comics
Free comics!
This has been going for a while, but I only discovered it last week. Dark Horse comics have moved their old Dark Horse Presents series onto Myspace. I’m pretty sceptical of reading ‘normal’ comics (as opposed to strip style webcomics) on a screen, but the short 3-4 page format actually suits it pretty well.
All the Dark Horse favourites are there if you search through the back issues, including a Firefly comic, a few Buffy ones (some by Joss Whedon, some by Jane Espenson) and I think I saw a Dr. Horrible one too. There’s also some Hellboy ones and the very cool Mike Mignola comic ‘Witchfinder: Murderous Intent’ which is what got me here in the first place. Over all it’s well worth an explore and a good way to get some experience with a few different comics without having to shell out money for a trade paperback.
Holy Crap! Disney buys Marvel
Read all about it here. I’d potentially be very afraid if I was still reading X-Men comics.
Comics and the movie biz
On a plane yesterday I watched the really, really terrible Wolverine movie. I mean the worst comic movie I’ve seen in years – like comic movies used to be. That said it reminded me how there are some pretty cool things about Wolverine as a character.
But what to buy if I wanted to get into Wolverine? This link is all about how the comics business interacts and fails to win from successful movie tie-ins. And a key reason is a lack of obvious starting points for characters – especially characters that have been going since before I was even born. This is similar to the complaints that are made about the lack of a good introductory RPG – attempts Chris Pramas and Green Ronin are trying to solve with their Dragon Age RPG.
I don’t have the time or inclination to get seriously into superhero comics, especially big name ones from the big two publishers, so I’m glad the films like Iron Man, the first 2 X-Men and Spiderman movies and the recent Batman movies are getting made – they allow me to get my big super hero fix without spending wads of cash on comics of variable-quality comics. I just hope that they re better than Wolverine…
Bone is coming back
According to the AV Club. Excellent!
More cool links
Two cool links for today – one comic related and one golden oldie PC game related:
- This is all over the net by now, but it’s still pretty cool – a Peanuts/Sin City mashup. Make sure to cliuck through for the second page.
- Gamers With Jobs have posted a wonderful tribute to the original Wing Commander games. I spent so many hours playing these things as a kid – it’s great to bring back the memories!
Watchmen – I watched them.
So last night I finally got to see Watchmen.
It was good – not great, but not horrible and certainly the best Alan Moore adaptation so far done. While totally overscored, the acting was pretty good, the look/design of the film was astonishingly loyal to the comic, as was the casting and direction. Most importantly, while the plot was shorn of side stories, it was also (with one fairly major exception) ripped almost entirely from the page.
But that’s a big part of the problem. When you film a book you are interpreting prose description visually – one of the reasons that the Lord of the Rings movies were so loved by so many people was because they managed to make our imaginations live on screen. the Watchmen film just took the pointers from a visual source and recreated them on screen. And ultimately that seems a little empty. Why bother to do that? I’ve already seen the comic and the illustration that accompanies the plot – I don’t really need to see it again, especially when there is so little reinterpretation of anything – themes, characters or story.
Where they did change things, there were mixed results. The comic is much less violent than the book. At least one major and brutal fight scene in the film is covered in four cells in the comic and the violence is largely implied. And from the evidence of the comic, Laurie doesn’t stab a gang member in the neck with his own knife and then use his body to shield herself from gun fire.
The violence in the comic is much more sparing and with the exception of Rorschach and the Comedian’s sections of the story, actually fairly tame. It’s two-fisted silver age superhero comic book stuff, not the sort of violence that came after Watchmen. And violence in the movie is graphic – to me, it seemed out of character for Nite Owl and most of the other characters. The violence was well done and fun to watch (in the fight scenes at least – Rorschach and the Comedian’s violence was largely horrifying), but it jarred with me thematically.
That leads me to another point. To me, Watchmen is largely a mediation on what the world would be like if people really had dressed up in costumes and fought crime. What sort of people would do something like that? And what effect could it have on the world, especially if some of them really did have super powers? Perhaps necessarily, the movie doesn’t delve into that, but there’s not a whole lot of mediation on the thematic themes of the story.
One thing I did really like about the movie was how much it made me appreciate the comic. I’m now three ‘chapters’ in to my reread and I’d never previosuly noticed how filmic some of the scene changes and the like in the original work were.
It also did manage to take a sprawling, complex and dense plot and par it back to essentials. The ending, as has been widely reported, has been changed. It needed to be because the original ending is reliant on pages and pages of foreshadowing and sie plotting that needed to be cut form the film, but the new ending is clever, well put together and thematically appropriate which was probably the biggest surprise of the whole evening.
Watchmen was a good action film based on vastly better material – as Ciaran said as we left ‘if it had to be done, I’m glad it was done like that’. I’m glad I saw it.
“These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored”
In Wired here.
I can remember Willis O’Brien’s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes, I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because, frankly, I could have gotten someone, a passerby on the street, who could have gotten the same effect if you’d given them half a million dollars to do it.
In his own writing on these subjects, and any other chance he gets, Moore can be a bit ranty. But Adam Rogers keeps him nicely on track, while allowing him to speak his own mind – maybe he just got him on a good day? Anyway, Moore speaks about Watchmen, movies in general, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, cultural criticism through differnet mediums and a few other things besides.
Brisbane geek shopping
I’m in Brisbane for a day for work and thought I’d take a break this afternoon and check out a couple of geek-related shops: Ace Comics & Games and Pulp Fiction. This is the first of my travel related shop reviews – I’ll do them as I go to visit places but please note that they’re just impressions from (usually) a single visit. › Continue reading
Here I am, thank you Ma’am
Thanks Soph.
As I became a father for the second time only a few months ago, my ability to keep up with table-top RPGs has been pretty limited. But I still come across interesting things from time to time and I’m going to be playing a new game in the New Year, so I’m intending to post occasionally on matters relating to all kinds of geek subjects – comics, books, and games of all sorts: board, electronic and table-top.
As an introduction, I thought I’d do a slight best of. It’s not actually a best of, as I haven’t played enough of anything to really judge, but it’s probably the things I’ve enjoyed most in 2008 across a number of categories.