Here’s a 10-second peek at the Game Day spot for Marvel’s “The Avengers”. You can watch the commercial during Super Bowl XLVI this Sunday as a break from watching the Patriots get pounded on. (Ahem.)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZsu3sbWnAU[/youtube]
Bleeding Cool reports that Al Rio, best known for his work for Wildstorm, Marvel, and Zenescope, died this morning in an apparent suicide. He was 49.
Al Rio, born Alvaro Araújo Lourenço do Rio on 05/19/62, was raised in Fortaleza, in the northeast of Brazil. Al began his career in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as an artist in the early ’90s, illustrating books for a local English School.
After working as animation director at this same company, Al became an animator in Brazil for Disney, working on such properties as the syndicated Aladdin animated series.
Upon joining the comics-centric international art agency Glass House Graphics in the mid-’90s, Al began working for DC Comics, though his “big break” came from succeeding J. Scott Campbell on Wildstorm’s Gen 13. From there, Al, best known for his versatility and his ability of drawing some of the sexiest women in comics, went on to draw for Marvel, Vertigo Press, Dark Horse, Chaos! Comics, Avatar Press, Crossgen, Zenescope, Image, and more — drawing titles such as his own series Exposure, as well as Captain America, DV8, Voodoo, Purgatori, Lady Death, X-Men, New Mutants, Spider-Man, Vampirella, and Star Wars, among many others.
via Remembering Al Rio by David Campiti | Bleeding Cool.
Al is survived by his wife Zilda and their three children, Rene, Adrielle, and Isabel. His funeral will be held on Wednesday, February 1st, on Cemitério São João Batista, in Fortaleza, Brazil. Contributions may be made to his family on his behalf through Kickstarter, and condolences may be sent to his family through terry@alrioart.com.
Few 20th century novels have been as warmly regarded as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Currently a perennial work taught in high schools around the nation, it was an acclaimed, award-winning work when released in 1961 as the southern author tried to recapture her childhood life in a small Southern town. I enjoyed the book as a student, then a parent, and now that I’m studying to become a teacher, recognize it as a great piece of literature and great teaching tool.
She wrote in 1964, “I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. I hope…to chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain. This is small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to Gothic, as opposed to Tobacco Road, as opposed to plantation life.”
It was a story of rights and responsibilities, tolerance, fear of the unknown, race relations and many other issues. When first released, it kicked up quite a bit of dust, especially from people who felt maligned by her glaring spotlight on the small town and its small-minded people. But most everyone else embraced it. (more…)
Disney announced today that they have collaborated with the NFL to give viewers an opportunity to enter “The Journey to the Super Bowl Sweepstakes” with an ad for “John Carter” that will run during the Super Bowl XLVI broadcast this Sunday. The Grand Prize winner will receive a trip for two to Super Bowl XLVII in 2013 in New Orleans.
Viewers who are interested in entering the sweepstakes should tune into the game and watch for the “John Carter” commercial. During the airing of the 30-second spot, a code will be revealed. Viewers can then go to NFL.com/JohnCarter and input the code to be entered. The Grand Prize is a trip for two to Super Bowl XLVII on February 3, 2013. The trip includes a 5-day/4-night trip for the winner and guest to attend the game, two tickets to Super Bowl XLVII and access to Game Day hospitality at the stadium.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBVi3nDZlZ4[/youtube]
I am far from being a prude.
In fact, I’m so far away from being a prude the next level in my open mindedness would be to become a prude.
I’ve met a lot of prudes in my life and nothing makes a prude more prudish than their views on sex.
Me? As long as it does not include kids or animals I say what ever floats your boat sexually, have at it. You would have to be into some sick shit (kids, animals, Republicans) to disgust me.
I’m not quite at the point that I’m disgusted by the depiction of some women in superhero comics but I’m far from all right with it and have not been all right with it for a while now. It’s just a real turn off to me and it’s also one of the reasons a lot of people still think comics are juvenile fare at best.
The depiction of super titty women is not something I consider as important to be concerned about like some sicko who’s into gerbil love or some other crazy action. I guess for the most part absolutely unrealizable depictions of women with breasts as big as a weather balloons is harmless, except for giving young men a bullshit unrealistic view of women and demeaning women in all sorts of ways. But other than that, it’s harmless.
