7 Days in May | Deadpool, Sinbad, and Sherlock Jr.

Deadpool (2016)



The trailers and other marketing for Deadpool didn't make me laugh at all, so I had decided not to see the movie. But positive reviews from friends and critics made me reconsider and with little else going on at the theater that I wanted to see, I checked it out.

And it's not too bad. I was surprised at how much I cared about the character even while I found him and his girlfriend super annoying. Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead are great foils whom I enjoyed whenever they showed up, and it was also great to see Gina Carano and TJ Miller. The movie has a cool look to it, too, and I enjoyed the way it used music.

My biggest problem with the movie is that it's just not my humor. I chuckled a couple of times and neither were at actual jokes. They were just nice character moments that I thought were amusing. The jokes were simply more of what the trailer suggested: references to sex, poop, and self-referential stuff like other X-Men movies, Green Lantern, and Ryan Reynolds in general. Basically, it's Family Guy humor. So while I had a pretty good time watching Deadpool, it ultimately didn't feel like it was for me.

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)

I remember liking this a lot when it came out, but the animation doesn't hold up by today's standards. Especially the integration of the CGI elements with the mostly hand-drawn cartooning. But for the most part it gets Sinbad right and I think that's what I originally responded to. He's a swashbuckling rogue with a diverse crew who faces various monsters in the pursuit of treasure.

Unfortunately, the treasure is a vaguely powerful object called the Book of Peace, with no explanation for what it does or why it exists in the first place. And the movie pulls Sinbad out of his Middle Eastern setting to plop him into Europe, which is a shame. Other than that though, it's enough in the spirit of the live-action, Harryhausen versions that I have a good time watching it, even if it doesn't have all the charm of those.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

This is one of a handful of silent movies that I'm totally comfortable showing to people who don't know if they'll like the format. Thanks to Victor Hugo, it's a strong story, but the film does great by it. It balances the large cast of characters well, it's funny, it's touching. And of course Lon Chaney's makeup and physical shenanigans are fantastic spectacles.

Three Ages (1923)



One of the first full-length features that Buster Keaton did. There's a racist gag that bothered me, but for the most part Three Ages is great. It explores essentially the same love story in three different time periods, with the same actors playing the same roles in each era.

What it calls the Stone Age could more accurately be described as the Flintstone Era, since Keaton rides a dinosaur and his rival in love owns a mastodon, but that's all for the better. The other two ages are Ancient Rome (featuring a fantastic chariot race and an awesome scene between Keaton and a lion) and the Modern Age. Great gags, great stunts, and charming plots.

The Balloonatic (1923)

A short Keaton film that's not so much about a hot-air balloon as just general outdoorsiness. Some good stuff, but not one of Keaton's best.

The Love Nest (1923)

I didn't realize until partway through that I've seen this short film before. I don't remember where - TV probably - but it's probably one of the first Buster Keaton films I ever saw. And it's a good one with Keaton as I most like him, bumbling into success on a whaling ship under a horrible captain.

Our Hospitality (1923)

A feature-length Keaton film that's super strong from beginning to end. The plot, the stunts, the gags, the characters... all of it. This is more of how I like him: as an unflappable, slightly clueless good guy who knows when to be heroic and when to run away.

The Ten Commandments (1923)

I've been curious about the original Ten Commandments for a long time. The Charlton Heston version was ubiquitous in my childhood and I've always wanted to see where it came from.

The Exodus stuff is impressively spectacular, but it's ultimately just a long prologue to the real story about a pair of brothers with differing views on religion. Sadly, this part is crazy didactic and obvious, with the characters primarily existing to demonstrate the relevance of the Ten Commandments to modern life. It's extremely well acted though and it's nice to see that the spectacle didn't end with the Biblical prologue. The modern segment also has massive crowd scenes and dramatic visual effects.

So it's great from a technical perspective, it's just that the movie's thoughts about religion are rather shallow, focusing on following rules instead of being a moral person. And that's a shame since communicating those thoughts are the entire reason the film exists.

Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor by Stephanie Barron



I've re-read this several times (and even blogged about it) and have just done it again in an attempt to catch up to the rest of the series. Barron (a pen-name for Francine Mathews) writes compelling, spooky mysteries in the humor-filled voice of Jane Austen. She includes great details to bring the historical period to life and a fantastic cast of supporting characters who follow Jane from book to book.

This one drags a little for me in the middle, but I think that's because I'm so familiar with it that I'm eager to get to the final revelations at the end. It certainly didn't feel slow the first time I read it.

