Tag: Fantastic Four

Movie review – Fantastic Four: First Steps

The positive buzz to the new film Fantastic Four: First Steps assuaged my resistance to seeing yet another Marvel Movie. As any member of the MMMS (Merry Marvel Marching Society) could tell you, there have been previous FF films that ranged from disappointing to pretty terrible.

An example of the latter is the unreleased Roger Corman film (1994), which I saw on YouTube a decade or so ago. It was so bad that it was mildly entertaining. I thought the 2005 film was pretty pedestrian. The 2007 follow-up has been on my DVD, unwatched for months.

The new film is “set against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world.” A reliable source tells me that MARVELS, the miniseries with Alex Ross art, appears to be the primary influence here. What I know for sure is that it worked for me. I got the Earth-828 reference; August 28 is the birthday of FF co-creator Jack Kirby. Whatever the source,  the film’s aesthetic wowed me, leaning into the comics of the 1960s without feeling stuck in the past.

The team

The team’s interaction was interesting. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) feels responsible/guilty for the team’s transformation four years earlier. Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) is the most interesting of the four. Unlike her comic book counterpart in the 1960s, this woman is fierce. She loves and is frustrated by her overthinking husband, Reed.

Sue’s brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) is impulsive but talented. The script gave Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) short shrift, with just a hint of a potential romance. Herbie the Robot was integral to the plot. 

I wondered how the group would, or could, defend Earth from Galactus, the powerful eater of worlds (Ralph Ineson), and his mysterious herald, Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). And there’s a personal complication. It seemed like a credible solution. 

A person who is the biggest FF fan I know has seen the film twice before I’d seen it once. The Rotten Tomatoes score was 86% positive with critics, 92% with fans. I saw it on a hot Tuesday afternoon at Spectrum 8 in Albany. 

I liked the vibe, optimism, and unity of the general public in the film —well, most of the time. However, I’m not sure it was enough to make me watch the sequel. Not incidentally, at least one person in the theater left immediately when the credits started, missing the Four Years Later postlude. I liked the cartoon at the very end of the film.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps Main Theme and more, music by Michael Giacchino. And if you are obsessed – I am not – 47 minutes of BREAKDOWN – Marvel Easter Eggs You Missed!

Spider-Man, and other films, non-MCU

ANOTHER iteration?

The_Amazing_Spider-Man_theatrical_posterI started watching the movies in what was eventually labeled the Marvel Cinematic Universe back when it started in in 2008. Now for those of you NOT seeped in these things, not every Marvel character that appeared in a movie this century is an MCU film.

For convoluted aesthetic and licensing reasons, the films with the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Blade, and Deadpool films, among others, are not part of the canon. The Spider-Man films in 2002/2004/2007 and 2012/2014 are not MCU. But the recent ones with Tom Holland, including Captain America: Civil War and the last two Avengers films, ARE MCU. Got that? There will be a test.

Despite having had collected comic books for over a quarter-century, primarily Marvel products – and I still own some Marvel Masterworks books – I hadn’t watched all that many of the films. Before I tackle the MCU, I thought I’d check to see which ones of the other Marvel films I’ve seen.

Howard the Duck (1986) – the movie was previewed in Albany in a movie theater, sponsored by FantaCo, the comic book store where I worked. I related to the “trapped in a world that he never made” description in the comic book, which also transferred to the film. It was roundly panned, and perhaps deservedly so. Yet I had an odd fondness for it.

Fantastic Four (1994 – unreleased) – at some point in the 2010s I saw this, possibly on YouTube. It was not very good. In fact, it was so awful, it was mildly enjoyable.

Friendly, neighborhood…

Spider-Man (2002) and Spider-Man 2 (2004) . These are the ones starring Tobey Maguire. I saw the first one in a cinema, the second at a resort in the Berkshires. Never saw the third one. I liked the first two enough to get them on DVD.

X2 (2003) – I watched in a hotel in Oneonta on New Year’s Eve many years back. Maybe because I didn’t see the first X-Men film, it didn’t make as much sense as I thought it should.

Fantastic Four (2005) – I thought Michael Chiklis was actually quite good in this. That is high praise since he was all but unrecognizable as The Thing. The rest of the story, as I recall, was pretty pedestrian. That’s necessary, I suppose for an introductory piece, but still… Never saw the follow-up.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) – for reasons I’ll explain soon, I have been watching a LOT of MCU movies this summer. So in early July 2020, I needed a palate cleanser before starting on Avengers: Infinity War.

Why did we need ANOTHER iteration of the web-slinger? I say that as someone whose favorite Marvel character is Peter Parker, the awkward young man with a secret.

Maybe we didn’t. But I felt Andrew Garfield was a credible Peter. And since the earlier Sam Raimi stories focused on his relationship with Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), it seemed natural that the series deal with his first love, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone). Her internship with Osgood Corp may have been a bit too coincidental for my taste.

Still, I appreciated their relationship. Her father, the cop (Denis Leary) felt like a real dad, as did Peter’s uncle Ben (Martin Sheen). Aunt May (Sally Field) fretted a lot. If the villain was more tortured soul than actually evil (Rhys Ifans as Curt Connor/the Lizard), that would be in keeping with the comic book narrative.

Ultimately, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the films I had seen a decade and a half earlier. Still, it was time well-spent. I’m still warming up to the new Spider-Man. But that’s a story for another time.

