Joe Szilagyi

It was at a preview screening in Seattle at Pacific Place on Monday night. The crowd was oddly quiet and relaxed before the film, which was weird, as most of the promotion was done via local comic book stores for this particular screening. During the very advance preview for Zombieland that we saw there, the crowd was really amped up and rowdy; by the time the opening chords of For Whom The Bell Tolls hit at the opening credits the place nearly flipped out. The KICK-ASS opening is the trailer scene of the guy flying off the side of the building in New York City–when that scene finished, the crowd DID go nuts, and it didn’t stop whooping and cheering the rest of the way. I think the crowd–for whatever reason–either had no idea what KICK-ASS was really going to be like or had never touched Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s comic book. We had, we’d seen the trailers, and were waiting for all hell to break loose, and holy shit does it.

Minor spoilers ahoy:

The movie is much, much funnier than the trailer gives any clue it would be, and it’s much, much funnier than the comic book. Some bits of the comic are nearly perfect reproductions of the film. KICK-ASS and the car after his first superhero incident and his superhero public reveal in the camera phone video scene in particular. That scene from the trailers (“I’M KICK-ASS!”) was done INCREDIBLY well and a near perfect example of how to show a character transformation and origin in one go on-screen–it was thrilling and the single best scene in the film (second best is the hilarious Ennio Morricone bit).

Yes, the violence was at times totally absurd, but that was sort of the point–over the top and brutal violence is really the only weapon a “real life” superhero would have. No “Spider-Sense”, no Superman-style bouncing bullets off of your chest. You’d have to beat the holy hell out of someone–or shoot them–before the same happened to you. You’d get the tar beat out of you. Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale alluded to this in a few scenes in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but in that fantasy Batman has the world’s most cutting-edge armor, the world’s greatest ninja training, he’s the most driven and single-focused crime fighter of them all… and he’s still a battered mess of bruises and stitches. A normal person, trying to fight crime? It would be straight up kill-or-be-killed. Beat them rotten before they knife you.

Even when Kick-Ass does kick ass in that “I’M KICK-ASS!” scene, he gets his ass completely kicked at the same time. He’s all but spitting up blood and teeth. It’s what all this would really look like, or as close as we’re likely to ever actually see unless someone does go and actually become a superhero. The film is brutally violent at times, but the comedy, the great characters, and the strong undercurrent of hope and idealism in the film completely mitigate and balance that. The microwave scene (best completely horrible joke scene of the year; it will be very hard to top, especially the reaction of the goombah on the far right side of the screen) and/or anything with Hit-Girl will probably get the most complaints for the Conservatives in the world, along with all the sex jokes.

There’s some unevenness in the acting, but that’s really my only sole complaint. Nicolas Cage is Nicolas Cage, and to me at least he can sometimes seem to veer far off the rails in performances, but that’s what I love about him. My wife unfortunately absolutely doesn’t like him as an actor because of this and thinks you get Nicolas Cage too much in films. She had no complaints about him in KICK-ASS, and by her rating that’s like forcefully shoving an Academy Award into his hands for playing Big Daddy in KICK-ASS. Seriously. I thought he was great. Chloe Moretz gets ALL the best lines, and the sheer madness of her spouting things like “Let’s see what you cunts can do now” and “Show’s over, motherfuckers!” is endlessly surreal paired with her adorable “Look what I did!” expressions when she’s sending body parts and viscera flying. For a little kid, she’s actually got some chops. The pacing, editing, soundtrack and structure of the film were perfect. It grabs onto your typical modern film ADD-riddled mind and just keeps shoving you forward in a very good way. The film visually was gorgeous.

I adored the last film Matthew Vaughn and Ben Davis did, Stardust, and I admit I like that film even a bit better than Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s book that it was based off of. I think KICK-ASS is a better film.

I’d summarize my review by the first thing I said the minute the credits popped up: “Yeah, we need this on Blu-Ray,” to which my wife said, “Are you fucking kidding? Hell yes.” It’ll be either a Zombieland+ level hit or a cult classic. I’m not sure which.

For those that want a very in-depth review from someone who simply gets both film AND comics.

We got to see Watchmen tonight thanks to the magic of a pair of free passes. Right off, no spoilers.

It’s the most faithful comic book adaptation I’ve ever seen, and the best adaptation overall. It works as an adaptation, and most importantly it works as a film. There are some entire scenes and sequences that are recreated almost literally from the books–in gorgeous detail–and some that are tweaked just enough with judicious cuts and adjustments that they work perfectly for the film.

Are there flaws? Probably, but I didn’t see them, and I was dissecting the film as I watched it. I’ve read Watchmen end to end on a scale of dozens of times, and read the odd chapter or page more times in the past 20+ years than I can imagine; I’ve had a copy of the trade in the house non-stop since forever.

