole ten year run in a relatively short period of time, I see it for what it is — a disciplined and articulate work by a genuine artist.
Calvin and Hobbes has several things in common with its only slightly more famous forebear, Peanuts. It focuses on a narrow set of circumstances, has a very limited cast of characters and is clearly not meant to be perceived only as what it is on its surface. Both Watterson and Charles Schultz before him don’t intend for us to take their dialogue and comic scenarios featuring children at face value. What we get when we read Calvin or Charlie Brown’s dialogue is a direct window into the worldview of the their respective creators. So, to be clear, we’re not talking Ziggy here. Calvin and Hobbes has a consistent voice and an integrity that sets it apart from the vast majority of the comic strips done over the roughly one hundred year history of the medium. Yes, it has a limited series of repeating motifs, but the overall effect is a fully-realized world with honest-to-God thematic through lines. Some novelists have trouble laying claim to that sort of artistic achievement, let alone lowly cartoonists.
I hesitate to call Wolverine a “steaming pile” for two reasons: 1) Because it’s not so godawful that it deserves that label and 2) Because calling it a steaming pile would, in a strange way, be giving it too much credit. Here’s at least one thing a steaming pile has going in its favor… you tend to remember a steaming pile whereas I doubt very seriously that Wolverine is going to stay with me in any kind of meaningful way. I was bored, and I was occasionally dumbfounded by a silly plot device, but I wasn’t actively offended by this movie at any point. Really, I just wanted the damn thing to end so I could go home and get some shut-eye.
Translation: If you have a burning desire to see Wolverine, do yourself a favor and wait for the DVD. Otherwise, avoid it all together. Read a book, spend some time with friends or family. I guarantee you can find something better to do with your two hours.
There’s been a trend the past few years of publishing the entirety of a classic comic strip’s run in handsome (sometimes “super deluxe”) hardcover books — every single strip, Sunday and daily.They’re in the midst of doing it with Peanuts (no small project that since it ran for more than forty years); Popeye has an ongoing series of books; there’s a deluxe version of The Far Side strips; and there’s even an exhaustive set of — are you ready for this? — Dilbert. Out of all of them, the one that I’ve come closest to buying is The Complete Calvin and Hobbes — a set of three ginormous hardcover books with a combined weight of twenty-two pounds (you read that right — twenty-two). The one I really want though is Bloom County — my hands-down favorite strip of all time. Whenever I see an interview with creator Berke Breathed, he’s asked whether or not BC will ever get the “complete treatment”, and for years he’s said “no, not interested”. Well, apparently he’s had a change of heart because this coming October will mark the release of the first volume of The Bloom County Library. Each book will contain approximately two years worth of strips (for a combined total of five volumes — my math, not theirs: Bloom County ran for roughly nine years). Here’s the press release:
“Bloom County Library to Collect Entire Run of Classic American Comic Strip”
Oh, and here’s that crazy Calvin and Hobbes thing I was talking about…
I was just reading a Newsweek piece wherein the self-consciously “hip” writer insinuated that Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen was a failure on the level of Star Wars Episode I, and Malin Akermen was to Watchmen what Jar Jar Binks is to The Phantom Menace. I find both of these assertions to be ridiculous especially since the writer takes some pains to admit that he was initially an apologist for “Episode I” and he refuses to be caught with his pants down when the inevitable Watchmen backlash comes several months from now. Having seen Watchmen for the first time earlier this evening, I’m hard-pressed to understand just what it is Newsweek-boy is going on about, and I predict that his promised backlash will never come.
As adaptations go, Watchmen is absolutely remarkable in its fidelity to the source material. In fact, it’s almost slavish in its devotion to the 1985 comic book upon which it is based. Where it diverges, it does so for reasons of compression and clarity, but never does it break from the spirit of original writer Alan Moore’s basic vision. Like the graphic novel, the movie version of Watchmen is dark, nihilistic, and often ugly. It is also complicated and challenging — no mean feat for an expensive studio creation about guys in capes. Is the movie perfect? Not by any means, but it is a remarkable achievement. With all of its flaws, it’s full to bursting with clear ambition — ambition to entertain and engage on an adult level. I for one appreciate that.
