All Hail Comic Books

Comic books definitely seem to be getting their due in the literary, cinematic and cultural realms.

Literary. My pal Patrick just published Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse : Paper Dolls and Spider Women which features some from the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets. While dense, pick it up from Amazon and help my friend out!

Cinematic. Of course everyone knows about Spider-Man, X-Men and other recent big budget Hollywood adaptations. But there are some upcoming works that both excite me and leave a little nervous.

• Sin City. Friggin' A, this looks awesome. I am coincidentally reading this right now, and I am excited about it.
• Constantine. Um. Very, very nervous.
• The New Superman Movie. Optimistic (Bryan Singer after all). But now that we have Smallville, I feel like the myth is getting a good freshening up as it is now.
• The New Batman Movie. Yay! I really like choice of Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne -- he did a great turn in the Machinst (a DVD rental; no need to see it on the big screen, but worth watching). The director did both Insomnia and Memento, both very good and very dark movies.
• Elektra. Basically the only thing good from that gawd-awful Daredevil movie, but from the clips, I am dubious. I love Jennifer as much as the next lesbian, but still there seems to be entirely too much hair.

Cultural. Well, perhaps it is just the permeation of all the movies, but it definitely seems that there are more and more places where comic books are the germ of cultural sentiments. I even saw it permeate Christmas Stories (3 MP3 audioplays from the 70s starring Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman and the Spirit of Christmas!) Or, there is the instance where a television auteur, Joss Whedon (the creative force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly) wrote the introduction to Planetary: The Fourth Man, an obscure comic book graphic novel. Since comic book readers (and I suppose writers) are getting older (the younguns don't read comics; they play Nintendo) will the new ideas come from games?