This blog is essentially a collection of posts I used to write on Facebook combined with my travel blog and expanded to make a very public forum of my thoughts regarding Pop Culture, The Interweb, Cartoons, Comics, Ultimate Frisbee, Absurdity, Life, Travel and whatever else captures my attention long enough to write about it...

Enter at your own peril!

23 June 2011

Comics, part 1

So looking over my previous posts I've found very little reference to comics on here. Now I'm not quite a "comic book" person like you imagine when you hear the term... There's no collection of air tight plastic bags holding issue 1 of anything, in fact there's very few actual comics in my collection, it's almost exclusively "graphic novels" (big comics for those who don't know what that means).
Anyway I guess when I first started paying any attention to comics it was in the 90s and mainly Marvel stuff... But that was mainly due to the toys and the tv shows and not actual comics... Although I do have one (somewhere) where Magneto rips out Wolverines adamantium and then Prof X vegetables him... So in the Marvel vs DC debate I'm pretty heavily on the Marvel side (on that note I did have a couple of the Marvel vs DC comics they did... and years later picked up the collection). When I started looking at them again a few years back (coinciding strongly with the appearance of a disposable income) I drifted away from the Marvel/DC "mainstream" and started looking at other publishers like Devils Due and the more obvious Image, Dark Horse etc...
So I was shifting around my collection to new shelves and I thought I'd write something about it... but I couldn't quite come up with anything that worthwhile... So I thought I'd just write about comics/characters I like or own and why...

Starting with the "classics" (most are movies now too)


Watchmen
THE comic that everyone tells you to read. Alan Moore (a name you need to know to understand comics today... but a bit of a douche... more on that later). Award winning (and not just in comic categories, but actual "real" books too) and quite worthy of said awards. Complex story with lots of morally grey areas and a quite good movie too. Read it more than once... Although the artwork is nothing special (Alan Moore is pretty boring in his layouts...) Committing comic book heresy here, but I actually like the movie conclusion a lot more than the book, (spoiler time) but Dr Manhatten going rogue and threatening earth seems much more realistic (within the bounds of the story) than other dimensional aliens... Although it sucked they took out the pirate story. Also interestingly was meant to be set in a "universe" of another publisher that DC "acquired" and then be killing off established characters with history, rather than newly developed ones.
V for Vendetta
Again with Alan Moore, this time indulging in his pen chant for anarchism and revolution (rather than sex and conspiracy that Watchmen covered). Interesting enough story with boring as art (although no thought bubbles is new). A semi decent movie adaption that Alan Moore seems to hate (basically he's a douche and hates anyone doing anything with his work). He can blather on about trying to make his work unfilmable and wanting comics to be special... but that's not ever going to happen dude... get over it...
V is harder to read than Watchmen mainly due to all the hoo hah about anarchy and the completely unrealistic end game of V... People ruling themselves nicely? Dream on... I quite like the anti authoritarian stance, getting upset because the words "anarchism" and "fascism" aren't used is pretty silly IMHO

Sin City
Another classic turned into a reasonably popular film, this time however it's NOT an Alan Moore work but Frank Miller. A series of very awesome looking comics held together by a very tight (if somewhat over the top) story. And because Frank Miller had a bullshit time making Robocop 3 (basically he got fucked by a studio) the movie is pretty close to the comics too.

300
What? Frank Miller again? Yes much like Stan Lee invented 90% of the Marvel universes characters a surprisingly large proportion of really kick ass (more on Kick Ass later) comics come from a surprisingly small portion of writers. Funnily (yet unsurprisingly) enough Alan Moore had a whinge about this comic (and probably the movie too)... Apparently there wasn't enough homo in it for him... I get the feeling Alan Moore is kinda a epic douche as a person.
The art is once again quite awesome (and different to the "norm" or Alan Moore's "extra boring" style) and again the movie (the "this is Sparta" one) turned out to be quite popular (at least on the interweb) and quite close to the original comic.

Moving on from "classics/must haves", but continuing the "recently filmed" trend and you have

Kick Ass
Not Frank Miller or Alan Moore, but once again comic bigwigs (kinda) and you get a relatively new comic being developed almost alongside its movie. Substantial differences exist between the comic and movie (not the least being the reaction by the chick when she finds out he's not gay) and whilst you might think the movie is a little fucked up, it's got nothing compared to the comic. And most amazingly the comic writer is quite ok with the differences between the movie and the comic, with the reasoning being comic audiences and film audiences are different and film audiences wouldn't be able to deal with the less than happy things that happen (because they're pussies essentially). Think of Kick Ass the movie as the "chick flick" of the comic.
Bright colours, over the top storyline and gore make this comic most amusing to read... and I can't wait for the next two installments (comic AND movie)

The Mask
Yes it was a comic first, no the movie has nothing at all to do with the comic... Well they both have green faces, that's about it... I do like the Jim Carey vehicle, however comparing it to the comic is possibly even less reliable that comparing the Starship Troopers book to the movie.
Crazy over the top stories and violence makes the looney tunes copy cat mask from the movie appear like a total pussy... Plus the mask is actually a BAD guy in the comic...

I dearly dearly dearly want to read the Lobo/Big Head crossover and the Big Head/Joker crossover.

That's about all I can be bothered writing for the moment, but I do have more to write about (Scott Pilgrim, Hack/Slash, Dead @ 17, Marvel stuff, not to mention Neil Gaiman) so I'll do that whenever I get around to doing it

Love, Hugs and Kisses
ANt

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