Oops, looks like I spoke to soon--Marvel Comics was also enduring Meteormania!This seems to be another one those cases where Warren had the rights to produce a movie-centric magazine featuring photos and interviews, and Marvel got the chance to do a comic book adaptation, similar to Close Encounters of the Third Kind a year before.
If you can get past the uninspiring cover(not one of Earl Norem's best), Marvel actually went all out with this, and hired no less than Gene Colan and Tom Palmer to do the art--wow!!
Colan seems like an odd choice, since so much of the story concerns itself with giant spectacles of destruction, but Colan handles that stuff very well, and gives us a couple of giant, full- double-page panels to try and replicate the widescreen excitment of the movie:
...I know I say this about pretty much every comic book ever printed, but I think would've worked very well as a treasury-sized book, what with these huge shots of massive objects colliding into each other(like when a meteor hits the Twin Towers...ugh). In fact, it's a little surprising they didn't do this as a treasury, since they did it for Close Encounters, and Marvel seemed to like use the treasury format for its licensed properties. Oh well...
The painted color is also by Palmer, who does an excellent job, using all different kinds of palates to capture the mood of any given sequence. I love the electronic glow on the faces of the government guys in this panel, for instance.After the story, there's an usual text article featuring a massive list of Disaster Flicks by Tom Rogers, but done with a light touch that makes for fun reading(for instance, Star Wars is included on the list, because of the destruction of Alderaan), then a second article about the film's special effects(somebody call Jim Warren's attorney!), and then a final piece about real-life disasters, ending the book on a wonderfully downbeat note.
All told, a lot of comic ink got spilled for Meteor; I wonder if either of these comics were anywhere near a success, despite the film. Marvel's version here(written by Ralph Macchio) is actually pretty good, and fairly enjoyable whether you've seen the movie or not.
I just bet DC was happy they didn't get roped into a Superman Vs. The Meteor treasury comic...
3 comments:
Wow - check out the meteors in that girl's top!
You're obviously part of the target audience!
Looks better than the film.
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