With the release of Watchmen fast approaching, I decided I’d have a look at this documentary on the visionary writer who conceived the comic book back in the middle 1980s. Anyone who’s followed comics in the past thirty years has heard the name Alan Moore. Not only did he write Watchmen, he also did stints on Swamp Thing and Hellblazer, and created such seminal work as From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Along with Neil Gaiman, he’s the closest thing comics has to a genuine rock star. Moore is an erudite and articulate man with a far-reaching mind and, as is often the case with men like that, he also has a strong inclination toward genuine eccentricity. The Mindscape of Alan Moore is quite literally one hour and twenty minutes of that erudite and eccentric man talking. This is, at once, its greatest virtue and its biggest flaw. I say virtue since Moore is an unquestionably brilliant man capable of going on at length — and with surprising vivacity — about subjects as far-ranging as comic books, education, storytelling, science, religion, culture, and magic and shamanism (with the latter being, quite clearly, a driving personal passion). None of what Moore has to say is boring by any stretch (in fact most of it’s quite fascinating) — but there’s just so damn much of it. Therein lies the aforementioned flaw. It’s hard to listen to anyone go on for nearly ninety minutes regardless of how many topics they cover within that span. This is no fault of Moore’s really — we as simple creaures tend to have limited tolerance for lengthy discourse. Does that mean that I’m going to not recommend that you watch The Mindscape of Alan Moore? Quite the contrary, actually. I think the movie’s quite good and Moore’s a fascinating character. Here is what I recommend you do if you have even a passing interest in Moore or his work: Netflix the disc and watch it in three roughly thirty minute sittings. The meal is too rich to take in all at once (as I did this evening), but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t tasty.
[Revised and Expanded 10.07.08]
THE MARVEL ENCYCLOPEDIA SKIMMED:
Here is book five from my Science Fiction Book Club introductory package. Why would I get a coffee table compendium of superheroes, you ask? Because it retails for forty bucks and I got it for seventeen cents. I’m not going to lie to you though — I didn’t exactly read this one from cover to cover. I picked it up, perused it for an hour or two, and then slid it onto a shelf with all of my hardcover art books. Ultimately, this is a reference volume and a silly one at that. Imagine taking a comic book character with a forty year history and condensing his entire biography into three paragraphs. Many of the entries are positively arcane and I found myself utterly baffled by them. Still, there are a lot of pretty pictures and if I ever find myself needing a refresher on Captain America’s back story, I now know where to look.
ANATHEM ABANDONED:
I started reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson and dropped out after fifty pages or so. Like The Lord of the Rings and Dune, the book attempts to draw the reader into a wholly manufactured world. While both Tolkien and Herbert throw a lot of peculiar ideas and terminology at you, they do it at a comfortable pace and you’re able to slowly acclimate yourself to their new realities. Stephenson, perhaps to his credit, doesn’t hold the reader’s hand. Not only does he throw a lot of idiosyncratic lingo at you, he uses peculiar sentence constructions and you’re forced to read very closely. I suppose some would call Anathem “challenging”, and, while I respect that, it’s not what I’m looking for right now. More than just the fact that the book was difficult to process, it also wasn’t clicking with me on an emotional level. An unhealthy percentage of those first fifty pages was description — of places, of lifestyles, etc. I really didn’t feel like I was getting to know any of the characters — which is weird when you consider that the book is written in first person and I should have at least developed some feeling for the narrator who was ostensibly talking directly to me.
Ah, well. Chalk the abandonment of my fourth Science Fiction Book Club selection up to laziness if you must. I just didn’t have the patience for it.
