Just a few quickies to get you back in the flow:
An interview with Rina Ayuyang at The Comics Reporter:
AYUYANG: Well, stuff by Dan Clowes and Lynda Barry told me that comics wasn’t just the Sunday funnies and newspaper strips, or just about superheroes or detectives. There were other worlds and ideas that you could explore through comics. I did know early on that I wanted to write about things I cared about, things that not everyone would be interested in, or things that weren’t too out of the ordinary I think it was John Porcellino, Chester Brown‘s autobio, and Adrian Tomine‘s short stories that told me it was okay to make comics about subtle and quiet things. I was totally motivated to just try because of those cartoonists, and so I drew my first mini-comic Namby Pamby.
§ J. Caleb Mozzocco looks at which comics sold worse than THOR: THE MIGHTY AVENGER and most of them are kids or licensed comics, at least at Marvel:
Here are the Marvel-published titles released in September that charted worse than Thor: The Mighty Avenger: Halo: Boot Camp #1, Iron Man 2: Agents of SHIELD, Hercules: Twilight of a God, Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter: Circus, Hit Monkey, X-Campus, Cassanova, Gorilla-Man, Rawhide Kid, Marvelman Family’s Finest, Spider-Man (Only 5,779! That’s around half of Thor!), Super Hero Squad (5,304!) and Sky Doll: Lacrima Christi.
§ What was she REALLY thinking? We found this years later interview with Jessica Alba on what the making of FANTASTIC FOUR 2 was really like a refreshing reminder that some of the best acting is done at movie junkets:
Alba goes on to share an anecdote about working for director Tim Story on the set of ‘4: The Rise of the Silver Surfer,’ which is apparently what that movie was called. Her tale of woe — her “low point” — addresses a valid complaint: ” [Story said] ‘It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.’ He was like, ‘Don’t do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.’ And I’m like, But there’s no connection to a human being. And then it all got me thinking: Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don’t want me to be a person? Am I not allowed to be a person in my work? And so I just said, ‘F-ck it. I don’t care about this business anymore.'”
Wow, that Jessica Alba quote is pretty depressing, and spells out exactly why those FF movies felt so flat. Ugh.
Saddest part is that i doubt that only FF movies had such bs.
The director of the FF movies (he did both) was always a problem. His reimagining of Doctor Doom was ridiculous. His odd ideas extended to a belief that Mr. Fantastic had to hold on to something and “brace himself” in order to use his power, but while the first FF film was being filmed The Incredibles came out which showed the wrongness of his ideas so much that they added more scenes to the FF movie to try to keep from looking pale next to The Incredibles (which was more of an FF movie than the FF movie was).
The Incredibles was more of a Watchmen movie than Watchmen was. Greatest comic book picture.
“Cry prettier…”? Ugh.