The Strange World of Thomas P. Coombe

Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?

I was supposed to be working earlier, until a friend asked this question on Facebook: Do you guys think Batman is a vigilante or a superhero.

 I will turn 34 in a few days, and yet I spent a good portion of this evening arguing my case (he's a superhero). What follows is a transcript of the discussion that followed, involving me and my friends Jerry, Phil and Frank:

 

 Phil: Shannon and I are having a debate: She says Batman is a superhero; and I say, since he doesn't have super powers, he's a vigilante. 

Jerry: But he has access to "super" equipment. As he's stronger, faster, more agile, smarter, and with more stamina than the average person, the equipment makes up for any shortcomings and pushes him over the edge. He couldn't take on a tank like Superman, but he could probably take out a company of soldiers without anyone knowing he was there.

Five Comic Book Series That Would Make Great TV Shows

  When FOX announced its winter schedule last week, one of its new shows was Human Target, an action/drama series based on a character from DC comics. Meanwhile, AMC -- which has had an amazing track record with Breaking Bad and Mad Men -- is adapting another comic book series, Robert Kirkman's addictive life-after-zombies book The Walking Dead.

 Visit a comic shop these days and you'll see plenty of titles based on the world of TV, from Joss Whedon's continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to (really) Oprah Winfrey. But going from comics to TV? Doesn't happen very often, at least not that successfully. (Smallville, now in its 45th season, is an exception. And it's based on a well-established character.)

 It's too bad, because there are quite a few titles that have come out in the last few years that would make for great TV series. Here's a look at just five of them:

 

What I've Been Watching, Part V: Short Attention Span Edition

 There's a lot of little things I've been meaning to write about, but none of them at the type of length that I want to do a full blog post, none of them brief enough to write about via Twitter. This looks like a job for...bullet points!

• I've gotten familiar enough with Sons of Anarchy that I think I'm going to add it to the blog rotation, starting with tonight's new episode. I still kind of think it's a bit over-the-top, but it's hard to expect a show about a gang of violent bikers to have a lot of Mad Men moments. Plus, I'm really enjoying Adam Arkin as the season's Big Bad, a quiet, soft-spoken neo-Nazi who wants to run the Sons out of town.
• Speaking of Adam Arkin, I'm watching the second season of NBC's sadly-shortlived Life, in which he plays the sidekick to the main character, Damian Lewis' Charlie Crews. Watching it now, I'm wishing Crews had stuck around a little longer. Actually, maybe NBC could resurrect the character and put him on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. He's a lot more appealing than Goren.
• Also on my DVD list: the fourth season of Supernatural, which may be the most critically underrated show on TV right now. (Other than the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan, I don't see a lot of TV writers giving it the press it deserves.) Four seasons in (I'll be starting on the latest, season five, some time next week), I'm thinking it's a worthy successor to Buffy or the X-Files: funny, scary, smart and heart-felt, a weekly monster movie that's also a story about the importance of family. Whenever I see the trailer for a horror movie these days, I find myself thinking "I bet Supernatural could do this better."
• If you have HBO On Demand, you really need to be watching Epitafios. It's a thriller from Argentina that ran its first 13-episode season a few years ago; HBO2 started showing the second season last month. Both seasons are great, and supremely frightening. They follow a detective in Buenos Aries chasing serial killers, but I don't want to say much more than that. Go in cold, like I did. It's miles away from anything Criminal Minds can accomplish.
• Word is that Joss Whedon's Dollhouse might get cancelled, which would be a shame, even if the last two episodes have been kind of bland. But if it that does happen, can Whedon maybe turn his attention to comics full time? His Buffy comic is a must-read for me every month, but I've also just discovered his Astonishing X-Men arc (in trade paperback), which has been, well, astonishing. He manages to make all the characters his own (Kitty Pryde sounds like Willow or Buffy), while still staying true to the series. Really good stuff.
• Two good movies I've seen lately: The Informant!, which takes subject matter that might have wound up on Frontline and turns it into something akin to Burn After Reading, and Zombieland, which is a zombie film along the lines of Shaun of the Dead, but with a bit more emotional heft (and actually, a lot more consistently funny.)
• That's it for now. Sons of Anarchy tonight, Office/Flashforward/Fringe later in the week.

 Tom Coombe

The Strange World of Fletcher Hanks

While this blog is called Tom On TV, occasionally I like to talk about other things I like: movies, books, and comic books. This is one of those times.  

 Anyone who knows about Batman can tell you he was a pretty vicious guy in his early days. The Batman stories I read in the 1980s and 90s always talked about his refusal to kill. Fifty years earlier, the character had no such code.

 Still, the dark version of the Dark Knight has nothing on Stardust, the Superwizard, the vengeful, godlike "hero" of a series of comic books from the earliest days of the medium. He turns criminals into rat-like creatures, exiles them to faraway planets and imprisons them in ice.