Oh man, you just cannot keep Rob Liefeld out of Hollywood, by which I mean you can't get him in there with a crowbar or a cannon. Liefeld's "upcoming" (read: will never come out) graphic novel Capeshooters is apparently currently in negotiations with Warner Bros. and super-genius Bryan Singer (a coupla hit comic book movies under his belt notwithstanding, this is the guy who didn't realize that Hugh Laurie was British when he cast him in his own show. Not one for reviewing the ol' resume, our Bryan) for development as a major motion yah yah yah yah.

Remember when he had this super-cool movie "The Mark" that had Stephen Spielberg attached to it, and also Will Smith, no wait he meant Tom Cruise? Anyway, how's Doom's IV coming along, do you think.

Best like from the article:

" The story is based on an upcoming graphic novel by Rob Liefeld, who was one of the founders of Image Comics and at one point one of the hottest artists in the comics arena."

Lovin' that qualifier. It's how you know this doesn't come wholesale from Liefeld's PR.

Okay, this is sure to be at least a little tacky, BUT - I was recently flipping through Tom DeHaven's excellent speculative Superman novel "It's Superman" (Which I heartily recommend, particularly if you're a fan of the 1930s Superman), and giving some thought to one of the constructs therein; In his book, he explicitly (well, not explicitly explicitly, but implicitly explicitly) chronicles Clark Kent's first sexual experience. In the same book, though, although he routinely puts Lois right on the edge of banging like a screen door, right down to all-night jazz parties and lolling around the bed in her lingerie, but then yanks her back after having gone only so far. Clark's getting it on in the urbane fields of Hollywood while Lois remains, as far as we can tell, a virgin.

That's an interesting - albeit weird - decision to make for the characters, one might even argue that it's utterly unnecessary, but mostly one must assume that it's probably wrong. There is certainly something about the Superman/Lois relationship which implies, at the very least, that the Last Son of Krypton is by far the less experienced member of the couple.

Being a de facto kids' medium, comics typically tend to keep their characters above the covers; I think it was only the late Seventies when it was even hinted that Lois and Superman occasionally shtupped - neverminding the later Superman II establishing it for a non-canonical fact - and it wasn't until Talia al Ghul and Silver St.Cloud that you ever saw Batman slipping out of a beautiful woman's bedroom window for reasons other than having just slugged her.

After the Crisis revamp, all bets were off, and characters all the way from Superman down to the former Kid Flash were allowed to have fully adult sex lives - in Superman's case, Superman ends up having had two, -maybe- three previous sexual partners before he meets Lois. Lois, on the other hand, Lois cannot be stopped. Storylines kept Clark and Lois stumbling over Lois' exes in abundance, not the least of which being Lex Luthor who might just have nailed Superman's Girlfriend, it's never really established one way or t'other.

So, this got me thinking; It's pretty clearly established, to my mind, that Lois is the more sexually experienced partner in her relationship, but what about the other major comic book romances? Yes, that's right, it's poll time, and the topic is (egads) sex lives of super-heroes! I bring you Who Do You Think Has Had The Greater Number of Sexual Experiences In These Comic Book Romances! Hang your heads in shame!

Poll #1228327 They be bangin', they be super-bangin'
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Who's had more: Superman or Lois?

Who's had more: Peter Parker or Mary Jane Watson?

Who's had more: Peter Parker or Gwen Stacy?

Who's had more: Steve Trevor or Wonder Woman?

Who's had more: Aquaman or, uh ... what, a passing manatee?

Who's had more: Bruce Banner or Betty Ross?

Who's had more: Batman or Catwoman?

Who's had more: Batman or Talia al Ghul?

Who's had more: Batman or Zatanna?

Who's had more: Batman or Barbara Gordon?

Who's had more: Batman or Wonder Woman?

Who's had more: Cyclops or Wolverine

SPECIAL INTERNET COMIC BOOK CHARACTER SEXUAL PARTNERS DEATH MATCH: Who's had more: Luke Cage or Starfire of the Teen Titans?

*I made that up.

I don't know why you guys are so excited about the new Watchmen movie, it looks fucking awful.

Whilst I was flipping around the web to pick a few comic strips for my list, I noticed a small archive of the old "Inside Woody Allen" strips.

They hain't actually funny (except the 1926 Packard strip), except you gotta give it credit for doing masturbation jokes in a newspaper format.

All righty, I've been thinking about this on and off for the last couple of months, and I thought I'd best get around to finally pitching it to the SeeBelow community. I have been building IN MY MIND a list I have chosen to call "The 100 Greatest Comics of All Time That Weren't Written By Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman or Frank Miller, Because Come On, We Know Already¹," and I wanted to invite the SeeBelow readers to participate in picking the list.

