Monthly Archive: June 2007

The Weekend Numbers, Plus…

According to Variety estimates, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was the top-grossing film this weekend, earning $43,188,000 over Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  The hilarious Knocked Up was second with $29,284,20, while Shrek the Third earned $26,704,000.  Newbie Mr. Brooks earned just over $10 million, while Spider-Man 3 took in $7.5 million.

Variety also says that Jack Black will star in Year One, a comedy produced by Judd Apatow and directed (and co-produced) by Harold Ramis.  Ramis is co-writer, and Owen Wilson will executive produce.

Along with the upcoming Superbad, Apatow’s plate is full.  He is producing and in some cases co-writing a series of Columbia projects, including Walk Hard, Pineapple Express and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, which stars Adam Sandler, a former roommate of Apatow’s.

(more…)

Hey! Yamodo!

  • Uncategorized
  • June 3, 2007

Featured at this year’s Book Expo America in New York was the new game Yamodo, and the manufacturers were gracious enough to provide a special demo for ComicMix.

Yamodo is played with two or more players and a box of cards. Each card has a made up word on it (think wesocol or lombutate), a line or two of a drawing and three lines to define the image being drawn. Each player adds a little bit to the image and a line of description and passes it to the next player. There are no winners, only the pursuit of creativity.

A personal favorite feature of mine was the space to write and describe the drawing, giving people an opportunity to interpret the ugly scribbles people like me end up drawing on these cards. Also the lack of structure is a nice change of pace from the competitive nature of most other games.

Completed cards can be uploaded to Yamodo.com and shared with anyone who happens to visit. Site patrons will also be able to submit new fake words to be used in volume two of Yamodo, set to be released in the early part of 2008.

Yamodo is available at Barnes & Noble and Discovery Channel Stores.

Beat the heat and read

This little homebody has had enough of running around in The City.  Sometimes you just have to stay home and collapse before facing another workweek, and what better way to relax than with another reading of some fine ComicMix columns?:

And some listening to Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s most recent podcasts?:

And by phrasing everything in the form of a question?

RIC MEYERS: Tokyo Shock

ric-meyers-100-1109283It’s that time again. I’m back on my annual summer filmfest tour. My first, and favorite, stop is FanimeCon in San Jose (“By Fans, For Fans”) California, where my friends at Media Blasters showcased riches aplenty – some recent, one brand spanking new.

Now, I’ve been fans of M.B. for awhile, since they’re the only (legal) place to get such classic Japanese samurai (a.k.a. chambara) films as Hideo Gosha’s Goyokin, such fine “old school” kung-fu films as 7 Grandmasters, and such rare, treasured Japanese action TV series as Baian the Assassin and Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman. But this time they’ve outdone themselves … at least in terms of this column’s raison d’etre.

Let’s start with their recent output. They’re repacked and repackaged two cult favorites in ways both wild and weird. First, topping anyone’s list of “you may regret it but you’ll never forget it” movies is renegade firebrand director Takashi Miike’s graphic (is there any word stronger than graphic I can use?) live-action adaptation of the landmark manga Ichi the Killer. Once seen, you’ll know why “graphic” or even “explicit” don’t cut it (“cut’ it … get it? Anyone seeing the film will).

This tale of a repressed, demented, vigilante going after the worst yakuza sado-masochist ever put on film is a work of extreme “so-excessive-it’s-funny” art (art using mostly the color red). So it makes sick sense that Media Blaster’s “Tokyo Shock” division would package their new Double-Disc Special Edition in a Collector’s Blood Bag.

ichi-5487813First, the good news: the mass of extras do nothing to lessen the impact of this literally unforgettable entertainment (although I almost hoped it would, given the intensity of the flick). They include a new 16×9 transfer, audio commentary with both the director and the manga artist/writer (Hideo Yamamoto), interviews with the actors and producer, and an illuminating on-the-set making-of doc.

