Movie review: Casper

digresssmlOriginally published June 23, 1995, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1127

It must be getting fairly frustrating for Marvel. With its sole big screen release being the much-maligned Howard the Duck, it seems that everyone else is able to turn their characters (Superman, Batman, TimeCop, the Rocketeer, the Mask, the Crow, Swamp Thing, Tank Girl) into big screen stories with far greater ease and frequency. The results, both critical and financial, have been mixed—but that’s going to happen with any genre.

Now another company can be added to the roster of those who have beaten Marvel to the punch, when it comes to producing a successful screen translation of one of its characters: Harvey Comics, with the advent of Casper.

And I’ll tell you: The film is, for my money, one of the best comic book adaptations, bar none.

Cowboy Pete Lights Up “Green Lantern”

It’s challenging when one sees a film that is getting slammed by hostile reviews, because it gets into your head and you start looking for everything that’s wrong, because if everyone else saw it, then you figure there’s something wrong with you if you’re not seeing it as well.

Okay, well…there’s something wrong with me. I saw “Green Lantern” and thought it was a perfectly good movie about Green Lantern.

I am Totally Ripping This Off for “X-Factor”

Reported by the Associated Press:

After hacking into the Islamic jihadist magazine “Inspire,” British Intelligence agents changed the directions for making a home-made bomb to a recipe for making cupcakes.

I think that’s hilarious. I’m going to have Rictor do something similar to that, purely as a throwaway bit, in a future issue of X-Factor.

PAD

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