I have some interesting news this week. Chew, Eisner award winner and all around awesome comic series, is now in development to be a half-hour comedy show on Showtime. Now, in an age where comic franchises seem to be perpetually up for grabs for TV and movie deals, it may have only been a matter of time until Chew was picked up, but still this is something that I think warrants more study.
The article that I read said that the scripts being written by Terri Hughes Burton and Ron Milbauer, the same people responsible for Supernatural and Eureka. I’ll admit to never seeing the former, but I’ve so far been impressed with the writing of the ladder. I’ve also heard that the production company in charge of Chew, Circle of Confusion, is run by the same upstanding gents that brought us AMC’s Walking Dead, and if that’s the standard for all the shows they produce, than that gives me reason to have high expectations.
Despite all these good signs, for some reason I just can’t muster up the confidence to say this is a good idea. Anyone whose read my blog on the subject knows that Chew is the one series I feel comfortable recommending to absolutely anyone. It’s darkly comic, uniquely quirky, and has that faint air of mystery that keeps you coming back for more. Without a doubt, Chew is a really great story (I think the Eisner proved that), but the question I have to ask myself is: is Chew “TV great”?
The problem with many book-to-film adaptations is that often they aren’t able to make the transition as well as the fans would like. It’s easy to blame this on whoever writes the script, but sometimes stories inevitably lose something in the translation from paper to film. In Chew’s case it might be the art.
One of Chew’s strongest points is how Rob Guillory’s art style works in such perfect harmony with John Layman’s writing. The story is gross, gritty and bizarre, qualities that the art both alleviates and enhances at the same time. If they try and make this into a live action series, obviously the graphic aspect of the story would have to go. Maybe if they decided to turn this into a cartoon with Guillory as the lead illustrator they could keep everything intact, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.
Maybe this is just me not wanting some other writer to ruin a good thing, but out of all the things that the movie and television industry has adopted from the graphic novel community, this might not be their best move. However, let it not be said that I’m unwilling to be proven wrong. If any of you out there think that Circle of Confusion can pull out another hit series from Image, then give me some food for thought (heh, food pun).
If not, then let this be something you can just chew on for a while. Good, bad, or otherwise, this is one Showtime series I’m definitely not going to miss.
Have you ever read a comic series that changed the way you thought of comics; something that was entertaining and bizarre and over the top? Over the course of my long and varied history of reading comics, I’m come across a few of those, but one of the first was a series called Young Justice. Written and sustained by the creative team of Peter David and Todd Nauck, Young Justice was a series that reminded everyone that the lives of teen heroes are even more mixed up and hilariously bizarre than we could ever imagine.
The series started out focusing on the misadventures of Superboy, Impulse, and Robin, but later expanded to include Wonder Girl, Arrowette (top left), a teen version of Lobo (bottom left), and a couple of never before seen super heroines – like the voodoo powered Empress (top and second from left) and the spectral Secret (far right). The series had a 56 issue run between 1998 and 2003, during which Young Justice fought fearsome foes such as werewolves, super-powered mimes, a black ops agency called A.P.E.S. (the All Purpose Enforcement Squad) and even a super villian who called herself “Mighty Endowed.” It was a juvenile book for a juvenile audience, and it promised me at least one good laughing fit per issue. The series ended to make way for the new Teen Titans series, which featured many of the same characters, but I never stopped hoping YJ would eventually make a comeback.
I had pretty much given up hope on ever seeing my favorite superhero series again, but then I heard that Warner Brothers and Cartoon Network were working on a new Young Justice animated series, and I just had to investigate.
From the looks of things, this new show is going to have more in common with Teen Titans than its namesake, but it shows promise. Produced by Brandon Vietti and Greg Weisman, the latter of which also produced both Gargoyles and the Spectacular Spider-man television shows, Young Justice will include old favorites like Robin, Superboy, and Kid Flash as well as some fairly new faces like Miss Martian and the new Aqualad (as seen in the more recent issues of Brightest Day).
According to interviews with Vietti and Weisman, the show is going to be more along the lines of Justice League Unlimited than any other cartoon series and will include a lot of raw action with a teenage twist. It’s not my idea of Young Justice, but considering the stock of characters they’re working from I still have high expectations.
Jim’s excellent posts on Night Man and M.A.N.T.I.S. stirred deeply repressed memories of a horrible and short-lived TV show based on Mike Grell’s pretty great comic book, Jon Sable Freelance. The lumbering pace and clumsy plummet off the roof in that intro by the actor playing Mr. Sable are a microcosm for the entire show, only more exciting.
As with seemingly all comic-to-film translations of its day, Sable’s showrunners made wholesale changes to the background, world, characters and plot. (This still happens today, and I’ve reached the point where I no longer see comic-book based movies. I hear some of them are pretty good, but I’ve never heard anyone say any of these films are better than the source material, so why bother? If I want to throw away $10 on something moderately entertaining, I would have continued buying “Blackest Night.”)
Mike Grell’s Sable is an ex-Olympic marksman turned African game warden whose family is killed by poachers. This tragedy drives him out of Africa and into the shady world of mercenary work. As with all Grell books, this was a fast-paced, high-action book involving manly men and lots of adult situations — publisher First Comics let Sable be a man as often as he needed to, which means drinking and the making of sweet, sweet love with beautiful women were a regular occurrence. Sable’s alter-ego is B.B. Flemm, beloved writer/illustrator of a series of children’s books about leprechauns, and I’m not even making that up.
