Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Tonight let’s talk about movies and shows that are based on characters that originated in comic books.
Love them? Hate them? Should they stay true to character or is it okay if the original stories and characters are jumping off points?
Has anything big as big as Black Panther was 5 years ago?
Speaking of jumping off points, this post is wide open for anything related to comic book characters. Discussion need not be limited to the small bit of framing supplied here. Which is always true of Medium Cool, but particularly so for this one.
A Ghost to Most
I, for one, am done with comic book characters and movies. I could do with some real stories about real heroes. But I’m old.
Geoduck
Time for another attempt at a Howard the Duck movie! (He did actually cameo in one of the Marvel movies.)
gwangung
Um, I’m also old. But I’m always down for well told stories, whether the figures are human or larger than life. There’s a craving for larger than life, hopeful figures in all people and part of my artistic mission is to create them, particularly for those parts of American society that haven’t had them before.
That’s why Black Panther hit so hard and so big; having a hero where there were so few before, having a hero that looked like particular people that have almost always been shown as sidekicks or actual villains is huge…and drives home the point to other parts of the community that have ALWAYS had heroes that looked like them that it’s possible for heroes to come in every form and color
@Geoduck:
Alas…I don’t think it’ll ever work without the touch of his creator, Steve Gerber…
geg6
Hate them. The only good ones are now ancient: Superman with Christopher Reeves and Batman with Michael Keaton. Have tried to watch a few of the Marvel films but I can’t get through more than about 20 minutes before wanting to die of boredom. Never was a Marvel fan, even as a kid. Gotta say, it was a revelation to watch Keaton as Batman. I’d watch him read the phone book.
Urza
Theres talk of Wolverine and Tobey Maguire’s Spider Man teaming up in the MCU, probably in Secret Wars.
Starfish
There was a big push for the new Deadpool and Wolverine movie, and I enjoy both Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. But it seemed like the actual humans were lukewarm about the movie itself.
I loved this TikTok where a fan is discussing a reference in the movie that was an in-joke for the comicbook nerds about one comic book artist’s ability to draw feet. I love when people get into the tiny details of things that I know nothing about.
strange visitor (from another planet)
i don’t think there’s any such thing as comic book movie fatigue. i think there’s bad movie fatigue.
Tim in Cape Fear
The wife and I haven’t followed network series for some time now, but “Agents of SHIELD” and “Gotham” were right up there. “Wandavision” was a lot of fun too.
Steve in the ATL
@A Ghost to Most:
@geg6:
I concur. Used to enjoy going to the movies from time to time, but now it’s all comic books, on offs turned into franchises, and rereleases of movies I saw 25+ years ago.
No wonder your industry is dying!
JWR
Batman (1966 TV series), and Batman The Movie (1966)
That is all. ;)
kalakal
Men in Black was good fun
The first Blade movie was fun too
The Mask was rather silly but enjoyable
Road to Perdition is pretty good
And I will always enjoy the pure silliness of Flash Gordon
Steve in the ATL
@strange visitor (from another planet):
I dissent. There most certainly is, whether the movies are good or bad. There is plenty of other material out there to give a chance to.
WaterGirl
@Tim in Cape Fear:
I loved Marvel’s Agents of Shield and The Flash on network TV, though The Flash started to lose me in the last year or two, and i quit watching. I really liked Arrow, too.
I had never seen any of the comics, so there was likely a lot that flew over my head, but they were enjoyable.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish: I greatly enjoyed Deadpool & Wolverine as an extended goof on comic-book movies, comic books, Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox, the various Marvel movie universes and superheroes in general, but all of the humor in it except for a few broad gags was so inside that I would absolutely not recommend it to anyone who isn’t heavily into this stuff already.
scav
@strange visitor (from another planet): Similarly, only there can also be what I’ll call left-over fatigue, which is “not ANOTHER” movie of this <insert genre> again!
ETA: Even to the point of shit, not another fast talking dame.
lamh47
@Starfish: I enjoyed the Hugh of it all, but it’s not one I plan to rewatch again in theatres. Maybe I’ll catch it on streaming.
Chris
To avoid the obvious ones:
I enjoyed the Tintin movie from a decade ago and wish there had been more of them. I also wish more Franco-Belgian comics got their own Hollywood movies, but that would require them to be better known in America, and for whatever reason they never really made it big over here, unlike Japanese comics.
lamh47
Black Panther and the sequel are still top tier for me.
hueyplong
I’d pick 1989 Batman and 2008 The Dark Knight, and pretty much nothing else. Not a comic book guy, so my vote shouldn’t count as much as those of actual fans.
Matt McIrvin
@Steve in the ATL: The superhero-movie era is winding down–you can feel it. The aforementioned Deadpool & Wolverine is to some extent a commentary on that.
We’re back in an age when some of the big blockbusters can be things that are not comic-book movies. But it’s a slow process.
Suzanne
I’m bored of all the comic book movies.
I like mysteries, thrillers, and spy movies, I want more of those.
kalakal
@Chris: I enjoyed the Tintin film but I’m a Tintin fan. I’ve never seen the Asterix ones
Chris
For the superhero comics:
The X-Men trilogy from the 2000s is what got me interested in the superhero genre in the first place and will probably always be my favorite. The 2010s movies were hit or miss, but I really liked the first three, including, to most people’s horror, the third.
Spiderman and Dark Knight trilogies had two strong movies followed by a terrible third. MCU is comfort food, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
Starfish
@Matt McIrvin: Oh! So that is what is going on.
I will occasionally watch a comic book movie and look for the Stan Lee cameos in the ones before he died.
Disney can wring all joy out of anything (Star Wars) in the effort to create product lines that appeal to boys.
I will also read comic books, graphic novels, etc., but none of the ones I like are about superheroes.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Steve in the ATL: yeah, and more than most likely, it’s an adaptation of something.
it’s extraordinarily rare for completely fresh conceptions being made into films and it’s been like that waaay before the “comic book” film era (allegedly) started with the raimi spider-mans and the singer x-films…
yet the thing people forget on the regular is that comics aren’t a genre, they’re a form of media. there is not a story told about any topic on the planet that cannot be covered in comic book form.
so yeah, again. not comic movie fatigue, bad movie fatigue. if it was a damn fine film, you wouldn’t feel fatigued.
Craig
I remember loving the Black Panther comics when I was a kid. T’challa was just so cool, open, and elegant. He was unlike any other characters. Glad that Ryan Coogler got that in developing the movie.
Frankensteinbeck
@Starfish:
LIEFELD. That shit destroyed my favorite comics because he couldn’t stand to work on female characters who weren’t slutty eye-candy and men who weren’t edgy and dark. He is the apotheosis of Marvel’s turn to Bro Comics.
I haven’t even seen the movie, but there’s only one artist whose reluctance to draw feet is an industry wide joke.
Steve in the ATL
@Matt McIrvin: great—so let’s do ten more Jurassic park and ghostbusters movies!
Geoduck
@JWR: “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”
Matt McIrvin
@lamh47: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever did pretty well for a post-pandemic Marvel movie, and I thought it was pretty good, despite being faced with a seemingly unsolvable problem in the death of its logical star.
Also… sue me, I enjoyed The Marvels. It was doomed by having so many characters and situations mostly introduced in Disney+ TV shows, but I had actually seen those shows.
Steve in the ATL
@Suzanne: concur. More spies, fewer superheroes!
Chris
Lastly, there’s what I consider a trilogy (unofficial) of proto-superhero pulp films from the nineties: The Shadow, The Phantom, and The Rocketeer.
The first is the least good. The second is good pulpy fun in a low-budget Indiana Jones vein; I’ve enjoyed the comics it’s based on when I find them. The third is the only one that’s actually not based on 1930s comics, but it does a great job of feeling like it is; it’s my favorite of the three.
Splitting Image
Mainly indifferent to them, even though I collected comics for a long time back in the day.
I respect the fact that there are some gems in the pile, but I’m digging in different piles of art at this point in my life.
I quit buying comics when the Image art style was taking hold at Marvel and right before the Clone Saga started in the Spider-Man books. I started buying them again for awhile when I began playing City of Heroes in 2004 or so and was chatting with people in the forums there.
When they did the One More Day storyline in Spider-Man, I figured I’d bought my last Marvel comic. The MCU started around the same time, but I just ignored it. At this point I wouldn’t say I’m boycotting the movies, but I just can’t bring myself to bother.
Back when I was buying comic books back in the 80s, my two favourite Marvel characters were the Scarlet Witch and Spider-Man. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Marvel’s editorial policy for the last 30+ years is to antagonize me on a deeply personal level.
Baud
@A Ghost to Most:
The Baud! Movie!
Starfish
@Steve in the ATL: I am still waiting for Jaws 17 like that one Back to the Future movie promised me.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Steve in the ATL: huh. that was weird. i just wrote out a huge response to you and it looks like it got ate.
tl:dr- comics are a form of media, not a genre. comics cover a whole lot. most films, nearly ALL films are adaptations of SOMETHING.
good movies don’t cause fatigue.
Suzanne
@Steve in the ATL: I enjoyed Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes much more than as Iron Man.
BellaPea
This is so embarrassing for a 68-year-old woman, but….Tom Hiddleston as Loki really got me going on the Marvel movies. His take on that character was so elegant and Shakespearian, and since he is a classically trained actor I guess that makes sense. My hair stylist and I both shared crushes on him, especially with that long black hair. Excuse me, need to stop now before I embarrass myself further.
Matt McIrvin
@Steve in the ATL: One of my favorite recent trends has been the revival of murder mysteries. But it’s still kind of a modest thing.
