CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Television in the 1960s and 70s was the internet of its day. Everyone was hooked.

What was it that made me immediately want to see the new Dad’s Army film, despite misgivings about the modern attempt to recreate the comedy classic about the antics of a Home Guard platoon in World War Two?

’Initially, Watchmen gained a lot of its readership because it was taking an unusual look at superheroes, but actually it was more about redefining comics than it was about redefining one particular genre,’ said Alan Moore, the famous writer of what has been called the greatest comic book of all time, to a London music newspaper a few years ago.

It’s peculiar that V’s mask from Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel V for Vendetta has become an iconic representation of the ‘Anonymous’ organisation, a real-life anarchic group operating mainly online to disrupt elements of what it perceives as the establishment. 

I’ve said earlier that there was one way for DC to go which might work in terms of out-creating Marvel: go ‘super-grim’, in an effort to match the Ironic and bleak nature of today’s culture generally. Batman vs Superman did just that, as predicted. 

The ninth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series of films, Captain America: The Winter Soldier earned $259.8 million in North America and $454.7 million in other territories, adding up to $714.4 million worldwide.

I’ve argued before in this blog that Marvel have the upper hand on DC in terms of a successful cinematic venture stretching out into the future, mainly because they have a particular kind of heritage to draw from and DC doesn’t.

Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has master-minded the apparently unstoppable behemoth which we all know as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but exactly how he has done it, or how he was even able to do it, rests very much with the fact that he was in harmony with the original spirit of Marvel as generated by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and the other founding members of Marvel Comics.

Stan Lee, so the story goes, was thinking about getting out of the whole business of comic books back in the late 1950s. He’d worked his way up from errand boy to a script writer and editor at the company that had become Marvel Comics, and had tried his hand at everything from westerns to horror to romances and the game was getting boring. Then, legend says, he was told that, as he was on the way out, why didn’t he try writing some stuff that he wanted to write, with no real editorial guidelines other than his own preferences?