But-that does seem to be what the audience wants, though it seems to me the 38 double-D tits, tiny waist and banging booty that appear to be the preeminent portrayal of women in comics is just silly in this day and age. Yeah, I can hear the decades old ridiculous argument “they are drawn that way for the 15-year-old boy audience.”
Really? So those 15-year old boys are not into the guys in tights that beat up on other guys in tights, which is the reason most superhero comics exist? So doing away with the big titty women would result in those 15-year old boys no longer reading about the men in tights who like to pound other men in tights?
Oh, wait a sec.
Perhaps the reason for the big titty women is to insure that no conservative family value group complains that comics are nothing but guys in tights pounding each other.
That can’t happen. It would destroy the sanity of marriage.
So I guess we are stuck with the 15-year-old boy defense for the reason that big titty superhero women are on the rag…I mean all the rage!
Heh.
That defense is weaker than OJ’s but it’s working just as well I guess. It’s the cop out of all cop-outs and artists who spin that line are just wrong or really horny.
I mean really.
The only thing that’s possibly worst than comic’s big titty women are the big titty women in some video games. Have you seen Catwoman in Mortal Combat VS. The DC Universe? She looks like a porn star that has seen way too many one eyed monsters. I mean…damn.
I often wonder what the wives and girlfriends of the artists who draw big titty super women think. But then again, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe most of these guys have no wife or girlfriend. Maybe they just need to get laid.
Well if that’s the case I’m not here to judge, I’m here to help. Follow the steps below and your pent up frustrations will soon be a thing of the past.
Step 1. Go to a bar.
Step 2: Buy the ugliest or the fattest girl a drink or seven.
Step 3. Get real drunk yourself.
Step 4. Take her home.
Step 5. Tap that.
Note: for even faster action, buy a fat and ugly girl the drinks.
This works. Trust me. How do I know? It’s in the Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain handbook and just look how much tail those guys are getting.
On the very, very slim chance there is a woman artist out there drawing big titty women in comics the followings are steps that you can use to get laid.
Step 1. Go to a bar
Step 2. Look for the guy trying to get a fat or ugly woman (or both) drunk.
Step 3. Go up to him and just say “yes.”
Step 4. Let him take you home and “tap that.”
Step 5. In about two minutes after he is “tapped out,” leave and go home and work.
By the way, shame on you for being such a slut.
Look, kidding aside, I’m a big a fan of big titty women with tiny waist and banging booty as the next guy but I prefer real and not plastic.
That’s the problem with the way some artists depict woman. Their depictions just do not ring true.
Yes, I know that neither does a guy who comes from another planet and can bend steel in his bare hands and who, disguised as Clark Kent is tapping the ass of one of the few female characters who is not a big titty woman. I know that does not ring true either but that’s a non-truth I can live with.
The new guys would do well to take a page from some of the masters of comic book art. They took the time and effort to draw women with grace, style and attitude and those women were hot!
Gwen Stacy as drawn by John Romita Sr. is the hottest comic book woman character ever created bar none.
Who’s hotter? Nobody.
Gwen Stacy was not a superhero but she was still a piece of ass to beat any other piece of ass.
Female agents of SHIELD as drawn by Jim Steranko – hot!!! Nick Fury’s girlfriend Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine as drawn by Jim was sexy beyond words.
Jack Kirby’s Sue Storm was so fine that she was my second pretend girlfriend. The first was Gwen Stacy and the third was Laurie Partridge.
Yeah, I had a thing for white girls. I had to have a thing for white girls; there were no black women in comics or on TV for my 10-year-old self to develop a crush on.
I’m proud to say as a proud African American man, all my crushes now are of women of color…Asian.
What?
I don’t expect anything to change anytime soon with regards to super big titty woman but maybe some artist will read this and check out how the greats did women.
Give that a sec.
You know, if those comic book artists who draw those outlandish women would simply draw less big titty women the big titty women they did draw would become that much more of a sex symbol because she would be rare.
That would be sexy.
I miss you Gwen Stacy. I’m sad that the Green Goblin broke your neck.
That sucked.
