Cinema: Comics into Film: Bam! Pow! Eek!

FLASH GORDON Directed by Mike Hodges; Screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. POPEYE Directed by Robert Altman; Screenplay by Jules Feiffer

Biff! Bam! Pow! Also Ugh! Yargh! Ptui! Not to mention Eek! Awwk! and Aggrrraa!

The beloved onomatopoetics of yesteryear, redolent of childhood's long, rainy Sunday afternoons, cannot help recalling that the comics were the popular art that most radically stylized experience. Sometimes artfully, more often not, they reduced it to its basic components of violence, disgust, fear, heroics and sometimes laughter. From their beginnings, the comics and the movies have lived together symbolically;...

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