create an account   |   login

About Me

Alex Carrillo
Age: 19
Location: Southern California
Ethnicity: Latin/Hispanic (I'm Mexican)
Religion: None

Banner by TrailerParkJesus

G-mail/G-talk - Alexandorator [at] gmail.com


. Daft Punk - Alive 2007

. The Mars Volta - The Bedlam in Goliath

. DangerDoom - The Mouse and the Mask

. The Inkspots - The Millennium Collection

. Andrew Jackson Jihad - People Who Can Eat People Are The Luckiest People In The World

These are subject to change.







Frank Miller's Robocop
Frank Millar - Steven Grant - Juan Jose Ryp
Avatar Press

The original Robocop was fantastic. It was funny, violent, and it had some things to say about society (though not intelligently). The movie bordered on a thin line of acceptable ridiculousness, and was rather enjoyable cyberpunk flick. Robocop 2 and 3 on the other hand, were awful pieces of shit.

Everyone seems to place the blame on poor old Frank Miller for the dreadful sequels, but he says otherwise. According to him, Hollywood took his screenplay and made drastic changes. Producers of the film claimed that most Miller’s vision was “unfilmable”. Nevertheless, it left a bad taste in his mouth. Miller wasn’t too happy with the way Hollywood worked.

From 2003 to 2006 Avatar Press published nine issues of Frank Miller’s Robocop, now deemed to be the real Robocop sequels by nerds across the globe. The book follows Miller’s original Robocop 2 script, and bit off of Robocop 3 as well. He didn’t write it though. The adaptation was written by Steven Grant, but was looked over by Frank Miller.

With all that said, I don’t know if what Miller had written in his original script was worth all of the drama. The outlining story is practically the same. Detroit is still shitty, OCP still replaces the cops with a private military of criminals, and there is still a “Robocop 2” that Robocop has to battle.

I won’t tell you what differences there are between the movie and comic specifically. What I will say is that they make very little difference towards the end quality. Lewis still has no character, as well as everyone else in the book. Nothing is explored -- a generic and tired formula that begs to be ignored.

Grant does inject a bit of that satire found in the original film, and while it isn’t as good, he still manages to land a few on the bullseye. What is landing one hundred percent is the violence. Some of you could have fun with watching a woman’s burning, melting corpse slam against a wall.

The art was a tad difficult for me to review. While I can’t say it’s necessarily bad, it sure is “busy” (for lack of a better term). Too busy. Many times I’ve had to take a while to figure out what I was looking at. The detail work was somewhat impressive. In a way, it sort of channels that sense of chaos that comes from this universe’s version of Detroit. You can take it either way.

I can’t recommend this to everyone. I can’t even recommend it to most Robocop fans. You gain nothing from reading it. If you’re looking for something violent, or just want to rinse out some of what you saw in Robocop 2 and 3, then this could be for you. Everyone else should just…



Got a comment for one my comic reviews? Think it sucked? Found some errors? Check these links for its community blog post.

Older reviews:
Shooting War
Coward - Criminal Vol 1.
Frank Miller's Robocop
Fell: Feral City - Vol 1.
Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse - Vol 1.
Batman Death Mask
Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life - Vol. 1

Coming Soon:
Halo Graphic Novel
Stephen King's The Dark Tower: Gunslinger Reborn
Preacher Vol. 1
___________________



Thanks, The_GHost!

Gamer Profile

3DS friend code:
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/vex
Battle: vexed_@hotmail.com
PSN: Alexandorator
Mii:
Gamertag: Vexed Alex

Following (67)

Comic Review: Batman Dark Mask vexed alex | 10:35 PM on 03.11.2009 3 comments

Yoshinori Natsume DC Comics As very few of you may know, I’m not a big fan of manga. I think the books are horribly overpriced, and all of them being black and white totally bums me out. Sometimes it may work, but most of the time it feels like a limiting rule within the medium. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to reading a few books, and I’m a big fan of the Initial D series. I was interested in seeing what the Japanese would do with a character like Batman. After watching Batman Gotham Knight I wasn’t too thrilled. Apart from Kevin Conroy taking back his role of Batman and the first segment’s (Have I Got a Story For You) art style, it was fairly forgettable. That’s disappointing considering how awesome Animatrix was. So was Japan able to redeem itself with “Death Mask”? Sadly, no. Like the movie, the story was fairly stock. It was typical Batman wrapped in not-so-awesome Japanese style art. I’m not saying the Japanese aren’t capable of making a good looking book. This just felt very typical and bland. Perhaps some color could have helped, perhaps not. Either way, I wasn’t really digging it. Unfortunately the art wasn’t backed up by an interesting story. Like is said, it was fairly typical stuff. They did try to touch on a few things like Bruce’s past, but who hasn’t? After Frank Miller’s Batman Year One people should have really stopped trying. I will admit that it trying to focus on a singular part of Bruce’s pre-Batman life was wise, but the execution was immensely average. It read like a Western writer was doing this book. My advice to Yoshinori Natsume is to do his own thing. I would have been fine if he strayed away from typical super hero conventions. And don’t even ask me about the characters. I can’t remember anyone’s name and I just reread this book yesterday. All I can say is that there’s a masked killer ripping off people’s face and Bruce is having nightmares. Oh, and there’s this whole thing where the writer suggests Batman’s vigilantly shenanigans is causing Gotham more harm than good. What super hero comic has tried that? Oh, wait. 99% of them! I can’t really recommend this to anyone. Manga fans and Batman fans will both probably agree that it’s best that you ignore this book. At $10 you can go grab yourself a Scott Pilgrim book and have a much better time, or you can track down a copy of “Child of Dreams“. I haven’t read it but I hear it’s Batman in a manga done right.