Polly and the Pirates, Volume 1 by Ted Naifeh

I'm a big fan of Ted Naifeh anyway, but Polly and the Pirates is especially my cup of tea. It's the story of a proper, young girl who's horrified to learn that she's the daughter of an infamous Pirate Queen. Various groups want to use her to find the Queen's hidden treasure and adventure ensues. Naifeh's created a world that's just enough related to our own to feel comfortable, but also fantastically different.

Polly and the Pirates, Volume 2: Mystery of the Dragonfish by Ted Naifeh and Robbi Rodriguez

The sequel to the first Polly and the Pirates adventure is also fun. Robbi Rodriguez' drawing style is different from Naifeh's, but it's appropriate and beautiful. I wish there'd been more volumes, because it's a fun world and these are great characters.

Sword and Sorcery Cliche No. 2: Barbarian Bikinis [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

I believe the movie was Spartacus (1960) with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. In an early scene, the trainer of the gladiators is showing the new recruits how to kill an opponent. Using a large paintbrush, he dabs on color in three spots, explaining these are the three most vulnerable places on the body. With a cruel switch he cuts at the throat, the belly, and the knees. Why do I mention this? Because if you look at Red Sonja's steel mail bikini you'll see it covers none of these.

Red Sonja was created in 1973, not as an adaptation of a Robert E Howard character, but as an amalgam of Howard's Sonya of Rogotino, CL Moore's Jirel of Joiry, and just plenty of sexy '70s goodness. And who am I to argue with the commercial results of selling sexy babes to fan boys everywhere?

But it raises the question: where did such ridiculous armor come from? Whether it is Sonja's steel attire drawn by Frank Thorne or the equally common fur version for less divine opponents painted by Frank Frazetta? The fur and steel bikini is our second sword-and-sorcery cliché and it has its own history, of course.

The 1960s was a time of expansion, even explosion, for fantasy, whether in print or on the silver screen. It was also a time of changing ideas about sexuality, freedom, and identity. So for every feminist staking out more territory for women there was a paperback with a sexy lady on the cover or a movie with a semi-clad starlet in it. In this way, Ray Harryhausen was one of the first filmmakers to have a beautiful young woman as the centerpiece to the film. Not that he had to animate them. Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC (1966) was quite capable of wearing her own fur bikini. This was not a sword-and-sorcery film, but when Harryhausen would produce later films like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) or Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), he was sure to include Caroline Monroe and Jane Seymour in revealing Arabic garb.

In the paperback world, an area of increasing expansion since World War II, artists like Gray Morrow produced numerous fantasy scenes for novels costing only ten cents to a quarter. His work was solid, but nothing compared to the furor that Frank Frazetta would create when he began painting covers for the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs for ACE and the story collections of Conan for Lancer. Here women wore as little as possible, regardless of whether they were on the sands of an alien planet or in the snows of Cimmeria. This sounds as if I am putting down Frazetta's work. Nothing could be further from the truth. To look at a Frazetta is to peer into a frozen moment of action and magic. His work sold as many books as the thundering great words of Howard or Burroughs.

Frank Frazetta (1928-2010) was a classically trained painter. Unlike the goofy-looking SF covers of a decade before, Frank's images were so believable, so real in the moment of time in which they happen. You didn't stop to say, hey, isn't that gal a little cold standing there in the snow as she's about to be eaten by wolves? That was the power of Frazetta's brush. A power so enchanting that Betty Ballentine published best-selling collections of his work. I can't imagine the '70s without those volumes containing his paintings and sketches.

Whether they captured your imagination or not, Frazetta did perpetuate the fur bikini-ism of Harryhausen, as lesser artists jumped on the Frazetta bandwagon. What Frank could pull off in a flurry of excitement, they could not. And so the cheesy sword-and-sorcery gal with the impossibly huge sword became a favorite of artists making their money at SF conventions (along with that other fave, the gal with the incredibly large bust and a smoking laser rifle).

The transition from fur to steel occurred quite by chance. Red Sonja appeared for the first time in Conan the Barbarian #23 (February 1973), drawn by Barry Smith with a full shirt of mail and sexy hot pants. But Smith left after Issue #24, and Roy redesigned the character's attire when simple dumb luck put an image in front of him. This was an unsolicited, single page, black-and-white illustration by Spanish artist Esteban Maroto. Unlike American (or British, if we included Barry Smith) comic artists, Maroto brought a Roccocco flourish to his art. The bikini Red was wearing looked more like something you'd hang on your porch to catch the wind than a suit of armor.

