Fresh Loaf

1. Atlanta THUNDERSNOW!!!! (Yes, that was last week. Snow. Inches of it. Followed by 80-degree bliss. Georgia is rad.)

2. Man found dead in Capitol office building (State employee apparently took his own life.)

3. Gena Evans: ‘Best day’ at GDOT was day I was fired (What the former Department of Transportation commissioner meant to say was, “Take this job and shove it!”)

4. Speakeasy with Outkast’s Andre Benjamin (Rapper’s “Class of 3000″ cartoon transitions from TV to the stage.)

5. Animated superheroes burst from shadows of live-action films (In other animation news, comic-book protagonists transition from ink to celluloid.)

(Image from Regator’s “thundersnow” t-shirt page on Zazzle)

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A testament to both the popularity of the original Watchmen graphic novel and the excitement over the new movie version (released today and reviewed here) is the sheer quantity of Watchmen homages and parodies in cyberspace. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since Snakes on a Plane-mania of 2007, which seemed to abruptly end when Snakes on a Plane finally opened. One of the cleverest, most widely-diseminated Watchmen riffs I’ve seen is this clip, which envisions the story as a 1980s kiddie cartoon:

Other video parodies include a pretty good one that spoofs “Two and a Half Men” and a weaker sitcom riff, “I Love Rorschach.”

More esoteric quips: Comics Critics wonders “What if there were a Watchmen video game?” Boingboing envisions “Watchpeanuts,” as if the comic book were drawn by Charles Schulz of “Peanuts” fame. The New Yorker magazine’s on-line cover contest re-imagines its mascot Eustace Tilley as “Rorschach Tilley.” Someone Photoshopped the official poster into Swatchmen. Plus I have to mention that several years ago, “The Simpsons” made a passing reference to “Watchmen Babies: V For Vacation.“

Update: I’ll add more as they come up, like Ombudsmen (Popeye as Rorschach). Slate wonders What if Woody Allen directed Watchmen? (Kind of tepid, but Slate seems to hate the movie and the graphic novel alike.)

(Thanks to Allison Keane for drawing my attention to some of these.)

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1) Alcove Gallery hosts Cartoon Madness IV: Circus.

2) The D.A.I.R. Project stages aerial dance production Views Through a Window.

3) Richard Thompson plays Variety Playhouse.

4) André Benjamin’s Class of 3000 Live opens at the Alliance Theater’s Hertz Stage.

5) Watchmen opens in area theaters.

(Art by Ben Boling)

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LOVE IS DA BOMB: Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman, left) and Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson)

Upon its publication in the mid-1980s, the 12-issue graphic novel Watchmen earned a reputation for being “the Citizen Kane of comic books.” That’s not just hyperbole: Both works feature multiple narrators trying to piece together an enigmatic death, although in Watchmen, the ensemble happens to be former masked heroes, sleuthing against a backdrop of impending nuclear war.

Like Orson Welles, Watchmen writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons drew on seemingly every stylistic innovation in their respective media and shot them with lightning, raising the bar for a popular but increasingly sophisticated art form.

Zack Snyder’s long-awaited film adaptation of Watchmen is not a classic worthy of Citizen Kane. Thankfully, it’s not a bomb on a par with Howard the Duck, either. It comes close to being something like A Clockwork Orange for superhero movies — a dystopian satire marked by meticulous craftsmanship and sluggish pacing, of incongruous music and horrific violence, of heavy-handed sermonizing and astonishing imagery.

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CL’s Chanté LaGon and Curt Holman chat about how superhero movies are making a splash at the box office (The Dark Knight and the upcoming Watchmen, for example). Holman discusses how superheroes also are transitioning well in animated form, even without all the over-the-top CGI special effects. Case in point: Wonder Woman.

Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.

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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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Found this in my inbox this morning:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,
Based on your recent shopping history, we thought you might like to know that Amazon Gourmet offers this special coffee:

Nite Owl Dark Roast Coffee

Enjoy the brand of coffee featured in the upcoming film “Watchmen” — and learn more about this “subversively good” brew at Amazon.com’s blog Omnivoracious.

And the (shameless) marketing campaigns begin…

(Image courtesy Amazon.com)

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Every year Comic-Con steals some of the thunder of Atlanta’s Dragon*Con (this year held Aug. 29-Sep. 1). The San Diego comic book, fantasy and all around geek showbiz convention has gradually become Hollywood’s unofficial venue for hyping genre projects. That neat-0 Iron Man trailer from last year, for instance, debuted at Comic-Con. A friend of mine who lives in Los Angeles and frequently attends Comic-Con said that the studio hype is getting a little out of hand: “This is the year that Hollywood Officially Ruined Everything.” I wasn’t there, but here are a few apparent highlights. (Any of you who did attend Comic-Con, please let us know what else looked cool.)

Pixar presented an extremely short teaser trailer for next year’s Up — which, based on the company’s track record, could be one of next year’s best movies. Up stars the voice of Ed Asner and has been called “”a Pixar-meets-Miyazaki art film version of About Schmidt,” so it could be the studio’s riskiest venture yet:

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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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