Check Out This Fucking T-Shirt

As we all know, with the emergence of the superhero flicks, this has been a good time for nerd merch. I'm not really one for action figures, but I do keep an eye open for superhero t-shirts. You can find them in pretty much every clothing store in America these days, but most of those are shitty cartoonized versions of movie posters. It's pretty difficult to find a superhero-themed t-shirt that isn't too plain, too ugly, or too event-comic-double-page-spready. I don't need Michael Turner art on a t-shirt.

(We speak ill of the dead here at CotU.)

Basically, a superhero t-shirt needs to be retro. It lends that pop art quality that a Marvel Zombies cover just doesn't have (looking at you, Hot Topic). Also, whoever it is that makes these goddamn things thinks that just by plastering any comic image onto cotton, they have a good t-shirt. Fuck those guys! A comic shirt has to be a GOOD-LOOKING SHIRT that just happens to be comic-related.

That said, check out this fucking t-shirt.



BLAM! Giant-Size X-Men. They aren't lying--they are presented in a large fashion. The art is courtesy of Seventies Dave Cockrum. Mostly. Whoever made this shirt (the tag just says Marvel Comics) slapped an image of Magneto on top of the original cover art. I dunno if it's Cockrum, but it works.

What separates this t-shirt is the little details, though. Fading the image to make it look older isn't new to shirts with old comic art, but it's nice. It just seems better on this one than it seems on a lot of others. But what really works is the lightly-printed interior art on the blue of the shirt.


Now, I'm no X-Men scholar. The only full runs of it that I've read have been Morrison's and Whedon's, and they're the only two that I've liked (Brubaker sucked, Carey sucked, and I won't read Fraction's because of the shitty art). After looking up Proteus in Wikipedia, I discovered that this is John Byrne's work. Aside from Jean and Cyke here at the bottom, Storm shows up down there (I cut her out of the picture because...Storm sucks), and at the top of the shirt you can see what looks to me like Bashee standing next to Colossus-with-his-head-cut-off, both also by Byrne, I would have to assume. All in all, a pretty sweet t-shirt I think, and I wish more of them were this good.

Quotes On Comics

"Comic books [in Mexico] are one of the few sources of accessible reading matter for the poor and semiliterate sectors of society and, as such, they not only offer entertainment but also play a crucial role in the dissemination of information and ideology."

-Thea Pitman

Quotes On Comics is a great collection of quotes on various aspects of comics and their place in culture. (via Drawn)

here are a few more good ones:

"As every schoolboy knows, comics do not stand alone at microphones in the dark. Indeed, we cannot even read them in the dark. We need light, the more, the better. And we enjoy comics best in solitary, by ourselves, not in crowds; although large numbers of people read comics, they generally do it by themselves, in silence."

Robert C. Harvey

The cartoon art form — the art of treating an image impressionistically — will not fade. It will keep growing in popularity, because a cartoon is able to convey an idea as an image, and images are the means of communication that are proliferating.

Will Eisner

Personally, I don’t have a problem with the fact that comic books have grown up. I do wonder, though, if perhaps comic books are now being taken a little too seriously.

Susan Tomaselli

The Last Watchmen Story You Need Ever Read

Via io9 blog- The Last Watchmen Story You Need Ever Read (thanks, Jeff!)
hostess haha's

Jake's Watchmen Review

B-.

Watchmen Review: T's Take

The most perfect part of Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ alternate reality graphic novel) was the pure comic-book yellow that filled the screen for the first 5 seconds of the film. I thought to myself ‘this is the most this film can ever be’. Then the credits rolled, I was fairly impressed by the "3D-as-2D through angled camera flashes" montage sequence, and the film began.

Snyder has said in a few interviews that he wanted to ‘kill the superhero movie’ just as Moore and Gibbons’ killed the superhero comicbook. If that's his goal, I figure let's judge him by his own standard and see how well he did.
I can see that Snyder wanted to do for Watchmen what Peter Jackson did for Tolkien’s trilogy. You get an honest sense of love and admiration for the source material, and a keen eye. But as a result it also suffers from biopic-syndrome (the comic itself being the biographer’s focus). Favorite comic moments, quotes, and images are lavishly recreated. Others are mixed and matched, *sort of* referring to things that actually happened, but not quite. And all the while the dramatic structure gets lost under the weight of getting all those fractured moments ‘just right’. This is part of the reason why Snyder’s assassination mission is doomed to fail. Strike one.

The film isn’t all bad. I did find myself wondering/realizing things about the Characters as well as Moore’s possible thought process while watching the film, things that had never occurred to me when reading the comic (admittedly I’m not an acolyte of Moore’s Graphic Novel, coming to it too late, after its shock value and ideological novelty were gone). No, its not all bad, but there is a LOT of bad. Snyder’s previous effort was 300, based on the Graphic Novel by Frank Miller. Misogynistic and in love with gratuitous violence, Miller can almost be thought of as the Anti-Moore. And yet, in Snyder’s adaptation, he never gives us Alan Moore’s Watchmen. He passes it through some transmogrifying Alternate Reality portal and delivers....poof! Frank Miller’s Watchmen!

