John Ostrander: Backwards or Forwards?

John Ostrander

John Ostrander started his career as a professional writer as a playwright. His best known effort, Bloody Bess, was directed by Stuart Gordon, and starred Dennis Franz, Joe Mantegna, William J. Norris, Meshach Taylor and Joe Mantegna. He has written some of the most important influential comic books of the past 25 years, including Batman, The Spectre, Manhunter, Firestorm, Hawkman, Suicide Squad, Wasteland, X-Men, and The Punisher, as well as Star Wars comics for Dark Horse. New episodes of his creator-owned series, GrimJack, which was first published by First Comics in the 1980s, appear every week on ComicMix.

You may also like...

3 Responses

  1. Mindy Newell says:

    John, I read somewhere that the studio badgered Coppola into making GODFATHER III (which really sucked, imho.) Of course, Coppola might have needed the money at the time to prop up his Zoetrope Studio. But overall I loved the way the first two GODFATHERS expanded upon Mario Puzo’s book.

  2. Mindy Newell says:

    Oh, I also read somewhere that Coppola made GODFATHER II because he was upset that GODFATHER made the Mafia “heroes.”

  3. Rene says:

    The problem with sequels, prequels, inquels and remakes is that Sturgeon’s Law resets for them. Every movie has a 90% chance of being bad. Only because the original movie managed to make it into the 10% of great works is no reason to expect that the sequels will make it too.

    Apart from ROCKY, I also would add THE FLY, ROBOCOP, HIGHLANDER, FIRST BLOOD, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, PREDATOR (actually ALL horror franchises from the 1980s and 1990s, except for ALIEN), SCANNERS, BEVERLY HILLS COP to the list of movies that were diminished by their sequels.