Category: Comics

How would a Fan film look like if made by Hollywood pros? Damn impressive, that’s how: Batman: Dead End (thanks to Oren Henkin for the link).

An interesting set of thoughts on Superhero comics as Opera, starting here:

Further distorting most of the critical takes on super-heroes is the fact that writing about all comics tends to focus more on the writin’ than the drawin’, and while this isn’t a fatal flaw when the subject is Harold Gray or Harvey Pekar or E.C. Segar or Harvey Kurtzman, ever since Joe Shuster drew a picture of a dude in tights lifting a car above his head, the appeal of the super-hero comic has been primarily visual. I’ll have to save my post on Alan Moore and the folly of the through-written super-hero story for a later date, but 15 years after Watchmen I’m convinced more than ever that Stan Lee’s approach to super-heroes is the best. We don’t go to see a Verdi opera for the story, but to hear the music. We don’t read a Kirby comic for the words, but to look at the pictures. Working with Kirby and Steve Ditko, Stan Lee proved himself the finest super-hero librettist the comics world has produced. Fans who find humanistic depth in the stories in The Fantastic Four are as wrong-headed as critics who attack what seems to them to be these stories’ superficiality and simplemindedness.

Follow-ups here and here, in response to comments on other blogs.

Comic Book Covers and Ads of the 1970s! is tantalizingly brief, unlike the more substansive Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index. More, please.

From The Sun (via Uncle Bear):

SHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll — and uncovered a giant green WILLY.

Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” at a seaside fair.

And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them.