Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The Superhero

Rummaging through the YouTubes today I came across an excellent, albeit exhaustive, documentary on the comic book hero. TONS of industry visionaries sound off on what makes a good hero. It examined DC and Marvel and their differing approaches to superheroes, paying particular attention to the sixties, when a lot of dimension was added to superhero stories.

Interviewed: Quesada, Kaluta, Adams, Evanier, Infantino, Simon, Sienkiewicz, Dini, Buscema, Stan Lee, Jim Lee, Kubert, and more.

Highlights:

  • Neal Adams explaining comics as "an exercise of fantasy".
  • A very intelligent extrapolation of the very obvious notion that superheroes simply don't work as well when taken out of the urban environment ("the prison-like grid"). I had never given this much thought, but when I consider it, it adds a lot of dimension to modern comics
  • Stan Lee to Marvel artists in the 60's: "Stay modern and draw what the kids are wearing."
You can see it here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10

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1 comment:

colin said...

Watched the whole thing. Very neat.