davextreme

In an interview on Complex.com, Joss Whedon talks about Dollhouse and a few other things, including confirming that there will be a “season nine” of Buffy in comics once season eight finishes, and that comic book artist John Cassaday will direct a Dollhouse episode.

The 13th episode of Dollhouse, which Fox didn’t air, is now available on iTunes.

Neat article on the original movie Buffy versus the series. There aren’t many other cases where you can see how a screenplay can get mangled as it becomes a movie and then compared it to a TV series where the creator was able to bring it to life. The American President and The West Wing come to mind. Comments are open if anyone has other examples.

I know, I know, I can’t stop talking about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Bear with me for a minute.

Star Wars started in the middle of its tale, and did it brilliantly. Did you really need to know how Darth Vader became a bad guy? No, the movies were perfect just as they were, starting with part four. Certainly the prequels could have been better, but no matter what story they told, they still end with Darth Vader becoming the villain, which you figure out pretty quickly in the very first scene of the original movie. Why bother telling the whole story when you can just tell the interesting stuff and leave the rest to your the imagination?

Lost has just gotten through a similar problem. When the show started out, the flashback sequences were a great format that gave you background about the character that contrasted with what was going on the present. But once you know that Charlie is a failed rock star and junkie, how many more episodes do you need to see of his pathetic life? Again, just give us enough to know what’s going on. Fan fiction writers will will in the rest.

Dr. Horrible gives us a neat spin on this. We see how a small time crook becomes the mighty Dr. Horrible, but we never see who he is afterwards. Maybe he becomes the leader of the Evil League of Evil. Maybe he really does take over the world. It’s like Joss Whedon just gave us Bruce Wayne’s training on the mountain and cut out the context where he becomes Batman. We get Dr. Horrible’s tragic rise to power, and then a fade to black instead of the rest of the picture. Sure, he could probably go back and make the rest of the movie, but why bother when he’s already shot the good parts?

The second “issue” of Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon’s Sugarshock! is up now for your free online viewing. First one’s here. This is all part of Dark Horse’s new Dark Horse Presents experiment on MySpace, and I’m going to go ahead and call it unsavory. The works themselves are great, but the Web just isn’t the place for long form comics. (Comic strips work great.) Whenever I read anything online, I’m usually in “skim” mode. It’s already very easy to skim comics when reading them in physical form. You just read the words and skip over the pictures once you have the general idea of what’s going on. In doing that, you’re missing a lot of the work, like watching TV with the picture turned off. Online, it’s even easier to do this, with your finger on the scroll wheel. I’d even go so far as to say that this movement by Dark Horse will weaken people’s impressions of the comic book format. Get them used to skimming comics on the web in 30 seconds each and they’ll start to think of comics as something not substantial, not worth spending money on. The webcomic strip works great because it’s designed to be read in under a minute, and you can put one out a few times a week.

Whedon and Moon’s work is good, though. I’d like to see it printed.