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All posts tagged "FANGIRL MOMENT!!!"
What is waiting for me on the other side of exams?
KILLER FUCKIN’ COCKROACHES.
Vertigo’s The Exterminators has issued its final tradie in a 30-issue series. After waiting nearly two years to close this story, I’m saving it as my post-exam reward.
I’m not sure how I feel about this final cover by Tony Moore; it feels a little too rendered, and not entirely representative of some of his more amazing pieces. But how could I not love a guy who lists his hobbies as “watching horror movies, getting fat, sleeping, and “maintaining” this crappy website”? We have way too much in common.
In other awesome news, apparently the production team behind Dexter, the show about a serial killer with a heart of gold, is going to bring The Exterminators to the small screen. Like the comic, the television series will “revolve around the Bug-Be-Gone crew, an extended dysfunctional family of exterminators whose greatest enemies aren’t the insects and rodents they meet and kill on a daily basis but rather their own self doubts, vices and inner demons.”
I’m pretty sure that there is no possible way this combination will be anything less than radical, but I can’t help but wonder if this blurb means that the show won’t incorporate the book’s more wildly sci-fi/fantasy tangents. It would definitely be a neater, tighter story better-suited to television without the weirder elements; the grimy depiction of the depths of the human condition set against the death throes of urban living would make for compelling viewing. Indeed, the storyline’s heavy reliance on the occult has the potential to translate into a ridiculously cheesy TV show — although without it, it just won’t be the same. But I should probably reserve judgement ‘til I get my grubby little hands on the final bit of the story.
Procrastibation.
Now that the assessable component of this blog is over, I’ll be frank about what has been consuming a large hunk of my time over the past few weeks: GIANT PENIS MONSTERS.
No, it’s not some Freudian fantasy gone horribly awry (or horribly right, depending on how gross you are); it’s SPORE, Maxis Software’s latest successful effort at destroying my soul.
SPORE is like Age of Empires meets The Sims: it’s utter shit, but totally addictive. The game’s Wikipedia entry describes it as “a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse”, but it’s best summed up as a complete waste of time. You begin the game as a single-cell organism, swimming ‘round the evolutionary sludge, chomping down lesser organisms and earning tokens and points that allow you to evolve into some ungodly freak of nature in the user-controlled Creature Creator. The next thing you know, it’s seven hours later: you’re sweaty, confused but strangely satisfied, and you’ve evolved your species into a space-faring civilisation.
Putting aside the ability to create phallus-monsters and other awesome opportunities to let your inner child wreak havoc, SPORE is appealing because of its choose-your-own-adventure style of gameplay. Each seemingly insignificant decision dramatically changes the available outcomes of the game. For example, if you choose to be a carnivore in the primordial ooze stage, it will affect what you can evolve into in the creature stage, which in turn affects available options in the subsequent tribal and civilisation stages. This presents seemingly limitless storylines and optimum replayability.
Funnily enough, this is also what makes the game mind-numbingly boring. With no real sense of cathartic completion and with its cutesy graphics, SPORE remains a game better suited to ten-year-olds. Maxis has cleverly attempted to overcome this by creating a complex playable online universe into which hardcore SPORE players can transpose their own creations, but I’m not pathetic enough to have ventured that far. Yet.
I don’t know what it is about repetitive and menial open-ended gameplay that gets my motor running. Maybe somewhere in my psyche, I have a buried Messiah complex that fills me with the urgent desire to make entire species bend to my will, and it’s best exercised only in the virtual world. Or maybe I just like wasting time. Either way, Maxis has definitely perfected the formula for the never-ending game: with an expansion pack already due for release this November, they’re making massive coin out of procrastibators like me.
But with over 41 million user-created entries in the SPOREpedia, it’s at least a tiny iota of comfort to know that I’m not the only idiot wasting my time.
One of the only times “Oh, snap!” is a tolerable reaction.
Remember Emma Frost in Grant Morrison’s run on the New X-Men? Before she turned soft and somehow fell for the foppish, whinging bag of snot that is Cyclops? Remember? When she was awesome?
Image scanned by me, because yes, I am that lame. From Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s E is for Extinction.
Because I don’t know how I ever forgot. Flipping through the newly-released collated omnibus of this series at the book shop (because I’m on a budget, okay?), I realised that Morrison’s run on the New X-Men was one of the first comic books I ever read in earnest. Through the nostalgia, I remembered that Emma Frost was a cornerstone for the beginnings of my fascination: a smart, “sexy”, multi-dimensional female character who used humour to mask her overriding desire for self-preservation and who could figuratively and physically throw punches with the toughest dudes. Plus, she could turn into diamond — awesome.
Who will watch the Watchmen? Me, for sure.
Fact: if you say ‘I read graphic novels,’ you sound way wankier than if you just say ‘I read comic books.’ Surely, the phrase ‘graphic novel’ is just a desperate attempt to legitimise the art form, to bring comic books into a more literary, intellectually acceptable realm by sluicing away the negative connotations that imply light, pulpy reading.
At least that’s how I felt until I read Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. There is just no other way to describe it than as a novel that is executed primarily in graphic form. A graphic novel, if you will.
Ironically, Moore himself as been quoted as saying: “My book is a comic book. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book.” But there is just something intangible about the multilayered work that transcends the implications of those words.
Since its first publication as a 12-issue series in 1986, it has remained a strong critics’ favourite, and featured in Time magazine’s list of the top 100 books of all time. Even Stan Lee – the industry’s demi-god creator of classic characters like Spiderman, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man – called Watchmen his “all-time favourite comic book outside of Marvel.” Generally speaking, Watchmen is the comic book you recommend to the jerks who hate comic books.
And it’s the latest in a slew to get the Hollywood treatment, with the movie due to launch in February 2009.
It’s hard to not feel conflicted. Moore himself eschews the movie studios; he’s notoriously protective of the integrity of his work. Following a legal wrangle over Twentieth Century Fox’s adaption of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as Warner Brothers’ atrocious excuse for V for Vendetta, the writer has asked that his name be removed from those titles, and receives no royalties. To add insult to injury, Warner Brothers is also behind the Watchmen film. But holy shit, this trailer looks SO FUCKING AWESOME:
Written as the Cold War was winding down, Watchmen is a cautionary political commentary on the global insecurity caused by nuclear arms. Within an alternate history, Moore creates epically detailed characters who seem superhuman, and yet are all too susceptible to human foibles and failures. Through amazingly detailed vignettes, and intricately laced parallel stories, Moore touchingly tells of their personal crises in a time of crisis on a world-scale. Underpinning the tale is Plato’s haunting question, as relevant now as it was thousands of years ago: who will watch the watchmen? Nevertheless, Moore stops short of grandiose posturing. Shit, the dude even quotes Bob Dylan.
I’m by no means a purist; I like popcorn-bustin’, no-brainer comic movies as much as the next slavering tight-arse Tuesday-goer. I even own the X-Men film trilogy on special edition DVD, although I do enjoy smugly pointing out the inaccuracies. But for every exceptional comic-to-film adaption (300, Iron Man, Sin City, The Dark Knight, Ed Norton’s Hulk), there are at least two that make nerds around the world run home from the cinema to urgently register their distaste on internet forums (Wanted, Ghost Rider, Constantine, Batman & Robin, Eric Bana’s Hulk, Wanted, Wanted… Did I mention Wanted?)
And with a work as complex as Watchmen, it would be next to impossible to translate the subtle nuances of the writing, the innovative use of metafiction, and the excruciatingly detailed visual clues into film.
But having seen the trailer, I sure as shit can’t wait to see them try.