The only place the frills falter is with “The Cult of Ichi” and Eli Roth interview featurettes in which horror writers and “torture chic” filmmakers heap bloody praise on the film. What they have to say is pretty much what anyone would probably say, but it you like their work, it might be fun to see them give voice to what you would probably think after seeing the movie.

Now, the bad news. While the packaging is “clever,” it is also wildly impractical. It took me more than two minutes to extract just one of the two discs from its sticky plastic prison, and it was nigh impossible not to get my grubby paw prints all over the wrong side of the DVD. (more…)

BEA Day 2 pictorial

I’m getting way too old for this.  Nonetheless, had I the energy to walk around and the time to have planned ahead (a must!), I would have loved Book Expo America even more.  It’s been at least 15 years since I’ve been to this trade show (the last time I attended it wasn’t even called BEA), and it’s as exhilarating as ever.  Whoever believes nobody has any interest in books any more needs to be dragged to this show.

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The ComicMix contingent was out in force for this one.  Pictured here are Mellifluous Mike Raub, Head Honcho Mike Gold, and Spin Queen Martha Thomases.  Not pictured are Kai Connolly and Glenn Hauman.  Expect any info from these folks to be far more valuable than my meager photos, as they got info and interviews galore.

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More than ever before, comics and particularly graphic novels are firmly ensconced in the pantheon of publishing, and enthusiastically accepted by show attendees.  Lots of emphasis was put this year on graphic novels for kids, and Harold Buchholz and Jane Fisher were doing their part to expand that — do check out their Kids Love Comics website!  I also had my photo taken a bit later with Harold and Colleen Doran, who warns me it’ll be up on her site when she gets home.  It was terrific to see so many Team Comics people at this show! (more…)

Sunday morning blasphemy

  • Uncategorized
  • June 3, 2007

drwhosavior-8348310For those of you can’t get a decent morning’s sleep on Sunday morning becasue they are plagued by early morning zealots, but find that it’s a bit much to invoke Cthulhu early in the day, Home On The Strange has now provided you with a new way to deal with them, here and here.

Me, I usually just wait until people notice the swastikas in the tile in the foyer. That usually gets them to leave pretty quickly. If that doesn’t do it, I start explaining that the New Testament is just an Old Testament Gary Sue fan-fic.

MICHAEL H. PRICE: The Long Shadow of Boody Rogers

305_4_01-6254468People and events of consequence cast their shadows before them, never behind. Oklahoma-born and Texas-reared Gordon “Boody” Rogers (1904 – 1996) owns one of those forward-lurching shadows – an unlikely mass-market cartoonist whose oddball creations anticipated the rise of underground comics, or comix, and whose command of dream-state narrative logic and language-mangling dialogue remains unnerving and uproarious in about equal measure.

I had discovered the artist’s more unsettling work as a schoolboy during the 1960s, via the used-funnybook bin of a neighborhood shop called The Magazine Exchange. One such title, Babe, amounted to such an exaggerated lampoon of Al Capp’s most celebrated comic strip, Li’l Abner, as to transcend parody. (One lengthy sequence subjects a voluptuous rustic named Babe Boone to a gender-switch ordeal that finds her spending much of the adventure as Abe Boone – almost as though Capp’s Daisy Mae Scragg had become Abner Yokum.) Such finds drew me back gradually to Rogers’ comic-strip and funnybook serial Sparky Watts, a partly spoofing, partly straight-ahead, heroic feature about a high-voltage superman.

Rogers resurfaced in my consciousness quite a few years later. A college-administration colleague showed up one day around 1980 sporting a canvasback jacket adorned with cartoons bearing an array of famous signatures – Al Capp and Zack Mosely and Milton Caniff among them. The garment proved to be one-of-a-kind.

“Oh, it’s my Uncle Gordon’s,” my co-worker explained. “Kind of a family heirloom, I guess – something his cartoonist pals fixed up for him on the occasion of his retirement. He lends it out to me, now and then.”

