Monthly Archive: April 2008

Interview: Peter David on Stephen King, ‘X-Factor’ and ‘Dark Tower’

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  • April 7, 2008

Peter David has had many successes during his long career as a writer. From his beginnings as an assistant in the sales department at Marvel Comics, through his character-redefining run on The Incredible Hulk, to his bestselling Star Trek novels, David’s talent, wit and style continue to serve him, and his readers, very well.

More recently, he’s taken on the task of helping to bring Stephen King’s The Dark Tower to the pages of comics and jumped back into the X-Universe by writing the re-booted  X-Factor title for Marvel. ComixMix recently caught up with the multi-talented author to get the latest on X-Factor, how he works with artists and the legendary Stephen King, and what makes a good story.

COMICMIX: Peter, thanks for taking the time to talk. Getting right to it, take us back a bit — how did you get started writing comics?

PETER DAVID: Well, I was working in the sales dedepartment at Marvel Comics under Carol Kalish and writing was something I was doing on the side. Long story short, I started pitching ideas around at Marvel and wound up impressing Jim Owsley, the then-editor of Spider-Man, and was assigned to Spectacular Spider Man as a writer.

I did that for about a year or a year-and-a-half. After that, I was offered the Incredible Hulk, which I, of course, took on. During that time, I also started to send out inquires to other publishers like DC and asked if they would be interested in hiring me.

They said they would so I decided to become a full-time writer and never looked back. That was in 1986 or 1987, something like that.

CMix: Was there one particular moment when you realized you could do it for a living?

PD: People coming to me and asking me to work for them kinda tipped me off. It was primarily when I approached DC to see if they would be interested in me as a writer and they said they were.

If they had said no, that might have been it. I might still be in the sales department at Marvel.

CMix: Did working at Marvel at the time help you make the transition to full-time writer? Did it help to already have your "foot in the door"? (more…)

‘Watchmen’ Compared: Movie vs. Comics

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  • April 7, 2008

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The biggest question regarding the currently filming adaptation of Watchmen has to be how it will compare to the original comics series, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The comics are some of the most highly regarded works ever created, and so the filmmakers face the task of not only making a quality movie, but also of appeasing fans of the book.

A new report over at Slashfilm takes some new photos from set locations and puts them next to Gibbons’ original art, so fans can decide for themselves how close director Zack Snyder is hewing to the source material. The locations include:

  • Dr. Manhattan’s lab
  • Dr. Manhattan’s apartment
  • Rorschach’s jail cell
  • The Comedian’s apartment
  • Mason’s Auto Repair
  • and the New York City streets

In other Watchmen movie news, ComingSoon has some video from the set, which you can check out right here.

Money, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • April 7, 2008

I started thinking about money.

Well, actually, I probably haven’t stopped thinking about it since the day I realized my daily school lunch would buy me three comic books and one candy bar. But being older yet no more mature, this time around I started thinking about the price of gasoline.

Right after the New York Comic Con, my wife, daughter and I are going to pile into my 2005 Ford Focus hatchback and drive across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana to spend time in Detroit and Chicago. Mostly work, but lucky for me I work with my friends, which is sort of like spending my lunch money on comic books.

Here in Fairfield County Connecticut the price of a gallon of gas is $3.45. It’s about time they dropped that “9/10ths” thing – I’m sure they will when the price of gas goes above $9.99 a gallon. If previous trips (I do this about three or four times a year, mostly for conventions) are any indication, I suspect I’ll be paying about $3.19 a gallon in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The drive, in total, runs about 1800 miles and my Focus gets about 35 miles to the gallon – this is mostly highway driving, so I’ve got the right car for the job. That’s about 52 gallons for the trip, which I figure will run about $170.00 plus tolls. Call it $200.00; if I flew in alone the car rental would cost more, let alone my airfare.

This brings me back to my lunch money. I am so damn old that my school lunch only cost my parents 35 cents, and therefore the comic books I bought with that lunch money only cost a dime (when the price went up to 12 cents, I just stared at the cover as though it said the Communists had just seized control of the drug store). Today, the average cost of the standard format mainstream comic book costs $3.00. That’s a thirty-fold increase. A gallon of gas in the late 10-cent comics era was about 30 cents, so we’ve only suffered a little more than an eleven-fold increase. (more…)

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending April 6, 2008

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  • April 6, 2008

Hollywood icon Charlton Heston is no longer with us.  Cineleet has a nice overview of his roles in three classic sf movies, but of course he was so much more, both on the screen and in real life.  Whatever one might think of  his politics, the fact that he and his now-widow Lydia were married for 64 years is enough to earn my respect and admiration.  As April is National Poetry Month, feel free to add your poetic thoughts about Heston in the comments section, and don’t forget to check out this past week’s ComicMix columns:

Godspeed, Chuck – not that you need it, you probably have the inside track after all those Biblical epics…

The ‘Paper Comics Deathwatch’ Continues

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  • April 6, 2008

In the recurring "Paper Comics Deathwatch" feature over at Flashback Universe, the blog’s authors chronicle the events they believe to be hastening the demise of comics in printed form. It’s an interesting read occasionally, and I can’t help but laugh at the way "PCDW Points" are assigned to each event.

Recent subject matter for PCDW includes all of the love publishers are showing MySpace around the comics scene, an analysis of Joe Field’s address at the recent Comics Pro retailers conference and the Wizard crew pimping an advertising partner’s scanner as "Comic Book Collectors’ Heaven."

Heck, they’ve found so much fodder for this feature that they’re taking art submissions for a PCDW logo and awarding some prizes for the winner.

(DISCLOSURE: Readers can always get free, online comics published every every day of the week here at ComicMix, so there’s a distinct possibility that we might be showing up in that PCDW feature at some point, too.)

In related news, Vaneta Rogers recently tackled the best ways to attract new readers to comics in her always interesting Q&A feature over at Newsarama. A variety of industry creators weighed in with their thoughts on how to get a foot in the door with readers outside of the hardcore comics scene.

Christos Gage offers up some of his thoughts:

Like, if you rented a film noir movie, then there would be an ad at the beginning of the DVD, just like you have ads for other movies, but it would be for Criminal by Ed Brubaker, or something like that. I’d like to see ads that tie-in not only with comic book movies — like if you enjoy the Iron Man movie, then you’ll like Iron Man comics. But something where it says, "Hey, if you like James Ellroy, you’ll like Criminal."

Chuck Dixon also makes a nice point:

I wish someone other than Archie would make a digest-sized comic for the "impulse" aisle at the supermarket. A Batman/Superman or Spider-Man or Star Wars comic would go nicely in the pocket recently vacated by the cancelled Disney Adventures digest in thousands of market checkout lines. Disney cancelled their book because it was only selling a million copies a month!

 

(semi-via Journalista)

‘Dragonball’ Set Pictures Online

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  • April 6, 2008

ComicMix previously reported that the Dragonball film has been pushed back to 2009, but now Joblo has posted some exclusive pictures from the set of the movie that should help hold you over until then.

Based off of the popular manga series and animated program, the movie follows Goku as he tries to find Master Roshi and collect all of the Dragon Balls in order to save the world from the evil Piccolo.

If you’re worried that all of this will look a little ridiculous in live action, well, you’re right, but isn’t that half the charm?

The set photos include pictures of Justin Chatwin in his Goku gear, Chow Yun Fat as Master Roshi, and Emmy Rossum as Bulma. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see James Marsters in his Piccolo get-up yet. Oh well, it’s always best to save the best for last.

Why ‘Little Lulu’ Works

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  • April 6, 2008

Over at Comixology, Shaenon K. Garrity offers up her thanks to Dark Horse Comics for publishing Little Lulu reprint volumes en masse, and provides a great analysis of what made the comic strip work.

Simply put, I’m quite certain this is a quality piece of commentary because it actually made me want to hunt down a few volumes of Little Lulu, a strip that never really piqued my interest in the past.

The thing about the Little Lulu reprint project is that, brilliant as Little Lulu is, no one really needs 19 volumes of it. It’s a very repetitive comic. The adventures of Lulu Moppet, Tubby Tompkins, and their many small neighbors were published in a time when kids read their comics and threw them away; a month later, they were ready for more of the same. John Stanley and his nameless assistants worked out a series of reliable formulas which play out, often with only slight variations, in issue after issue after issue:

Garrity goes on to describe each of those "reliable formulas" in detail, explaining the typical set-up inherent to each formula, the payoffs readers could expect to see, and why the strips kept readers coming back. The author also provides examples of the small slices of zen served up by many of the strips:

Although Tubby was unable to carry his own spinoff comic for long, the Tubby-centric stories in Little Lulu are some of the best, and many of them feel autobiographical. When Tubby saves up his pennies to eat at a diner on the outskirts of town because real live truck drivers eat there, and he eagerly asks every man at the counter if he’s a truck driver until—joy of joys!—a bunch of truck drivers come in and sit down right next to him, the story transcends the formulas of kids’ gag comics and becomes a perfect moment drawn from life.

 

 

(via Journalista)

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Happy Birthday: Brainiac

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Though not truly alive, Brainiac can date his creation to April 6, the day the Computer Tyrants of Colu created him. The green-skinned humanoid wreaked havoc across the galaxy, including shrinking several cities to subdue their populaces.

One of those cities was Kandor of Krypton. Years later, Brainiac encountered the man who would become his chief nemesis, Kal-el of Krypton—better known as Superman. It was a battle with Superman that forced Brainiac to destroy his original body and create a new, metallic skeleton form.

Brainiac has taken on several different forms since then, and his origin story has changed several times as well—sometimes he is an actual Coluan man instead of an android—but his twelfth-level intellect and his hatred for Superman continue unchanged to this day.

Mel Brooks and Woody Allen and Drew Friedman, by Michael H. Price

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  • April 6, 2008

more-old-jewish-comedians-6769250I met Drew Friedman in 1990 through a long-standing friendship with his brother and then-frequent collaborator, the songwriter and social critic Josh Alan Friedman, while we were attending a cartoonists’ convention in Dallas as working artists and comic-book developers. Drew had built a reputation within the industry as a meticulously lifelike portraitist, capable of arraying tiny dots of ink into images of dreamlike accuracy that captured the soul – unflatteringly so, as a rule – as unerringly as it suggested a physical reality.

Poised for a leap into mass-market commercial illustration, Drew had brought to the Dallas Fantasy Fair a work-in-progress assignment for a video-box edition of a pioneering television series, The Honeymooners. The portrait of star player Jackie Gleason shone forth from the over-sized Strathmore page – Drew was working on a scale larger by far than the size of an actual videocassette sleeve – like some impossible photograph. The piece was too richly caricatured to be a photo, but it captured an essence of Gleason in a way one seldom sees in ink-on-paper.

“Needs some cleaning up,” Drew said, surveying the results. He set aside his Rapidograph, a fountain-pen drawing tool capable of dispensing near-microscopic quantities of ink, and went to work with an X-Acto knife, chiseling at one ink-speck after another with unerring near-photographic accuracy. Gleason’s face, already as convincing as if reproduced by a half-tone engraving camera, seemed to engage the observer in direct eye-contact animation under Friedman’s masterful touch.

The intervening years have found Drew Friedman moving ever deeper into pop-mainstream acclaim via such publications as MAD and Los Angeles Magazine and Entertainment Weekly – a far cry from the compassionately acerbic show-business satires that he and Josh Alan once produced for various under-the-counterculture and arts-revue publications.

(more…)

ComicMix Radio: From Battlestar To Bruce Campbell

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Now that Battlestar Galactica has started on the road to its series finale, co-executive producer Mark Verheiden is turning to other creative avenues, including his new DVD feature with Bruce Campbell, The Teen Titans and his wishlist of creator-owned comics. In our ComicMix exclusive, he shares his plans, plus:

— Stan Lee’s new manga project to debut at NYCC

— Cartoon  Network announces "Fantasy Friday"

— Fell left out with Battlestar? Here’s a quick refresher!

—  And… another  exclusive Graham Crackers Comics variant that could be in the mail to you, if you win by e-mailing us at: podcast [at] comicmix.com

Don’t mess with Bruce, just press the button!

 

 

And remember, you can always subscribe to ComicMix Radio podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-8986822 or RSS!

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