Monthly Archive: August 2007
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Backwater Texana and a music-biznis digression
The songwriter and guitar-builder Greg Jackson, a key music-making cohort of mine since 1981, has taken the occasional hand in the comics racket, as well, as a consequence of the affiliation. Greg is the life-model, for example, for the character of Jackson Walker in Timothy Truman’s Scout books, and Greg supplied the lap-steel guitar riffs for a funnybook-soundtrack recording that accompanies a chapter of the Prowler series, first as an Eva-Tone Soundsheet insert and eventually as a digital file.
Greg and I have a rambunctious Texas Plains upbringing in common, too – our hometown areas sit within half-an-hour’s drive from one another, and we attended West Texas Suitcase University during the late 1960s and had many of the same musical accompanists – although we never met until after both of us had resettled in North Central Texas. A steady influence overall has been the work of the Oklahoma-to-Texas balladeer Woody Guthrie, whose rough-hewn autobiography of the 1940s, Bound for Glory, once inspired Greg and me to begin thinking about a composite memoir. Guthrie’s equally rough-hewn cartoons had suggested that a comic-book composite memoir might suit the Jackson-Price agenda just fine: Call it Rebound for Glory.
A worthy thought, but the music-making imperative has taken prior claim to such an extent that what stories Greg and I have managed to tell together have all turned out to be songs. Postmodern folkie-scare material, for the most part, but with nods all along to a shared family-band tradition. Our first album of Texas Panhandle ballads – ballards, as Greg calls ’em – arrived in 2006 under the title Mortal Coils, with as emphatic a nod to Aldous Huxley and Mr. Shakespeare as to Woody Guthrie.
The origins of some such material predate Greg’s and my efforts by a good many years, including quite a bit of resurrected ancestral material from the 1930s – 1950s. We’ll be taking the Mortal Coils songbook out for an in-person jaunt on September 5, 2007, at Granbury, Texas. The plan is to vary the program to include some recitations of neo-Texana by my longtime newspaper publisher, Rich Connor, with whom I work at The Business Press of Fort Worth, in Texas, and the daily Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (not far, incidentally, from Tim Truman’s turf). The spoken word and the gargled lyric have quite a bit in common, in this instance.
Did I say “predate” – ?? Back in 1934, the silent symphony of a Southwestern dawn inspired two music-making brothers to begin a long-in-the-making song called “Mornin’ on the Desert.” One of the authors, Manny Jackson, eventually became the father of Greg Jackson, a like-minded soul who eventually would retool the verses into a coffeehouse ballad. (more…)
BIG BROADCAST: Halo Everybody, Halo!
Did you pick up Marvel’s Halo Uprising #1 this week? The one written by Brian Bendis and drawn by Alex Maleev? If not, go grab one QUICK! We tell you why!
The Big ComicMix Broadcast kicks into the weekend with an exclusive sneak preview of the Mattel Makeover coming to DC’s super-hero toy line, including plans that take us well into 2008. Plus the return of Classics Illustrated, Hawaiian Dick, and the rundown of the 10 biggest comics and graphic novels from July. …but first…
PRESS THE BUTTON!
GLENN HAUMAN: Decompression and burn rate
Bully makes a speech buried in a comment thread on decompression in comics that I’ve been saying for years, and deserves much wider play, so I’m running part of it here (but read the whole thing):
"Read the books on their own, month by month, paying $2.25 (or whatever they are now), and it’s clear: you get very little story for you money. I can’t quantify value as you say, because your joy over a decompressed story may vary from person to person, but I lament that you can now spend three bucks and read a comic book in less than five minutes. That is poor entertainment value for the money and only exists because of the crack-like addiction we (I’m including myself here) have to these characters.
"My point, and I do have one, is that in many ways — not all across the board but in so many instances for so many titles — "comics are your worst entertainment value." Spending three bucks on five minutes of enjoyment and not getting the feeling of a full story is a trend that does not help gain new readers. We lament that it’s hard to turn new readers, especially kids, onto superhero comic books. Is it any wonder, when you get a fraction of a story that reads like the wind. I’m not calling for a return to wordy stories that are "done in one" across the board, but the trend of decompression devalues the worth of the comic as a piece of entertainment.
