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Hellfire! By: Mark Morgan on 5/20/2000; 1:54 PM If you do injustice to the innocent, a walking, flaming skeleton will shoot fireballs out of his hands at you and burn your very soul. Ghost Rider, a comic I adored as a teen, comes to the big screen. You know, Marvel has a boatload of movies and other media projects in development. That's good and bad, because it's nice to have the opportunity to see some old favorites, and some new ones on the big screen. On the other hand, Marvel hasn't had a ton of sucess making superhero movies. I can't bear to even rent Captain America, it looks so bad. DC has the advantage of Warner entertainment behind it; Marvel gives projects to whoever gives them a check. How likely is it that these projects will get good directors or good casts? Or will the people making the movies see them as a toss-off in between their "real" movies? Bryan Singer, the X-Men movie director, seems to be taking the movie seriously, not as a goof. Although Hale Berry caused wide-spread dislike by telling some interviewer that she'd been "reduced" to taking the role of Storm. Reduce your sorry backside right back home, missy! On a more disturbing note, it's becoming apparent that the financial people micromanaging Marvel now could care less about the comic books and want to move the company more into a media company. Which might explain why Marvel seems to consist solely of fifteen titles with "X" in them, and Spiderman. Ugh. I love Spiderman, but for the comic industry to survive it needs more vigor than that. I remember when comic books were on grocery store shelves. I'd love to see that again, a vibrant comic book market. Focussing on media at the exclusion of The Work does not make me happy.
RE: Hellfire! By: Brian Carnell on 5/22/2000; 3:40 PM "I love Spiderman, but for the comic industry to survive it needs more vigor than that. I remember when comic books were on grocery store shelves. I'd love to see that again, a vibrant comic book market. Focussing on media at the exclusion of The Work does not make me happy." The grocery stores where I live do tend to have comic books on their shelves, but I'm not sure that's necessarily all that good of a thing. When I was a kid you could find a lot more comic books in grocery stores, but while I still love the comics I bought as a kid, they aren't the sort of thing that I would choose to follow if I started reading comics as an adult. That said, I wonder what you mean about a vibrant comic book market. I can go into a comic book store today and buy comic books that blow away pretty much everything on the shelves when I first started reading comics in the late 1970s. There's more variety and quality stories than ever. To my mind, that's actually the comic industry's biggest problem -- the books are so varied that there's no longer handful of target markets. For example, I love Western-oriented comic books, and I bet the demographic for that isn't enough to sustain a title long term in a specialty comic book shop, much less a grocery store. At the grocery store near my house you can pick up say one of the DC Batman or Superman titles or one of the seemingly endless Marvel "X" variants, but that's about it.
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