Comic-Con movie news

While I would like to experience the San Diego Comic-Con sometime, I may have been able to follow more news from assorted media than if I had to deal with the more than 100,000 people at the genre entertainment convention last week (23 to 26 July 2009). I was disappointed that so much coverage still seemed to be snickering at the attendees, characterizing them as geeks, nerds, or worse.

Yes, most of the fanboys at such events are young men, but we don’t all live in our parents’
basements, have questionable personal hygiene, fear women, or lack productive jobs. In fact, most of my peers who are fans of fantasy, science fiction, horror, anime, and superheroes are well-adjusted professionals, often with families. People who play videogames, gamble, or are avid sports fans are still more socially acceptable than the millions of us who read comics, play role-playing games, and make the movies adapted from them profitable.

Speaking of genre film, the big Hollywood studios have all but taken over Comic-Con,
using it to preview and promote their upcoming releases. With the average price of tickets at $10 and climbing, studios are trying to find ways to compete with home theaters, online file-sharing, and ever-more-fragmented audiences and attention spans. As a result, they’re playing it safe, adapting known intellectual properties; using gimmicks like 3-D, computer imagery, and IMAX for more and more flicks; and relying on big-budget “tentpole” summer fare to boost their box office.

Still, for all of the conservatism of producers, good films are still being made. We’re still
riding the latest wave of movies with costumed superheroes, as second-stringers such as Western antihero Jonah Hex are portrayed in live action, often for the first time. I thought the previews of Iron Man 2 looked promising, even if they and the cast didn’t inspire
fans as much as when director Jon Favreau brought the first movie to Comic-Con.

As for Tony Stark, star Robert Downey Jr. can soon also be seen in Guy Ritchie’s action-oriented take on Sherlock Holmes. I’ll probably enjoy it as a steampunk/alternate
Victorian-era history rather than a faithful rendition of one of my favorite fictional characters.

Nostalgia is also behind Seth Rogen’s upcoming Green Hornet. I’ve seen reruns of the 1960s television show featuring Bruce Lee, and the “Black Beauty” was a contemporary of the classic Adam West Batmobile. I was a fan of the early 1980s Tron — not only did I play the videogame in arcades, but I have fond memories of using bicycles and Frisbees for “light cycles and deadly discs” with neighborhood kids! Thus, the trailer with genre vet Jeff Bridges looked exciting to me, even if I had to explain to Janice why.

Fantasy enthusiasts can look forward to the whimsical (and surprisingly melancholy,
from the preview) Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonzes’ live-action rendition of the Maurice Sendak book. I reviewed Hayao Miyazaki‘s Ponyo a few months ago, and the American English-dubbed version of the animated fable should be worth screening in a cinema. The animated Mr. Fox could also be good, since Coraline recently demonstrated that stop-motion is still a good fit for fantasy. I may not be the biggest fan of Tim Burton’s quirky style, but it does seem well-suited to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Fantasist Terry Gilliam’s Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus should be able to overcome the untimely death of actor Heath Ledger.

In addition, The Chronicles of Narnia [3]: Voyage of the Dawn Treader has started filming. Let’s hope that Guillermo Del Toro and Peter Jackson can make their two-picture Hobbit continue to do justice to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth as the Lord of the Rings trilogy did.

In terms of literature, science fiction was my first love before I discovered other subgenres. District 9 looks like an explicit parable about apartheid, and like last week’s Torchwood: Children of Earth, it shows that ordinary humans can be as villainous as any alien menace. If you take classic space opera, add dollops of the ever-popular cyberpunk, and use state-of-the-art visual effects, you might have something resembling James Cameron’s Avatar (not to be confused with M. Night Shyamalan’s Last Airbender). Somewhere between Burton‘s fantasy and postapocalyptic dystopia is the upcoming stop-motion “9,” which also looks interesting.

I’m less optimistic about Roland Emmerich adapting Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, a
speculation about future history and the rise and fall of galactic civilization. Asimov‘s intellectual stories aren’t a good fit for Emmerich’s usual pyrotechnics. Many more announcements were made at Comic-Con, but I’ve only mentioned the ones I found interesting.

Coming soon: Comic-Con TV, comics, and game news!

Comics Wednesday, July 2009

Friends, please note that my blog is no longer available at Yahoo 360. You can find it at MySpace.com or under my “edemaitre” Yahoo Profile. As promised, here are some of my thoughts on recent comic books.

As I mentioned in my previous posting, the San Diego Comic-Con is this week. While I
haven’t yet made the hajj to the largest annual genre/popular culture event in the U.S., I have closely followed coverage of it for the past few years. Movies, comic books and graphic novels, action figures, television shows, games, and more are announced or previewed at this convention. I hope to get to smaller shows here in the Boston area, such as November’s Super MegaFest.

