Comic book movies - can this really last?

I was there. I read most of those early ones although I preferred DC in general. Spiderman back then was easily the best Marvel book.

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It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula

Okay ... I figured it was something like that. You are correct on your first one about meetings though. I swear, Peter Parker's love life is more complicated than a soap opera.

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I have no such excuse. I'm just a super nerd. At least my kids will likely escape that label. My 17 year old asked me yesterday, "who's William Shatner?" Either we've done a good job there, or a horrible one, I'm undecided as to which.

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Family DVD Collection | My Top 100 | My Movie Thoughts | Frank Capra

That's because it is basically a soap opera with radioactive mutation thrown in. That's pretty much the marvel formula, exhaustively convoluted but shallow continuity with romance between hot people, and plot twists.

Sounds like real life to me.

That was the biggest problem I had with the Spiderman movies.

I have always loved Thor, Silver Surfer, Hulk & Captain America as characters.. Don't care about the rest of the Marvel characters..
I like Ditko's run on Dr. Strange, only ended up reading it after Tom Wolfe mentioned it in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

I prefer reading specific storylines from the mainstream comics rather than reading all the issues.

Marvel did have some nice titles decades ago, like:

ROM the space Knight.
Warlock
Dreadstar
& my all time favorite 'NAM.

Spiderman got more soap operaish after Ditko left. It had a more realistic feel under him as the focus was less on Parker's romantic life and more on his hellish high school existence and need for money with Aunt May having a heart attack every three or four months. Once Parker went to college, even under Ditko, the tone became less grim as PP became less of a loser. I liked that at the time, but in retrospect it took a lot of the edge and distinctiveness away from the series. Romita was known primarily then for drawing romance comics so his style influenced the direction the series went.

I'd say Ditko was the critics favorite, but Romita was more popular. At the time though ... I never thought about who was drawing or writing the comic books. It just wasn't important to me as a child. I simply loved the Marvel characters.

the soap-opera factor is probably where the initial appeal was for me in the first place and then paradoxically the reason for losing interest in super-hero comics. it was the same with manga and most tv shows, really. after a while it just gets to be "i'm only still reading this because of the commitment of watching the previous 500 episodes" and then by the end it's almost inevitably "that's it?" With Marvel it's even worse because there's no real cohesion between the various writers/artists/editors the story passes through and there is no end, just a beginning and an interminable middle. I can see the appeal of just following certain runs (I enjoy the Sienkiewicz run of New Mutants) but it's really hard to extricate that from what came before and after in the story, which is *****. I'll take the novelistic/movie form any day. That's why Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen (and especially Miller/Sienkiewicz's Elektra) work. They imply and draw from a larger cosmology without relying directly on it, you can read them without caring who the heck Batman or Daredevil are, in the franchise.

With manga my rule of thumb now is to just not read anything that runs over 10-volumes long, with a few exceptions (that may sound long but you can usually read 200 pages of a manga in around a half of an hour). When I read superhero comics now (which is really rare) it's usually just to look at the art.

I tried reading one of those volumes of early Spider Man stories several years ago but the melodramatic Stan Lee-isms killed it for me pretty fast.

Caption: "Spider Man swings towards the open window and..." Thought Balloon: "I must make it through that open window" Picture: Spider Man swinging towards an open window.

So once upon a time there was a guy that liked comics, and he also was into Vespas, and wanted to somehow combine his 2 loves.



lol

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"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

6 year + bump Dexter, solid effort.

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When are they going to make movie of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl and their nemesis, Spider Lady (if Marvel doesn't sue)?

katey Perry was born to play that role.