| Author | Message | ||
     Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 85.222.86.72 |
Except for Craig, who isn't excited by this:http://horror.about.com/b/2010/06/03/awesome-first-look-at-zombies-from-amcs-the -walking-dead.htm?nl=1 | ||
| Frank (Frank) Username: Frank Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 85.222.86.72 |
Craig - that wasn't a dig, I mean, Darabont does zombies...obviously people will die really pointless deaths without furthering the progress of the script (; | ||
| Stu (Stu) Username: Stu Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 213.81.120.84 |
Has anyone read the comic? Is it any good? I've only read Kirkman's superhero stuff and wasn't too impressed. | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
I found the first graphic novel massively dull. In his intro the author said that he saw it as a soap opera but with zombies and saw it going on for hundreds of issues potentially. That's when I decided not to bother. Plus I'm not a massive fan of Charley Adlard's artwork. | ||
| Stu (Stu) Username: Stu Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 213.81.120.84 |
Yeah, the fact that it goes on indefinitely was not a big selling point as far as I was concerned. I read Garth Ennis's Crossed the other day and thought that was pretty good. You read it? | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
I'm not interested in series like that. It's why I stopped reading Blade of The Immortal, the Japanese manga. It was beautiful but when I got eight books in, I genuinely couldn't remember what the start of the story had been. Also, such massive series feel a bit like mugging the reader, getting them committed to something so unwieldy that it couldn't possibly deliver a satisfying conclusion. (One of the reasons I never got into Lost) To be honest, since hanging up my 2000 AD hat I've read very few comics. Some of that is due to burn-out from 5 years in the comic industry, which I didn't always find rewarding. There are other matters as well that I'm sort of getting over now, but it took a while. I do love comics though, just I find less and less that inspires me. Think that the last one I read was probably Grandville. | ||
| Stu (Stu) Username: Stu Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 213.81.120.84 |
You mean you're not following the vampire comic strip in the Sun? Seriously, I'm not not making this up, the other day at work there was a copy of the Sun lying around and flicking through I spotted a comic strip about vampires. Obviously designed to cash in on the Twilight market. And with computerised artwork as well. Funnily enough it was shit. | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
That sounds delightful. Quite a lot of people who are lauded as genius's in comics these days just strike me as really lazy writers. Mark Millar for one. Wanted made me want to kick my TV apart it was that bad. | ||
| Stu (Stu) Username: Stu Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 213.81.120.84 |
Not read or seen Wanted but from what I gather the comic and the film part company story-wise with the comic being the better of the two. That said, I'm not a huge Millar fan. Most of the stuff I've read by him came across as lazy and cynical. | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
Indeed. I heard him being interviewed about Kick Ass and I now have utterly no desire to see the film. Sounds vile and cynical to me. The worst excesses of comics. While I do love the graphic form, writers do seem to get away with being lazy and using stereotypes all the time. Some break this mould and do brilliant work like Ennis and Morrison, but there are way more who are just churning out the same old tired shit time and again. | ||
| Stu (Stu) Username: Stu Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 213.81.120.84 |
Kick Ass was a lot more fun than I expected it to be but it did squander the idea of what a real life superhero would be like if they were just a deluded fanboy in a leotard. After setting up the premise the film just ignores it after the first 20 minutes or so and just becomes just like every other superhero flick. Only more stylish and with a little girl doling out most of the violence. | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
Yeah, that latter is what put me off the most I think. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
