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Every Monday, Matt. Murray reviews, revisits and rambles about comics, cartoons and their interactions in and with related media.

by Matt. Murray

A little more than ten years ago, the mis-identified “genre” of comic book movies entered a new phase with the release of the first Blade.  Declared dead in 1997, thanks largely to the efforts of Joel Schumacher and Akiva Goldsman, movies based on superhero comics bounced back a summer later thanks to the underestimated efforts of and a lot of luck riding on the side of  screenwriter David Goyer, actor Wesley Snipes and director  Stephen Norrington.  Blade opened the door for not only two sequels, but for the development and final greenlighting of several other Marvel Comics properties including X-Men and Spider-Man.

Now, as we have either just left or recently entered a newer cycle thanks to Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and the just released Watchmen looms in the collective consciousness – splitting the ranks of film and comics fans a like, I feel that its a good time to take a look back at what I believe to be the true crap that emerged from the shadows of Blade.

This isn’t a list of “the worst” super hero movies per se, but rather a brief look at films I really didn’t like from the past ten years and why I didn’t care for them.

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Strip Search features reviews and recommends comic strips available in print and on the web.

by Jennifer M. Babcock

Piled Higher and Deeper is a webcomic drawn by a good friend of mine, Jorge Cham. He started drawing PhD Comics as a graduate student at Stanford University. For about a year, my alma mater UCLA ran his comic in their paper (I believe on Wednesdays) and it has since been syndicated in several university newspapers and in three published book collections. On top of all that, Jorge gets to run around the country giving lectures about how to cope with being a grad student – using his comic as visual aid.

In a nutshell, PhD is a pretty big success. I don’t think it’s listed as a webcomic that is self-sufficient (meaning that the profits Jorge receives via merchandising and advertising can fully support him without a “day job”) but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t.

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On alternating Fridays, Leah Schnelbach waxes rhapsodic about comics, education, religion, film and postmodernity.

This week, a very interesting issue of The New Yorker hit the stands. It’s interesting first and foremost because of the excellent and heart-wrenching article on David Foster Wallace (my favorite writer) along with an excerpt from his last novel, which is being published posthumously. They also have one of the most frustrating movie reviews I’ve ever seen. The reason that I’m mentioning it on this site is that it’s a review of Watchmen.  Full disclosure – I haven’t seen Watchmen yet. [Ed.: Watchmen is released nationally today.] I’ll probably see it at some point next week, after the first throngs have strained and shuddered and spent themselves. So I’m not reviewing the review of the film, or disagreeing with it. Why bring it up, then, you may ask?  On reading this review, looking only for the writer’s opinion of the film, I found myself disturbed and eventually angered by the tone of distaste it shows, not for the film, but rather for comics culture as a whole.  Now, if the review simply expressed an opinion that the film wasn’t very good that would be fine  (Although, for the record, he seems to prefer The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a film to the adaptation of V for Vendetta, and while neither was great, there is a fucking yawning chasm between the two….)

My real problem is that the film, as a film, isn’t really reviewed.  The author discusses enjoying the opening credits, but from there contents himself in swipes at Alan Moore as a writer (even though he states early on that Moore had nothing to do with the film), itemizes the acts of violence in the film (as though containing scenes of violence disqualifies a film from also being interesting or at least dealing with interesting topics), and finally resorts to a creaky kids-these-days style rant against comics readers. At least, those comics readers who don’t mind if characters throw a cape over their shoulders now and then.

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