“The fact that he’s wearing a shirt at all, and not wearing wings and a hawk mask, makes this a pretty good disguise”: Rachelle Goguen, the Internet’s number one rater of super-hunks, reviews the street clothes the Justice Leaguers are wearing in a panel from JLoA #89, which she calls “one of the most insane and self-indulgent comics ever written.” Ooh, that one should be in the next Showcase Presents collection. Get collecting, DC!
“Who is this movie for? And why this particular story?”: This review of the Superman/Batman: Public Enemies DC does a good job of encapsulating what has been one of the major problems I’ve had with each of the projects I’ve seen so far, that of address. They seem short and simplified as if for children, but usually throw in enough “grown-up” stuff to seem inappropriate for kids. He closes the review out by rating it in probably the most appropriate way possible, as either less than or greater than other DC direct-to-DVD movies. All of them I’ve seen—just the first three or four so far—have been poor in the exact same ways (far too short, bizarrely addressed to the narrowest imaginable audience), so that system seems to work out well.
“The superhero mode has so dominated — you almost want to say “deformed” — comic books for so long that few folks younger than 50 can remember the wonderfully diverse subject matter of the comic’s early days”: Here’s Milo Miles on the Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly edited The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics for NPR.
“‘Comic’ retells Honduran coup and Manuel Zelaya arrest”: In other news, The Guardian still using quotation marks to indicate that not all comics are actually comical.
“New graphic novel is ‘all dolled up’ to go somewhere”: Abby Denson’s Dolltopia should prove popular with headline writers. The puns practically write themselves!
“One fun thing about being an editorial cartoonist is that I sometimes get invited to strange places as a cartoon celebrity”: Daryl Cagle on his week in Algeria.
“Asterix at 50″: Time magazine looks at the career of the most famous Gaul in comics.
Library employees fired for violating library policy proceed to alert the media: Apparently, two employees of the Jessamine County Public Library in Nicholasville, Kentucky were fired last month because they refused to allow an 11-year-old to check out what a local TV news station calls “a book from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman series,” which one of the employees, Sharon Cook, referred to as “pornography.” As is usually the case at public libraries, the policy states that it’s up to parents to deem what is and what isn’t appropriate for their children. I know there’s some pretty weird sex in each of the volumes, and if I was a parent I might not want my 11-year-old reading it—while being impressed that she’d be able to understand the dense, allusion-filled book enough to enjoy it—but it’s hard to imagine a grown-up could even flip through any of those volumes and decide that they are actual works of actual pornography. Here’s WTVQ’s report from Wednesday, and here’s a Thursday follow-up on reaction to the original story. You can watch the report here, if you don’t mind sitting through a twelve-second commercial first.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:44 am
I think that Public Enemies review is probably spot on… No, I haven’t seen it yet (I’ll wait until it’s on TV). I just know what a turd the original comic is, and I’ve seen plenty of reviews that say the same stuff about the movie. I do disagree with the reviewer on one thing though. I do think Loeb wrote good comics at one time. It was just a loooong time ago. Superman For All Seasons is still my favorite Supes story ever, and he’s written some classic Bats too, but that’s irrelevant here.
The point is that it was just a dumb story to adapt into a movie, and NONE of the DCUA movies I’ve seen seem to either make a good, intelligent movie for grown-ups OR an appropriate movie for kids (The Power Girl stuff sounds insulting). I’d say they need to make up their minds and be one or the other, but there’s no reason they can’t appeal to both. PIXAR, anyone? They sure know how to write films that appeal to all ages. Apparently WB just doesn’t have that kind of talent, or isn’t willing to spend more time and money to get it?
I love Bruce Timm, but I’d be surprised if he honestly thought these movies were as good as the best work on the Timm-verse TV shows. As long as WB/DC keeps cutting corners, writing weak stories that run less than 90 minutes, and can’t figure out who they’re targeting these movies at, they’ll remain B-grade or C-grade releases that aren’t worth it. None of the previous ones have been worth seeing more than once.
Maybe that next JLA one will (finally) be better, but even then they had to go and get different people to voice Bats, Supes, Luthor, etc. WTF?
October 24th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Oh, and those librarians? Firing them might be going a bit far, but I agree that it’s not up to them to decide who can and can’t check out the books. I know at my local library, all the graphic novels are located by the young adult/teen books. That’s roughly the age group this reader is in.
If a librarian is honestly going to call an LoEG book “pornography” then she’s just asking to get fired… That’s an extreme(ly stupid) view, but not atypical of the Bible Belt I guess. She’s really not be public librarian material, if she’s going to act like some kind of “moral guardian” for the community.
October 24th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Many libraries get around this problem (checking out books for teens and adults to younger children) by providing a children’s library card for those under the age of 12 if the parents wanted a more limited card that didn’t allow the holder to borrow adult material; the public library system where I used to work did this. And yes, my library included The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the collection – in the adult section of the library. Teens could easily borrow books from the adult section, so there was no censorship.
Most public librarians are more open-minded than these two individuals. They do remind me of the type of librarian around when I was a kid – many public libraries back in the 40s and 50s wouldn’t allow The Wizard of Oz books, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, The Bobbsey Twins, and others into the library because they were “trash.”
October 25th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Is JLA #89 the one with a thinly-disguised Harlan Ellison having a “thing” with Black Canary, and a final panel of writer Mike Friedrich explaining in first person that when he writes the characters, he IS them??
October 27th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
First, these women are not librarians, they are support staff who were not authorized or trained to make decisions about collection development or readers’ advisory. If they had concerns that should have told their supervisor(s) and let those with authority make the decision. They had no right to make that decision.