Fresh Loaf

ELECTRIC SLIDE: Unlike animated features, live-action adaptations require intricate and expensive special effects, such as Jon Osterman's (Billy Crudup) transformation into Dr. Manhattan for 'Watchmen.' (Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

After more than 20 years, DC Comics’ Watchmen will make the quantum leap from comic-book page to live-action film with its release this Friday. If hype and anticipation translate to even a fraction of box office success, Watchmen will affirm the popularity of superheroes — and even R-rated antiheroes — as Hollywood’s saviors. The blockbuster could join the ranks of such record breakers as the Spider-Man trilogy and the Oscar-winning The Dark Knight.

Superhero movies make the transition from ink and paper to celluloid the hard way, however. Saving the world and defeating flamboyant evildoers is the least of it. Simply making an exciting, convincing superhero movie that doesn’t insult an audience’s intelligence practically demands a miracle. Cinematic, super-powered derring-do requires massively expensive special effects, along with the challenge of casting flesh-and-blood actors to play literally two-dimensional, archetypal roles with impossible physiques and ridiculous costumes.

For every hit like The Dark Knight, there’s at least one costly flop: take the nipple-costumed Batman & Robin or Halle Berry’s embarrassing Catwoman. Even with the successes, audiences face flaws like the obvious CGI-rendered Spider-Man and Hulk in their first movies, or unfortunate choices such as Ian McKellen’s dumb-looking Magneto helmet in the X-Men films.

Animation holds out an easier approach; it goes with comic book stories as comfortably as a cape and cowl. The best cartoon features and TV series can do an end run around the real world’s limitations to offer an unlimited canvas that emulates iconic comic book art while putting exciting designs into motion. The right voice performances can even convey emotional heft without hanging a tights-wearing movie star from wires.

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The Jacob Javits Center was the epicenter of the American comic book industry last weekend, as editors, creators, and business types from almost every major publisher congregated at the fourth annual New York Comic Convention. They were surrounded by an at times impenetrable wall of fans, as several thousands of comic book and pop culture obsessives clogged the convention center hallways. It was as if the economy wasn’t halfway through a Triple Lindy.

One thing overshadows all else at a comic convention, though, stealing the spotlight from the panels, the creator signings, the video game demos, the dealer tables, even the 50-minute previews of unreleased Pixar films. I’m talking about costumes, and the fully grown individuals that spend exorbitant amounts of time, money, and effort on them. They call it cosplay, and it was inescapable at the NYCC.

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1. Trackside Tavern destroyed by fire (In a sad day for horny drinkers on the prowl, Decatur’s beloved dive bar and hook-up spot was gutted.)

2. Dr. Lowery’s inaugural benediction riffs on the blues (Weird how few media outlets picked up on Lowery’s inaugural nod to Big Bill Broonzy’s “Black, Brown and White.”)

3. Killing what’s left of the press (A legislative proposal that would decimate small-town newspapers. As if the print industry needs any more bad news.)

4. 2009 Georgia General Assembly struggles with budget, gridlock (You think YOU’RE broke? The state is $2 billion in the hole!)

5. Readers can’t keep up with Spidey and Barack (Comic book featuring America’s favorite superhero flies off the shelves. Spider-man is pissed.)

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GUN SHOW: Ray Stevenson as Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, in "Punisher: War Zone"

TITLE: Punisher: War Zone

GENRE: Ultraviolent comic book

THE PITCH: Ruthless anti-gangster vigilante Frank Castle (“Rome’s” Ray Stevenson), a.k.a. “The Punisher,” engages in escalating battles with a hideously scarred mob boss called “Jigsaw” (“The Wire’s” Dominic West).

MONEY SHOTS: The Punisher spins upside down from a chandelier and machine guns lots of bad guys in sort of an NRA version of a Cirque du Soleil act. West’s gangster falls into a recycled glass crusher and gets a new look. When a thief makes a mid-air flip, The Punisher explodes him with a grenade launcher. A bad guy shoots the heads off a little girl’s dolls just for kicks. A kickboxing brawl in a bathroom nods to German director Lexi Alexander’s background as a champion martial artist.

BODY COUNT: I make it close to 50: The Punisher routinely kills goons in bulk. Most of the violence seems unusually head specific, and includes a chair leg to the eye, a machete to the head, an old lady with her head mostly blown off, a fork through the throat, and a scene in which the Punisher pretty much caves in someone’s face with a punch.

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Scott McCloud, a terrific comic book creator who may be today’s most thoughtful and popular advocate for the medium, will be lecturing on “Comics: A Medium in Transition” at Agnes Scott College tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. McCloud created the beloved comic book Zot! in the 1980s, but he’s currently best-known as a comic book theorist for his three books Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. I wrote about McCloud before he spoke at Georgia Tech in early 2007:

The ironic thing about Understanding Comics and its two follow-ups is that they represent some of the most exciting, engaging uses of the comic-book form in the past two decades — they just happen to be about comics. McCloud returned to the format for what he calls a more “dense, problematic” book, 2000’s Reinventing Comics. Partly, it’s a history of the trends that have kept the art form in the culture’s margins, and partly a manifesto for change and new possibilities, with particular zeal over online, digital comics.

For a fun, neat-o example of McCloud’s ideas about the visual possibilities of on-line comics, go to page three of “Zot! Online: Hearts and Minds” at scottmccloud.com. You’ll find a comic-book story with a panel that, in real life, would be 10-12 feet high, and which moves in an almost cinematic way when you scroll down. It’s cool! The site features McCloud’s other on-line essays in comic book style, as well as an opinionated, in-depth links page about other on-line comics.

Incidentally, earlier this year McCloud reprinted Zot! 1987-1991, The Complete Black-and-White Collection, an anthology of the comic book’s best issues, which offers sophisticated, sensitive portrayals of adolescence alongside sci-fi derring-do with ray guns and robots. By the series’ end, McCloud focused on the “My So-Called Life”-style teen realism at the expense of the escapist aspects. It’s a cult classic.

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Since The Dark Knight is finally in theaters (and apparently already broke records for midnight shows last night), it’s high time to get all obsessed and bent out of shape over the next geeky superhero adaptation: Watchmen. The adaptation of the landmark graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen will open on March 6 of 2009, but an elaborate teaser trailer is attached to The Dark Knight, and in a way, it’s even cooler than it looks:

Watchmen was a 12-issue miniseries published in the mid-1980s, and is generally considered to be one of the most complex and innovative comic book stories every published — it’s called the medium’s equivalent to Citizen Kane. Watchmen offers a revisionist portrait of superheroes set in a dysutopian, alternate-history version of America in which, among other things, the United States won the Vietnam war and made the Asian nation the 51st state of the union. (You can see a glimpse of Dr. Manhattan, the book’s equivalent of Superman, killing a Viet Cong.) I wrote my 1989 master’s thesis on Watchmen and can attest that nearly all of the images in the trailer are completely faithful with the graphic novel, a rarity in Hollywood.

Writer Alan Moore, who currently publishes comics through Marietta’s Top Shelf Productions, has been badly served by misbegotten Hollywood adaptations like LXG (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). And even though the trailer looks pitch-perfect, can Zack Snyder, director of the similarly faithful but hardly subtle graphic novel adaptation 300, possibly shoehorn enough of the book’s dense content into a satisfying two hour movie? Keeping watching.

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Some early notices for the epic-length Batman drama The Dark Knight suggest that the late Heath Ledger gives the “definitive” performance as The Joker, the Caped Crusader’s sociopathic arch-nemesis. It’s true that Ledger does tremendous, terrifying work in the film — if he’d lived, he could have launched a second career playing psychos. I’m not sure, however, that anyone can give the definitive performance of such a pop culture mainstay. In high-brow terms, it’s like expecting a definitive Macbeth or Blanche DuBois. Like any enduring fictional character, the Joker has a long history that reflects changes in his target audience and creative staff — we get different Jokers for different times. Following are five of the traits that make The Clown Prince of Crime possibly the most memorable and timeless villain of them all.

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