The performances come from what I’d call the “Tales From The Darkside” school of acting. Certain performers rise above this at times, but all have moments of wooden staginess. And the love of action, while not always inappropriate, is often so. The film would have been better served to reserve glossy action sequences for one or two well-chosen characters and allow the rest to perform as unglamorously as the source material suggests. This is strike two on Snyder’s assassination mission.

Finally… for a director who’s so self-professedly in love with the source material, (he does impressively cover the lion’s share of the Graphic Novel’s plot, even if most of the novels’ supplemental materials get cast off*) he seems to have no grasp of what's essential. The film is paced fairly well for a three hour movie, but the moments where he ignores either the letter or the intent of the book are made all the more aggravating by this supposed devotion.
In the end, Snyder doesn’t have the heart to land the bullet squarely between the genre’s eyes. At best he lands a glancing blow, a flesh wound, and that’s probably fitting; Snyder shows throughout that he is most concerned with the novels’ surfaces. Problem is, surfaces were the very thing Moore was trying to get beyond.

*this absence kept me thinking as i watched that this really could have worked as an HBO miniseries, and they coudlve included those supplemental materials as either bumpers or online minifilms/articles/photos/etc.


As a side note, if there are any New Yorkers interested in the depth and multiple layer’s Julian refers to in his review, you might want to check out the link below. My friend Jeffrey Lewis is giving a lecture based in part on his Senior Thesis “The Dual Nature of Apocalypse in Watchmen” at Jim Hanley’s Universe on March 19th, 8PM. Should be awesome.

Link To Details for Jeff Lewis' FREE lecture at Jim Hanley's

Watchmen

Watchmen is a strange film. The more I think about it, the less it seems that I should like it. It fails Hitchcock's litmus test, and yet I have to say it: I liked Watchmen. Despite its flaws – and it is a very flawed film– the movie's triumphs are entertaining, thought provoking, and on rare occasions deeply moving. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons seminal limited series needs no introduction among even the most neophyte of comic book connoisseurs, so forgive me if this is treading well walked ground but it's impossible to talk about this movie without at least touching on the themes of its inspiration.

Watchmen is an incredibly dense narrative with multiple layers of meaning and a spider's web of connections. It is at once a political thriller, a meta-textual deconstruction of the superhero, a meditation on power dynamics in society, and polemic of the major philosophies that have driven the better part of the twentieth century; and that's just naming a few off the top of my head. Terry Gilliam dropped the project, famously calling it unfilmable, this was followed by a good two decades of development hell that seemed to prove him right and helped to strengthen Moore's faith in Glycon.

For his part, Snyder's film focuses on translating the main plot of the book with a devotion that is obviously heartfelt, but perhaps ultimately misguided. The most ubiquitous criticism of this movie seems to be that it was too slavish to the material. I'm not entirely convinced that's the case. Indeed, most of the movie's weakest bits are when it deviates from the material. The problem with this film, is that Zack Snyder is not an actor's director. He has a very strong sense of the tableau, as evidenced by the lavish opening credit sequence. In a sense, this is a strength, as comics are all about the tableau. Unfortunately, when it comes to coaxing performances out of actors, or simply accommodating them, Snyder is woefully out of his element; and in a film filled with outlandish characters his actors are paddling upstream the entire time to inject some much needed humanity into the story.

Luckily, most of the main cast is up to the lion's share of the work. Billy Crudup is the standout performance, his frail and lonely god is incredibly nuanced and though he is certainly disconnected he is also sympathetic. Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earl Haley both brought touches of their characters from Little Children to their respective roles as Nite Owl and Rorschach. Haley, in particular, took one of the most grandiose of misanthropes and managed to not only make him believable (without the benefit of a decent back story) but also make the word “hurm” sound entirely natural. Morgan's Comedian is sometimes stilted by simply impossible lines; but his cynical amusement with the disgusting elements of civilization is on the money, and “Jesus Christ Sal, can't a guy talk to... to his old friend's daughter?” is one of the best moments of the film. Goode is a convincing intellectual, but his cold distance makes him entirely unsympathetic. Ackerman is the actress who needed a director's guidance most of all, her performance, along with most of the supporting cast is stilted and perfunctory.

Seeing as the actors, for the most part, seemed to have such a firm grasp on their characters, it's a shame that Hayter and Tse didn't. Rorschach's misanthropy remains intact, but his Objectivist outlook is noticeably neutered, if not removed entirely. Dr. Manhattan's judgment of humanity is turned into a trite lover's note. Ozymandias never gets a chance to ask Jon whether he did right in the end or admire Alexander's solution to the riddle of the Gordian Knot. Not that it matters because we never see the locksmith fix Dan's door. While that last detail is an example of the kind of subtlety this movie sorely lacks, the first three examples were a matter of a few lines, and so their absence is both frustrating and confusing. Snyder has said that there is about an hour of footage that didn't make this cut, while there are people who would say the movie is already too long as it is, I'm anxiously anticipating the Director's Cut in the hopes that it gives the third act the time it desperately needed to breath and the context that it deserved.

Looking back on this review, it seems that this movie has precious little to offer. Still, I find myself remembering the stand off between Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach, the quiver in Haley's lip as he begs for release from a world he cannot be a part of, the pain in Crudup's voice as he laments that for all he is capable of he “can't change human nature”, and I can't bring myself to call this a bad movie. Warts and all, it works.