Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Rob Clough on See You Next Tuesday and Displacement. Todd Klein on Jupiter's Legacy Vol. 1. Sean Gaffney on A Silent Voice Vol. 2. Henry Chamberlain on The Bozz Chronicles. Jerry Smith on Monster Mash. Zed Alexandra on Three Shadows.

* not comics: here's David Sims on why making a Fantastic Four movie is hard. It's hard to make any movie, really. The specific problem with Fantastic Four is that the genius of the comics is in how they were executed, not in the series' conception. At its best, FF was a breathless romp with appealing, imaginative characters. It's not really "about" family, although if you're Stan Lee trying to get Hollywood work in the '60s and '70s you're going to want every concept boiled down in a way that suggests you should be given idea-man work. In life as in pop-culture-reverse-engineering, it's easy to miss the story for the themes. The best run of FF, that glorious #44-#67 stretch, is soaked in story: monsters and beautiful designs and killer pacing and space adventures and forgotten civilizations and worlds within worlds and the greatest comic book creator of the 20th Century at the height of his powers pointing and going, "Look, look, look!"

If it was about anything thematically, I'd suggest Fantastic Four explored a certain kind of American self-conception commnon to the years between 1958 and 1968, the way Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy was about America's last bloom of youth more than it was about adult male friendships or the fluidity of economic status. In the Fantastic Four comics, great power comes with great deformity, if not for you than for someone close. The answer to managing both is to look without and within, into outer and inner space, propelled by dynamic intensity undercut by wisecracking everyman glamour. (The Fantastic Four are the Kennedys, if you squint.) Guest stars encouraged.

If anyone ever again insists on making a Fantastic Four movie, maybe start it in the middle of one action scene and end it in the middle of another one. Make it big. Make it crazy. Make it fun.

* finally, here's a list of submissions guidelines from publishers still willing to take submissions guidelines.
 
posted 5:05 pm PST | Permalink
 

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