The criteria is as follows: Anything arguably called a comic is eligible, whether it's an individual issue, a story arc or even an entire series, a graphic novel or a collection, whatever. If it can arguably be defined as a comic, then we consider the argument already won in favor of "it sure is." To wit, I'm going to include some comic strip collections in my list. SHOCKING, I KNOW! The only restriction is that maybe it's time to just assume that everyone knows they're supposed to be reading From Hell and Sandman and Batman: Year One by now, so that's enough of that already.

Judge on whatever merits you deem relevant. I'm changing my criteria from book to book, myself, because I'm enamored of the many facets of comic book storytelling. Also because I'm undisciplined.

Here are some of the comics in my list, for your consideration:
Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe: Highly biased, totally subjective, dynamic, exciting, engrossing, it is a cliche to say that it makes "history come alive," but it does (figuratively. Literally speaking, history is as dead as my heart). Gonick's other science-oriented volumes don't have the enthusiasm and panache of this series, nor the mind-boggling scope, which is why I'm singling this one out.

The Tracts of Jack Chick: You cannot argue that the average Jack Chick tract fails to get its (utterly batshit) message across. These are possibly the most widely read and acknowledged pieces of sequential art distributed in the US today, particularly considering that they depended so long on literally being physically handed around. The books are so ubiqitous that any parody of the same is immediately recognizable, a clear indicator of a profound cultural artifact.

Love & Rockets: The Death of Speedy and Palomar(The Heartbreak Soup stories): The L&R stories which will definitively teach you the difference between Jaime's and Beto's style, and also which are fucking roller-coaster rides.

Hellboy: Because I must represent. I can never get enough of this character, as long as at least the stories come out of Mignola's pen.

Okay, that's a start from me, whaddya you got to add? The sky's the limit, so just don't be boring.

¹Got someone to add to this list? Grant Morrison? Warren Ellis? Can we just scratch Y:The Last Man off the list? I suggest that not because it's a great comic, but actually because I think it's breath-takingly overrated and I just want it off the lists because it irritates me. Anyway, lemme know if I should add anyone else to the list of exceptions...

Presented, without comment, a link to a page containing the first full trailer for Mr. Francis P. Miller's treatment of The Spirit:

Go, watch, then comment away.

"Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks. All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber. In brief, Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for “Batman” (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle. Yet “The Dark Knight” is hardly routine—it has a kicky sadism in scene after scene, which keeps you on edge and sends you out onto the street with post-movie stress disorder. And it has one startling and artful element: the sinister and frightening performance of the late Heath Ledger as the psychopathic murderer the Joker. That part of the movie is upsetting to watch, and, in retrospect, both painful and stirring to think about." 

Whoa whoa WHOAH!

"TIM BURTON'S orginal conception?!"

Newsarama reports that Michael Turner passed away yesterday. I never liked his work, but it sucks when a dude passes away at just 37 years old. Really, it sucks when anyone passes away and there's no way to say "I didn't like the art but didn't hate the artist" without sounding like an asshole. So I will stop there.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20208522,00.html

King Kong. Curious George. Clint Eastwood's buddy in Every Which Way but Loose. All pioneering simians, all troublemakers. Come Sept. 3, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Daredevil, and their compadres will join these ranks when Marvel Comics, in a bid to duplicate the success of the Marvel Zombies franchise, re-envisions its marquee superhumans as...apes. Creepy apes.

It begins when Marty ''The Gibbon'' Blank, a mutant chump with chimp-like powers, is ensnared in a science experiment gone wrong. He's jettisoned into a sinister alternate reality devoid of humans; here, all of our crime-fighters are now hirsute anthropoids. Joined by the fetching human scientist Dr. Fiona Fitzhugh, this wannabe villain (the Gibbon founded the Spider-Man hating/baiting Legion of Losers) is, in fact, recruited by the seemingly upright Ape-Vengers as he searches for a way back home.

As writer Karl Kesel (Fantastic Four) said in an interview at New York Comic Con earlier this year, this is ''a sprawling epic like Lord of the Rings, and the Gibbon is our Frodo — one small person dwarfed by the overwhelming forces....'' But who are we kidding? At heart, Marvel Apes — with illustrations by Ramon Bachs (World War Hulk: Frontline) — is a four-issue miniseries about spandex-clad paladins acting uncivilized because they're apes.

Since we're only human at EW.com, we couldn't resist sharing/gawking at these first-look images: the alternate cover for issue 1 of Marvel Apes (above), plus six ''ape variant'' covers

Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this is neat, but- on one of the Dark Knight tie-in sites- A Gotham City Rail map

Chuck Dixon was fired from DC and all we got were some Dan Didio to Jim Shooter comparisons.

