SonicWaffle said:
Therumancer said:
I guess I will have to replace "most unlikely comic to ever be made into a TV series" from "Preacher" to "The Invisibles" in my mental listing.
I have read The Invisibles from beginning to end at least five times, and I still have no idea what the fuck was going on. Bless you Morrison, you adorable lunatic.
OT: Can't see it working. It's just too
weird to translate into the mainstream without cutting out a hell of a lot of stuff. Not only that, but there's something in there to offend
everyone: the BDSM crowd won't like Jesus de Sade, the gay crowd won't like the Sexual Investigators or the overall homophobic tone, the Southern crowd won't like the redneck incestuous hillbillies, the touchy-feely crowd won't like Jesse's hatred of psychiatry and anything else he sees as not sufficiently masculine, the feminist crowd won't like an openly sexist hero, the religious crowd won't like...well, anything, the suicide prevention crowd won't like seeing a botched teenage suicide played for laughs...
More importantly, of course, is that they'd need to cast someone to play Bill Hicks. And that's blasphemy.
I could spell out the whole "Invisibles" thing for you if you want but it would take a while, mostly because it's big on establishing a narrative and using time travel to later explain a totally unexpected outcome and certain characters having had foreknowledge of events without making it clear they had foreknowledge of events. As a result it's kind of best understood from the ending back to the beginning oddly enough because when you know where it's going the rest of it makes more sense as odd as that sounds.
For example one of the big surprises is that our young protagonist was calling the shots from the future the entire time, and some characters like Ragged Robin pretty much knew a lot of what was going to happen before they did. If you ever wondered for example why she introduced herself as "I'm Ragged Robin and I'm insane" when she's arguably one of the more stable characters you later found out that she was told in the future that those were the first words she spoke to him... etc... What's more some of the odder groups like the Halinquinade which they eventually realize "are us" actually are them acting from the future. Of course things aren't made any easier by the fact that it seems at least half the cast is supposed to be telepathic, and if you wonder "well why isn't anyone doing psionic" later on Mister Six makes it clear they actually were which put a lot of events into doubt, by way of telling one of the main bad guys "hey you just walked into a room with a bunch of the most powerful telepaths in the world, do you really think you had this under control and we didn't see it coming?" or something along those lines.
That said it is totally insane, and can be hard to figure out. They even wrote an entire "Disinformation Guide To The Invisibles" both about the production and sorting out some of the utter strangeness.
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That said, yeah, I previously considered Preacher a lot less likely to get made because while "The invisibles" has some weird stuff going on (heck the bring The Marquis De Sade through time and he becomes one of the supporting cast, King Mob is an S&M Master, and you have people using tantric magic to have sex with ghosts and time travelling astral forms) it's actually not tall that graphic as there is no real need to be for the purposes of the story. On the other hand it could be argued in Preacher all of that offensive stuff kind of is the story, since half the point is how it winds up being put into context.
That said it has been a while but I actually though Jesus De Sade would be one of the easier bits to do, at the end of the day he's mostly just terminally kinky, not really part of any particular subculture. His entire gags were like having an armadillo brought to his bedroom on a covered tray because it's announced "he buggers a new species every day, and they are running out of things to sodomize because he's worked through most of the greater quadrupeds". For the most part he's ignored as being fairly harmless, until it's revealed towards the end of Jessie's visit that he's making incestuous pedophile movies, and that's when Jessie kind of loses his sh@t. Things like this push the envelope for what you'd need to show, but really it's within the range of what HBO has already done, which is why I'm mostly thinking that I couldn't see AMC pulling it off.... what's more since you mention "The Invisibles" one of the gags at De Sade's party is that you'll notice a pair of people in hunting outfits chasing a naked guy around in the backround... remember the beginning of The Invisibles and later reveals as to who they actually were? Nothing deeper intended, just one bizzare fringe comic apparently making a nod to another.
Truthfully I'd think the BDSM crowd would get a little more irritated with the portrayal of Ms. Oatlash later on. She's a little more plot centric due to her crush on Jessie, and a bit more offensive, especially seeing as she's portrayed as being mostly harmless, and despite the destruction of her Nazi collection she more or less gets away unscathed if I remember. That said the one two punch of her, and then what Quintin Kincaid is up to in his meat locker which to work has to be an "OMG, WTF am I seeing" moment... yeah I think some sensibilities might be offended.
At any rate I shouldn't say anymore, it will be interesting to see what happens, but honestly I just can't see this being done right. I can almost guarantee a bunch of fans will be looking at the TV productions and rightfully claiming they more or less ruined it (as well as accusing Garth Ennis of selling out) because really, it seems obvious right from the get go that they just cannot do this right. Preacher by definition is supposed to offend the mainstream in a way that a TV network cannot do and continue to operate. If it fails, a big part of the point, and the message, is being missed. A politically correct version that does not tread on "sacred" territory, and treats all people with respect and dignified representations misses the point entirely. Gays, rednecks, perverts, the religious, right wing, left wing, "moderates", atheists... they all get blasted.
In Preacher the only thing that is sacred and beyond criticism is John Wayne... John never lets his partners down, and is a REAL American, and what the country should stand for.... and this itself is part of the joke.
