Iron Man 2 has been released and I checked it out last night. Personally, I enjoyed it, but doubly after having read the Alexander Irvine novelization. Much like with going from the graphic novel of Kick-Ass to the movie Kick-Ass, the transition from a weak telling of a story to a strong telling of a story can make such a difference based purely on the comparison.

I always love doing this little experiment of checking out the novelization of comic book movies, then seeing how the final product compares. I’ve been doing it for the past few years and they’ve always seemed to be based on the full version of the story. The novelization is what the movie is like before the editor cuts off chunks. Sometimes this works out for the better (Incredible Hulk). Sometimes this works out for the worse (Spider-Man 3). There’s even the first Iron Man, where the second act had to be refilmed and edited around just to make the Air Force happy.

Iron Man 2 is a different beast, since it doesn’t appear to be based on the full version of the screenplay, but of an earlier, incomplete version. There are plotholes and loose ends riddling the story that the movie is nice enough to fix. Even better, some of the climactic moments are so ridiculously underwhelming that the final cinematic output is a godsend.

Let’s take a look at what was changed.

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We’re a month away from the release of the two-years-awaited Iron Man 2 and only a week or so ago, the novelization came out. Like with all the other Marvel movies, I picked this one up. Surprisingly, this one isn’t written by Peter David, but by Alexander Irvine. You might recognize the name if you’ve read Daredevil Noir.

So what’s going on in the story? It takes place six months after Iron Man – although Irvine flubs that by referring to it as two years at least once – and sometime before Incredible Hulk. Tony hasn’t done too much in terms of righting wrongs as Iron Man, but he does flaunt it when possible and gets in trouble with the government because of it. They insist he should hand over the tech to them, which he totally disagrees with and points out that the rest of the world is 20 years away from reaching that level anyway. Also, Tony has a couple events marked off on his calendar and every one of them is a backdrop for an action sequence. Really, every action sequence can be summed up with, “I can’t wait for _______! I hope nothing bad happens! Oh, crap! Explosions!”

Let’s go over the characters, starting with our hero.

Tony Stark is getting ready for the Stark Expo (hey, guess what that means?), but at the same time is secretly disturbed by the realization that his arc reactor isn’t so perfect after all and it’s slowly killing him. He and JARVIS have been working on a way to reinvent the arc reactor, but so far nothing’s doing and things look grim. In response, Tony has been acting even more reckless than usual and becomes a grade-A asshole.

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Because to read makes his speaking English good.

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Most of the novelizations of Batman that I’ve seen have been written by writers who primarily worked in comics. Although some of them are very good, I’ve wondered what it would be like if regular novelists wrote Batman books. I think the person I’d most like to see write one is Stephen King. He has a knack for making bizarre situations blend into the real world.

Of course, there are all kinds of genres. King would be good for horror, or dystopian sci-fi. Can anyone think of any other authors who could do a great spin on Batman, or the DCU?

Usually, whenever a big comic book movie comes out, I’m there with a little article about comparing the film to the novelization. After all, the novelizations are based on earlier scripts of the movie and shed some light on what was taken out. Sometimes things are for the better. Sometimes they’re for the worse.

There’s a reason I’m so late with the Dennis O’Neil adaptation of Dark Knight. While the books for Marvel movies come out about a month or so before release, it was decided, for spoiler purposes likely, that Dark Knight would be released as a strict-on-sale title. It came out the same day as the movie, but my Barnes and Noble didn’t receive it until days later. As a fun aside, O’Neil himself came to the store, wondering if we had it yet.

At first I wasn’t even going to bother. Reading the book after seeing the movie didn’t sound like as much fun. That decision changed after seeing what I have to call the best movie of the summer. I picked up a copy and spent the next week or so reading it.

I should point out that this is going to be spoiler-heavy, but this is a comic site and you are a person reading a comic site. If you haven’t seen Dark Knight by now and haven’t at least been spoiled about the scene where David Allen Grier appears as Oswald Cobblepot, then there’s probably something wrong with you.

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Caught the midnight showing of Incredible Hulk tonight. Very fun movie that’s definitely better than the Ang Lee non-prequel. It flows nicely and the action wasn’t too brief, as it sometimes felt in Iron Man. Not to say it’s better than Iron Man, because it isn’t, but there’s no shame in that. Besides, this is the second episode of the Avengers Movie Saga and it does feel right in that respect.

Several weeks back I read the Peter David novelization, as I’m wont to do, so I already had been spoiled in terms of the plot. While there are few surprises, there’s still the interesting experience of seeing stuff that was in the original version of the story that got cut out. I’ve done this before, of course, with Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man. The former was originally a solid story until important chunks of it got cut out. The latter remained good, despite a subplot cut out because of the Air Force’s say so.

With Incredible Hulk, the good outweighed the bad in terms of cuts. God, did it ever. Yes, there was definitely some stuff that should have stayed in there. No doubt. It’s just that a lot of scenes that got ousted had the potential to be really bad. Really bad. I’m talking Superman’s cellophane S projectile bad. I’m talking Matt Murdock fighting Elektra at the playground bad. I’m talking the entirety of Rise of the Silver Surfer bad. It’s cool that I count that movie as one long, horrible scene, right?

Word on the street is that there are 70 minutes of stuff cut. It’ll probably be seen in DVD form. Whether or not that makes for a better movie remains to be seen. The deleted scenes below, filled with spoilers, don’t seem to sum up to 70 minutes, but when it comes to cutting them being a good or bad idea, I’ll let you be the judge.

