Comics for Those New to the Idea of Comics

Knight Joined: 03 Apr 2012 Posts: 103 Location: UK

I've not seen the film of V for Vendetta - mostly because I've heard that it changes the point of the comic. I think I'm right in saying that Alan Moore refused to have his name officially associated with it.

It's been a while since I read the comic. V certainly isn't a straight hero; he has motivations for what he does but he's none too fussy about who gets damaged along the way - but then he's pretty damaged himself. The fact that the hero/villain issue isn't clear-cut is one of the things that makes the story so powerful.
Overall, the story is a pretty bleak view of humanity, but the dystopian future/post Apocalypse vision is a classic of British S-F. It's there in Brave New World, 1984, Blakes 7, Survivors, and books by Edmund Cooper and John Wyndham, for example. Judge Dredd springs from the same roots.

Master Joined: 15 Apr 2008 Posts: 4404 Location: Korriban

^ Ya Moore hated the film. I didn't like some of it honestly. They changed to point from revolution against a totalitarian regime to "Bush is a monster, Bush needs to die, hate Bush everybody!"
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Perfection is a lifelong pursuit requiring sacrifice. The only way to get it quicker is to sacrifice the most.

That wasn't a diss on the recommendation, I guess just the cultural phenomenon of it. V is one of the best comics ever made and I actually do like the movie too. It's probably the best movie version of an Allan Moore comic book.

I totally understand Moore not liking the movies because for him he wanted to make comic books, not movies. It wasn't his choice to make those movies, it was DC comics because they own the rights to his stories. And unlike Watchmen which was a pile of turds IMO, V was actually a pretty good movie, as far as movies go. But both of them kind of missed the point. V was very much about how Margret Thatcher and the Tories were monsters, etc. and as opposition to Neo-Conservatism is does work for Bush, but doesn't really work for Blair and the contemporary English government in which it takes place. Watchmen was about Cold War fears which are almost entirely nontransferable to modern politics.

Along the same lines The Dark Knight Returns is about opposition to Reaganism in America, which is ironic because it's creator, Frank Miller came to embrace those values and I wonder if maybe he was just trying to cash in on V's success as political commentary. It's still a pretty good comic and the coolest portrayal of Green Arrow saying F The Man.
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They have taken the hearts and minds of our leaders. They have recruited the rich and the powerful, and they have blinded us to the truth! Our human spirit is corrupted. Why do we worship greed? Because, outside the limit of our sight, feeding off us, perched on top of us from birth to death are OUR OWNERS. They have us! They control us! They are our masters! Wake up! They’re all about you, all around you!

Master Joined: 15 Apr 2008 Posts: 4404 Location: Korriban

^I thought Watchmen was more about humanity and what it takes to survive. That was the whole point of it actually was the differing philosophies and how none of it truly mattered in the face of what humanity really is. The Watchmen movie wasn't all that great, but it captured that really well.
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Perfection is a lifelong pursuit requiring sacrifice. The only way to get it quicker is to sacrifice the most.

I thought it was about the fact that life felt pretty hopeless when humanity faced the threat of wiping itself out with nuclear weapons. Which Zac Synder had to pound over the audiences head because he doesn't understand what subtlety means, by changing the ending to make the threat be the guy who was granted god mod by nuclear energy. Which to be fair I guess he had to because no one would understand that in a post-Cold War society where that no longer applies.

and alien vagina monster is still way less stupid than anything in that movie.
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They have taken the hearts and minds of our leaders. They have recruited the rich and the powerful, and they have blinded us to the truth! Our human spirit is corrupted. Why do we worship greed? Because, outside the limit of our sight, feeding off us, perched on top of us from birth to death are OUR OWNERS. They have us! They control us! They are our masters! Wake up! They’re all about you, all around you!

Master Joined: 15 Apr 2008 Posts: 4404 Location: Korriban

Again we have this conversation. Snyder didn't write the script. He's stated that multiple times. You wanna be mad at the ending change yell at David Hayter and Alex Tse, they botched that. And the ending was more to remove the squid monster. It didn't work on film. Snyder's particular visual style may not have 100% worked with the source material, but it always bothers me when people bag on him for the movie despite the fact that they offered him a lot of money and since its his job he took it. Its the screenwriters who removed all the Cold War analogies and its the screenwriters that removed all the real political meaning behind V for Vendetta and so on.
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Perfection is a lifelong pursuit requiring sacrifice. The only way to get it quicker is to sacrifice the most.

I don't see why you feel the need to defend Synder if you don't think that it was a good movie. I feel the need to attack him because I think his movies suck, and pointing out that he can't write his own material and he just made the movie because they payed him a lot of money doesn't help dispute that. It's the director's job to bring all of the elements of a movie's production together. The script is a guideline and the director submits their own script of how they want the movie to be, which is the one that they end up filming and all of it is subject to change as they go along. If something doesn't work then it's the directors job to make sure that it doesn't end up on the screen. So yeah, Zac Synder made a stupid movie, but he wasn't the only one who made a stupid movie, so that makes it OK?

Nothing of which changes the fact that the film's differ from their comic book versions, which was my whole point. And if you think changing the ending captured the spirit of the story, then you missed the point too.

and why are you telling me to go yell at the screen writers? Do they post on EU Cantina? Does Zac Synder? Are you Synder, is that why you don't like me bashing your movies? I'm not yelling at anyone who has anything to do with the movie, but I'd like to yell at a lot of people if I had the chance.
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They have taken the hearts and minds of our leaders. They have recruited the rich and the powerful, and they have blinded us to the truth! Our human spirit is corrupted. Why do we worship greed? Because, outside the limit of our sight, feeding off us, perched on top of us from birth to death are OUR OWNERS. They have us! They control us! They are our masters! Wake up! They’re all about you, all around you!