Frankensteinbeck
A friend of mine reread the first 100 New Mutants issues in the last couple of weeks and kept sending me screenshots of pages. They made me realize just how deeply that comic affected my writing. It was a very different style than modern comics or the movies made about them.
@kalakal:
There was a movie that only Queen could have written the theme song for.
gwangung
@Craig: In a lot of ways, Black Panther was two separate characters in the comics. Up until the 90s, he was a peak human-level acrobat. Not really that special.
In the 1990s, Christopher Priest took the character and made him cool by thinking how FORMIDABLE a person could be if they had the muscle of an entire country behind…and multiplied by the advanced super technology established in the comics. It might have gotten out of hand…but, still…he’s an A-level character right now…
eclare
I never got into comic book movies. The last movie that I saw before the pandemic was Little Women, and the first movie that I saw after was Barbie.
Dagaetch
I enjoy them as pulp entertainment, but with rare exception, I don’t think about them otherwise. They don’t prompt conversations with friends or an interest in an obscure subject later the way a really good movie can. I’ve also come to realize that even with the recent focus on antiheros, Hollywood continues to give us the impression that the bad guys will get their due, justice will prevail, etc. But then we look at the headlines here in the real world and see that it just isn’t true enough. It’s kind of soured me on watching anything that’s about a bad person. Give me more shows like Parks & Recreation, or movies like The Martian, that are just about good people trying to do good things. When I don’t want to think about the real world, that’s the entertainment I want.
lowtechcyclist
@Geoduck:
I loved the comic book HtD, as a matter of fact I collected the series. (I think the title, “Where do you go – what do you do – the night after you’ve saved the Universe?” pulled me in, and then I had to go back and read the others. And in 1978, this meant buying physical copies, of course.)
But that movie…Lord, was it ever horrible. They were aiming for it to be a blockbuster, but HtD wasn’t a blockbuster character. They’ll probably make that same fundamental mistake if someone gives it another try. If it should happen, I’ll duck it until I hear what other people have to say.
Dagaetch
@Baud: the pants-less hero we deserve
mrmoshpotato
@Starfish:
Sorry, it was Jaws 19. “Shark still looks fake.” :)
Steve in the ATL
@Suzanne: I’ll bet that would have happened if not for Discovery doing shark week!
ETA: d’oh! That was supposed to be a reply to starfish. But Suzanne I agree with you.
Chris
@Steve in the ATL:
I don’t know. I went to see the Wolverine/Deadpool movie a month ago, and it really struck me that only one of the trailers before the movie was for a superhero movie. I feel like even a year ago it would’ve been most of them.
I get the feeling that the air is going out of the balloon. I’d be happier about that if I didn’t know how deafening the “it’s because they made everything woke, now it sucks!” narrative to explain that is.
strange visitor (from another planet)
that was weird
that’s three posts/replies that were ate.
citizen alan, ftw.
Citizen Alan
I think the MCU has had some difficulties post-Endgame due to some poor decisions and some monumentally bad luck.
I would conced that there has probably too much fan-service in the MCU that makes them unapproachable to non-fans. There were moments that would have Marvel fans screaming with joy that would be totally lost on people who didn’t grow up on the comics (I can’t imagine what non-fans thought about Captain America finally saying “Avengers Assemble” after 10 movies and the audiences going completely berserk). I can see how that’s off-putting to a lot of fans.
But when the MCU is on its game, it’s on its game. I absolutely loved the third Spiderman movie and the third GotG movie. I loved both seasons of Loki. I know it is divisive, but I even loved She-Hulk. I still think Wandavision was robbed of the Emmys it deserved.
There were plenty of things not to love about the MCU, I admit. But the sheer dismissiveness if not contempt people seem to have for a studio that, more often than not, puts out products that I greatly enjoy is starting to grate. (The funniest thing about She-Hulk was how perfectly it anticipated the reactions of the Incel crowd and made it a major plot-point.) I think a lot of things that people seem to complain about in MCU movies are things they wouldn’t mind so much if the films were not part of a shared continuity and put out by a company (Disney) that attracts visceral hatred from a lot of critics.
And please note that I was only talking about the MCU. With the exception of some of the Batman stuff and maybe the first Wonder Woman movie, the DC movies have mostly been artistic failures pretty much since the second Christopher Reeve Superman movie. YMMV.
Matt McIrvin
@BellaPea: Have you seen the Loki TV show? Takes Loki in a radically different direction. It was trying to help set up Marvel’s big Multiverse arc that got torpedoed by Jonathan Majors turning out to be an actual villain. But the real star of the show was the production design–it takes place at a kind of sinister multiverse-pruning agency filled with an aesthetic of 1970s modernist office equipment turned into science-fiction nightmares.
Baud
Out: Comic book movies
In: Video game movies
geg6
@Suzanne:
A decent comedy would be nice. Especially a good romcom. There hasn’t been a good one since Nora Ephron died.
mrmoshpotato
@kalakal:
Smokin’!
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Citizen Alan:
gonna agree with pretty much everything you just said.
Indycat32
@BellaPea: As a 75 year old woman, I totally agree!
Steve in the ATL
@Chris: I think the narrative is more “JFC, give it a rest—there’s a lot more out there than comic books, and your entire audience is not 12-year old boys!”
No offense to the adults here who like these movies….
mrmoshpotato
@Dagaetch: Agreed!
Dagaetch
@geg6: have you watched Hit Man? I’d put that in the romantic comedy genre and thought it was excellent.
Chris
@kalakal:
The Cleopatra one from the early 2000s is widely considered the best I think, though I haven’t seen all of them.
Steve in the ATL
@Dagaetch:
So that’s one “no” vote on Baud!: the Movie
hueyplong
@Dagaetch: If graphic novels count, I’ll add The Road to Perdition.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: I think they were, in a way, lucky that Endgame happened exactly when it did. The gigantic story arc that they had been setting up for years actually got to have a satisfying conclusion that tied it up with a bow, just before the pandemic (which in a weird way accidentally worked out to be the thing the Snap was a metaphor for).
And then they were stuck with the question of what to do next, and got hit with this series of disruptions that made it immensely harder even if they’d had a good idea in the first place.
Another Scott
I haven’t seen enough of the comic book movies to have a strong opinion. I enjoyed Wonder Woman, and Barbie was great (though not really a comic book movie).
I do very much tire of the sound effects sounding the same – the same rumbles, the same booms, it’s lazy and tiresome. I also tire of the obvious over-the-top product placement.
Good story ideas and characters can come from anywhere – an old fairy tale, a novel, stealing from a different culture, some BSing at a bar.
I haven’t seen any of the eleventy-seven Fast & Furious movies, either. ;-)
We’re probably well past our peak going out to the movie years, so it doesn’t matter much to me either way. Giant media companies will continue to try to find safe blockbusters – if it’s not comic books, then it will be something else. Maybe Jean and Rin Tin Tin will make a comeback!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Citizen Alan
@Splitting Image:
I would have quite reading comics after One More Day had I not already quite cold turkey four months earlier after Civil War, the ending of which led me to believe that Marvel editorial was run by fascists. One of things I do greatly enjoy about the MCU is that for the most part it has been run by people (Feige and the Russo Bros, among others) who have looked objectively at which storylines worked in the comics, which did not, and why the latter did not. Which is why the comics Civil War utterly enraged me, while the MCU Civil War was something I loved unabashedly.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh, I enjoyed The Marvels very much. Fuck the haters. It might not have been a masterpiece, but again, the MCU was never about producing masterpieces. It was about providing a steady diet of comfort food.
MattF
Watched Umbrella Academy on Netflix. The fourth and final season just ended, so one can go watch the whole thing. It was rather better than I expected, with a sort of gonzo energy in the good bits. Many good moments, but underlying narrative and world-building were often muddled or problematic, going back to the origin of the series in comic books. A big problem was wondering what was ‘canon’ and what was not. I think this is a problem with all the comic book universes— too many ‘stakeholders’ who disagree about what’s important.
Citizen Alan
@Baud: I’m sure Fast and the Furious 12 (or whatever they’re up to) will be out soon enough.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: so there is no hope?
lowtechcyclist
@Steve in the ATL:
Some, y’know, original movies might be nice. We don’t need another Jurassic Pork movie anymore than we need another MCU movie. I don’t really want to see another movie that’s either a remake of an older movie, or a movie that’s the eighth in a series that should have stopped after the third movie, or maybe even the first.
JWR
@Geoduck:
A commenter after my heart! ;) But srsly, that’s always the first scene I think of whenever that movie comes up.
Geminid
I’d like to see someone make a Pogo movie.
Citizen Alan
@Frankensteinbeck: My understanding is that the entire English-speaking cast thought they were making a comedy and the entire Italian-speaking production crew including the director all thought they were making the next Star Wars. Which pretty much explains how that movie could have that much talent and still be so gloriously bad.
Craig
I’m a big fan of Marvel’s casting. Some is just brilliant. Starting with Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. I remember thinking, “wait, so to play a guy who follows his father in the same industry, has a brilliant career, blows it on booze and drugs, and manages a comeback, you get a guy who IS that exact same person? Sold”. Robert Downey Jr. must have laughed his ass off when they asked him. Chris Evans is perfect as Captain America. Can’t find anyone more Thor than Chris Hemsworth, he’s so Thor. Tom Holland is perfect as wide eyed teenage Peter Parker, and stunt casting Marisa Tomei as his Aunt May was a stroke of genius. I fell in love with Marvel Comics when I was a little kid out in the country and they really opened my eyes to what a big and crazy world there was out there.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris:
Everyone with a brain knows that’s bullshit, though.
Black Panther is the prime counterexample. If “go woke go broke” were the problem, Black Panther would not have been one of the biggest hits in the series.
