Yearly Archive: 2008

Batman Acknowledges Spoiler, Girl Wonder?

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  • February 4, 2008

The Beat points me to an interesting panel in one of the recent Grant Morrison-penned issues of Batman. Apparently, the very, very vocal campaign for Batman continuity to acknowledge the existence of short-lived female Robin, Stephanie Brown, received a nod in Batman #673, during a dream sequence scripted by Morrison.

Girl-Wonder.org is, of course, quite excited about this development.

Way to go, Goddamn Batman.

 

“… this is Captain America calling…” by Mike Gold

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  • February 4, 2008
There’s been a lot of controversy about killing and resurrecting superheroes. I know that, because we’ve done a lot of that here on ComicMix. It’s fun. Be that as it may, Steve Rogers is dead, deal with it; Bucky Barnes is alive, so we (meaning me) should deal with that, too.
 
Quite frankly, I would have been burning effigies of Joey Quesada for allowing  ol’ Bucky to rise from the grave – if not for the simple fact that Ed Brubaker’s run in Captain America is so damn great. Any lesser achievement would have inflamed my wrath and you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
 
Well, maybe you would, but only from afar.
 
Wandering back towards the point, it’s perfectly fair for someone to inherit the mantle of a “dead” superhero. I did this when I was editing The Flash; management wanted a new person inside the suit, and I felt strongly that Wally West earned his stab at adulthood. If Bucky Barnes (now referred to as “James”) is alive and well, he deserves the shield and cowl. So it’s only appropriate that I comment on Bucky’s transcendence.
 
There’s an odd timeliness to the story, as it opens with the doubling of the price of gas and thousands of homes being foreclosed. That puts a sharp contemporary edge on a story about a guy who should be 80 years old and keeps on linking his feelings to those he experienced in The War. But the economic apocalypse is a story-point that establishes the role Captain America will play in this continuing story.
 

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‘Iron Man’, ‘Wanted’ Superbowl Trailers Hit the ‘Net

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  • February 4, 2008

Superbowl XLII was exciting, sure – but did you catch the trailers for "Iron Man" and "Wanted" that debuted during the game? Well, don’t worry if you were grabbing a beer when they aired, because the InterTubes always come through.

The new footage from "Iron Man" included quite a bit of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in full Iron Man armor, and showcased some of the heavier CGI-driven scenes you can expect to see when the film hits theaters May 2, 2008.

You can watch a high-definition version of the "Iron Man" trailer on apple.com, view the embedded version posted below (while it’s still available) or peruse a gallery of screencaps from the "Iron Man" trailer at your leisure over at ComicBookResources.

 

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ComicMix Columns For The Week Ending Feb 3, 2008

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  • February 3, 2008

Snackies at hand?  Ready to cheer on the best ads in between the quarters?  Me, I’m psyched to see me some Tom Petty at halftime.  Before they take the field for Superbowl XLIIayeaye!!one!, why not warm up with this past week’s ComicMix columns?:

I love how the titles of those first three columns kind of go together… sex, hate, death (warmed over)… Anyway, Giants in, erm, four, just to be weird…

Free Hot Comics Links For A Super Weekend

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  • February 3, 2008

On this “Super” weekend, ComicMix Radio is more than happy to offer a number of surfing options to keep you busy during the parts of the SuperBowl between the cool commercials.

 
One of those commercials will be the latest trailer for the Iron Man movie from Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment. Look for it to run at around 7:30 PM. Chances are, you have already seen the tease here at Marvel. After the big game, the new ad will also be available here at Apple, and at  the official movie website. Tomorrow it will also hit sites that include Yahoo Sports! and ESPN.com, so basically you won’t be able to miss it. 
 
Brian Wood has posted his Channel Zero design book, Public Domain, as a free PDF download here. Public Domain is a collection of 145 pages of black and white artwork that includes extras generated in 1996-98 during the creation of Wood’s first graphic novel Channel Zero. 
 
Oni Press is picking up the sword and shield with North World, Book 1: The Epic of Conrad, a new original graphic novel series from cartoonist and web comic creator Lars Brown. Part Lord Of The Rings and part Gross Pointe Blank, North World is a fantasy epic that is also a webcomic that you can see here.
 
And as always, you can subscribe to our podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-3122376 or RSS!

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Across the Midnight Express Universe, by Ric Meyers

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  • February 3, 2008
 
This week I watched two DVDs that considered the same turbulent period, but from two wildly divergent vantage points. 
 
First, the divider. Reviewers were almost totally at odds over Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor’s “homage” to The Beatles. Homage is in quotation marks because half the critics thought its liberties and excesses were trumped by its imagination, while the other half thought it was simply, cringingly, awful. 
 
