There is no doubt that the Showtime series is outrageous, but how far is TOO far? We talk to the cast about where they draw the line – plus Kevin Smith is headed to AMC and DC Comics brings us back to Earth Two.
Well, this is an interesting way to support comic shops in the face of a digital onslaught. If you purchase* a comic on the Marvel Comics app on January 7th, between 12:01am EST and 11:59pm EST, you will be e-mailed a coupon (on January 8th)** valued at five dollars to be used for any Marvel comics purchase at your local comic store. Please note that only one coupon is available per user during this limited-time offer and may only be redeemed at select comic shops.***
“We’re big believers that everything we do with the Marvel Comics app brings new fans to our great medium and we want to make sure those same fans discover the great comic book stores out there,” said David Gabriel, Senior Vice-President of Sales, Marvel Entertainment. “For our fans, this is a great chance to digitally try out a new series you’ve heard about—and get a great coupon to use on the Marvel comics you buy at your local shop each Wednesday!”
“As we continue to grow the digital comics world, we want to make sure it’s always to the benefit of the medium and our comic shop retail partners,” said Peter Phillips, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Marvel Digital Media Group. “This coupon is a great way for us to let more of our fans know about their local comic store and incentivize them to make the trip there. At the end of the day, our goals in the print and digital mediums are the same—bring more fans to comics.”
Of course, Marvel will also get a LOT of demographic information out of this offer, which hopefully will get them a much better snapshot on the comics industry as a whole.
* To receive this coupon you must be logged in with a Marvel account. If you don’t have an account, go register for free in the ‘My Comics’ section of the Marvel Comics app or at Marvel.com.
** This coupon expires on February 6th, 2012 at 11:59PM EST.
*** Fans: The e-mail containing your coupon will also include a link to help you find the closest qualifying store(s).
The most important story of the new year is not being covered by the lame-stream media. You won’t find it on the more popular blogs. Neither Heidi MacDonald nor Rich Johnston has the scoop.
We’re getting a new cat. You heard it here first.
In my life, I’ve only had three cats, unless you count the two on the commune where I spent 1974 and half of 1975. My first cat, Toots, came from a friend who found her on the streets of Yellow Springs, Ohio, and brought her to me in college. The second two, sisters Trixie and Midnight, were brought over from a rescue group. This time, I went to the Humane Society. They asked me what I wanted.
Using all available self-control, I did not specify a lightning-bolt marking on the right side. Neither did I specify super-strength, x-ray vision, nor the ability to fly.
Is there a more appealing concept in all of literature than the super-pet? Superman had Krypto, a super-dog, Supergirl had Streaky, a super-cat, and Comet, a super-horse. Batman had Ace, the Bat-hound. Chameleon Boy had Proty, a malleable blob.
I wanted all of them. I also wanted Beppo, the super-monkey, although I was never clear on whose pet he was.
At the time I had a dog, because at the time, I was ten years old and lived with my parents and had a yard. My dog was fairly awesome, but she couldn’t do anything Kryptonian. She couldn’t change her shape. She couldn’t even solve crimes. It seemed to me that having a pet who could take me on adventures, who could perform extraordinary feats for my amusement and, if necessary, for my protection, was the greatest thing that could happen in a person’s life.
As I said, my dog didn’t do any of those things. She did, however, love me more than anyone else. She even loved me more than my mother, who fed her.
A companion animal – a pet – is wonderful for a child. A pet won’t blab her secrets, no matter how juicy. A pet, unlike parents and teachers and even school friends, never judges her. A pet is always there, to play in the backyard or to sit in her lap watching television. A pet is always warm and soft and there when she needs a hug. For all these reasons, a pet is also wonderful for adults.
Those are pretty awesome super-powers.
Because the Humane Society has a fairly rigorous process to match animals to humans, I don’t yet have my new cat. I don’t think we’ll be naming her Streaky, because, really, I’ve never seen a cat with markings like that. I’m thinking of naming her Selina, after Selina Kyle. And also after a fairly brilliant singer-songwriter.
Back during the heyday of the Classic Pulp era there were magazines devoted to just about every type of genre you could think of or that publishers thought they could sell to the entertainment hungry public.Most of us are familiar with the hero pulps, the western pulps, the science fiction pulps, the horror pulps.But there were far more than that.You had your spicy pulps which was a safe name for what was pretty much soft core porn.There were gangster pulps, railroad pulps and sports pulp.And a sub-genre of the sports pulp was boxing pulp stories.
