New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.

The Losers

The “living room war” had started in the mid-1960s. The Viet Nam conflict was brought directly into US homes via network news. Firsthand video of the frontlines made war very unpopular. By the 1970s, sales of G.I. Joe action figures had plummeted. War comics had to adapt or be snuffed-out entirely. Enter the Losers: a war comic whose very title suggested a much darker perception of the war. These were heroes, yes, but there was far less glorification of war than there had been in previous war comics. Characters who had been appearing in DC war comics throughout the ‘60s now had a darker home - which lasted until the series ran out of steam in the early ‘80s, just as the Reagan era saw somewhat darker glorifications of war in movies like Rambo and Red Dawn. G.I. Joe sales were back on top. Decades later, DC decided to go back to the Losers property via a comic book written by British comic book writer Andy Diggle. Re-envisioned in an era of modern covert warfare, the series ran for roughly two and a half years. Four years after the new series ended, Warner Bros. launched a film adaptation of Diggle’s series with some of Hollywood’s newest action stars. How does film stack-up to the series that inspired it?

The Series

Andy Diggle’s Losers was a socially conscious update on the 1970s comic book series set during World War II. Diggle's update brings the series into contemporary Iraq. The group in question is a special forces squad that has been double-crossed by a mysterious rogue government operative named Max.

The series runs a pretty clean 32-issue course that plays out over some two and a half years. Fans probably know for sure, but it’s likely that the series wasn’t envisioned as a 32-issue series. That being said, the story has a very clear arc that runs through a number of smaller chapters, culminating in the inevitable death of Max and subsequent disbanding of the squad. The series left no loose ends. Everything got wrapped-up quite nicely.

Continued:       1       2       3       4