Category: Comics

I’m not much of a fan of Frank Miller’s over-hard-boiled writing on ‘All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder’; it’s as if he’s writing Sin City with capes, and given the solid work he’s done on the character twice before, it’s rather disappointing.

I find its over-the-top-ness mildly amusing, though – which is almost a shame, as if I actively disliked it I’d be able to use the phrase ‘Wholly Crap Batman’, but as tempting as that is, I have to be honest and admit to more of a ‘meh’ reaction.

Anyway, it turns out that the latest issue (10) of the book has been pulled and pulped by DC Comics, because it featured Batgirl and some criminals sparring and swearing – with the black bars (in the speech balloons) which were there to obscure the naughty words not being dark enough to actually, um, obscure the naughty words.

Want to see the pages, and see Batgirl saying and being called rude things? Well then, brace for strong language and click here.

It’s mildly amusing, sure, but it does seem to raise some questions about the production process involved – why actually go to the trouble of having someone letter the words into the balloons, just to impose black bars over the top of the letters? Why not just put in a bar of appropriate length? Given that much comic lettering is done on computers anyway now (offhand, I think that this title’s computer-lettered by Comicraft, though I could be wrong), why not just save yourself the potential hassle? It’s all rather strange.

It’s hard to imagine that DC Comics are deliberately trying to stir up the publicity here, as they’re very conservative when it comes to the characters they own, and so I don’t see how this is anything other than a rather silly production error. Still, given that the book stars the comic character who’s this year’s biggest box office draw, you’d think a closer eye would be paid to such things, wouldn’t you?

Some people might have felt that my comment in yesterday’s post that “a filmed version of Watchmen makes about as much sense as a musical version of the Mona Lisa” was a bit dismissive and reductionist, so I thought I’d expand on my point – unpack it, if you will.

Watchmen, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, was a 12-issue comic series released in 1986-7 by DC Comics, the US-based firm who publish Batman and Superman, and who are a small subdivision within Warner Brothers, or Time Warner as I think it’s now known. The series (which was always set at 12 issues, having a self-contained story to tell) was written by Alan Moore and drawn and lettered by Dave Gibbons, with colouring by John Higgins. It was published in monthly(ish) issues, with no adverts, and generally featuring 28 pages of comic story, and 4 pages of background material.

I was going to try to summarise the plot here, but it’s so clever and dense I risk under-selling it by trying to precis down to one paragraph; but it’s definitely one of the first – and most successful – comics to cover the question of what it would be like if there were superheroes in the real world. The writing is more intelligent than the vast majority of comics (and indeed novels), and the art is perfectly judged in all regards – Watchmen is often said to be the Citizen Kane of comics, and whilst that’s true in that it casts a shadow over everything that follows it and remains a standard which few have attained since, the meshing of the creative team feels more like Lennon and McCartney in that they’re both at the top of their game and productively nudging each other to do the best work possible.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m a huge fan, and I’m not alone in that – it won a Hugo Award, and was included in Time Magazine’s 2005 list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels ever. There was steady and solid praise for the comic as it was released in its individual issues, and there was a minimal period of time after its completion before it was gathered into a single volume of 360-odd pages. The collection has remained in print pretty much ever since then, and is a consistently good seller.

Now, after many years of a film version being suggested and multiple drafts of screenplay adaptations having been written, the trailer for the film version to be directed by Zack ‘300’ Snyder has been released (you can see it here ), and there’s been a surge of interest in the original work, coupled with discussion of whether or not it’s a good idea to make it into a film. The creators themselves disagree about this, in fact – Alan Moore thinks it’s a bad idea, but Dave Gibbons has been quite supportive (visiting the set etc), and the two of them have been quite gentlemanly about this (Moore’s made sure his name’s not on it, and has given his share of the money to Gibbons).

My casual point yesterday, though, sums up why I think it’s a poor idea – one of the many charms of Watchmen is the fact that it’s so very specifically designed to do things in the comic medium which you simply can’t do in other medium (obvious example: Chapter 5, ‘Fearful Symmetry’ is arranged so that the scenes and panel layouts on the page are symmetrical – the first page is the same as the last, the second as the penultimate, and so on until they meet in the middle). This sort of detail is something which you can’t transfer to film, and there are many other comic-only narrative tricks and little background elements which won’t make the transition.

Terry Gilliam, who was lined up to direct the film version in the late 1980s, has said that “the problem with Watchmen is that it requires about five hours to tell the story properly, and by reducing it to a two or two-and-a-half hour film, it seemed to me to take away the essence of what Watchmen is about.” Well said, Terry – whilst there are some works which I think can be reduced and compressed in the transition to the screen without any genuine deterioration (‘American Psycho’ and the ‘Lord Of The Rings’ spring immediately to mind), for any work longer than a couple of hundred pages, you’re looking at a question of what to remove. And with something like Watchmen, which is so cohesive and tightly-packed, removal will inevitably equate to loss.

So I think that the creative reasons for the film are pretty feeble, though I’m painfully aware of the commercial reasons – the comic isn’t owned by the creators (I understand that the rights will revert to Moore and Gibbons if the book ever goes out of print for more than two years, which is unlikely since they did such a fine job), and so the surge of interest in the run-up to the film and after its release will mean DC / Time Warner make money from the increased sales of the book and associated merchandise (including some items which are simultaneously ridiculous and creepy ).

