Yearly Archive: 2008

Remember the comic miniseries Arkham Asylum: Living Hell where a regular guy gets sent to the madhouse for Batman’s criminally insane enemies?Well, now that could be you. Gamestop is sponsoring a contest where your likeness will be put in the Batman: Arkham Asylum game. You’ll get to co-star with Mark Hammil who was recently announced as reprising his voice acting role as the Joker for the game.

The winner will have to patient because Batman: Arkham Asylum doesn’t come out until August 2009, but you can hold yourself over with these amazing screenshots seen below and after the jump that were posted for a short time on developer Rocksteady Games’ website.

The Seven Samurai remains one of the classic storytelling devices invented for movies and has been the template for many films beginning with The Magnificent Seven.  It has now also proven to be the inspiration for Doomsday Protocol, a science fiction thriller.  The original script by Shane Salerno was purchased by 20th Century Fox for development.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “a group of aliens and humans with various abilities who are brought together to save Earth.”

Salerno’s previous writing credits Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, Ghost Rider, the remake of Shaft ,and Armageddon.

Fear(s) of the Dark, an animated horror film from France, will receive a limited US release in October through December.  The movie screened this past January at the 37th International Film Festival Rotterdam and garnered good reviews.

Coming to America via IFC Films, the movie is an anthology of six intertwined tales about phobias and nightmares from a variety of international creators including Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire.

The film will run between October and December at mostly independent theaters.  See IFC’s website for additional details.
 

I haven’t done a week of jumping-into-the-middle in a while, so I thought it was about time to try that out again. This time, I have three books from Yen Press, all second volumes in series that I haven’t read before. So let’s see if they make any sense to me…

Goong, Vol. 2
By Park SoHee
Yen Press, July 2008, $10.99

Goong is an alternate history series, in which the last Emperor of Korea (Soon-Jong) wasn’t actually the last Emperor, and that Korea got its independence from Japan (as it actually did) and stayed unified (as, of course, it hasn’t). Park has a short comics afterword in this volume to explain the set-up – and something of why she chose to make the royal family in her series Kings rather than Emperors.

That’s the background: Korea is unified, and has a King. That king has a disinterested, self-centered teenage son, Prince Shin. And, in the way of royal families through the ages, Shin had an arranged marriage to a teenage girl, Chae-Kyung (our viewpoint character). Their marriage takes place at the very beginning of this book – we know that Shin and Chae-Kyung don’t love each other, and barely know each other, but we don’t see (in this volume) all of the machinations that led to the wedding. (Presumably, though, it has something to do with the fact that Chae-Kyung’s family is poor.)

Chae-Kyung has somewhat more interior life than the usual run of girls’ manga heroines, and Shin isn’t the standard spoiled brat, but something more nuanced. So Goong has a lot of generic elements, but assembles them into something more substantial and interesting. I’m also finding that Korean comics have less of the over-exaggeration of Japanese comics, which works better for my eye. Goong might not be groundbreaking, but it’s quite good for what it is. (more…)

IDW has announced an October 1 release for the hardcover collection of Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft. The book is from novelist Joe Hill who created the miniseries for the publisher and was surprised by its enthusiastic reception. It has since been optioned by Dimension Films.

Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft, written by Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez (Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show), will include the first six-issue storyline, cover gallery, conceptual sketches by Rodriguez, and an all-new introduction from best-selling mystery novelist Robert Crais (Chasing Darkness). The 152-page book will carry a $24.99 cover price.

Locke & Key tells of the Locke family, who relocate after an unspeakable tragedy to Keyhouse, an unlikely New England mansion, with fantastic doors that transform all who dare to walk through them… and home to a hate-filled and relentless creature that will not rest until it forces open the most terrible door of them all…

The Locke & Key story continues next year as well. Hill and Rodriguez pick up where this story leaves off with the next story in the ongoing saga, January’s Locke & Key: Head Games #1.