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The Incredible Hulk, part two of the “Avengers Saga” of Marvel films (there go my nipples again), is on its way in a few weeks. Naturally, Peter David wrote a novelization based on the upcoming movie. Since I did the same for Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man, I went up for round three by picking it up and seeing what it had to offer.

Incredible Hulk is like Ang Lee’s Hulk mixed with Superman Returns, only better than each of them. Granted, I did enjoy the older Hulk movie for the most part. I thought most of the stuff involving David Banner was fantastic and found him so sympathetic that I can’t even bring myself to call him a villain. But let’s be honest, the pacing had problems and there was a huge unbalance in the story where they try to tell the tale of a man’s tragic relationship with his father one minute and HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE WHAT HE DID TO THAT TANK the next.

This new movie is most definitely not a sequel to the Ang Lee production, but like with Batman Begins and the Tim Burton Batman, stupid people will believe they’re connected no matter how many changes in continuity they spy. Still, the movie knows what we saw in Hulk and doesn’t give us a story based purely on origin. Though the Hulk’s origin is different this time around, it’s only delved into through explanations and brief flashbacks.

David’s book is based on the screenplay treatments of Edward Norton and Zak Penn. That means that it’ll be harder to tell how accurate it is to the final product than usual, based on the stories I’ve heard about the movie’s production. For one, Norton had been rewriting scenes on the set just about every day. For two, they decided to make some edits that have pissed him off. Even the little footage I’ve seen of the movie is different from what the book goes with. Such as that scene where Hulk tears a cop car in half and uses it as boxing gloves. Not only is that not mentioned at all here, but that scene involves Abomination talking. Abomination has no dialogue in the book after his transformation.

This could be a good thing or a bad thing. Truth is, there are a couple minor bits I wouldn’t mind changed.

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A year ago, I bought, read and reviewed Peter David’s novelization of Spider-Man 3. I thought it was pretty good and went on record to say that Sam Raimi would have to go out of his way to fuck up that movie. Wouldn’t you know it, he did exactly that. He deleted a handful of scenes that would have turned the movie’s three villains into more than ridiculous, one-dimensional jokes. While he removed all the valuable Eddie Brock and Sandman scenes, he made it even worse by hardly shaving off any whiny Mary Jane moments.

I made the decision to go for round two. This time Peter David writes a novelization based on the upcoming Iron Man film. More than anything, I was curious. The build-up has been nice. Not just with the trailers, but the feeling that there’s love in the movie. I recall Jon Favreau saying that in preparation, he had been reading every single issue of Iron Man from the 60’s on. So would love be enough to make this story work?

Yes. Yes it really would.

I’m not going to give out explicit spoilers, but if you really want an absolute blank slate to the point that you didn’t even watch the trailers, by all means don’t read this and instead just give me $5.

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“I think the thing to do is produce the best material you can, and on a regular basis, so that your readers know you can produce on a deadline, no matter what. Yabs showed editors, I was told, that I could hit a new idea each week, in a different ‘voice,’ and maintain a certain level of quality. A ton of editors read it each week, and a bunch offered me a shot. All of which I turned down, but that’s another story!”

— Gail Simone giving advice to Gavok

The other day I started cleaning my place, trying desperately to sort my DVDs, games and comics for the first time in about a year. There’s a chair where I toss stuff I had just bought that had gotten so ridiculously cluttered that I discovered barely-read magazines from months back.

Having finally sorted out all my comic trades, it was shocking how many of them remain unread. Some don’t really count because they’re collections of stuff I’ve already read as issues, like All-Star Superman and the first two volumes of 52. The real deal stuff I stacked into one big pile, guarded by an unbeatable team.

Gentlemen… BEHOLD!

The Sentry has the power of a million exploding suns, which is why everything is so glossy. Really. That’s why. Shut up.

I work at a bookstore and when I get paid, I use the option of having my check cashed on the spot. When that happens, I get high on my cash and want to spend immediately. This leads to too many comics and that neglected stack above. By admitting my problem, I hope I can finally push myself into making this stack lighter.

Here’s the what’s what of my far-too-tall tower. What are the books? Why did I buy them in the first place? If I bought them, why the hell haven’t I read any of them? We’ll start from the top and go down.

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I too saw the midnight showing of Spider-Man 3. Fun movie, even if it does have its flaws.

I do like how the crowd I saw it with was totally into it. Stan Lee got a round of applause. Bruce Campbell got a crazy ovation. The initial Venom transformation got a round of applause. Even that one bit at the Jazz Club towards the end where Peter does that thing he immediately regrets got a huge applause despite the fact that it was meant to be serious.

There are some groan-inducing scenes, though. I can understand why people wouldn’t like it.

Keep in mind, with the novelization, I thought it was quite good. It’s just that Raimi decided to cut out a lot of stuff and I’m not sure I agree with what he decided on.

Below is a list of most of the stuff that was either cut out of the movie, or Peter David just snuck into his version of the story. If a lot of this stuff is included in the eventual Spider-Man 3.1, I’ll be sure to pick up a copy. It may not be an improvement the level of Kingdom of Heaven, but I’m sure it would be an overall improvement nonetheless.

Remember, this is spoiler-heavy. So don’t go complaining to me because you accidentally read about the scene where Spider-Man defeats Venom by playing the entire guitar solo from Freebird and the rent-crazed landlord reveals himself to be Dormammu in disguise.

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