| Quote: Originally Posted by dellamorte dellamore None of those films have gone into these darker areas that Hancock seems to do . This is an unrepentant alcoholic , womanizing , kid hating drunkard , this is something new . Personally i don't think these types of films are dark enough because they are straddling the line between appealing to the younger people in the audience and the adults . I want to see some real neuroses on display , i don't want it just hinted at . No, for a comic book fan like myself, this is decidedly NOT something new. And, in fact, this is something DANGEROUS, that ought to be avoided. A quick history lesson.... Silver Age comics (1960-1985) was very happy go lucky, as I've said in other posts, then, in 1985, a slew of titles came out that shifted the industry, this slew was headed by Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Over the course of the next 10 to 15 years, almost everything that came out was grim and gritty, what you're talking about in your post, double D. You want the kind of thing you're talking about? read Preacher, a book that is so sacriligeous and messed up, it leaves you wanting more Read Sin City, if you've seen the movie, you know this is the thing with anti-heroes. but most of all, read Kingdome Come (I think it's the best trade paper back in the history of comics) a book where the next generation of DCU super heroes and portrayed as all the things that you wanted them to be. During this era, there were thousands of books that were trying to immitate (ie, copy) what DKR and Watchmen acheived, unfornately, very few succeeded. As a result of dropping sales, DC was acquired by Warner Bros and Marvel declared Bankruptcy, and with a few execptions (mostly stuff that Jeph Loeb was writting), people thought the industry was dying. Then, in 2001, a funny thing happened. A bunch of comic book writers and execs thought long and hard about how to fix things, and they looked at each other and said "whatever happened to making comics fun to read?" A new age was started by Brian Michael Bendis and Ultimate Spider man #1. There's still grim and gritty, there's still heroic decontruction, and all those things, but the big difference between comics as they are now, and as they were ten years ago, is that writers are making them fun to read, and artists are making them fun to look at again. Its one of the problems with the grim and gritty approach. Done correctly, like in Kingdome Come, it can be spectacular ("...and he cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth....and when he cried...seven thunders uttered thier voices....SHAZAM!) however, it's also unbelieveably easy to mess up, more so than silver age corniness. In fact, the industry's major plot point these days is to look back at the silver age, keep what worked and what made comics fun, and to re-imagine the stuff that didn't work into a more palatable means. These days, we have the "phantom zone arrow" in Green Arrow's quiver, and a slight reimagining has transformed it from the dumbest thing of all time into something very cool. I would argue that what comics are putting out now, a "Silver age reborn" is the optimal way to go. grim and gritty failed comics for a reason, and I don't want to see movie studios learn that lesson the hard way. |