Jimmy Palmiotti on Painkiller Jane

Today we lay out the facts on Painkiller Jane‘s premiere, compliments of creator Jimmy Palmiotti, tell you about how Painkiller‘s co-creator pulls out of the Eagle, dig into Matt Raub’s review of the second Doctor Who of the new season, show you how MySpace just gave a big boost to a prime time show and then take a nostalgic glance back to when CBS was the "sexy" network!

All this, a really groovy Timeline, and – dare I even suggest it? – even more on the big ComicMix Podcast, right here:

And feel free to comment on the ComicMix Podcast below.

Transcript

www.ComicMix.com Are you listening to me? Shut up! If only somebody could have given Don 9 a set of eyes about 7 days ago. Hi, it's Mike Raub.

Nothing to apologize here. Another podcast for the middle of the week and we continue our exclusive look at Season 3 of Doctor Who with another review this time, the second episode. And boy, it is a killer. Speaking of killer, painkiller Jane comes to prime time. We're going to talk to one of her creators and find out what that's all about.

And we'll take a look back to when, believe it or not, CBS was considered the sexy network. All that and more on April 12, 2007. ComicMix. Right off the bat, here's a couple of second printing variant covers you're going to want to grab. And our usual disclaimer follows, talk to your retailer to be sure you get these.

Starting with Fantastic Four, number 544. That was the first issue to feature the new team lineup. It's gone. Second printing is on the way with a brand new variant cover by Paul Pélotier. And Omega Flight Number One came out just about a week ago with the debut of Canada's new super team.

It is gone at Diamond and on the retailer shelves as well. Scott Collins, the series artist, is doing a variant cover for a second printing. Both of those should be out within about the next three weeks. Good news for Tic fans. He's coming back twice with two brand new Tic comics on the racks coming up here in the spring.

There's the Tic 20th Anniversary Special Edition Number One, celebrating, of course, his 20th Anniversary. And the Tic Comic Con Extravaganza, both will be out in the spring, like we said, from New England Comics. Featuring some work by a lot of great people, including writer and artist Sean Wang. To get information on that, be sure to talk to your retailer to make sure they're going to get those in as well. A elaborate fan page for a character on the CBS Monday Night's sitcom How I Met Your Mother has helped drive that show to the highest ratings of the season.

Now listen to this. The character is Robin Sparkles, who's actually the identity of another character, the aspiring news anchor on the show, played by actress Colby Smulders. It appears that back in the 80s, she was a kind of a Tiffany-style mall pop superstar in Canada. And they even put together a fake hit single, which is all over the page. Let's go to the mall, everybody!

How's it working? Well, the MySpace page is now attracting some 5,000 friends in a single day, and the ratings of the show last week jumped by more than 1 million viewers. It may have started out as a Sex in the City ripoff, but the 39-second single has grown into its very own as a really cool little weekly web sitcom about dating in New York. It's produced by 39-year-old Liza Persky, who's the star, and her friend Mary Matthews, and you really have to see it to understand it. Trust us, you'll like it. Take some time, though, because you're going to be addicted and want to watch two or three of these at once.

Check it out at 39-second-single.blogspot.com. Speaking of MySpace, they've launched a new service called Trailer Park, which is a movie trailer site that allows viewers to embed or send movie trailers to their friends on MySpace. Just remember, don't send your friends the Die Hard trailer. They'll never talk to you again. Funimation Entertainment has acquired several new anime TV series and movie titles from the guys at Central Park Media. They'll be broadcast on their digital Funimation channel.

Some of the titles include Record of the Lotus War, the Project Acos series, and Grave of the Fireflies. And Sony Pictures say they're going to release Ghost Rider on DVD. Coming up before you know it, on June the 12th, it'll be in Blu-ray, PSP, and of course, regular DVD. It'll also be in two versions. One disc will be the regular theatrical version.

You can buy that one or spend a little more. One other quick story. Joe Cassata, Marvel Editor-in-Chief, has asked the organizers of the Eagle Awards to take his name off the nomination ballots this year. He said his reasons are the fact that in the past, every time a Marvel Editor-in-Chief gets nominated, they usually win, which really isn't fair to the line editors, which are the guys that really do the work. Very classy, Mr. Q. Very classy. There was a day a long, long time ago that if you were a comic fan, you'd just had one TV show.

And you had to love it no matter how wacky it was, and trust me, it was wacky. Today, there are a lot of choices. The superhero genre is truly accepted on the big and the small screen, but it isn't something we should take for granted. That being said, let's take a look this week at a premiere of a comic character in prime time on this sci-fi channel. It's Painkiller J, spinning off from that TV movie last year into a regular series now.

