Monthly Archive: July 2007

Fall of the House of Harry Potter Mania!

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

harry-5375349

In honor of Daniel Radcliffe’s roving eyes, today here’s a picture of what Emma Watson looks like on a regular movie screen, and what she looks like in IMAX 3-D. Quite a difference, eh? (And if you want to see the photo I almost used here — which is probably not safe for work, and presumably is from Daniel Radcliffe’s stage work in Equus earlier this year in London — it’s here. The caption would have been something like "Hey! That’s not Hermione!")

NPR interviews Arthur Levine, J.K. Rowling’s American editor.

The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles J.K. Rowling.

The Guardian profiles Christopher Little, Rowling’s famously tough agent.

My god, even Eddie Campbell has gotten into the act. Must everyone in the whole wide world write about Harry Potter?

The San Jose Mercury News, running a bit behind, files the standard Harry Potter story (interviews with kids, librarians, and booksellers; lots of impressive numbers; thumbnail history) that everyone else was doing last week.

KansasCity.com thinks the Harry Potter readers will be writing their own fantasy novels in six years. (So, agents, if you start getting a flood of boy wizards in 2014, remember that Kansas City called it first.)

Newsday, from bucolic Long Island, New York, gets a bunch of people to recommend other fantasy books for Potter readers. (more…)

Simpsons: Testify This September 18

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

homer_1024x768-3652991The Simpsons movie is set to open in less than two weeks, meaning there will be a long, hot stretch of summer with no new Simpsons.  Thus, the anticipation for the 19th season will be even more fevered.  Adding to the frenzy will be a CD, Simpsons: Testify, from the Shout Factory.

The soundtrack includes the vocal talents of the regular Simpsons’ cast (Dan Castallaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartright, Yeardly Smith, Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer and guest regular Kelsey Grammar) plus musical ringers like Jackson Browne, Weird Al Kankovic, Ricky Gervais, and David Byrne.

For complete track listing, please visit: http://www.shoutfactory.com/press/214/the_simpsons_testify_a_whole_lot_more

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Apollo’s Song

apollo-7172680

Like Ode to Kirihito, this is a major graphic novel by Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and “godfather of manga,” translated and published in English by Vertical Publishing. I won’t repeat the background here, but you click to the earlier review if you like.

(I’ll just wait for you to get back.)

Apollo’s Song is from the same era as Ode to Kirihito – it was serialized in Shukan Shoen Kingu in 1970 (Kirihito ran during 70-71) – and has similar concerns and motifs, though it seems to be less aggressively counter-cultural than Kirihito was. There’s a strong medical drama element in Apollo, and even more mystical/religious ideas than in Kirihito, including an on-stage pagan goddess who I believe is meant to be taken as real.

Tezuka clearly doesn’t fear anyone’s scorn; Apollo opens with a ten-page sequence about impregnation from the point of view of sperm, characterized as a vast army of identical men, all seeking one woman, the ova. The story proper begins immediately afterward, as a boy – apparently meant to be about fifteen or so – is brought to a psychiatric hospital for treatment after having been caught attacking and killing animals. The boy, Shogo, explains that he is the unwanted son of a prostitute (or perhaps just a kept woman…kept by a long series of different men) who hates love, romance, and all manifestations of “tenderness.”

(more…)

New Star Trek ‘toon feature debuts at Convention

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

borgwartrailerhighres_b-1844248Geoffrey James made a feature-length animated film by reprogramming computer games.  The result, the Star Trek film Borg War, with Patrick Stewart, Tim Russ and Brock Peters, will debut at the Official Star Trek Convention 2007 at the Las Vegas Hilton August 10.

According to the press release, Borg War clips have received more than a million downloads online.  If you want to see the trailer for the feature, check out http://www.creationent.com/cal/stlv.htm.

Vegas expects more than 12,000 Trekkies, and a guest list that includes William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Brett Spiner and damn near everybody else who’s been associated with the franchise and remains alive.  Also on the schedule — a Star Trek concert with members of the Las Vegas Philharmonic.

stlv_cartoon_sm-8933815 (more…)

MIKE GOLD: The Peacock Priorities

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

mikegold100-9759129About a month ago, our Glenn Hauman turned me on to this story and I’ve got to tell you, I’m still pissed.