Furthermore, the bros’ absolute least favorite, Captain Marvel starring their Great Satan Brie Larson… was a huge hit! The sequel flopped, but the sequel required homework to understand. And that’s the real problem infecting Marvel movies at this point. Even if I don’t mind, I know normal people will.
hueyplong
@lowtechcyclist: One thing I’ve learned from overwatching TCM is that nearly every movie after about 1934 is recycling one idea or another. The Maltese Falcon and the Wizard of Oz were both remakes
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
I think Endgame, by its very nature, blunts the post-Endgame momentum. We had a loose story arc that had been going to eleven years, and then that movie finally brought it to a climax, not only by ending the Infinity Stones saga but by knocking off three of the biggest heroes we’d been following for all that time (Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow).
By its very nature, it’s a good jumping-off point.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: I confess to being sucked in to the “Fallout” series.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
I’m watching it now.
Frankensteinbeck
The animated Spiderverse movies are masterpieces, of course. Great for characters and stories, and their variation on Doc Oc was a hoot.
But more than anything, the animation was so well done that the rest of the industry bowed in homage and studied its innovations.
There have been so many animated series. Teen Titans, while hampered by the issues of cartoons of that period, is justly a classic. The twistedness of Terra’s story or the way they handled Raven being the Antichrist would justify its reputation by themselves.
Batman: The Animated Series gets the most press, and certainly earns its fame. I mean, here’s a cartoon adaptation that introduced a side character so popular that Harley Quinn was added to the comics and is in everything Batman now, often as the lead. Great version of her in The Suicide Squad.
I do remember Batman: The Brave And The Bold fondly, because while it was kind of mediocre, its theme was to highlight the most wtf villains and storylines of Batman’s career. There is certainly grist for that mill.
Citizen Alan
@Chris: Part of it is that Marvel/Disney has acknowledged glutting the market and they are throttling back on their production schedule. (In some ways I find disappointing–a few projects that I had been looking forward to are likely to get axed going forward.) It remains to be seen if James Gunn will pick up the slack once he gets going properly and whether he can overcome the decades of bad decision-making by Warner Bros.
piratedan
I liked the fringe stuff more than the mainstream…. so my tastes were more in line with The Tick, The Mask and Mystery Men. Probably explains why I enjoyed Deadpool, Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man.
I thought that the Pixar take with The Incredibles were enjoyable too. Like any other genre, do you have a story to tell, are the characters compelling.
Sure Lurkalot
My Marvel stage began and ended with Millie the Model.
Frankensteinbeck
@Geminid:
Which one? Start with I Go Pogo, stop motion, 1980.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Its creators will meet the enemy, and….
SW
Never understood the appeal of comic books. Still don’t.
zhena gogolia
@geg6: Amen. It’s all on streaming, I guess, but they aren’t very good. Like the one with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron. I watched it, but I can’t say it was good. I couldn’t get through the first episode of the Anne Hathaway one.
zhena gogolia
@SW: I understood the appeal of comic books between ages 3 and 10.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
Agree. Spiderverse was amazing.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: The third Spider-Man was utterly shameless fanservice done so well that you don’t really care… as long as you’re in the target audience. Not much of a movie that stands by itself, but that’s not really the point.
Come to think of it, you could describe Deadpool & Wolverine as the exact same thing, only for Fox’s and New Line’s pre-MCU Marvel properties instead of Sony’s.
Chris
@Steve in the ATL:
I think that’s how most casual fans see it. It’s definitely how I see it a lot of the time. But there’s also been a stupendous amount of effort put into making it all about wokeness in the last few years, in a way that makes me think “man, is this what the anti-disco hysteria of the eighties was like?”
Craig
@Citizen Alan: She Hulk is great. Really fearless storytelling. Daredevil’s walk of shame is hilarious.
BellaPea
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, I watched the first season of the Loki show on Disney. It was pretty good, liked the action between TH and Owen Wilson, but the multiple Lokis (really, an alligator?) and some of the time traveling details a bit off-putting.
David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch
G.I. Jane
Atomic Blonde (based on “The Coldest City“)
Geoduck
Yes, the famous version of The Wizard of Oz is a remake. It’s also, ironically, a LOT more faithful to the original novel’s plot than any of the attempts before it. Including the ones that the author Baum himself was involved with.
Frankensteinbeck
@Geoduck:
From what little I’ve read of his commentaries on his own books, I’d guess Baum wasn’t too hung up on accuracy and just wanted a story kids would enjoy. I’ll have to look up the movies he was involved with.
BellaPea
@Indycat32: It is going to be interesting to see where TH goes in the future. He was amazing in The Night Manager and apparently they are doing a second season. He is so versatile and talented (not to mention hot).
Tim in SF
My favorite comic book movies, in no particular order:
VFX Lurker
Sometimes I don’t watch films/shows and read the comics that inspired them instead:
I’d like to add my love for the Loki TV series mentioned upthread. Great characters and art direction.
I also recommend the Netflix adaptation of Sandman. I loved that comic so much in high school, and the TV adaptation does it justice.
I read the One Piece comics over a year so that I could catch up on the story without watching 2000+ episodes. The Netflix adaptation does a sterling job adapting the comic book. In just eight episodes, one meets most of the main characters, their backstories, their shared quest, and their individual dreams. Great show.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: Into the Spider-Verse may be my single favorite superhero flick of all time. It changed the art of animation, just by blowing up the Pixar model for a CGI-animated movie that almost everyone had tried to imitate up to that point.
I felt coming out of it the same way I’d felt coming out of The Incredibles years earlier, that someone had made real innovative art out of a seemingly basic superhero story and changed what movies could do.
Across the Spider-Verse suffers a bit from being the first part of a two-parter that we may not see the end of for many years. It’s not as tight. But I loved the ways it tried to up the ante–the long opening sequence in Spider-Gwen’s universe and its version of Hobie Brown, Spider-Punk were masterpieces.
Belafon
Well, Deadpool & Wolverine for one. But, you might have heard about Avengers Endgame, which, in it’s opening weekend, was showing on 85% of all movie screens. I hear it did pretty well.
Craig
@Matt McIrvin: I didn’t know how the Russo Brothers could pull off Endgame. They had so many balls in the air, and had been tossing storylines in that direction for so long it seemed a heavy lift. They pulled it off. I remember just sitting in the theater saying Holy Shit!
Citizen Alan
@hueyplong: Here’s a thing that bugs me in this endless complaining about “comic book movies.” A “comic book” is just a storytelling medium, one that can produce compelling works of fiction or banal crap, just like every other storytelling medium. If we’re going to lump things like “Road to Perdition” or “40 Days of Night” into the “comic book movie” genre just because they had their origins as graphic novels without their being the slightest hint of superheroics, I just think that’s reductive. What matters to me are: (1) what kind of story is the comic book telling? and (2) how well is that story adapted to the big screen?
Say what you will about Marvel, but for a lot of us, the X-Men was the first thing we read as kids that showed us the horror of racism and bigotry and what it’s like to be a member of a despised minority. Iron Man was the first thing we read to introduce us to the concept of struggling with substance abuse. Captain America was our introduction to the need to balance patriotism and love of one’s country against a healthy cynicism and distrust of what a corrupt government could do. The Hulk (starting in the Peter David era) was our first introduction to the idea of someone having mental health problems as an adult stemming from childhood abuse. There is a reason so many people got physical chills in No Way Home when May’s last words were the “Great Power/Great Responsibility” line.
Matt McIrvin
@piratedan: The animated Tick cartoon from way back was top-notch, brilliant stuff. I wasn’t as fond of either live version, though the guy who played Arthur in the last one seems to have been a real-life mensch.
Geoduck
@Geoduck: Baum’s real life-long passion was the theater. He only kept writing the Oz books because they paid the bills.
David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch
No love for “The Watchmen“?
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
The Civil War comics felt like they had no idea what they were saying. They have a very strong vibe of condemning the out of control security state of the Dubya era, especially once Iron Man starts building Space Guantanamo in another dimension and imprisoning superheroes in it… Except the conflict that starts it all is the much milder question “shouldn’t superheroes, who in this universe add up to one of the most powerful police and paramilitary communities in the world, have some kind of training, certification, God forbid, accountability? To which the immediate response of half the superhero community, long before we get to Space Guantanamo, is “no, fuck you, that’s tyranny, only we can police ourselves.” Which side is supposed to represent the out of control security state again?
Gwangung
@BellaPea: heh. I sorta was meh on Loki Season 1. But Season 2 was such an unexpected and satisfying journey and end for the character that o forgive the first season’s faults (which may not be faults to you).
Matt McIrvin
@Geoduck:
Yes! The silent-era Oz movies and the stage plays were just… bizarre, from what I’ve seen of them. The 1939 MGM movie changes and condenses a bunch of stuff, but the basic plot outline of it IS recognizably that of the first Oz book. The main differences being that they collapsed the two Good Witches into one character, cut out most of the second half to improve the story pacing, and added the whole “dream” element with parallel characters to the Kansas scenes.
Craig
@VFX Lurker: The Boys is pretty nuts. The guy who plays Homelander is terrifying.
I really liked Sandman. I went in expecting to be disappointed since I loved the books. Turned out great.
Citizen Alan
@MattF: Umbrella Academy is another example of what I’m talking about. It’s a comic book movie in the sense that it originated in a niche Indie comic written by a guy best known for being in My Chemical Romance and it uses the plots of the first few story arcs for the basic framework. But by and large, Umbrella Academy is about a group of young adults, all siblings, dealing with various adult traumas that stemmed from them all sharing an emotionally abusive parent. The superhero stuff is just tacked onto that.