In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying DC’s Wednesday Comics, a 12-issue experiment in weekly comics on tabloid newsprint. The quality of the writing varies, but the art is
impressive, and it reminds me of lying on the floor reading Prince Valiant in the Sunday funnies.

DC‘s big summer storyline crossing over several titles is Green Lantern: Blackest Night, which addresses the temporary nature of death among costumed superheroes (and villains). Although I don’t plan to spend even more on comics than I do now, it has gotten good reviews so far.

I have continued picking up the Batman family of titles, as Bruce Wayne is presumed dead and former Robin/Nightwing Dick Grayson has taken up the mantle. I wasn’t a big fan of Grant Morrison’s trippy run, but he, Paul Dini, and company have upped their game with the creative freedom granted by the temporary change in lead characters.

Similarly, Marvel Comics is winding down its run of Bucky Barnes as Captain America with the imminent return of Steve Rogers. Unlike the regular shakeups for Superman, Spider-Man, or the X-Men, Rogers has been gone for a few years now of continuity (fictional history), and the espionage/thriller tone of his title remains engaging. I’ve been avoiding most team-based Marvel and DC books lately because of overly convoluted continuities and gimmicky crossovers designed to sell more issues.

Speaking of alternate histories, I’m still catching up on collected editions. I’ve recently read Dark Horse’s convenient omnibuses of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and I look forward to getting to the next installment of the steampunk The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (not the weak movie adaptation), the metahuman procedural Powers, and the political Ex Machina. Dynamite, which I’ve praised previously for its handling of licensed properties such as Buck Rogers, will also be handling the next batch of Stargate comics.

Typically, fiction is adapted from print to television or movie, but in the case of Nickelodeon’s excellent Avatar: the Last Airbender, a fantasy cartoon is being adapted to a live-action film series directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Last Airbender shouldn’t be confused with James Cameron’s upcoming science fiction movie Avatar.

The first previews and still photos of the young cast have appeared online. I sympathize with those who feel that Last Airbender should have had more actors of Asian descent in its cast, I’m cautiously optimistic. We’ll have to wait and see whether planned movie reboots such as Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, Astro Boy, and Green Hornet are closer to Watchmen or to Dragonball in quality.

Summer SFTV

The summer 2009 genre television season has picked up, including SyFy’s lighter conspiracy series Warehouse 13, TNT’s returning capers on Leverage, and Disney XD’s Silver Age-style Spectacular Spider-Man. Because of time constraints, I’ve dropped the computer-animated Iron Man and Bible-inspired Kings from my viewing schedule, and although several friends have recommended Lost, I’m leery of making a commitment to yet another continuity-driven show.

This week promises an embarrassment of riches, with BBC America showing the well–received Torchwood: Children of Earth science fiction/horror miniseries and the beginning of the end of David Tennant as the eponymous time traveler in Doctor
Who: Planet of the Dead. I’ve been a fan of that long-running franchise since high school and look forward to the good doctor’s next incarnation.

In addition, G4 will be covering the annual San Diego Comic-Con, which has become more noteworthy lately for film previews than for comic books and graphic novels. On DVD, I’m looking forward to the releases of Watchmen, The Middleman, Coraline, Pushing Daisies
Season 2, and Green Lantern: First Flight. I have yet to see Hulk vs., Quantum of Solace, and Tale of Desperaux.

9 June 2009: Comics musings

In the past month or so, I’ve been able to catch up on reading and filing comic books and graphic novels. Here are some of my observations.

The trend of adapting licensed properties to comic books has continued, just as Hollywood keeps raiding the medium — and not just superheroes, but also other genres — for ideas. I’ve already mentioned the solid translations of Conan/Red Sonja, the Lone Ranger/Zorro, and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer/Angel, as well as Star Trek, Star Wars, and Farscape. They’re being joined by revivals of Sherlock Holmes, the Muppets, Doctor Who, and Buck Rogers.

Unlike some past comic versions, most of these are being done with reverence for the characters and stories of the source material, and the art and writing is nearly as good as
reading a classic book or watching the original TV shows they’re based on. Other independently published books that I recommend include anthropomorphic animal fantasy Mouse Guard (in the same spirit as Watership Down and Redwall), the noirish Powers, and the surreal Umbrella Academy.

