The Point – February 9th, 2009
We are back and barely unpacked from New York ComicCon 2009 and we brought you some surprises already starting with the coolest Comic iPhone app so far, plus DC revives The Doom Patrol yet again, Mike Gold talks comic economics plus The Five Cool Things in comic shops this week. Not enough? Then wait until you meet The Great Cat!
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Hello, it's Mike Raub. Welcome to The Point where all parts of pop culture come together. We're back from the New York Con and we brought you surprises, starting with the coolest way to read of comics on your iPhone yet. My goal talks comic economics and the picture is not pretty. There's five cool things in the comic store and then there's the great cat. It's Monday, February 9, 2009 and we get to The Point right now.
This is The Point, The Point radio, get The Point radio. It's up to you, New York, New York. It was a long weekend but a good one in New York City thanks to all those of you who stopped by to say hi to us at New York Comic Con 2009. It was interesting to see the people numbering by the way just a little under 100,000 according to some unofficial estimates as they walked
through the floor being barraged constantly by sights, sounds and lots of colors. The crowd had a lot of first timers in it including. I'm Coby Left. I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Well, I've been to Wizard World before so I expected it to be kind of like that but this is a lot bigger and a lot nicer and I think it's more than I expected. We got to see the new Galactic Adventure score and that was pretty cool. I bought a Civil War comic
and an Iron Man comic for my dad because he's obsessed. And then there was George who's slightly older. George has been collecting comics for a long time but never made it to a comic convention. Why? Well, he wasn't really sure what he was going to find. What did he expect before he got here? Um, you know, fanboys, you know, dressed in costumes, never stepping out of character, no girlfriends, you know,
usual. Like so many others, George discovered there's a whole world of pop culture out there, most of them walking around the floor of the show. A lot of interesting characters to meet with a lot of interesting projects to talk about. Are you ready to go? Let's talk about the new DVD. What the DVD features is that the Fly the Bowlby, Paganini, Torture Techniques, Blood, Islamo Fascists, Beethoven's Symphony, Bach's Brandenburg Concerto and featuring
the Shred cartoon which is the great cats playing the Fly the Bowlby as a cartoon version. When do you see it? You're going to freak out. That is the Great Cat, producer of a DVD with classical music done as guitar riffs. And despite her animated energy, she's real serious about this. I'm a Juilliard graduate. I went to Juilliard for violin. I'm a violin virtuoso. Graduated with honors, played a card and he was trying to hold one of the
artists international. And after I realized that classical music was dead, I decided to take it into the future, mix it with metal, mix it with guitar and bring shred guitar with exact note for note. I take Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the exact score. I take Fly the Bowlby, I take Paganini's Caprice and I play it on guitar and I play it on violin. Mix it with mini orchestral instruments and live band and you got something that kids
can not only understand but enjoy. Shred their head to. Wake up. Get into the 21st century and get enjoying the shred-viciousness of classical music. All right, take a deep breath and check it out. Da da da da da da da da da da. Wait here. Go to the website, greatcat.com. Needless to say, it was a wild weekend and we've got lots more to share here. It's Monday, February 12, 2009. Here's what we're talking about in pop culture and most
of it came down over the weekend. Emmy and Golden Globe Award winning actor Michael Chickless has now signed a deal with IDW to develop a graphic novel series. It's called Olympus is based on an original idea by Annie Simon Beck and it talks about the ancient Greek gods returning to earth in the present day where they battle for the future of mankind. Chickless and IDW are hoping this will not only be in a graphic novel form but also expand
the film, television and games. According to Variety, Rob Liefeld's Young Blood is the next comic that could be headed to the big screen and Brett Radner may be attached to direct it. An Indian medium conglomerate called Reliance Big Entertainment allegedly bought the rights to Young Blood for six figures. Two of the bits of interesting DC news coming out of the show involve the revival of adventure comics, not a big surprise there, especially
since you got adventure comics number zero last week. And yes, there will be a Legion of Superheroes series in there. Recently, Legion artist Francis Mattepole will be doing the art on that. Geoff Johns will be writing but a more interesting revival is The Doom Patrol. It's an ongoing series being brought back by Keith Giffen with a backup of the metal men drawn by Kevin McGuire. Matt Clark will be doing the Doom Patrol art. No word
on when we'll see that series begin. Marvel threw out word of a couple of interesting things including the Marvel's Project by Ed Brubaker. It starts over the summer exploring the early history of the Marvel universe and the true origins of some of the Marvel Golden Age characters. There's also Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers make that of what you will. And the five issue miniseries Punisher Noir coming out later this summer as well. Look