My own view of comics (an artform I love) runs something like this: 1. I love anything by Alan Moore. A brilliant writer who has never once failed to deliver, from his days as a hack on 2000 AD to his current position of complete artistic freedom, with whom all the great comic artists want to work and over whom he has first choice who to work with. Comics are art, first and foremost, but when coupled with genuine literary genius they truly become Art. 2. I love anything by Robert Crumb. The ultimate example of intelligent, and healthy, and painfully funny cynicism at the state of the world today expressed in the man's own medium: truly beautiful drawn art. That is why he is the Hogarth of today (not my comparison but can't remember who said it). 3. I love anthology comics and will always pick them over continuing storylines. From the days of EC (no intro needed) through those old B&W 'Creepy Worlds', 'Eerie Tales', 'Astounding Stories', etc. (of which Steve Ditko's stories always stood head and shoulders above everyone else's) to those magnificent Warren publications of the 70s; 'Creepy', 'Eerie', 'Vampirella', 'The Spirit' (where I first fell in love with Will Eisner) and the brilliantly nostalgic resurgence in the 80s of; 'Twisted Tales', 'Alien Worlds', 'Alien Encounters', 'Tales Of Terror', 'Wasteland', 'Gore Shriek', 'Taboo', Fly In My Eye', etc, etc to... this is your queue, Stu, to fill me in on what I've missed. 4. I love the classic years of all the archetypal superheroes (apart from certain inspired reinventions [and even then only for the initial run] of which Alan Moore again reigns supreme). Spiderman = Steve Ditko, Swamp Thing = Berni Wrightson, Superman = Siegel & Shuster, Batman = Kane & Finger, X-Men = blue & yellow suits, etc, etc... 5. I love zany humour comics. Mad magazine, Marvel Madhouse, Viz, etc, etc... 6. I love the classic British comics of my youth and yearn for someone to reproduce them: Beano, Dandy, Topper, Beezer, Action, 2000 AD, etc... 7. I love the quality comicbooks & annuals of my youth: Tintin, Asterix, Rupert the Bear, etc... 8. I love classic newspaper comicstrips & satirical art of which Peanuts & Andy Capp + Giles & Steve Bell reign supreme imho. It has always been my opinion that comic art is the GREAT unrecognised popular artform of the 20th Century that can say every bit as much about where we have come as a race as the purely written word only with an incisive and spontaneous capture of the moment that will forever be denied literature. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.0.198 |
The charm of the zombie is lost, to me. Films like [REC] and 29 DAYS AFTER and HORROR PLANET and such do a good job towards reviving and/or satirizing them... but a TV series?... hmmm.... I know I'm notorious round these parts for hating THE MIST, but please - can I be known in the future for despising (the film) THE WATCHMEN? | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.55 |
29 days after? Do you mean 28 days later? which isn't actually a zombie film as none of the infected are dead. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.0.198 |
Yeah, 28, 29, after, later, zombies, shmombies, whatever... maybe it was a leap year, I don't f*ckin' know.... | ||
| Jonathan (Jonathan) Username: Jonathan Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.143.178.131 |
Moore is undisputedly brilliant but now that he realises they will publish absolutely anything by him, has become somewhat self-indulgent. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier was very disappointing. Crumb I think draws wonderfully - but I find his misogyny hard to take. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.166.117.210 |
And isn't it Watchmen? No "The" required? And Planet Terror? | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
'Watchmen' was as good as cinema could ever get to portraying the brilliance of Moore's graphic novel (and was one of my films of last year) and even then pales into insignificance beside the book. Why is that? Comicbooks are a visual medium in and of themselves. 'Watchmen', the comic, was created from scratch by Moore & Gibbons and for someone else to try and match their vision by slavish copying of every pose and angle and lighting effect is actually rather redundant in my view. A comic can be picked up and put down and returned to later like a novel. A film or TV programme has to be gamely sat through till the end. Comicbook adaptations can be entertaining, after a fashion, but never approach the primal, and essentially unrealistic, power of the 2D originals - in fact they can't help but dilute it. Comics are the fairy-tales of today, the myths and legends that colour our world view by being irrevocably removed from it while mirroring reality just enough to set off resounding echoes in the hot wires of our mind. Their power is underappreciated imo. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.176.105.55 |
As we've always said, Craig knows shit all about films. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.166.117.210 |
Yeah, let's punch him in the face. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.0.198 |
