From Roger Ebert’s review of “GI Joe: The Rise Of Cobra“:

“G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” is a 124-minute animated film with sequences involving the faces and other body parts of human beings. It is sure to be enjoyed by those whose movie appreciation is defined by the ability to discern that moving pictures and sound are being employed to depict violence. Nevertheless, it is better than “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

The late Gene Siskel had a famous test for evaluating a movie. He noted that “It’s amazing how many movies aren’t as interesting as a documentary of these same actors sitting around talking over lunch.”

A wise and shrewd observation. And with just a slight modification, it might offer us a way out of this horrifying era of awful, awful movies based on comics, toys, games, and other bits of pop culture ballast.

I present a new guideline. It takes the form of a cautionary question for every studio, every producer, and every 19 to 23 year old actor and actress who gets paid $4 million based on how good they look in a slightly sprayed-down tee shirt:

“Before making a movie based on a licensed property, ask yourself: is this movie going to be less entertaining than just Googling for Adam Hughes drawings of these same characters?”

This simple little test will avert endless future catastrophes. But please…don’t just take my word for it.

Ebert’s one-star review of “Catwoman“:

“The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.”

Adam Hughes’ Catwoman:

Ebert’s two-star review of “Superman Returns“:

Superman is vulnerable to one, and only one, substance: kryptonite. He knows this. We know this. Lex Luthor knows this. Yet he has been disabled by kryptonite in every one of the movies. Does he think Lex Luthor would pull another stunt without a supply on hand? Why doesn’t he take the most elementary precautions? How can a middle-aged bald man stab the Man of Steel with kryptonite?

Adam Hughes’ Lex Luthor:

Ebert’s half-star review of “Josie And The Pussycats“:

Josie and the Pussycats are not dumber than the Spice Girls, but they’re as dumb as the Spice Girls, which is dumb enough.

Adam Hughes’ Josie And The Pussycats:

Ebert’s 1-1/2 star review of “Elektra“:

“Elektra” plays like a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories. It can’t decide what tone to strike. It goes for satire by giving its heroine an agent who suggests mutual funds for her murder-for-hire fees, and sends her a fruit basket before her next killing. And then it goes for melancholy by making Elektra a lonely, unfulfilled overachiever who was bullied as a child and suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. It goes for cheap sentiment by having her bond with a 12-year-old girl, and then … but see for yourself. The movie’s a muddle in search of a rationale.

Adam Hughes’ Elektra:

Ebert’s two-star review of “Attack Of The Clones“:

In the classic movie adventures that inspired “Star Wars,” dialogue was often colorful, energetic, witty and memorable. The dialogue in “Episode II” exists primarily to advance the plot, provide necessary information, and give a little screen time to continuing characters who are back for a new episode. The only characters in this stretch of the film who have inimitable personal styles are the beloved Yoda and the hated Jar-Jar Binks, whose idiosyncrasies turned off audiences for “Phantom Menace.” Yes, Jar-Jar’s accent may be odd and his mannerisms irritating, but at least he’s a unique individual and not a bland cipher. The other characters–Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padme Amidala, Anakin Skywalker–seem so strangely stiff and formal in their speech that an unwary viewer might be excused for thinking they were the clones, soon to be exposed.

Adam Hughes’ Padme and Yoda:

Ebert’s one-star review of “League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen“:

“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” assembles a splendid team of heroes to battle a plan for world domination, and then, just when it seems about to become a real corker of an adventure movie, plunges into incomprehensible action, idiotic dialogue, inexplicable motivations, causes without effects, effects without causes, and general lunacy. What a mess.

Adam Hughes’ Mina Murray and Mister Hyde:

Ebert’s two-star review of “Spider-Man 3″:

The great failing of “Spider-Man 3″ is that it failed to distract me from what a sap Peter Parker is. It lingers so long over the dopey romance between Peter and the long-suffering Mary Jane that I found myself asking the question: Could a whole movie about the relationship between these two twentysomethings be made? And my answer was: No, because today’s audiences would never accept a hero so clueless and a heroine so docile. And isn’t it a little unusual to propose marriage after sharing only one kiss, and that one in the previous movie, and upside-down?

Mary Jane by Adam Hughes:

I believe I’ve made my point here, yes? To see more art by Adam Hughes, check out his site, “Just Say AH!” or his Deviant Art gallery.

Oh, and yes of course looking at Adam Hughes’ take on characters from “G.I. Joe” is better than watching the “The Rise Of Cobra.” Witness Scarlett and the Baroness:

This morning’s Funky Winkerbean moved me to cut, paste, and blog:

What a gorgeously-drawn strip. And that’s been a consistent feature of the thing. Every character has a distinctive appearance. Everything’s drawn with an economy of line that communicates clearly, yet omits no necessary details. Characters have solid anatomy. The artist is a good “director,” choosing his shots well to communicate the story, and he gets good performances out of his actors.