for Scar to be heading to Earth in a Planet Scar story arc also that starts in Scar Son of Hulk number 11. Got a little time to kill the computer this week. Seth MacFarlane's cavalcade of cartoon comedy is back. It's on the Google content network and is now sponsored by Priceline which means that they get to poke fun at William Shatner and yes they do. Check it out with some new episodes available this week and more to be added in the weeks
to come. ABC Family announced a few new pilots on the way including one based on the movie Ten Things I Hate About You. More interesting though was a new series called Ruby and the Rockets. It stars Patrick Cassidy and his brother David as voice dub rock stars. By the way ABC Family has announced the official cancellation of Kyle XY. And if you haven't had enough Coraline over the weekend Coraline the video game is now out for the Wii Nintendo DS and
PlayStation 2. You can see samples and get more game information at CoralineTheGame.com. The point radio. This is what's cool. Alright so maybe you weren't in New York City over the weekend but there's plenty of excitement to share in your own comic shop this week. The five cool things we think you should look at this week include Batman number 686. That is the very first of the Neil Gaiman and the Cuber whatever happened to the Caped
Crusader story a lot of people are going to be talking about. If you're a Gears of War fan and maybe you missed the first few issues of the comic you can get them all contained in the Gears of War flipbook out this week from DC. Masquerade number one comes from Dynamic Forces another part of their Project Superhero series. It is only a buck a great way to sample what's going on there. From Image Darkness number 75 relaunches that title
a great jumping on point for that. And speaking of jumping on Incognito number two the Ed Brewbakers series continues this week and if you miss number one don't worry we'll give you a tip on that coming up. DC's Origins continues in a big way this week. Titles there include Action Comics number 874, Booster Gold number 17, Green Arrow Black Canary number 17, Green Lantern Corps number 33, Nightwing number 153 and Titans number 10. And then
your heart stuff all the variants and second printings that might be available this week. First of all a second printing of Farscape and number one we told you about how good that series is last week from Boom. Great chance for you to catch up there. There's a variant of the Batman number 686 of course. Batman and the Outsiders special number one this week also has a variant edition. And from DC as well Gears of War number four has
a variant edition this week and Rebels number one. There's a whole bunch of different variants the Darkness number 75. Check with your retailer on that one. Incognito has a second printing variant of number one which is a great way for you to pick that up. Giving you an excuse to read number two of course. There's a Punisher number one second printing variant this week from Marvel and a Secret Invasion of War of Kings one shot second printing variant as
well. For the better part of 30 years comic book publishers kept their price at an even 10 cents. That was a mistake as the mom and pop stores were dying and the mall and chain stores that replaced them needed to make more money. So when the price went up it was too little and too late. Since then prices skyrocketed and readership fell. Last week DC Comics and Dark Horse announced they were raising their price. DC up to $3.99 matching Marvel and Image for much
of their lives. Some DC books will cost $4.50 particularly the ones they are about to cancel. The question is is it worth it? For collectors maybe for the common fan not so much. For trade paperback sales probably. For expanding the audience absolutely not. If you are say an X-Men fan and you want to buy a month's output it's going to cost you $60. If you're selective it'll cost you about the same as three movie tickets. If you're a Teen Titans fan you'll
be spending maybe 20 bucks a month. If you're a superhero fan you've got to get a second mortgage on your house right now. The publishers have been advancing their 32 page pamphlet in favor of trade paperbacks that might reflect the cost of material. And they're giving comic book stores advanced knowledge that their competitors are now Barnes and Noble and Amazon. If comics publishers are going to treat their
product like commercial fare it would be nice if they advertised and promoted aggressively. But that would just bring about another price increase. Either way the 32 page comic book is going the way that buggy whip. This is Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind. I'm Mike Gold on the Point. All right so you got your iPhone and you've wondered exactly when it's going to be the point where you can really see comics on it. I mean there have been some smaller apps out there
that have done the job but nothing that really has made it comfortable for a long time comic book fan to be able to read the things he or her loves on the iPhone. Well we found something that just might be closing that gap. The ladies are Melissa and Helen and their product that we saw at the con was Kamikaze. Kamikaze is the coolest graphic and comic book reader that is coming out for the iPhone. We just went live about three days ago with IDW's Zombies vs. Robots. It's the first
