Not with a bang, Ice Age 2 and Jack Kirby

Last week Ben started work on the downstairs of his house so he returned the remaining red room and green room props. Then today I decided to clean out the garage so most of the garage set is down now. It was fun seeing all the old props and devices... the spinner controller and video stabilizer that Ben built, the jury-rigged wiring that Erik and I did... and lots and lots of props. The old school telephone. The Ward Airline TV. The unused shrine prop. So much time and effort invested in what is now a bunch of MiniDV tapes sitting in a plastic shoebox. This is the way the film ends, not with a bang but a whimper—sets slowly being taken down and at a certain point, no going back for reshoots.

Sean's watching Ice Age 2 today which is really terrible, one of those characterization-by-talking movies. The writers try to advance the story through dialogue then put in action interludes. A lot like Cars. And of course, don't forget the golden rule of bad films—if you want someone to fall in love with you, save their life!

It got me thinking about comic book artist Jack Kirby. Stan Lee said that even without words you can look at a Kirby layout and it makes sense. And it's really true. Kirby's layouts are less like looking at storyboards and more like looking at screen captures of an animation taken at 3 second intervals. There's lots and lots of repeated information. It's funny. In my mind, Kirby is about flying fists and dozens of people flying around and weird power auras and bombastic action and things moving quickly. But when you look at those panels, everything is actually spelled out very deliberately. You hear so much about "story telling" in comics. I wonder if this just means filling in all the logistical blanks—like understanding the difference between painting and film, and between montage and continuity.

The dialogue in those Lee/Kirby comics has to work only well enough to keep the viewer engaged while looking through highly continuous illustration. Take a look at the page above. You know exactly what's happening—that the Hulk is "transporting" to another place. Yet, it takes an entire page to move at the speed of light, talk about continuity. The dialogue is almost like filler—in this case literally when the caption reads, "the scientific principle is too complicated to explain!" So maybe part of the success of the Marvel Silver Age is use of visuals, not dialogue, to drive the story, a result of the unusual Marvel development methodology and Kirby's high-continuity sensibility.