This is a nice coincidence: Neil Gaiman writes the "final" Batman story. Should be good.
Gaiman: "When I was 5, I was in a car with my dad and he mentioned that there was this Batman TV show in America about a man who dressed up in a costume and fought crime. The only bat I ever knew was a cricket bat, so what I thought he looked like was rather odd, based on that. Months later, the series hit the U.K., and I remember watching and being affected by it. Really worrying, genuinely worrying, on a deep primal level, "Will he be OK?" That is the way it was with every deathtrap. If I missed the end of an episode, I'd get my friends to tell me he was OK."
Personally I think it's a stupid choice for a publisher to throw away seventy years of continuous numbering. You can't replace it, and I don't see how you gain very much except for temporary publicity. I was even talking about that recently with somebody, about when they did it with Superman, just on the say-so of writer/penciller John Byrne. (It was Mike J, and he said "that's like if Leica rebooted the numbering of their cameras.") (Apropos Mike, he has just made a fun post inspired by a video I blogged recently.)
It's odd, I can't remember reading Alan Moore's "Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?". It seems incredible that I should not have read it. But perhaps it was before I really became aware of Moore, I have to admit I was slightly behind the cutting edge in the seventies, I was still an X-Men fan. (I also didn't get the first half dozen issues of Sandman, because the art and coloring didn't appeal. Dammit.)
That Gaiman interview is good.
"So I went out to Hollywood with beautiful artwork and toys and did a presentation, talked them through the storyline. We talked about what it was and who the characters were, and how you could do it in three, four or seven movies. I got to the end, very proud of myself for encapsulating 2,000 pages of comics into a giant visual pitch, and what I got was, "Jeff and I had lunch and were talking about the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises, and we agreed that each was successful because they had a clearly defined bad guy. Does The Sandman have a clearly defined bad guy?"
I said, "No it doesn't," and they said, "Thanks for coming!" They know that even if it is one of the jewels in comics' crown, it wasn't designed to be a film. "
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Coraline the book was very good, and it seems the movie is too. More about it here, including intro video.
5 comments:
I think with the likes of Wormtongue, Wormtail, Snape, Saruman, etc etc, it is easy to see both LotR and HP have a lot of ambiguous and weakly defined bad guys.
Sure there is Sauron and Voldemort, but really, I mean Malfoy just disappears towards the end.
I was even talking about that recently with somebody, about when they did it with Superman, just on the say-so of writer/penciller John Byrne.If you're talking about the '86 reboot, I doubt that was on Byrne's say-so.
It's odd, I can't remember reading Alan Moore's "Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?". It seems incredible that I should not have read it.You didn't miss anything. It was awful. A bunch of people die, and die stupidly. It's unworthy of Moore. It might be more in the style of today's "dark," "gritty" comic books but was not the way to end the series as it had existed up to that point, which had never had much to do with reality. No one dies for issue after issue after issue, and suddenly all these people snuff it? It was really lame. Too bad it was also Curt Swan's...er, swan song (sorry).
That's odd, Neil Gaiman seems to think it was awesome.
That's great. For him.
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