you haven’t seen the movie? wow. well, they were not subtle with the cheese on that one. i don’t know how it would fare with a first time viewer in 2022.
Speaking as a fan of the novel, the movie is a bad thing that should be killed with fire. If it had just been called “Satirical Movie by that Robocop Director Guy” I wouldn’t care about it, but because it is totally misrepresenting the source material I have to hate it.
Supposedly, people thought it was dumb when it came out, and these days many people regard it as a brilliant anti-war satirical movie. I still think it’s dumb.
i’ve met a few diehard fans of the movie. i’d say there’s huge value in producing something that different, and using the imagery and propagandist feel past wars was an interesting choice for certain. i can’t speak to what the book did, but i think the movie was effective at making the ‘heroes’ kind of virtuous in one regard, and completely blind to the reality of their situation in another.
another director might have been more faithful to the book, but when you hire the guy who made robocop to do your gritty sci fi army movie, you get what you get.
when Black and Blue is inevitably brought to the silver screen, if people will feel that it was too much of a departure from the comic. i wonder what paul verhoeven will be doing by then?
The movie was not close at all to the source material, and in fact turns it on its head in many ways.
It describes a future society where the hand of government rests so lightly on the people that most people aren’t motivated to get the right to vote. The right to vote isn’t given out to anyone who is alive and above a certain age; it must be earned, and the protagonist joins the armed forces to earn a vote. His father cusses him out for wasting his time. The protagonist has to work hard to become a soldier, and later in the book goes to officer school and works even harder to become an officer. The armed forces are worked hard in boot camp to weed out anyone who wouldn’t make a good soldier, and then provided good equipment. The bosses are more or less competent but were human (they did screw up from time to time).
In the movie, the government is shown as a fascist government, with some characters dressed in uniforms clearly patterned on Nazi uniforms. The training of the military forces is a joke and their equipment is inadequate, and at one point the main character is just told “you’re an officer now.” I only watched it once and it’s been a long time but I think there was a general impression that the government was running the war badly… that should be trivially true since the soldiers were obviously ill-equipped. (They were fighting giant bug monsters the size of houses, and they were using rifles similar to an M16, and the monsters were able to absorb thousands of bullets without being much hurt. Facepalm.)
The book was very clearly written to teach a lesson: that the highest moral purpose is to defend humanity. It’s noble to defend your own family, but animals manage as much. It’s more noble to defend your own “tribe” (your town, let’s say). But to place the good of people you don’t know and will never meet above your own needs is the highest purpose a person can have, and anyone who serves that purpose should be respected. The situation in the book was deliberately set up with a situation where the war was a clean situation: the bug monsters started the war, the bug monsters want to kill humans. A soldier doesn’t need to lie awake at night wondering if he’s doing the right thing by fighting in this war. (There are other novels where war is shown as a complicated thing. This is not one such.)
The message of the movie, as far as it has one, is that war is bad and dumb fascists are bad. I don’t hate that message but I hate that they had a chance to actually make a movie out of the novel I love, and did that instead.
By the way, for many decades, the novel _Starship Troopers_ was on the recommended reading list for new soldiers in the US Marine Corps. I’m not sure if it still is, or not. But I think the moral lessons are approved of by the USMC, and the depiction of combat is great (as far as I can tell as a total non-expert). Heinlein imagined that on the future battlefield you can kill anything you can see, so he imagined soldiers that were constantly moving, and therefore difficult to target. He imagined mechanized armor suits that served as tremendous force multipliers. (One of the baffling mysteries of the movie is that the armor suits, which are cool and would have looked great on the screen, were not shown at all. I guess they wanted us to be able to see the pretty faces of all the young actors.)
yeah, sounds like the book and the movie were quite different. the depiction of the military and government in general seemed quite fascist, so it was interesting in that regard to see a movie where our future had gone down that path, and not the depiction of a slick idealistic future. at the time it rubbed me the wrong way, cause i didn’t really see the value of the satire in it when i first saw it. i think if you take it for what it’s worth, and maybe you haven’t seen the movie to compare it to it’s source material, one could enjoy it on that level. who knows.
i would read it, but i don’t do much reading at all. any time i would spend reading, i spend drawing and working. they should make the days have more hours. haha
There wasn’t any walking, talking bomb in _Starship Troopers_ but there was a bomb that had a 30-second timer on it, and played a recording in the local language: “I’m a 30-second bomb! 30, 29, 28…” It was intended to sow panic more than hurt people.
i don’t think anyone said it walked, but self referential talking does imply self awareness. unless it was just a recording, which i suppose is less funny.
I am here to bother you in request that you make merch available – maybe limited edition if you’re worried about not selling it all. I really want posters of the chapter covers, especially the Grins. I’d rather not pirate your work to print the posters out for myself, and I’d love to support you somehow. I think merch would be more popular than you expect. I’ve introduced this comic to some of my friends and they all agree that the art style would look great on posters. On a separate note, the red light in this panel looks very visually pleasing in contrast with the blue color pallette.
haha, i saw your previous comments. like i said, feel free to print stuff and save yourself some money. it’s just for yourself anyways, so it’s not like you’re pirating anything.
as far as support, i always tell people that sharing my comic is awesome. i love knowing i’ve reached new readers! of course, i have a patreon as well, but i’m just as happy to know that new people are checking out my work!
and you’re right about the red. i never know if i’m using it too much, or not enough….
