Frank Miller's Goddamn Justice League Movie

A good portion of comics fandom is currently up in arms thanks to this little piece of rumor and innuendo from the comics internet’s premier home for rumor and innuendo, Bleeding Cool. Apparently, a couple of poorly disguised market researchers wandered into a local comics shop asking the clientele various questions meant to gauge general geek interest in prospective big screen adaptations of DC Comics. One of those questions concerned the prospect of a Justice League movie with Frank Miller’s name attached to it in some capacity. Now, I touched upon DC and Warners’ crippling incompetence and overall inability to successfully adapt any of their iconic properties not named Batman to the big screen in my post about the company’s mishandling of Superman, but this episode – if true – might just sum up their overall ineptitude in that area even better than such laughable film missteps as Superman Returns and Greens Lantern already do. Why do I find this story so funny?

Cosmic Slop: Thoughts on Marvel's Cosmic Universe and the Guardians of the Galaxy film

Hall H in the San Diego Convention Center is in many ways a microcosm of the pop-culture geek orgy that San Diego Comic Con has become over the past decade: a gathering of movie and television enthusiasts packed on top of one another to celebrate and scream at news and sneak-peek footage of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster film or television project. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of place us devoted comic fans avoid when we attend SDCC purely out of an interest in actual comic books (we still make up a meager percentage of the 100,000-plus who attend each year). And while I steered clear of the notorious Hall H each of the four years I attended the exhausting pop spectacle that is SDCC from 2006-2010, a small, sick part of me still would’ve loved to have been in the hall this past year during Marvel Studio’s presentation of their upcoming slate of movies, if only to hear the crowd’s reaction change from orgasmic cheers to general bemusement when the announcement of a planned Guardians of the Galaxy film followed the highly anticipated confirmations of Marvel’s planned sequels to Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers.



Since the Guardians of the Galaxy aren’t exactly the most popular characters amongst even diehard Marvel Comics fans, it’s probably safe to assume a good chunk of the crowd in Hall H had little idea who the characters are, let alone why Marvel chose to give the Guardians the big screen treatment ahead of more recognizable properties like, say, Dr. Strange, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Black Panther or even sequel/spinoff treatments to the Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Widow and/or Nick Fury. But there are plenty of damn good reasons why Marvel tapped their team of interstellar misfit adventurers to follow the original Avengers onto the big screen, and those same reasons will likely lead the Guardians film to enjoy the same crossover, mainstream success as the rest of Marvel’s billion-dollar film franchises despite their low profile. In short, the cosmic realm of the Marvel Comics Universe is an awesome, weird, incredibly fun place filled with endless story possibilities. If Marvel Studios gives it and the Guardians the same accessible yet faithful-to-the-comics treatment it gave its other properties, those Hall H fans, as well as the rest of mainstream moviegoers, are in for a hell of a treat.


What follows is a background and appreciation of Marvel’s Cosmic Universe and thoughts on the exciting potential of a Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Prejudging Marvel NOW!

After spending time last week to weigh in (and mostly tear down) DC Comics’ New 52 relaunch, it’s now time for me to turn my attention to the other massive, line-wide comics overhaul coming down the pipeline in a matter of weeks: Marvel NOW!, the publisher’s campaign to slap a shiny new #1 on many of its series while cancelling some titles, launching many others and in general shifting its top writers and artists onto franchises they’ve never before touched.



If you listen to Marvel’s editorial brass and publicity department in their promotional pieces regarding Marvel NOW!, the initiative is in absolutely NO way just another gimmick to boost sales with new #1’s OR any sort of response to the sales success of DC’s line-wide reboot, but anyone with either half a brain or the slightest familiarity with Marvel’s publicity tactics should know that’s a crock of bullshit. Like DC, Marvel is perpetually guilty of telling fans their latest publishing move has nothing to do with the competition when in reality the exact opposite is most likely true. Regardless of the possible reactionary nature of Marvel NOW!, however, I figure now’s the perfect time to take a look at how Marvel is approaching their latest overhaul and what that approach says about the publisher’s strengths and weaknesses over the past few years compared to DC’s.


What follows is a series of snap judgments on Marvel NOW! based on their publicity campaign and how they’ve approached their publishing line in recent years.

From the Vault: The Joker's Greatest Stories

So a gigantic storm blowing through my neck of New York has my electricity going in and out, which means I haven't had a continuous block of time - one not interrupted by my power dying and me screaming profanities - to write up tonight's blog post. Rather than risk losing any work, I figure I'd post something from the vault of the old IGN days. In this case, with Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo ready to unleash their highly anticipated Joker story, "Death of the Family," it seemed like the perfect time to revisit my article on the greatest Joker stories of all time for IGN's Ultimate Bookshelf feature.   Keep in mind that the article is a a few years old at this point, and I'd probably add Morrison's Batman RIP onto this list if I were to update it.


