This was one of approximately fifteen hundred different one-shot movie adaptations Marvel did in the b/w magazine format in the late 80s/early 90s. Though of course adapting Darkman made a little more sense, because of its subject matter and super-hero(ish) lead character.
I remember seeing the Darkman movie in the theater, and left feeling perplexed, as if the filmmakers didn't quite know what kind of movie they wanted to make. But the movie adaptation, because of its change in format, suffers no such tonal shifts.
No, from the very intense cover (by our pal Joe Jusko) until the final page, this version of Darkman reads like a straight-up horror/action story.
For instance, the scene where Darkman is created after an explosion, it cuts from that moment (via CGI flash-forward) to his girlfriend mourning at his grave:
The art in the first half of the book is by Bob Hall and Mark Texeira, whose tough, muscular style works well for this story.
The final page of the story is about as downbeat as can be, with Darkman rejecting a life with his beloved and choosing to wander the streets and...scaring random people, I guess:
Marvel released Darkman as a three-issue standard format mini-series around this same time. I remember the movie not being that big a hit; but since Marvel did a second Darkman series a few years later, I guess they had a better success with it than the movie studio did.
2 comments:
HA! The reason all the masks look alike on the cover is that we didn't really understand the story or have pics of the actors he impersonates so we just did a generic face.
That's not how the movie ends. After he tells Julie Hastings, "Peyton is gone," he melts into the crowd with a new mask. It's actually Bruce Campbell, Ash in Raimi's Evil Dead series.
I wonder if the ending of the magazine came from something that ended up on the cutting room floor? It certainly makes our "hero" seem far more sinister.
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