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"What I hope is that people take from it the unlikelihood that a piece of paper, with little ink drawings of figures, with little written words, can make you cry, can make your heart soar, can make you scared, sad, or thrilled. How mental is that? That piece of paper is inert material, the corpse of some tree, pulped and poured, then given new meaning and new life when the real hours and real emotions that the writer and the artist, the colourist, the letter the editor translated onto the physical page, meet with the real hours and emotions of a reader, of all readers at once, across time, generations and distance."
I've never really liked Superman as a character. Always had a hard time relating to him, especially contrasted against...well, pretty much anyone, particularly Batman, probably his most common foil. Where Bruce Wayne's alter ego is a product of fantastic wealth, Olympic-level training, peerless deductive skills and deep-seeded childhood trauma, Kal-El is...just an alien, gifted by his inhuman biology to be almost invincible, unless you happen to have a specific green radioactive crystal lying around. He's an easy character to write poorly (as JMS proved pretty handily with his "Grounded" arc, the success of which would fit neatly on a microscope slide), but so damn hard to write in a manner that's true to his nature and still dramatically resonant. By my count, three relatively modern stories have done it well -- Alan Moore hit it twice with "For the Man Who Has Everything" (the animated adaption of which being possibly the only adaptation of his work Moore has ever enjoyed) and "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" which would've served as the perfect end of the Silver-Age Superman.
In the tone of the latter tale came Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman. Given that Frank Miller's All-Star Batman and Robin gave us a laughably outrageous take on the Caped Crusader that the [ahem] iconic "I'm the goddamn Batman" bit is pretty much the only aspect of that series salvageable, that Frank Quitely's art is an acquired taste at best ("Oh God, it's the potato-faced people again"), and that Grant Morrison's approach to his subjects can be charitably described as "eccentric" (and not-so-charitably as "insane" or "deranged" or "utterly incomprehensible"), I was expecting the title to flicker into obscurity and be entirely avoidable.
It is the complete opposite. It is indispensable. No one who is the slightest fan of the character should be without it. Anyone who considers themselves a fan of the medium should at the very least read it, and if that leads to eventually buying a copy, I wouldn't be surprised.
When I'd heard that there would be an animated adaptation, I was...excited, if a mite worried. It didn't strike me as a good choice for adaptation, if only in that a lot of Quitely's art was powerful in its invocation of motion and continuity while being static images -- some of the majesty is lost in moving it from the printed page. And there's simply no way to compress twelve issues of concentrated awesome (well, okay, ten if you discount the Bizarro issues, but that's my personal preference) into a coherent DVD, and slavishly trying to do so gets you Watchmen, and let's not do that again, okay? I knew that Dwayne McDuffie -- who'd brought us the better moments of the DC animated universe -- was a talented storyteller, but he had a hell of a lot on his plate this time.
Like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, I had one must-have deal-breaker scene that had to be in the adaptation. Unlike those two, my scene didn't make it in this time (yes, it's Regan; what, was it too dark?), and that colored my impression of it greatly. Part of why the adaptation didn't gel for me as a whole is that necessary omission that ran against my personal grain -- lose the Bizarros, fine, I'm all aboard that, but why do we get the two pompous Kryptonians and we lose the Chronovore in Smallville? We miss the Jonathan Kent scene? Thank God the prison break bit stayed in, at least, or else I'd have been no end of pissed off. Adaptation decay's to be expected, I know, but I question the judgment of anyone who'd keep the Kryptonians -- or five additional minutes of punching, really -- and lose the most emotionally effective parts that made the original so brilliant. On whichever level those choices were made, I think they were made poorly, and the whole product suffers as a result.
Which is not to say I didn't like it -- the Sun-Eater, the aforementioned jail break, Ed Goddamned Asner, Alexis Denisof, Luthor's super-powered realizations -- I just didn't like it as much as I think I could have. The animation for Solaris in particular (and some of his fight scenes) was awful, the new Luthor/Quintum ending rang hollow, and I don't blame anyone for being disturbed by Jimmy Olsen's perplexing peripheral inclusion in this little endeavor. Maybe I'm just too close to the original work to be entirely objective -- if it leads more people to hunt down the original comics, it's a worthwhile endeavor, but I see this movie as a seriously flubbed opportunity, and that's kind of crushing.
