Well using the Aristotelian mode here what is being imitated? Premises: the X-Men or people with mutant powers who live at a school in Westchester NY. He does point out that Martial Arts as a genre is different than the depiction of martial arts when he talks abot Iron Fist.

To me Martial Arts is a genre first and action second - "the wuxia genre is particular to Chinese culture, because it is a unique blend of the martial arts philosophy of xia (俠, "chivalry", "a chivalrous man or woman") developed down the centuries, and the country's long history in wushu."

As physical action only his arguement stands as that is the way it is generally taken as being to most western viewers, only action.

Look I am sorry if I am being unclear here but I'm finding it hard to be brief about these complex ideas. re: not can't but best at. Meaning what Aristotle saw in art as the ever realization in external form of a true idea

The truth is, I'm ducking the question and hoping no one will notice...

DRAT! Foiled again!

I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!

This is exactly what I was getting at. I guess figuring that this idea – that comics are an artform worthy of appreciation, no matter the genre, and that some people just plain like the form – would be self-evident was a mistake on my part.

whoosh.

I addressed this already. It's sort of a scaled values thing. Comics can do stuff with superheroes that you can't do in live action. A movie based on Watchmen or Promethea can't do a lot of the stuff that was done with the visuals in those series in a way that would make sense. In the case of Promethea, not only would it be hard to adapt a lot of the things the art team did with comic book pages but the pacing would be bogged down with a lot of long speeches about magic rituals and the Kabbalah that are absolutely essential to the narrative. Being forced to slow down by the very nature of the medium makes that stuff work.

In a comic, Superman can lift bigger stuff, telekinesis isn't limited by the special effects budget and you can do a lot more with things like energy blasts and shape changing. It would be hard to make the Phoenix Saga work in live action without toning down all the superpowers and space battles and giant robots to a degree that would make the thing seem like a cheesy knock off of Star Wars.

You can also get away with more outrageous costumes and other stuff that supposedly doesn't look good on film.

Live action forces compromises. Live action superhero movies usually just seem silly and poorly executed to me because they don't capture the "super" part very well.

Batman movies sort of work because the most fantastic part is the costume. But even then, the harder they try to make stuff seem plausible (cf. Batman Begins) the more it draws attention to how inherently ridiculous Batman is and how his backstory really only works because we're used to stuff like that in comics.

Certainly, there are Marvel and DC characters who would work better (or at least just as well) in live action... but even Nick Fury works better as a Steranko comic than as a crappy movie starring David Hasselhoff. You can do more with the Helicarrier, LMDs, Man-Droid armor and all the other wacky science fiction stuff.

I was thinking more about realism, actually. Comics definitely do over the top stuff better than live action. It would be just about impossible to recreate some of the stuff drawn by Walt Simonson, Steve Ditko and J.H. Williams III with real human beings. But strictly adhering to realism, for me anyway, helps point out some of the limitations of comics.

Issues of The Badger where he mostly goes around beating up normal humans who are trying to kill him aren't as engaging as the ones where he talks to animals and fights vampires.

Theater and novels each do different things well. Would you say that reading Hamlet is just as good as seeing a production of it somewhere?

If you read the text, you can spend more time memorizing memorable lines or whatever... but you won't get as much out of it as you would from seeing talented actors interpreting the material.

Dramatic readings and things like that can work, but wouldn't you rather read the book yourself?

I care more about the writing than the art, so one of the things that is creating difficulty here is that I don't really get the point of buying comics just to admire the pencilling style, or whatever makes the art interesting.

I love Mike Allred's art style, but I never followed X-Force because I had no interest in any of the new characters. I needed more incentive than "it looks like The Atomics and has a similar type of layouts." For that matter, my interest in The Atomics was pretty limited. Madman, on the other hand, captured my imagination with a great character and quirky stories.

Going back to Fight for Tomorrow for a second, it was hard for me to care about the protagonist or his story when the whole point of the exercise seemed to be letting Denys Cowan experiment with a different style.

I suppose if admiring the art is enough for some people, there would be a point in reading that mini-series... but the story and the action just weren't working for me as a comic. There wasn't enough going on to keep me interested.

But, just as with martial arts, movies can do things with superheroes that comics can't. If you're looking for what one medium can do that another can't, then you go with the former. Action in motion is something that movies can do that comics can't, regardless of whether it's martial arts or superheroic. True, but movies can be just as structurally complex as any comic book by Alan Moore. Neither media is inherently limited in the potential level of complexity. Depends on the reader and the company doing the play which you're comparing. I wouldn't make any universal rules on this. Kant had a secretary who read to him in his later years and seems to have done alright. Which seemed obvious to me, except you cited the movement in martial arts movies, not the narrative structure and quality of the writing, as being why comics come up short with the genre. I can't imagine anyone arguing that comics are inherently better in terms of writing than films. The evidence certainly doesn't support that.

Thanks to this and later posts, I do get a better sense as to why you feel the martial arts movies work better than martial arts comics, and vice versa for the superhero.

I would add, though, that there is a sort of "superhero" tradition in the genre which in turn expresses itself in both media, where one sees martial artists blasting each other with their *ki* and suchlike. I would anticipate that you might think that martial arts comics of this stripe are more palatable than martial arts films like, say, ZU WARRIORS OF MAGIC MOUNTAIN.

It's also true that in practice superheroes on paper can get away with a lot more than superheroes on film, even if theoretically the difference could be narrowed to almost nothing. Some of it has less to do with technical capability than narrative expectations. Thus X-MEN 3, in adapting the Dark Phoenix saga, will almost certainly leave out all the alien forces that were involved in said saga. In practice, films are more governed by sci-fi's "one gimme" logic, that says that you can have mutants or aliens but usually not mutants and aliens. (And yes, I can name the exceptions as well as anyone here.)

I love it when you think you've got me, but you're really just being obtuse.

I never said anything about how the writing in comics compares to the writing in movies, so you're jumping to a faulty conclusion.

However, based on my personal experiences, I would tend to assume that the writing is stronger in films most of the time... which is another reason to prefer Hong Kong action movies over old issues of Power Man and Iron Fist.

To my point: You replied: Which seemed to be about dismissing the depiction of action, since you don't care much about the art. However, your stated difficulties with martial arts in comics all had to do with the art, not the writing.

Oh well. We all agree you don't like martial arts in comics, at least.

Go be a patronizing asshole on somebody else's thread. I addressed your objection once and I'm not going to do it again.