niallmccann

April 19, 2011 6:28 am I really liked the film, thought it was great, overall.

I felt like they needed to be more inventive with the denoument; "Superman lifts something heavy" just isn't enough for the climactic scene of the movie. And sure, a continent is reeeeeeeeally heavy, but it's still not enough.

I thought Bosworth didn't pull off Lois very well. She was far too angsty, she wasn't the sparkplug that Lois needs to be.

But I thought the plane rescue was great, I thought Spacey's Luthor was amazing, and I really don't have a problem with the kid. Made perfect sense in terms of the story.

So... not my favourite Superman film, but I enjoyed it a lot. Great to see someone try to do something interesting with Superman. It shouldn't be such a rare event, but it is.

July 6, 2010 5:39 pm

It's a great story, with some phenomonal art.

I mean, you can see the start of the deconstruction that Moore would perfect in Watchmen, but as a comic, on it's own terms, it's hard to beat. Love it.

June 30, 2010 8:22 pm

Great news.

 The wallpaper on my phone is a Shalvey sketch of The Rocketeer. I loves it.

April 13, 2010 6:56 am

This has been sitting on the shelf of my local bookshop for over a month, I do intend picking it up, just from nostalgia for the great 90s film, if nothing else.

In the meantime, you might find this cool, i found it some time ago, now it's the wallpaper on my phone:

http://eclecticmicks.blogspot.com/2009/03/rocketeer.html

April 12, 2010 8:33 pm

I'm surprised that there's so much hand wringing about what can be done for new readers; it seems very simple to me: let each book tell its own story in its own title. No game changing crossovers that happen elsewhere, no "specials" like the one you mention.

As an example: this weekend I bought the omnibus of Fraction's Iron Man. Now, I'm enjoying it, it's a good book. Having said that, there's a huge status quo change between the first and second arcs of that book. Between issues (or chapters, if you're reading the story collected, as I am) Tony goes from head of SHIELD to wanted fugitive. That's fine, if (like me) you have a reasonable working knowledge of what happened in Secret Invasion. If I was buying these as seperate trades, and without the insider knowledge of what's happening, then I'd be missing an important plot point of the book. How could that not put you off? If you went into a bookstore and bought a book, took it home and found out that chapter three isn't included, and not only that, but that it actually happens in completely different book that you didn't buy and don't partuclularly want to... well, you'd be p****d off. And rightly so.

I stopped reading JMS's Spider-man after he joined the Avengers... I had no interest in that story, I was enjoying the story I'd been following up to that point. I was avidly following Johns' run on GL, and really psyched for Blackest Night until I realised that when Blackest Night actually arrived it wasn't so much a GL story as a story featuring everyone in the DCU, none of whom had actually appeared in the book previously. I'd been devouring those trades up until that realisation... I haven't bought one in months and there's no fire under me to follow up where I left off.

These events are fan pandering nonsense, rarely worth the build-up and never engaging to new readers, or any reader who isn't on a site like this following every detail and discussing them ad nauseaum. The only conclusion I can come to looking at the nonsensical and self-defeating way the comics industry is run is that no one involved is interested in telling a good story, they're just interested in empty fan service and transparent marketing ploys. Why invest your time, money and energies in something as hollow and disposable as that?

This is a rant, I understand that it is and I apologise. But I believe every word I've written is correct. I love superheroes and I'd like to see them be the best they can be, and the industry as it is currently being run doesn't allow for that.

June 28, 2009 7:34 pm

I think this column might have been more relevant 40 years ago than it is today.

I'm tired of people judging comics the way I see them judged here, and it's dispiriting that they're being judged that way by someone who you would expect to have a broader, more nuanced picture of the output of the comics industry in general.

Even to say it would have been more relevant 40 years ago is a disservice to many of the comics that were being produced at that time; Spider-man, The Hulk, Green Lantern/Green Arrow were all excellent examples of comics that threw the comfortable formula of wise, all-knowing hero vs maniacal villain into disarray. And even to say that they were the first mainstream comics to do that is to ignore the many visions of sensuously attractive villainy or understandable desperation that peppered Eisner's Spirit strips for two decades before, or Bill Everett's decidedly unstraightforward hero in Namor, which predates even that, I think.

There's always been shades of moral grey in comics, and there continues to be. If the majority of characters don't get sufficiently in depth consideration, well... I don't see why a redefinition accross the medium is necessary, or why comics in that respect should be different from any other medium; TVs in a golden age at the moment, but for every show like The Wire or Battlestar Galactica, there's a hundred CSIs or Grey's Anatomy's. And either of those (IMO) inferior shows will blow the former shows out of the ratings water any night of the week.

Bendis's Daredevil or Ennis's Punisher are popular, mainstream books. And either one has all the shades of moral grey you could hope for.