Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
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Horrorthon Posts
How do you like those apples? There’s a big version over here.
To all you actual Tintin fans: What do you think, huh? This kind of confirms what we already knew about how “The Secret of the Unicorn” has been somehow combined with “Cigars of the Pharaoh.” Or rather, the brief sequence on the trawler in “Cigars” (with the famous Tintin/Haddock first meeting) and the escape by longboat has been transposed into “Unicorn,” although I can’t really understand how one would do that.
It’s kind of like the new “Winnie the Pooh” movie: there’s always a need for a new story, apparently. It makes me realize how unusual the Peter Jackson/Tolkien movies are.
Thursday, July 28th, 2011
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Horrorthon Posts
“Or, some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!”
Legendary EC Comics/MAD magazine artist Wally Wood (one of the “holy” triumverate of Wood, Elder and Davis working under Kurtzman and Gaines in the 1950s) drew this comic book artists’ compositional guide, called “22 panels that always work,” I’d never seen this before but apparently it’s very famous…an awesome peek behind the scenes of the magical art of comic books. (Wood was also famous for saying, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.”)
Click for big version.
According to the Wikipedia article, it’s been made into a short film, and “In 2011, cartoonist D.J. Coffman had all 22 panels tattooed onto his left arm.”
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
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Horrorthon Posts
Okay, I know that the clues and teaser scenes in all those Marvel movies over the past few years have been intrusive and irritating, but nevertheless I admit that I’m totally sold on this Avengers scheme, now that the Joss Whedon (!) payoff movie is actually in production. (It had seemed like one of those Hollywood pipe dreams that don’t actually come true.) When I was a kid, I vaguely hoped this kind of thing (essentially live-action “Super-Friends,” minus the weirdo sidekicks) would happen, but those hopes faded as I got older and grew more aware of the realities of Hollywood.
In “Origins of Marvel Comics,” Stan Lee wrote about the monetary value of bringing characters from one comic book series into another, since a popular property like Spider-Man could boost sales of a weaker title like “Fantastic Four” (especially if he appeared in the cover art). Which was great, and they did it constantly…but obviously it didn’t cost anything to have Jack Kirby or Gene Colan draw Spidey rather than drawing somebody else. (They own the characters, the stories, the names, the logos, and even the drawings..so it’s just India ink at a dollar a bottle, right? And a salary you’re paying anyway.) But orchestrating the cinematic equivalent is vastly more difficult and expensive—a long-term chain of steps that can fail if any of the intermediary fail (which is why they’re on their third Hulk).
But wow, what a payoff! Look at the glorious multi-poster banner! Look at Johannsen and Downey, Jr. next to Evans and Hemsworth! (With Hopkins, Rourke, Paltrow, Bridges and, um, Loki looming in their pasts! And all-new weirdo sidekicks!) Yeah!