THE CLONE WARS RECONSIDERED:
I watched the first two episodes of The Clone Wars on Friday night. Given the absolutely horrible theatrical kick-off for this series, my expectations were quite low. Perhaps it was because of this that I was actually pleasantly surprised by what I saw. Don’t get me wrong — the show still isn’t as good as Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D shorts of a few years back, but we’re still talking about a substantial improvement over the movie version. I think the stories are still skewed a bit a young and they have a tendancy to fall back on cliche, but the show could evolve into a decent enough kids’ program given judicious handling. Here’s my advice to the creators to instantly make the show 25% better: Don’t let the droid soldiers talk anymore. Ever. The “comedy” these characters spew out is nausea-inducing.
Recently, I was lucky enough to be gifted with not only a high definition television, but also a Blu-ray player. I’m not sure what I did to so win the favor of the Gadget Gods, but it’s probably better not to question these things.
![Spider-Man - The High Definition Trilogy (Spider-Man / Spider-Man 2 / Spider-Man 3) [Blu-ray]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cFvZy9liL._SL75_.jpg)
Almost by happenstance the first four movies I’ve watched in hi-def have all been adaptations of Marvel Comics. I got a secondhand copy of Spider-man: The High Definition Trilogy and the wife and I peeped out Iron Man courtesy of Netflix. All these re-viewings did was concretize the opinions I already had:
- Spider-man 1 & 2… Quirky films which occasionally skirt the edge of fatal implausibility, but capture the essence of the source material so well that you’re having too good a time to notice.
- Spider-man 3… You had to go and push it too far, didn’t you, Sam? The movie just doesn’t work. Logic has been thrown to the wind and it’s debilitating to the stuff in the flick that does work. If you’re like me, you felt cheated by this one.
- Iron Man… Succeeds largely on the charm of its stars and the believability of its effects. The film won’t win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, but I am unreservedly looking forward to a second installment.
![Iron Man (Ultimate Two-Disc Edition) [Blu-ray]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51hso1X0GJL._SL75_.jpg)
And there you go: my first foray into the world of Blu-ray… a bunch of flicks I’ve already seen. And I’m afraid that won’t be changing anytime soon. The other set I picked up at the secondhand store was Francis Ford Coppola’s new restoration of The Godfather films. Looking forward to that one.
I grew up in the 1970s on steady diet of Marvel Comics. At that time, I knew the name “Jack Kirby”, but I wasn’t a fan. The guy had an eccentric drawing style and the projects he was working on all looked a little silly to me (does anybody remember Devil Dinosaur?). Eventually, as I got to know my history, I came to respect Kirby as one of the founders of the Marvel style. Though he never got the credit he deserved, he and Stan Lee reshaped the medium into what we know it as today. Along the way, they created characters that now bring in hundreds of millions of dollars at your local multiplex. The X-men? Spider-man? The Hulk? Iron Man? Yeah, Jack “King” Kirby had a hand in all of them.
Kirby: King of Comics (another of my Science Fiction Book Club selections) is a damn fine primer on the man’s life and work. Author Mark Evanier was an assistant of Kirby’s for a number of years and obviously knew him well. His loose, anecdotal style is a joy to read and the wall-to-wall illustrations provide irrefutable proof that Kirby was a bona fide treasure — a master stylist and a helluva sequential storyteller. If you were around in the sixties and seventies and you want to know more about this often overlooked genius, you need to read this book. If you’re a young comics fan and you want a better understanding of how comics came to be what they are today then you really need to read this book.
A+.
Rereading Watchmen reawakened my love of comics. The truth is, I would love to always have a stack of good comics by my bedside, but I’m particular and comics as a medium never really seems to live up to its full potential. There’re some positively phenomenal artists out there, but the writing is where things often fall short for me. At their best (as in Watchmen, for instance) comics can stand toe-to-toe with any other form of popular art. That being said, either I don’t get out enough or there are just too many comics that are problematic in the way that they meld their visuals and their narratives.