Master Joined: 15 Apr 2008 Posts: 4404 Location: Korriban

Few directors are Nolan or Aronofsky, expecting them all to write, produce, and direct every project is like asking for Keanu Reeves to deliver one Oscar-worthy performance, its just not gonna happen. Directing a film is a job. Some get to create their vision of art for work, some have a knack it and get paid for it. That's like saying any author or novelist who does that soley for a living should only focus on artistic integrity, sometimes you gotta sell a short story to a pulp magazine to pay the bills.

And I've read Watchmen multiple times, there are several themes. I didn't say I didn't like it, but it was nothing compared to the source material. Some of the themes made it into the movie, some didn't. The ending didn't, but the idea behind it did. The moment where Adrian tricks humanity into accepting his utopia by focusing them on something else to reveal the reality behind what it means to be human was the point of the ending. Actually the film also discussed the energy concerns that were an aspect of the Cold War as well as the threat of a nuclear strike. Like it or not the film followed the story, interspersed the plot accurately, and stuck to almost half the themes (again, agreeing with you on the fact that it missed the themes). Your hatred for Snyder aside, he's a good director when it comes to action. When it comes to subtlety he has absolutely no chops, but for a mindless action movie he's brilliant. Heck, you loved Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and that was almost his movie to. Over-stylized, ridiculous action is Snyder's thing and that was all that movie was (again, something that completely threw theme and meaning according to the source material out the window). I understand the story, I just choose to look at different aspects of it than you and not focus my hatred on a director who filmed a sex scene that two other men wrote into a script.

EDIT: I rescind that final statement there. There is plenty to dislike about Snyder's direction. He's one that needs to be kept on a leash though. He has potential an over-stylized action director, but Suckerpunch showed us what happens when he gets let off the leash and gets to go for his vision: we get crap that's crappier than crap.
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Perfection is a lifelong pursuit requiring sacrifice. The only way to get it quicker is to sacrifice the most.

Yeah, maybe this is veering way too far off into a movie discussion. I just wanted to talk about the differences in the movie and the comics, since I imagine that most people who don't read comics regularly are more likely to see the movie version and if they don't like them, then they really won't want to read the comics.

I think it's an accepted fact that pretty much all movies are crap versions of comics, but people seem to like them anyway, so I do believe there is some disconnect there.
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They have taken the hearts and minds of our leaders. They have recruited the rich and the powerful, and they have blinded us to the truth! Our human spirit is corrupted. Why do we worship greed? Because, outside the limit of our sight, feeding off us, perched on top of us from birth to death are OUR OWNERS. They have us! They control us! They are our masters! Wake up! They’re all about you, all around you!

Master Joined: 15 Apr 2008 Posts: 4404 Location: Korriban

Christopher Nolan has handled it pretty well, and the new Spider-Man film sticks a lot closer than Raimi's (though it'll never equal the dynamic in his second film). There is a real effort to make superhero movies better for the fans and more serious as a genre in the last 6 years or so (yes yes, Green Lantern should never have happened) and I think there's real potential. Nolan may be the only one who has found the balance between respect for the source material, characterization, tone, and visualization in terms of art but there are others that aren't bad.

As a fan of comics from a young age I've gone back and read as much as I could, from offshoots to alternate universes, and I've found that the obscure, awkward titles get better writers (Watchmen has no mainstream characters because Moore couldn't get rights to them, but there's Swamp Thing and Sandman and even the more modern Umbrella Academy). The films are starting to try to match the tone in a way that has never been present before and I'm for that. If the films encourage people to go back and support the comics by reading a lot of the source material I'm for that to. If they don't like it then to hell with them, its still all there for us to enjoy.
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Perfection is a lifelong pursuit requiring sacrifice. The only way to get it quicker is to sacrifice the most.

If anyone's interested in trying out Marvel Comics, a bunch of the series are starting out with #1 in October/November, under their Marvel NOW line.

Basically, a bunch of series are going to react to the events of Avengers vs. X-Men, an event that includes a 12-issue miniseries (#11 came out last week) and affects many of their titles. So at the end of it, several series, most notably those that directly implicate the Avengers and the X-Men, are restarting at issue 1, or are starting new.

As a result, it might be a good jumping-off point. I myself haven't bought Marvel books by the issue before (only the occasional TPB and library reading), but I'm checking it out.

I personally will be buying "All-New X-Men" (the original 5 X-Men coming from the past into the modern time), "Thor: God of Thunder" (replacing The Mighty Thor), "The Indestructible Hulk" (replacing The Incredible Hulk), and "Uncanny Avengers" (new, a team made of both Avengers and X-Men).

But they're also doing Captain America, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, FF, Thunderbolts, Deadpool, a couple of other Avengers and X-Men titles. For more information, check out the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_NOW!

I'm also reading Captain Marvel. The character of Carol Danvers (formerly Ms. Marvel, Binary, and Warbird) has taken on the mantle of Captain Marvel, and thus is more prominent. I loved the old Ms. Marvel books from the 70s (got the Essential Ms. Marvel book and loved it!) so I thought I'd try it out. It's really well written, and the art is really cool. Reminds me a bit of the painted style in the Star Wars: Blood Ties books (but better).
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It was the year of fire… the year of destruction… the year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth… the year of great sadness… the year of pain… and the year of joy.
It was a new age. It was the end of history. It was the year everything changed.
The year is 2261.
The place: Babylon 5.

Master Joined: 15 Apr 2008 Posts: 4404 Location: Korriban

Been re-reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman. My mind is re-blown.
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Perfection is a lifelong pursuit requiring sacrifice. The only way to get it quicker is to sacrifice the most.

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