Mixed Media
This is one of those days that I sort of look back on and wonder, "What the heck did I do today?"
Mostly pretty mundane stuff: I balanced by checkbook and worked through my credit card purchases and just generally took stock of my finances. (Despite my summer spending spree, they seem to be in good shape.) That actually took a remarkably long time! I sent some checks out for some comics I'm buying over the Internet, and poked at my laser printer, which is finally going to get a new ink cartridge after five years of ownership.
The centerpiece of my day was going out for a bike ride through the UW arboretum, and nearly finished Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It's still cool out, but also still quite humid (the weather said it was around 65% humidity at 11 am this morning). So it was a kind of icky ride, but still pleasant overall. I had some frozen custard on the way home, and stopped at the comic book store to tell the owner about a web site I found, The Pacific Comics Club, which reproduces and sells old newspaper strips. He was rather interested to learn about it; we've talked about some old strips recently while I've been going through my Prince Valiant phase.
But I was glad to get out and get some exercise. I blew off Epic's annual picnic today, figuring that I'd just gone to a team picnic a couple of weeks ago, I've been to the last four company picnics, and I didn't much feel like hanging around with a mass of people from work anyway.
And I read in the latest Comics Buyer's Guide that there's a new series by the same folks which will be a Batman cartoon taking place in the future (a century or so?), which could be interesting. Also, they're looking at doing a Justice League of America cartoon to come out maybe in late 1999. That could be cool!
It's pretty amazing to contrast this crop of cartoons with the old Superfriends series, the latter having been primitively animated and terribly written. I bet the new cartoons get a lot of their audience from adults, so they tend to be aimed somewhat higher than your typical cartoon.
By the way, when I was in Chicago last weekend Jim and I were in a comics shop that was airing a live-action video which appeared to be a Justice League story. Now, there had been a couple of very cheesy JLA stories made in the 70s and starring Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin, but this clearly had a 90s sensibility. Turns out it's a never-aired pilot for a JLA series which is making the rounds, featuring the Martian Manhunter, Flash, Green Lantern, Fire and Ice, and a couple of others I didn't recognize. The script was quite clumsy, and it was not hard to see why it didn't make the cut on CBS. I'd be willing to watch it once out of curiosity, though.
Y'know what I'd love to see James Cameron apply his big movie budgets and technical know-how to? Some really ambitious, serious superhero flick, like Green Lantern. Apparently Cameron had the rights to Spider-Man a few years ago, but nothing's come of it yet. (Mercifully, it sounds like the Tim Burton Superman flick, with Nicholas Cage in the title role, is just about dead in the water. I thought Burton's Batman films were exceedingly weak; I hate to think what he'd do to Superman.)
I didn't get into the Flash TV series that aired a few years ago, and the recent Nick Fury TV-movie (starring David Hasselhoff!) came and went with barely a blip on the radar screen, sort of like the direct-to-video Captain America film a few years ago, or the finished-but-not-released-in-any-form Fantastic Four film that got canned when Chris Columbus acquired the rights to the FF and put the kibosh on the other film through some chain of events which I no longer remember.
Of course, there was the Generation X TV-movie a year or so ago, which I skipped (hey, I haven't read the X-Men since the mid 80s!), and apparently a live-action X-Men series is in the works. And I have watched the X-Men and Silver Surfer cartoons, neither of which impressed me.
And then, of course, there was Barb Wire, which came from a comic book. At the other end of the success spectrum, Men In Black also had its genesis as a comic book. (I enjoyed the latter, and haven't seen the former.)
It's pretty mysterious why comic books are such hot properties these days. There have been a few big successes, but an awful lot of dismal failures (both artistically and commercially). But I guess as long as the properties continue to be valuable somewhere, fans in the film and TV biz will continue to try to adapt them to those media.
A lot of the time I wish they'd get some better scripts, though.
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