“Superhero power ebbs”

Or so says the LA Times in this article today:

Comic book sales were down for most of 2008, even at behemoth publisher Marvel Comics. And many small comic stores are closing one by one.

Just last week, Marvel released a special edition of Spider-Man in which the superhero notices two identical Obamas at today’s presidential inauguration, uses basketball to weed out the phony and is thanked with a fist-bump from the new president himself.

But times are stark, and it may take more than Obama and his illustrated posse to revive business, as the industry nervously trains its spider sense on the notoriously feeble January sales month.

God, if the bottom fell out of the comic book hero market, I shudder to think what that would mean for Hwood. On the one hand, we could get all snarky and suggest that the studios might have to actually resort to making movies with good stories instead of just relying on CGI pyrotechnics. However movies like The Dark Knight and Iron Man prove the two can co-exist.

It’s an interesting question to ponder: What would Hwood try to use as tentpole movies if they couldn’t rely on book superheroes?

Of course, it’s not like Hwood’s fixation on comic book type characters / stories is going to end any time soon. Here’s a few of those type projects that have been set up in just the last 2 weeks:

Title: Cowboy Bebop Logline: Set in a time where “astral gates” make interstellar travel possible. Humanity, decimated by a lunar explosion resulting from a gate accident, spreads out across the solar system, as does crime, which gives rise to the use of bounty hunters. Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter & former member of a crime syndicate, and with Jet Black, a fellow bounty hunter & former cop, are the two pilots of the spaceship Bebop.
Title: Daemon Logline: Before his death, an iconic game designer sets up a program to fight mankind and thus ensues man-vs.-machine battle. A daemon is a computer program that runs without the direct control of a human.
Title: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame Logline: When the mysterious deaths of a series of loyal subjects threaten to delay the 690 A.D. inauguration of Empress Wu, China’s only female leader, she calls the infamous Detective Dee back from an exile into which she cast him eight years earlier. Dee accepts the challenge and partners with gung-ho Commander Bei and the Ghost Doctor, a master of disguise, to solve the crimes.