James and the Giant Problem

Being a fan can really suck sometimes.  You find something which speaks to you on a level you yourself don’t fully understand, it brings you joy.  You start buying stuff related to it.  You own the movies, the comics, you watch the videos of the games because you don’t have time to play them all.  It becomes part of your identity, loving anything even remotely related to it.  You see more people start loving it, or maybe they already did, and people with money notice.  Now they start pumping serious money into it. The real test begins, do enough people love it for the same reasons you do?  If so, you are in luck, you are going to be getting so much content you won’t be able to keep up, I promise.  If not…well, then you are in a tight spot.  God help you if the general audience doesn’t just “not care” but actively condemns what you love.  Now you can get ready for an onslaught of, you’re wrong, I don’t trust your opinion, and the general assumption that you don’t know what you are talking about.

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Dancing with the Devil by the Pale Moonlight: Batman 30 Years Later

In a time where superhero movies were not dominating the box office; where the idea of a dark, moody and serious comic book movie was something that people would screw their noses up at, one film managed to break the mold of what we conceived comic book films to be. It showed us that they could be serious and didn’t have to be about extraordinary characters.

But the transition from the pages of comic books to the big screen was not an easy one.

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A bird? A plane? It’s 40 years of Superman!

Imagine a time when comic book movies were not even a genre and the idea that they would dominate the box office would be laughable. Imagine a time when a film based on a comic book was seen to be a huge risk. That time is 1978 and a film was on the horizon that would change American Cinema forever. That film was Superman. At this point the most well known comic book adaptation was the live action Batman starring Adam West. The campy series was the exact opposite of what producers Ilya Salkind, Alexander Salkind and Pierre Spengler wanted to achieve. The development of Superman is the stuff of legend and borderline insane.

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