Roy Thomas saw the potential and so the first issue of Savage Sword of Conan (August 1974) bore a Boris Vallejo painting with steel bikinied Red Sonja and Conan fighting a crew of undead warriors. (These Boris Conan covers are oddly important to me for as a fourteen year old I had a T-shirt emblazoned with a Boris decal that declared to the world my status as a sword-and-sorcery nut. I never quite got around to having a Frazetta painted on my van though.) The look had arrived. Red Sonja, wearing steel coins where any reasonable person would want thick leather and metal armor, danced across Marvel publications, sword in hand. Artists like Frank Thorne would draw Sonja in regular sized comics, attend conventions with steel-bikinied fangirls (including Elfquest's Wendy Pini) and even do his own racier version of Red called Ghita of Alizarr in the '80s.

We are stuck with the fur and steel bikinis. They are part of sword-and-sorcery's history. (As is the terrible movie version of Red Sonja starring Brigitte Nielsen from 1985. Strangely, Brigitte never wore the ridiculous steel bikini but a Romanesque leather corset with fur trim. Not sure why this was so. Red's steel attire was part of her draw. Plenty of cosplay costumes proved it was possible to make such a garment. Perhaps Nielson refused to wear it?) I like to think that we can set this cliché aside now, laugh at our simplicity back in the day, and return to something closer to what Catherine Lucille Moore conceived with her Lady of Joiry back in 1933. But if Dynamite Comics, the latest copyright holder of the She Devil with a Sword, is any indication, I'd better not hold my breath.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Elsewhere...Harryhausen's Sinbad sails without Harryhausen

In lieu of actual content today, I hope you're okay with my pointing you to this week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs post:

Bluewater sent out a press release last week to announce that Morningside Entertainment has optioned the film rights to Bluewater’s Sinbad: Rogue of Mars comic from 2007. There are several interesting things about that.

According to the press release, Morningside has optioned the comic in order to adapt it into a feature film for 2012. Not a reboot, the movie is intended to be an extension of the Sinbad films that started with 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and continued into the ‘70s with The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

The release went on to quote Executive Producer Barry Schneer as saying that Rogue of Mars would be the first film in a new trilogy. “I’m thrilled to continue the amazing legacy my uncle, Charles Schneer began with 7th Voyage and to bring to the screen the Sinbad movie that he and Ray Harryhausen never got to make.”

Since Bluewater published Sinbad: Rogue of Mars as part of its Ray Harryhausen Presents line of comics, I started wondering how this fit together and who owned the rights to what. I assumed that Morningside already owned at least a portion of the rights to the Sinbad films. Since Rogue of Mars was based on those movies, why would Morningside need to option the story from a comic book company that had bought the license from them in the first place? What exactly was Morningside optioning? And how does Ray Harryhausen himself fit into all of this?

I asked questions and got some answers, all of which you can read in the link.

Pass the Comics: Son of Sinbad

Ransom of Shipwreck Shoals



Joe Kubert draws this story about the Son of Sinbad (who doesn't seem to have any other name than that) who goes after some lost treasure of his dad's in order to rescue a gorgeous slave girl. [Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine]

Pass the Comics: Attack of the Octo-Man!

The Fantastic Voyages of Sinbad



Sinbad hates cephalopods (and dragons and giant spiders). [Gold Key Comics!]

Arms of Doom



A mad scientist creates a human octopus! [Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine]

Pass the Comics: Sinbad, Conan, Deep Sea Spies, and More

I think I've finally stumbled onto a title for this feature. When my siblings and I were growing up, there was only ever one section of the newspaper we were interested in. "Pass the comics" was a common request in our house and I'm happy to pass these along to you.

The Captain's Quest



I don't know much about the characters of Zip and Li'l Bit, but their latest adventure takes place on a whaling ship. The webcomic just started and updates every Sunday. [By Trade Loeffler.]

K-51: Spies at War



I've shared this one before, but it popped back up on Golden Age Comic Book Stories again [you have to scroll down aways to get to this story] and it's one of my favorites. As the title suggests, it's not just tentacles that our hero has to deal with. It's also filthy Nazi deep sea divers.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad



By John Buscema. [Hairy Green Eyeball 2]

The Castle of Otranto



I love a good Gothic Romance story. Unfortunately, a lot of them tend to be tortuously long and rambling novels, but Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto isn't one of those. It's short, sweet, and chock full of vengeful ghosts, floating skulls, secret passages, swooning damsels, heroic young men, and of course a dark, evil, mustache-twirling villain. The adaptation for Adventures into the Unknown isn't nearly as fun and atmospheric as the book, but it's wonderfully illustrated by Al Ulmer. [Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine]

Hour of the Dragon



The first part of Robert E Howard's Conan novel as adapted by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane. [Diversions of the Groovy Kind]

Escape from Planet Nowhere



Otis Frampton's giant robot webcomic has kicked off with a bang (and a couple of thooms).

