Category Archives: Comics

Comics, Movies

What makes a comic-book adaptation work?

The glut of movies based on comics, in recent times, has added substantially to my View Queue. Reminds me of times I would scour second-hand magazine shops for the odd Cinescape, Cinefantastique or SFX for tidbits about the possibility of this actor playing that superhero, if this comic ever came to screen; which storyline would make for the greatest adaptation ever; would this little-known indie title fare better if it made a silver screen debut. And now it looks like every other 2 or 3-issue-old title has either been optioned, or is in pre-production already with the writer having banged out a first draft in two months and the artist involved in production design. Fuck, I realized that nearly every comic I know is being made into a movie.

One of the biggest changes in Hollywood dealings in recent times is the greater emphasis placed on the creator’s vision ( in case of non-corporate comics) and on the reliance on the overall back-story with the old-school mainstream superheroes. Sharp contrast to the times when auteur vision would take over – yes, Ang Lee, I am looking at you – with occasional scraps thrown in for the geek crowd, and the final product would leave me on the verge of tearing out my hair in rage. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City did unbelievably well, and suddenly Hollywood woke up to the joys of the templated comicbook movie – the precise translation of panel to screen.

So, coming back to the deluge of newer and newer film productions devoted to adapting comics, it is evidently still not clear what will succeed and what won’t. Why does an Iron Man and a Dark Knight work at the box office, while a Punisher War Zone and a Spirit die ignominious deaths? Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X-Men 2 made mutants epitomise comicbook coolness, so why did Superman Returns explode like a planet near a red sun? I have some thoughts on those – maybe they’re not all the points that contribute to the success of an adaptation, but I think these are the most obvious.

1. Getting the Pitch right  – This is, I believe, the most frequent stumbling block for a movie studio swayed by a director and overpaid, image conscious stars into bankrolling a movie that resembles the original comic in name only. Ang Lee’s Hulk is the most perfect example – a character primarily known for smashing things could not – and did not – work well as a psychological study of father-son relationships. The first two Superman movies were successful because they got the square-jawed do-gooder image of the character perfectly, the later ones made Superman the straight man, and boy, were they bad or what! One of the most jarring films I’ve seen of late was The Spirit. Yes, the one that featured Will Eisner’s character as interpreted by Frank Miller – and the movie just could not make up its mind about whether it was a noir take-off, a goofy take-nothing-seriously caper, a sex-violence-gore-filled piece of exploitation cinema. It was possibly Miller’s inexperience at work, but here’s a textbook example of how to NOT make a film. Sure, you can interpret characters your own way – but you cannot have a violent, bone-crunching fight sequence followed by a goofy Loony Toonesque show-off between the two characters.

2. Obscurity works. I will admit that I hadn’t heard of Daniel Clowes before I saw Ghost World. In fact, I will even admit that I had kind of assumed Ghost World would be about a world full of ghosts where a lone warrior, accompanied by the two hot girls on the cover of the VCD will wage a lonely war against supernatural beings by day, and totally do the girls at night. The movie of course had nothing to do with the scenarios my wretched mind had cooked up. It was a neat story about growing up in the suburbs and teenage alienation, and the fact that it was based on a little-known graphic novel worked in favour of both the film and its source – people like me went and discovered the sweaty, underground genius of Dan Clowes and the indie crowd loved the movie. What I am trying to say here is – a lesser-known graphic novel might just beat every other rule that I’ve laid out – it could include stars, it could manufacture its own interpretation of the source material, take tremendous liberties with the storyline, and could still win accolades. There’s no pressure to live up to the demands of the true believers – hell, did anybody know about A History of Violence before David Cronenberg made a movie out of it? Or Road To Perdition? When there’s no fan following in the first place, it gives the film-makers the liberty to make a film that stands on its own. If you read the original graphic novels, you’ll be shocked at the way the movies diverge from the books – not only adding characters and situations that weren’t there in the comic in the first place, but in both cases, changing the structure of the storyline to match the point Mendes and Cronenberg tried to get across. And they still worked, earned awards and created new readers for the books – in both cases, forcing DC Comics to reprint the books in newer editions ( they were originally published through Paradox Press, an original line under Warner that published mostly standalone crime comics).

