Brad Meltzer's "Book of Fate": NOT the first book to involve comic material!
Mercury Studio presents a facinating correction to the AP's recent article I took apart earlier in which the reporter credited the pretentious novelist's recent book as being the first to feature comic book pages included (via Newsarama blog):
Mercury also says that:
Basically, all the AP and other such press sources are trying to do is to promote Meltzer by making him sound like this great, super-duper writer who's a kindly, devoted fan of comics, which amounts to little more than exaggerating and inflating someone's image and ego, ditto whitewashing it too. I've got a fair guess why: if he really were a writer with even an iota of decency, like maybe Harlan Ellison, who worked on a couple of comic stories in the late 60s-early 70s, and did some pretty good items in his time, for all I know, chances are you'd never see Meltzer's name mentioned in fluff-articles like these. Most likely it's because they realize that he's put out some pretty reprehensible items, and so that makes him a hero in their twisted POV. In a sane world, we wouldn't have to worry about the wrong kind of people being promoted as the best all-time talents, but sadly, this is the kind of reality we live in, where overrated are lionized by a media that doesn't care about real quality, and those with common sense and perceptive viewpoints are obscured almost entirely.
Update: also interesting is what one of the commentors at the other blog says:
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I have but one thing to say about this: it just proves how anyone who feels that the mainstream press doesn't do any serious fact-checking isn't too far off!It's horribly, appallingly nerdy of me to pipe up about this, (or even to know it, I guess) but Laura Esquivel and Miguelanxo Prado beat him by over a decade. Esquivel's novel "The Law of Love" came out in 1995 and contained several comic book sections illustrated by Prado that functioned as part of the narrative.
Mercury also says that:
It's always a little frustrating seeing these "novelists do comics" articles because they only seem interested in novelists dipping their toes into work-for-hire superhero projects or (in the case of the Stephen King item) allowing others to adapt their work.For me, it's practically appalling, because of how they're fawning over them, not writing any in depth focus on their work to ask if anything these novelists do is good or bad, and are even worth buying in the first place. Nor do they ask if the novelists really are fans of superheroes or any of the positive impacts they have, or even if they intend to write something positive themselves. Suffice it to say that Jodi Picoult seems to have been a big fuss over nothing to boot.
Basically, all the AP and other such press sources are trying to do is to promote Meltzer by making him sound like this great, super-duper writer who's a kindly, devoted fan of comics, which amounts to little more than exaggerating and inflating someone's image and ego, ditto whitewashing it too. I've got a fair guess why: if he really were a writer with even an iota of decency, like maybe Harlan Ellison, who worked on a couple of comic stories in the late 60s-early 70s, and did some pretty good items in his time, for all I know, chances are you'd never see Meltzer's name mentioned in fluff-articles like these. Most likely it's because they realize that he's put out some pretty reprehensible items, and so that makes him a hero in their twisted POV. In a sane world, we wouldn't have to worry about the wrong kind of people being promoted as the best all-time talents, but sadly, this is the kind of reality we live in, where overrated are lionized by a media that doesn't care about real quality, and those with common sense and perceptive viewpoints are obscured almost entirely.
Update: also interesting is what one of the commentors at the other blog says:
It might be stretching the definition a little, but in 1974, Dennis O'Neil co-wrote a novel called "Dragon's Fists", and subsequently used its main character as the star of Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter...And even before that, we had Marvel's own inclusion of Fu Manchu in their own Master of Kung Fu series, which ran for almost a decade. That too, in a way, was an adaptation.
Open trackbacks: Is it Just Me, Leaning Straight Up, MoreWhat.Com, Point Five, Right Pundits, stikNstein, The World According to Carl.
Labels: msm propaganda