We the People

On last weekend's What are You Reading? feature at Robot 6, I talked briefly about what should have been an awesome comic. The descendents of Robin Hood, Sinbad, and Zorro taking to streets of a modern city? Sounds great! Unfortunately... not so much.

Homo Aquaticus

Sinbad



Who's volunteering to translate this into English and take my money?

Your 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Picture of the Day



By Alphonse de Neuville.

Your Marvel Classics Comics Cover of the Day



I'm digging through the back issue bins when I go to the store tomorrow.

The news just gets worse...



Look what horror Calvin's uncovered.

Homo Aquaticus



By Lyod Birmingham.

Creature from the Black Lagoon



By Brian Pelletier. The Movie Monsters category at DrawerGeeks is well worth checking out. I'll resist posting more from it and tell you instead that there's an awesome Nosferatu/Spongebob mash-up waiting for you as well as a great Giant Robot piece.

A Week at Sea: I don't think we're going for Play-Doh

Treasure Island



By Edmund Dulac.

Pirates!



Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace & Gromit, are working on an animated pirate movie.

Captain Swing and the Electrical Pirates of Cindery Island



Warren Ellis is working on something for Avatar Press with the word "pirates" in the title. Now you know exactly as much as I do about it. For all I know, these are space pirates, but that would be pretty cool too.

El Llamado del Mar (The Call of the Sea)



Blade II's Leonor Varela is producing and starring in a film about a wish-granting ghost ship. The catch is: you get a wish; the ship gets your soul. Sounds a bit like the Flying Dutchman from the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, but it's actually based on a Chilean legend.

Sinbad movie update



How I wish that was actual art from the Sinbad production instead of just artwork for a graphic novel I won't be able to read, but according to this short interview with director Adam Shankman, the movie they're making sounds promising on its own. There's not a lot of meat to the interview, but Shankman stresses big action and modern effects. That's in spite of the interviewer's suggestion that an homage to Harryhausen-style effects would be appropriate.

Listen, I like Harryhausen a lot too, but I agree with Shankman when he says, "If you go back and watch the Harryhausen movies, they are fun, but they're not good. You know what I mean? They're fun, and they're famous because of that initial work, but the Cyclops looks like Play-Doh. This is a $175 million movie, I think, so I don't think we're going for Play-Doh."

The most interesting part of the interview to me actually has less to do with the Sinbad movie than it does with the way movies are being made now in general. Asked about casting, Shankman says, "Movie stars in and of themselves aren't opening movies anymore. The people need to want to actually see the movies, not just because of who's in them. Amy Pascal's philosophy, and it was with Spider-Man, is [that] Sinbad is the title. That's what is bringing people in, so we don't need to have Will Smith play Sinbad. We don't require that to make this movie." I can't tell you how happy that turn of events makes me.

Your 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Picture of the Day



By Gil Kane.

Shark vs. Octopus



Okay, that looks really frickin cool, but I still contend that the Asylum's Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus can only disappoint. If you really want to see cool footage of a shark fighting an octopus, check out what Calvin discovered.



No wonder he and my son hate those things so much.

Creature from the Black Lagoon Remake Update



No, that's not actual art from this movie either. But they could sure do worse than that as the look of the Creature, huh?

There probably aren't any designs for the remake yet, but director Breck Eisner is trying to get it (and a Flash Gordon movie) pushed through. He says he's going for a "dark adventure tone," but that he wants it to be scary.

"Is this a piña colada which I see before me?"



Terrence Howard is producing and starring in his own version of Macbeth, set on a Caribbean island. Awesome. I'm thinking maybe voodoo priestesses instead of witches?

Captain Kirk vs. Space Pirates

Captain Kirk and the Flight of the Buccaneer

I don't link to Siskoid's Blog of Awesomeness - I mean, Geekery - enough, so let me take a step towards correcting that. After all, a post about Captain Kirk fighting a bunch of space pirates is pretty much tailor-made for me.

Siskoid recently finished up the daunting task of reviewing every single Star Trek TV episode and movie ever made and is following it with reviews of the comics and books, including that Voodoo one I posted about last Spring. It's Must Read Internet.