CONVENTION REPORT: Gencon 2007
At last weekend’s Gencon 2007 it was clear that almost no one is launching a game without a popular license attached. In a market defined by Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering it can often seem like those are the only two games left that crafted their own setting.
Upper Deck Entertainment is the poster child for the modern game company. Their strongest selling game is Yu-Gi-Oh, a game that they don’t even design on their own; they get most of their cards from the Japanese company that invented it. Their newest hot game is the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, which is, of course, based on the ludicrously popular computer game. I got a chance to demo it and the game mechanics seem to be one part Magic, one part Alderac Entertainment Group’s Warlord.
The marketing for this game is brilliant though; some fantastically rare cards unlock unique items in the computer games to show off to people there. In addition, every con attendee got a starter pack of the game when they checked-in for the weekend giving them access to potentially thousands of new customers. Even after the demo they gave me, my free pack remains unopened.
Also at the Upper Deck booth I got a chance to check out the Vs. card game, a game featuring heroes and villains from DC and Marvel comics. The demo decks were out of their recently released Hellboy set. This may have been a mistake because their booth was decked out in huge Alex Ross paintings of DC and Marvel characters. I was set to see Superman take on the Hulk, not Hellboy versus Rasputin.
The game uses a scaling resource system that is becoming increasingly standard in the industry, one more resource each turn almost regardless of what’s in your hand. So, having a character that cost the maximum amount you could spend in a turn was important. I knew the game was lost when on my sixth turn I had to settle for a second turn and fourth turn characters while my opponent got a massive sixth turn guy capable of dealing massive damage to my guys without any fear of retaliation. This seems to lend itself to a game that is all but over before any iconic characters could hit the field. This was a disappointment because any card game that could dedicate an entire set to the Green Lantern Corps and another to the Legion of Superheroes clearly knows what kind of comic game I want to play.
Saturday Morning Cartoons: Happy birthday, Transformers!
Twenty-three years ago today, Hasbro brought the Autobots and Decepticons to store shelves all across America. Initially reusing previously-released toys from the Japanese Takara toylines Diaclone and Microman, Hasbro issued the toys under the name Transformers. The basic back-story of the toyline and subsequent comic books and cartoons was developed by the Marvel Comics writers Jim Shooter and ComicMix‘s Dennis O’Neil; it was O’Neil who actually changed Convoy’s name to Optimus Prime.
Oh, and speaking of Optimus Prime, he now seems to be doing reviews with Alan Kistler, reviewing such recent fare as the new Bionic Woman pilot, the new Flash Gordon series, Eureka and Torchwood. But be warned — Optimus Prime has gone through a few transformations of his own.
If you haven’t heard yet, Transformers: The Movie will be released in IMAX September 21 with extended footage. And finally, we have the most impressive Transformer costumes that I’ve ever come across…
MARTHA THOMASES: Wild in the Streets
Maybe it’s because this presidential campaign is lasting more than two years, but lately, I’ve heard a lot of people bemoan their feelings of helplessness. The system is unchangeable, they’ve decided, and there’s nothing they can do.
When I was a teenager, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, we thought we could fix everything. War, poverty, pollution, inequality – it didn’t matter what the problem was. All we needed was ourselves, our energy and resolve (music and drugs were optional, but helpful).
Today, not so much.
I don’t know precisely how, but our cool rebellion and anti-materialist hedonism got co-opted by the very corporations we despised. The very culture we created sold us out. Maybe it was the 1970s, when the music business got huge, segmented radio and split us apart in order to sell to us more efficiently. Punk started in protest to this, but was co-opted even more quickly. MTV turned rock’n’roll into long-form commercials. By the time grunge was hip, Calvin Klein already had Time Square billboards with underwear models looking strung-out in Seattle.
Movies didn’t do much better. The rebellious, independent filmmakers who gave us Taxi Driver, M*A*S*H, Easy Rider and others were rejecting Hollywood’s glamour, glitz and phoniness. Somehow, they and their rebellious stars were absorbed into the studio machine even more quickly that the rockers. Maybe Jane Fonda wasn’t the deepest political thinker, but she looks like Noam Chomsky compared to Lindsay Lohan.
