John Ostrander: A Fair-to-Middling Earth

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.

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1 Response

  1. Desolation of Smaug felt like the part where the most padding was done. The Tauriel character and plot worked for me – I see the value in adding a female character in such a sausage-fest, and we’ve gotta have a romance, by George.

    But some of the areas where they padded almost made no sense. Adding one more dramatic moment in the finding of the keyhole seemed a bit much. The extra battle with Smaug in the halls of Erebor worked well, and the sequence in the barrels was both over the top and a lot of fun to watch.

    What I found annoying is for all the stuff they found need to pad and stretch, they still found a way to reduce Beorn to damn near nothing, The monologue Gandalf uses in the book to talk Beorn into letting them stay is both hilarious, ane could have served as a perfect summary of the first film; instead they sneak into his house, and next thing you know they’re having breakfast.

    I get the impression they kept him simply so they didn’t have to go through Tom Bombadil all over again.