Fresh Loaf

HOT SEAT: Veeps

The playful history bookVeeps: Profiles in Insignificance proves that the vice president typically holds far more importance as an election-year campaign symbol than any real authority once in office. Despite the recent fuss over Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, the vice president traditionally holds so little influence that the U.S. government scarcely notices if he’s gone. Throughout history, the veep office has been left vacant 16 times when vice presidents have either died in office or succeeded a president, for a total of 37 years with no occupant.

Published by Marietta’s Top Shelf Productions and featuring a hardback cover design that resembles a weathered high school text, Veeps offers puckish profiles of all the vice presidents, from John Adams through Dick Cheney. Writer Bill Kelter reveals a keen instinct for juicy anecdotes, while illustrator Wayne Shellabarger provides realistic but less-than-flattering portraits as well as amusing editorial cartoons of historical low points. (more…)

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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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