According to published reports, which all carry the following verbatim: “NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”

Okay, let me first state the obvious: this man’s head is so far up his ass his eyeballs think they’re hemorrhoids. And I am in the intellectual property business: what ComicMix publishes is intellectual property, and we’d rather not see our various creators’ work, current and forthcoming, ripped off.

The whole thing about copyrights and the Internet is a little wacky and confusing. This country has lousy copyright laws and, to the extent they “protect” anybody, they tend to offer that protection more to the corporate oligarchs than they do to actual creators, let alone to any legitimate sense of history, art and culture. We’re muddling through as best we can, basically using the Grateful Dead’s policies as our starting point.

But Mr. Cotton acts as though he is an idiot. He is either woefully misinformed or he is an out-and-out liar. Intellectual property crime runs into hundreds of billions of dollars each year? Prove it. Smith Barney, hardly a communist organization, quotes the Motion Picture Association as saying such piracy cost them $6 billion in 2005. I realize there’s a lot of other stuff going on – music piracy, books, even comics – but movies and DVDs are the E ticket of the operation. If Mr. Cotton is even remotely correct, these other media have to come up with a minimum of $194,000,000,000.01 to justify his number. (more…)

Behind The Big ComicMix Broadcast

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

benturpin-1110741As the days roll by, I have two stacks of paper here on the Big ComicMixBroadcast Desk. One is labeled “Before San Diego,” the other is marked “Whenever.” That pretty much stands as a metaphor for things here right now as well. However, that doesn’t mean I have lost ANY of the notes I need to share with you from the week:

  •  If you are looking to (*ahem*) familiarize yourself with the actress cast as the new Supergirl on the CW’s Smallville, I found the best place to be here. It is much better than sitting through My Mom Has A Date With A Vampire – trust me!
  • The “test version” of Disney’s new free (with ads) gaming site can be seen here,  but BE CAREFUL. There are still links up fore the old subscription based site.
  • You can get info on all the deals offered & the creators appearing at SDCC from Penny Farthing Press here. A lot of these books can be ordered right from the site, too.
  • If that editorial job offered by IDW Press sounds interesting, you can get a jump on this by going here for more info.
  • You can see samples of Breaking Up by Aimee Friedman and Christine Norrie, you can go to Christine’s site. You get treated to a LOT of Christine’s other work – a real bonus!

Back at you in a couple of days as we continue to edge closer to the San Diego ComicCon, marvel at Harry’s magic boxox office and clear off the shelf for a big pile of new comics and DVDs!!

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Will Eisner’s New York

  • Uncategorized
  • July 15, 2007

eisner-8371014

Will Eisner is one of the giants of 20th century comics; a figure whom reviewers always say “needs no introduction,” but then gets an extended explanation anyway. I’ll be brief: Eisner founded what became a major packaging studio in 1936, at the very beginning of the comic-book business, then launched the unique Spirit newspaper insert section in 1940. Starting in the ‘50s, he ran his own company, American Visuals Corporation, which created instructional materials in comics form, mostly for the government. In the late ‘70s – in his sixties, when most men are retiring – he started writing and drawing long-form stories that are now often called the first graphic novels, starting with A Contract With God in 1978. He died in 2005 in Florida, where he’d lived for the previous twenty years.

Will Eisner’s New York is the second omnibus volume of Eisner’s stories from W.W. Norton, a highly respected publisher of mostly non-fiction, after 2006’s The Contract With God Trilogy, collecting that original graphic novel and two related works. New York itself collects four separate books – New York, The Building, City People Notebook, and Invisible People – which are loosely related to each other and also vaguely set in the same city as the Contract With God stories. The “Contract With God” stories were set in a fictional Bronx neighborhood, but the stories in New York range more widely – a lot of them feel like the Bronx, but some are more Manhattanesque. (There’s not a whole lot of Brooklyn or Queens in here, though, and no detectible Staten Island. Eisner’s New York, like everybody’s, is specific and parochial.)

