The Book Was Better: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Neil Gaiman To Produce Sandman Movie

I love comic book movies, but it is a love like John Hinckley Jr.’s for Jodie Foster: just because a feeling borders on obsession doesn’t mean that the object of that affection will ever love you back.

It is a hard-fought love, as I am 42 years old, and therefore lived in a dark time when genre fans hoping for a movie to their tastes would have to bite the bullet and pretend to be excited about things like Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man and then find a way to convince ourselves that we were worthy of sucking breath in the morning. And if you wanted a comic book movie? Well, there was the first Batman movie that opened just after my 18th birthday, sure, but before that? Well, in the five years before Batman, the only comic book flicks that were released were The Return of The Swamp Thing, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, Supergirl, and Howard The fucking Duck. That’s a real murderer’s row of movies. In the sense that I want to line them up and shoot them.

So we comic book fans truly live in an amazing time, in the sense that there are many movies based on comic books, and most of them are pretty damn good. Sure, there’s the odd X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 out there, but there are very few real stinkers. Sure, there are still arguments about Watchmen (which I rewatched recently and still like a lot), but that comic was so dense that it would have been well-nigh impossible to do a really killer adaptation of the thing. So while I like it, I can understand the argument that everyone involved should have left well enough alone. After all: some comics should just stay comics.

Which is one hell of a long way to go to report that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has announced via Twitter that he has signed on to produce a movie adaptation of Sandman with Neil Gaiman and David Goyer.

Family Reunion: The Sandman Overture #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Since my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me why anyone would consider a digital publication of any kind when he’s sure he probably has a slightly used yet still perfectly good Juggs Magazine he could sell me floating around somewhere, was sold out of The Sandman Overture #1 when we visited yesterday, this review is based on the digital version available on Comixology and read on a seven-inch Android tablet.

So. A prequel to a beloved genre series that is widely considered to be a classic, released about 16 or so years after the original series ended. That almost always ends well.

Seriously: I’ve read through The Sandman Overture, written by Neil Gaiman with art by J. H. Williams III and purported to tell the story of what Morpheus was up to just before that dink Roderick Burgess trapped him in a snow globe, and I’m not sure what I think about it. Because it’s a comic book that’s almost impossible to consider on its own merits… not that that’s a bad thing. After all, if The Phantom Menace hadn’t been tagged with the words Star Wars, it would be best remembered as a Twitter hashtag whenever it aired on the SyFy Channel after Sharknado.

But if you take The Sandman Overture #1 as part of the epic tale of Sandman, that means that you’re not only tacking onto a mythology that took 16 or so years for Gaiman to write, but one that spans thousands of years and just about the entire universe. Gaiman took the long view with Sandman, and there’s no reason to think he’s not doing the same with this miniseries.

But the trouble is that we don’t have the entire miniseries yet. We just have this one issue. And while the sum of the parts might wind up being spectacular, I just can’t say that about this single issue. What we have here is, well, a prequel. And one that shows some disturbing signs of succumbing to the same pitfall that all-too-many prequels to genre properties have fallen over the years.

Fan service.

SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part One: DC’s Meet The Publishers Panel

We are coming up on the final bits and pieces of coverage we took from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con – yes, I know the convention ended eight days ago, but it turns out we had a lot of video to sort through, and a significant percentage of that video needed extensive processing on an actual computer in order to make it into something that YouTube would recognize as a video file, as opposed to some form of data wad, or perhaps a Word file detailing our manifesto and list of demands.

But the computer has done its work and dinged like a toaster oven (as we all know computers do), so we are finally proud to present a series of videos from DC Comics’s Meet The Publishers panel, held on Sunday, July 21st and featuring Co-Publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio. And you can say what you want about, say, DiDio (God knows we do, repeatedly), but there is no denying that the guy runs an entertaining panel with an infectious enthusiasm, which even Lee gets caught up in.

This was a fun panel, and we’re happy to bring you, a day late and a buck short, a small piece of it, along with some art that was shown to crowd at the panel. You can check them out after the jump.

SDCC 2012: DC’s The Edge And The Dark Panel. Oh, and Neil Gaiman’s Returning To Sandman

First of all people of San Diego: it’s a fucking e-cigarette. It emits water vapor. So please stop passive-aggressively giving me shit when I’m using it on a public sidewalk, out of doors and approaching the convention center, by muttering, “Nothing I like better than a faceful of cigarette smoke blowing into my baby’s face…” Let’s clear the air here (ha!): my e-cigarette emits no odor and bothers no one, unlike your little bundle of squalling fecal production. And since my e-cig doesn’t even burn, the San Diego Fire Marshall even considers it less of a fucking fire hazard.

Okay, I feel better now. Now that we’ve got my personal news out of the way, let’s talk about what’s been happening at SDCC 2012 that doesn’t involve self-righteous self-absorbsion.

The actual programming at SDCC started in earnest yesterday, featuring panels on everything from homosexuality in genre fiction to Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II. (Rob: This may be redundant. Consider editing. -Amanda)