Which brings me to Hellboy. Talk about problematic. I know I’ve sung the comics’ praises in the past, but I just took a spin through all eight of the trade paperbacks currently available and the experience left me scratching my head. I acquired two of those books recently and it really is in the latter volumes than things start to break down. When I closed volume eight I had to give some real thought to what I’d just read. The lore has become so labyrinthine that I was hard-pressed to suss out the continuity. And the problems don’t just lie with the overarching narrative. There were times when I wasn’t sure what was going on from panel-to-panel because the drawings were too sketchy or the “shot flow” was ill-conceived. All in all, this was a pretty disappointing return trip to the world of Hellboy. Although I still admire creator Mike Mignola’s obvious love for folklore and mythology, I think that his passion is obscuring his judgment. By the end of volume eight, the folkloric references were flying fast and furious and we were hip-deep in special guest stars from world mythology. The net result is positively arcane and lacking in logic.
I’ll still pick up new volumes as they appear, but Hellboy’s on probation with yours truly. I want to start seeing some cohesion and I want to start seeing it soon.
No big mystery here: I saw the trailer for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen feature film before The Dark Knight and decided then and there I needed to revisit the graphic novel. Originally serialized in twelve issues back in 1986 and collected in book form in 1987, Watchmen is writer Alan Moore’s masterwork. The book is subtle and nuanced and, a little over twenty years later, it’s still the closest comics have come to conventional literature. If you’re a comics fan and you’ve never read this book, shame on you — do it now. If you don’t know from comics at all, go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of Watchmen. It will cause you to look at comics in a whole new light. The plot is extremely satisfying and fits together like an extremely elaborate jigsaw puzzle. To get any more specific than that would be doing those of you who haven’t read it a disservice. If you do find yourself intrigued and you buy the book, do yourself a favor and don’t flip through it. Read it from beginning to end without jumping ahead and let the full impact of Moore’s carefully crafted ending wash over you. It really doesn’t get any better than this, people.
Which leads me to raise a small concern. Alan Moore is a well-documented eccentric with a dim view of his works being adapted for the cinema. In fact, he’s so adamantly opposed to the idea that he forgoes any monies earned, bequeathing his share to the respective artists. He reportedly did this on both the adaptation for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which, in my opinion, was butchered in the translation) and for V for Vendetta. He’s said publicly (and I’m paraphrasing, of course) that adapting Watchmen into a movie is a fool’s errand — that it is uniquely of its medium and won’t properly translate. After revisiting the work as I just did, I’m tempted to say that he might be right. Watchmen is a peculiar little creation, cleverly designed to be what it is. I’m afraid that any attempts to transmute it into something else may result in something which is neither fish nor fowl. But I’m getting ahead of myself… No one wants Zack Snyder to succeed in his adaptation as much as me. I wish him all the luck in the world. He’s going to need it.
I saw The Dark Knight again yesterday in an IMAX theater. I won’t belabor things with a full-blown second assessment because I’ve already reviewed the movie here once. Let me sum up quickly: 1) The IMAX print of this film is fricking amazing. If you have an IMAX theater near you, try and catch “Dark Knight” before it amscrays — it’s a totally new experience. The helicopter shots of Gotham in particular are breathtaking. 2) I liked the movie better the second time. When I see something for the first time, I’m drinking it all in and I think I have a tendency to be hyper-critical. The movie’s still a little on the long side, but there’s not much I’d change about it really. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the best superhero movie ever made.
There, I said it.
If you’ve been paying attention at all lately, you’ve heard some of the hype leading into The Dark Knight. Most critics have been saying that Heath Ledger should probably get a posthumous nod for Best Supporting Actor, and a few particularly rabid commentators have dared to suggest that the movie should garner a Best Picture nomination. So, does the actual film live up to all that hype? No, of course it doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Point of fact, it’s very good.
Director Christopher Nolan had a mission in 2005 with Batman Begins: he clearly wanted to give us a more realistic take on the Batman legend. With The Dark Knight, Nolan turns that mission into a crusade. There are no (apparent) CGI buildings darkening Gotham City’s skyline this time out. Batman’s hometown looks and feels like a modern American city (which it is actually — Chicago, to be precise). Given this less art-directed, grittier take on Gotham, the action that takes place at street level is more realistic as well. The set pieces in this movie feel like they could have come out of a more mainstream heist or crime film — a heist or crime film not featuring a guy dressed as a bat and another guy dressed as a clown. Overall, I found The Dark Knight to be very consistent across the board in terms of the tone of the action and drama and the look and feel of the visuals. That could be a problem for some people, however. In fact, the friend I saw the movie with considered the seriousness (and, let’s face it, bleakness) of the picture to be antithetical to his expectations. In his world, Batman stories have a sense of color, panache, derring-do and, well, fun. He also worried that this new outing didn’t really have a point of entry for kids — a fair chunk of the character’s target demo. While my friend’s take on things wasn’t at all where my mind was at when the flick was unspooling, I concede that he has some valid points. Of course, all of this is subjective, but your enjoyment of The Dark Knight may depend greatly on your expectations of the character — who’s had a widely varied career in his, what, nearly sixty years of existence. There have been numerous takes on The Batman, and “Dark Knight” may not jibe with your past favorites.
As for me, I do think this is one of the top five superhero movies done to date. Despite its flaws — it’s too long, a couple of plot points don’t mesh with the whole, the script gets a little too free with broadcasting its thematic stances as the climax nears, etc. — The Dark Knight had a lot for me to like. But Hell, show me a movie that doesn’t have some flaws. Taking that into account, color me impressed by Chris Nolan’s sophomore outing with the character. Go see The Dark Knight, but give a thought to my friend’s experience — factor in your own expectations (if you have any) and bear in mind that the word “dark” is in the title for a reason.
Let me just say up front that I’m a fan of the Mike Mignola comic series. When Hellboy is on, it truly is one of the best comics in the field. In many ways, I felt that Guillermo Del Toro’s first feature film based on the material missed the essence of the books. The folkloric quality and the loopiness just wasn’t there. A recent re-viewing of the DVD (to prepare myself for the sequel) only served to confirm this — in fact, I think I dug the movie even less after watching it again.
Well, I’m happy to say that Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is a substantial improvement over the first film. The actors all seem more comfortable in their roles and Del Toro has (seemingly) surrendered himself to the gestalt of the movie’s universe and pulled out all of the stops. “Golden Army” is a fun movie and I’d hazard a guess that the director and his cast had a good time making it. It’s that very spirit of fun which may be off-putting to some people, however. This is a movie that does not take itself seriously at all. The tone — with its frequent doses of odd-ball humor — will probably not work for everyone. That odd-ball humor is mixed with some well-staged action and moments of real gravitas, however, and — for me at least — it was a deft juggling act. My hat’s off to Del Toro this time out. The movie still isn’t a literal adaptation of the comics, but it stands now as its own thing — cohesive and entertaining.
You guys remember Animatrix — the collection of japanimation shorts designed to bridge the gap between the first and second “Matrix” films? Well, Warner Brothers has gone and given the same treatment to Batman. Batman: Gotham Knight is (supposedly) the connective tissue between Batman Begins and the upcoming The Dark Knight. Before I go any further, let me just say that this is utter nonsense — nothing but marketing hype. “Gotham Knight” (a collection of six animated shorts which themselves are only tenuously connected) seems to have little or nothing to do with Christopher Nolan’s two live action features. Forgetting for a moment the supposed bridging aspect of “Gotham Knight”, it’s overall quality is pretty variable. Each of the shorts was done by a different Japanese studio. Some of them are okay. Some of them are butt-ugly. The writing in places is quite good and in others it’s bland and uninteresting. Actually, the first short (which has nothing whatever to do with the subsequent five) is a truly lousy story. It’s a plot they did on Batman The Animated Series fifteen years ago and, of course, they did it much, much better. I thought I was in for a crappy evening after that first segment. It got much better, but I still feel like I could’ve taken a pass on the whole show and been none the worse for it. Batman: Gotham Knight isn’t bad, nor is it good. You can probably find better things to do with your time.
[The one undeniable upside to "Gotham Knight" is the fact that Batman/Bruce Wayne are voiced by Kevin Conroy -- the same guy who played those roles in the aforementioned "Animated Series".]
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