I could become a fan of the new BBC Sherlock Holmes serial. And mind you, I am a lifelong Holmes fan who has demanding tastes in adaptations (I hate Jeremy Brett, for instance).
Well, now, I've seen part of that more fundamental argument and think I shall leave it to others, as I haven't read the early issues.
More frivolously, "it was in canon" by itself works better as an argument for movie-suitability with Holmes than Captain America. I was reading it rather haphazardly in the early nineties, and I recall an issue where he narrowly escaped being turned into a woman and one where he did get turned into a werewolf. :)
This may surprise you, but I have been a Cap fan even longer than I have been into Sherlock Holmes - my interest started in Italy, as a child, when I could not even read English properly. So I can identify all the stories you mention - indeed, they are in my library in the other room in my flat. They come from the declining period of Mark Gruenwald's long run; alas, you seem to have got in just as he lost direction badly. I have written an essay on the Gruenwald Cap years for a fanzine I used to publish, which I don't think I ever reprinted in this blog - if you are interested, I will.
My point is that the fuss made about the movie adaptation's director's description of Cap as "not a super-patriot, but an ordinary Joe who tries to do his best and live up to the image cast on him" proves beyond a doubt that the people who made the fuss had never read the comic. The "ordinary Joe" is at the heart of everything that all the best Cap writers have tried to do with the character, and Jack Kirby, the author most closely associated with Cap, explicitly and repeatedly stated it as the core of what his Captain was just that. In his Captain America's Bicentennial Battles (which, in spite of the dreadful title, is one of the greatest Cap stories ever and one of the peaks of Kirby's stellar career), he closed the package with a single-page drawing of Cap out of his mask, and a parade of his arrogant and stupid enemies - from Nazi officers to Batroc the Leaper - who repeat in chorus that none of them would bother with someone so commonplace. And all the leading Cap creators - Joe Simon who created him, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Englehart, Roger Stern, Marc de Matteis, Mark Gruenwald - were one way or another part of the left-of-centre area, and Cap was consistently the defender of a moderately but distinctly left-of-centre notion of decency.
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Date: 2010-07-28 01:56 pm (UTC)More frivolously, "it was in canon" by itself works better as an argument for movie-suitability with Holmes than Captain America. I was reading it rather haphazardly in the early nineties, and I recall an issue where he narrowly escaped being turned into a woman and one where he did get turned into a werewolf. :)
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Date: 2010-07-30 08:06 am (UTC)My point is that the fuss made about the movie adaptation's director's description of Cap as "not a super-patriot, but an ordinary Joe who tries to do his best and live up to the image cast on him" proves beyond a doubt that the people who made the fuss had never read the comic. The "ordinary Joe" is at the heart of everything that all the best Cap writers have tried to do with the character, and Jack Kirby, the author most closely associated with Cap, explicitly and repeatedly stated it as the core of what his Captain was just that. In his Captain America's Bicentennial Battles (which, in spite of the dreadful title, is one of the greatest Cap stories ever and one of the peaks of Kirby's stellar career), he closed the package with a single-page drawing of Cap out of his mask, and a parade of his arrogant and stupid enemies - from Nazi officers to Batroc the Leaper - who repeat in chorus that none of them would bother with someone so commonplace. And all the leading Cap creators - Joe Simon who created him, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Englehart, Roger Stern, Marc de Matteis, Mark Gruenwald - were one way or another part of the left-of-centre area, and Cap was consistently the defender of a moderately but distinctly left-of-centre notion of decency.