3. Contemporary Relevance Comics have always reflected contemporary trends – Miller’s Dark Knight Returns is largely a reaction to the Reagan administration, a lot of anti-Thatcher sentiment appears in the 80s works of British writers like Pete Milligan and Alan Moore. But while backstories make sense to the followers and action sequences bring in the early weekend box office returns, the smart filmmaker knows how to add a layer of subtext that strikes a chord with the casual movie-goer and elevates his film beyond a generic popcorn fest. V For Vendetta was a comic set in a Thatcherian England gone fascist, while the Wachowski brothers, in their adaptation, made it more reflective of the prevailing political climate in 2006. Zack Snyder’s version of 300 also had a set of themes tacked on to its generally-straightforward storyline. The plus point of adding contemporary relevance to a comic book movie is that it gives the critics a hook to watch and review the film at a different level, and it leaves the current-affairs-savvy viewer happy that he “gets” what the movie is really about.

4. Stars don’t matter, actors do – There is this famous anecdote about Sir Alec Guinness, who could not stand the fan adulation about his character Obi-Wan Kenobi – and refused to attend Star Wars conventions. Probably Sir Guinness could not stand how Kenobi overshadowed every other role in his illustrious career, but this is a telling example of how a role brands an actor for life. All the more relevant with comic characters – fans have a tremendous   emotional investment in characters they’ve grown up with, and if actor Joe Shmoe plays  WhamPowBiff-man, he will always be identified as such. Christopher Reeve was a wonderful actor – look at his deadpan role of a theatre actor in Noises Off, but hey, he’s always remembered as Superman. Ditto Hugh Jackman. Non-stars have the ability to invest more fully into the character, rather than their own personal tics taking over the story. Jack Nicholson did a smashing job as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, but at the end of the day, the character you saw onscreen was Nicholson playing a deranged lunatic, not the Joker. Tobey Maguire as Spider-man works in the first movie, but by the time he takes off his mask for every other scene in Spider-Man 3, it’s almost farcical – seeing Maguire the star try to assert his presence in the frame. In sharp contrast, look at Hugo Weaving as V or Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, and you will be hard-pressed to believe these characters were overshadowed by the star-power of the actors involved.

5. Slavishness does not equal “Faithful to the source” Yeah sure, so the movie resembles the comicbook, the plot is directly from a memorable story arc and even the actors stand around just like the original panels. So why am I watching the movie in the first place? For that matter, why call it a movie at all – just call it a role-playing comic or something. It was Sin City that began this fad of panel to screen recreation, and while it was a bold visual experiment that worked really well – actors in stilted poses pretending they look anything other than dumb when emoting to the specifications of a printed page? Newsflash – they look very dumb. Voice-overs that echo narrative captions, excessive green-screen sets – I predict that in 10 years, all this will look as dated and groan-worthy as music videos from the 80s.  And then we’ll all snicker about how we called Zack Snyder a “visionary” director.

6. Ignore the fans Yeah, you heard that right. Sure, fans weep and wail  about every single detail, but here it is – they will always find flaws with the finished product, regardless of how good it is. So why bother at all? Keep the fan-service to a minimum, stick to a solid concept, make the changes that will translate the film properly onscreen – never mind the complaints about not being faithful to the source. The source comic exists as the template, but it’s moronic to think it’ll look or feel the same when real people are mouthing those lines or wearing those exact same costumes. Sam Raimi took liberties with quite a few aspects of the Spider-man mythos while making his movies – did anyone hear the howls of frenzy when the term “organic web-shooter” was bandied around? – but it paid off. The whole Harvey Dent/Two Face origin was reworked in The Dark Knight, but the brilliance of the overall package bulldozed over all fan-grumbles.

7. Stick to the same team for the sequels This one’s pretty much common sense coupled with a rudimentary knowledge of film production. A movie works not because of a concept, a script or a strong character, but because of a solid combination of the above with the vision of the principal crew, along with the equations that are shared between them and the cast. Your movie is a success, and then you decide to make the sequel, but with a different director – you’re effectively starting from scratch. Too many examples to mention here – consider the Batman sequels after Burton, X-Men 3, or even Punisher War Zone. The caveat: if your franchise tanked, feel free to reboot the franchise with a completely new team. Worked for Hulk and Batman, didn’t it?

