Please Stop

Around 2000 I waited with baited breath for the release of Spider-Man. I drank in every publicity photo, video clip, and trailer. It had been since the Batfilms in the late 1980's and early 1990's since a quality superhero flick was released, and the fandom was in a tizzy.



within a decade Spidey had gone emo, and the rest of the comic to film players weren't faring a whole lot better. Fantastic Four was a fantastic bomb, Ang Lee's Hulk was as bloated as its title character, Ben Affleck Daredevil, Electra, Ghostrider, X3, Cat-Woman, and on and on. As years passed the quality and inventiveness of the genre died more. For me the soullessness genre reached its nadir with Zack Snyder's Watchmen. It was by far my favorite comic, and the way it eschewed the comic industry while being a part of it was genius. The movie though represented all that writer Allen Moore railed against in the creation of Watchmen. If written in the mid 2000's rather than the 1980's Ozymandias would've been hyping the movie with his Watchmen action figure line. It was sad.

This summer is lining up to be yet another uninspired, bland buffet of comic-rag crap. Set to come out are: Captain America (fuck yeah), Thor, Spider-Man (gone emo kid), and X-Men (also branching out in a decidedly emo direction). As a comic-con going geek I am in the target audience for these films, and I honestly say I've had enough.

I can only hope that projects like A&E's Walking Dead will raise the bar back to where it had been. Put the focus back on creativity and storytelling rather than the marketability of a character.