Geekboys everywhere are wetting their briefs today while anticipating their viewing of the Watchmen flick, but, naturally, the whole affair will blow over soon in a marketing blitz for the next comic book adaptation to the big screen. Looking ahead a few years, I fear for the trashing of my favourite series, 100 Bullets (see a previous discussion), which is barreling towards its own series conclusion (at Issue #100!) at some point in the next few months. I just finished the twelfth graphic novel and am fairly confident that the series will end in a bloody, violent triumph for Ms. Dizzy Cordova, but only time will tell. I just hope that Hollywood doesn’t eventually transform the saga of the Trust and Minutemen, like many pieces of literature, into utter crap. At this point, I remain guardedly optimistic, if only for the fact that comics generally have a jump start on their adaptation to film:
Back in that fulminating midpoint of the last century, comic books were seen as degradations of literature. Their pictorial spoonfeeding would atrophy a kid’s interest in the printed word. Their bloodthirsty action would corrupt his or her moral being.
Today the best comics are honoured as near-prophetic screeds: their mix of words and pictures form a pop-hieroglyphic art that tilts at global or social anxieties, through fable and fantasy, and interrogates notions of heroism, while occupying an aesthetic vantage ground between literature and cinema.
Comics are made up of frames in motionless sequence, movies of frames in kinetic sequence. The second merely hitches a ride on that human quirk called the persistence of vision. The Oxford Dictionary defines this as “the continuance of a visual impression after the exciting cause is removed”. (“Exciting cause”! On the high seas of sensory impact, emotion is a stowaway even in phrases intended for scientific neutrality.) When a picture flashes on a screen from the projector, the mind carries it forward to the next picture. Ingmar Bergman, in his memoirs, commented on the miracle whereby human perception erases the shuttered intervals between frames, annihilating the fact that a large percentage of a watched film is actually complete darkness.
Unfortunately, in the case of 100 Bullets, there’s already a shitty video game in the works based upon the series, which means that the interest of Uwe Boll may be piqued as a result. The man really knows how to ruin a video game, but he’d better damn well stay away 100 Bullets. If Boll even so much as breathes upon the greatness associated with writer Brian Azzarello and artist Eduardo Risso, well, let’s just say I’m gonna have to find an attaché of my very own.
More info on 100 Bullets can be found at the DC Comics/Vertigo and 100Bullets.co.uk websites.
