This morning I spent a few hours yakking on yon Twitter about the upcoming slate of films from Marvel Studios: Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers.
At the same time, I was listening to Matt Fraction's brilliant performance at w00tstock of "The Batman Dreams of Hieronymus Machines." (Okay, so I was also doing ACTUAL WORK, since I have an ACTUAL JOB. I multitask; it's how I do.)
It made for an interesting collision. Fraction's speech is about a great many things, and deserves to be listened to instead of just reading my shitty half-sentence summary, but it deals primarily with the unique alchmey of comics as a storytelling device--words, pictures, and whatever you bring to the table.
I think that's amplified by the fact that they're always a personal experience; you can see a movie with 1,000 of your closest friends, and you can go to a concert and get beer spilled down your shirt while you listen to your favorite song. But there's ultimately nothing communal about a comic; it's you and the work.
Except that often the second you're done, when you can log on and find dozens of places where your opinions, ideas, theories, and lame gags can get mixed into the meaty, frequently pungent stew commonly known as "online discourse."
I kid, I kid. It's good stuff, mostly. And sometimes, it brings the magical to a level that is fully mundane.
I'm having this chat about The Avengers, which I am enjoying even though it's frequently frustraing me, and I'm listening to one of my favorite comic book writers talk about the fucking magic of stories, especially those told in comics form. (As opposed to the fucking magic of fucking magnets; for more on that, see here.)
There's this fine line geeks tap-dance upon, and it's the one between the possible and the all-too-real. The ambitions we have for the stories we love must often be reconciled with the disappointing actualizations of those stories. I want a $150 million three-hour feature film adaptation of Infinity Gauntlet, directed by Bill Condon and starring James Gandolfini as Thanos; it will not happen.
So I start immediately reconciling in my brain, tap dancing along the line, thinking about what could be and what will be, excited and disappointed by both. It's probably gonna be an Ultimates adaptation, that's cool, I like those comics...but what about the Cosmic Cube? And Loki? That's awesome sauce to stir into the mix. And Janet and Hank Pym, I'd love to see them in the film, but Whedon's probably already told us it won't happen...but what if he's being obtuse, and when he says "Ant-Man," he doesn't necessarily mean Hank Pym?
Or the other ideas floated by my pals...Janet Pym on her own in a romance with Steve Rogers...the "death" of Bucky Barnes and the rise of the Winter Soldier somehow folded into the storyline...a Hulk that's still crazy but has just enough Banner to be dangerous...
The possible, the probable, banging heads incessantly until the movie is out, and we all go, and we all judge it.
Then we start talking sequel. And so it goes.
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