The casting is perfect. If I had to pick any nits, and this is how far I have to dig, it’s that in some shots and angles something felt ‘off’ about Sally’s old-age makeup (typically on some early shots of her straight ahead, right in her face) and especially that in a few close-ups of her hands, they didn’t look old enough–but they screw that detail up in every film with aged younger actors. The actor playing Rorschach was the best bit of the film, to me, overall; Andi thinks the famous end of the Mars conversation was the best–she cried there. All of the Doctor Manhattan CGI was fantastic. Yes, there was the odd shot where you would say, “Yarp, that’s CGI,” aside from the fact he’s blue, clearly made of energy rather than flesh, and is literally glowing bright blue.

I really don’t know what else to say. Is it the best film ever made? I don’t think it’s a Lawrence of Arabia. It’s head and shoulders better than The Dark Knight. Go see it.

I said to Andi on the bus on the way home, “This film, together with Dark Knight, and the crazy grosses of all the Spider-Man films completely validates this art form we’ve all been passionate about so long as a mainstream art form.” That is NOT to take anything from sequential art–comics–which stands on it’s own, but fuck: if this is the end result of a comic book, then anything is possible artistically. Watchmen is LITERALLY in vast stretches a comic book come to true life.

Frankly, I loved it.

I don’t know if I like this. I need to see the whole episode… the characters seem down-pat, for what they should be, and I like the art and animation, but I can’t tell if the old-school vibe is a put-on or homage…

Via Warren Ellis, you should read this. Warning: some comic, television, and Quantum of Solace/Bond spoilers.

Found on the Stranger Slog. It’s simply made of awesome.

It’s out! Issue 1 of Galaxy Hunters, Andi’s comic, and the new site (the design is a work in progress, don’t hit me…!) are live.

Go look:

Rory Root, of Comic Relief, is currently in a coma. Please send some good thoughts and love his way.

“Everything is going according to plan.”

Oh yes, indeed. That looks fantastic!

Mike Wieringo passed away yesterday from a heart attack, at only 44 years old. Story here. Jesus…

GALAXY HUNTERS is live! Go see: http://www.galaxyhunters.net

Writer: Andi Szilagyi
Artist: Josh Crowe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVRQjCG8tn4

Go look now, before some fool goes and gets it pulled for copyvio reasons!

Work on the web comic continues behind the scenes, but if you go right now over to Galaxy Hunters, you can sign up right now for the announcement mailing list! Low volume, and probably no mail at all for the time being. But, once the art work is done and the writing ready, and the site goes live, we’ll be sending updates out. So, sign up!

Andi and her friend from way back in the day are putting together a new webcomic: GALAXY HUNTERS! It’s coming soon, and here’s a tiny bit of preview sketch art:

Go here, to see the site (not quite ready for prime time, yet, but soon!).

The Emerald City ComiCon is this weekend in Seattle at the Qwest Field Event Center. Andi and I will be there probably late in the day on Saturday to hang out, and again late on Sunday to try to score deals from vendors. If you see us, say hey.

On a related note, I predict that the forthcoming Marvel MMORPG being produced by Cryptic Studios, the producers of the hugely popular City of Heroes/City of Villains MMORPG, will be a bad thing for the legions of COH/V players. Why? Let’s assume that the Marvel game will be a success, and well made. Knowing Cryptic’s skill–the COH/V games frankly are amazingly fun and immersive MMOs that barely feel like MMOs (none of that horrific unclean feeling you get from playing World of Warcraft)–the Marvel game will be very good. If it’s a rousing success, which is quite likely, it won’t be long before production begins on a DC Universe MMORPG as well. Let’s say that the DCU game is at least half as good as the Marvel one. We’ll have three quality superhero MMORPGs.

As my friend Chad put it,

“I don’t think it’ll hurt CoH, I think it’ll outright kill it. My hope is Cryptic will take what they learned making the city of games and make the Marvel game even better. I don’t have high hopes for the DC one, even though I’m a big DC fan, due to Sony’s involvement. They have a great track record of screwing things up.”

Sony did bone up Star Wars Galaxies pretty good, but lots of people are playing that still. COH/V has (the last time I looked at the NCSoft public financial disclosures–they own COH/V) somewhere north of 250,000+ monthly subscribers. How many would defect for a great Marvel game and a so-so or better DCU game? A hell of a lot, that’s how many. I love playing City of Heroes (the villain side, not so much, but that’s just personal taste). But what will happen to the game I love if half the population bolts for greener, more desired pastures? Personally… the idea of the Marvel game in particular sounds nice. Would you rather play and spend your time in Metropolis, the Avengers/Spider-Man New York City, or a fictional urban city in Rhode Island populated by characters that only exist in the in-game environment of Cryptic’s game? No brainer.