It is also, IMO, much better than the comic it’s based on because it had to go through a more thorough editorial process to turn it into something to appeal to a wider audience than the sort of insular “elitist comics nerd” who was the target audience for Dark Horse comics.
Splitting Image
@Geoduck:
I have no objection to a remake when someone clearly buggered it up the first time, or couldn’t do a proper job because of the limitations of the time.
I only disapprove of remakes when the original was popular because the cast and crew caught lightning in a bottle and attempting to do it twice is doomed to failure.
I’d rather see someone take another stab at Catwoman, for example, than for someone to remake The Princess Bride.
If movies teach us anything, it’s that we should accept the failed adaptations the same way we do the successes, with quiet dignity and grace.
kalakal
@Chris: Never saw The Phantom, thought The Shadow was ok but The Rocketeer was wonderful Timothy Dalton was great as the baddie
Starfish
@Craig:
@Citizen Alan:
She Hulk was a lot of fun.
Citizen Alan
@lowtechcyclist: The problem with originality is that we expect risk averse studies to plunk $100m or more to make a movie based on something no one has ever heard of before with the understanding that if it is a bomb, the execs who greenlit it will probably get fired. Ultimately, it’s a failure of capitalism more than one of imagination.
Steve in the ATL
@Citizen Alan:
For me it was The Gulag Archipelago but I was a bit precocious
Craig
@Citizen Alan: yes to all of this. I didn’t even know that Road to Perdition was from a graphic novel until well after I’d seen the movie.
Geminid
@Frankensteinbeck: I didn’t know they had one.
Now I want to see an ensemble movie like the Marvel movies, but with Pogo, Crusader Rabbit, Rocky and Bullwinkle and the Roadrunner. Superheroes I could get behind!
Chris
@lowtechcyclist:
One of the reasons I’m quite fond of the John Wick movies is that they’re a 2010s franchise that wasn’t based on preexisting IP, and that’s really nice. (Another being all the emphasis on practical effects in fighting).
Kristine
Enjoyed most all the MCU movies (lukewarm about Hulk and Spiderman, though I like Ruffalo and Holland). Enjoyed the TV shows. I have vague memories of a few DC and Marvel comics growing up thanks to a babysitter, but I was never a comics kid. That means I came into the MCU cold, and it all pretty much worked for me. Loved Loki S1. I realize much of the purpose of S2 was to support the Multiverse storyline, but they threw out everything I loved about S1 in the process. Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Sophia di Martino were utterly wasted. I do mutter about the fates of several of the female characters—I’m a member of The Wrong Avenger Died on Vormir Club—and I am crossing my fingers that those remaining meet better fates.
I think the Multiverse storyline was flailing before Majors crashed and burned. The dangers were too vague and scattered and there was no RDJr/Boseman-level actor to serve as point. I am really interested to see what comes of RDJr’s return as Dr. Doom.
I admit to enjoying Justice League and Aquaman 1. My major issue with the DC movies is the writing—the pacing and action are so much slower compared to the Marvel movies and the dialogue lacks.
Also loved Resident Evil. Underworld. Blade. John Wick. I like noisy hero movies.
Citizen Alan
@SW: This comment reminded me of someone I once knew who said he hated all musicals because he didn’t understand why people would just burst into song for no reason.
As I said, comics are just a storytelling medium. Every comic book is either a short story or a serialized chapter of a longer story told with a mixture of printed text and artwork. Sure, the story and/or the artwork could be crap, but that’s true of motions pictures as well.
OldDave
It doesn’t match the “characters originating in a comic” theme, but I do want to mention that the 15th anniversary re-release of “Coraline” is still in the theaters for another few days. It’s an exceptional stop animation work.
Mike in Oly
I’ve been mildly obsessed with superheroes and comics since I was a kid and Superfriends was on the Saturday morning cartoon lineup. I bemoaned all the years when the SFX was not up to snuff to really do them well, and what treat it has been in this modern age to see them brought to life. Some better than others, for sure. Some real stand outs for me are:
The new Superman looks like it might be a fun ride. As does the next Fantastic Four (which have been lacking so far).
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Citizen Alan: tried to say that earlier about genre not medium, they’re mad/ tired with superhero movies, but post got eaten.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: What I loved about No Way Home was this: There are a lot of people who were very fond of the Tobey Macguire Spiderman movies and the Andrew Garfield movies (for me, yes to the former, no to the latter. YMMV). And there was something deeply satisfying about a movie that tells us “Yes, those characters still exist. They were not erased from history just because the studio did a soft reboot.”
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: Why was Thor: Love & Thunder so bad? I still can’t quite figure it out. Because it really did suck, but it was the same creative mind behind Thor: Ragnarok which absolutely was one of my favorite Marvel movies, and it some ways, it feels like Waititi was just doing more of the same thing so it ought to have worked. But it didn’t. Somehow it was just pushed a little further in a direction that made it… bad. The magic wasn’t there.
geg6
@Dagaetch:
Never heard of it. Who is in it?
Kristine
@David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch: I loved the (not so) recent remake.
I will add that I learned more about certain events in that series than I ever did in school.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: I think the thing I liked the most about it was that it gave Andrew Garfield another chance to prove to everyone that he was great. Those movies he was in weren’t any good, but he was. He just acts rings around most of the cast in No Way Home.
(Willem Dafoe excepted. He BRINGS IT.)
Citizen Alan
@Chris: I approve of Marvel’s efforts at representation, but even I admit they can push it too far with unfortunate results. They could have had a multi-ethnic cast for The Eternals without turning Makkari into a deaf Hispanic woman, which makes absolutely no sense because the Eternals are artificial lifeforms created by the Celestials, so for some reason, god-like aliens intentionally designed her to have a disability.
Splitting Image
@Citizen Alan:
I used to be fairly anti-musical when I was younger, but I’ve been warming to the genre more recently.
Among comics, I’m still a big fan of Pogo and Groo the Wanderer, and I’ve been reading Bone, which I really like. The most recent super-hero comics I’ve read have been the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League run, which I missed the first time around. I thought Formerly Known as the Justice League was hilarious.
Suzanne
@geg6: I remember when I went to see Hidden Figures in the theater with Mr. Suzanne. I don’t go to many movies in theaters, so it was a memory that sticks out. About halfway through, I realized that it was the kind of movie I never see anymore: well-acted, well-crafted (fantastic set design and costumes), with a fantastic, humane story and nothing blowing up.
Hollywood doesn’t seem to want to deliver a whole lot of those.
JML
I suppose it’s sort of appropriate that so many people are consistently slamming “comic book movies” these days since there’s always been a ton of people who have been bashing comic books themselves, frequently with the same kind of criticism.
As a long-time collector, I’ve been thrilled to have so many of the characters and books I’ve loved brought to the big screen in ways that seemed impossible for so long. Until relatively recently comic book fans had very little: even once Superman with Cristopher Reeve hit in 1978, it was another 20 years before we had much of anything that wasn’t Superman or Batman (and both of those franchises collapsed long before the story potential of either had passed).
Right now, the adaptations are struggling creatively (especially since everyone is trying to repeat the Avengers cycle that made a katrillion dollars for the MCU through Endgame). It happens. Hopefully they’ll re-set and re-think what made the early MCU movies, the early Nolan Batman, the OG Superman work: good stories, smart scripts, good casting, and talented directors. Basically: make a good movie. The source material is still pretty great and there are a lot of amazing, emotional, powerful stories to tell. Hope to see some more of them.
Timill
@Citizen Alan: G&S had it right in Ruddigore:
Mike in Oly
@Craig: I forgot about Sandman! So well done. I had never read the comics so came into the series as a newb, but it was amazing. My husband – who hates comic book stuff – was even into it.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh sure. Same with Star Wars. You never hear the “get woke go broke” crowd hold up Rogue One as an example, because that one was insanely popular, despite hitting all the same “woke” notes.
Citizen Alan
@Tim in SF: What I’m taking from your list is that you don’t like comic book movies about superheroes. Half those movies I didn’t even recognize as originating in comic books. I mean Weird Science? Seriously? I had to look it up on Wiki to learn that it was based on a single issue of science fiction comic book from 1951!
Chris
@BellaPea:
TNM felt like a not so low key audition for Hiddleston to be the next James Bond, which he passed with flying colors, IMHO. Unfortunately, the powers that be apparently don’t want him.
WaterGirl
@strange visitor (from another planet): I freed you.
They were in SPAM. The spam filter has been overachieving for the past few days. Hoping for an update soon to fix that.
geg6
@Belafon:
See? Right there is the problem. I like going to see movies in an actual theater. I’m female and 65 yo. Other than Star Wars films, the only movies that tempted me to go in the last decade or so were Barbie and the Taylor Swift concert film. When 85% of screens are showing one movie that is aimed at (mainly) young men, there is something very wrong with Hollywood.
geg6
@David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch:
Watched the first episode, which was pretty good. Went downhill from there and I never got past the second.
JML
@Matt McIrvin: Part of the problem with Love & Thunder was the first half of the film decided to ignore all of the character development Thor had made, and throw him back to being something of a himbo screwup. You could also feel them reaching for the joke, rather than letting it be more naturally funny. Comedy is always harder when you’re begging for the laugh, right?
I’d argue that it also wasn’t well rooted in anything. While Portland looked buff and had some cool moments, her total lack of interest in Dark World didn’t exactly have people clamoring to see her again. And there wasn’t exactly impressive chemistry between Hemsworth and Portman this time around, which certainly reduces the interest. But where exactly was the villain and story supposed to be coming from?