If you’re at all familiar with the boxing pulp genre it’s probably because of Robert E. Howard and his champion boxer character Sailor Steve Costigan.Even though Howard is best known as the creator of Conan, King Kull and Solomon Kane he wrote more stories about Sailor Steve Costigan.
It’s probably inevitable that in the New Pulp Renaissance we’re enjoying right now that the pulp boxing genre should also enjoy a revived popularity and it’s a genre that’s well represented by the the Fight Card series of books in general and THE CUTMAN in particular.It’s the second book in the series but you don’t have to have read the first one in order to enjoy it.The books are credited as being written by Jack Tunney but that’s a “house name”.The first book “Felony Fists” was written by Paul Bishop and THE CUTMAN was written by Mel Odom and it’s a terrific read.
First off, it’s set in Havana, Cuba during a period of history that fascinates me; the period when American organized crime worked hand-in-hand with the Batista regime, turning Cuba into a playground of illegal activity.It’s here that the cargo ship Wide Bertha docks and it isn’t long until one of its crewmen, the two-fisted Irishman Mickey Flynn runs afoul of the henchmen working for small-time gangster Victor Falcone.And this in turn leads to Mickey having a beef with Falcone himself who has aspirations of moving into the big time by currying favor with Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
The boxing angle comes into the story due to Falcone’s sponsorship of savagely brutal backroom boxing matches which is dominated by his fighter, the human buzzsaw “Hammer” Simbari.Simbari is a bloodthirsty sadist who derives extreme satisfaction from beating men half to death in the ring and the inevitable battle between Mickey and Simbari is written with a great deal of tension and suspense as we’ve seen what Simbari can do and so has Mickey.And he’s not all that sure he can take Simbari.
Not that he has any choice.In a series of plot twists I wouldn’t dare reveal here, the fate of Wide Bertha and her crew rests on Mickey’s exceptional boxing skills, skills learned from the legendary Father Tim of St. Vincent’s Asylum For Boys in Chicago.Mickey’s got no choice but to climb into the ring with this near unstoppable fighting machine.
THE CUTMAN has got a lot going on besides the boxing.There’s a whole host of supporting characters that added greatly to the flavor and atmosphere of the story.Colorful, delightful characters that reminded me of those great supporting actors in those classic black-and-white Warner Brothers crime/gangster movies of the 30’s and 40’s.In fact, that’s exactly how THE CUTMAN reads, like an old fashioned Warner Brothers movie.The crime elements are interwoven with the well written fight scenes and there’s even a romantic subplot with Mickey and a lusty gorgeous Cuban barmaid which doesn’t go the way romances in this type of story usually go.
So should you read THE CUTMAN? I certainly would recommend it.It’s a solid page turner that does exactly what I think a pulp story should do; keep you asking; “what’s going to happen next?”It’s very well written with snappy, slangy dialog and good descriptions of the fight scenes.At all times we know exactly what’s happening and why.I’m most certainly going to be reading “Felony Fists” in the next few days and keeping my eye out for future volumes in the Fight Card series which are available as e-books only.
SOUTH BEND, Indiana – 1/04/2012 – Captain Action Enterprises and Round 2 are pleased to announce that sculptor Tim Bruckner will be developing superhero action figure sculpts for the 2012 Captain Action toy line.Captain Action, the popular super hero toy from the 1960s, will return to toy shelves along with new costume sets, including Marvel Comics’ heroes such as Spider-Man, Thor and Captain America. New toys will debut in March 2012, with additional waves every three months.
Bruckner is a highly regarded sculptor, best known for creating dozens of statues and over 140 action figures for DC Direct. His 40-year career has included a variety of clients: Mattel, Sideshow, Dark Horse, Hasbro, Toy Biz, Hallmark, Gentle Giant, the Danbury Mint, Enesco and many others. Tim’s work has been featured in several museum shows and was recently seen in Blue Canvas magazine. He co-authored the book Pop Sculpture: How to Create Action Figures and Collectible Statues and has appeared in several issues of China’s most popular magazine dedicated to fantasy art.
“We’re thrilled to have Tim on board. We’ve been big fans of his for years, and know that he’ll help us provide great looking product that both collectors and casual toy fans will love,” said Joe Ahearn of Captain Action Enterprises, LLC.
Bruckner has begun working on the new mask sculpt for Hawkeye, the Marvel Comics character who appears in the Avengers comics, animated series and the upcoming theatrical release. “I’m excited to be part of the action, and really excited to work on some iconic Marvel characters too!” said Bruckner.
The poetic irony of Shakespeare’s phrasing is not lost on Anthony Head. When the Bard wrote that “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” even he could not have known what was in store for the actor Head’s royal character as the fourth season of MERLIN begins tomorrow at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Syfy.
