Tagged: Iron Man

Superhero Novelizations for 2008

  • News
  • January 7, 2008

With the summer super-hero blockbusters come the inevitable novelizations. It used to be almost every movie from every genre would receive the prose treatment but with time, that has been winnowed dramatically.  These days it appears just the genre films get the attention and not even all those receive a book. 

The blockbuster, tent pole films for 2008 will be receiving not only novelizations but tie-in and spin-off books galore.  One, Speed Racer, does not have a novelization but a ton of related books for the younger audiences.

Here’s a look at the 2008 novelization list, in order of film release, with some rather familiar names attached:

   

Iron Man by Peter David

Speed Racer, none scheduled

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by James Rollins

Incredible Hulk by Peter David

Wanted, none scheduled

Get Smart, none scheduled

Hellboy II: The Golden Army by Robert Greenberger

The Dark Knight by Dennis O’Neil

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, unknown

The X-Files 2, none scheduled

Punisher: War Zone, none scheduled

Star Trek, unknown

The Happy Optimist, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • December 31, 2007

 

As I write these words on the final Friday of 2007, I’m already tired of all the “best of” lists on all the media, so I’m going to go in the other direction and point my antennae towards the future. Chipper li’l guy that I am, here’s some of the reasons why I’m looking forward to 2008.
 
• Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in the Iron Man movie. I can’t think of a better casting choice, except maybe for Howard Chaykin – and I’m not sure Chaykin could pull off the moustache thing. Downey’s got the right look, the right attitude… we’ll see if he gets the right screenplay.
 
• The inauguration of ComicMix: Phase Three and ComicMix: Phase Four. Actually, Brian tells us Phase Four might be ready before Phase Three. If so, we’ll probably rename Phase Four Phase Three. I went to school for this, you know.
 
• The end of Campaign 2008. Maybe we’ll get somebody worthy of the job. There’s a better chance of that if we all go out and vote at least once. I suspect I’ll be voting twice, as I once registered in Chicago.
 
• The most amazing and astonishing Munden’s Bar story ever told. With luck, we’ll have it done in 2008. It’ll be worth the wait.
 

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Little Ditty About Danny and Fred, by Dennis O’Neil

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  • December 25, 2007

Danny and Fred were the last two kids in their grade to still believe in Santa Claus. 

 
Danny had first believed in Daddy, but he stopped when Daddy began to yell a lot, and drink whiskey, and throw things. So Danny could believe he had a father, because he could see a man coming and going, but he stopped believing in Daddy. 
 
But he still believed in Santa Claus. Santa Claus would never yell or throw things or drink whiskey, and besides, he brought presents and all Danny had to do was be good, which he was anyway. Fred, who lived next door, also believed in Santa, though he and Danny never discussed the etiology of it, so Danny didn’t know why Fred believed. He didn’t care, either.
 
Then, when Danny was fourteen, Father, who was once Daddy, came into Danny’s room on Christmas Eve and pulled Danny from bed and hustled him into the front room, where the Christmas tree was. Father sat Danny down on the sofa and got a big cardboard box from a closet.
 

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Driving The Big Boat, by Dennis O’Neil

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  • December 18, 2007

Maybe we ought to retire the word “hero” and designate the characters whose needs and actions drive the story, more technically and accurately, as “the protagonist.”

(You’ve guessed that we’re continuing our incredibly prolonged discussion of the evolution of superheroes?  Good.)

As mentioned in an earlier installment of this blather, the word “hero” is derived from the Greek and means, roughly, “to protect and serve.”  (Lest anyone think I’m a scholarly dude who actually knows Greek…I wish!) The problem nowadays is defining exactly how the protection and service is to be accomplished.  In other words, what kind of person do you admire, and why do they do what they do?  Who do you favor mor e– Mother Theresa or the late Colonel David Hackworth, our most decorated combat veteran?

I never met the good nun, but I did spend an hour or so with Colonel Hackworth once and liked him very much.  I don’t think I would have enjoyed Theresa’s company a whole lot.  But maybe she was the more heroic of the two, if we count heroism as doing deeds that take courage and accomplish long-term good.  Going out every day to deal with disease and poverty…it must have taken guts and it can’t have been easy.  Easier than facing enemy guns?  I have no idea what measurement we can use to quantify such things.  Maybe there is none.

Col. Hackworth did what he did repeatedly and must have often known what he was getting into and, presumably, chose to do it anyway.  But I’m wary of heaping too many accolades on folk who, in a military situation, do one brave thing because…

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The Evolution of the Superhero, by Dennis O’Neil

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  • December 11, 2007

redfox-8337995And on we plod, continuing our seemingly interminable discussion of the evolution of superheroes. This week, let’s leave the capes and masks and other such accoutrements, and the “super” prefix, in the trunk and concentrate on the hero part.

First, a little oversimplification.

