This weekend, the Widget and I spent a few idle minutes watching a portion of ‘Speed Racer,’ a 2008 SFX-fest that was at least ostensibly based on the cartoons of my youth. After a short time, she got bored, and I decided to check out the actual cartoons on the internet, which entertained us both for nearly twice as long. (The Mammoth Car is still terrifying.) To my utter horror, I also found out for the first time that the movie was the work of the Wachowskis, they of ‘Matrix’ fame, which put a final nail in the coffin of my respect for/trust of their work. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good stuff in their movies, but it never ends up being worth it for me as a viewer. Their script for ‘V For Vendetta’, a story that I dearly loved, botched the ending in a way that COMPLETELY misunderstood the point of the source material, and the less said of magical sex-raves, the better.
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) accidentally took the fuchsia pill, and now I can spit in seven different colors, asking: What creators do you no longer trust, no matter how much interest you might have in the concept or source material?
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It saddens me to say this but Dave Sim.
I was heavily into Cerebus in my early 20’s.
I made it all the way to the Form and Void trades when I realized that I was just buying the books just to get to #300 rather than out of an sort of enjoyment of where the story went. Then I bailed out.
I’ve made peace with the fact that I will likely never read the end of Cerebus.
I think I prefer to appreciate Dave from a distance.
M. Night Shyamalan tops my list. All I can say is that he got lucky with ‘Sixth Sense’. He went on my list with ‘Signs’, and ‘The Happening’ pushed him to the top. Haven’t seen anything associated with him since.
Same, except the only movie of his I really liked was “Unbreakable”. The rest just felt like “Keep the same plot, change a few details, I bet nobody notices”.
Even more sad was the fact that he drove one of the best modern animation franchises into the ground. I feel bad for the Avatar guys who will now have an uphill battle for any sort of cinematic adaptation.
I almost gave up on Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind due to long publication delays – six month hiatus, followed by a year long haitus, followed by an eighteen month hiatus, etc., but I stuck with it because the story and art made up for it (unlike other problematic series like Cerebus and Starstruck. Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta – I LOVE Starstruck, but, damn, if you can’t get a publisher to let you finish the story…. haven’t you people ever heard of the Internet??? Next year it will have been thirty years since the story sputtered to a premature end… talk about your comicus interuptus!
Howard Chaykin is near the top of my list, too, because he comes up with great stories and looses interest part way through. Plus his beautiful babes all seem to have evolved into hookerhood, and not in a good way. And then there’s Erik Larsen. The Savage Dragon was brilliant and funny, but I abandoned it in the late 80s when the letters page, editorial rants and ad pages consistently outnumbered the actual pages of art and story in every issue.