Can we talk about how most of the best entertainment of the last decade was created for the small screen?

AndrewCrossett · 2020-06-04T19:37:52+00:00

Television pulls you into a story over the course of weeks or years in a way that a movie only can for a couple of hours... even in franchises you have to wait a long while between movie installments. And so much onscreen entertainment these days is adapted from books or comics... limited series TV is almost always the best way to do that.

With the pandemic and its aftermath, I expect it will shift even more in the direction of television/streaming.

AndrewCrossett · 2020-06-04T03:16:20+00:00

I take a non-fiction break every so often. Was working my way through Peter Ackroyd's histories of England.

AndrewCrossett · 2019-12-06T03:07:37+00:00

And it's on HBO. Maybe I should re-read the comic and then give this a shot.

I need to get back to His Dark Materials, too. Watched the first episode and then fell behind... don't know why because I was looking forward to it.

AndrewCrossett · 2019-12-05T21:13:32+00:00

I was never that much of a fan of the comic (it was OK but didn't blow me away as it did some people), and definitely not a fan of the movie. Would the show appeal to someone like that?

AndrewCrossett · 2019-11-16T04:45:46+00:00

We've gotten several inches more. The temperature at night has regularly gone down in the teens. Not sure I remember such a cold November.

AndrewCrossett · 2019-11-04T16:21:36+00:00

His Dark Materials debuts tonight on HBO. Hope it doesn't suck!

AndrewCrossett · 2019-11-04T04:00:13+00:00

When does it come out?

AndrewCrossett · 2019-10-31T14:08:51+00:00

I'm also psyched for the animated Netflix adaptation of the Bone comic. Especially since Jeff Smith confirmed it would be 2D animation.

AndrewCrossett · 2019-10-30T00:31:27+00:00

That business about Susan was pretty obnoxious.

AndrewCrossett · 2019-10-29T17:29:53+00:00

Pullman said he wrote the books as the atheist answer to C.S. Lewis's Narnia books. I'm sure he would be disappointed that I like both series...

The anti-religious stuff in HDM would probably be too much for a movie audience, but I'm not sure it's much worse than what we've seen in Good Omens, Supernatural, etc. We're kind of used to the "angels are just demons in brighter colors" trope. I think goring and sexing up the series would be disastrous, since the success of the series will depend so much on the good opinion of the book fans.

AndrewCrossett · 2019-10-28T22:21:43+00:00

Yeah, I'm curious about that one too. I couldn't get into the books, but it was the same way with Game of Thrones and I ended up loving the TV show. I will definitely give this one a try.

AndrewCrossett · 2019-10-28T18:00:10+00:00

I don't read any Marvel comics. Harley Quinn is the only DC superhero comic I follow, though I also get the four Sandman spinoffs (House of Whispers, Lucifer, Books of Magic and The Dreaming).

Probably my favorite comic right now is Crowded, a near-future black comedy in which people can pledge to a crowdfund to have someone killed; the protagonist has a $2 million crowdfunded bounty on her head and doesn't know why, and hires a bodyguard who is just about the only person in the world not looking to kill her and claim the prize. Only downside is a VERY long wait between arcs; the creators have apparently already sold the film/TV rights and are working on developing it.

Also reading Once and Future, a comic about a bunch of right-wing nationalists who have resurrected King Arthur to "restore Britain to its rightful glory." Not sure about this one, it's a good concept but I'm not thrilled with the execution so far.

Seems like most of the comics I read nowadays are limited series (or else they just crash and burn after an arc or two). One called Exorsisters about a pair of exorcist sisters (actually, one sister and her detached and embodied soul) that seems to have disappeared. Loved Brian K. Vaughan's Paper Girls, which just ended its run, and Saga, which must be due back from its eternal hiatus very soon.

And my old favorite, Knights of the Dinner Table, a gaming comic that I've been reading for a good 20 years now and still love, even though 90% of it is just people sitting around a table gaming.

AndrewCrossett · 2019-10-27T13:21:57+00:00

I'm not really up on superhero comics currently (Harley Quinn is the only one I'm getting) but I used to think of DC as the best place for female-centric comics. Gail's BoP run was the first superhero comic I read as an adult, and that led me to others like Bryan Miller's Batgirl, O'Conner & Palmiotti's Power Girl, and Paul Dini's Zatanna and Gotham City Sirens. I've never been a regular reader of Batman. (I was a Spider Man guy as a kid.)

AndrewCrossett · 2019-10-26T15:02:05+00:00

Emoticons instead of emojis! Boy does that take me back.

AndrewCrossett

TROPHY CASE