Yearly Archive: 2008

I was taking stock recently, reviewing the silver past and anticipating a golden future when I was struck by the fact that for the past six months I’ve given books by Kyle Baker to friends and relatives on every possible gift giving occasion and then some.  This speaks well of Mr. Baker, whose line of books now covers every possible demographic.
 
For the very young or people who just don’t like to think about a nemesis more personal than hunger or gravity, there is his autobiographical work of family theft known as The Bakers.  As a comic or a collection these gag panels, comical strips and full-length comic novellas start small and suck you in to a quite often very complicated gag, a combination of motives and subplots only a very accomplished technician such as Mr. Baker can execute.  They are wonders of timing and staging that show how valuable he must have been during his sojourn in the Hollywood cartoon business, and how his talent for real-life details would have driven the kidvid fantasists to make his work there living heck.  Everything in The Bakers universe can be imitated by a real family and has probably bedeviled your real family in its time.
 
In the book-shaped The Bakers: Babies and Kittens (Image Comics), the second book of it’s kind (after The Bakers: Do These Toys Belong Somewhere) Mr. Baker confounds the people who have spent their lives in a futile flight from cute.  Like R. Crumb, his command of the medium and knowledge of what the eye likes (before the consciousness can muck things up) seduces his audience into taking a ride it thinks it has been on before, and a kiddy ride at that.  But the plastic elephant takes a wrong turn and you’re soon in a fix that Ricky Ricardo and Harold Lloyd would shudder to consider.  He then spares us the usual sitcom sermon and leaves the world of The Bakers as delightfully unbalanced and full of comic inevitability as it was in the beginning.
 
Comics is a near perfect medium today, unencumbered by commercials, your neighbor’s cell phone, the sponsor’s amoral code of standards, the way the electronic media is really after your time.  No, you’re in the driver’s seat, Mr. Comic Reader (or should I say “Mrs.”?).  It’s your choice:  Read it one panel at a time, sit down and read the whole thing at once.  Laugh.  Read that panel over again (you don’t have to wait till summer or even to download it).  Put it down on the coffee table and read it again later, or recommend it to your roommate. (more…)

David Mack, not the Kabuki David Mack, is no stranger to the Star Trek writing universe, having written several well-acclaimed novels solo and also a couple of televison episodes with former Star Trek book editor John Ordover.  He dipped a toe into the Marvel Universe with his excellent Wolverine novel, Road of Bones (with a cover from the other Dave Mack). His latest work, the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy, spans several storylines that will change Trek literature forever.  The first volume of the trilogy is just now hitting bookstores so we thought it was a good time to catch up with Mack who was kind enough to discuss his career and future writing endeavors with ComicMix.

CMix: How did you get your start in Star Trek?

David Mack: Long story. I first set my sights on writing for Star Trek while I was a sophomore in college.  That was when Star Trek: The Next Generation announced its open-door policy for script submissions.  I collected many fine rejections but never succeeded in breaking through at The Next Generation.

I continued submitting scripts through the same venue for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and I collected many more fine rejections. I finally got my break when a college friend of mine introduced me to Star Trek fiction editor John J. Ordover. John had the connections to bypass the slush-submission process and pitch ideas to the producers; what he lacked was scriptwriting experience, for which I had been trained at film school. So we teamed up.

Working together, John and I made a sale during our first pitch session to Star Trek: Voyager, and another a few weeks later, to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The Voyager story was bought but never produced; the DS9 story became the fourth-season episode “Starship Down.”

We figured the floodgates would open after back-to-back sales. They didn’t. It was three years before we sold another story to Deep Space Nine (the seventh-season episode “It’s Only a Paper Moon”).  In the interim, to earn freelance money to help pay off my mountain of college-loan debts, I did editorial scut work around the Star Trek books office: reading slush submissions, compiling reference materials for the authors, organizing photo files, etc. (more…)

Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as the eternal detective, is rounding out the cast.  Esarrlier this week, Jude Law was confirmed as Doctor Watson and Mark Strong will play Blackwood, the antagonist.  Rachel McAdams was announced as joining the cast. Guy Ritchie will direct this original story based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal character for Warner Bros. The story is actually an adaptation of a comic book Holmes adventure that producer Lionel Wigram penned as an example on how to handle the character today.

McAdams will portray Irene Adler, first seen in 1891’s "A Scandal in Bohemia”.

With True Blood earning good ratings and second season order, the producers are expanding the cast with the addition of four new regulars.

Mehcad Brooks, Todd Lowe, Deborah Ann Woll, and Michelle Forbes have already appeared as occasional participants this season and the quartet has been upgraded to series regulars.

Brooks will debut as Benedict "Eggs" Talley, a mellow, guitar-strumming refugee from a hard life in the season finale later this fall.

Forbes is best known for her work on Star Trek: The Next Generation as Ensign Ro and as Admiral Cain in the revamped Battlestar Galactica.
 

With a lot of attention focused on Pixar’s attempts to adapt John Carter of Mars to film, the small publisher Paizo has been exploring a different take on the Red Planet.  They announced a release of Otis Adelbert Kline’s The Swordsman of Mars. The 1933 tale was first serialized in Argosy Magazine, which also ran Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Under the Moons of Mars in 1912.

The serial was finally collected in hardcover by Avalon in 1960.  Later that year, Ace published a paperback edition as part of their growing SF line. According to Paizo, though, “entire chapters are missing, key character and location descriptions are completely absent, and the final product cuts a slash across the chest of Kline’s literary reputation that would be totally invisible to readers unable to assemble the original Argosy serial and compare the two texts.”

The publisher, under their Planet Stories imprint, is finally releasing the complete and unabridged tale of swords and monsters on a world not our own this month.