“I feel that if we see comics in relationship to movies then the best they will ever be are films that do not move.” – Alan Moore (from the Mindscape of Alan Moore)

I have a feeling that when Geoff Johns writes a comic book script he envisions his story eventually making it to the silver screen.

Comics have become a fertile breeding ground for Hollywoods desire for blockbuster films – there is a lot of money to be made of these characters. While turning comics into movies is nothing new, it has picked up considerably since 2000 and the improvement of CGI and computers. Now it is much easier to believe a man can fly then it was in 1979.

But regardless of how much a movie costs and how great the special effects are and how talented the actors, the “MOVIE” in my mind while reading a comic book is 10 times better. There, in the theater of the mind, I supply the sound effects and voices. I am completely immersed in this world and it totally believable. Spandex and all.

This re-booted Aquaman is trying to hard to make it as a blockbuster movie rather then a comic book – and I find that irritating. Even the 2 page spread title page is “letterboxed”.

While there is nothing wrong with a writer or artist using cinema techniques to tell a story, a comic book should utilize every aspect of being a comic to become something better then the sum of its parts. The perfect example of this would be Watchmen – in that book there are things happening in the background of a panel, like say that crazy “it’s the end of the world” guy digging thru the trash, at the same time we are reading the caption about how Rorschach needs to check his “mail-drop”. Watchman was made into a film but it only captured half of what you got out of reading the comic. It can never replace the Watchman that plays out in the mind when you read it.

Aquaman Issue #2 might as well be called Aquaman Episode #2. This a TV series drawn by a great artist. Aquaman #2 is the equivalent of putting movie stills on a page. I don’t want to read a tv show or film – I want to read a comic book, and have the words and art speak to me the way only a comic book can.