Monthly Archive: December 2007

Happy 53rd birthday, Tamora Pierce!

Happy 53rd birthday, Tamora Pierce!

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  • December 13, 2007

Today is young adult fantasy writer Tamora Pierce’s 53rd birthday. Pierce is most famous for creating young heroines, most memorably, the medieval transvestite, Alanna of Trebond from the series, The Song of the Lioness. The noble-born girl wants to become a knight and goes the way of Hilary Swank a la Boys Don’t Cry (minus the rape, but being up against a dragon is no fun either). Either way, those young female readers need their empowerment stories any way they can get them. Cross-dressing knight heroines is as good a way as any.

Tamora is probably best known to comics fans as the co-author of the recent White Tiger miniseries for Marvel starring former FBI agent Angela Del Toro, taking off from Brian Bendis’s run on Daredevil.

Terry Pratchett’s Embuggerance

Terry Pratchett’s Embuggerance

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  • December 13, 2007

Author Terry Pratchett posted a message on Paul Kidby’s Discworld News website revealing that "I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom ‘stroke.’ We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism… All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers.  Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet :o)"

Pratchett went on to reassure readers that any serious consequences of this diagnosis "maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell. I know it’s a very human thing to say ‘Is there anything I can do,’ but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry."

Having been enthralled by a TV movie of Pratchett’s novel Hogfather the last couple days (actually our first exposure to the author’s Discworld), we have held him very much in the forefront of our minds, and wish him and his family the best during this difficult time.

I’m Dreaming of a Celluloid Christmas Part Deux, by John Ostrander

I’m Dreaming of a Celluloid Christmas Part Deux, by John Ostrander

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  • December 13, 2007

We now return to my list of Christmas movies, begun last week. And thanks to all of you for your responses and your own suggestions.

How better to begin this round than with How the Grinch Stole Christmas – the cartoon TV special, not the bloated movie that was a vehicle for Jim Carrey. I mean, do I really have to say that? Dr. Seuss, Chuck Jones, and Boris Karloff, Thurl Ravenscroft – the voice of Tony the Tiger – singing “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” which is one of the great modern Christmas songs. All in twenty-two minutes. Perfect.

Actually, let’s spend a moment’s meditation on both the Grinch and Scrooge. They are certainly cousins. And I think we not only identify with them at their curmudgeonly worst but we are meant to do so, especially these days. Yes, they are both monsters in some fashion – but we also identify with a good monster, do we not? They act out what we feel about the holiday season – Humbug! Oh the noise, noise, noise, noise! – and the gaiety that is being forced upon us, especially these days in the over-commercialization of the holiday.

Maybe we feel locked out of Christmas – by choice, by belief, by our own religion – and we rightfully feel resentful. Christmas time is also a time of depression for many people, especially if we think we should be feeling like something out of Norman Rockwell – and don’t. The Grinch and Scrooge both give voice to our inner misanthrope and God love ‘em for it. Even if they do change by the end.

Since we’re talking about TV specials at the moment, let’s add A Charlie Brown Christmas – the first Peanuts TV Special and the best one. The story is true to classic Peanuts which also makes it true to kids. Other Peanuts TV specials would be tied to other holiday times of the year and would twice more, as my memory recalls, return to Christmas itself. The later Christmas Peanuts stories, however, never seemed to have a central story as this first one does. At it’s heart in the original is Charlie Brown’s choice of a Christmas tree – a forlorn little twig that he thinks has character and the rest of the gang thinks is awful. By the end, however, with some love and kindness, it turns out to be a fine Christmas tree after all.

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Happy 58th birthday, Bill Nighy!

Happy 58th birthday, Bill Nighy!

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  • December 12, 2007

How can we let it go by without acknowledging the great squid pirate, the undead stepdad, the aged rockstar, the bad ass vampire lord, and Slartibartfast? 

In case you missed those references, please get a Netflix account (that way you don’t have to leave your man-cave, you hermit) and rent Pirates of the Caribbean, Shaun of the Dead, Love, Actually, Underworld (both 1 and 2) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  He’s one crafty shape-shifter.  We won’t really examine  his dramatic works on Broadway, the West End, or Oscar nominated pieces because we all know those are just boring. 

Way to have that career surge at mid-life, sir, and a happy birthday to you.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier Review

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier Review

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  • December 12, 2007

Ambition, all by itself, is neither good nor bad. The greatest artistic works wouldn’t exist without vast reservoirs of ambition, but ambition by itself doesn’t guarantee anything. Even ambition combined with proven ability isn’t necessarily successful. And just because one work by a particular creator (or creators) was transcendently wonderful, that doesn’t mean the next related work will be equally so.

And that brings us to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which, I’m sad to say, is pretty much the Tom Sawyer, Abroad of our day – a book that should have been something really special, given its predecessors’ pedigree, but which instead is self-indulgent and shows signs of existing purely because of contractual reasons.