titles and coming up after that is Will Eisner's Contract with God. It'll be out next week. Of course we can't physically show it to you but trust us when we say it is the closest thing to just like reading a comic. It's kind of a way that you can still have your comic book in full pages and in panels. Turn your pages turn them back and forth and still keep it in as close to comic book format as you can in a digital format. So what we do is we do full pages and on the full pages
you're able to touch the text simply just the text itself and the text bubbles pop out and come full screen so you can read them touch them to send them back. If you touch the panel instead of the text then you go into the panel by panel mode and you're able to swipe through and go just panel by panel by panel and you just do a little simple pinch in you get back to the full page. Most important thing is what's going to be available on Kamikaze. Well the girls said they're working very hard to
get the best up as soon as possible. We are talking with a lot of the major publishers obviously we're going after the best content we have the best program and everybody's pretty aware of that. How about some of the indie publishers for example if you've got a comic out there and would like to get it on Kamikaze well the door is open. We're very open to any individual artists to all indies we just want great work. So I know you're asking how do I get this it's real easy even for the iPhone
novice. On your phone or on your computer you just go to iTunes just like if you're gonna go buy a song in iTunes there's a section called the App Store. So you click the App Store we are in the book section right now even though eventually we think that what's gonna happen is they're gonna make a comic section inside iTunes because it's just getting it's probably the most popular medium in books. And of course a website to get all the information. We are at www.genusapps.com. G-E-N-U-S-A-P-P-S.
It's Monday February 9th of 2009 let's take a step back again into the 80s. The Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole headed east today after easily winning the all-important Iowa caucus. Meanwhile Vice President George Bush was vested by TV evangelist Pat Robertson therefore Bush said he refocused his campaign before entering the next primary. And Michael Jackson's long-awaited Madison Square Garden concert sold out in just four hours in this
pre-internet world. Meanwhile in the movies there was Action Jackson there was Sharon's moonstruck Ironweed broadcast news three men and a baby and Robin Williams at the top of his game. Tonight had Who's the Boss on ABC back over to NBC for Mad Lock Hunter and Crime Story then to ABC at the end of the night for moonlighting and before that the show with a theme song that'll be stuck in your head all day I guarantee it.
On the radio was a strictly studio group who did manage to grab one Grammy nomination while they were top of the charts. One time only for Mars. Here's Pump Up the Volume. Hopefully you wrote down all the lyrics there. There will be a test later. Let's take a step back another couple of decades. 1964. The Cyprus situation was forefront of the news with the US and Britain calling Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev unreasonable in trying to reach a settlement.
The US took silver and bronze ski medals in the winter Olympics this week and medical pioneers said they were optimistic that soon they can successfully transplant human organs from patient to patient. In the movies there was Move Over Darling, Captain Sinbad, Yul Brenner in Kings of the Sun and Elvis in Fun and Acapulco. TV on this Sunday night had all the usuals there was Bonanza an episode of Arrest and Trial the travels of Jamie Peters and
starring June Lockhart, Hugh Riley, John Provost as Timmy and of course Lassie. Right after Lassie though we were all sitting in front of the set for another look at those guys from England. And now this has happened again last Sunday on our show in New York the Beatles played to the greatest TV audience that's ever
been assembled in the history of American TV. Now tonight here in Miami Beach again the Beatles face our record-busting audience. Ladies and gentlemen here are four of the nicest chances we've ever had on our stage the Beatles. Thanks for exposure from Ed and a few other places it began the phenomenon we've come to know as the Beatles. I never realized what a kiss could be this could only happen to me can't you see can't you see
that when I tell you that I love you Oh you're gonna say you love me too And when I ask you to be my You're gonna say you love me too The point
That puts a cap on the start of the week for us we'll be back though on Friday with more from New York Con and lots of other surprises as well. By the way thanks to everybody at REED Exhibitions and New York Comic Con 2009 for being great hosts. Thanks to all the point people who made our stuff work over the weekend including Kai Conley Rob, Martha Thomases, Matt Raub, Michael Falco and so many others. Thank you. The Point is produced by Malcontent Media and heard on great websites
at ComicMix.com, MichaelDavisWorld.com, ZZ Comics.com and Ravenswolfstudios.com. If you want to check more out we got a website getthepointradio.com that's a place where you can talk to me as well at mic and getthepointradio.com and if you're poking around iTunes don't forget to subscribe to us as well. Easy to be found in the podcast area just search for The Point. See you on Friday getthepointradio.com
