* Rest in peace, Bettie Page. She was beautiful!
* I linked to this interview with Hans Rickheit a while ago, but since he’s long been my number-one “altcomix cartoonist who should be a bigger deal,” I really ought to emphasize that he’s apparently doing a graphic novel for Fantagraphics. Outstanding news.
* Doomsday: The Series? When was this announced? Was it announced? (Via Rickey Purdin.)
* The Battlestar Galactica webisodes start today!
* Final Crisis #5 was really good, and you can read annotations thereof by Douglas Wolk and David Uzumeri.
* Ben Morse Rickey Purdin suggests 10 things Hellboy and the BPRD could have done instead of what they did in Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
* Quote of the day:
When you do a comic book that seems so easily translatable into film and television, the things film and television does very well begin to expose the comic as unsatisfactory when it comes to aping those elements….Actors have compensating virtues when it comes to suspension of belief. They’re real, they have a natural physicality, they bring an incalculable number of tics and idiosyncrasies to the table. This comic misses all of those things, and seems exposed for it.
—Tom Spurgeon on Boom!’s The Remnant. This passage struck me because it’s exactly what I thought about those first Joss Whedon-scripted issues of the Buffy Season Eight comic book.
* I could read Jon Hastings talk about different kinds of action movie filmmaking all the livelong day. I suppose I do have to say that I think that in both the nu-Bond and Bourne movies, I’m not seeing the lack of sense of spacial integrity/intelligibility that Jon is seeing. I don’t think I ever had a hard time figuring out who was who or what was happening where. Anyway. Where does Rambo fit in your taxonomy, Jon?
‘preciate the link love, STC, but Rickey did the Hellboy post, not me.
Yeah, Whedon’s Buffy comics are a disappointment. The same type of dialog that the actors brought to life just sits there on the page.
Re: Doomsday: The Series
With Marina Sirtis!
I think there’s a similar argument to be made for the idea that characters who draw their roots in comics can’t be fully adapted to a medium like film and retain all their best qualities. I know this is a lame example of what I’m talking about, but I had a professor in college who used to joke that they’d never find an actor to play Superman because they’d never find an actor with blue hair. Batman’s white eyes present a similar visual problem.
Ben: Fixed! Thanks!
Jim: I’m a little out of my element here since I’m not a Whedon TV fan, but what did you think of that Brian K. Vaughan Buffy comic arc? I remember a lot of the Buffy fans at Wizard saying that his stuff “felt” more like the TV show than Whedon’s did, because he was better at writing the comic as a comic rather than as a TV script that was then being drawn. I didn’t have anything to compare it to but it did feel that way to me too.
Brian: I KNOW!
Kiel: I think ultra-faithful adaptations like Sin City and 300 and (potentially) Watchmen make this question even more interesting, because I do know people who feel like it’s the flipside of the Buffy comic situation, where lifting imagery and composition directly from the page doesn’t work on the screen. So far I disagree, though.
I haven’t read the BKV stuff. Just that first TPB, which I was unable to finish.
The weird thing is that I like Whedon’s X-Men stuff. Or I did, when it was still being published on a regular basis. It’s got similar Buffyish dialog, but at no point am I confused as to what’s going on. It’s just a good ol’ above-average X-Men comic, which I guess is damning with faint praise.
Hi Sean –
In terms of technique, I think Rambo is closer to the movies I’ve put in Branch 2 (esp. Saving Private Ryan).
What interests me about Rambo is that it is the work of a “Blood Poet” – Jake Horsley’s term for filmmakers like Peckinpah, DePalma, the Scorsese of taxi Driver, Tarantino, who make movies with an “unresolved” attitude towards violence (in Peckinpah violence is beautiful and horrible, in Tarantino funny and horrible).
I want to write more about it at some point.