Un excelente perfil, en WIRED, sobre la próxima novela gráfica de Batman y su creador Paul Pope (y imagenes del comic).
Va ser una novela distópica con todos las cosas que nos encantan en Futuratronics. Acá va una descrpción:
--Pope's Batman will battle his own villains. The series is set in a high-anxiety future, where totalitarianism has nearly snuffed out the remnants of humanity. America in 2039 is a police state, individual liberties have been curtailed, and there's a dark sense of impending doom. Roving police squads, Blade Runner-esque floating vehicles, and robotic watchdogs scan the skyline. A distressed-looking Batman is the only person Big Brother fails to track, and the superhero's mask symbolizes the last hope against a corrupt government encroaching on individual privacy. "He's someone with the body of David Beckham, the brain of Nikola Tesla, and the wealth of Howard Hughes, who is pretending to be Nosferatu," Pope says. --
I can't wait.
Imagen: el Batman de Pope
12.2.06
El Futuro de Batman, en el futuro
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The Dark Knight Returns
The dark prince of comix takes Batman 30 years into the future.
By Todd Jatras
Almost every night, Paul Pope is anchored to a stool at a battered drafting table in his spare fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan's SoHo. His apartment is the perfect loner's lair - shower in the kitchen, tidy stacks of books, few personal effects, and crumpled papers around the table that suggest a pressing, desperate deadline. It's Pope's own Batcave, a place of comfort and order where he can be single-minded in pursuit of his mission.
Pope, a 35-year-old graphic novelist, keeps odd hours, working until after midnight and then typically heading out to a local bar. (He suggested I phone him at 2 am to follow up on an interview.) On this brisk December night at Puck Fair, an Irish pub in lower Manhattan, Pope is attracting not-so-fleeting glances from strangers. They don't know him - the comic-book superstar is rarely recognized outside certain circles. But he has a distinct presence. Maybe it's his fashion-forward style and gritty good looks. People see him and scratch their heads. Isn't he the lead singer of that Brit-pop band? Isn't he the guy in that buzzy new indie flick?
The fact is, Paul Pope is about to go mainstream. In February, DC Comics will release the first installment of his four-issue graphic novel, Batman: Year 100, which reinvents the caped crusader yet again. The 200-page miniseries imagines the superhero in the year 2039, and it's backed by the power of the Batman franchise and DC's multimillion-dollar marketing muscle. In other words, Pope is set to soar to glory on the spandex cape-tails of one of the most profitable superheroes ever.
He won't be the first artist to benefit from Batman. Bob Kane, who drew the original Dark Knight in 1939, instantly became a celebrity and went on to a film and fine-art career. Neal Adams, who's credited with rescuing the crusader from the high camp of the 1960s TV series, also reinvented the X-Men before parlaying his work into a successful film career that earned him enough to spend his retirement promoting the theory that Earth is expanding. Then there's Frank Miller, a close friend and mentor to Pope, whose 1986 miniseries, The Dark Knight Returns, was the inspiration for Tim Burton's acclaimed movies. It also led to Miller's runaway success with Sin City, first as the author of the comic-book series and then as the codirector of the screen adaptation. Now it's Pope's turn to extend the Gotham legacy. He likens the experience to "being handed the keys to a really, really hot car."
Pope keeps the first cartoon character he drew, at age 4, on his studio wall. It's Batman, inspired by scribblings he made on the bedsheets in his childhood room in Bowling Green, Ohio. As a teen, Pope was an awkward Dungeons and Dragons-playing outsider who hung with the stoner crowd. After studying fine art part-time for eight years at Ohio State, he left college without a degree to work for Kodansha, the world's largest manga publisher, in Japan. It was there that he perfected his signature style, a brushstroke that is equal parts manga and classic European pop art.
Since moving to New York in 1998, Pope has created four acclaimed graphic novels. There's Heavy Liquid and 100%, published under DC's hardcore Vertigo imprint. Their continued popularity keep Pope's name in the spotlight. And there's Escapo and THB (for "tri-hydro-bioxygenate," the chemical name for Pope's fictional purple biomechanical security guard), more personal works that he says he's especially proud of; they were released on a smaller scale through Horse Press, a publishing venture he started back in Ohio at age 21. The THB series, which New York publisher Henry Holt has expressed an interest in buying, could wind up being one of the world's longest comic books. At a projected 2,000-plus pages, the tome is his magnum opus - what he calls "my Dune." Pope expects to work on the serialized book, a romantic epic set on a terraformed Mars, for the rest of his career. He releases THB in driblets and is nearly halfway done.
He's also venturing beyond the gray pulp of the comic book. This summer, AdHouse Books will debut a coffee-table collection of his erotica. That'll be followed a year or so later by Henry Holt's release of his first kids' series, Battling Boy. The two-book, 400-page fairy tale revolves around a young hero who faces off against various demons in the city of Monstropolis.
Pope's Batman will battle his own villains. The series is set in a high-anxiety future, where totalitarianism has nearly snuffed out the remnants of humanity. America in 2039 is a police state, individual liberties have been curtailed, and there's a dark sense of impending doom. Roving police squads, Blade Runner-esque floating vehicles, and robotic watchdogs scan the skyline. A distressed-looking Batman is the only person Big Brother fails to track, and the superhero's mask symbolizes the last hope against a corrupt government encroaching on individual privacy. "He's someone with the body of David Beckham, the brain of Nikola Tesla, and the wealth of Howard Hughes, who is pretending to be Nosferatu," Pope says.
Pope's grim style is perfectly suited to drawing Batman. Legendary comics editor Bob Schreck, who has long overseen the Batman franchise for DC comics, calls him a "far-reaching visionary" and says it's inevitable that "one or more of his properties will hit the big screen. He's really just started."
Pope has already had a few close calls with Hollywood. In 1999, Tim Burton looked into adapting his Escapo, a tale of an escape artist. But back at Puck Fair, sipping a glass of red wine, Pope tells me nothing more has come out of it than "shuck and jive." "I'd take the money," he says, adding that he wouldn't want anything to do with actually making the film. "I've seen what Frank went through codirecting Sin City. That's his thing - I wouldn't want any part of it." Then he laughs, "I'm much more likely to go into something like fashion design." Now it's my turn to laugh, as I consider for the first time the exquisitely imagined outfits that fill his comic books. Batman has never looked so stylish.
Todd Jatras (jatras@yahoo.com) wrote about Kenji Yanobe's doomsday gear in issue 14.01.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/pope_pr.html
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