8. Throw Joseph Campbell out of the window The classic “journey of the hero” bit that Campbell expounded has, quite frankly, been done to death by monkey-hordes of screenplay writers hacking out three-act scripts. It’s time to move on, already. Scripts that work beyond the usual good-against-evil spiel that’s been around, scripts that go beyond telling a basic vendetta tale that could be a generic action movie. One of the most telling examples of this is Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil, even though the movie was true to the spirit of the original comics, the pedestrian script let it down. Add to it the insipid writing in Constantine, the Punisher movies, the Fantastic Four movies, and others too numerous to mention – the ones in which you can predict in detail where the movie is going because you’ve seen hundreds like them before. All with the same cliched punchlines, the clipped dialogues, the juvenile foreshadowing and the soaring strings.

9. Avoid Alan Moore You would think film-makers would learn by now, but apparently not. So here’s the thing – Alan Moore writes comics. Comics, see? Not storyboards that can leapfrog onto the screen and make you pots of money. He writes his scripts with an eye on the artistic team he’s working on at the moment, and he writes stories that could probably be told on the screen, but not the way he wrote it. You can make a movie on Jack the Ripper, and it could be a thrilling look at a serial killer in Victorian England, but you cannot adapt From Hell. Call it something else, distance yourself from Moore the writer, and you’ll have a film that might work on its own, and you’ll have your dignity intact at the end of it all. Why expose yourself to an impossibly high standard that you know you are never going to attain anyway, when you can safely – y’know – write your own story and bring it to life? So the next time you want to adapt an Alan Moore comic, do yourself a favour. Watch From Hell, Constantine, LXG, V For Vendetta and Watchmen – and weep with disbelief at your own temerity. Quit it, there are better things to do that trying to adapt a Moore comic.

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Comics

Zot update, and stuff

I just finished reading The Complete Zot, going as slow as I could. Each of the stories is followed by a commentary page by Scott McCloud, in which he would explain some of his motivations, give a bit of historical perspective to his work ( being very modest about his genius and all) and that would make me go reread the issue again just to take in the story from a fresh perspective. I never thought I would enjoy the series the way I did – in my mind, I had filed the book as ‘out-of-print curiousity’ rather than a work to be enjoyed. But once you get beyond the awkward figure-drawing and somewhat clunky dialogues, McCloud’s stories and characters radiate an old-wordly charm that is hard to explain. It is a beautiful mixture of fun superheroics and a melancholy coming-of-age story. The early issues are almost all set in Zot’s world, and the emphasis is more towards tweaking familiar superhero idioms – alas, if I had a rupee for every post-80’s series that tries to do this, I would own a Frank Miller Daredevil page by now. There are flashes of brilliance in these stories – the De-Evolutionary “Revert!” vaudevillian romp had me in stitches; it is hard to believe that a character like Arthur Dekko (and his completely-twisted worldview) could exist in a pre-Morrison Doom Patrol world; and the chilling 9Jack9 moment, where the character does the unexpected, leading to one of the most downbeat superhero endings I’ve ever read. But it is with the Earth stories, the ones in which Zot is stranded on Jenny’s (i.e our) world is where McCloud really cuts loose. It’s no longer a superhero story from then on, as individual issues are told from points of views of different characters, with Zot himself becoming little more than a presence in most of the stories. Every one of the earth stories deal with real-world themes – about adulthood, sex, same-sex relationships, responsibilities, to name a few. The book ends on a very open-ended note, possibly the best possible conclusion a series like this can have.

