[Image: [left to right] LEGO Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore,
from The Beat]
Bilge Ebiri looks at comic-book-to-film adaptations in the new issue of Bookforum: The creators of these adaptations, it seems, have managed to get away with murder, in a Hollywood increasingly wary of offending others’ sensibilities. The irony here is that they have won this freedom for themselves by ceding a certain amount of control— if anything besides a fascination with perverse violence and controversy unifies these films, it’s their fidelity to the source material. While adaptations of literary works are judged (often superfluously) by their faithfulness to the original stories, adaptations of graphic novels are, by nature, even more limited: They’re judged also by their adherence to the original imagery. Manohla Dargis argued as much in her mixed review of Sin City in the New York Times, when she noted that “in an effort to make a faithful adaptation, Mr. Rodriguez put his own movie sense on hold, not even bothering with a real script. He didn’t just try to make his Sin City look like a graphic novel: he tried to replicate the private experience of reading one too, slowly turned page after slowly turned page.” + Kapow! The new film superheroes: As to the next Batman film, the director Christopher Nolan promises that it will be even darker and more morally ambiguous than Batman Begins (2005). It’s enough to make you worry for the forthcoming Tintin series, even though the team behind it are cinema’s own super-heroes – Steven Spielberg and Kevin Jack-son [sic]. Can the clean-cut, asexual boy reporter make it in an antiheroic age? Perhaps Captain Haddock will come to the rescue. Another, slightly less innocent icon of the past, Barbarella, is also due a remake, at the hands of Robert Rodriguez – as long as the flop of his Grindhouse does not threaten this project as it has Sin City 2. + Mark Cardwell, who interviewed the mighty Brendan McCarthy for Dogmatika earlier this year, shares some pages from Phil Bond’s Dogmeat series: Dogmeat, however, showed he could also do cute girls wandering around with no knickers at all. Any ever-so-mild whiff of Crumbian misogyny was completely undercut with a gonzo sense of the absurd, meaning no-one in their right mind could take offence. [thanks A.] + Wizard talk to Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, and PopCultureShock TV get the word on the HBO Preacher series [via Journalista]
God is a Big Jerk. Tony Millionaire reviews Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great + Newsarama talk Change-Bots with Jeffrey Brown: Change-Bots is my tribute/nostalgic reverie of the Transformers and their ilk. I’m aiming for three audiences with this one – people who already like my comics, people who are really into the Transformers, and people who see the movie and don’t know any better than to buy this book.” + A massive retrospective of manga god Osamu Tezuka. + Dean Haspiel ACT-I-VATE‘s [via Comics Reporter] + Dame Darcy’s Gasoline
[via Flog!] + A graphic novel primer. + Interviews with Ivan Brunetti [Time Out], Eddie Campbell [Suicide Girls], Adrain Tomine [Publishers Weekly], Kim Deitch [Daily Cross Hatch], Rian Hughes [Newsarama], Lewis Trondheim [Comics Journal] and Lambada winner Alison Bechdel [Newsarama] . + Asterix is too French. + Karen Slaughter is writing a graphic novel. + A Nat Turner comic. + A Hurricane Katrina webcomic. + Paul Gravett on Cult Fiction [more here]. + Sweatdrop , a UK manga podcast.