Here's a nice recap.

I know that it was last week that we were ruining the movie adaptation of THE WATCHMEN, but I didn't finish this until this morning. I give you:

(Title Sequence: Music by Danny Elfman. Camera swoops in low over a strange, smooth landscape on a field of blue-black. Credits roll. Production – Studio – Studio – Co-Production – Director’s Name – Producer - Concept – Based on the DC Comics Graphic Novel. The tense, rapid music swells as the camera dives into a valley amidst the yellow-and-black shapes. Actor’s names. The camera pulls out to a long view as the music builds to a staccato resolution

TITLE : THE WATCHMEN

( Read more... )

Look, I don't have to tell you people about Watchmen movie obsession. We're all victims of it, to a greater or lesser degree. Even if you suspect -- as calamityjon and I both do -- that the 2009 Zack Snyder adaptation is going to smell like hobo feet, you can't deny the attraction of a big-screen version of what's widely considered the greatest superhero comic ever made.

And sure, I know what you're saying: comical graphic aside, how can we, the SeeBelow readership, ruin The Watchmen? Isn't Zack Snyder already doing that for us? Well, here's the thing, folks: I think Snyder's movie is going to be bad. But I don't think it's going to be as bad as it could be. I think, at the very least, he's going to try to make a good movie, and that means he's going to leave out hundreds, even thousands, of trite, cliched movie tropes -- from superhero movies, or just from cinema in general -- that could make it even worse than it's going to be.

What do I mean? Well, let's take this one, from beloved founder calamityjon:

I'm standing by my one prediction for the Watchmen movie which I made back in, like, 1987. There will be a scene with some military dude in the middle of a big crisis, and he will actually say "Call in ... THE WATCHMEN."

Or my response:

Any scene where Dr. Manhattan winks at the camera.

Jon again:

Instead of just retiring to his room and feeling like a schmuck, Dan inadvertently ends up spying on Silk Spectre getting undressed, in an embarassing sex scene that lasts way too long.

And me:

Rorschach confronts the john who mistreated him as a boy -- and it turns out it was Ozymandius!

So, there's your task for this week, kids. Scan your vast internal archives of worn-out, hackneyed movie truisms and graft them on to The Watchmen in order to help us create the worst possible film version of the best comic ever made! Best one wins a prize, maybe!

Now go like Jon Osterman! BANG, ZOOM, TO MARS!

Final Crisis #1: Delicious.

If I straighten up and come right down to admitting it, I'm a DC guy more than a Marvel guy. If I had to choose a reason, it's because Marvel was built outwards from a connected series of themes, and to this day sticks to the principles established by Lee, Kirby and the rest of the original bullpen. It's very organic, very sympathetic and very linear, and I admire it on those qualities. DC is, owing to numerous acquisitions and the absence of a single guiding vision at any stage of the development of the company's stable of stories, all over the map, and that exuberant quality gives its universe a colorful, unpredictable energy. Owing to endless Roy-Thomaserism in Marvel's history, you can draw a straight line from Ant-Man through Zuras and hit every character and event in the Marvel Universe in-between. In DC, you've got Guardians of the Universe and New Gods and the Elders of the Rock of Eternity and Kryptonians and Thanagarians and Egyptian artfiacts of tremendous power - every one of them consistent and complete in their own books, but seemingly utterly incompatible in a grand scope.

That's why I liked Final Crisis - you remember how much you loved superhero teamups as a kid? Because of that energy of two colorful, utterly independent creations creating tension between their respective continuities, perspectives, cast and conflicts? Morrison is doing that very thing with entire thematic environments - as utterly incompatible as they are - in the DCU. And making it seem natural. Anthro + New Gods + Kamandi + The Secret Society + The Guardians of the Universe + Terrible Dan Turpin + The Question + That Horrible World of Monitors idea from Countdown, and it all seems as fluid and sharp as liquid heat.

Anyway. I only mention this because I remembered something I always wanted to see happen in regards to the Fourth World Saga and the Anti-Life Equation, and there is JUST a wee part of me thinking it might happen in Final Crisis.( It is a small thing, and only a morsel for a nerd )

According to Eisner-nominee Matt Silady we are living in the new golden age of comics. To which I say, buh-what?

Warner Bros. plans to release an animated direct-to-DVD adaptation of Tales of the Black Freighter five days after Watchmen hits theaters. Along with that side story, the DVD will also include "a documentary-style film called “Under the Hood” that will delve into the characters’ backstories."

So I guess this is how they'll attempt to fit in some of the supplementary material "into" the film.