Wow, for me to get everything wrong like that... clearly my mind can't even be bothered to accurately read the data contained in my own brain cells... I guess that's what I think of zombies of late.... I think some things done in one form, Stevie, simply cannot - nay, should not! - be done in another. The dialogue of old pulps couldn't be transposed directly to film nowadays, and taken seriously. So now extend it to so many things in comics - I have never cringed so much recently, gazing behind me even in the secret confines of my living room (i.e., to see, with shame, if anyone was watching me), than I did with WATCHMEN. It is so embarrassingly bad, imho, that it defies description... but I know I stand mostly alone in this opinion, so... where's that O'Sullivan song again?... | ||
| Mark_samuels (Mark_samuels) Username: Mark_samuels Registered: 04-2010 Posted From: 86.142.169.99 |
Damn it! I was going to ask Stu to loan me the comic series. And now I find out he doesn't own it. That's bad. I expect him to have all the comics ever printed in the world. He's let me down badly. Mark S. | ||
| Stu (Stu) Username: Stu Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 82.11.81.115 |
>>It has always been my opinion that comic art is the GREAT unrecognised popular artform of the 20th Century that can say every bit as much about where we have come as a race as the purely written word only with an incisive and spontaneous capture of the moment that will forever be denied literature. Yeah, comics can be wonderful. They can take the best storytelling elements of film and prose and stick them together while coming up with new techniques to cover the bits they can't do as effectively as other media e.g. sound and continuous movement. Comics can be used to tell pretty much any story you want and tell it damn well. Providing of course that the writer and artist know what they're doing. As for anthology comics I can't think of any offhand but if you haven't already got the Mammoth Book of Horror Comics and The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics they can probably point you towards some interesting stuff. There's also a Mammoth Book of Crime Comics and I think one of War Comics as well. Loads of the old Commando comics have been collected into omnibuses recently as have some of the old Battle strips. And Watchmen. Yeah, the film was probably about as good as we could hope for but it still fell way short of the comic. They gutted pretty much every aspect of the plot that carried any emotion leaving the film feeling pretty hollow. And there were times when I had to question Snyder's choice of what to alter from the comic and what to leave as it was just to please the fanboys. For example you get an Outer Limits episode playing in one scene even though the whole point of it appearing in the comic has been removed -- the plot point it alludes to has been cut out, the visual/verbal pun it makes when combined with the artwork is no longer present -- there's no reason for it to be there. And some of the line readings ... Okay, some of the actors would've killed the dialogue stone dead no matter whether it was from the comic or rewritten especially for the screenplay but at times Snyder seems to be deliberately sabotaging the dialogue. Take 'The Comedian's dead.' In the comic that line is fantastic; it's the full stop at the end of the scene and is set up by the "camera" gradually pulling away from the speaker in an aerial shot over the course of the page so that when the line is finally delivered the speaker is a tiny, pitiful figure, isolated and scared by the weight of unfolding events. In the film the same line is IIRC delivered with a close-up of the actor's face seemingly for no other reason than to emphasise his wooden delivery. It felt like most of the times when Snyder changed things it was either stupid decisions like that or just so he had an excuse to squeeze in more gore or another slo-mo fight scene. But still, it could've been worse. It could've been Michael bay directing ... | ||
| Stu (Stu) Username: Stu Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 82.11.81.115 |
Mark, if it makes you feel any better I can lend you Crossed, a comic about 28 Days Later style "zombies." | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 62.30.117.235 |
I've got the big compendium of The Walking Dead, and it's good, but I'm not nuts for it. I'm a bit behind on Mark Millar's work, but his Swamp Thing run was very good. | ||
| Stu (Stu) Username: Stu Registered: 04-2008 Posted From: 82.11.81.115 |
Millar's done some good stuff but I can't remember what any of it was offhand. Is Aztek, The Ultimate Man, the series he did with Grant Morrison any good? I was thinking of buying the trade. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 62.30.117.235 |
I enjoyed it, but the art wasn't terribly clear, and it was cancelled before it really got going. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.17.252.126 |
Just remembered another comic art hero of mine; Chester Brown. Anyone here read 'Ed The Happy Clown'? If you have you'll most definitely remember it... I love that kind of quirky oddball humour and anything-goes madcap surrealism. I wonder what he's up to these days? |