The last couple of years have been a tough old time for your com­mon or garden comic film geek. Let’s be hon­est, the pick­ings of decent comic book film adapt­a­tions have been very, very, (oh good God what is X-Men 3 doing?) very slim.

I’m not sure why, but there hasn’t been a decent film that’s genu­inely caught my interest, or my enthu­si­asm, for a long time — not since an anom­al­ous 300 in 2006 and before that Batman Begins in 2005.*

Superman Returns des­troyed the inner child within me that belived a man could fly; Fantastic Four 2 went exactly as one would have expec­ted for a film with Jessica Alba and Chris Evans in, and I’m actu­ally now aller­gic to Ghost Rider. Catwoman and Elektra caused me phys­ical pain without lay­ing a sol­it­ary fin­ger on me, and Blade:Trinity reminded me why I like gar­lic in my popcorn**

Tough and con­cern­ing times indeed.

However, yes­ter­day, I had the extreme pleas­ure of going to watch The Incredible Hulk at the cinema and can only com­pare the joint exper­i­ence of that and Iron Man a few weeks before­hand to that of the time John Mills had a lovely, lovely drink.

My dear lord that was a won­der­ful exper­i­ence; there is little I could dribble on about here that won’t be said in a far more elo­quent way in other places. But that isn’t the point of this little post. For the first time in a long time, I have found myself look­ing at the upcom­ing film releases, won­der­ing what to get excited about next.

Plus, with the lovely bit of sequel set­ting up both Iron Man and Hulk have done (if you’ve seen it, you know what I mean) it’s look­ing like the my per­sonal filmic drought is finally get­ting some storm clouds on the horizon..

^{*And no, I don’t count Spiderman 3. It was gash. Here endeth the dis­cus­sion.
**I don’t. Stop look­ing at me like that.}