Captain America!!!!!

So I saw Captain America: The First Avenger on Friday. I liked it a lot. I think Marvel has been very smart with this series of movies; they're all pretty good as stand-alone action movies, while simultaneously building up to the big Avengers movie. That's not an easy trick to pull off. Captain America: The First Avenger may be my favorite superhero movie of the summer, which is saying something, since both Thor and X-Men: First Class were really good. I seriously think it should be an Oscar contender for all the production design categories.

I haven't seen, and probably won't see (unless it's free on TV), Green Lantern. The only good things I've heard about that one are from people who saw it and said it wasn't as bad as they expected, given all the terrible, terrible reviews from critics and fans alike. It used to be that I would see a superhero/comic book-related movie regardless, even when I expected it to be bad, just because. It really says something about the power of film in our culture that so many people crave having their favorite books, plays, comics, games, cartoons, et al adapted into live-action films, as though that somehow conveys some sort of cultural status on the original material.

For example, two years ago, I attended an academic conference about the 19th century militant abolitionist, John Brown (no relation!). After two days of discussions on the historical legacy of John Brown, the abolitionist movement, the political and economic culture of antebellum America, and the nature of political violence, the final panel was an interview with Russell Banks, author of a fictionalized account of John Brown, Cloudsplitter. It's a bona-fide Great American Novel, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Banks is in general one of our greatest living American writers. During the hour-long interview, he briefly discussed his interactions with Hollywood in optioning the novel. It's in 'development,' which of course only means that someone paid a lot of money for the rights to make a movie that they may or may not actually intend to make someday. The audience was almost all serious academics and historians, amateur and professional, yet during the Q&A session, almost every question was about this hypothetical movie version of the novel. These academics at Yale University were even floating casting ideas just as comic nerds dream-cast superhero movies. They were just soooo excited to see a big-budget movie about their favorite historical figure.

By the way, the general consensus was that John Brown should be played by Tommy Lee Jones, who was excellent in Captain America: The First Avenger. So ... Captain America! Go see it.


Here's the scan of the pencils, and the digital inks.