Oddly enough, similar themes as Zot can be seen in the TV series Freaks and Geeks. Saw all 18 episodes last weekend, based on recommendations from my friend Pablo. It was only when the credits ran at the beginning of the first episode that I realised this was a Judd Apatow production. And it had Apatow familiars Jason Segel and Seth Rogen in it. Set in a Michigan high school in 1980, and dealing primarily with the tribulations of the Weir siblings – Lindsay and Sam, the series is as much about their social universe as it is a delightfully retro look at life in the eighties. While primarily a comedy, F&G has just the right moments of drama to balance out the goofiness from time to time. The casting is note-perfect.The soundtrack is a delight, featuring bands like Joan Jett ( the title song ‘Bad Reputation’ is by her), Billy Joel, Gloria Gaynor, The Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Cream, The Who – well, nearly every notable band of the time period.

Right now, I am blazing through The Big Bang Theory, and enjoying it tremendously.

A not-so-funny parody of Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome comic.

A neat feature comparison chart of the major music players on Windows – Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player and the somewhat lesser-known Media Monkey, which pips the others. Not too surprising for me, I’ve been using MM for nearly a year and a half now, after an eight-year relationship with Winamp, and I can vouch for its solid featureset and overall user-friendliness.

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Comics

On superhero comics

I like to think I’ve outgrown superhero comics. That’s not true at all, though. It’s badly-written superhero comics that I do not enjoy – note that the definition of ‘badly-written’ does not extend to characterization that contradicts past continuity, storytelling directions that take radically opposite directions from the characters’ past- heck, I can even overlook sixty years of complicated continuity. It just means that when I see the writer insulting my basic level of intelligence with his dreck, or when my minimal requirements of entertainment are not being met because of the detracting elements of the creators’ personal quirks, I lose my patience and either throw whatever it is I am reading across the room and fume, or, as the case mostly is nowadays, just delete the offending cbr files from my disk and get along with my life. It’s that simple.

Case in point – Brad Meltzer’s Justice League of America. I am willing to go on record and say that the ten-odd issues I read last year were The Worst Comicbooks Ever. Any comic in which Red Tornado is called “Reddy”, and has a story arc in which three characters sit around a table looking at photographs and passing slavishly fawning comments about each other deserves to be pissed on. The One More Day brouhaha in Spider-man turned me off because the premise appeared completely brain-dead ( Read this for complete details. ) I tried reading Planet Hulk/World War Hulk, but lost interest the minute I realised the ‘World’ in ‘World War’ means Manhattan. X-Men Messiah Complex was interesting for about 2 pages, before I gave up.

I like to think I’ve outgrown superheroes. But occasionally I am reminded of how much I really love reading them. The Sinestro Corps War, for instance. This was a crossover between the Green Lantern titles last year, and after having heard good things about it from various sources, I gave the scans a try. While the writing is clunky in parts, the series strikes just the right balance of continuity-enslavement i.e drawing upon the Green Lantern stories that the writer Geoff Johns ( for the most part) grew up reading, the gosh-wow factor of seeing events that affect the status quo, and a heady good-vs-evil conflict. I liked the way the tension builds up throughout the series, when all odds seem to favour the upstart Yellow Corps, when Superman-Prime is freed from his space-prison ( not that I didn’t see it coming ) and rendezvouses with the secret leaders of the Corps. I totally dug how two Alan Moore short stories from the eighties, muhuahaha, yeah, stories I read in my childhood, are major plot-points in the arc. It’s also gratifying to know that the entire Sinestro Corps war is actually the second of a trilogy of Green-Lantern-Corps tales ( Rebirth being the first, and next year’s Black Night the last ).

Another Geoff Johns title I enjoyed thoroughly was Booster Gold, the new ongoing series. At least the first six issues of it, collectively called 52 Pick-up ( the reference is to Elmore Leonard AND the weekly DC miniseries). I never really liked the character of BG, except when he was used as a basis for comedy, as in the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire run of JLA, and grudgingly like his plotline in 52. But in this series, Johns manages to infuse the character with a near-Shakespearean level of pathos. Okay, maybe I exaggerate, but still. The twist that Johns introduces is this series is that Booster Gold is probably the sole reason why the world and its heroes are saved from total annhilation, because he is a behind-the-scenes worker in the timestream, flitting in and out of the past, present and future to make sure no supervillain damages existence by tampering with the natural order of time. The catch is that nobody can know about his heroism, and he has to maintain his klutzy image throughout. The six-issue arc sees Booster Gold averting a meeting between Sinestro and someone who would go on to become an important character in the DC Universe, saving the grandparents of another famous character by teaming up with ( of all people ) Jonah Hex, trying to ensure his own existence by hooking up his ancestors, and making a tragicomic cameo in one of the DC Universe’s most chilling shoot-out ( Hint: “Smile” ) I am hooked.

