That's our Paul!

Wow.

Sure, ok.

Call it whatever you want.

Can I ask why that distinction is significant?

So he probably shouldn't like (the parts of) any Marvel movie. He must have hated the Spideman movies? Has he commented on the new Spider-man reboot yet?

Actually, it's not even the part where Byrne decides he dislikes a movie he hasn't seen. That's his prerogative. Nobody's making him buy a ticket if it doesn't look good to him.

No, the funny part is where Byrne argues with and criticizes people who have seen the movie and liked it.

Snappeth Byrne when a few people said it's a good flick:

Well, be sure to run out and "vote with your wallet". Make this "version" a big success, so Hollywood will once again know they're right to do the characters the way THEY think they should be done.

Hey JB, if you don't want to try the green eggs and ham, don't try the green eggs and ham. But stop lecturing Sam I Am on why he shouldn't like them, either!

I've seen the Avengers movie and it's bloody brilliant. It's a double-sized, all action comic book come to life. It's not deep, it's not meaningful, it's just great. The Hulk is particularly good after the Ang Lee travesty and the sort-of-okay Ed Norton version.

Here's Byrne at his classic best. To quote

"In one of the trailers, there is a scene with Stark talking with Banner, in which Stark says he LOVES how Banner turns into a giant green rage monster. That's an INCREDIBLY insensitive thing to say to someone who frequently loses control and has huge, destructive rampages that threaten the lives of everyone around him, including and most especially those he loves."

Hilarious, you couldn't make it up.

The odd thing about the thread on the Byrne Board is that everyone who has seen it really liked it (apart from a few minor quibbles).

John Byrne had been getting dull lately but it's good the ol' boy has still got it in him to be a total twat ...

Oh, welcome back Paul!

Yeah, although some of the Byrne-bots -- bless their hearts -- parrot their master's complaints, despite their also not having seen the movie.

And the easy answer to all of that is, of course, stay on model. If you expect kids/adults to seek out the comics after seeing the movie, make the movie look like the comic. It's all ass-backwards.

You hear that Kirby and Sinnott? Good old Marvel Studios tossed out your crappy old boring awkward bath water to save your baby from your stupid mistakes that were weighing the good stuff down until now. Yay! The character of Captain America has been fixed. Those long disappointing decades waiting for someone smart enough to come along and fix the character are finally at an end! And to think that I was able to see it in my lifetime! Glory be!

And so on.

The gist of these complaints, I think, is that the Marvel superheroes in the movies are not exactly like the Marvel superheroes in the comics.

Of course, the Marvel superheroes in today's comics are not like the Marvel superheroes in the 1980s comics when I was a kid, which were not like the Marvel superheroes in the 1960s comics when most of them were new.

The Thor movie, for example -- did anyone really want Thor to spend two hours fighting the Stone-Men from Saturn? Because that's the actual first adventure of Thor, as presented by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY 1962.

My complaint is that outside of Spider-Man II and Iron Man, this generation of Marvel movies have either been seriously flawed (Spider-Man I and III, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, both Hulks) or entertaining but nothing more than that (Thor, Captain America, Iron Man II). I mean, it's nice that the Cap and Thor movies didn't suck, but what were they really about? In Captain America, the best part of the film by far was the extended origin sequence, before they got to the silly USO stuff. I mean, the U.S. army has a soldier faster and stronger than any human being alive and they decide to use him for publicity, even though you could stick any reasonably fit guy in the costume and get the same effect? The best line out of that origin was about a weak man knowing the value of strength, a concept that had jack all to do with anything that happened in the rest of the story.

Mike

It was a movie about Thor, the Norse god of thunder, turned into a superhero here on planet Earth, fighting a giant killer robot. (The robot was faithfully adapted from Lee/Kirby comics, I might add.)

What were you hoping it would be about? Man's inhumanity to man?

Last month's Thor comic book -- what was it really about?

What was Iron Man about? What was The Dark Knight about? Both of those stories were about themes and concepts a lot more significant than "guy in costume punches evildoer in nose".

You make fun of Byrne for taking this stuff too seriously. Don't you want storytellers to take this stuff seriously, at least more seriously than their audience?. You know what you get when when storytellers don't take this stuff seriously? Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin or Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

Mike

Aliens invade Earth. A lame physician trapped at the scene of the invasion discovers a magic hammer that transforms him into the Norse god of thunder. He battles the aliens and uncovers their plot to take over the world while trying to adjust to his new identity and the fact that it's more like a split personality than an alter ego.

How does that not sound at least as good as what we got?

Mike

It was about 152 minutes.