kill for our own food, the human civilization has been constantly looking for purpose and what is normal. But as we crossed through the nineties, the world began to shift to become more about convenience. With convenience comes more free time to enjoy your life. When I was young, you weren’t supposed to be reading comic books or enjoying fantastic worlds. You were a nerd or a geek if you did, and you needed to get your head out of the clouds and get a real job. But with the world becoming about enjoying your time, popularity in such topics has grown.
Instead of remembering Batman as something you read as a child, now you can go buy the newest comic. Instead of missing out on the latest movie because you have to stay
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late in the office, you can go see it and take calls on your smartphone if needed. What I’m getting at is this is where the acceptance came from.
These worlds that many of us have been in since we were children have become acceptable not because they got cooler, but because people actually have the time to enjoy them. So what we hope to accomplish with this book is to explain what happened with the superhero genre. Because a lot of the first movies were incredible and were listed as some of the best movies of all time. But eventually, superhero movies fell into a gutter of trying to sell topical ideas and toys.
That should have been the end of many superhero series, but a lot of companies realized they can try again. We’ll be looking at some key franchises and how they rose, fell, and rose again. The fact taht they can rubber band back so easily has created a weird situation for the superhero genre in which companies are repeatedly making similar movies until the movie-going public enjoys one of them. But I can’t argue with success, and we have now gone from a successful movie to superhero movies ranking among the highest grossing films of all time, elevating these superheroes and the fans of comic books.
We as geeks and nerds have gone from the outcast to the cool individuals who know all the fun facts you’ll never get in a movie. Now our goal is to educate you about what has happened with each of these movies, and then to present the opinions and reviews of these movies from a nostalgic old comic book reader and a comic book reader that jumped on board in the recent years with the new material. You will also notice entire segments for Superman and Batman while Marvel is lumped together.
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This is not due to some fanboyism or preference for DC over Marvel. It’s actually based on the fact Superman and Batman have completely separate franchises, while Marvel is touted as a complete franchise to itself. Superman and Batman were handled separate from each other, but both learned from Marvel’s successes and that is proven by the last film in each of their franchises. As this is such a very opinion-based book, I thought it would be fun to bring in the members of Comicstorian team and explain who each of us is.
I am Benny, and I run the YouTube channel Comicstorian. On a frequent basis, we take comic book plots lines, cut them up into a ten-minute video, and read back what happened in a dramatic manner. The goal is to give people a general idea of a story that involves their favorite superheroes and entice them to go pick up a similar book or the book we read itself to get the full story.
I have held discussions about superhero theory, lore and plotlines. I have been reading comics since I was a child, when my father got me my first Superman comic. It was something that I could connect with my father about because we didn’t have very much else in common. Once he had introduced me to the world of comics, I would ride my bicycle miles down the road to the local store and fully immerse myself in this world. I did fall off the wagon around the time Spider-Man decided to have more clones than adventures, but the superhero movies X-Men and Spider-Man brought me back into the loving embrace of a new comic book. I started the channel Comicstorian in order to share my passion and love for all things comics with likeminded individuals. I never expected to meet and experience even half of what I have, which has led to the creation of this book.
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JASON
To say that writing movie reviews about comic book films is my destiny is not something that I would tout as one of my greatest accomplishments but it is certainly very cool. As a child I was always surrounded by great movies. My family is a family of cinephiles so I simply played along. As I grew older I learned that it wasn’t considered normal to obsess over films, which I thought was odd because people really seem to like movies. All of the pop culture I was exposed to centered on films with branding involving clothes, toys, and video games. Comic book and movie themed birthday parties were common place.
So what’s the big deal?
Why is it wrong to discuss ideas about who should be cast as Jean Gray, or who the next Batman villain should be? These are life altering important decisions! In college at Colorado State University I started writing movie reviews on a now defunct website called The Keen and Hair Reviews which was my attempt to be the Roger Ebert of the Twenty-First century.
Writing film reviews is unrewarding and serves no real purpose but to be therapeutic. It’s also a great way to create rote responses to people who continually ask me my opinions on a new film’s. Why are people asking me about my opinion all of the time? It’s because I became a full time manager at Grand Slam Sports Cards and Comics in 2008 after my career in teaching social studies was sidelined for numerous reasons. As a person who sits behind the comic counter I immediately become the pop culture expert. In fact it almost becomes my responsibility to see these comic book films first thing when they are released. I would like to say that the majority of the
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films I’ve reviewed in this work were at a midnight screening premiere, but I’d be lying.
When Benny the Comicstorian walked into my life in early 2014 it was quite interesting. He told me about his YouTubing shenanigans and I was blown away that I met one of these people who claims to make a living off of You-Tube. Shortly after he began to craft his identity of Comicstorian and I was asked to come along on the ride.
I created my YouTube identity of Indie-bookasaurus and started helping with videos by being in them or even scripting them. I actually have T-Shirts (shameless plug)! During this time I have started a movie review podcast titled End of the World Movie Reviews with my friend Andrew Saiger. It is still going and you can check it out if you want the more off color versions of some of these film reviews. All of this somehow leads to me writing movie reviews in this book, which is for a super nerd a great honor.
While I don’t hold a degree in being judgmental of cinema I hope you can appreciate the perspective of someone who is a professional at selling comic books and in many ways a professional comic movie reviewer. For some reason my reviews hold weight with some of my customers so I hope they hold some weight with you my dear reader!
DAN
My name is Dan Rumbles, and I’m the lead editor for the Comicstorian YouTube channel. Sure, I’ve read a couple of comics here and there throughout the years but it was in