As the new season opens, Head’s character – King Uther – is a mere shadow of himself, mired in bleak despair after realizing that his illegitimate daughter Morgana has arisen to become his greatest enemy, using dark magic to besiege Camelot and its leaders.
The first of a two-part episode, “The Darkest Hour, Part 1” finds Morgana’s blinkered determination threatening not only Arthur’s future, but the very balance of the world. With her magic stronger than ever, the sorceress summons the mighty Callieach (pronounced “kay-lix”) to tear open the veil between the worlds. Hellish creatures – the Derocha – pour forth, killing any who succumb to their touch. With King Uther in dire straights, it falls to Merlin, Arthur and his loyal Knights to protect the kingdom.
Head, the beloved Rupert Giles of Joss Whedon’s cult classic TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, enters his fourth season as Camelot’s monarch Uther Pendragon. The actor has been particularly busy for the past year working in television on both MERLIN and reprising his role
on NBC’s Free Agents, as well as appearing in feature films, including The Iron Lady alongside Meryl Streep and the upcoming sequel Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.
QUESTION: After all that happened in Season 3, how has Uther’s perspective changed entering Season 4 … and how does that change things in Camelot?
ANTHONY HEAD: Uther is broken man. Everything that he basically believed in and held
as reality has shifted. I’d say he’s not playing with a full set of marbles. And all of that means Arthur has more responsibility, and there is another – Nathaniel Parker has joined the cast as Agravaine – who has been drafted to act as the chancellor, to politically help
Arthur. It’s an interesting and kind of logical progression from where we were. (more…)
Oh yeah, here we go with another time displacement. I’m writing this at about 5:20 on Saturday evening, New Year’s Eve, and you’re reading it, at the earliest, on Thursday morning.
Unless you’re not reading it at all because the doomsayers were/are right and maybe the world stopped existing at midnight, or stopped ever having existed, which would pretty much cancel you and me, and make who’s reading what moot.
Or maybe…you’re not you and I’m not I. Maybe we exist in parallel universes and because of some unthinkable and pretty dumb cosmic anomaly, what I’m typing into my computer changes places with what my other-universe doppelganger is typing into his computer – the same words, same typos, same everything, only a different and completely identical reality.
Can you say that it isn’t so? Can you be absolutelycertain that it isn’t so? I thought not. (Or we thought not?)
Or maybe…this is all a hallucination. Maybe I’m a brain in a vat being fed an illusory existence by who-knows-what kind of mad – or utterly sane – scientist. Or maybe old Rene Descartes was right and I’m at the mercy of a demon who’s feeding me the illusions. Which, of course, posits that demons exist. But heed me, all you skeptics – can you prove that demons don’t exist? (I won’t even mention unicorns.)
Or – still on the topic of illusions – maybe it’s about 50 years ago and I’m driving home late on a Friday night after being dumped by my girlfriend of four years and, full of woe, I’ve accidentally run a red light and been hit by a Walnut Park bus and in these, my last few moments, I’ve hallucinated a long life which includes eventually marrying the young woman who’s just terminated our romance. Any nanosecond now, lights out.
A final hypothesis appropriate to the venue we’re occupying, you and I and our other selves, if any: maybe we’re all characters in a comic strip created by a staggeringly advanced writer-artist with really excellent equipment – no sable brushes and india ink bottles for him/it. No, he/it has tools we wouldn’t know how to use even if reality glitched and we got our hands on them and his/its existence, if any, certainly explains all the stuff that vexes and disturbs and dismays us and torments our days, the stuff we just can’t dammit understand!
How? Well, think about it. Maybe all that would help us make sense of our lives happens between the panels and since we don’t exist there, between those panels, we can’t possibly know about it. And hey – doesn’t that let us off all kinds of hooks? Well, maybe not. I guess we’d have to know more about him/it to answer that. I mean, does he blame his creations for their shortcomings?
I may be getting close to Deep Philosophy here and before we get caught in that quagmire, I’m going to scurry away, wishing you all lots of light as I go. Assuming that you, or I, or any of us, exist. Or ever have existed.
If you you’re inclined to keep an eye out, heroes pop up like Kleenex. Steve Niles just made the cut.
At the 2010 Baltimore Comic-Con Harvey Awards dinner, Mark Waid offered a courageous keynote address which offered a simple message: digital comics are here to stay, there is an international bootlegging community and we as creators and industry doyens must learn to deal with it. For this, Mark was roundly booed, hassled and harassed by his peers. Astonishingly, one of his tormentors was the otherwise quite gentlemanly Sergio Aragonés.
