How About the Children’s Crusade? Was That Moral? - Ругательное про приквелы "Watchmen", для тех, кто ещё не устал от этого. В комментариях, разумеется, дискуссия о том, так ли хорош "лучший графический роман всех времён".
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
Most people who know me flinch when I say: Watchmen is the greatest graphic novel of all time. Everybody protests, but my feeling is that they are protesting not the sentiment but rather that “greatest graphic novel of all time” is an answerable quantity. People want it to be unanswerable. Not coldly, flatly answered with “yes, there is a greatest–you read it already, years ago.”
...
For actual decades, the devotees of this artform have struggled to see this medium treated as a legitimate field. One of the greatest arguments for graphic novels and comics in general as a legitimate creative artform has now been retrofitted as a hot summer crossover event. If art is to have any meaning to human culture then there should be some basic deference to the undisturbed value of the few works that have moved us forward as a people.“This Has Been Building”: An Interview with Chris Roberson -
Крис Роберсон рассказывает The Comics Journal, почему он решил уйти из DC. Вы не поверите, но это тоже во многом про "Before Watchmen"! В интервью он также ссылается на неплохую
статью Дэвида Бразерса. Те, кто не очень в курсе контекста: глобальной проблемы "Большой двойки" с изначальными создателями "больших" франчайзов, могут быть слегка... обескуражены.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
Yeah, and that’s really one of the things about it that has rankled me so much over the course of the last months. Because the only defense that’s offered of things like either Before Watchmen or the counter-suit against the Siegels or any number of different things that have been done historically is that the company is operating within the bounds of the law. The company is doing nothing illegal. There’s no defense mounted to the ethics or morality of their actions, and in many cases they will make kind of passing nods to the fact that what they are doing might be interpreted as unethical, but that because it’s not illegal, you know, they’re going to do it.
...
I mean, to people that have a blushing familiarity with prose novels, they’re aghast at the way that the rights structures work, at least for work-for-hire stuff, but for those novelists who’ve done work-for-hire novels, whether it’s writing novels for tie-ins for TV shows or games or action figures or whatever the case may be, they’re perfectly sanguine about it, because it’s the same thing. The difference is that in the prose world, the work-for-hire stuff is a very small sliver that is kind of—I don’t want to say the bottom rung, but it’s not the thing that the most attention is paid to. More attention is paid to stuff that people create themselves and own. And there are sometimes confused looks when I have to explain that the reverse is true in the comics industry.Empirical Reasons Why The Silver Age Was Better - из чтения "полегче": про достоинства "Серебрянного века". Лично я, как человек, для которого из-за отсутствия декомпрессии значительная часть старых комиксов просто нечитаема (до сих пор с содроганием вспоминаю, с каким трудом я продиралась через первые пятьдесят номеров "X-Men"), скорее согласна с
одним из комментаторов, но само по себе размышление интересное.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
These days, after reboots and post-reboot reboots and deck-clearing event crossovers, half the B and C-listers are dead or evil or both, and efforts to create the next generation’s icons are few and far between. A while back, MGK posted about how hard it was for the WWE to write good stories when they aren’t working to groom their minor characters into fan favorites, and the same can be said of DC and Marvel. After you’ve killed off forty-seven heroes in your last crossover’s double-page spread, it’s hard to find good guest stars anymore. If you want to look at the big two as managers of intellectual properties, “Infinite Crisis” was intellectual arson.
...
Now all we get is an extended “house mix” of those new stories. The cool thing about the Justice League of America wasn’t that it had Kanjar Ro and his Gamma Gong, to pick a random element that Mark Waid brought back just to bring back at one point. It’s that nobody had ever seen anything like Kanjar Ro before. The Silver Age is best recreated by not repeating it.What The Avengers Means For The Future Of Comic-Book Movies - взгляд с "цивильной" стороны. Настороженный взгляд.
ВыдержкиВыдержки:
Marvel should be really proud of its achievement. But I'm worried about what the post-Avengers landscape is going to look like—for Marvel and for everybody else who wants to make a big comic-book movie. Those kinds of summer extravaganzas aren't going away, certainly, but our expectations may be altered for a while. And not for the better.
...
I could tolerate the individual Avenger movies when the other characters were mostly limited to the end credits, but if each one of the new movies will be a Where's Waldo? of unnecessary cameos, then we're getting dangerously close to a lot of flicks like Iron Man 2, which was half-movie, half-Avengers setup.Yes, Axe Cop Is Real, And Soon It Will Be A TV Show. Get Used To It. - и из новостей того, что комикс-гики любят обзывать словом "awesome": они делают мультфильм по
Axe Cop. Это... несколько не в моём вкусе, но, эй, потенциально здорово, так? Будем надеяться, что этот проект не постигнет судьба
заброшенных ТВ-шоу по мотивам комиксов.