schrockmedia

A year ago I started consulting for Quarterlife.com, and helped with the initial sourcing of talent and getting the project off the ground. I haven’t kept track of the site since I started teaching, but did wonder what its fate would be after the television series went the way of the dodo.


In the month of June, the site’s reach dropped from .006 to .001. Admittedly, the most drastic part of the plummet is with reach and rank, but clearly it’s not a healthy social network site. I’m not sure why the drop - it’s too late for it to be due to college students leaving for the summer - but certainly new users aren’t coming to the site like they once were. There’s nothing that says “crash” more than Google adsense advertisements for incontinence showing up on a site’s main page. People notice when you’re selling out the most prominent area on the site for a low CPM rate. It screams desperation.

The whole Quarterlife story is tragic, because if it were successful, it might have ushered in new opportunities for those in the entertainment industry. Chalk it up to short-lived buzz not lending itself to a long-term business. The idea was to get the buzz around the show to feed into a social network, but the may just not be enough opportunities on the site to fill in the gaps between the peaks in popularity. Although promised, the contests have yet to appear. To my mind, this would be the “killer app” of Quarterlife, which would retain users with other activities, similar to OurStage.

Labels: facebook, MySpace, quarterlife, quarterlife.com, SNS, social networking

The Watchmen was arguably the most coherent and mature DC novel of its time. I came to it through DC Vertigo (Sandman, Shade the Changing Man), and was immediately attracted to it. To my mind, the Watchmen was about a set of older superheroes struggling with their individual challenges, in light of threats they were trying to understand (killing of The Comedian) or were fundamentally unable to understand (the ratcheting up of tension with the then-Soviet Union). The changes that they went through, especially as concerns them being out of step with the current day, was a key component of the drama, and gave the novel more depth than its contemporaries.

Now, the trailer that was recently released doesn’t look altogether shabby. The effects look sharp, and Dr. Manhattan looks how I imagined he would. It appears to keep to a relatively strict interpretation of the story, as there are several shots that are easily identified as key points in the storyline.

But a few things are nagging me: In the movie, Nite Owl looks positively ripped (he could give Batman a run for his money), Silk Spectre (II) looks like a Playboy playmate, and Rorschach takes a back seat. I never imagined Nite Owl or Silk Spectre as being in their prime when the storyline took place, and Rorschach was the lead narrator. Despite being the most violent and flawed of the heroes, he moved the plot forward, and ultimately was revealed to be the most fragile and mortal.
Nite Owl, as depicted in the graphic novel

Nite Owl, after seriously hitting Bally's and getting a wardrobe upgrade from The Matrix leftovers

Alan Moore is, of course, not hopeful about the movie adaptation, but this isn’t really surprising; when was the last time he was? He does have a few good points, though, particularly about relying on the Director of 300:

I would rather not know [about the movie],” said Moore. “[Zack Snyder] may very well be [a very nice guy], but the thing is that he’s also the person who made 300. I’ve not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn’t particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: that it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that’s not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but… I wasn’t impressed with that… I talked to Terry Gilliam in the ’80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ”Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.”’ And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t.

Who wants to try and show up Terry Gilliam? I wouldn’t.

Labels: alan moore, comics, watchmen