Stan Lee on comics and games
By Peter Nowak - Thursday, October 13, 2011 - 3 Comments
It’s not often I become a quivering fanboy while interviewing someone, but it happened a few weeks ago when I got the chance to speak with comics legend Stan Lee. As the man who put Marvel Comics on the map in the 1960s by creating the likes of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, he’s pretty much responsible for much of the joy I experienced as a kid.
My childhood revolved around comic books. I’d bike downtown several times a week to buy them, then spend the rest of the week reading them. I learned to draw by emulating the likes of John Romita Jr., John Byrne and Marc Silvestri, and I’m pretty certain comic books contributed a great deal to my reading ability. And that of course led to writing, which is what I do for a living. In some ways, my entire livelihood can be traced back to Stan the Man. Continue…
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Wham, pow: it’s Superputin!
By Erica Alini - Friday, June 3, 2011 at 4:00 PM - 8 Comments
A new Russian comic book portrays Vladimir Putin as the next action hero—crushing terrorists and the opposition.
Superputin.ru
Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have had his upcoming Governator comic killed after details of his marital infidelity were splattered in gossip magazines across the world. In Russia, though, the news cycle is actually helping rocket Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to the big league of cartoon superheroes. Superputin, A Man Like Any Other, an online comic strip, was released last week, and is already an Internet phenomenon—courtesy of its timing, which coincides with the run-up to the presidential election next year.
Superputin, allegedly the work of a Russian PR freelancer who received no input from the Kremlin, features a kimono-clad Putin darting to rescue a bus from an al-Qaeda bomb attack. Helping him is the cartoon version of President Dmitry Medvedev, described as a “gnome raised by bears” with an obsession for gadgets. The gentle parody of Russia’s political duo registered three million views in its first week, but has also stirred criticism for portraying the political opposition as brain-hungry zombies.
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Why Hasn't There Been a Good ARCHIE Adaptation?
By Jaime Weinman - Monday, June 8, 2009 at 5:09 PM - 10 Comments
All the Archie/Betty/Veronica talk the other week got me thinking again about Archie comics, to the point that I promised on my other blog that I wouldn’t make such references for a while. (But I made no such promise here.) One question that interests me: we can see, from the immense public interest in this gimmick, that the Archie characters are some of the best-known comic book characters around, for better or for worse. (I say it’s for better if they are drawn by someone as great as the late Harry Lucey.) Yet they’ve never been adapted into other media with anything resembling real success, unless you count “Sugar, Sugar,” and that doesn’t actually have anything to do with the comics. There have been several TV cartoons, but all of them kind of stunk; the main question is whether the Filmation cartoon stunk worse than “Archie’s Weird Mysteries.” There was that live-action TV movie where they’re grown-up and return to Riverdale, and many, many rumours about possible feature films, TV series and stage musicals, which never come to pass. How many comic book characters are that popular yet have such a dismal track record in adaptations? For God’s sake, they did a flop movie version of Josie & the Pussycats, which flopped because they didn’t include Pepper in it, but not an Archie movie.
More proof that Betty is an insane psycho stalker
One reason why the adaptations never happen is that the Archie world is so generic that you can do virtually the same characters and setting without actually having to adapt the comic book. I can think of at least three successful franchises from the last 20 years that owe an obvious debt of inspiration to Archie comics: 1) Saved By the Bell; 2) High School Musical; 3) Beverly Hills 90210. (I doubt Darren Star intended to do a California Archie show with the Peach Pit standing in for the Chok’lit Shoppe, but that’s what he came up with.) It’s not like superhero comics, where if you want to use the specific powers and villains in your movie, you have to pay for them. There’s no copyright on the concept of teen hijinks and chaste love triangles.
Also, the Archie characters are harder to cast than superheroes, because superheroes depend to a large extent on the costume: you put the actor in a Superman suit, he looks like Superman. Casting someone who looks like Archie, let alone Jughead, let alone Betty and Veronica (who, let us remember, have the exact same face) is much trickier. How do you convince us that this guy is Archie, just because he has red hair and maybe wears an “R” on his shirt?
Still, I think that with all the zillions of comic-book movies around today, it would make sense for someone, somewhere to do an Archie movie. It could even work if they went back to the old Frank Doyle scripts for inspiration on how these characters should talk (which is to say, like old-time Vaudeville comedians).
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Superheroes are starting to bug me
By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 118 Comments
All those Sharpie-bright spandex boys have helped Hollywood off an awkward hook
No disrespect to Wolverine, who’s the hottest Canadian at the box office since Mary Pickford (even if they do need an Australian to play him), but I wonder about this superhero business. They’ve been cleaning up at the multiplex ever since the dawn of the millennium: Spider-Man. X-Men. Batman. Iron Man. The mid-20th-century long-underwear guys are bigger than ever in the 21st. Truly this is the Age of the Superhero. And it’s beginning to bother me.Don’t get me wrong. I love comic books. Meeting Stan Lee was one of the great moments of my life. Read a zillion of his masterpieces as a kid—although my grasp of the details decades later is generally frozen circa issue No. 22: Jean Grey will always be Marvel Girl to me. Please, no need to write to point out that she subsequently became Phoenix, and then Dark Phoenix, and then died, and then turned up in a pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, which was given to Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, and then she died again but implanted her psyche in the body of the comatose Emma Frost . . . I’m just skimming the CliffsNotes here, so, alternatively, don’t write if my précis has omitted many fascinating plot twists over the decades. My point is that keeping up with these guys is a full-time job. And even the fellows whose basic bio doesn’t change much get “reinvented.” The reinventions are invariably the same: out with the breezy guy swinging through the streets of Gotham to a ring-a-ding-ding Neal Hefti theme tune; in with some morose misanthrope hunched on the rooftops brooding and riddled with self-doubt. In the sixties, the TV Batman was camp. Then he got dark in the eighties movie. But then by the nineties sequels the dark Batman had mysteriously camped up again. So now he’s darker than ever. I think the concept of reinvention could do with reinventing.
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Obama and Palin go to war again
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at 12:23 PM - 2 Comments
Barack the Barbarian takes on Palin in a cape
A new comic book series features Barack the Barbarian taking on “the overpaid despots of the time” and their champion Sarah Palin, who sports a cape made from wolf skin, her trademark glasses—and very little else. Chicago-based publishers Devil’s Due asks readers to follow the adventures of “Barack, Sorceress Hilaria, her demi-god trickster husband Biil, Overlord Boosh and Chainknee of the Elephant Kingdom. Who can the lone barbarian trust, if anyone?”