Even the “cinematography” is top-notch. Pay attention to how this strip is lit and colored. Given the current state of the print biz and the comics page thereon, I have to think that the colorist is working with the online edition in mind instead of the limited range of soybeans smeared across mashed-up trees.

Which brings up a question: given that a comic strip pubished online can be any size or dimensions…why do most newspapers’ sites scale them down?

This JPEG was copied from the Seattle Pi comics page, which is where I read “Winkerbean” every morning. I had to scale it up here on my MacBook to make sure y’all could see the strip for what it is. Even at with the upsampled resolution artifacts, it “reads” so much better at a thousand pixels wide.

There are a couple of subscription services that’ll put all of your comics on one page. The trouble is that the user interface isn’t great and if they’re missing just a few of your favorites…well, what’s the point? You might as well save yourself some money and keep visiting three different newspaper sites every day (in my case: Seattle Pi, Yahoo!, and the Houston Chronicle). You’re still forced to make side-trips for webcomics like PVP, Girls With Slingshots, and XKCD.

It’s funny how the wheel keeps turning around. A hundred years ago, the comics page was hotly-contested property. The right collection of strips sold papers, period. And the comics page reflected that. They were printed big, with plenty of landscape for artists to play in and enough room for dialogue. You didn’t cheap out on the printing or production, either.

Newspapers are in no danger of dying off. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you a timeshare or the digital equivalent: trying to line up angel funding for yet another social news bookmarking service. But the industry needs to adapt to the new currency of readership. And here, comic strips can fulfill their traditional role by being the thing that brought you to the paper in the first place.

It works. I read a lot of Seattle Pi and Chronicle articles because I finished my comix-viewing and saw an interesting headline linked in the column next to “Pearls Before Swine.”

Comics aren’t the answer. But a smart newspaper will invest in improving their comics infrastructure. I want a system that displays full-color comics at high resolution using a helpful but inobtrusive Flash player that takes me through all of my favorite strips (skipping over “The Lockhorns,” “Momma,” etc.). The paper that commissions such a system, and makes it easy for me to send people to their site by blogging about today’s “Funky Winkerbean” or emaiing a link to last week’s “Peanuts” to a friend, will do very well.

These are interesting times for folks in my line of work. By “my line of work” I mean people who write and draw things and publish them…and by “interesting times” I mean that I’ve added weight training to my workout regimen, so that next year I can get a job loading trucks at the UPS depot and maybe start earning a decent living wage for once.

No, no, it’s not that bad. But the business is changing. You’re no longer a writer or an artist. Nowadays, you “produce content.” And oddly enough, if you want to build and hold on to an audience online, the important thing is to give your readers more freedom, not less. It’s like holding on to Jello: the tighter you squeeze, the more you lose.

This was on my mind as I read through a PR pitch about the revamped Dilbert.com site, detailing all of its (“Gutsy!” “Unique!” “Compelling!”) new features. Scott Adams is arguably the most successful cartoonist currently in worldwide syndication. If he’s suffering for readers and revenue, the only tangible sign is that he can only afford one $250,000 ticket on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two, and will be forced to go into space without putting his feet up on an empty seat next to him.

And yet the reinvention of his site is indeed ambitious. It’s a great example of what an independent, scrappy creator would need to do in order to succeed in online publishing.

First and foremost — and virtually unprecedented in a “big syndicate” strip — the Dilbert strip has a full RSS feed. I don’t need to visit Dilbert.com every morning; I can simply subscribe to the strip via Google Reader or Bloglines or any other content reader on my desktop, notebook, or my phone, and the daily strip is delivered to me automatically via my mechanism of choice.

It also illustrates the need to relinquish control of how your work is read and accessed. This is a particular bugaboo with web strips, which only make money when readers visit the creator’s site, where they can buy merchandise. Very few strips offer Dilbert.com’s hyper-flexibility.

But there’s a serious downside. I love Danielle Corsetto’s “Girls With Slingshots” (daniellecorsetto.com; sometimes not work-safe) but without any sort of feed, I have to remember to visit every day for my strip fix…and that doesn’t always happen. Even Player Versus Player, arguably the best online strip of them all, only offers “partial” RSS feeds. The feed only offers the strip’s title and a link that takes you to the actual strip on PVPOnline.com.

