Mediadome: Comic vs. Movies

Apples and oranges my ass. We all have preferences, let's display them. The point of these mediadomes is two fold. Find out who kicks the most ass and to write down reasons for your loves. Today comics and movies come walking in, with one much closer to my heart and sure to lose. I'll vote, if I feel like it, when I feel like it. This is different then the other domes due to my poor posting skills and highly emotional state.

Two mediums enter, one leaves.

Last session, Video games got their ass kicked by their antiquated cousin the Boardgame.... ah, is there no progress?? The score was 17-5 with four people in the ??? category, that's alamost as many as video games. Looks like prunes are right behind VG's as the potential new youth killer.

That sounds like my cue.

[clears throat]

COMICS ARE THE GREATEST EXPRESSIVE MEDIUM EVER INVENTED AND ANYONE WHO DISAGREES IS A ROTTEN COMMIE.

Juniper wrote:

That sounds like my cue.

[clears throat]

COMICS ARE THE GREATEST EXPRESSIVE MEDIUM EVER INVENTED AND ANYONE WHO DISAGREES IS A ROTTEN COMMIE.

ROTTEN COMMIE here.

Movies

Do you get free movies when you buy bubble gum? NO!

Therefore, comics are clearly superior.
QED.

I never got into comic books.

Actually, I'm not much into movies either, but I do watch them occasionally.

Bid: Movies

Hi, I'm Michael Barnes, and I vote for COMICS. A vote for movies is a vote for uncle sex.

Movies are generally better at telling stories than comics, though I've read more brilliant comics than I've seen brilliant movies.

Vote: Movies

However, if this was Alan Moore comics versus movies based on Alan Moore comics, I would have to vote for Alan Moore comics.

Hi, I'm Frank. When I'm not putting shrimps on the barbie and talking like Crocodile Dundee, I read COMICS. Movies can kiss my antipodes.

The Man, the Spawn, and I vote for COMICS. So that's three votes. Count them all or I'll tell you what I really think about your shoes.

Movies are great entertainment, but when I think back to when I did read comics a lot (the 80s when 2000AD was in its prime) nothing (mediawise) can beat that experience.

Vote: Comics

Sheesh, landsliding already, lookout Fleetwood.

Allright, I'll help my good buddy the comic out as much as I can.

Here we go.

Movies have many, many people involved. Anyone of them can fuck up your experience. The make-up artist, the cinematographer, the director, the performers, the set guy (yeah, that's the technical name), the composer... there's alot going on. Just look at the credits and count the number of people involved.

Comics have a smaller more concentrated group and it's easier for them to have a consistent vision. You only need to get 3-4 people on the same page, writer, artist, letterer, colourer. That's it. The resulting vision is generally more unified, not as much as a novel say, but more then a movie. How many times have you seen a movie where the soundtrack doesn't gel with the rest of the picture?

But my favorite part about comics is the line between panels. That's right, that tiny little white or black line seperating the panels. The reason is that this is where my brain gets more involved. This is where my brain has to figure out how we got from the one image to the other, this is where I become an active member in the creation of the story. Comics take a little more work then movies on the part of the audience. Comics are portable and don't require any other device to work. They are compact (though I don't want to carry around my Krazy Kat books because they're fucking huge).

From Alan Moore, to Bill Waterson, to Walt Kelly and Kurt Busiek, I prefer comics. I prefer what my brain does when I read them, I prefer not looking at a screen, I prefer the lack of limitations ("there's no money in the budget for this" is a line never used in the comics industry).

There's a page in Promethea (my least favorite Moore comic) where the whole page is a mobius strip and the characters are walking along the edge, in two demensional space of course, and their conversation is as elliptical as the drawing itself, the last line naturally leading into the first. That, to me, is irressistable, and all in a comic I don't even like. You can't do that in a movie. Witness the Hulk, Ang Lee's hulk where he tried to do panels. It worked, o.k. but it is not the same effect. I can look at what happened seconds or hours ago in the story very simply by going back and forth, either between pages or on the same page at any time I want.

I have to exercise self control though and not look ahead either because some moments can be ruined. Comics are perhaps the oldest art form we still have examples of. Cave drawings anyone?? They tell a story with pictures and occasionally use words. They are the begining of language, character based language that is. Which naturally lead to pheonetic based languages. But character based language is very much like a comic.

They feel ancient, edgy, underground, new, and mainstream all at once.

Comics are fucking awesome and I don't want any of them turned into movies. Leave them the hell alone and write your own story you two bit hack (I'm talking to you Zack... Snyder). In case it isn't obivous. I totally expect comics to lose this but just to jump in on the right team, the only team, and to promote my own dome...

My vote:

COMICS

That Promethea panel got me hooked on that comic. I bought it, read it, and then rushed back to the store the next day to buy every back issue that they had. I eventually bought the first trade just so I could get all the early issues. Unfortunately, the last few issues of Promethea were very disappointing.

Shellhead wrote:

That Promethea panel got me hooked on that comic. I bought it, read it, and then rushed back to the store the next day to buy every back issue that they had. I eventually bought the first trade just so I could get all the early issues. Unfortunately, the last few issues of Promethea were very disappointing.

Yeah, it's irresistable. Alan Moore, like him or not, is the most versatile writer comics have ever seen.

A vote for comics is a vote for:

Charles M. Schulz
Herge(Georges Remi)
Jack Kirby
Harvey Kurtzman
Will Eisner
Osamu Tezuka

These are the true artistic geniuses of the 20th Century.

A vote for movies is false and wrong.

The first couple Promethea books were pretty intriguing but then it went downhill for me. Definitely my least favorite of the "top shelf" Moore comics.

But as much as I love great comics, a great movie is still a more rewarding experience. I doubt very highly if any media experience (short of new technology stuff that who knows what it will be like) will top Trilogy Tuesday when they showed the first two extended edition Lord of the Rings movies and then premiered the third at a couple hundred theaters around the world.

Part of it is that for all the unique experiences you can have in comics, you can have just as many only in movies. The audio component of a great film just can't be duplicated. But another big thing is the energy of seeing a movie with a theater full of other huge fans. Trilogy Tuesday was a huge event, people dressed up all over the place, a theater packed full of mega excited cheering nerds, the theater was so stoked on the whole thing that they ordered free pizza for everyone between the 2nd and 3rd.

Like a fool I went to the New Haven theater instead of the NYC one where a bunch of the cast showed up to hang out because I didn't want to park. Fuck.

Vote: Movies