Speaking of characters I don’t like, another one happened to be Iron Fist, a kung-fu expert from the Marvel Universe whose existence was based on the success of martial arts movies of the seventies. I used to find Iron Fist a pointless character, with occasional redeemable guest-appearance potential ( See: Civil War, Daredevil ). Enter the three-man team of writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction and Spanish artist David Aja, whose ongoing series The Immortal Iron Fist KICKS EFFING ASS. Brubaker is a writer who comes from a crime/noir background, as is evident from his work on Gotham Central, Sleeper and Criminal, but of late, he has excelled in mainstream superheroes, especially the kind of gritty street-level superheroics of Daredevil. Fraction is a demented ( I think) indie comicbook writer whose Casanova is a acid-trip of a Bond movie. Together, the duo mesh the character of Danny Rand, the Iron Fist into something so diabolically cool that it makes me wonder about the potential of other, poorly-handled characters that have faded away or don’t really get too much attention. The term “Kungfu Billionaire” is the hook, and the creators proceed to take the best of Shaw Brothers films, a dash of Marvel Universe super-villainy ( Hail Hydra, indeed! ) and pump it up with back-story, tonnes and tonnes of it. Turns out, there has been sixty six Iron Fists throughout history, every generation spawning a hero who has to undergo the same rite of passage in the mystical city of K’un L’un to gain the power of the Fist. We are introduced to an immense cast of characters, both old and new, including Luke Cage, Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, Danny Rand’s former colleagues, The Steel Serpent, an old foe who has gained a new way of augmenting his strength; Orson Randall, Rand’s predecessor to the legacy of Iron Fist is still alive, and is being hunted by those who target Rand’s company. The first arc, called ‘The Last Iron Fist Story’ is about Randall, and how he guides Danny to recognise his destiny, and his potential. The second arc takes Rand back to K’un L’un, where he learns that the city is one of seven cities of Heaven, and he has to participate in a contest that will determine the fate of his city. The bizarre cast of characters in this arc includes the Crane Mother, a fearsome crone, Lei Kung the thunderer, Rand’s master, and a breakout character called The Prince of Orphans, John Aman, who was created in the 1930s by Bill Everett as a character infused with superhuman powers by Tibetan monks and was reintroduced by Brubaker and Fraction into this series, a move that reeks of genius, I daresay.

Truth be told, none of the concepts introduced are too unfamiliar or ‘out there’ – the first thing Neil Gaiman did after coming onboard Spawn was to introduce a similar generational idea to the existence of Spawn, and before him, there was Moore and his Swamp-Thing-as-plant-elemental-throughout-the-ages retcon. ( Did Samit Basu indulge in similar gimmicry in Devi? Anyone? ) What propels The Immortal Iron Fist to greatness is the seamless blend of these ideas with David Aja’s artwork. The guy is good, bringing a smoky atmosphere to the proceedings – his work brings to mind the dynamic photorealism of Michael Lark and John Cassaday with the atmospheric stylings of Guy Davis. I am in the middle of the second arc, The Seven Capital Cities of Heaven, which will conclude soon, and it’s a pity the trio of creators will move on after issue 16.

Now that psasidhar brought with 32 kgs of my comics last week, I am tempted to reread Starman and Usagi Yojimbo, masterful series both. SINGLE ISSUES, woo hoo! And there’s also the near-complete run of Peter David’s Hulk, and the new Punisher MAX issues, and the Invincible trades, and…

I like to think I’ve outgrown superheroes. Hah, what a laugh!

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Comics, Manga

An Extended Look at Lone Wolf and Cub: Volume 1: The Assassin’s Road

Because this is the first volume, and we have time on our hands, let’s do this very simply. Grab a chair and some popcorn, and let’s go through the stories one by one. It’s going to be tough for me, but I guess we can do it for one volume, right?