I don’t recall if Steve Niles was at the dinner, but if not, it’s likely he heard about it. Suggesting that any acknowledgement of those who pirate comics is akin to taking a dump on the bible. This is true throughout the media: records (yeah, it’s okay to call them “records;” look it up), movies and teevee shows, even books. And you thought nobody was reading.
The media industry’s response to this has been to advocate passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a.k.a. SOPA. Simply put, SOPA allows any intellectual property (IP) owner to legally compel any Internet Service Provider (a.k.a. ISP; we’re shooting for the entire alphabet this week) to kick off any website suspected of copyright infringement.
Well, here’s a clue for you. Well over 99% of the websites on the Internet infringe copyrights and trademarks. Pick-ups of news items, graphics used to illustrate anything, sound bytes and even some You Tube links – they are all infringing upon somebody’s IP. You rip off the Superman logo font because you’re artistic and just being cute? Well, that logo is a registered trademark, and you are now Lex Luthor.
So Steve, bless his 30 Days of Night heart, took a stand. “SOPA does more than go after so-called ‘piracy’ websites,” said he. “SOPA takes away all due process, shuts down any site it deems to be against the law without trial, without notification, without due process… Nobody seems to give a shit, or either they’re scared. Either way, very disappointing. I guess when it affects them they’ll get mad… I know folks are scared to speak out because a lot of us work for these companies, but we have to fight. Too much is at stake.”
He tweeted all these comments; I got them from our pals at Digital Spy, except they asterisked “shit.” We here at ComicMix are beneath that.
Here’s some facts. Every time somebody unlawfully downloads IP – and note I said “unlawfully” because it is unlawful – the media racket sees that as a lost sale. This is overwhelming bullshit. People sample, people are curious, people’s friends make a recommendation and said people check ‘em out. There’s plenty of stuff that you’d check out before laying down your plastic sight unseen. The actual number of downloads that defraud the owner (which is usually not the creator) is a fraction of the total. These downloads are still illegal, but IP moguls should pull the stick out of their ass and tell the truth when they are babbling about how much bootlegging is costing them. They are liars.
There are a great many services that allow you to legally purchase IP, and the largest of these is Apple’s iTunes, which offers music, television, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, software (a.k.a. “apps”) and probably jpg’s of papyrus scrolls. As of around October 2011 – the date varies by category – iTunes has sold over 16 billion songs, about one half-billion movies, videos and teevee shows, some 20 billion apps, and Crom knows how many books, magazines and newspapers.
Here’s the rub: in each and every one of these approximately 40,000,000,000 cases, the purchaser could have downloaded the damn thing for free. In most cases, it is far easier to illegally cop a boot than it is to purchase one. Let’s start with the fact that you don’t need to have a credit card or room left on your credit limit to procure your illegal bootie.
So. 40 billion downloads from just one – the biggest one – online merchant in a world that only houses seven billion people. That’s an average of four and one-half perfectly legal downloads for each and every person, including babies in the Amazon who don’t even have access to Amazon.
Hey! People are inherently good. Go know!
Of course SOPA is being supported by all the big IP companies, including Disney (Marvel) and Time Warner (DC). If only they were so moral about how they treat their creative talent, without whom both companies would constitute another real estate bust.
On the other side: Facebook, Google, Twitter and Wikipedia, the latter of which threatens to disappear should SOPA pass. Then students will actually have to do research, and we can’t have that.
Also standing proudly on the other side: Steve Niles. Good for you, pal.
More money in a week than Steve Ditko has seen from Spider-Man, ever.
Look who’s sporting a big smile behind his mask on Broadway — none other than the once-mocked Spider-Man. The Broadway League reported Tuesday that “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” took in a whopping $2,941,790 over nine performances last week, which is the highest single-week gross of any show in Broadway history.The musical shattered the old record held by “Wicked,” which last January recorded the then-highest one-week take on Broadway with a $2,228,235 haul, though over an eight-show week.
Former MI-6 agent Michael Swann is in Russia, working against time to prevent the Soviets from gaining nuclear dominion over the planet. But what he doesn’t know is that he may already be too late! John Byrne’s latest creation concludes its initial story, “The Damocles Contract,” here! Hopefully Swann survives to fight another day, but that remains to be seen…
Cold War: The Damocles Contract #4 is written and illustrated by John Byrne 32 pages. $3.99. In storesJanuary 4, 2012
There is no doubt that the Showtime series is outrageous, but how far is TOO far? We talk to the cast about where they draw the line – plus Kevin Smith is headed to AMC and DC Comics brings us back to Earth Two.
