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In Media Madness, Matt. Murray reviews, revisits and rambles about comics, cartoons and their interactions in and with related media.

I read some disappointing news over at Dark Horizons last week — rumor has it that Hayden Christensen will be playing Mandrake the Magician in some Criss Angel style adaptation of the Lee Falk comic strip of the same name.  Ugh.

While I’m not adverse to updating and playing with what is clearly a dated concept and character, I am frightened and saddened by choosing uber-douche Angel as the mold to recast the hero in (he evidently has a cameo as well) and then there’s casting Dork Vader himself to carry the production… In the words of Patton Oswalt doing his impression of Nick Nolte as Han Solo: Aw Hell, Chewbacca!

How the hell does this guy still get work? Has no one been to the movies in the past ten years? This kid buckled under the weight of the second Star Wars trilogy and was outperformed by the special effects and Billy Fu@%ing Elliot in Jumper. He can barely sustain the illusion of having an emotion on screen, how are we supposed to buy into the fact that he’s the world’s greatest illusionist and escape artist?

(In better news, Djimon “Give Us Us Free” Hounsou is in it too.  I’m assuming he’s playing Mandrake’s African sidekick Lothar as he’s absolutely perfect casting in that department.   So here’s hoping that maybe the producers and director aren’t complete shortbussers.)

In honor of this disgusting piece of casting that will no doubt amount to a staggering disappointment, and the death of another potentially cool classic comic franchise (The Phantom and/or Spirit, anyone?), I’ve assembled a list of the 5 worst performances in movies adapted from comics in the past 10 years or so.

Disclaimer: Enjoy the list, but by no means don’t watch the films. Really. You shouldn’t. Not only are they horrible performances but these people will get paid in some way, shape or form if you pick up the disc or watch it via some other legal means. Don’t encourage crap kids, it only begets more!

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Due to injuries sustained during a month long blogfest, Matt. Murray is currently on the SAC Blog’s disabled list.  He hopes to quickly ascend the ranks of the injured reserves with a fresh onslaught of insights and snarky comments about comics and cartoons.  This week, Jared Gniewek will graciously be delivering a double dose of Die by the Pen…

As someone who is recently unemployed, it is doubly important for me to adhere to a work ethic regarding my writing. I find that my gentleman’s library can be a touch distracting if I am in the middle of a piece and need to get out of the house to work. I found a coffee shop a mere fifty blocks away. It’s good to get out of the house and the walk keeps the brain gears greased. I find, sometimes, that stories are a very easy thing to come up with on a two and a half mile walk, but what becomes difficult is communicating their setting. I mainly write Horror, and it is very important to maintain setting. A reader has a very hard time accepting that the monsters are real when the characters are floating around an undefined place. One must know the barriers in Horror, so that these may be destroyed by the invading agent.

My latest inspiration is experimenting with world building exercises. It’s important that the characters you work on live in a breathing, vital world. No one lives in a vacuum – not even the most powerful wizard in the universe. Everyone is a part of their community (even an outsider is a reflection of our response to a pre-existing social network). We inhabit physical spaces; so should our characters. The town, country, planet, dimension, etc. should be hatched out at some point. In a lot of cases it won’t matter all that much that the story takes place in Utah or Burbank. But in quite a few stories the environment is so defined that it becomes an entity as strong as the characters themselves, such as in the setting of Tokyo in the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi or the planets of Apocalypse and New Genesis in the works of Jack Kirby. Or, perhaps most famously, Hill House in the novel by Shirley Jackson.

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