I also think the MCU has a “recurring gag” problem in recent movies. They think something is funny once and go back to well as many times as possible. I mean, envy between Stormbreaker and Mjolnir? not nearly as funny as they thought it was.
Second half was ok-ish, but the first half was dreadful and boring.
Frankensteinbeck
@Splitting Image:
As any fool can plainly see.
geg6
@Citizen Alan:
And again, this is the problem. A good film could be made about young adults dealing with their traumas. But stupid super hero stuff has to be tacked on and it ruins it for me right there. I’m no longer interested.
Citizen Alan
@Chris: The biggest problem with Civil War is that attacked one of the fundamental premises of the super-hero genre: the idea that a civilized society would tolerate the existence of masked and anonymous superpowered individuals operating as vigilantes. It’s an absurd idea. But so is the idea that someone could control the weather or walk through walls because of a genetic abnormality, and if we deny that basic assumption, the X-Men becomes impossible.
The utter silliness of the concept was revealed in the very first Avengers comic after CW ended. Recall that the whole point of the Registration Act was to establish accountability for superheroes for all the damage they do. And the note that Mighty Avengers #1 involved the Avengers blowing up half of New York during an alien invasion … with no notion of accountability for the property damage they caused
Of course, the second worst thing about CW was the absolute character assassination of Tony Stark who engaged in a host of criminal actions in order to make sure his side won the debate for which he never faced any accountability either. And the way they got around it and made Tony one of the “good guys” when the Registration era ended was to give Tony amnesia so he wouldn’t remember the bad things he did and therefore he wasn’t responsible anymore!
Dagaetch
@geg6: the stars are it boy of the moment Glen Powell, and one of my crushes Adria Arjona. It’s available on Netflix.
Matt McIrvin
@OldDave: I went to the Coraline re-release. It holds up, though it is and always was a terrifying film as well as a funny and charming one. The recent revelations about Neil Gaiman being a sex pest had me regarding the depictions of women in the movie with suspicion, but that’s probably not its fault.
strange visitor (from another planet)
? see if this works
eta- that was weird. i had like, a whole slew of posts and responses eaten by the underpants langoliers.
citizen alan is right. comics are a way of transmitting stories. you guys sound like you’re tired of superhero origins.
zhena gogolia
@geg6: It is not a romantic comedy.
The title is not ironic.
JML
Eternals was pretty to look at but not very good. It was always going to be a hard lift, because these are fairly weird characters without much of a following (there’s a reason that every Eternals comic has gotten cancelled for low sales). But they made it so much harder on themselves by having too many characters, and then fell into the modern trap of making sure the the “real” villains are the supposed heroes, because anything else isn’t interesting enough for critics.
I’m basically the target audience for Eternals, and I was bored. Looked pretty, wasn’t very interesting, didn’t care much about the characters, and the plot was too intricate for a film with so much exposition and new characters.
frosty
Wait, Black Panther was five years ago??!?!!???
Tony Jay
Netflix really hit the bullseye with its early Marvel-themed shows Jessica Jones, Daredevil and Luke Cage, all of which took the ‘what if we put Marvel’s street-level superheroes into street-level stories’ ethos of the early 2000s Marvel Knights imprint and brought it even more firmly down to earth. Yeah, they’ve got superpowers, but that’s not what they’re about. They were all stories of damaged people trying to do the right thing in shitty circumstances, and for the most part they worked, especially the early seasons of the first two.
The one that didn’t was Iron Fist, which was a pity, but that was mainly due to the writers catastrophically misunderstanding the character and Finn Jones being several thousand times less comfortable in the role than Krysten Ritter, Charlie Cox or Mike Colter were in theirs. All the other shows took understandable liberties with aspects of the source material that worked better on TV, but Iron Fist’s conceit of ‘what if a blonde billionaire kid had been raised to be the champion of mystical Kung-Fu’ couldn’t really work if the lead displayed zero Kung-fu skills, and the side-stories of his Trumpian antagonists and lady cop/lady ninja allies were actually more compelling than his ‘I don’t wear shoes, aren’t I odd?’ shtick,
Apparently the Punisher series was a return to form, but I never watched it. Maybe I should give it a go.
As to the Disney Marvel movies, I think the main problem was the loss of momentum. The Avenger-centric early phase worked because all of these heroes were being introduced as strong, individual characters all travelling towards a thematic end point centred on the threat of Thanos, the weight of which was itself carried by the light-as-a-feather sci-comedy of unexpected breakout hit Guardians of the Galaxy.
The Captain America trilogy could jump from Spielbergian WW2 blockbuster to 70’s paranoid spy-thriller to a modernist take on the question of what constitutes responsibility for a patriotic icon when their country is shitting the bed, because those were all good stories based around Chris Evans’ portrayal of a 100% nice guy with a spine of ethical steel. The Iron Man movies were less cohesive, but surfed on Downey’s grasp of who Tony Stark was and how he was always looking to weaponise his wealth and genius to correct his screw ups. The Thor movies were all very different (Shakespearean origin story – LOTR Space Opera – Sci-Fi buddy comedy) but they all showed the main character growing into the kind of hero who would fall the furthest when confronted with absolute failure and need to rise again. They were all very different, but they were always going to the same place.
After their stories reached their conclusions in Infinity War, Marvel sort of lost its way. Was it building up a Young Avengers team? Was it setting up a Multiversal War storyline to lead into a version of Secret Wars? Was it bending the Marvel Universe into a place where the threats were magical more than sci-if and Doctor Strange was the central lynchpin Fucked if I know. How did the threat of Kang the Conqueror match up with a Strange-centric post-Avengers MU? Wouldn’t Captain Marvel have been a better choice for lynchpin character? How did the conclusion of Loki tie-in?
Incoherence. No clear direction. Are they setting up She Hulk, Moon Knight, the new Captain America and Winter Soldier to form a new Avengers with Spider-Man? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on with Marvel anymore. I don’t think Marvel really know. They can’t have Kang as the main villain because of the actor? Okay, but they can’t just recast the character? It’s going to be Doctor Doom instead? Okay, fine, but Downey is going to play Doctor Doom? Really? When the main complaint about every one of the past portrayals of the character has been the absence of his actual character, a Central European sorcerer/scientist tyrant with an ego the size of Jupiter.
Man. Anyone would think Disney cared more about sucking up revenue through quantity of production than artistic integrity or fidelity to the consumer/creator code.
Don’t tell their lawyers I said that. I’m not De Santis, I can’t make Florida pay for my errors of saying stuff.
Matt McIrvin
@Gwangung: It felt to me like Loki season 2 was a little padded with “intrigue”, you know, character vs. character backstabbing business to stretch out the story once all the ideas had been established. But the ending of it was great and gave variant-Loki a good destination.
kalakal
Post seems to have fallen victim to the filter try again..
A fairly small category
Films based on board games
The very wonderful Clue
WaterGirl
@frosty: Yeppers. All I know is that I uploaded the Black Panther image to the media library in July 2019 for the new site we rolled out on Nov 13 of that year. It’s possible that it could be 6 years, but it’s at least 5 years for sure.
JML
@Tony Jay: I haven’t watched the second season of the Punisher show; the character is increasingly…difficult in the modern world, you know? But I agree with you on the Netflix shows, which were pretty strong. Iron Fist could have been good, but it’s a sad truth that the supposed best martial artist (Iron Fist) frequently looked like the worst of the main characters.
I’m hopeful about the Daredevil revival (it’s been fun as hell to see Charlie Cox reprise the role in She-Hulk and Spider-Man) but you never know. I liked the Hawkeye show a lot, so they clearly still can do a more street-level show.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: My personal theory is this: Between Ragnarok and L&T, Chris Hemsworth voiced a version of Thor usually referred to as “Party Thor,” and Hemsworth really enjoyed playing a broad comedic version of the character and wanted that for L&T. And Waititi went with it and threw out every bit of character development Thor had experienced since his first appearance so that he could be a vapid wisecracking himbo for the whole movie. Seriously, the character was so annoying that the movie started with a cameo by the Guardians of the Galaxy just so they could all talk about how annoying Thor was to have around.
So the movie was loaded down with extremely sophomoric humor and a very two-dimensional performance of a previously nuanced character. And then, on top of that, the unfunny humor was schizophrenically juxtaposed against Jane’s storyline (dying of cancer!) and Gorr’s storyline (a man deciding to exterminate all the gods in the universe because the deity to whom he’d been a priest allowed his daughter to die of starvation during a famine!)
I was actually angry that Christian Bale, in likely his only MCU appearance, gave such a compelling performance that was absolutely wasted in a movie that also featured a slumming Russell Crowe prancing about in a too-short toga and using an awful Zorba-The-Greek accent and an extended unfunny gag based on the “screaming goats” meme.
Craig
@Tony Jay: The Punisher was great. John Bernthal is fantastic casting. I really thought he would get type cast because of this. Turns out he’s a good enough actor to avoid that.
lowtechcyclist
@hueyplong:
OK, what was Harold and Maude a remake of?
Yeah, I know, the exception that proves the rule. But there’s a big difference between recycling ideas and doing a remake.
I mean, there had to be plenty of jailbreak movies out there when it was made, but that didn’t turn The Great Escape into a remake of any of them.
And a remake can be good, if it doesn’t feel too constrained by the original – The Maltese Falcon is a good example of that. Just from scanning the plot of the 1931 original, it’s clear that the Bogie version is a very different movie.
BTW, I’ve been unable to find a reference to a pre-1939 Wizard of Oz movie. Any help?
CliosFanboy
Maybe the smaller scale Marvels will still work. Loved Hawkeye and Echo. For DC, Gotham was great and the new Batman Animated series is interesting. Did not bother with the last Batman movie though. I looked like they totally ruined the Riddler.
