The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Kevin Smith, �Chasing Dogma�

Started December 23 � Finished December 24, 2003; 120 pages. Posted 04 January 2004

I�m starting to think that sudden stardom, usually fatal for people in Hollywood, may be a better path to follow that what happens to people like Kevin Smith. Oh, I�m glad for his success and I like his stuff, but he�s also saturating multiple markets, and it�s the markets I�m interested in, being both comics and movies.

Earlier on, I just noticed all the cross-references between the two. This made it feel like you were in a private club — there was no way you could get all the references unless you had seen and read all the other things put out with his name attached.

But he put his fingers in too many pies, and it�s obvious that he�s running out of time to complete them all. Kevin Smith revitalized the Daredevil comics, putting out a great eight-issue story line, but he ran into so many problems that the monthly comic started coming out every three months — if we were lucky.

That run on Daredevil led to other comics, one being a four issue run for Spiderman and the Black Cat, the other being a continuing saga of Daredevil and Bullseye. Both have been on hold for the last eight months while he finishes his newest Ben Affleck movie, Jersey Girl, which by my calculations, should have been released six months ago.

Some people seem to put up with this because he�s Kevin Smith. Hell, I put up with it for the same reason.

After reading this, however, I�m more worried that he�s tried to do so many things that he�s running out of ideas. What used to be cute self-referencing has now become overused, as this comic is essentially Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in comic form. If the comic was called Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back I wouldn�t protest, but this was put out just before Dogma was released, and so it comes off more like the film studios wanted him to make a movie and so he rehashed his material, hoping people wouldn�t notice.

Well, I noticed.

In fact, the story line of the Federal Wildlife Marshall would have worked better as originally planned — a Tommy Lee Jones rehash from The Fugitive — but instead they decided to go with a bumbling Will Farrell (and if you want to be REALLY depressed, guess who got the part of Ignatious J. Reilly for the film version of A Confederacy of Dunces — that�s right, Will Farrell.)

I�m not totally against this book, and I�m not sorry that I read it, but this was one of those things where when I finished, I couldn�t help to think that there were so many other things I could have read in its stead. After all, if I don�t have time to reread some of the other titles on my shelf, why am I wasting time reading something that I�ve seen before?


Rating: Worth Used.

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