In more mainstream superhero titles, I’ve drifted off from DC Comics‘ “Blackest Night” and Marvel’s “Dark Reign” back to monthly issues based on individuals or smaller teams rather than crossovers. Although Batman and Superman aren’t even appearing in their own titles right now, the writing has been pretty good, as it has been for Captain America and the Flash. In the case of most of these superheroes, former sidekicks have stepped in to replace Bruce Wayne as Batman and Steve Rogers as Captain America, while the Silver Age icon Barry Allen has returned to take back the mantle of the Flash from Wally West. Justice Society of America and Titans have also illustrated the appeal of so-called legacy characters.

As a longtime fan of Green Arrow and Black Canary, I’m disappointed at the cancellation
of Birds of Prey, which focused on the DC Universe‘s superheroines. However, as part of Grant Morrison‘s trippy replacement Batman storylines, perhaps Gotham Girls will be good. Of course, most big changes are only temporary in these fictional universes, as writers must balance decades of continuity with most readers’ desire for their favorite characters to be unaging.

Despite continuing speculation about the imminent demise of print, costumed vigilantes are also doing well in other media, with Smallville, Batman and the Brave and the Bold, Wolverine and the X-Men, and a new computer-animated Iron Man on television, as well as X-Men Origins: Wolverine starting off the summer movie season. I haven’t yet seen the revisionist origin story of Wolverine, partly because of mixed reviews and partly because of the recent glut of mutants, metahumans, and antiheroes in theaters.

On the other hand, Batman and the Brave and the Bold continues to impress with its tribute to the sensibilities of the 1950s and 1960s, and in the coming weeks, Disney XD’s energetically retro Spectacular Spider-Man will begin its second television season. I’m also looking forward to direct-to-video releases such as the upcoming Green Lantern: First Flight.

Entry for March 31, 2009: Wonder Woman!

On Saturday, 21 March 2009, Janice and I picked up my subscription at New England Comics in Norwood, Massachusetts. In addition, we watched the new direct-to-DVD release of Wonder Woman. As with the retro Justice League: New Frontier and anime-style Batman: Gotham Knight, Wonder Woman is intended for an older audience than recent television cartoons based on DC Comics, such as the charmingly campy Batman and the Brave and the Bold.

As one of the oldest and best-known costumed superheroes, Wonder Woman is considered one of the DC Universe‘s “big three,” along with Superman and Batman, but hasn’t been adapted into other media as often. I do remember her role in the Super Friends cartoon and the Lynda Carter television series back in the late 1970s, but even George Perez’s reboot after Crisis on Infinite Earths didn’t help Wonder Woman much in terms of popularity.

Fortunately, the recent Timm/Dini Justice League (now in reruns on Boomerang) helped revive interest in DC’s characters beyond print. While related big-budget movies have stalled — again, with the notable exceptions of Batman and Superman — at least the new video does justice to Princess Diana of Themyscira. On a side note, the actor who might have played Batman in George Miller’s Justice League had a cameo in this week’s episode of supernatural slacker comedy Reaper.

Wonder Woman retells the first superheroine’s mythic origin, from her creation from clay by Queen Hippolyta to her Amazon training to her departure for “man’s world” with U.S. pilot Steve Trevor. Her main opponents are petty Greek gods and the all-to-human vices of dishonesty, sexism, and war. The animation is solid, and the fight scenes earn the PG-13 rating for violence.

The voice talent, picked by DC animation veteran Andrea Romano, is very good: Kerri Russell of Felicity and Waitress is the young princess, Virginia Madsen of Sideways is stern Hippolyta, and Firefly/Serenity and Castle‘s Nathan Fillion is a man in need of rescuing as Steve Trevor. Fans of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Spider-Man 2 will recognize Alfred Molina as the evil Ares, and Sin City‘s Rosario Dawson is the tough Artemis.

The writers, Michael Jelenic and Gail Simone, not only respect William Moulton Marston’s creation but also incorporate elements from more recent comic book storylines, having major battle scenes erupt in modern-day Washington D.C. I’d give Wonder Woman a 9 out of 10, or an A-.

The DVD’s extras include some insights into the production of the movie, episodes from Justice League Unlimited, documentaries about the history of Wonder Woman, and a preview of a promising direct-to-video Green Lantern. The documentaries were a bit repetitive, and I would have liked to see more about the television show’s effect on popular culture and comic book storylines since the Perez run. I do hope that the ambassador of Paradise Island will return to prominence in both print and live-action.

In other animation, I enjoyed the first season finale of Star Wars: the Clone Wars on the Cartoon Network. Speaking of DC heroines, Zatanna, the mistress of magic, made a guest appearance on Smallville last week. Janice and I also started watching our DVDs of the Kirk Alyn Superman serials from the late 1940s/early ’50s. This past weekend, we screened Monsters vs. Aliens, which I’ll review in my next blog post.