A man who wanted to see a world of equality and peace, and yet his life ended in violence, being memorialized barely a week after another brutal slaying.
I’m really not sure what to say that wouldn’t sound banal.
PAD
Month: January 2011
Movie review: The Mask
Originally published August 26, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1084
Some years back, author Gary K. Wolf wrote an offbeat mystery titled Who Censored Roger Rabbit? It told the story of a down-in-the-mouth detective named Eddie Valiant, and his involvement with cartoon-strip actors… i.e., “characters” who posed for comic strips and spoke in word balloons that materialized over their heads.
It was fairly hard-boiled stuff, considering the subject matter. The titular rabbit was pretty pathetic, and even became pretty dead (hey, how big a spoiler can that be? It was in the dust jacket.) Most of the supporting characters were unpleasant, including Roger’s wife, Jessica. Ultimately, although the book was good reading, it was fairly bitter and kind of depressing.
Then the story was made over into Who Framed Roger Rabbit (no question mark, as if Doctor Who were the culprit). Roger became framed rather than dead, the characters became more accessible, Jessica became a doting wife rather than a literally one-dimensional bìŧçh. The entire story, in short, became family entertainment.
Now history repeats itself, as The Mask opens at a theater near you.
An Additional Green Hornet In-Joke
My daughter, Ariel, saw “The Green Hornet” with her friends and picked up on an in-joke in there that went right past me…which is mildly annoying, since I was the one who gave her the piece of information in the first place that the gag was based on.
The Green Hornet
We loved it. Okay, well, I did; the 3D gave Kathleen some nausea issues, which hits her sometimes when she’s watching films that were retrofitted rather than shot that way. But when she wasn’t feeling sick, she liked it as well.
March 15th? Really?
So the opening of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark has now been pushed back to March 15th.
Now: I get that they’re still working on fixing the story and songs. For that matter, if you compare it to a musical’s typical development time–considering that ordinary musicals have extensive out-of-town tryouts where such changes are usually made so that it arrives in NYC pretty much locked–it really amounts to about the same amount of time. Instead of starting in LA, moving to Chicago, then Boston and finally NY, all the repairs are happening right here.
I get all that. With that said:
They’re opening it on the Ides of March?
Great idea. What could POSSIBLY go wrong on the Ides of March?
PAD
Image Concerns
Originally published August 19, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1083
In an earlier column, I pointed out that Marvel Comics was suffering from a major perception problem. That, to an extent, it didn’t matter what its motivations for certain actions were. Credibility was being damaged due to the public perception.
It has since been pointed out to me that I have the same situation in regards to Image.
A Picture Worth Six Words
Don’t you think she looks tired?
Suggested by Sasha.
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