Matt Yglesias

10 Years of Dr. Manhattan

Watchmen is hardly the first movie to try to employ web-based spinoffs as part of its marketing campaign, but it may be the first one to have actually done it well. Here, for example, is a YouTube video of a 1970 NBS broadcast taking a look back at 10 years of Dr. Manhattan:

For many of the same reasons that Watchmen was long deemed unfilmable, it seems uniquely well-suited to this sort of thing. It’s not a literal adaptation of the interstitial material in the book, but it’s true to its spirit.

Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

If I may take the time to agree with my friend Spencer Ackerman, it’s absolutely imperative that Samuel L. Jackson be paid whatever it takes to persuade him to appear as Nick Fury in upcoming Avengers / Iron Man / Captain America films. Marvel literally drew the character to look like Jackson when they launched their Ultimate Marvel series. They put jokes about Jackson playing Fury into one of the Ultimates stories. And then as an easter egg at the end of Iron Man they cast Jackson as Fury. They’ve come too far to back down now.

Invincible

I’d fallen into a comic book drought over the past few months and was starting to feel like an actual adult. Then on the recommendation of friends I read the first few trade paperbacks of Invincible the day after Christmas. Suffice it to say that I now own all the trade paperbacks of Invincible and am close to having read them all:

Invincible is based on an idea that’s quite original in its very banality — it’s a super-hero comic. And sort of a super-hero comic without a twist. It’s just a new super-hero comic with characters you’ve never read before, inhabiting a universe you’ve never visited before. The concept is really brilliant in its simplicity. People like super-hero comics and they read them all the time but the existing DC and Marvel books tend to feel stale. So why not write new ones? Well I think the answer is that it would be hard to do well — but it’s done very well here. If you like super-heroes and aren’t reading Invincible, add checking it out to your list of resolutions.

The Spirit

I made The Spirit my Christmas movie choice. It’s a great technical achievement, but it’s been married to a bizarre storyline that ultimately makes this quite difficult to enjoy. The idea that this “should make comic modern-day fanboys happy, what with its dark undertones, its beat-it-to-a-pulp action and its sly winks at comic greats past and present” is true only if you have an exceedingly low opinion of fanboys. At the end of the day, technique is nice but the point of great technique is to bring a story to live. Mostly, this just left me wishing to see some more Sin City stories adapted for the screen.

Glenn Nye

One House race I was paying especially close attention to was the VA-2 where Thelma Drake (R-VA)’s opponent Glenn Nye happened to be a guy I met in Austin and wound up going to see The Dark Night at one of the outlets of the Austin Cinema Draft House with. I take it he didn’t emphasize his “going to see comic book movies with bloggers” credentials out on the trail, but suffice it to say that I’ll be glad to see a member of congress who not only has extensive experience in foreign affairs but also really knows what Green Lantern is all about.