Comic Books and Beyond

 Recently, Marvel Entertainment started trickling out some information on their future self-produced movie releases; the string of these movies includes Iron Man 2, Ant Man, Thor, Captain america and the Avengers.

  Not much has been confirmed about these movies except for the release dates.  The later release date for the Avengers, July 15th, 2011, confirms in my mind that it will indeed be the capstone for the currently planned crop of future Marvel movie releases.  The director has yet to be named, and the cast is as of yet unannounced.  Of course the casting for the Marvel Avengers movie could pretty much be decided by the casting of characters in the movies scheduled ahead of it: Robert Downey Jr should be adone deal as Tony Stark/ Iron Man because of his three picture deal.  If the Hulk is indeed included in this film than it could possibly be Ed Norton.  Whoever is cast for the Thor movie and the Ant Man movie and the Captain America movie will make that less casting decisions for the Avengers movie as well.  There has been a rumour of one of the desperate housewives actresses, Eva Longoria, as being a possible studio choice for the Wasp role - a rumour backed by photos of her carrying around some avengers comics.  It would also be intersting to see if the idea of the Hulk as a villain is explored, or if in holding with tradition, the idea of the Hulk being a founding member is used instead - something that was done in the original Avengers comic book of the sixties.  Following that sixties idea, the character of Loki as the villain would also be apossibility, especially if that character is also in the upcoming Thor movie.  Of course the presence of Samuel Jackson's Nick Fury character is really from a series of Marvel comics that saw the Hulk used as a foil for the Avengers team as much as a team member.

  Whatever they decide, the build up to this film as well as the earlier scheduled Marvel movie releases should have many of us comic book movie fans speculating and imagining for the next couple of years... 

As a rule of thumb, I am not really a big fan of comic book adaptations of Television series or Movies. I know that more recently, many of these adaptations - like Buffy, for instance, have been pretty decent (at least that's what I'm hearing from those that actually read them). Well I recently picked up the Heroes Volume One trade paperback. This is the trade version of the Hardback that was released earlier to those hardcore Heroes fans that would shell out for the more expensive edition (don't get me wrong: I was a huge fan of the Heroes series during the first season, just not a big enough fan to run out and buy the hardback).

Just like with the Hardback Volume, the Heroes TPB collects the first thirty four installments of the online comic that was regularly released during the first airing of the first season.

The idea here was that the stories told online were to be stories set inbetween the episodes of the television series.

Plotwise, for the most part the stories told were okay, however I cannot help but wonder how much pressure the various writes were under to come up with' between episodes' stories that would not interfere with the series continuity in any substantial way. This might be a challenging enough task in the first place but considering that Heroes was a series that had little in the way of continuity gaps between episodes in the first place, the writers have mostly gone with the time tested device of using 'untold tales' of the primary characters.

Artwise, the art is servicable for the most part if not a bit disjointed: it seems to suffer at some points from a lack of artistic continuity as the installments are drawn by a rotation of different artists. To be fair, the artists themselves are doing a decent job for the most part, it's just that it would be nice to see fewer artists so that each one could have a longer unbroken stretch of the book.

I was a fan of how the show used the art of Tim Sale to frame the episodes in such a way as to suggest a comic adaptation of their adventures existed somewhere in their world. I was glad to see that they reproduced all of these covers in the trade, but was diheartened to find out that that was all that Sale contributed artwise to the book: apart from the cover reproductions - no Tim Sale.

All in all I would describe this collection as something for the Heroes completest. It is ironic that I lost interest in the television series early into its second season but that I felt a compulsion to get this collection so that I could enjoy some more stories from the first season.

Who knows, maybe someday I will finally watch the whole second season and then feel the urge to buy a second volume of in between stories, if they should in fact publish such a thing...