Metal Men, Naruto, and Other Unfathomable Things
Comics Links
Comic Book Resources looks back at the long, odd history of the Metal Men.
The Toronto Star reports on a Toronto Comic Arts Festival presentation on four wordless graphic novels from the early 20th century.
If you’re like me, and spent much of the weekend in the company of kids watching a Naruto marathon, you might also find this Paul Gravette lecture about Naruto to be useful in explaining what the heck it all is about.
Comics Should Be Good takes a look at all of Image Comics’s October covers.
Mike Sterling discovers that if you stare at a poster of Superman’s funeral long enough, the abyss also gazes into you.
Comics Reviews
Comics Reporter reviews Rian Hughes’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows.
The New York Times reviews Emily Flake’s These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves and Jessica Bruder’s Burning Book.
Warren Peace Sings The Blues reviews Whiteout by Rucka and Lieber.
SF/Fantasy Links
Douglas Cohen responds to comments and criticisms of his drive to increase subscriptions for print SF/Fantasy magazines.
Irene Gallo of The Art Department showcases Jon Foster’s covers for Timothy Zahn’s “Dragonback” series.
The Hugo Awards now have a website of their own – just in time for this year’s awards, which will be announced at Nippon 2007 in less than two weeks.
The UK SF Book News Network lists all of the newly-published books that they’ve received in the last three weeks.
Long-time Batman fan Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont will be appearing in next year’s movie 
A whole bunch of us ComicMixers have been attending various and sundry comic book conventions over the past half-year, and, having just come back from Chicago Wizard World, I’ve got a few observations.
BEST COSTUME: This is a close call, and sadly I don’t know the name of the winner. But he dressed up as Adam Strange in a costume so on-model Murphy Anderson would have swooned. Take a look; he’s the guy with the ray guns.
According to 
Twenty-five years ago, the late, great Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, tried to beat Lord of the Rings to the cinematic punch by co-writing and co-directing a similar and derivative, yet pioneering and daring, “adult” fantasy. Four years after that, approximately twenty-one years ago, he tried to combine Star Wars, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Where the Wild Things Are, and M.C. Escher, among other things, to create a new coming of age teen tale.
He seemed to have little choice, of course, since his chosen medium was the puppet, and, back in the 80s he was limited to what those puppets could achieve, no matter how hard he pushed their envelope. What these new DVDs have over his old movies is that very knowledge. Once a viewer knows how hard he tried and how much work was put into pulling the difficult concepts off, new admiration for the attempts, if not the finished products, is hard to suppress.
I think when it is all done, we’re are going to call this season Catch Up Summer. It seems that every time we sit down, it’s a race just get caught up to where we should be starting! Here’s our notes from this week’s Big ComicMix Broadcasts, some items dating back to our visit to Wizard World Chicago last weekend:
The kinship between science and fantasy runs deep into antiquity – deeper, yet, than the well-aged but comparatively modern notion of science fiction. The filmmaker Ray Harryhausen, in his foreword to my revised edition of the late George E. Turner’s Spawn of Skull Island: The Making of King Kong (2002), invokes the spirit of the alchemist Paraceleus (1494 –1541) in describing the imaginative zeal necessary to bring (seemingly) to life the impossible creatures of cinema.
For over 30 years he has been on greeting cards, t-shirts, coffee mugs, calendars and in hundreds of daily newspapers – and he wasn‘t created by Stan Lee. Ziggy is arguably one of the most successful comic creations of the late 20th century, and he is also the butt of a zillion jokes. Creator Tom Wilson tells The Big ComicMix Broadcast where Ziggy came from and where he is going.
According to 