Each creator needs to make that sort of decision for themselves. It’s completely understandable that creators don’t want to give their readers so much freedom that it never occurs to them to send a little cash your way from time to time.

But you must build your audience before you can bilk your audience. And thus it’s critical that you make it as easy as possible for people to find, read, and get hooked on your content. Full feeds are the very best answer.

The new Dilbert.com also offers archives of every strip back to 2001, with the goal of ultimately putting the entire archives online. Terrific: never forget that content is king. In traditional publishing, putting material online for free when it’s also in bookstores for $12.95 is a seriously itchy idea. But it helps build an audience and for now — for now — the numbers indicate that web archives just make the printed editions more valuable. It builds and maintains interest in the property.

And once you have a large archive, you need to take advantage of the awesome power of your audience to market your content for you. Which takes us to another thing that the new Dilbert.com is doing right: if a Dilbert reader likes a particular strip, they can MySpace it, Facebook it, Twitter it, and all kinds of other verbs that didn’t exist before Web 2.x came along.

Linking to a favorite strip is the modern equivalent of slapping a clipping on a cubicle wall. If you don’t give your readers the ability link directly to your content, you’re just running on two cylinders.

Dilbert.com has added another feature that’s very buzzword-ey: now, there’s “user-created content.” You can submit your own punchlines for selected strips. This was done first, better, and breathtakingly illegally with “The Dysfunctional Family Circus,” in which visitors to Spinnwebe.com were encouraged to add decidedly less-wholesome captions to “Family Circus” panels.

User-created content is a smart addition. It helps to build communities of users…intensely devoted readers who feel a certain amount of pride in being part of the group. This is a fine compliment for your work. This is also a rather lucrative group of suckers. Pick one up by his or her ankles and shake them until the majority of their cash has clinked to the floor and they’ll be pleased to have been singled out for special hands-on attention.

And once the flywheels of the user-content area of your site are up and spinning, thousands of people are updating your site with fresh content for free while you’re off somewhere getting waffles. Which in itself will expand the popularity of your site. Folks keep coming back if they know that they’ll find new stuff every time they visit.

But user-generated content is less useful for an established property like Dilbert. People are coming to see Scott Adams’ jokes, not mine. And although me pitching in to create content for Dilbert.com is a nice demonstration of the old Dunkirk Spirit, I mean, come on: look at Scott Adams’ car and then look at mine. Who should be doing free work for whom, here?

These are hard lessons for traditional publishers, and the phrase “people just don’t get it” is glib, callous, and overused. But it’s a fact of life: giving readers more power today will absolutely put a creator in a better position to make money and keep publishing tomorrow.

You’re at that awkward stage. You’re nowhere near ready to get rid of all of your comic books, and yet there’s a closet in your house that you don’t want your friends to see. Not until they know you well enough to understand that although you certainly do have an opinion on whether Batman could beat Captain America, they’ll never be subjected to it.

(Not unless they have access to your LiveJournal.)

It’s helpful to explain exactly where you are on the Comic Book Collector spectrum, so that your mom, your boss, or a potential third-base partner understands that there are those who are in far, far deeper than you are.

The Spectrum is like a pH test kit. Read the following list until you see a shade of nerdity that matches your own skin tone:

1) You continue to put every new comic you buy in a protective baggie…but you stop using backing boards.

2) You put every comic in a baggie. But you buy the cheaper, ordinary plastic kind instead of archival-quality neutral baggies.

3) You no longer care whether “Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man” is alphabetized under P, S, or A (for “Amazing Spider-Man,” which absorbed that title this year).

4) You stop entering your new comics into an inventory database.

5) You stop keeping your comics alphabetized.

6) You stop putting your comics in baggies and just put them in the longbox “naked.”

7) You keep them in cheap OfficeMax cardboard boxes, instead of industry-standard “longboxes.”

8) You throw out all the multiple copies of comics you bought during the “speculator boom” in the Nineties.

9) For the first time in your life, you look at a comic in your collection and you think “I’ll probably never read this again, ever.”

10) You still have boxes of comics, but you need to go drive somewhere if you want to visit them.

11) You throw out a run of comics because you have another copy of this storyline in the form of a trade paperback reprint.

12) You throw away new comics after you’ve read them.

13) You go through all of your existing comics; cull out the ones you actually want to keep, and eliminate the rest.

14) You go through all of your existing comics and throw away any that probably aren’t valuable.

After Stage Thirteen…your nephew gets an awesome birthday present and your sister or brother no longer invites you to the family barbecues.

Hmm? Oh: Stage 12. Not a statement of pride…just a statement of fact.

Josh Middleton has absolute crazy talent. I could pull up a chair and gawk at a piece like this for an hour.