I was just thinking I should reread Gotham Central. I never expected to enjoy a series about the GCPD, especially one without Commissioner Gordon, but I was happy to be wrong.
The artist, Michael Lark, deserves a ton of credit for keeping all those non-super characters visually distinct and recognizable. His characters needed to "act," and they did.
Agreed: that’s often a problem that non-superhero/non-fantasy comics encounter, when the artist isn’t able to properly differentiate ‘ordinary’ characters. Gotham Central nails it.
I have thoughts, but today isn't one in which I can take the time to write them down.
I'll just digress into the "The Transformers: The Movie 40th Anniversary Apology Tour" for a moment. It's a funny bit of marketing, but if that movie HADN'T killed off Optimus Prime and dozens of other characters, we would'nt still talk about it. That added stakes to the franchise. And, of course, generated an actual emotional response from the audience beyond the vague "Yay!" that the good guys won another formula episode.
That's a good list of stuff I want to cross paths with.
Re. Kieron Gillen, when I was a teenage nerd in the late 20th Century, he used to write for Amiga Power, and we'd all look forward to his magnificently funny and weird ravings in the same way Charlie Brooker absolutely lit up PC Zone when he was allowed to fully go off the rails. It's delightful to see both of them coming super-accomplished in a fashion that's 100% true to the way they wrote back in the 80s.
The quality of writers in the gaming press in the 90s and 2000s was inexplicably high. KG went on to co-found Rock Paper Shotgun, which I read religiously for about 10 years. The other writers from there have all gone on to do excellent work as well: Jim Rossignol made some games himself and now does TTRPG, Alec Meer has a lovely newsletter about transforming robots, John Walker still does games journalism that’s noticeably better than…well, everything else.
I used to read Amiga Power and Amiga Format in the early 90s, even though I didn’t have an Amiga. I’d read them cover-to-cover, dreaming of one day owning one, yet I never did. As such, I’d read an entire walkthrough for The Secret of Monkey Island, yet didn’t actually play the game properly until the early 2000s on PC…..
"According to Wikipedia, the character was originally called Mr Zero in the comic, but the 1960s TV show renamed him to ‘Mr Freeze’. The camp is real."
Question: What do George Sanders, Otto Preminger and Eli Wallach have in common?
Answer: They all played Mr. Freeze on the '60s television show.
And yes, he was a camp character, until the 1990s animated TV show, which gave him a truly tragic backstory and treated him as serious as cancer. One of the remarkable things about that show was the amount of realistic gravitas the actors and producers gave to the villains, to treat them more than just walking punchlines, and he got the biggest facelift.
I was just thinking I should reread Gotham Central. I never expected to enjoy a series about the GCPD, especially one without Commissioner Gordon, but I was happy to be wrong.
The artist, Michael Lark, deserves a ton of credit for keeping all those non-super characters visually distinct and recognizable. His characters needed to "act," and they did.
Agreed: that’s often a problem that non-superhero/non-fantasy comics encounter, when the artist isn’t able to properly differentiate ‘ordinary’ characters. Gotham Central nails it.
I have thoughts, but today isn't one in which I can take the time to write them down.
I'll just digress into the "The Transformers: The Movie 40th Anniversary Apology Tour" for a moment. It's a funny bit of marketing, but if that movie HADN'T killed off Optimus Prime and dozens of other characters, we would'nt still talk about it. That added stakes to the franchise. And, of course, generated an actual emotional response from the audience beyond the vague "Yay!" that the good guys won another formula episode.
That's a good list of stuff I want to cross paths with.
Re. Kieron Gillen, when I was a teenage nerd in the late 20th Century, he used to write for Amiga Power, and we'd all look forward to his magnificently funny and weird ravings in the same way Charlie Brooker absolutely lit up PC Zone when he was allowed to fully go off the rails. It's delightful to see both of them coming super-accomplished in a fashion that's 100% true to the way they wrote back in the 80s.
The quality of writers in the gaming press in the 90s and 2000s was inexplicably high. KG went on to co-found Rock Paper Shotgun, which I read religiously for about 10 years. The other writers from there have all gone on to do excellent work as well: Jim Rossignol made some games himself and now does TTRPG, Alec Meer has a lovely newsletter about transforming robots, John Walker still does games journalism that’s noticeably better than…well, everything else.
I used to read Amiga Power and Amiga Format in the early 90s, even though I didn’t have an Amiga. I’d read them cover-to-cover, dreaming of one day owning one, yet I never did. As such, I’d read an entire walkthrough for The Secret of Monkey Island, yet didn’t actually play the game properly until the early 2000s on PC…..
"According to Wikipedia, the character was originally called Mr Zero in the comic, but the 1960s TV show renamed him to ‘Mr Freeze’. The camp is real."
Question: What do George Sanders, Otto Preminger and Eli Wallach have in common?
Answer: They all played Mr. Freeze on the '60s television show.
And yes, he was a camp character, until the 1990s animated TV show, which gave him a truly tragic backstory and treated him as serious as cancer. One of the remarkable things about that show was the amount of realistic gravitas the actors and producers gave to the villains, to treat them more than just walking punchlines, and he got the biggest facelift.
I did not know about all that history! Thanks, David.