Anyway, Enjoy.  We'll resume our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

Judging DC's New 52 One Year Later

After spending much of the night kicking around possible topics to tackle for tonight’s post, I sat down to read Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman #0 (it’s good!) and realized, hell, DC’s New 52 relaunch is exactly a year old this month, so why not finally sit down to address what I think about the bold new publishing initiative? Just be warned: various aspects of the New 52 bugged me the minute the news of the relaunch broke, and those areas of concern have only widened and become more apparent in the twelve months since the first issues hit the stands. In short, I am not a fan of the New 52, so this post will hardly read like a celebration of the relaunch.

Taking a Bite out of The Walking Dead TV Series

I like to believe I’ve matured past being the sort of comic book fan who immediately decides a movie or television adaptation is automatically inferior to the original simply because it diverges from the source material or, god forbid, dares to bring anything new to the table. I’ve been around long enough and have seen enough dramatic adaptations in my life to know for every Superman Returns, Green Lantern and Elektra film that completely misses the mark of the original, there’s a Godfather, Jaws or Kick-Ass (just to name three very different examples) that surpasses the quality of the source book.

And if Batman Begins taught me anything, it’s that even a source mythology as thoroughly explored as the Batman legend offers the space and freedom for a talented storyteller to blaze exciting new ground while keeping faithful to the spirit of the original. By and large, I’m willing to judge an adaptation and its source on their own merits while allowing them both to exist as separate entities, and as long as an adaptation sticks to the spirit, tone and basic intent of the original work I enjoy, I’m rarely bothered by specific inconsistencies between the two.

All that being said, whenever I hear someone praise AMC’s The Walking Dead television series as some sort of extraordinary achievement in entertainment, I can’t help but revert to my worst Simpson’s Comic Book Guy voice while pointing out that not only is the phenomenal comic series vastly superior to the adaptation, but the TV show isn’t even all that good to begin with.

Don’t get me wrong – at times, as in its near-perfect pilot episode and fleeting moments spread out across its first two seasons, The Walking Dead is great. But there are far more times (and for reasons I’ll get into in the body of this post) when it’s downright awful and exceedingly difficult to watch. And it’s because of that jarring inconsistency that the show is by far one of the most frustrating television serials I’ve ever stuck with for any significant amount of time.

(I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers or specific references to plot points for the rest of the post, but if you’re not caught up on the show I’d still tread carefully if I were you.)

Sick of Supes: Garth Ennis' The Boys

My comics reading and consuming habits have changed drastically since my time at IGN ended, a reality I describe in detail in my initial two blog posts for this humble little dumping ground for random ideas I call External Underpants. Go back and read those posts if you haven’t already and are interested in learning just how those habits have changed, but suffice it to say the number of superhero comics in my weekly reading stack shrunk almost immediately the minute I found myself no longer responsible for reviewing and keeping up with the regular occurrences of the DC and Marvel Universes.

Between the haphazard nature of DC’s New 52 reboot, Marvel’s never-ending cycle of event-driven storytelling, the editorial-dictated nature of both Big Two publishers, the lack of any sort of consistent artistic/visual presence on so many superhero books and the disturbing over-reliance of Marvel and DC on artificial gimmicks to drum up interest in and sales of their books, it didn’t take long for me to realize that the majority of superhero books were simply no longer worth my time, attention or money. And with my frustration over the way superhero comics are written and sold reaching unprecedented heights, I figured now was as good a time as any to revisit Garth Ennis’ The Boys, a series that ups the ante on taking the proverbial piss out of the superhero concept like no comic in history.

Superman: Recommended Reading

After spending last week railing against DC and Warner Bros’ mishandling of the Superman franchise over the past twenty years and then pointing out arguably the most egregious case of DC’s editorial department missing out on an opportunity to revitalize The Man of Steel for a modern market, I suspect it’d be easy for a reader of this blog to assume I haven’t been a fan of any Superman project released during the past two decades save for Mark Waid’s Birthright and Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, the only two actual published stories I positively mentioned in either of my previous two Superman-related posts.

That’s not the case, as I’ve thoroughly enjoyed quite a lot of modern Superman comics despite the fact that the forgettable, mundane and/or terrible books have greatly outweighed the ones that get the character “right.” I figure, after ranting in such detail about how Warners and DC in particular have gotten the character wrong, it’d only be fair to give them credit for their genuine successes in the modern era, and in doing so perhaps illuminate more clearly why I think the character remains one of the best superheroes ever created, and one that surely deserves a level of success on par with Batman, the X-Men, the Avengers and every other superhero property to enjoy mainstream popularity without having to be tinkered with drastically every five or so years.

So after the jump, let’s dive right into a few of my picks for Superman’s best modern comics stories, which will hopefully give you an idea of my take on the character’s vast potential and the elements DC and future Superman writers should focus on in order to capitalize on his appeal.

Brian K Vaughan interviews Jason Aaron on Scalped

Off to a gig tonight, so in place of a proper post, here is Brian K Vaughan (Lost, Ex Machina, Y: the Last Man) interviewing Jason Aaron about Scalped courtesy of Comic Book Resources. A worthwhile read. I always love reading one great writer interview another.

We'll return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.