The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1672: Time Bandits, 1982 (Movie Adaptation Week)

The last of my film adaptations for this week comes from a movie I loved (LOVED) as a child. I haven't watched it in many years, so I'm not sure how it holds up, but anything from the pens of Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin, produced by George Harrison, has to have something going for it. Those who've never seen it, I recommend it. Imagine Monty Python doing science fiction, and you'll have some idea of what the film is like.

This adaptation is one of the few this week that I can actually compare to the movie, since I've actually seen the movie. And it's a pretty good version. The likenesses to the actors is good, though perhaps not great, but the narrative follows the film pretty faithfully. The static nature of the medium keeps some of the physically-comedic notes from coming across fully, but the puns and satire are there.

Adaptations are a tricky business. They're always going to be compared, be it favourably or no, to the source material, whether film or screenplay. And when they're adapted from the screenplay, sometimes there will be vast differences between what eventually ends up on the screen and what we see in the comic. Over the weekend I read the adaptation of the Howard the Duck film, and the creatures at the end are actually supposed to be monstrous ducks, rather than the insectoid creatures we see in the final film. Sometimes these differences are good, and highlight the freedom that drawing a story affords artists, but sometimes the differences are bad, and one can see why, in the final film, they would have been changed. I think the monster ducks were a change that needed to happen.

Not sure where we're heading tomorrow, but I'm sure it'll be interesting.

"And for the loser...a soggy death by drowning in a giant bowl of warm custard! Isn't that a scream?!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 736: The Spiral Path #2, July 1986

I was surprised by the outcome of this comic. The two protagonists that we meet in the previous issue, Caed and Bethbara, meet a tribe of little people and are subject to a hallucinatory experience with the elder woman of the tribe. At which point Caed finds himself on the battlefield with Artuk the dead king, and ends up taking his place. Whereas Bethbara, after ascending into the sky, becomes a queen and, seemingly, is set in opposition to the new king of the dead. Very much not where I saw the two characters going, which is always a lovely treat in a story like this one. Parkhouse is pulling on some very deeply mythic language and imagery in this series, and his combinations of North American and British legend and myth is simply wonderful. He treats each with respect, and reminds us that there are undeniable similarities in the systems of belief that have stirred the great civilizations that arose in both of those places. The final page of the story teases that a sequel, The Silver Circle, "may appear at a later date," but from what I can tell that later date has not yet arrived. I can only hope.

I recommend this one, if you can find a copy of the two issues. Lovely art, cool story, and definitely a deep read. I feel like I'll be coming back to this one, one day.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 735: The Spiral Path #1, July 1986

As I noted a few weeks ago, I picked up a box of indie comics on the cheap, and found some real treasures (both of the excellent and execrable kind) contained within. Having made my way through some of that box, I found a few series that I thought were worth pursuing, so I returned to the scene of my previous purchase and made another, this time with some method to the madness. I was fortunate to come across in these quarter bins a few complete runs of old school comics (Jon Sable#1-20, Aztec Ace #1-12), and a couple of complete series. Today's comic (and tomorrow's) are examples of these.

The Spiral Path is a cool little fantasy comic, reprinted from the seminal British comics weekly Warrior, and written by Steve Parkhouse, the man responsible for many of my favourite old school Doctor Who comics. It's cool because it is meshing, somewhat seamlessly, the aesthetic of ancient Britons and ancient North Americans - it works nicely, given the correspondences between Druidic belief and Native American belief. I'm a little concerned that this might qualify as appropriation of a culture that still believes in many of its ancient ways, though the other side of that is that many ancient practices are used as settings of fiction. I suppose the difference is that not all of them have been the target of such a protracted attempt at erasure as Native American belief has. On the plus side, then, this comic is celebratory of such beliefs, casting them as a defense against the power of death.

Is it odd that I'm feeling the urge to put a positive spin on everything I see and hear these days?

To be continued.