"In the one Mythic moment we’re all united, kissing our Lover for the First time, the Last time the Only time, honouring our dear Dad under a blood red sky, against a darkening backdrop, with Mum telling us it’ll all be okay in the end. If we were able to capture even a hint of that place and share it with our readers, that would be good enough for me."
I've never really liked Superman as a character. Always had a hard time relating to him, especially contrasted against...well, pretty much anyone, particularly Batman, probably his most common foil. Where Bruce Wayne's alter ego is a product of fantastic wealth, Olympic-level training, peerless deductive skills and deep-seeded childhood trauma, Kal-El is...just an alien, gifted by his inhuman biology to be almost invincible, unless you happen to have a specific green radioactive crystal lying around. He's an easy character to write poorly (as JMS proved pretty handily with his "Grounded" arc, the success of which would fit neatly on a microscope slide), but so damn hard to write in a manner that's true to his nature and still dramatically resonant. By my count, three relatively modern stories have done it well -- Alan Moore hit it twice with "For the Man Who Has Everything" (the animated adaption of which being possibly the only adaptation of his work Moore has ever enjoyed) and "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" which would've served as the perfect end of the Silver-Age Superman.
In the tone of the latter tale came Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman. Given that Frank Miller's All-Star Batman and Robin gave us a laughably outrageous take on the Caped Crusader that the [ahem] iconic "I'm the goddamn Batman" bit is pretty much the only aspect of that series salvageable, that Frank Quitely's art is an acquired taste at best ("Oh God, it's the potato-faced people again"), and that Grant Morrison's approach to his subjects can be charitably described as "eccentric" (and not-so-charitably as "insane" or "deranged" or "utterly incomprehensible"), I was expecting the title to flicker into obscurity and be entirely avoidable.
It is the complete opposite. It is indispensable. No one who is the slightest fan of the character should be without it. Anyone who considers themselves a fan of the medium should at the very least read it, and if that leads to eventually buying a copy, I wouldn't be surprised.
When I'd heard that there would be an animated adaptation, I was...excited, if a mite worried. It didn't strike me as a good choice for adaptation, if only in that a lot of Quitely's art was powerful in its invocation of motion and continuity while being static images -- some of the majesty is lost in moving it from the printed page. And there's simply no way to compress twelve issues of concentrated awesome (well, okay, ten if you discount the Bizarro issues, but that's my personal preference) into a coherent DVD, and slavishly trying to do so gets you Watchmen, and let's not do that again, okay? I knew that Dwayne McDuffie -- who'd brought us the better moments of the DC animated universe -- was a talented storyteller, but he had a hell of a lot on his plate this time.
Like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, I had one must-have deal-breaker scene that had to be in the adaptation. Unlike those two, my scene didn't make it in this time (yes, it's Regan; what, was it too dark?), and that colored my impression of it greatly. Part of why the adaptation didn't gel for me as a whole is that necessary omission that ran against my personal grain -- lose the Bizarros, fine, I'm all aboard that, but why do we get the two pompous Kryptonians and we lose the Chronovore in Smallville? We miss the Jonathan Kent scene? Thank God the prison break bit stayed in, at least, or else I'd have been no end of pissed off. Adaptation decay's to be expected, I know, but I question the judgment of anyone who'd keep the Kryptonians -- or five additional minutes of punching, really -- and lose the most emotionally effective parts that made the original so brilliant. On whichever level those choices were made, I think they were made poorly, and the whole product suffers as a result.
Which is not to say I didn't like it -- the Sun-Eater, the aforementioned jail break, Ed Goddamned Asner, Alexis Denisof, Luthor's super-powered realizations -- I just didn't like it as much as I think I could have. The animation for Solaris in particular (and some of his fight scenes) was awful, the new Luthor/Quintum ending rang hollow, and I don't blame anyone for being disturbed by Jimmy Olsen's perplexing peripheral inclusion in this little endeavor. Maybe I'm just too close to the original work to be entirely objective -- if it leads more people to hunt down the original comics, it's a worthwhile endeavor, but I see this movie as a seriously flubbed opportunity, and that's kind of crushing.
"In the one Mythic moment we’re all united, kissing our Lover for the First time, the Last time the Only time, honouring our dear Dad under a blood red sky, against a darkening backdrop, with Mum telling us it’ll all be okay in the end. If we were able to capture even a hint of that place and share it with our readers, that would be good enough for me."