Would love to see a more adult Spiderman with Toby MaGuire and MJ. and yeah, the Animated Spiderverse cartoons ROCK.
CliosFanboy
@lowtechcyclist:
look in the early silents. They were awful. Look for Oz rather than Wizard.
Gwangung
@Matt McIrvin: I think that’s kinda key: sticking the landing. Do that and viewers will overlook a lot of faults.
Splitting Image
@lowtechcyclist:
The most important one is a 1925 Larry Semon comedy co-starring Oliver Hardy.
Citizen Alan
@JML: I will always have a fondness for comic books even though I don’t collect anymore simply because I attribute a lot of success in my life to them. I honestly believe that the fact that I consistently read above grade level my whole time in school was due to the fact that I started reading X-Men at the age of 10 and that book under Chris Claremont consistently punched above its weight in terms of the vocabulary it required of its readers. And growing up in Shithole, Mississippi, if I hadn’t been reading comic books, I probably wouldn’t have read anything that wasn’t assigned in school.
Noskilz
I don’t mind them. Some are good, some are bad, some are just kind of mediocre.
As for faithfulness, I don’t get too hung up about it. Many of these characters have been around for decades and been through multiple retcons and writers, so they might almost be completely different characters at various points in time. For example: when it was announced that Tony Stark/Iron Man was going to be added to the MCU, one question on a lot of minds would be which Tony Stark would be showing up, because that is a character that has had some annoying, obnoxious phases.
What matters most to me is when a character is adapted to the screen, is that whatever choices have been made work and preserve those essential aspects of the character that made it compelling to me to begin with. I care less if it is slavishly faithful to the source material and more if it tells an good story in a way that is faithful to the sensibility of the characters involved.
Of course, if the people making a film or series don’t seem to know or care what the source material is that is probably a very bad sign, as it might suggest one is probably in for something a lot closer to a careless mangling than a carefully considered update.
Mike in Oly
@Tony Jay: I totally forgot about Jessica Jones. So well done. Loved Luke Cage as well. Both series were well cast and well written. Nice to see the hero genre from the street level. Never did get into Daredevil, and Iron Fist was a huge miss, IMO.
Citizen Alan
@Mike in Oly: I don’t even consider Sandman to be a comic book series. It’s original format was in a comic book, but it had none of the superhero elements, and its main characters were in no sense superhero characters. Neil Gaiman could have written Sandman as a novel and it would have been just as good and probably would have gotten more respect from critics. But it wouldn’t have had the frequently stunning artwork and imagery.
Geoduck
@lowtechcyclist:
Here are a couple of the early version of The Wizard of Oz. As previously noted, Oliver Hardy appears in the second one, without Stan Laurel.
The Wizard of Oz (1910)
The Wizard of Oz (1925)
Steve in the ATL
@Citizen Alan:
Even the Powerpuff Girls got called out for doing over a million dollars worth of damage to the Townville bridge to stop bank robbers who were absconding with a fraction of that amount
Mike H
@Suzanne: Just like actual super hero comics have done, I think the super hero movies should also explore genres. Spy thrillers, sci Fi, sword and sorcery…a lot of stories were Shakespeare, Azimov, and period pieces with super heroes. In my prime comic reading, the impact of Star Trek was unmistakable.
Gwangung
@CliosFanboy: I think some of the later Msrvrk series have been unfairly labeled as flops. She hulk was a mixed bag (which I loved) but Loki, Hawkeye, Ms Marvel and Moon Knight were really good series whose good qualities are getting ignored.
geg6
@Dagaetch:
LOL, never heard of either of them, too! But I’ll check it out.
Mike in Oly
How about what hasn’t been done yet from the comics? I would love to see Powers done as a series. Also, the Astro City comics series is so ripe for a TV series as well. Something different with new perspectives on the genre. The comics are one of the few I collect and keep and reread. Kurt Busiek’s writing is so so good. Alex Ross’ artwork is next level.
Citizen Alan
@geg6: Yes, but the trauma comes from the superhero background! Hargreeves adopts the six children in infancy specifically because they have powers and he basically raises them their whole lives to be superheroes and, in the process, ruins them emotionally. One of the characters is dead and is haunting one of his siblings who has the power to see ghosts. Another is a deeply traumatized 60yo man restored to the body of a young teen. Without the powers, there’s no story.
geg6
@zhena gogolia:
Oh. Probably not my thing (not a big violence fan), but perhaps it’s better than the umpteenth Avengers movie.
Mike in Oly
@Citizen Alan: Agreed, not ‘super heroes’ per se, but still beings of power operating in mortal space. So some overlap. I hope they do another series from it. The first one was so good.
SW
@Geoduck: That and being a racist piece of shit
Craig
@Citizen Alan: This. Exactly. Chris Claremont’s vocabulary and concepts were way more sophisticated than anything I was reading in school. Same with crazy Jim Starlin. Sitting around dorking out about X-Men and JRR Tolkien with my couple of elementary school friends set us up to appreciate books that our school wasn’t preparing us for.
Matt McIrvin
@Kristine: And as Citizen Alan said, it seemed to be the moment for everyone to go hard into the “multiverse” idea, to the point that people got sick of it almost immediately. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Everything Everywhere All at Once were the truly artistically satisfying takes on it. But since the idea has a long heritage in superhero comics, once they realized movie audiences would go for it, both DC and Marvel leaned into it way too hard. And it’s not compelling enough to be the basis for a whole story arc like the Thanos arc.
The MCU has managed to exploit it satisfactorily in a few specific movies and shows, but mostly as an excuse to do fanservice crossovers with non-MCU superhero properties enabled by corporate stuff happening outside of the story (Loki is an exception, but its use of the idea gets frustratingly abstract at times).
Grumpy Old Railroader
Okay the only cartoon comic turned into a movie I ever watched was Robin Williams and Shelly Duval in POPEYE. Really enjoyed that movie
Citizen Alan
@JML: I would only had that they used Planet X as the basis for the movie and that mini-series was awful. “The Earth is a Celestial egg” was a stupid idea in 1999 and it remains a stupid idea today.
They should have used the 2006 Neil Gaiman Eternals miniseries because, among other virtues, it would have explained where the Eternals have been this whole time! (Spoiler for an 18yo comic: Sprite got tired of being trapped in the body of a child, so he did something to transform the Eternals into human bodies who forgot their true natures and were living as humans who just had weird dreams about past lives. Then, Ikaris remembers the truth and goes on a quest to get the band back together.) It was tight and lean and perfect. But no, we got “the Earth is a Celestial egg.”
JML
@Citizen Alan: There’s still some great artists and fine storytelling in today’s comics and much more variety available with some great original stories and characters getting decent play in the indies as well as the bigger companies. But there’s a real preference for deconstructed storytelling now and it’s harder for someone to dip in mid-stream.
But I’m still blown away by some of the earlier works. Claremont’s extended run on X-Men is pretty unbelievable, especially in his ability to shape his stories to his artistic partners after Byrne left. But it’s also why it’s a bummer that they seem to have no idea how to do a Dark Phoenix story properly on film…
Craig
@Gwangung: I was really impressed with Echo. Totally unexpected show.
Geoduck
@Grumpy Old Railroader: It was sure a good thing Shelley Duvall existed- no one else could have played Olive Oyl.
Citizen Alan
@JML: I loathe the Punisher as a concept because he’s basically a serial killer with a socially acceptable preferred victim profile. But it was the 80s and Dirty Harry was king of the box office, so Marvel simply had to cast the guy as an anti-hero.
lowtechcyclist
@Citizen Alan:
Why should it take anywhere close to $100M to make a movie?
Monty Python and the Holy Grail was made for just under £230,000 which was then maybe $650K, which would be maybe three or four million now. And it’s one of the greatest comedies of all time.
Breaking Away was made for $2.3M in 1979, which would be about ten or eleven million now. Made $20M and won a passel of awards.
Etc.
So I’m very confused about why it takes $100M to make a good movie now.
Sandia Blanca
@BellaPea: He’s starring in a new movie, “The Life of Chuck.” Based on a Stephen King story, I believe. Just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Matt McIrvin
@Mike H:
They have though. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was MCU doing a 1970s paranoid political thriller. The Thor movies were basically high fantasy and then Kirby-style science fiction. Guardians of the Galaxy was comic space opera. Black Widow was MCU doing James Bond, basically. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was… well, mostly it was frustratingly stuck in first gear, but when it finally got going it was Raimi doing his horror comedy thing. So that idea is already in there.
geg6
@Citizen Alan:
Oh, there are plenty of stories. In case you forgot or didn’t know, I work at a university hundreds of young adults, almost all of them with traumas. No one is actually interested in telling their actual stories in Hollywood. Say what you will about 80s/early 90s films about dysfunctional, self-absorbed (as all young adults are), confused young people. But at least the films show them more as they really are rather than some fantasy version of themselves which they can never attain. If that’s your bag, great! But I sure wish you and your comrades who love this stuff weren’t the only ones to whom 85% of screens are devoted to.
Gwangung
@Craig: That one especially…got totally branded as a “woke” disaster where every element got slagged as “unbelievably bad.” (Like the fight choreography…which, professionally speaking , was good and were totally clear on who was giving what fight move to which character…which is not easy given all the black leather costuming).
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: I think the real reason the MCU moved in the direction of alternate universes is so they could set up Secret Wars and use that as a soft reboot that moves all the later-acquired properties (Fantastic Four, X-Men) into the shared universe.