On another level, though, the excitement with which comic fans have greeted the film’s trailer strikes me as a bit odd; it’s often as if having a film made of a comic is in some way a validation of the story in question, or even the comics medium as a whole, as if the commercial plan to build on an existing property (unlike adaptations of novels for the screen, comics come with inbuilt storyboards and costume designs) is in some way the same as comics readers being told “hey, you know, your comics are almost like a real artform… they just need to be made into films”.

Okay, I’m overplaying it, but this apparent underdog mentality amongst comic readers (and creators, and publishers, and so on) strikes me as ultimately unhelpful; it’s less prevalent in Japan or Europe, to take obvious examples, but it still seems that UK and US comic readers all too often seem to see a film being made of their favourite comic as the ultimate seal of approval.

There’s really no need for this, surely – Picasso drew a comic strip, comic-related books have won the Pulitzer Prize not once but twice, Alex ‘The Beach’ Garland has written a Batman story … I mean, just how many validations or commendations does the medium need ?

Worst of all, if the Watchmen film loses all the subtlety and nuance of the original work, it’ll be the only experience people have of it, and – as was the case with the frankly useless Judge Dredd film in the 1990s – it’ll mean a lot of people say “Watchmen? Oh, I saw that, it wasn’t much cop” and don’t bother to look at the source material, which would be a shame, as Watchmen is one of those works which everyone goes on and on and ON about, saying how great it is, and when you actually take a look at it, you know what? It’s even better than that.

(Mind you, most alarming is that the Watchmen trailer has been well-received despite featuring music from Batman and Robin, itself a film which hardly helped comics be seen as a serious medium.)

As this here blog has been linked in Rich Johnson’s comic gossip column Lying In The Gutters, I seem to be attracting a few more readers of a graphic-fiction-sequential-art mind. Welcome, welcome – hope you’ll come for the comics but stay for … er, well, more than just that, I guess.

Anyway, I wanted to ask the comics-knowledgeable amongst you for advice or recommendations on a specific theme; I’m fairly au fait with what’s going on in the UK and US mainstream (and occasionally the small press), but am only just starting to venture further into reading manga.

The problem I have is that there seem to be just so many titles to choose from, and I’m looking for pointers on stuff of interest. I’m less aware of what I’m after than what I want to avoid, if that makes sense – I’m not really interested in post-apocalyptic stuff (I liked the film of Akira, but got a bit bored after the first few issues of the Epic translation) or fantasy stuff with dragons and the like in, and I’m not really looking for anything featuring psychic schoolgirls and/or panty shots (this latter aspect made me less keen on Battle Royale v1, which I read recently, and the violence and pantie-flashing seemed a bit calculated, though the linework was nice).

Manga I have read and enjoyed are:

Lone Wolf and Cub – Read the entire series (in the really rather delightfully-sized Dark Horse reprints), and though it was a bit long, it was always interesting, especially as the over-arching plots became clear.

Old Boy – recently finished this, and though the ending didn’t justify the length or the bad guy’s motivation at all to my mind, it was well-drawn. I preferred the film, but this was enjoyable enough to read.

Death Note – I’m seven volumes into this now, and am enjoying it a lot. For a book which often features people standing round talking or thinking, it’s genuinely exciting in places, and the characters are interesting if not necessarily likeable. There’s a fantasy element to this one, yes, but the real-world grounding of it works for me.

Monster – Oddly enough, I picked this up after it was recommended by Masi Oka (who plays Hiro in ‘Heroes’) in an interview, and I’m only just starting the second book, but I like the general mood and premise, so I’ll probably continue.

Buddha – I’m onto the third volume of this, and can see why Tezuka’s so well respected; there’s sense of fun and pace to it all, as well as it being the story of a chap I’m genuinely interested in.

… and that’s about it. As I say, I’m not mad keen on the kind of stories mentioned above, but then again, if there’s a really good story about a psychic schoolgirl that I really, REALLY ought to read, then just ignore my prejudices and recommend away. It’s not as if I haven’t been wrong on things before, after all.

If you’ve got recommendations (or even warnings about works to avoid), please feel free to post a comment. I’m genuinely keen to learn more about manga, and as it seems that there are a lot of different genres within it, I feel rather spoiled for choice. So if you could let me know stuff you’ve read and enjoyed, I’d appreciate it (and so would my wallet, as it’ll save me wasting my hard-earned).

And for the jokers amongst you, no I don’t think I want to read loads of Yaoi or Shojo stuff (blimey, there’s a whole new set of terms for me to learn, isn’t there?)…

Back in this review, I asked how DC Comics were going to make it clear which of the 52 universes in their newly-reinstated multiverse they were going to allocate to which characters and scenarios.

Well, they’ve issued a list, which you can see here.

I’ve stopped reading a lot of DC Comics in recent times, as they – like their competitors Marvel – seem to be mired in continuity and cross-overs, and that list does nothing at all to make me think I’ve made a mistake in doing so. Oh, sure, I’ll have a look at ‘Final Crisis’ when it comes out next year, but that’s only because it’s written by Grant Morrison, and not because I care about the Earth-22 Flash or whatever.

But given that DC have removed the multiverse and then put it back within the last couple of decades, I guess I shouldn’t really expect the change to last forever, should I ?