(Yes, the T in the Park stuff’s coming…)
Opened up LinkedIn today to get a nice little surprise in the form of a recommendation from well-known (in the US anyway) writer and publisher Larry Young. Larry and I first met through Warren Ellis and kept in touch - sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, rarely enough - and have chewed the fat over doing some projects together, and it nearly came off once (saying nothing else as it’s still a slowly evolving project for elsewhere).

Anyway, there was a recommendation there for me, that not only made me laugh, but I may just have to find a permanent home for on the front page of here:

“Craig’s command of language allows him to make words dance like teenagers ’round the campfire, enjoying cheap beer and each others’ company on the last day of summer before school starts.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to round up those teenagers…

Quick one: Grant Morrison has launched a new website. His old one still seems to be up as well, but head over to the new one if you want an update on what one of the world’s most creative men (or most dangerous man, according to Pat Kane) is up to.

Amongst the highlights - no, not the pictures - is a short version of his Pop Mag!c manifesto, which has been used for everything from setting up successful business to getting people pregnant. How many self-help books can you say that about?

(AKA here’s one for fans of zombies, Brad Pitt, Thor or the Justice League of America)

One of the perks of trying to write a Grant Morrison biog and being the reporter who broke the news to the world about David Tennant being the 10th Doctor Who is that I have some decent contacts - who seem more happy to share stuff when I’m not a reporter bizarrely enough - who pass on the odd gem.

In this case, imagine my surprise the other morning when my inbox had not one, but three movie scripts - for Marvel Comics’ Thor, DC Comics/Warner Bros’ Justice League of America and the adaptation of Max Brooks’ World War Z novel.

Without trying to out-AICN AICN, here’s a little rundown of the three of them, starting with the last one (and isn’t it a nice change for the blog to be talking about something except media?)…

Max Brooks has done incredibly well from two zombie books and this script, written by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynsk should see a nice little franchise develop.

World War Z is actually quite a tricky book to adapt to a movie. As it’s mostly a bunch of vignettes, it’s hard to build up concern for one character. And while the book makes you care for a huge amount of them, that’s a harder task for a two hour movie and something more suited to a TV miniseries.

But JMS takes the overall idea and adds in more from the narrator collating all these stories, adding in ideas on the the nature of duty and truth, but constantly building it around a human story that has a nice little tweak (twist would be pushing it) at the end.

One thing that JMS is often criticised for is his dialogue, yet I think when he nails conversation, there are few better at it (it was one of the strong points of his Spider-Man run) and he gets it right here.

Brad Pitt is said to be interested in this and if he is - and there’s a decent director on board - this could be a fantastic hit, especially as I think the zeitgeist over the next few years is going to be for survival under extreme conditions and the breakdown of society (if you look around, you’ll see that popular fiction has already been going that way for the last year or so).

Well worth a watch when it comes out.

Then there’s Thor - Marvel’s take on the Norse Gods. I’ve never been a big fan of the comic or the character, but he has his fans, though I wonder how they’ll take to this version because there’s next to nothing that comes from the comic - it isn’t set on Earth and there’s none of the alter-ego nonsense - this is very much tapping into the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit audience.

It’s a decent enough script and origin story - it’s the tale of Thor v Loki, the hero is banished and then discovers his purpose in life before coming back to save the day. One thing it will also be is either expensive or shot with a lot of blue and green screen as it’s more or less all set in Asgard. Rumour has it that Marvel has said Matthew Vaughan can direct it if he’s able to bring the budget down to $150million, to which I say good luck to him.

If you know your Loki from your Odin then this is your thing, but it’s not for me. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and American Gods were enough norseness for me.

So then, finally, what about the oft-ballyhooed JLA film, starring many of DC Comics’ top heroes - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and so on. It’s a decent stab at a superhero teamup, ripping shamelessly from Mark Waid’s Tower of Babel storyline from earlier in the 2000s, but it’s the exact opposite of the Thor movie: while that has gone for an almost non-comic book feel, this script feels like it’s full of fanboy moments and marketing plugs (for example: for a funeral all of the superheroes wear black versions of their outfits).

It’s a decent script, but for something like this, decent isn’t good enough. This - to nick how Grant Morrison used to describe the JLA during his run - is a pantheon of the Gods and the threats and disasters they face should be equally epic, while reminding us why we love them.

And this script doesn’t do that. To be fair, neither did the Superman Returns script. At the end of that film, a near dead Superman lifts an entire continent into space and throws it out of Earth orbit and there was no sense of majesty, no grandeur, no awe (apart from ‘awe for God’s sake is this film nearly over?’).

DC may make the better comics, but Marvel seem to be whupping them at the box office - and you can’t use this year’s films as an indicator because there will be a lot of ghoulish attention over The Dark Knight.

So if this lot all came out on the one Friday night, what should you go and see? World War Z without a doubt. After that, it depends on your preferences. I’d just hit the pub.

Thanks to those who sent me these scripts - sorry I can’t name you for a credit, but I’m sure you would rather stay in jobs…

There’s a Knight Rider GPS SatNav out now for fans of the old Knight Rider show (yes, I know there’s a (not awful, but not great) remake pilot out there and a series coming soon) that has the old KITT voice, but for the new series, NBC should make downloadable voices available for popular SatNavs free of charge? You could have Val Kilmer alongside John Cleese.

But why stop there? You could have James McAvoy or Angelina Jolie from the film adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic Wanted; Peter Cullen voicing Optimus Prime from the Transformers film (”Freedom is the right of all sentient beings - as is turning right 300 yards ahead”) and Steve Jobs as an iPhone 2.0 GPS addon (”One last thing…turn left to reach destination”).

Or you could get a collection of voices for specific places. For example, directions to the job centre? Alan Sugar or Donald Trump.

The only area this might not work is in getting porn film tie-ins. After all, do we really want someone saying ‘faster, faster, faster’ in these safe driving times?

The one I would love to see would be the classic Glaswegian tones on this page (NSFW as the Acronym Army like to say).

Comicbook writers and artists must be the meme of the day or something as they seem to be popping up everywhere.
Anyway, the rather talented Warren Ellis has asked if bloggers can remind the world about his strip Freakangels that can be found at www.freakangels.com or RSS at http://seed.sproutbuilder.com/LACofd2ABL8Bmckn

Warren’s a good bloke. Anyone wanting to see decent journalism should pick up his Transmetropolitan series. Some great writing in there.

I’ve always wanted to see Grant Morrison or someone write a comic based around a newspaper, because in somewhere like the Marvel or DC Universe, it would be a blast. In the meantime, who are we to argue with a man who normally has his finger on the pulse…