WEDNESDAY: Mike Gold
It’s been over four decades since BATMAN crashed into prime time TV. We edit down with Burt Ward (Robin), Julie Newmar (Catwoman) and Batman Adam West on what is was liked to be at the heart of the pop culture sensation. Plus TORCHWOOD isn’t quite dead and Walt Simonson grabs a shot at a new DC Universe graphic novel.
The Point Radio is on the air right now – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or mobile device– and please check us out on Facebook right here & toss us a “like” or follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
…comes from James Altucher on TechCrunch:
If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room. But don’t believe me, it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself.
via Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book | TechCrunch (emphasis added).
I won’t even start with the “creating a comic costs you nothing and almost no time” supposition. But I will say this: if you are at a cocktail party where being a multimillionaire entrepreneur does not get you access to your object d’amor d’moment, but being a comic book creator does–
–dude, I want to go to your parties, because I don’t remember anything like this at TechCrunch events.
There is absolutely nowhere near enough story to sustain the 2:30 running time of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. This third installment in the live-action adaptation of the classic toys and anime is loud, noisy, and very busy but ultimately empty. I kept wanting to turn the channel as I watched the Blu-ray release of the film, available Tuesday in a variety of packages including the four-disc combo (Blu-ray 3-D, Blu-ray, DVD and Ultraviolet digital copy).
Michael Bay by now has mastered how to fill the screen with kinetic action, spectacular explosions and CGI galore. What he continues to misunderstand is that all of this action needs to be grounded with characters we can care about and root for. While Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman gave it a valiant attempt in the first film, they were kind of coasting with the second feature and their writing partner Ehren Kruger was allowed to go solo this time out. Maybe the film feels so pointless because Bay himself didn’t want to make the film for another year, but Paramount forced his hand, announcing the June 2011 release, in 3-D no less.
Kruger had to find a story that would find the Autobots and Decepticons at one another’s throats with the fate of the world once more at stake, while putting good old Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) in the middle. It’s a tall order, no doubt, but the thin story feels like so much linkage between action pieces.
We open three years later as the Autobots have been integrated into the United States’ intelligence community, working with the NEST (Networked Elements: Supporters and Transformers) military force, policing the international political scene. Meantime, Sam has finally graduated college and in a nod towards current economic times, is having a tough time finding a job. Now, for most people that should be a real issue, for a Presidential medal winning hero, he should be the exception, snapped up by NEST or some related field. But that would make him less the everyman; a conceit the franchise seems bent on maintaining. Of course, most Everymen don’t go from one hot girl friend to another and the film makes some comments about this, casually dismissing Megan Fox’s character, who was booted form the franchise because the actress couldn’t avoid pissing off Bay and Steven Spielberg. She is replaced here with English model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, already in a deep relationship with Sam (who calls her “The One”). Unlike Fox’; character, who actually had some emotional stake in the first film; she is merely an attractive appendage throughout this film.
The Decepticons have not sat idle but have been manipulating events to bring about the enslavement of humanity in the name of saving Cybertron, their homeworld. And it all dates back to a Transformer crashing into the Moon in 1961 which we’re told is the real reason President Kennedy insisted we land a man on the satellite within a decade. They needed to beat the Russians to see what collided so near home.
Complicating Sam’s life is the no-nonsense director of National Intelligence Charlotte Mearing and Dylan Gould, his girlfriend’s boss and traitor to mankind. Both new roles are played by actors (Frances McDormand and Patrick Dempsey respectively) who either needed the paycheck or were slumming. Of course, once evil has risen once more, Sam finds himself working alongside the more familiar USAF Chief Robert Epps (Tyrese Gibson) and Seymour Summons (John Turturro), the former Sector 7 thorn in his side from the earlier films.
And with that, we’re off across the world, climaxing in the utter destruction of Chicago as the forces of mechanical good and evil make a lot of noise.
The film is bloated, in need of editing and depth. No doubt it looked spectacular on both IMAX and in 3-D. This has to be why the film did so well on the international stage, bringing in over $1.2 billion.
Thankfully, it looks and sounds great on both the television and laptop. The CGI is better than ever and it’s fun hearing familiar actors voicing the various Transformers (Peter Cullen and Hugo Weaving are joined by Leonard Nimoy, James Remar, George Coe and others).
