Tag: comics

November 17, 2012
When I first got my Kindle 3 (now named the Kindle Keyboard by Amazon), I toyed with comics on the device, downloading some samples. However a combination of monochrome (albeit nice, crisp monochrome) and a small screen, made it unattractive, and I took it no further.

On my new Nexus 10, using the Kindle Android app, I have downloaded samples of a couple of comics – some of DC’s Earth 2 graphic novels, and the best-graphic-novel-in-the-world, Watchmen. In addition, I have actually bought the first of the Sandman series – something I have come across a few times, but never collected.

October 12, 2010
This film has been getting quite a bit of advertising on British TV. However, it does look to be a fun romp, and I am quite looking forward to seeing Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren hamming it up as ex-spies: Retired, Extremely Dangerous.

Not to mention that it also has Mary-Louise Parker, which can’t be bad!

July 27, 2010
Back when I used to read comic books, one of my favourite Marvel titles was Daredevil.

So it pained me greatly when I first went to see the film Daredevil at the cinema, in 2003. Staring Ben Affleck, it was an incoherent mess, a string of bad action sequences without any real story to link them. It was a horrible movie, and what really annoyed me about it was that having made it, no-one else was going to make Daredevil the movie properly.

July 26, 2010
Caught the first 10 minutes of this film the other day, and it was so strange that I was compelled to record it, to watch later. I knew nothing of Harvey Pekar or his cult comic American Splendor (which told the story of his life, as he lived it), but by the end of this movie I felt I knew him. Onscreen, Harvey was brilliantly played by Paul Giamatti, although the real Harvey narrated the story, and appeared often throughout the movie as himself, at one point referring to Giamatti as “this guy who’s playing me”. Similarly several other characters were both played by actors during dramatic scenes while appearing as themselves in explaining how they felt at various points.

In addition, at several points the drama cut between acted scenes with Paul Giamatti, and archive footage of the real Harvey on the Letterman show. This sounds like it would be a mess, but it wasn’t – it was extremely well edited, and not confusing at all. What I particularly liked was the attention to detail – when Paul Giamatti is led onstage to be interviewed, he is wearing exactly the same clothes as we then see worn by the real Harvey Pikar when we cut to archive footage on the Green Room TV monitor. Simple, but very effective.