Online Movie Reviews

Sure, John Buscema and Stan Lee would be the obvious choices for a comic book team, but this DVD does not do them justice. When you pop it in, you feel ready to create a masterpiece, with pencil, paper, and of course, an eraser. A big one. This movie is simply OK. It is great to see them in action, but it simply states the measures, how many heads tall characters should be, etc. In the end, it feels like this was designed to teach people with degrees in both computer sciences, and art. There is no way a blossoming artist could even compare to these guys.

On a final note, this book/movie is for the pros, but is fun to watch also.

I actually like this film. It showed Stan and John doing what they did best, the writing and drawing of comics. It's also something of a lost art form because then, the writers and artists at Marvel worked hard to get the books out on time. The rat pack kids who work there now do not bother. They do not know the meaning of "hard work."

This was a fun tape for me, because I grew up reading these guy's comic books, and I bought the book version of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way years ago. I mainly got the video so I could hear artist Buscema's voice (which is great; he sounds like a character from the Sopranos scolding you for not drawing right). But all they do is read the book word for word from a teleprompter while John pretends to draw over some photocopied enlargements from it's pages! He's literally making these theatrical "drawing" motions without touching the pencil to the paper, while writer Stan Lee pontificates in his endearingly overblown and gratingly nasal Brooklynese. It's great. The original book was just Buscema's comic book drawing course, to which Stan wrote some psuedo-hip "Marvel" patter as a way of marketing it to a wider audience, and this is undoudtedly another scheme to cash in a little more, which must have taken the old partners part of a whole day to do. In fairness, they do some things in video that are pretty good, like superimpose the rough drawing over the finished one to illustrate how it develops. These two are real American characters, and if you liked the book, and you read comics in the '60s, you'll probably get a kick out of this.