Heroes come in two models: the authority-sanctioned kind, as embodied by King Arthur’s posse, Beowulf, and James Bond, to cite just three of many possible examples, and the loners – the cowboys, the private eyes and, yes, most superdoers.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first kind were dominant throughout most storytelling history – were, in fact, integral to the “monomyth” described by Joseph Campbell. Again oversimplifying: ultimately, the result of all the hero’s roving and adventuring was benefit to his community. And, bowing once more to conventional wisdom, the second kind, the loners, became prominent after the First (don’t we wish!) World War when belief in the essential goodness and wisdom of humanity’s leaders became…well, challenging.

I dunno…the cowboy archetype was well-established before the war broke out in 1914, and it, in some ways, was the model for the private eyes and other rogue justice-dealers. I guess you could argue that the defining event of America’s nineteenth century, the Civil War, made the citizenry wary of Authority, and that wariness grew for maybe a hundred years as media technology made our immediate ancestors aware that if a person was in the market for some really ripe corruption, the statehouse was the place to look..

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Nudity and the Editorial Process, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 4, 2007

3202470258-9273812In my dotage, I’m coming to believe that a little adolescent rebellion is usually a good thing, and if the rebellion creeps a year or two into full, card-carrying adulthood, that’s okay. Much after the fact, I learned of some things my kid did in his Greenwich Village youth: I’m not sorry he did them and I’m glad I didn’t know of them until much later.

(As for myself…let me note that the principal of my high school told my mother after graduation that they never, ever wanted to see me again. I must have done something…)

Father does not always know best and either does Mother. Like generals, they’re fighting old wars and kids are caught in new wars, which means the kids have to find their own way, which is a process of experimentation, which means that Junior and Pops can’t and shouldn’t march in lock step,

We will now retire the military metaphors and explain what any of this has to do with our current topic, the evolution of superheroes.

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Oh, the weather outside is frightful…

  • News
  • December 2, 2007

It’s snowing, albeit gently, here in the Northeast, and the temperatures are definitely of the stay-indoors variety, so why not do what I’ll be doing, catching up on ComicMix columns from this past week?:

May all your hot chocolates be filled to the brim with peppermint schnapps!

Is Iron Man Mike Hammer? by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 27, 2007

schepper__mike_hamme_60417h-4232768So where we at?  For the past month or so, we have, in a scattershot and disorganized way, been discussing the various elements involved in the evolution of superheroes.  I don’t think we’ve come to any conclusions worthy of being preserved for the ages, nor should we: things change, darnit. But maybe a little tentative upsumming would not be inappropriate.

Upsumming:

Haberdashery: There is currently a trend away from putting superdoers in costumes, though the big bucks movie heroes are still wearing the suits and, judging from the films I know about that are in development, this will not change in the foreseeable future.  But most entertainment consumers — I’m excepting comics fans here — get their heroism, super and otherwise, from television and maybe because of tv production hassles, costumes aren’t common.

Powers: We’ve agreed (haven’t we?) that for a long time the superbeings of mythology and folklore got their powers from some supernatural agency: they were gods, or demi-gods, or friends of ol’ Olympus,  or something.  Or they were agencies of darkness — black magicians of one kind or another.  Then science became the rationale, most famously with Jerry Siegel’s extraterrestrial origin of Superman.  Last, and decidedly least, there was technology allowing the good guy to do his  stuff. And now…well, it’s anything goes time.  Look at the current television offerings: we have a superhero private eye whose abilities are due to his vampirism, which we can call magic; a technology-enabled superhero(ine); and a whole bunch of peripatetic whose gifts have “scientific” explanations, or so it currently seems.

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Giving thanks for good columns

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  • November 25, 2007

I find it nothing short of astounding that ComicMix columns continue to get stronger as the year goes on.  Here’s the past week’s worth of what’s shaping up to be a great legacy of reading:

Thank you again to all our readers for your participation via the comments!

Power!, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 13, 2007

So you wanna be a superhero. Okay, where are your powers going to come from?

For years – nay, hundreds of years; nay, thousands of years – the brief answer was: From out there. Somewhere. The first superbeings in popular culture (the only kind there was, back then) were either gods, or pals of gods, or imbued with magical abilities, the origins of which weren’t necessarily clear or important. What was important was…wow! – look at what he/she/it can do! And so much the better if it, whatever spectacular thing it is, is being done for reasons I approve of.

That’s still what’s important. But our minds seem to be wired to want reasons for what we see, which is certainly why there’s science and may be why there’s art and civilization. But, oddly, once a reason is supplied, many of seem to be satisfied and require nothing further. The great cosmic snortlefish created the oceans? Swell, now I know why there’s all that water and what’s for dinner?

By the time Jerry Siegel got around to thinking up Superman in the summer of 1934, magic wasn’t terribly fashionable and it had long since become divorced from religion. But science…ah, science was going to deliver us and besides, it was real. And Jerry was a reader of science fiction, which, in those happy days, at least claimed to be rooted in physics and chemistry and astronomy and stuff like that. So it was natural, maybe inevitable, that he would give his übermensch a science rationale. Guy comes from another planet, sure – that’d be why he could be so powerful. Makes sense. Made sense to Jerry in 1934, probably would have made sense to me when I was the age Jerry was when he created Superman, if I’d thought about it.

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