In the TV show, Sable is the alter-ego of Nicholas Flemming, children’s book author and huge fan of Michael Bolton, judging by the haircut. He has a blind black friend who provides background and leads for every single job Sable gets, a talent that relies heavily on a then-new invention called the home computer; he also eats a lot of cheesecake, so his nickname is Cheesecake. Cheesecake is the show’s comic relief, which means he practices his stand-up comedy while playing a recording of a laugh track — that’s gold, Jerry! I don’t remember much action, or plot, or even who starred.
Fortunately, the internet tells me that Sable is played by the immortal Lewis Van Bergen, that Rene Russo had a part in the show and that native St. Louisan and Broadway star Ken Page (you may know him as the voice of Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas) played Cheesecake. Wow. Various sources on the internet also claim there were two pilots made, the first of which starred KISS’ Gene Simmons as Sable (KISSdominion.com claims that Simmons was only ever in talks to do a film version). I would pay almost three dollars to see the Gene Simmons pilot if it really exists — leave a note in the comments if you can help a brother out.
The entire pilot episode is viewable online , but I wouldn’t recommend watching it — I watched several episodes this weekend, and it’s worse than even I remembered. Here’s a ten minute clip, and if you make it through that, you deserve it.
While I was writing about MANTIS last time, I got to thinking about other sub-par Super-hero TV shows from the 90’s and kicked myself for not remembering Night Man. For those of you too young to remember, Night Man was a character from Malibu comics’ Ultraverse line that came along during the early 1990’s. The Ultraverse brought us characters like the Sludge, Hardcase, and steroid poster boy Prime, but didn’t survive the decade once Malibu was bought by Marvel. Of all these characters, only the Night Man was apparently worthy of wider exposure through the medium of television well after the character had any relevance.
In the comic universe, Night Man wasn’t that bad a story, but on the small screen it was less than stellar. The series centers around Johnny Domino, saxophonist from San Francisco who when struck by lightening in a cable car accident discovers he has the ability to recognize evil, but loses the ability to sleep. Thus is born the Night Man. One little known aspect of the show is that the character of Prof Jonathan Chase, who was the lead character in the short lived 1983 series Manimal. The Night Man series can almost be considered a continuation of Manimal in that aspect. What surprised me about this series is that Night Man managed to earn itself a second season. I remember when I was a teenager and the opening credits would start at around midnight or one in the morning with that hot sax instrumental and I would quickly try to find something else to watch, but first I just had to get through the opening sequence. It was bad even by 1997 standards.
Just so you know, this incarnation of the Night Man is not to be confused with the character created by Charlie Kelly (Local businessman and cat enthusiast) from the show It’s Always
Sunny In Philadelphia. That Night Man is the fighter of the Day Man, champion of the sun, master of karate and friendship for everyone.
Huzzah! Futurama will be returning with brand-new episodes on June 24 on Comedy Central, nearly 7 years after the shows cancelation. The series ended after constant scheduling debacles on parent network 20th Century Fox destroyed viewership i.e ratings. In the following years, Futurama found a large market in the DVD television season sales much like fellow canceled series Family Guy, which demonstrated to the network the show’s loyal audience. Due to large production cost, the series was not relaunched on television like Family Guy. However, Comedy Central and 20th Century Fox entered into an agreement to release 4 straight-to-DVD Futurama films that would later be aired episodically on the Adult Swim program. The four films included “Bender’s Big Score,” “The Beast with a Billion Backs,” “Bender’s Game,” and “Into the Wild Green Yonder,” which in my opinion gradually declined in quality after each subsequent release. Still, strong DVD sales justified the series revival despite high production cost and by the end of the month I’m going to be glad I have cable, why not!
I’m sure that several of you folks are familiar with a little program on the comedy channel by the name of South Park which is notorious for their crude but sharp humor and satire. The show recently reached it’s 200th episode which resulted in a cliffhanger involving the TRUE revelation of who Eric Cartman’s father really is. See, for over 10 years (yes, the show has been on the air that long.) we’ve been led to believe that Cartman’s father was, well, his mother who was once a hermaphrodite. Episode 201 revealed that this was false.
Now, South Park is the kind of show that really pokes fun at pop culture, but seldom do they delve into the world of comics quite like they did with episode 201. If you saw the episode, you would also have been delighted to see their direct homage to the classic Alan Moore story, Batman: the Killing Joke starring Scott Tenorman as the Joker. I gaped in wonderment once I saw Tenorman sitting atop a pile of baby dolls in a way remenicsent of the Joker as he began his torment of Commissioner Gordan in the abandoned amusement park. There was even a scene in which Cartman was taken on a roller coaster car ride while Tenormans face appeared on multiple view screens throughout the ride, but with ginger kids replacing the creepy little people from the book. This nod to the Killing Joke was overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the censorship of saying the name of, or showing the image of the prophet (censored) who is a member of the Super Best Friends and had been shown and named in previous episodes. That was all well and good, but I was too busy geeking out on a Killing Joke scene in a South Park episode. Oh yeah, as it turns out, Cartmans dad was actually Scott Tenormans dad, who Cartman had killed and fed to Scott in a chili in the episode, “Scott Tenorman Must Die.”
Of course, this isn’t the first time Trey and Matt have given a nod to fans of comics. One of my favorite characters, Butters, happens to dress up in a Doctor Doom costume and call himself Professor Chaos. Oh, hamburgers! And who can forget the episode that made Batman: The Dark Knight seem silly? Despite all the accusations of crudeness and controversy surrounding South Park, you can’t deny that it relentlessly prods pop-culture and society with utter glee. Comic books included.
One of my favorite bookstores in St. Louis. Star Clipper offers not only the best selection of comic books and graphic novels in the city, but also a cornucopia of art, design and pop-culture related books and magazines. 