Sorry for spamming you haha, I didn’t know if you looked at comments from earlier in the comic. I am definitely ordering some posters.
I’ll be certain to share your comic with everyone I think would like it. It’s very well done and I hope it blows up. In the meantime though, it’s cool that you’re able to be so involved in your fanbase and take suggestions. That’s something that’s often lost with bigger creators.
thanks for saying so! and sharing it would be super appreciated. i try to get it out there, but advertising is kind of a money pit, whereas word of mouth is a solid recommendation from a friend who knows your tastes, and i think that goes further.
but don’t worry, i didn’t feel spammed at all. i just don’t know if someone gets a notification to a reply if i post it on a older page. so no worries! i definitely try to respond to my comments, maybe not always as timely as i can, but i get to it. i don’t know any creator wouldn’t. it’s a treat to talk to someone who’s checking out your work, and my readers seem to be pretty knowledgeable about sci fi. there’s no toxicity, it’s just a great little neighbourhood we have here. welcome!
i absolutely don’t remember that. was that in the movie? i would think i would have remembered that…. i even watched the plethora of bad sequels. so many mistakes….
I strongly recommend you read the novel. So completely different from the movie.
By the way, trivia time: Heinlein had a contract to write novels for young adults. These are often called his “juveniles”, his novels for the juvenile market. Heinlein wrote _Starship Troopers_ as a juvenile, and the publisher didn’t want it. So he stopped writing juveniles, had it published by a different publisher, and won a Hugo Award for it.
But imagine a novel that teaches young adults that hard work and self-sacrifice are virtuous things! And that soldiers can be virtuous. That novel would find few buyers in the modern world.
haha, nah. i just forgot to draw his arms across his chest in the close up panel. let’s just pretend gibson folded his hands back the way they were after he checked under his shirt.
Starship Troopers, the book. I’ve not seen the film … but I have played two different board games!
you haven’t seen the movie? wow. well, they were not subtle with the cheese on that one. i don’t know how it would fare with a first time viewer in 2022.
Speaking as a fan of the novel, the movie is a bad thing that should be killed with fire. If it had just been called “Satirical Movie by that Robocop Director Guy” I wouldn’t care about it, but because it is totally misrepresenting the source material I have to hate it.
Supposedly, people thought it was dumb when it came out, and these days many people regard it as a brilliant anti-war satirical movie. I still think it’s dumb.
i’ve met a few diehard fans of the movie. i’d say there’s huge value in producing something that different, and using the imagery and propagandist feel past wars was an interesting choice for certain. i can’t speak to what the book did, but i think the movie was effective at making the ‘heroes’ kind of virtuous in one regard, and completely blind to the reality of their situation in another.
another director might have been more faithful to the book, but when you hire the guy who made robocop to do your gritty sci fi army movie, you get what you get.
when Black and Blue is inevitably brought to the silver screen, if people will feel that it was too much of a departure from the comic. i wonder what paul verhoeven will be doing by then?
The talking bomb was in the Starship Troopers book (1959) I believe.
it’d be interesting to see how close the movie was to the source material.
The movie was not close at all to the source material, and in fact turns it on its head in many ways.
It describes a future society where the hand of government rests so lightly on the people that most people aren’t motivated to get the right to vote. The right to vote isn’t given out to anyone who is alive and above a certain age; it must be earned, and the protagonist joins the armed forces to earn a vote. His father cusses him out for wasting his time. The protagonist has to work hard to become a soldier, and later in the book goes to officer school and works even harder to become an officer. The armed forces are worked hard in boot camp to weed out anyone who wouldn’t make a good soldier, and then provided good equipment. The bosses are more or less competent but were human (they did screw up from time to time).
In the movie, the government is shown as a fascist government, with some characters dressed in uniforms clearly patterned on Nazi uniforms. The training of the military forces is a joke and their equipment is inadequate, and at one point the main character is just told “you’re an officer now.” I only watched it once and it’s been a long time but I think there was a general impression that the government was running the war badly… that should be trivially true since the soldiers were obviously ill-equipped. (They were fighting giant bug monsters the size of houses, and they were using rifles similar to an M16, and the monsters were able to absorb thousands of bullets without being much hurt. Facepalm.)
The book was very clearly written to teach a lesson: that the highest moral purpose is to defend humanity. It’s noble to defend your own family, but animals manage as much. It’s more noble to defend your own “tribe” (your town, let’s say). But to place the good of people you don’t know and will never meet above your own needs is the highest purpose a person can have, and anyone who serves that purpose should be respected. The situation in the book was deliberately set up with a situation where the war was a clean situation: the bug monsters started the war, the bug monsters want to kill humans. A soldier doesn’t need to lie awake at night wondering if he’s doing the right thing by fighting in this war. (There are other novels where war is shown as a complicated thing. This is not one such.)