Painkiller, of course, was originally created by Jimmy Palmiati and Joe Cassata for event comics back in 1995. It actually only ran for a five-issue miniseries, and there were lots of crossovers, and right now, Jane's being published regularly by the guys at Dynamite Entertainment. We talked to Jimmy about the new incarnation of Jane and how it's going to play out on TV. The series stars Kristana Logan, best known for her work in Terminator 3. Jimmy said the search for the ride Jane wasn't as hard as it could have been.

Usually, when creations come to TV or movies, the creators take a back seat, but not Jimmy. Painkiller Jane, premiering this Friday on the Sci-Fi channel, there will be also several repeats over the weekend. Be sure to check your local listings. In comics this week, it was a short-lived Captain Action series. It was up to number five with some absolutely gorgeous artwork by Gil Kane and Wally Wood.

Showcase 83 had Bernie Wrightson's Nightmaster, and Superman number 217 was an 80-page giant with a lot of super-debuts of characters we love. Over Marvel, Avengers number 65 had the swordsman, and him returned in Thor number 165. Plus, we spent a couple extra pennies and got creepy number 27 from Warren. In news, fighting in Vietnam escalated, especially in the Vinlong province. A munitions dump was hit by communist forces as part of the heaviest strike in weeks.

In the movies, we needed heroes, and we got up with Steve McQueen in Bullet and Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare. And on TV tonight, we ran from Jackie Gleason to My Three Sons to Get Smart to the Three Sexiest Girls on the Network. Forget about your cares, it is time to relax at the junction. Lots of curves you bet, and even more when you get to the junction. Pedicote Junction.

On the radio this week, we got the unusual combination of a family of five wholesome singers from Dayton, Ohio, combined with the title song from an almost-X-rated Broadway play. The combination pushed them up to the top, though. These are the cow sales. ComicMix. www.ComicMix.com

Well, as you know, Doctor Who season 3 has already begun over in England, and we are lucky enough to be able to get the episodes and see them. So, every week we decide to have Matt Robson down and tell us how we're going so far in season 3. If you're a die-hard fan, you want to wait until they come to sci-fi sometime in the next day or two, cover your ears. Otherwise, if you're a real Who fan, get ready to dig in with Matt.

Hey everybody, that's me, Matt Raub, back again, and this time I will be reviewing the second episode of the newest Doctor Who season 3, entitled The Shakespeare Code. Now, for those of you who are not too internet savvy or aren't able to catch these episodes until sci-fi airs them sometime in the next decade,

the episode is Martha's first adventure with the Doctor, in which they go back to the time of William Shakespeare, the Doctor's personal hero. There, the Doctor stumbles across a plot to use Shakespeare's plays to open a portal into an alien world filled with all of the bad kinds of aliens. Now, I was a little hesitant going into the episode.

I find myself more biased towards the episodes of Doctor Who that take place more in the future than even a parallel present, rather than the ones that take place in the past. I just find the pacing to be different, and being a Gen X-er, I enjoy lots of bright lights and colorful sets. Though this episode was lacking in that department, it made up for it with the side-splitting dialogue and little Shanghai Nights moments.

Now, I won't spend too much time on the Shanghai Nights theory. You can read all about that in my full review on the website. Now, looking at this episode from a step back, you can definitely see the resemblance to one of the first Rose Voyages, in which the traveling duo comes across Charles Dickens' path.

Considering in that episode we are still setting up the Bad Wolf plot, I'm tempted to go back and analyze every line in this episode, hoping to find a clue for this year's big ending. Attempted, but probably not going to happen. With the dialogue being the attention-getter of the episode,

there were tons of little throwaway lines, including my favorite moment of the season thus far, in which the Doctor explains time travel to Martha using Marnie McFly from Back to the Future as his example. Between little lines like this and another run-in with the Doctor's supposed sworn enemy, Queen Elizabeth I, I was impressed yet again by our friends from across the sea. I give this episode a wailing 8 out of 10,

with my only complaint being that there just weren't enough flying cars. Don't forget you can catch my full review over at ComicMix.com, and until next time, you stay crazy, you hoovians, you. ComicMix.com That's it, show's over.

Alright, show's over. Okay, come on, the show's over, let's go. Well, the weekend lies ahead, we're getting closer than ever to Spider-Man number three, and this weekend we're going to premiere our very first ComicMix Masters Series interview. We're going to talk to the people who helped shape the comics industry,

and our first one is a doozy, you're not going to want to miss that. Comments, we love them. Drop them on the website, of course, or write us direct at podcast.com. See you on the weekend, bye. www.ComicMix.com