We begin the first arc with a cover by Frank Miller, an image of a blood-smeared samurai who’s obviously been in a fight, as the pile of bodies behind him demonstrates. He is hauling a cart in front of him, a cart with a cute baby in it. Remember this image, burn it in your mind, because it’s one of the most recurring themes in the series –the innocent child bearing mute witness to his father’s bloodshed. Nine stories, and the opening stubs of a series of articles at the back – one called The Ronin Report and the other Culture and Pop Culture. The articles are nothing an average Wikipedia-user wouldn’t know about, so we shall ignore them completely.

The First : Son for Hire, Sword For Hire

Long. Very long. With images.
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AR Rahman, Comics, Mixtapes, Movies, Music

Of movies, blankets and mixtapes

What really annoyed me after watcing Darna Zaroori Hai is the knowledge that RGV’s scriptwriters are so starved of scary ideas. Between this movie and its precursor, there have been five storylines involving cars on lonely roads. Hey, I know lonely roads are scary, and I understand that you guys drive to Khandala every other weekend and it’s a long frigging lonely drive, but get off it already. My point is, if you want to make a horror movie, you need to understand horror. Are you being scared by what you just wrote and translated to screen? I think you need to go out a little more, read a lot, watch a bit of Argento and Fulci and Hitchcock and Park Chan-Wook. And then maybe you will get out of this loser-level walk-up-behind-me-and-say-boo level of scriptwriting. And someone needs to take a jackhammer to Amar Mohile’s keyboards, there, that’s a horror story for you guys – loony music critic ends up with a jackhammer because the music had subliminal messages in it.

Sasi was here for all of half a day, and just because I was dying to share Blankets with someone, asked him to borrow it off me and read it in the next couple of days. I loved that book. Once upon a time, I totally hated reading autobiographies, but it’s books like Blankets that renew my faith in the fact that people can talk about themselves without laying it on too thick. The book is beautiful, romantic without being cheesy, graceful without being highbrow, poetic without being inaccessible. One of the few books this year ( Yes, I know the year isn’t even half-over yet, but I know that this statement is true, period) that I read in one sitting. And the artwork, oh my goodness, what I wouldn’t do to get ONE PAGE of Craig Thompson’s pencilled art. I had read that he was inspired not by other comic-book artists ( though there were definite Will Eisner influences on the storytelling style), but by post-Impressionist painters like Pissarro, Modigliani and Matisse, and his influences show themselves in flowing panels, full-page thoughtscapes that give me goose-pimples as I read the book.

(So what is Blankets? It’s a graphic novel, by this gentleman named Craig Thompson, an autobiographical retelling of his childhood, his relationship with his brother Phil, and his first love, a girl named Raina who he meets at Christian winter camp. He spends two weeks at Raina’s place, and a greater part of the book deals with these two weeks and their repercussions on Craig’s life. GRAAAH, I am bad at describing things like this, just go and read the Wikipedia entry already, huh?)

This would perhaps be the most beautiful book you won’t read in your lifetime, if you are in India. The steep price-tag (29.95$) ensures that even if it’s imported, the price will be high enough to dissuade people from buying it. Plus, yeah, no scanned versions available yet. It would be tough to scan this without destroying the book, it’s 600 pages. So don’t ask.

I made a mix-mp3 collection, again, part of the weekend project. I call it my Ultimate Though Slightly Biased Feel-Good AR Rahman Mix. Slightly biased because these aren’t songs that have been dubbed (and hence not part of the “national consciousness”, so no Bombay, Roja, Rangeela, Dil Se – you hear?) or are easily associated with ARR Hits package – these are the gems that lie in dormant brain-cells, songs that give me a high everytime I hear them because I have not been saturated by them at any point of time in my life. Each of them has a story, of course, and maybe someday I might get around to wearing off your collective ears with them, but for now, the songs will do. 14 tracks in one zip-file, meant to be listened to in the order in which they are arranged.

You can download the zip right here.

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