The message of the movie, as far as it has one, is that war is bad and dumb fascists are bad. I don’t hate that message but I hate that they had a chance to actually make a movie out of the novel I love, and did that instead.
By the way, for many decades, the novel _Starship Troopers_ was on the recommended reading list for new soldiers in the US Marine Corps. I’m not sure if it still is, or not. But I think the moral lessons are approved of by the USMC, and the depiction of combat is great (as far as I can tell as a total non-expert). Heinlein imagined that on the future battlefield you can kill anything you can see, so he imagined soldiers that were constantly moving, and therefore difficult to target. He imagined mechanized armor suits that served as tremendous force multipliers. (One of the baffling mysteries of the movie is that the armor suits, which are cool and would have looked great on the screen, were not shown at all. I guess they wanted us to be able to see the pretty faces of all the young actors.)
yeah, sounds like the book and the movie were quite different. the depiction of the military and government in general seemed quite fascist, so it was interesting in that regard to see a movie where our future had gone down that path, and not the depiction of a slick idealistic future. at the time it rubbed me the wrong way, cause i didn’t really see the value of the satire in it when i first saw it. i think if you take it for what it’s worth, and maybe you haven’t seen the movie to compare it to it’s source material, one could enjoy it on that level. who knows.
i would read it, but i don’t do much reading at all. any time i would spend reading, i spend drawing and working. they should make the days have more hours. haha
There wasn’t any walking, talking bomb in _Starship Troopers_ but there was a bomb that had a 30-second timer on it, and played a recording in the local language: “I’m a 30-second bomb! 30, 29, 28…” It was intended to sow panic more than hurt people.
i don’t think anyone said it walked, but self referential talking does imply self awareness. unless it was just a recording, which i suppose is less funny.
I am here to bother you in request that you make merch available – maybe limited edition if you’re worried about not selling it all. I really want posters of the chapter covers, especially the Grins. I’d rather not pirate your work to print the posters out for myself, and I’d love to support you somehow. I think merch would be more popular than you expect. I’ve introduced this comic to some of my friends and they all agree that the art style would look great on posters. On a separate note, the red light in this panel looks very visually pleasing in contrast with the blue color pallette.
haha, i saw your previous comments. like i said, feel free to print stuff and save yourself some money. it’s just for yourself anyways, so it’s not like you’re pirating anything.
as far as support, i always tell people that sharing my comic is awesome. i love knowing i’ve reached new readers! of course, i have a patreon as well, but i’m just as happy to know that new people are checking out my work!
and you’re right about the red. i never know if i’m using it too much, or not enough….
Sorry for spamming you haha, I didn’t know if you looked at comments from earlier in the comic. I am definitely ordering some posters.
I’ll be certain to share your comic with everyone I think would like it. It’s very well done and I hope it blows up. In the meantime though, it’s cool that you’re able to be so involved in your fanbase and take suggestions. That’s something that’s often lost with bigger creators.
thanks for saying so! and sharing it would be super appreciated. i try to get it out there, but advertising is kind of a money pit, whereas word of mouth is a solid recommendation from a friend who knows your tastes, and i think that goes further.
but don’t worry, i didn’t feel spammed at all. i just don’t know if someone gets a notification to a reply if i post it on a older page. so no worries! i definitely try to respond to my comments, maybe not always as timely as i can, but i get to it. i don’t know any creator wouldn’t. it’s a treat to talk to someone who’s checking out your work, and my readers seem to be pretty knowledgeable about sci fi. there’s no toxicity, it’s just a great little neighbourhood we have here. welcome!
Deadly polite, this bomb.
Remember in Starship troopsers, the psych bomb that announces “I’, a twenty second bomb, I’m an eighteen second bomb, …”?
i absolutely don’t remember that. was that in the movie? i would think i would have remembered that…. i even watched the plethora of bad sequels. so many mistakes….
I strongly recommend you read the novel. So completely different from the movie.
By the way, trivia time: Heinlein had a contract to write novels for young adults. These are often called his “juveniles”, his novels for the juvenile market. Heinlein wrote _Starship Troopers_ as a juvenile, and the publisher didn’t want it. So he stopped writing juveniles, had it published by a different publisher, and won a Hugo Award for it.
But imagine a novel that teaches young adults that hard work and self-sacrifice are virtuous things! And that soldiers can be virtuous. That novel would find few buyers in the modern world.
I dare say Errol just woke up, maybe from hearing his name?
He’s putting his tie and shirt back in place!
haha, nah. i just forgot to draw his arms across his chest in the close up panel. let’s just pretend gibson folded his hands back the way they were after he checked under his shirt.
Ah! I didn’t recall that from the previous page. Oh well, it’ll be interesting to see when he is finally activated!
But isn’t his name Eroll as it’s printed on his chest plate? ;)
man, the typos never end! i don’t even know how i made this one. haha, whatever. it’s an easter egg now.
A suited headcase bomb! It’s not quite a suitcase nuke, but, in a pinch … of this, Hark Errol the Herald sings! Glory to the new Lord king!
a suitcase nuke that can walk around and quip! way more scary.
A bomb wearing a suit and tie!
the final boss in a dating sim!