So, comics? They fall somewhere in the middle, and off to the side, as they do in so many conversations about media. Originally reprints of newspaper strips, comic books were seen as disposable, cheap fun, so anything could happen. There’s amazing, subversive energy is Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, just to pick one example. When comics became popular, the people in power objected, and put through the Comics Code to keep the kids in place. Hippies re-discovered comics, and started to make their own. From these underground comics came new distribution, then the direct market, and now, with the exception of a few political titles like World War 3, independents have replaced undergrounds..
D2DVD REVIEW: Strange Thrills
What to do with Doctor Strange?
That’s a question Marvel creators have been asking ever since Steve Ditko left town with the original Eye of Agamotto. A lot of people gave it a shot over the past five decades, and, to be fair, several did a first-rate job. But they had a hard time recapturing the original magic.
This week, Marvel Studios released its [[[Doctor Strange]]] D2DVD, and, being a self-contained 75-minute effort, they took some liberties with the ever-evolving and sometimes contradictory comics versions. Overall, I think they did a good job.
This D2DVD is not quite a superhero effort; certainly, not as defined by their previous animated movies ([[[Ultimate Avengers]]] 1 and 2, [[[Iron Man]]]). They keep the most basic elements of the various origin stories and they don’t really alter anything of substance: Stephen Strange is still starts out as the egotistical, self-absorbed, money-grubbing surgeon supreme and within and hour and a quarter is fast-tracked to beatific altruistic sorcerer supreme. Which, if you think about it, is not a good thing for Strange’s master, The Ancient One.
Along the way, though, we see Strange’s journey to supremacy, we get to appreciate his frustrations and see him grow past his ego and get redeemed. Oh, and he gets to fight Mordo and Dormamuu and a boatload of demons along the way. Our Japanese friends could learn a thing or two from Doctor Strange’s approach to limited animation: Marvel took full advantage of the fluidity of the animation form to allow for the mystical poop to really pop.
Of course they made Wong politically correct, so I guess my desire for an all-Asian cliché-fest crossover with the Blackhawk’s Chop-Chop isn’t going to happen any time soon. And they even teased us with a sequel set-up.
The supplemental documentary is first-rate. Not as first-rate as the extras on the new [[[Popeye]]] box-set, but damn good. Their “[[[Origin of Doctor Strange]]]” delves fully into the comic book roots, showing off a lot of art, giving Stan Lee and (particularly) Steve Ditko their due, and interviewing the hell out of the always-eloquent Steve Englehart, whose own run as Doctor Strange writer (much of it with Frank Brunner as artist) was among the series’ very best.
Overall, a nice effort from supervising director Frank Paur and writer Greg Johnson. I suspect all but the most anal-retentive [[[Strange]]] fans will enjoy the experience.
Russell Crowe in Dark Knight? UPDATED
According to IF Magazine, Christian Bale dropped a little tease to the press: "Russell’s going to actually be in the new Batman movie, which is a big surprise and I want to reveal it to everybody right now." No confirmation from anybody else, and it could just be something to help drum up interest in their new movie together, 3:10 to Yuma.
We’ll pass on any data we get, either confirming or denying.
UPDATE 5:25 PM: Apparently, Russell Crowe is playing Robin.
COMICS LINKS: Play Ball!
Comics Links
Newsarama has discovered the exisitence of Triple-A Baseball Heroes, in which Marvel superheroes apparently battle villainy in tandem with minor-league team mascots. (The cover is our illustration today.)
Comics Reviews
Ain’t It Cool News reviews a pile of recent comics, starting with the Booster Gold relaunch.
CHUD’s Thor’s Comic Column presents reviews of comics by several people, none of whom are actually named Thor.
Comic Book Resources’s Hannibal Tatu reviews a pile of this week’s comics.
Comics Reporter reviews Hurricane Season #1.
The Daily Cross Hatch reviews Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets.
Comics Worth Reading reviews To Terra by Keiko Takemiya.
Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog covers this week’s comics.
Greg Burgas of Comics Should Be Good also reviews this week’s comics.
Comics Should Be Good’s Brian Cronin looks at the first issue of the second series of Mouse Guard.
SF/Fantasy Links
What is Star Wars were a musical? Let’s Blow This Thing! might just be the result. [via Extra Life]
Locus Online lists the new books that they saw in mid-August.
Jeff Somers’s new book The Electric Church now has its own website.