Okay, then. And who is this “Uncle Gordon,” to have been keeping company amongst the comic-strip elite?

“Oh, you’ve probably never heard of him,” she said. “He was a cartoonist, his ownself. Went by the name of ‘Boody.’”

Not Boody Rogers?(Yes, and how many guys named Boody can there be, anyhow?)

“None other. So maybe you have heard of him?”

Well, sure. Used to collect his work, to the extent that it could be had for collecting in those days of catch-as-can trolling for out-of-print comic books and newspaper-archive strips.

So, uhm, then, he’s a local guy?

“Well, not exactly right here in town,” answered my colleague. “But he lives not far from here” – here being Amarillo, Texas, in the northwestern corner of the state – “over to the east. Do you ever get over to Childress? You ought to drop over and meet him.” (more…)

Steve Gilliard, 1966-2007

gilliard_sm-7133323One of the most hard-charging bloggers around, Steve Gilliard, has died at the all too early age of 41.

Steve was a veteran of Silicon Alley, having started NetSlaves to chart the underbelly of the new dot-com workforce. Some folks called him the original blogger, before the genre was invented, with his first political commentaries in his frequent comment-posts under his real name at F***edCompany.com in 1999, and thereafter NetSlaves and beyond. He was one of the first guest bloggers on Daily Kos in 2003 and helped with its meteoric growth before starting up his own site, The News Blog. He was one of the earliest bloggers to actually read what was going on in Iraq and see how bad it was going to become.

He’d been in poor health for a while, but it was widely hoped that he would pull through. Many of us at ComicMix read his work regularly, and loved his passion and his take-no-prisoners style– I think I even described it once as, "Think Harlan Ellison, but angry."

Our condolences go out to Jen.

Cockrum remembered

Yesterday I alluded to an item which would explain the presence, all in one room, of people like Paul Levitz, Joe Quesada, Tom Brevoort, Dan DiDio, Mike Carlin, Bob Wayne, Jim Shooter, Dan Buckley, Peter Sanderson, Mark Waid, Chris Claremont, Peter David, Steve Wacker, Danny Fingeroth, Jo Duffy, Jack C. Harris, Irene and Ellen Vartanoff, Al Milgrom, Ken Gale and Mercy Von Vlack, and Cliff Meth all in one place and not at a convention.

All these folks and more gathered in the Time Life Building’s 2nd floor conference center on Thursday afternoon for both a happy and sad occasion — remembering and celebrating the life of the late Dave Cockrum and his many wonderful contributions to comics.

helpdave-7618784Paul Levitz led off the event by recalling the first official memorial over which the comics family presided, that of Wally Wood.  (The last one Robin and I attended before this was ten years ago, for Kim Yale.  While I don’t actually enjoy these events, I’ve found great comfort in like-minded folk coming together to salute one of their own and thus strengthen the bonds that exist between us all.)  Paul suggested the memorial tributes be done "open mike" style, where anyone who wished to share a story about Dave could come to the podium and speak about him, with Dave’s widow Paty being last to speak.

Cliff Meth, a very close friend of Dave and Paty, talked about how Dave’s love of comics shone through even in his passing (wearing his Superman pj’s under a Batman blanket) and cremation (in his Green Lantern t-shirt), and how strongly he felt Dave’s spirit still around, a feeling which would be echoed by Paty.  Cliff also passed along remembrances from two Californians who couldn’t be there, Marv Wolfman and Harlan Ellison — who recorded his eulogy, the reaction to which there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, and not from crying. (more…)

Silver Snail presents the Muppet version of Lord Of The Rings

  • Uncategorized
  • June 2, 2007

Silver Snail, the world famous comic shop in Toronto, has put up photos of their most popular window display of the year, entitled "The Muppet Show presents the battle of Ham’s Deep".

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Occasionally, there are no words. Other than "Good heavens, the elf’s a bear!" to which one must reply, "No he’s not, he’s-a wearing a tunic!"

Hat tip: Kathleen David.

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