Best Left Alone

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Just watching the movie "Fantastic Four" (2015) again - Doc Doom's just making his nascent appearance as they rescue Victor from the other dimension - shit's just kicking off. Reminds me of the great comic-book allegiance debates of my youth. Our postwar generation grew up on a diet of westerns, war movies and imported American comics, and playground tribalism centred as much around these non-native cultural tropes as football or music: the Blues, Villa, or Baggies? Motown, Stax, Atlantic etc.? All this was supplemented with Marvel or DC Comics? I personally cleaved only to the tribe of the Baggies (West Bromwich Albion) in football, but read both DC and Marvel, alongside titles such as Astounding Stories, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and of course, Mad magazine.

I wish I'd still got my Howard the Duck comics, though: Marvel's late - well, compared with FF, Spiderman, Thor, et al. - and very great invention that hardly gets mentioned these days, probably due to the awful 1986 film adaptation. It was never going to work, fellers: CGI'd cynical duck gumshoe superhero types really don't cut it: some things need to stay firmly in the two-dimensional, flat-colour world of the comic form. Things that just don't translate across media and are best left alone. "The Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy" spin-offs spring to mind: case in point: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. A lesson well to heed.

[Addendum: I believe Howard has occasionally resurfaced and made the odd cameo appearance in various Marvel franchises since the original comic book series: I guess I just haven't been looking!]

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