What strikes a new reader first is the question of dates; the stories in New York were originally published from 1981 through 1992, but the New York they depict is mostly that of the 1930s, with occasional bits from later decades. The “Dropsie Avenue” stories, like A Contract With God, are deliberately set in Eisner’s youth, but the tales in New York appear to be aimed at contemporaniety, but don’t feel any more modern than about 1966. It’s possibly too much to ask that a man in his sixties and seventies, living in Florida, be completely up-to-date with a city he already knows very well, but Eisner’s New York wasn’t a contemporary city even in 1981. This was the city he remembered, and recreated in ink from those memories.

(more…)

Harry Potter tops

  • Uncategorized
  • July 15, 2007

Box Office Mojo declalres Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the top-grossing film this weekend, with a take of more than $77.4 million and a per-theater average of $18,065.  Since opening on Wednesday, Potter has earned more than $140 million.

The rest of the Top Ten include Transformers ($36 million), Ratatouille ($18.019 million), Live Free or Die Hard ($10.875 million), License to Wed ($7.44 million ), 1408 ($5.01 million), Evan Almighty ($4.972 million), Sicko ($2.65 million), Ocean’s Thirteen ($1.91 million), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer ($1.585 million), Captivity ($1.55 million), Pirates of the Caribbean ($1.402 million) and Evening ($1.154 million).

Next weekend, the big premiere is Hairspray, whose major special effect is John Travolta in a dress and a fat suit.  As long as Christopher Walken dances, I’m there.

A midsummer’s weekly reading

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

Another glorious summery weekend here in the New York metro area, so with the necessary errands all done (why is it that most of them seem to involve spending money?), it’s time to catch you up on what ComicMix columnists have written this past week:

Hey, Mellifluous Mike Raub has reached a milestone with his big ComicMix Broadcast #65 and beyond; does that make him eligible for senior citizen privileges?

Lastly on a personal note, a huge thanks once again to Andrew Wheeler for all his comics link posts during my extended day-job swampitude! I hope to be back here full time before y’all know it (but not before Sandy Eggo)…

RIC MEYERS: Hard Dorm

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

dorm-8367722It’s about time I got around to Tartan – specifically Tartan Asia Extreme, since they’ve been inundating the DVD market with every Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai “horror” movie they can get their well-manicured hands on. I put horror in quotes, because, in reality, many of their releases are actually episodes of The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt with delusions of cinematic grandeur – essentially familiar ghost revenge sagas pumped and/or padded to feature length. I also say “well-manicured,” because, whatever the overall quality of the film they’re presenting, Tartan’s packaging is uniformly classy.

On the one hand, if you’ve yet to have Tartan’s special editions of South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance” trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and Old Boy), acquire them with all speed (and watch them in the aforementioned order, despite their actual release dates). On the other hand, I showed eighteen hours of Tartan’s other Asia Extreme releases at last year’s World Science Fiction Convention and didn’t see a single film that rated above “okay.”

So warned, let’s judge some of their latest releases from the special features perspective. First, there’s Dorm, a Thai award winner that strives to be like Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone. Both concern what happens to a young man in a creepy private school, and while del Toro connects the ghosts to the Spanish Civil War, director Songyos Sugmakanan weaves it within the universal loneliness of an outcast new student. It’s a well-made mood piece more than anything else, and a fine one, but, as previously mentioned, it would have been well-served as a ninety minute (or less) chiller, rather than the 110 minute saga it is.

Tartan attaches an interesting audio commentary with Songyos and some of his cast, in addition to a “making of” (which is really a ten minute on-set home movie of the complications that come of making a film with a pre-teen cast), a “behind the scenes” (which are actually a bunch of short prevue pieces detailing the cast and plot), fittingly eerie deleted scenes, a special effect featurette, and a welcome “character introduction,” which is like a visual program book. All in all, it’s a satisfying job. (more…)

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks