ComicMix Radio: Joss Whedon Spills The Back Story

Even if we are lucky enough to ever see another Serenity feature, there are far too many questions to be answered in one sitting. One of those is just who is Shepherd Book. Joss Whedon talks about why he chose character for a new Dark Horse mini-series, plus:

• Buffy gets an MMO, Firefly gets put on hold
• Ghostbusters ready for a revamp
• Who is Lady Bullseye?

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Transcript

Broadcast, 256. ComicMix.com Buffy and the Game, Firefly and the Comics. ComicMix.io Hi, it's Mike Raub and the world of Joss Whedon just keeps getting a little bigger step by step with a brand new series on the way that he's helming from Dark Horse involving one of the more popular characters from Serenity.

And the Buffy game too, what about that? We cover it all coming up on September 6th. 2008 ComicMix News Well it's not a total surprise with new manga and new comics. It seemed inevitable that eventually the Ghostbusters will return from the place that born them.

That being the big screen and now according to Hollywood Reporter there's a new third Ghostbusters film on the way. Or is it going to be a first one? It is a reboot much like what they did with Batman, James Bond and Superman as well. Some of the writers from the office have been signed to write the new film and allegedly Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman and original stars Harold Ramis and Bill Murray as well as Dan Aykroyd are somewhat involved with the project. That's all that's available on the new movie so far.

Meanwhile though keep in mind that originally the Ghostbusters movies grossed more than half a billion dollars worldwide for Sony and Fox Office returns. A lot more in DVD and other merchandise and by the way that was 80's money when you take inflation into account. We're talking well over Dark Knight totals. If you opened up your window this week and heard some screams of joys outside probably it was because the announcement that 20th Century Fox and the Multi-Universe Network announced they're working on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer massively multiplayer online game or an MMO. John Landau who won an Academy Award for Visual Effects is the advisor to the Multi-Universe and he made the announcement at the Virtual Worlds conference and expo that went on this week out in LA.

The game is going to be kind of unique because it has two modes, a 2D flash web based version and a fully 3D world with a dedicated website client. Right now though the bad news of the tail end of this is that the originally announced Firefly MMO from Joss Whedon and company has been put on the back burner so they could fast track the Buffy game. Don't feel too bad though, Firefly is alive and well in comics and we'll talk to the master Joss Whedon all about that coming up in a couple of minutes. Stick around. It's up on one of those comics that just might slip by you and by the time you notice it it's already on its third or fourth printing.

There's a new character headed to Daredevil called Lady Bullseye. It all starts in Daredevil number 111. Written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Clay Mann there's a couple of different variants of that issue planned including one by Terry Dodson as well. And the Lady Bullseye story begins in Daredevil number 111. That will be out later this month from Marvel. Speaking of Marvel we knew this was going to happen. Amazing Spider-Man 569 sold out. Now there's a second printing variant on the way for the second chapter of New Ways to Die.

That variant will be available coming up on the first of October in comic stores. There's a whole new re-imaging of Spawn going on and it's not really going to affect the regular comic but you might find this interesting. It's called The Adventures of Spawn that has a little bit lighter fare, not necessarily all ages. But Spawn is more of an adventure character now known as Spawn X teaming up with heroes like Omega and Redeemer to battle the forces of Maven. Now The Adventures of Spawn originally made its debut online at Spawn.com but now there's going to be a regular comic.

It begins with The Adventures of Spawn number 2 for some unknown reason. It's a 48 page color comic. It will be in stores coming up on November the 19th from Maven. One more dark night note. The film has now become the top grossing IMAX release of all time. $55 million in box office revenues since its release in July. That's according to the guys at Variety. Easily topping the Polar Express which came in at $45 million after its initial release and a bunch of re-releases every holiday season for the past few years.

Right now if you add the money together Dark Knight passed the $500 million mark this week in total domestic box office revenues. And if you count worldwide it's made over $900 million. It's the little movie that just won't die. It's the Voltron feature that keeps coming and going as far as a list of ongoing movies of comic book and anime properties. Right now Relativity Media is planning on doing the feature at some point and they're talking to director Max Makowski to take the chair. You may know him from a couple of different things. He's doing the film version remake of the TV series Kung Fu.

And he also wrote the Hawaii Five-O feature that is also a remake of a popular 70's property. My name is Jules Clyper and welcome to Comic-Man. Comic-Man radio. Comic-Man radio. He didn't have a blockbuster movie in the theaters. He doesn't have a new series on TV just yet. But it's been a very good summer for Joss Whedon with the incredible Dr. Horrible and his sing-along blog.

Taking charge of the internet and probably being the biggest phenomenon of at least this year and maybe the past few as well. But what about comics? A first love for Joss. What about the latest foray into that? It looks like once again Dark Horse will be the home for Joss's latest venture into comics. This time a look back at the characters of Firefly and Serenity. There will be a third mini-series along the end of the year which Joss will write himself.

It's called A Shepherd's Tale and it involves the backstory of the character Shepherd Book. But of all the characters involved in the Firefly universe, why this one? Like X number of years and they always ask. And I said, you know what? It has been long enough. This isn't something I'm going to say for the sequel that may never happen. So we'll make a comic book out of it because it's an interesting story.

So the inevitable question is what's next for Firefly at least in the world of comics? I don't. I mean I'm spending a lot of time with the Buffy comic and I think it just lends itself to that medium so well. The Serenity and Firefly comic, it's going to come for a little harder to put together and I haven't really focused on that quite as much. If it sounds like Joss isn't thinking too far ahead, well you're absolutely right. Considering that I'm struggling yet again to get my script done on time, I think my plan is to get my next script done.

No, that's not a vampire looming in the background of Metis' Mr. Whedon. It's old father time. And with the show and the internet show and the movie I just told him, I'm a little overextended. The Impact line was at the top of their game from DC Comics this week. We got comet number 16 and Crusader's number 6 waiting for us in the comic shop. As well as the first issue of Dark Stars, we got Detective number 652.

Furtigo's Doom Patrol number 60, Green Arrow number 67, and Justice League Europe number 43. Marvel was doing some bi-weekly comics and some of the oddball British stuff as well this week. We got Motor Mouth number 17, Quasar number 41, Tearing at number 6, Wolverine number 64, the bi-weekly Spider-Man, Amazing Style number 370, and also the bi-weekly Excalibur number 58. Image put out Shadowhawk number 3 and from Dark Horse we got Classic Star Wars number 5 and Robocop number 2. In the news, President Bush, the first, proposed a low-income health plan aimed at some 90 million Americans.

Volunteers streamed into Florida to help in the cleanup of Hurricane Andrew and US food shipments began arriving in war-torn Somalia. In the movies, another odd end of summer lineup that included The Unforgiven, Sister Act out on a limb, Disney's second franchise attempt at Honey I Blew Up the Kid, and the fact that David Lynch still didn't give us the answers we wanted. Nobody understood anything anymore after they came out of Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me. TV Tonight, the Jerry Lewis Tullathon began for the year, there was 60 Minutes, an episode of Murder She Wrote, married with children, Martin, and over on ABC.

Penny Lapone won carrying the tune for the rest of the cast and life goes on. On the radio, an English rock band was formed way back in 1976 and as each year of the 80's decade progressed, they became bigger and bigger. A huge underground favorite, in fact when it was over they're called the most popular alternative rock band in the world. And when you count it up, they've sold over 27 million albums. This was the year of their biggest single though, one that finally made it to the top of the US charts, for the band known as The Cure, and the song, Friday I'm In Love.

I don't care if Monday's blue, Tuesday's gray, and Wednesday too, Thursday I don't care about you, it's Friday I'm In Love. Comic Next Hopefully we'll be dried out of the east coast and back in business here the first of the week as we tackle the new DVDs and comics that are waiting for you and give you one of the ones that we think you should pay the most attention to. Later in the week the new TV series begins and one of the more interesting ones is again on ABC Family. It's called Samurai Girl, based on a comic of course and we'll talk to the cast about that all on the way right here and you don't have to miss it. Subscribe to us easily on iTunes and while you're at it make sure that you're on board for continued updates from ComicMix. You can get those connected right to you wherever you are on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

Free comics too, of course episodes this week brand new with some black ice, white viper and Hammer Of The Gods too and they're all free at ComicMix. Talk to you in a couple of days, bye!