Phein64
@gwangung: Me old, too. I’ve got four children in their 20’s and 30’s, so I’ve had to watch all the superhero flicks since 1997. The only one that I found engaging was Black Panther: real characters, with real character development (compared to the other flicks). Haven’t seen the sequel, although I understand there is one. Will wait until the grandkids are old enough to watch.
JML
They actually did a Powers series (buried on the Playstation Network). I’d love to see Astro City, but I fear they’d botch it up or wouldn’t have the budget to make it seem wonderous. (Probably why I’ll never get a great Legion of Super-Heroes show/movie)
But there are tons of characters and opportunities that haven’t gotten a real chance or one at all. I’d love to see Dr. Fate based on the DeMatteis/McManus series. Green Lantern definitely deserves a reboot. The Question could be pretty amazing.
There are so many X-Men who have never gotten a real chance to shine, either.
Matt McIrvin
@Grumpy Old Railroader: Popeye is underrated and oddly charming. It’s one of those movies where I marvel at the fact that it was even made. How did that happen? Who greenlit giving Robert Altman the Popeye the Sailor Man property? It’s just wild.
Geoduck
@Matt McIrvin: Another fun Popeye fact: The village set they built for the movie is still a popular tourist attraction in Malta.
Citizen Alan
@JML: It’s because they won’t let the characters develop. Dark Phoenix is probably the quintessential X-men story arc. If you asked X-fans to name the greatest story arc in X-Men history, probably 90% of them would say Dark Phoenix. But in the comics, the story of Jean being corrupted into Dark Phoenix was told over 36 issues and three years worth of comics. And before that, the character of Jean Grey had been around since 1963. Yet both times the films did the storyline, it was in the 3rd movie after Jean Grey had been introduced. We had no time with the character to to watch Jean develop and become someone we cared about. (And even more egregiously, in neither storyline did Jean actually take her own life in order to prevent the Dark Phoenix from taking over again.)
Craig
@JML: I read the Phoenix Saga in real-time as each episode came out, and it blew my 12 year old mind. I couldn’t wait for the next issue. It was the first time I remember being aware that I was witnessing, (and as a reader) involved with a truly important creative work of art.
geg6
@Craig:
Maybe my problem is that I was introduced to great literature and non-fiction as a child. My mom was a newspaper reporter and my dad an amateur historian (steelworker by day, mad skills at analyzing history and research—a superhero of sorts!). We were allowed and encouraged to read and discuss any reading materials in the house. At 8, I was making my way through the works of Dickens and could recount the lead up to WWII and the tale of the Tudors from their Welsh origins to Good Queen Bess.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Citizen Alan: the thing about thor: love and thunder is that it feels like the russos didn’t watch a single second of ragnarok. they missed the whole character arc where thor learns that his hammer is a crutch and grows beyond it.
in their haste to keep the odinson and hulk off stage, allowing the other avengers to breathe and work the problem themselves, the russos had thor spend a huge chunk of endgame trying to get a hammer to channel powers he no longer needed a prop to express.
so waititi felt like he needed to squeeze all the lebowski out of the thor in the first stretch of love and thunder.
to say it’s wildly atonal would be a cosmic understatement.
good performances all around but wasted by a screenplay that was uncomfortably grafting together three completely separate stories (and a tremendous waste of eternity.)
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@piratedan: The Amazon Prime take on The Tick was great. Unfortunately it only got two seasons. I was really disappointed they cancelled it
Craig
@lowtechcyclist: Breaking Away is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. When Dave comes back from riding with the Italian’s is the stuff from which Oscars are made.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch: not snyder’s. he completely missed the point alan moore was trying to make.
geg6
@geg6:
And I’ll add that I had two great honors English teachers in high school. Introduced me to some stuff I didn’t have at home (Voltaire and Cervantes and books and essays about the African American experience). I really loved their classes. In fact, they were the only truly worthwhile classes I took in high school.
Citizen Alan
@geg6: I think the idea that comic book movies or even popcorn blockbusters in general constitute “85%” of the movies on the screen is fairly ridiculous. A brief look at the box office listings for 2024 so far shows that Deadpool & Wolverine is the only comic book movie in the top 20. The bigger problem, I think, is that all of the top ten movies of 2024 so far are sequels. Personally, I would rather see a well-made superhero movie based on a character who has not yet appeared on film but which also continues the exploration of a shared universe than a seventh movie in the Aliens franchise or even a fourth Despicable Me, but maybe that’s just me.
JML
@Citizen Alan: The Gaiman Eternals mini might have worked as a basis. what they did certainly failed. I do think some people at Marvel took the wrong lessons from Black Panther regarding the supposed “villain problem” that Marvel movies have and have been desperately trying to make sure that whomever the antagonist is “has a point” and might not really be a villain, or by making the heroes less heroic and being the actual villains.
You know what? Sometimes the villain can just be evil. it’s ok.
Craig
@Gwangung: I’m probably going to watch it again after I rewatch Hawkeye.
Citizen Alan
@geg6: It was a testament to my innate love of reading that was initially engendered by comic books that the English teachers I had in high school and college did not utterly destroy my ability to read for pleasure.
Sadly, it took law school to do that,.
Villago Delenda Est
Rule of thumb (for me, a PMM) is “Marvel movies good, DC movies bad”. Of course there are exceptions, as geg6 outlined waaaaay up thread. Also, too, The Dark Knight is well worth watching for Heath Ledger’s performance.
kmeyerthelurker
I enjoyed the MCU well enough for a time, but around COVID I kind of began to lose interest. Checked out a couple here & there. The latest Dr strange was wonderfully psychedelic, if rather stupid. Really enjoyed the twist on the latest live action spider man also.
Since I stopped reading comics 40 years ago, I’m never going to get any of the inside stuff, and although I’ve had friends try to convince me that modern comics are really great, i cannot get into them. It just seems like reboots all the way down.
Craig
@geg6: could be.
JML
@Citizen Alan: I think they could have done it the first time, but you had a hack director and a lot of studio interference in the first attempt, plus they killed off Cyclops. Probably would have been better off having Jean come back in an X3 as Phoenix with Sentinels as the villains and doing Dark Phoenix as X4.
But the second attempt we only had Jean for ONE movie before they did a hack job on great X-Men story. At least they gave Cyclops some role in the story that time, but the obsession with Magneto & Mystique effectively boxed out the stars of the story from getting to be at the center.
It’s a bummer.
I was so excited to see a New Mutants movie and the possibilities using the Demon Bear Saga as source material, and then they did all kinds of weird and stupid things like making Illyana racist.
Citizen Alan
I also think that Marvel/Disney gets a lot of hate for the general quality level of “comic book movies” even though M/D has absolutely no say in the various cinematic abortions that Sony keeps putting out in its ongoing effort to cannibalize as much of the Spiderman universe as possible. I honestly wish they would cut a deal where Tom Holland would only appear in MCU crossover films and Andrew Garfield would be the official Spiderman for the Sony-verse. He might have a good time wise-cracking and making fun of how crap the Sony villains are.
Citizen Alan
@JML: I was pretty sure that movie was doomed from the start. I was completely baffled by the idea of doing a “New Mutants” movie with New Mutants characters while completely divorcing them from the X-Men setting. And yes, the Demon Bear storyline is iconic, but it was a pretty weird place to start with for a potential New Mutants franchise.
Mike in Oly
@JML: I had no idea they did a Powers series. Looks like Amazon has it. I may re-up my Prime to see that this winter. Thanks for the tip. And yes, Astro City is special. It would take a deft touch on every aspect to do it justice.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
The rule of thumb for me, at least in the 2010s, was that Marvel made good movies and bad television, and DC made bad movies and good television. (The gulf was much bigger for DC than Marvel).
RSA
Yes to all your observations. Add Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), and Magneto (Ian McKellan) of the X-Men movies, who made them worthwhile. Also, Logan may be the best of all the Marvel movies.
For comparison, movies based on DC comics don’t have the same depth of casting, outside of Batman movies.
Leto
@Citizen Alan: if you have a person who’s predisposed to think of comic books as only the 3 panel shit you find in the newspapers, you’ll never be able to convince them of their intrinsic story telling value. I’ve finally made it through the current 215 comments and I can summarize most of the non-comic people like this: I stopped listening to music between the ages of 3-10 and I see no reason to go back. OR: I listened to classical music at an early age, so I don’t understand why the radio station primarily caters to non-classical music.
I agree with most of your analysis here. I hope there’s more She-Hulk and Moonknight, but after the quick cancelation of The Acolyte, I’m not holding my breath. There was potential there but the continual incel backlash is part of why I’m just not hopeful for my franchise.
Craig
@RSA: yeah Logan is pretty special. Of course James Mangold was in charge of that and he’s pretty much best writer/director working these days.
Peke Daddy
@Citizen Alan: Thus is why we need either an animated or live action version of Kingdom Come. The DCAU version of Superman vs. The Elite was another work that addressed the superhero problem.
Craig
@Leto: regarding The Acolyte, it was just a bad show. The Jedi are once again clueless and slow witted. The young sisters are bad actors with terrible dialogue they have to perform. Lots of little annoyances, like the starship designs, why disengage the hyperdrive section and leave it in orbit? The twins switch is afternoon soap opera level trite. I felt the show was just sloppy.
karen gail
@geg6: I was also “corrupted” by adults as a child, since my early fiction was Hugo, Asimov, Heminway and Steinbeck. I read anything I could get my hands on, during Junior high I started at one end of the library and worked my way through to the end of Senior high section. From there I went to town library where the head librarian let me work my way through the adult stacks by the middle of my Junior year of high school.
I have never understood the attraction of comic books and discovered movies and television to be boring. Unless, I am knitting or crocheting then my attention is split and can manage to get through a movie.
