Culture from the darker side

It isn’t very often that a comic strip comes along that is truly great. Calvin and Hobbes though clearly fall in that Category.

For ten years (from 1985 to 1995) we could read their daily adventures in the newspaper, and even now, ten years after, they are still being printed on a daily basis.

Bill Watterson, the inventor of Calvin and Hobbes went pretty much into hiding shortly after the last strip ran, he never licensed any of the characters as mechandise so essentially Calvin and Hobbes was finished.

Now, ten years later we finally get the complete Calvin and Hobbes, three hardcover books containing all of the Calvin and Hobbes strips, including the sunday strips and Covers, as well as a new foreword by Watterson.

The strips are printed on glossy paper and are nicely offset of the background and the books are hardcover bound and are easy to open / turn.

The whole package weights in at a whopping 10kg and it doesn’t come cheap. List price for the whole collection is CAN$200 but if you look around online you will be able to find it for less.

If you enjoy intelligent reading, then this is clearly something for you, and if you are a fan of Calvin ande Hobbes already it is a given.

Rating 5/5

Online comics are a staple today, but even in this day and age a dead tree version is still nice to have.

Frazz is a comic that, in part, was compared by friends of mine who have seen it as a new “Calvin and Hobbes” though clearly similar it is not Bill Watterson in disguise.

If the world is best seen through the eyes of a child, best understood through the mind of a reader, best interpreted through the voice of a musician, and best felt through the body of an athlete… then it’s best laughed at through Frazz, the custodian of Bryson Elementary School. Frazz took the janitor gig to support a struggling songwriting career, but he just couldn’t quit once he hit it big. He loved the kids, he loved the atmosphere, and by that time he had the hots for one particular first-grade teacher.

So he happily sweeps through school and life, challenging students, sparring with crabby teachers and supporting good ones, racing triathlons, and trying all things new. He’s a breath of fresh air with a can of industrial-strength deodorizer.

You can read him daily.

Rating: 5/5

It is always a tricky thing to move a comic book onto the big screen.

Most of the things that work well in one medium are hard to translate, much more so if the medium is already graphical in it’s story telling like a comic or video games.

It thus shouldn’t be too surprising that the number of good adaptations in this field is rather slim, much more so if you consider that most comic book authors / artists aren’t actively involved in the transplantation (with Sin City being a notable exception).

“Immortel (Ad Vidam)” is based on the three comic books of the Nikopol Trilogy created by Enki Bilal.

The Story:

New York 2095. In a strange pyramid floating in the sky, the gods of ancient Egypt are judging Horus. In the city, Jill, a young woman with blue hair is arrested. She has a secret power, enabling her to procreate with gods, but knows nothing of it. During his search for an hosting body, Horus runs into Nikopol, a previous rebel condemned to 30 years of hybernation and just escaped by chance. Horus takes partial control of Nikopol’s body and starts looking for a woman who can give him a son, before his death sentence is carried out.

How it’s made:

The movie is both amazing and strange at the same time.

The world of Nikopol is strange, it is anything but what we would expect, with strange characters, humans are changing their bodies and aliens are on the planet as well.

In order to accomplish this the movie makes extensive use of CGI characters, and also most of them are done well (and don’t suffer from the odd “helmet off” effect that happened in the latest Star Wars), but they still look artificial unfortunately.

The story itself was changed in order to work as a movie, but it still works and retains the core components of the story, which is most likely due to Bilal writing the story himself and also directing it.

The movie is strange and beautiful at the same time and for most people it will probably not be an easy movie to watch, if at all.
It clearly is not an american style movie and this may explain why the movie never saw broad distribution in North America which is actually a shame as it would have been a lot more rewarding to see the movie on the big screen.
But the DVD release has one advantage: You can watch it more than once, definetly something you should do.
If you liked the fifth element, you’ll like Immortel (Ad Vidam).
Rating: 5/5

Hollywood and comics is not really a success story. Most of the comic to movie adaptations have (at best) been mediocre (X-Men exluded). But this doesn’t seem to stop Hollywood to continue trying to adapt things for the big screen.

Enter the next contestant: Constantine.
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Looks like India is going to get it’s own version of spiderman. At least if one can trust this Press Releases by Gotham Comics.

I have to say it looks pretty good, of course we most likely will never see anything like this outside of india. Unless of course as a collectors item.

It has been a while since Neil Gaiman penned his own comic series. He definetly re-defined in North America what comics are about. The Sandman up to this day is a very popular series.

Now, in 2003, finally we are receiving a new comic series: 1602.
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