There’s a disc of Blu-ray extras that are fun to sift through and certainly show the amount of effort went into the film’s production. We have the five-part Above and Beyond: Exploring Dark of the Moon, which is all the usual making of stuff you would expect. Deconstructing Chicago: Multi-Angle Sequences if a four-part exploration of the overblown climax and is really for filmmakers and CGI buffs. The Art of Cybertron gives you a plethora of views of the various mechanical lifeforms and their environments. The Dark of the Moon Archive includes some fun footage of the Russian premiere and other short featurettes. The Matrix of Marketing offers you trailers and a marketing gallery. The best of the bunch I the min-doc Uncharted Territory: NASA’s Future Then and Now, using the film’s premise to look at the real science.
Really, you have to deeply love this nonsense to put up with such an overblown film but at least it gets very nice treatment from Paramount Home Entertainment. It should be noted this is also included in the seven-disc limited collector’s edition that contains all three films and might be the version diehard fans lust after.
“I am a stranger in a strange land.”
As Superman zooms down into the torrent of Niagara Falls to save that dumb kid who is falling into the torrential waters of Niagara Falls, we hear an off-screen female voice – whom I’ve always imagined as Rob Reiner’s mother – saying:
“He must be Jewish.”
It’s a throw-away line, a bit of Yiddishkeit humor, in a movie (Superman II) about a comic book hero whose underlying themes are – you can say – chock full of Jewish mysticism and Jewish angst and Jewish hope and Jewish dissimilation and Jewish fatalism.
Think about it.
Facing annihilation as their world is torn apart by cataclysmic forces, loving parents rocket their child away in hope of their child finding refuge on an alien planet.
Facing annihilation as their world was torn apart by cataclysmic forces, loving Jewish parents in Hitler’s Europe spirited their children away into the hoped refuge of alien, Christian homes.
The child is raised in the Christian faith of his “foster” parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent of Smallville, Kansas, who do their best to keep the child’s true background a secret for fear that he would be taken away from them by the government and “studied” – or worse.
The Jewish children who survive the Holocaust learn the prayers and rites of the religion of their “foster” parents – Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim. All do whatever they can to keep the children’s true background a secret in fear of brutal, usually fatal, Nazi reprisals.
As an adult, the child uses his Earth name – Clark Kent – and religion as his “secret identity,” though he has learned that his true name is Kal-el, and that he is last survivor of the planet Krypton.
The Kryptonian “Kal-El” is close to the Hebrew קל–אל, which can be interpreted as the “voice of God. The last name “Kent” is an Americanization of the name “Cohen,” and “Cohen” is a transcription of the Hebrew כֹּהֵן, or “kohen,” which means “priest.” Kohens were the priests in the Temple of Solomon in biblical Jerusalem – the last remaining remnant of which is still standing today, known as the Wailing Wall.
He is publicly known as Superman, a hero capable of God-like powers who uses those powers for the good of humanity.
“El” means “of God,” or just plain “God” in Hebrew, and is part of the names of the angels Michael, Gabriel and Ariel, who look human, but are agents of God who are capable of flying and performing great deeds of good through the use of their superhuman powers.
The schlemiel Clark Kent – schlemiel being Yiddish for an inept, clumsy, hopeless bungler – falls for the self-assured, brilliant, famous, respected and beautiful Lois Lane, but she only has eyes for Superman.
Jewish men are traditionally said to yearn for the forbidden shiksa – a non-Jewish woman – who represent the self-assured, respected women who belong to a world that is alien to Jews. These women traditionally ignore them in favor of the Don Drapers of the world.
So did Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster purposely create a Jewish superhero? The traditional answer is, of course, no. Siegel himself said he based the visual aspects of Superman on Douglas Fairbanks and Clark Kent on Harold Lloyd. But did he know that Fairbanks was actually born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman, and was Jewish? Did he know that Harold Lloyd was the son of a Welshman and not Jewish? I doubt it, on both counts. But the subconscious does its own thing. To coin a phrase:
“Who knows what dreams lurk in the hearts of men?”
Or you can call it Jewish mysticism.
TUESDAY: Michael Davis
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
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