I’m going to be honest with you guys. I’m always honest with my readers, snarky exaggeration aside, so understand that if this wasn’t tied in to what I’m currently reviewed in “Yesterday’s” Comic, I would not be bothering with this riff fodder of a garbage short film. According to my reading list for the Ultraverse I’m reviewing on Monday’s this is where the Firearm film should go in the reading order…not that you can tell from watching it, because it tells you nothing and it’s only Ultraverse ties is the mention of Ultras and mentioning Hardcase. He also gets his own thankfully shorter film that the poster shoved in here so I don’t have to deal with it, and the intro for the only good live-action Ultraverse production apparently, The Night Man. The moral is get Glen Larson to adapt your work instead of Darren Doane. Otherwise, this is not very good. I can see why the only other out-of-comics adaptation was the short-lived low-budget Ultraforce cartoon that was still better than this schlock.
The Ultraverse reading list I’m going by places this before issue #0 of Firearm but one site said it actually came with the first issue. We’ll be taking a look at issue #0 on Monday, so this is the place to put it. Actually the place to put it is the shredder because this low-budget 90’s cheese…moldy cheese, not the good kind…is just terrible, and I’m not sure it’s a good introduction to Alex Swan, doesn’t really explain his connection to the bad guys, or explains why he’s called Firearm outside of a gun that can hurt demon-possessed killers or something. If you can figure anything out from this movie without going into the comics, I’d love to have a better explanation than the following summary.
Okay, so Swan is a private investigator hired to find blackmail evidence so his client can be free from blackmail. We see some over-the-top cop acting when a demon Ultra shoots up the police station because that makes no sense when even one of the cops has to point out how stupid the Swan-hating cop is acting when they let a man with a gun into a police station without being checked. Why is “Felix” killing people, including his own client? What does he have against the man he calls Firearm when everyone else calls him Alex? Darned if I know. I’d say enjoy, but I know better. If it wasn’t tied to current review material, I’d probably spare us both.
BW Media Spotlight 
BW’s Saturday Article Link> Graphic Novels ARE Books
The show Boy Meets World and its spinoff, Girl Meets World (following the daughter of the first show’s protagonist back when that could still lead to good storytelling–I actually like it more than her dad’s story), both have episodes in which a literature teacher has to fight to make a graphic novel part of their curriculum. I’m not a fan of the choices (for Cory it was God Loves, Man Kills, the X-Men story, if I remember correctly, and for his daughter Riley it was The Dark Knight Returns, both before Disney bought Marvel if memory serves) but they aren’t terrible ones to go with. It’s just not what I would have chosen. It does highlight the problems comics still have when it comes to being accepted as literature and art.
In an article by Ashley Skorld for Fansided’s “I Prefer Reading” site, she runs into someone at a bookstore suffering the same issue with her son, trying to get him to read something other than a comic. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you. I love reading both, but she then claims that graphic novels aren’t “real books”, and the writer takes issue with that point of view.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on July 27, 2024 in Comic Spotlight and tagged comics, commentary, graphic novels, Literature.
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