Leto
@Craig: I can understand those criticisms, even if I don’t agree, but that’s not what was driving the pre-release social media/score bombing. It had like a 15% fan rating before it even released. It was being lambasted just for having a black lead, and a primarily POC cast. This also goes back to what CA said about how the industry operates today: you’re either a blockbuster success straight out of the gate, or you’re canceled. And with the way most of the studios, both traditional and streaming, are trending, you’re not going to get a lot of originality. They don’t have time to build a compelling story or characters, you have to be able to turn an insane profit now. Not in the future, but immediately.
Leto
@karen gail: let me pose it like this then: you’ve read both Hugo and Asimov. Why did you read the one after the other when they essentially cover similar material, similar themes? You’ve read the one, there’s no reason to read the other. You’ve read the one, there’s no reason to read anything else in the genre.
I’ll simply repeat my example from above: you heard one form of music, and then proceeded to discount everything else. “I have never understood the attraction of classical music and discovered musicals and jazz to be boring.” It’s a deeply weird mindset that I just don’t understand.
scav
As though there were never any shit adaptations of The Classics or, God help us, a running repetitive string of yet another Jane Austen all in a clump. . . let alone the stuttering succession of repetitive sequels and remakes and reboots we’re struggling through. That’s a studio / industry problem, not an issue of genre. And, as for genres with outlandish unbelievable plots, usually flat characterizations, and stylized conventions, I’d hold up opera to comics any day. (even my favored early operas seem to be 50% Orfeo with an odd Dido for change.) Still, good ones and bad ones and a fair bit of mediocre ones.
karen gail
@Leto: I think that for some people comic books make sense because they need to see a character, they are more visual in the way they learn and relate to the world around them. Some people have a vivid imagination and they don’t see the characters the way they are drawn. Or some people are distracted by the visual character and it makes it harder for them to understand the story.
I don’t think has anything to do with how we were taught or exposed to when young but the way that our minds are wired.
Matt McIrvin
I’ve never actually been a (print) comics reader to any great degree–as a kid I never got into superhero comics, just had a few back issues of Harvey, Archie and Disney comics I’d gotten as a small kid and that were not super interesting. So while I like movies and shows about superheroes, the comics stuff, I’m mostly absorbed through Internet osmosis. There’s a strange madness to reading the Wikipedia history of a long-running comics character: all these confusing identity-shifts and power-shifts and deaths and resurrections and hard reboots and soft reboots compressed into a rambling narrative.
My daughter was a fan of Marvel’s recent Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel comics, and I became a fan of those too, particularly North/Henderson’s Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. That’s probably my favorite superhero comic, more or less by default.
BellaPea
@Chris:Yes, TH would have been an awesome James Bond. Quite different from Daniel Craig, more aristocratic.
Matt McIrvin
…On the other hand, while I have no great history with comic books, I loved newspaper comics from an early age and aspired sometimes to draw them.
I was more fond of the gag strips than the serial adventure or soap-opera ones, though I followed some of those too. I get all the jokes about the incredibly slow-moving newspaper Spider-Man comic that often portrayed him as an oddly ineffectual and lazy character, because, yeah, I followed that one.
billcinsd
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: Really? I thought it was horrible, trying to turn The Tick into a generic superhero. Bleh
karen gail
@Leto: I keep reading different authors both fiction and nonfiction; some I pick up and find that I can’t get through much more than a few chapters and others make me not only want to read everything that author has written but explore similar authors.
Comics was never my thing, just wasn’t; nothing against them I think they are great medium. Just not one that speaks to me; I can disappear into a book’s world and never found myself being able to do that with comics. I still believe that some of us have minds that are wired in a way that comics speak to us and some of us don’t.
Craig
@Leto: sure. I don’t really follow industry news, but that’s just sad about people complaining about having a cast of POC. Social media is a frustrating, disappointing place a lot of the time.
Matt McIrvin
@CliosFanboy: Lots of people whose taste I respect really loved The Batman. But I just could not watch it. I tried, on streaming, but it was too unpleasant a slog to keep going. I think I just don’t really like serial-killer procedurals, which is what that was. That’s my least favorite type of crime story. And it seems to be where modern grimdark Batman stories gravitate.
I’ll give it this: it definitely had the coolest Batmobile.
Craig
@BellaPea: Well, he did go to Eton and Cambridge.
Matt McIrvin
@Craig: The Star Wars online fandom is easily one of the most toxic ones out there. And there are a lot of toxic ones out there.
Craig
@Matt McIrvin: I grew up on Bloom County. The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes as well. For some reason I always had a soft spot for The Family Circus.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Matt McIrvin: sure, if you figure the batman “modern” era started in 1971. o’neil and adams brought the “detective” back to detective comics and got gritty AF after they introduced ra’s al ghul waaaay back then.
one of the things i really liked about reeves’ interpretation of the batman was that that version of wayne tried to solve crimes. he tried to save people. every other film batman (west excepted) has just brutalized and murdered people left and right
eta- yeah, they nailed the car
eta, eta- of course, before they introduced robin in the forties, batman carried a gun and killed most of his foes. the character hadn’t fully gelled yet.
rikyrah
Superhero movies
Superman 1&2. With Christopher Reeve
Then….Spiderman 2…with Tobey McGuire
And then Black Panther…
Honorable Mention: Captain America: Civil War
For Epicness..Endgame,
The conclusion of an era….
Craig
@Matt McIrvin: sheesh, much like YouTube comments I’ll just steer clear of that. Thanks for the info.
Gwangung
@scav: oh, tell me about it. There’s a small cottage industry in theatre doing Jane Austin fan fic; very reliable money makers particularly with middle heavyweights like Lauren Gunderson keeping swaths of theatre alive with her pastiches focusing on the Bennett sisters. Have to be careful on who’s doing which adaption for which theatre….
Matt McIrvin
@Craig: In the 1970s and 80s, the Washington Post had three whole pages of daily comics, and the Sunday section was huge. It was a lot of entertainment. While it existed, we got the Washington Star too and that had some other ones.
Peanuts, Doonesbury, Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, all brilliant stuff, and there was a lot of not-brilliant stuff too that was at least interesting to look at for technique and occasional laughs.
Craig
@Matt McIrvin: I never understood Mary Worth. So little happened in each strip.
Matt McIrvin
@Craig: There was apparently a Golden Girls joke in which Bea Arthur’s character says to Betty White’s that she used to read “Apartment 3-G” but she left off sometime around 1970. White says “Oh, I’ll fill you in! It is later that same day…”
M. Bouffant
The Lodger
@Mike in Oly: Speaking of Bendis books, there should be a movie/TV version of The United States (of/vs.) Murder Inc. Not superhero but plenty of noir.
Citizen Alan
@M. Bouffant: Probably a dead thread by now, but “The Patchwork Girl of Oz” gave me nightmares worse that any actual horror movie I’ve seen in years. The main character is played by an acrobat/contortionist playing an animated doll that continually flops around in a horrific manner while wearing a multicolored patchwork gimp suit.
BretH
@Geminid: Across the Pogoverse?
Chris
@Leto:
Yep. And semi-disagreeing with Matt McIrvin, it isn’t just Star Wars. Any major IP property these days attracts hordes and hordes of online Nazis. Fan sites are okay, when aggressively moderated enough, but on the main social media websites at least, any discussion of a new Star Wars or Marvel or DC or James Bond or Indiana Jones property quickly turns into a cesspool of racist and sexist comments. Admittedly that also goes to the enshittification of these spaces overall. But there’s a really loud and well-funded effort these days to try and bully the entire pop culture scene into the far right.
(The best fandom might actually be Star Trek, at least as far as this kind of thing goes, simply because it’s so self-consciously been “sci-fi for liberals” for so long that there’s just a really loud and active fanbase that won’t allow it to stop being that. But even there you get a sizable contingent of get-woke-go-brokers).
Chris
@BellaPea:
These things tend to go back and forth, with Roger Moore being heavier on the “refined gentleman” part of the character, then being replaced by Timothy Dalton who was heavier on the “tough guy assassin” part of the character, then swinging back in the former direction with Pierce Brosnan, then the latter direction with Daniel Craig. Tom Hiddleston would just have been the pendulum swinging back after Craig. He’s probably getting too old for the role now, though.
(The only actor who ever really nailed both parts of the character was Sean Connery, which, in addition to him being the first, is why he’s remained so many people’s definitive idea of James Bond).
Kosh III
Probably too late but whatever….
I’m an old fart, I bought the first issues of many Marvel comics paying a whopping dime for them, then 12 cents then whoa! 15 cents. I left them at home when I went to college and they got trashed because no one thought they were worth keeping. sig h…..
Anyhoo, some of the Marvel early movies were really good, the later ones seems to be repetitive. The Arrowverse shows on CW were enjoyable.
Currently started watching Preacher; it’s violent, bloody and ridiculously hilarious.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Chris: tell that to the people constantly slagging discovery.
but yeah, the acolyte was merely mediocre. it didn’t deserve the umbrage it’s getting except it’s far too woke for the far-right’s tastes.
NotMax
Late to the party (was 38,0000 feet in the air yesterday.
Quick scan of comments shows no one has yet mentioned Barefoot Gen.
Nelson
@Frankensteinbeck: The only thing wrong with that song was that it wasn’t long enough.
ljdramone
Another latecomer, but a big thumbs up for Mystery Men. Back in the late 80s I collected Flaming Carrot, Bob Burden’s indie comic that introduced the Mystery Men in a two-issue story.
And this year is the 40th anniversary of another guilty pleasure, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. It might be the only “comic book” movie that wasn’t based on an existing comic character, but spawned spinoff comics after its release.