I doubt the 2-Disc Deluxe Edition that’s showing up next Tuesday will do anything to dispel the opposites. It’s obvious that Taymor – best known as the director of Broadway’s The Lion King — was aiming for the same sort of cinematic success as The Who’s Tommy or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but the nay-sayers pushed it toward 1978’s campy bomb, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band starring the Bee Gees. 
 
The talented Taymor dodged that bullet, but couldn’t Matrix them all. The Beatles are a creative touchstone, all right, but not always for the best. Just as it’s more difficult to adapt a great book to film (The Kite Runner, Love in the Time of Cholera, etc.) than it is a pulpy one (Jaws, Psycho, The Godfather), it’s also extremely problematic to create a new musical from iconic music. And there’s hardly anything more iconic than The Beatles. The new, obviously far less talented, interpreters will always come out the short end.
 
To her credit, Taymor doesn’t try to overwhelm the music with vocal gymnastics (save for one exception) or distract audiences with stunt casting (save for the welcome inclusion of Bono and Joe Cocker in the supporting cast). But, apparently she can’t resist hurling buckets of creative energy all over the Frankenstein-stitched, wedged-in soundtrack. There are two kinds of directors: those who say “I” and those who say “you”: you’ll feel this, you’ll think this. Guess which one Taymor is.
 

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War on Scientology?

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  • February 3, 2008

Anybody who knows their ear from their elbow when it comes to the world and how ridiculous some of us can be knows how creepy the world of Scientology can be. Those who are unaware of this wacky world and missed the episode of South Park that explained it all, it’s a religion based on the writings of famed science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and is practiced in nearly 5,000 churches by some of the most powerful people in the world in over 100 countries.

And of course, with how open and freely accessible the Internet is, there will always be people with two cents that scream up and down about how evil and/or crazy this religion and its followers may be. While most videos and news pieces posted online against the Church of Scientology can be categorized as hogwash and petty, one-sided arguments, a new group calling themselves “Anonymous” is making quite the ruckus against the church and some of its biggest followers.
 
It all started when a video was “leaked” onto YouTube of Tom Cruise in an interview talking about his beliefs and practices with the church. The video was taken down several times after complaints from the church stating the content infringed upon their copyrights. That didn’t seem to stop some users, case in point (more…)

Megatron in New IDW Transformers Promo

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  • February 3, 2008

Chris Ryall, IDW Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, recently posted this new, untitled promo art by Nick Roche for an upcoming Transformers project.

That’s about all there is to say about it, other than the fact that it’s now my new desktop background.

Capt. Marvel and Serial Retro-Mania, by Michael H. Price

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  • February 3, 2008

 

515n0admfrl-_aa240_-6397917Apart from some chronic bouts of concentrated cliffhanger enthusiasm in visits with the pioneering Texas cartoonist-turned-fine artist Frank Stack, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention in recent years to the extinct form of Hollywood filmmaking known as serials, or chapter-plays.
 
I’ve overcome that neglectful tendency lately with an assignment to deliver a foreword for IDW Publishing’s The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Vol. 4 (due in print by March 25), which covers a stretch of 1936–1937 and thus coincides with the early-1937 release of the first Dick Tracy serial by Republic Pictures Corp. George E. Turner and I had covered the Republic Tracy in our initial volume of the Forgotten Horrors books – but a great deal of information has come to light during the nine years since that book’s last expanded edition.
 
The transplanting of Tracy from the newspapers’ comics pages to the big screen figures in an earlier installment of this ComicMix column. So no point in re-hashing all that here, or in spilling any fresher insights that will appear in the IDW Tracy edition.
 
Anyhow, I had expected that these strictly-research refresher screenings of Republic’s Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy Returns and so forth would bring on an attack of Serial Burnout Syndrome – but no such. If anything, the resurrected Tracy cliffhangers have stoked a level of interest that I hadn’t experienced since I had been granted my first looks at the Republic serials via teevee in 1966. (Those attractions were feature-lengther condensations, roughly half or less the running time of a theatrical serial, prepared expressly for broadcast syndication, and re-titled to compound the confusion: 1936’s The Undersea Kingdom, for example, hit the tube as Sharad of Atlantis.)
 
I had wondered aloud while comparing notes recently with Frank Stack, whose lifelong fondness for the serials influences his own approach to storytelling, as to how Dick Tracy in particular could have adapted so brightly to movie-serial form – given that Republic’s adaptation had altered many key elements of Chester Gould’s comic strip. Frank’s lucid reply:
 

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‘Iron Man’ Superbowl Promo Peek

Marvel.com has posted a screencap from this weekend’s much-hyped "Iron Man" trailer scheduled to air during the Superbowl. The screencap shows Tony stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) testing a new suit.

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They also promise to post the full trailer on Marvel.com immediately after it goes on the air, just in case you were in the kitchen getting more chips when the promo appeared.

You can see a full-size version of the image on Marvel.com.

 

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