Word: superheroics
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Toronto International Film Festival, which wrapped its 29th annual session on September 18, showcased 253 features and 75 shorts, with screenings that began at 9 a.m. and kept going until the climax of a Midnight Madness movie?say, the Japanese Zebraman, Takashi Miike's zesty tribute to a nerdy superhero that had the crowd la-la-ing along to its theme song at two in the morning...
There is precedent for a puppet movie like Team America: World Police. It's only that none has ever been placed in hands as deviantly deft as those of South Park malefactors Trey Parker and Matt Stone. A crew of superhero marionettes (the old-fashioned kind) faces off against wmd-hoarding, four-letter-wording North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Some have already attacked the film for mocking the war on terrorism. But given the correctly impolitic attitudes of Parker and Stone, count on both left and right wings getting clipped. The trailer ballyhoos star names: "Alec Baldwin! ... Susan Sarandon...
...Superheroes. You can't live with them and you can't live without them. They are inexorably tied to the history of American comic books. After the 1950s restrictions on comic's content, the popularity of superheroes kept the medium alive while simultaneously stigmatizing it as a children's entertainment. Beginning with the first generation of "underground" comix artists, most cartoonists interested in exploring the artistic possibilities of the medium have treated superheroes like a form of radiation - an invisible energy best left ignored lest you get seriously burned. Recently that prejudice has been eroding as more and more alty...
...Death Ray." Two years ago, "Eightball" #22 gave us an Altman-esque fractured look at the strange residents of suburbia (see TIME.comix review). Like its predecessor, number 23 is divided into multiple vignettes, but this time it focuses exclusively on the life of one character. Clowes takes the traditional superhero motifs - extraordinary powers, special gadgets, the sidekick, and the origin story - but eliminates the "super" and the "hero." Instead we get Andy, AKA The Death Ray, a drip of a guy with a completely self-serving sense of morality who beats people up and zaps anything or anybody into...
...While comics have a reputation for being high-impact, garish entertainments epitomized by such superhero antics as Marvel's Spider-Man, they have just as much ability to be quiet and contemplative. It is this aspect that the singularly named Seth, nee Gregory Gallant, 41, has come to make his metier. "I think what most interested us when we were in our twenties and talking about cartooning a lot was not so much the content of the stories but breaking away from the traditional approach to how cartoon stories are told," Seth told TIME.comix. "Certainly for the history of comics...