But let me back up. There have been two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories so far, both of which were excellent pulpish adventure, homages to writer Alan Moore’s favorite British stories from the turn of the last century. There was something of a tendency to paint the lily even there, though – to cram in references every which way, to show either how smart Moore was or how much genre fiction he had read. But the references were only rarely important to those two stories, and the times they were – the revelation of the first “M,” for example – they were very obvious references, which nearly every reader of the comic would grasp quickly. Neither of the first two League stories was great literature, but they were excellent adventure stories, though they did imply that Moore took old pulpy stories more seriously than perhaps he should.

Black Dossier is not the third major League story; that’s still to come, in a year or three, from a different publisher in an unlikely format. It’s instead a weird hybrid of story and background, with a League story set in the 1950s wrapped around a collection of documents from the past of that history; those documents, of course, comprise the titular dossier. In the frame story, a young blonde couple steal the dossier and run away with it, pursued by nastier fictional characters. To understand the villains, the reader must recognize James Bond (not too difficult), remember Harry Lime (somewhat tougher), and have some idea who Bulldog Drummond is (exceptionally difficult).

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Things to come, by Elayne Riggs

Things to come, by Elayne Riggs

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  • December 12, 2007

This is the time of year when people usually start to compile "best of" lists and recaps. But as 2007 has been more "the worst of times" for me than "the best of times," I prefer to look forward. After all, as Criswell once "predicted" in a hardly-memorable Ed Wood film, "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!"

Crystal ball gazing also helps if you have the retention level of a hyperactive gnat, which I’m afraid is the case for me. I don’t tend to get worked up over details in comic books or TV shows or movies because most entertainment is ephemeral to me; I just don’t feel I need to keep all the minutiae in my head. It carries the added advantage of making rereading the same book a lot more fun to me, a constant surprise as I encounter things again that I didn’t remember from the last time I read them.

In the land of graphic literature, at least in this country, Diamond’s magazine Previews is the only consumer choice in terms of moving from baseless speculation about what may or may not happen in monthly story installments months down the line (that’s more the realm of comics "news" sites, which often busy themselves in breathlessly extolling events yet to happen to the detriment of examining current comics) to actually planning out and ordering one’s reading of choice for the foreseeable future (say, two months down the line). Time was, order forms were the sole purview of retailers. Of course, time was when Previews wasn’t the only game in town. Not that the disappearance of competitors like Capital City and Heroes World constitutes anything like a monopoly for Diamond! At least not according to the antitrust investigation, which didn’t consider comics as separate from other literature. In any case, with all the major companies sewn up with exclusives and treated as Premier customers (some pigs being more equal than other pigs), Previews is the only choice now for readers who wish to support their local retailers, as well as for publishers who want to reach audiences they can’t afford to grow on their own (even in this age of online ordering). Unfortunately, Diamond doesn’t accept every comic published into the hallowed pages of Previews, so now more than ever it pays to see what’s out there in the virtual world, but online content distribution is another column entirely.

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Rock Posters Rule!

Rock Posters Rule!

ComicMix Radio jumps right into this week’s pile of new comics and DVDs that are screaming to be added to your gift list… plus:

• There was a day when every good (or bad) rock & roll concert had a distinctive poster attached. There’s a list of the Top 25 All Time Rock Posters – and even a few surprises for comic fans (Nancy, a word to the wise. Avoid this Alternate Universe Sluggo)

• If you like Street Fighter, this is your week

• Spike awards the Top Video Games but where was Guitar Hero?

• This week’s Sold Out score: DC 2 and Marvel 1

• The Fresh Prince puts his music career aside for a while

Please Press The Button – our pal Sluggo is getting scary!

The Evolution of the Superhero, by Dennis O’Neil

The Evolution of the Superhero, by Dennis O’Neil

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  • December 11, 2007

And on we plod, continuing our seemingly interminable discussion of the evolution of superheroes. This week, let’s leave the capes and masks and other such accoutrements, and the “super” prefix, in the trunk and concentrate on the hero part.

First, a little oversimplification.

Heroes come in two models: the authority-sanctioned kind, as embodied by King Arthur’s posse, Beowulf, and James Bond, to cite just three of many possible examples, and the loners – the cowboys, the private eyes and, yes, most superdoers.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first kind were dominant throughout most storytelling history – were, in fact, integral to the “monomyth” described by Joseph Campbell. Again oversimplifying: ultimately, the result of all the hero’s roving and adventuring was benefit to his community. And, bowing once more to conventional wisdom, the second kind, the loners, became prominent after the First (don’t we wish!) World War when belief in the essential goodness and wisdom of humanity’s leaders became…well, challenging.

I dunno…the cowboy archetype was well-established before the war broke out in 1914, and it, in some ways, was the model for the private eyes and other rogue justice-dealers. I guess you could argue that the defining event of America’s nineteenth century, the Civil War, made the citizenry wary of Authority, and that wariness grew for maybe a hundred years as media technology made our immediate ancestors aware that if a person was in the market for some really ripe corruption, the statehouse was the place to look..

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Round yon donuts, mother and child

Round yon donuts, mother and child

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  • December 11, 2007

Much thanks to Media Goddess Martha Thomases for inviting me and fellow ComicMixers to her annual Chanukah donut party on Sunday.  Here are a couple of happy guests, Liz Glass and Madeleine Grace Baker.

More pictures (expandable to larger sizes, yet) on my blog.

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