Unsurprisingly, we’ve been watching Heroes on NBC since it’s pilot aired originally last year. Surprisingly, we weren’t completely sold on the show at first. Why? The pilot, relative to what the rest of the first season, was by far the worst episode. Not even weakest–television shows, if they maintain a strong, religious following, and keep growing, can overcome a weak pilot sometimes. Of course, to everyone else I’ve spoken to, they’ve generally loved the Heroes pilot. For us, it was a case of being cynical old school comic book readers. Every single thing touched on pretty much in the pilot episode we’d seen before, multiple times. Not just that, but we’d seen it done exceptionally. Well. So-so. Poorly. We’ve been reading comic books for our entire lives.

Then something occurred to us. Comic book readers, especially people that actually study them somewhat, and actually read comic book scripts, and follow it as a form of art and literature, and not just a diversion, or hobby, or casual reading, are an extreme minority. We really are. We are, in relative terms, comic book snobs. We’ve read our Watchmen, and our Dark Knight Returns, and our Sandman, and our old large-volume reprints of classics like the original Bob Kane Batman stories, and our Amazing Fantasy #15. We gleefully pointed at the deconstruction of the form when it happened in Planetary. We’re elitist snobs (although I do love my Ultimate Spider-Man, still). We’d seen all this “crap” before. But 99% percent of the America–no, the world’s population–never had.

It was all new to them.

We came back next week, and the week after, and are now sixteen episodes into Heroes. Each week is fantastic. Each week shows growth for nearly all the characters involved, and their stories. Even better? Heroes, in many ways, is the antithesis of LOST. LOST goes out of it’s way to give you questions, but only the most (if at all) roundabout answers. LOST is like crack cocaine: a great high, but you feel rotten and dependent immediately. It’s Las Vegas; all flash and the illusion of substance like a mirage. I’ve heard that LOST is allegedly now “halfway done” and has a finite five year plan, so maybe that will be changing. But it is what it is. Heroes, on the other hand, is like the American heartland, or the ideal of it: all meat, all solid, whole-wheat, and pure story. Even better? Like I said, it’s all new to most people, but many of the themes to seasoned comic book readers will seem familiar since… oh, the 1960s or 1970s. That said, Heroes is one of the most amazing live-action interpretations of comic book superheroes (albeit without spandex) I’ve yet seen. In that, the show is on par with the Tobey McGuire Spider-Man films.

To my knowledge, very little has happened or come about yet in Heroes Season One that hasn’t either served the larger plot, a given character’s story, or been a set-up for one or the other. Watching Heroes is actually a lot like watching one of my favorite films, Ghostbusters. Go back and look at that film, and it’s best aspect, the brilliant script. Nothing happens in that movie, no action, no line of dialogue, no joke, that isn’t a setup for a plot point or something else. Everything builds into something else until the crescendo of the closing credits. That’s what the entire season of Heroes feels like (so far). The last episode, where we see one character suddenly flaunting a heaping host of abilities (at one point more than one at a time!) was just fantastic, and felt like the ending of act four of a five act story. The season so far, also rather interestingly, has more of the feel of a mini-series, than a regular week-by-week show, which has 18-20 stand alone episodes per season and then one larger series mythology aspect in the remaining episodes. All of Heroes is the mythology; every episode is a chapter of the larger story.

That’s what makes that show so fantastic: it’s all meat, with none of the vapor that other shows use to pad and fill out their allocation of episodes per season.

Oh noes…

From SDCC courtesy of NEWSARAMA

An otherwise uneventful Comics-Con panel led by Todd McFarlane Saturday (overview of Todd McFarlane Productions’ current and upcoming comics, slides of new toy products, Q&A) took an interesting turn when writer (and fellow Image contributor) Robert Kirkman took over the audience Q&A.

From the crowd, he identified himself as a fan who was wondering if McFarlane had any ideas for new comics. McFarlane (who evidently had never met Kirkman and did not recognize him) mainly danced around the question, equating it to if you create a character like Mickey Mouse, that would be enough for him and he wouldn’t worry about creating Donald Duck or Goofy. After this, one of McFarlane’s fellow TMP panelists identified Kirkman, telling McFarlane he wrote “that Walking Dead comic you like.”

Kirkman continued by saying he didn’t buy toys, and just liked McFarlane’s comics, and didn’t want to put him on the spot, but since comics were what got him famous and he has time to work with the toys, why can’t he put out a new comic?

McFarlane explained to him that it’s difficult for him to maintain the proper pace drawing and doing his other duties. Kirkman – still not satisfied – bluntly asked him “Do you want to do a book with me?” McFarlane eventually relented, and told Kirkman to talk with editor Brian Holguin about ideas and, adding, “You convince him, he convinces me – you and me. And I’ll give you some free toys.” He then joked, “And thanks for making money for Image,” to which Kirkman sarcastically replied “Someone has to.”

This ended the panel, and the two were seen shaking hands, with Kirkman saying that he’ll “come back next year if he has to.”