‘Ol Shellhead, Revealed

As a kid, my friend Derek and I would bicycle up to the local 7-11 in our neighborhood, pockets bulging with allowance money. And we’d blow it all on Hubba Bubba bubble gum, Slurpees, Charleston Chews, and comic books.

I wasn’t a “comic fan” yet. I had yet to develop a fondness for tight plotting, crisp artwork, character development. What I was a fan of, though, was characters who were, to my 11-year-old brain, “cool”. I liked Daredevil a lot, but my favorite at the time was Iron Man.

There’s a movie coming out, of course, with a big budget, critically acclaimed cast, yada yada yada. My thing was: What’s the damn suit look like?

Here’s the answer, and I’m pretty damn happy. (That’s a suit, by the way, not CGI.)

Reading The Movies

Well, I finished “Moonraker”. It was pretty good, especially the final suspenseful chapters. Made the disco-era James Bond-meets-Star Wars movie look positively sick.

Moving on, I decided to return to my beloved pulp-era stories. But what to read?

A few months ago, I was browsing a used bookstore and I found the novelization of “Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow“. I picked it up (a steal at only 50 cents) as just a souvenir, really. I thought I was above reading movie novelizations, and had no intentions of reading it.

As I stood there before my bookshelf last night, I picked up the book and thumbed through it, then read the first chapter. And then it hit me:

Why not? Why not read the damn thing? During the first chapter, I read what I had longed for since seeing the movie: a peek at an expanded “Sky Captain” universe. The chapter mentioned things like the precursors to the Hindenburg III zeppelin (the first one still crashed, but the engineers learned from their mistakes and continued building), and the fact that the Titanic is still sailing in the world of “Sky Captain”. It also included what could have been a cool shot in the movie: other planes from the Flying Legion escorting the zeppelin on it’s final approach to docking with the Empire State Building, each one with a different, personalized paint scheme (a bit Crimson Skies, no?), and a mention of previous foes vanquished by Sky Captain and The Flying Legion. It surprised me, and I decided to read the book. Time will tell if the book will be a truly deeper look into the world as set up by the movie, or just fan-fiction-ish in it’s handling. (Is there any good SCATWOT fan fiction out there? No slashies!)

Looking back now, some movie novelizations I’ve read were handled really well: Darkman’s fragile mental state and graphic injuries were a lot more detailed, more harrowing, Robocop’s fight to reclaim his humanity more sorrowful. They’re not bad, as long as the writer thinks “outside the box”, so to speak.

(By the way, don’t ever read the movie adaptation before you see the movie. I did that with the first “Batman”, and it totally ruined the entire movie for me… I knew what was going to happen, before it happened. I wish I wouldn’t have known that bit about the Joker killing young Bruce Wayne’s parents. That would have been a chilling moment in the theatre.)