Miller Craps On Will Eisner

UPDATE:
Frank Miller has created a Stink Fest of Epic proportions. According to movie critics, we are in Ishtar territory here and the general public seems to agree as The Sprit has tanked and tanked badly.

What's so sad about this is that Eisner was a revolutionary storyteller and now his most famous and innovative, Noir character, The Sprit, will be forever besmirched by Frank Miller's stunningly bad film.

There is a lot that can be said about this movie but I think this quote from MaryAnn Johanson's review says it the best

The Spirit does not believe in itself. It thinks comics are a joke -- and it appears to thinks that movies are a joke, too.

A sad sad time for comic book movies... and just when they were starting to get some respect.

Thanks Frank for f-ing up a legacy...

Let me add, in all fairness, that I have not seen The Spirit but I'm sure I will at some point to verify what is being said about the film. But this I do know, it was not necessary to shoot The Spirit in the same manner as 300 and Sin City.

I feel these two images sum this whole thing up.
Frank Miller's version of the Spirit on the left and an original Eisner Spirit cover on the right.


I'd much rather see a movie about that character on the right side.

UPDATE: I was talking to a guy at work last-night and he said he wanted to see the Spirit because he liked the first one...

I said "what first one?"

He replied "Sin City..."

Of course I politely corrected him that The Spirit was not a sequel

-Swinebread

Comic Con For Me

Of course Comic Con is going on this weekend but for obvious reasons I haven’t been paying much attention, But here’s a few stories that sparked my interest.


Rose McGowan and Robert Rodrigez talk about the new Red Sonja movie that's due out in late 2009 (here). It looks like it could be a lot of fun and I like what both McGowan and Rodrigez had to say about the Character and the project. The director, Douglas Aarniokosk, seems like a total putz though with statements like this:

"We're trying to do what Chris Nolan did with Batman, and that's [to] take an established story and an established character and reinvent it," he said. "You didn't have to see the other 'Batman' [movies] to appreciate it. You didn't have to read the comics to appreciate it."

You don't even have care about the Red Sonja at all to appreciate it... sigh

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The Greatest American Hero is set for a comic book debut this fall. The cast and crew reunited for walk down memory lane to talk about a what made the show so special and why it was canceled before its time. Plus, there’s a buzz of for possible film in 2009. See Here

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Frank Miller’s adaptation of Will Eisner’s classic comic The Spirit might be really cool or it might suck and maybe Samuel L. Jackson might make or break the film project. See here

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Watchmen, Watchmen, Watchmen… blah, blah, blah see here

Also, watch Dave Gibbons discuss his experience with the film here

Take a gander at the Nite Owl's ship here

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The Warlord is returning to comics for his 35th anniversary and this time the relaunch will be done by the character's creator Mike Grell. See here. This a big relief after the reimagining that DC did a few years ago stunk so bad. It is time to get back to the original version. Hopefully the new Warlord will be a success so some Warlord Showcase Presents will get published.


-Swinebread

Comic Book Baby Blues

First off, let me apologize for not responding to all of your comments and for not posting comments to all of your blogs. I’ve been a tad busy getting ready for our new baby. He can come at any time now and the wife and I have been getting our last few things done that we need to, like going berry picking for the last time in a good long while. Hopefully I’ll get one good sweep or two by everybody’s blogs before I’m outta’ the loop for period of time.

I’ve been having some weird thoughts about comics that I thought I’d share.



The Memin Pinguin thing got me thinking about my Spirit Archives. I’ve got volumes one through ten only. I just haven’t been able to justify, as married man, the expense of a 50-dollar book every few months. Sadly it’s volume eleven when things are supposed to get really good for the Spirit title. One through ten are kinda “meh.” I really love the spirit comics (volume 2) from my time reading the reprints published by Kitchen Sink Press. They were great because they were regular sized comics that had new cover art by Eisner and had black and white interiors, which I enjoy more than the color versions. When DC announced that they were publishing collections of the Spirit I was pretty happy but I would have preferred an affordable set of trades.


Regardless, I was quite shocked by how grotesque Ebony White was depicted in the early Spirit stuff. I knew he was pretty stereotyped from the later adventures I’d read in the Kitchen Sink Comics but man, the stuff in early Volumes is really ugly. I kept buying though, hoping I’d get the Spirit I knew (which I discovered later was post WWII). Where was P’Gell, Sand Saref and the Octopus? Where was the deft skill with which Eisner had crafted the Spirit stories? We’ll for the most part it’s not in the volumes I have. I’ve been considering selling these books for a long time, but now with a kid on the way maybe I really need to get rid of them. The problem is that the first 2 volumes are autographed by Eisner himself made out to me. These are the two that have the worst depictions of Ebony. *Sigh*… I wish… I wish would have had him sign my copies of the Kitchen Sink Spirit Comics instead…

In a similar vein, I was reading the latest issue AC Comics Mystery Men with a story about the Hood. He was smashing up a Japanese saboteur ring. The story was quite ridiculous with the saboteurs disguising themselves as cowboys while wearing suicide bomb vests. But it got me thinking… I’m gonna have a biracial child. He’ll be half Japanese. Obviously, I wouldn’t let him see this at a young age, but should I chuck out all my comics that cover WWII? Should I throw out my All-Stars Squadron comics, my Invaders comics and Captain America comics? What kind of affect could this have on him? Seeing big strong American Superheroes beating the shit out of Japanese villains might screw with his head right? I like superheroes a lot, and WWII is a big part of the superhero mystique. So, I’m a little at a loss of what to do. I’m probably overacting but I’m worried that my collection of Usagi Yojimbo books ain't gonna be enough to counteract any harm that may be done.

Just some thoughts I'm having...


-Swinebread

Random Movie Stuff

This stuff has been posted everywhere at this point but I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon.

The New Indy 4 movie poster:

Please don’t let this be like the Star War prequels.


Here's a couple of stills from the Whiteout film.



As I haven’t been paying attention, Will Eisner’s The Spirit is in full production right now. I feel like compete tool for not knowing this. In this pick we see Frank Miller on the set. It’s being shot in the same style as Sin City and 300. More info here (links at the bottom at page)




These comments by Jeffrey Dean Morgan on the set of Watchmen gives this old fanboy even more hope that the film version is in really good hands. Zack Snyder actually carries around a copy of the graphic novel on set all the time.

Reviews for I Am Legend are mostly positive (see here) but it looks like there’s a problem with the end of the film. From what understand they shot multiple endings for the movie. So maybe they never really knew how they wanted to end it. I’ll keep that in mind as I see the film, which unfortunately will not be this weekend.



-Swinebread