Comic book creator John Byrne is 70

FantaCo Chronicles

John ByrneBack in my FantaCo days, John Byrne saved my bacon. Twice.

For those of you who are not comic book fans, Byrne is a British-born writer and artist of superhero comics. Notably, he had a stellar run with Chris Claremont that made the X-Men the most popular title in the Marvel Universe starting in the late 1970s. He’s worked on many Marvel titles and a few from DC, as you can see here. In 1981, Byrne took over the writing and drawing of Marvel’s first superhero group, the Fantastic Four.

When I worked at FantaCo, we created a series of magazines about Marvel characters. The first was the X-Men Chronicles in 1981, which I edited, with a cover by former X-Men artist Dave Cockrum, It turned out to be monumentally successful, with a print run of 50,000.

The next two were to cover the Fantastic Four, edited by me, and Daredevil, compiled by Mitch Cohn, in early 1982. I no longer know how we did it, but we were able to get several name artists and writers to participate in our project.

Wait, Tom Skulan, publisher and store owner, remembers that several came directly from other artists who had done work for us “who felt that their friends would appreciate the high rates we were paying.” Mitch, in particular, often pumped creators for other phone numbers.

We DID have an impressive Rolodex. (Hey, kids: a Rolodex is “a rotating file device used to store business contact information. Its name is a portmanteau of the words rolling and index.” I have my red one SOMEWHERE, I think.)

Problem solver

spider-man chroniclesJohn Byrne agreed not only to do the front cover of the Fantastic Four Chronicles but the centerspread. He also wrote A Personal Reflection re: the FF. We needed to print the front and back covers of the Fantastic Four and Daredevil Chronicles “two-up”, i.e., at the same time.

The problem is that I didn’t have the back cover from prominent artist George Perez. What to do, what to do?

Finally, I called Byrne, who suggested using his front cover as the back cover as well. No charge. Eventually, the Perez cover showed and we used it as the inside back cover. It bumped a piece by local artist Joe Fludd, who was/is a big Perez fan. George, BTW, did the cover for the Avengers Chronicle, edited by Mitch.

I’m working on the Spider-Man Chronicles. Spider-Man was my favorite character. Mitch got Frank Miller, who had done the Daredevil Chronicles cover, to agree to do the same for Spidey. Then, at the last moment, Miller called and pulled out! I have everything else finished.

In desperation, I call John Byrne. Can he whip up SOMETHING? And quickly? I swear that four days later, the cover arrives in the mail. And it’s great! The book schedule is saved.

I haven’t kept up with Byrne since I largely gave up reading comics in the mid-1990s. I know that he and his X-Men collaborator Chris Claremont were entered into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2015. But thanks, John Byrne. And happy natal day.

Jack Kirby would have been 100

just search Mark Evanier’s page for info about Jack Kirby, or at least go to his August 28 posts each year.

Jack-KirbyThe Wikipedia post reads: “Jack Kirby (/ˈkɜrbi/; August 28, 1917 – February 6, 1994), born Jacob Kurtzberg, was an American comic book artist, writer, and editor widely regarded as one of the medium’s major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators.” This is understatement; he was known as King Kirby for a reason.

Check out this page for just some of the characters he was responsible for creating or co-creating.

Lots of people can write more eloquently than I about Jack Continue reading “Jack Kirby would have been 100”

Antics of comic books and film

Marvel can (and probably will) bring back the Fantastic Four, because, as someone who read the four-color items for three decades, almost nothing is permanent in the comic books.

FourEverI was, as noted, very happy that Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Marvel Universe (at worst) won his legal action with Marvel Comics. But it points out how much money must be involved, a rumored $30 million to the Kirby heirs.

It appears that Marvel Comics is canceling the Fantastic Four comic book, one of its flagship titles, and it’s likely it’s because of too little money, not from the comic book, but from the movies.

Before the superhero-movie renaissance, a struggling Marvel sold the FF’s film rights (along with those of the X-Men) to 20th Century Fox at terms very favorable to Fox. Fast-forward to now: Fox is rebooting the Fantastic Four film franchise and Marvel gets hardly any money out of the movie, unlike the insane cash it makes on flicks made by its own studio (Avengers, Captain America, and the other titles in that universe) and the Spider-Man franchise (owned by Sony, who cut a good bargain with Marvel a while back)…

So, it would seem, if Marvel cancels the comic book, the movies won’t do as well. If Fox stops making movies, the rights to the movie portrayals revert to Marvel. THEN Marvel can (and probably will) bring back the FF, because, as someone who read the four-color items for three decades, almost nothing is permanent in the comic books.

Now Marvel can’t very well dump the X-Men, their most successful comic book for decades. But they could, as noted X-Men scribe Chris Claremont wrote, forbid writers from creating new characters lest they become the property of Fox. This does not serve the comic book well, I believe.

My only horse in this race is that once upon a time, I edited magazines about the X-Men and the Fantastic Four (and Spider-Man), so I have a historical affection for the characters, though I haven’t read much of them in two decades.

As this infographic suggests, the movies of both Marvel and DC are very important.

John Green tells why he hates Batman. But if you’re in the Albany area, check out Batman’s 75th Anniversary Celebration at Albany Public Library branches this week.

Ramblin' with Roger
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