New Sinbad movie

In other pirate news, looks like there's a new Sinbad movie in the works. According to SCIFI Wire, "The story centers on Sinbad and his crew, who are marooned off the coast of China and embark on a quest to find the lamp of Aladdin."

The image to the left there is Sinbad, but otherwise has nothing to do with the movie. It's from Pierre Alary's upcoming graphic novel that I'm very impatient about.

1001 Arabian Nights: The Adventures of Sinbad

So we're three issues in and I absolutely love the story Dan Wickline is telling in his Sinbad comic. It's only fair to tell you that Wickline's a pal of mine, but if I didn't like Sinbad, I just wouldn't post about it. I'm telling you about Sinbad because I think you're missing out on an awesome story if you're not reading it.

It strikes all the right notes that I'm looking for in a Sinbad story: mystic artifacts, strange creatures, a diverse crew with various supernatural powers, a roguish hero, double-crosses, hidden islands, and lots of beautiful women.

I'm not as fond of the art on the first couple of issues as I am of the writing though. Paolo Pantalena has an angular, stylized look that I'm not sure was right for the story. As soon as I type this I'll think of an exception, but my favorite fantasy comics are usually ones that ground the wildness of the setting in a straightforward style. That's not to say that every fantasy comic should be drawn like Cary Nord - art doesn't have to be realistic to be grounded - but Pantalena's work is unsettling in its exoticness. I was never able to sit back and just enjoy the story. I always felt like I was interpreting his pictures.

Still, the man draws some awesome action sequences. He's dynamic as hell.

But back in the negative column, Pantalena's Sinbad sometimes looks malevolent when I think he's supposed to be cocksure. I saw this same expression on Sinbad a lot in Pantalena's issues.



Sinbad looks like his ideas may have as much to do with carving her up and dressing in her skin as they do with fooling around with her. Rest assured though, he's thinking about fooling around.

As you might expect from a Zenescope comic, the series is pretty bawdy. There are lots of barely dressed women and plenty of leering and groping from the fellas. That's not a complaint - it is what it is and the women give as good as they get in the series - but since most of the stuff I talk about here is fairly kid-friendly, I thought I should mention that this isn't. But even though I wouldn't read it to my six-year-old, it's great fun for me.

I mentioned the diverse crew with supernatural abilities. One of the main ones is Wilhelm, a cursed sailor whom Pantalena draws beautifully. Witness this entrance:



That's a great design. I'd buy a Wilhelm series if Pantalena drew it.

For the most part though, I prefer Tone Rodriguez's art in the third issue. He's got a more realistic style and he also gets Sinbad's grin right.



There's still some danger to that smile, but it doesn't look like he's about to cook and eat you.

Some of my fondness for the third issue may also have to do with the action's really picking up in it. There's nothing wrong with the pacing of the first two, but Sinbad and his crew do spend a lot of time sneaking around and gathering information. It's necessary and Wickline makes it interesting with lots of sword-play and intrigue and secret passages and whatnot; it's just especially nice when the dragons and flying lions show up in #3.

All-in-all it's a cool series. There are more artistic changes coming in future issues and I'd like to see Zenescope get that settled quickly, but Wickline's story is awesome. I'll be sticking with it.

Adventureblog Gallery: Indy, a couple of Hoppers, Wonder Woman, Sinbad, and a space monster

Indy and Marion



By Grant Gould.

Eleven AM

So, I'm reading Stephen King's Duma Key right now and on page 360 I get to this passage where the narrator is visiting an old woman in her room and she's got a print of Edward Hopper's Eleven AM above her bed. King describes it as "an archetype of loneliness waiting patiently at the window for some change, any change." Then, two pages later, he says this:

Over her head, the loneliest girl in the world sat in a chair and looked out the window forever, face hidden by the fall of her hair, naked but for a pair of shoes.

Made me want to see what he was talking about.



By Edward Hopper.

Wonder Woman and Malcolm Magic



By Malcolm's co-creator Lawrence Etherington.

Sinbad



By Pierre Alary.

Giant Two-Headed Space Monsters and the Men Who Kill Them



By Berni Wrightson.

Adventureblog Gallery: Spies, Sinbad, Powerpuff Girls, and a dragon motorsickle

The name is Bond



By Cary Nord.

Spy Girl



By Dub.

Powerpuff Girls



By Sarah Mensinga.

Sinbad



By Pierre Alary.

Dragonbike



Via.