Author: Glenn Hauman

Happy 7th Anniversary, Neil Gaiman’s Blog!

  • News
  • February 10, 2008

What started as a little thing to chronicle the writing of American Gods has grown and grown to the point of– well, something really big and blog-like. And dressed in black. And a turban. And some such.

So here’s to you, old man. And one of these days, we’re going to run that interview of you from way back when– but we just might save it for the 20th anniversary of the interview. Which, scarily enough, is only a year away.

Now if we could only find a way to rescue your old topic on GEnie…

On This Day: The Communication Decency Act

  • News
  • February 8, 2008

Twelve years ago today, as part of the 24 Hours In Cyberspace event, Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommuncations Act of 1996. A section of the bill came to be known as the Communications Decency Act, which imposed criminal sanctions on anyone who:

knowingly (A) uses an interactive computer service to send to a specific person or persons under 18 years of age, or (B) uses any interactive computer service to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs.

The law also explicity made it illegal to discuss abortions online, and implicitly outlawed a wide variety of non-obscene material.

The online community jumped into action immediately, with the Black World Wide Web protest which encouraged webmasters to make their sites’ backgrounds black for 48 hours (making 24 Hours In Cyberspace literally darker than planned), the Electronic Frontier Foundation starting up the Blue Ribbon campaign, and a number of plaintiffs (including, I’m proud to say, me and my company, BiblioBytes) joining the ACLU to get a preliminary injunction to prevent the act from ever taking place, and then taking it all the way to the Supreme Court (Reno v. ACLU) to get the thing unanimously overturned.

Yes, we shot a law in Reno, just to watch it die.

Sadly, bad parts of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 live on — most notably, the deregulation of media ownership which has led to the massive consolidation of the last decade or so (see ClearChannel and NewsCorp). But at least we’re able to put adult comics online.

Happy 75th Anniversary to the Lone Ranger!

  • News
  • January 31, 2008

On this day in 1933, to the strains of the William Tell Overture, the first of 2,956 episodes of The Lone Ranger premiered on WXYZ radio in Detroit, Michigan and later on the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network and then on NBC’s Blue Network (which became ABC).

We hope we don’t have to tell you who that masked man is, but just in case, return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear… when a Texas Ranger named Reid, who, as the series begins, was ambushed along with five other Texas Rangers by by Butch Cavendish, leader of the "Hole in the Wall Gang" and a man named Collins, who has infiltrated the Rangers for the gang as a scout, leaving almost every ranger dead.

Reid, the sole survivor, vowed to bring the killers and others like them to justice. So while he recovers, he asks his companion Tonto to make a sixth grave to make people think that he had died as well.

The Lone Ranger has gone on to appear on TV (both animated and the famous series starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels), in movies and serials, and (of course) comic books, most recently in publications from Dynamite Entertainment.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!

Interview: Jamie Delano on Narcopolis

  • News
  • January 30, 2008

Jamie Delano is back in the game. The British writer who helped usher in Vertigo with his launch of Hellblazer returns to comics with Narcopolis, his radical new vision of the future, out today from Avatar Press. In this exclusive, we took the chance to interview Jamie and got all sorts of answers about addiction, controlled substances, controlled people, and why you should be careful about getting drunk in a strange bar…

It’s been twenty years since you burst onto the scene here in America, with some rather scathing looks at Thatcherite England and Reagan/Bush America. So what are you looking at now?

Is that the time already?  Strange, how one’s life passes.  I guess you mean "bursting" in an antiheroic fashion…?

Not entirely sure just what it is I’m looking at now… some sort of ugly foetal monster of post-democracy is clawing its way down the birth-canal of history, though.  The aberrant post-war half-century of  social liberalism is choking its last, held face-down in the swamp of Terror.

  (more…)

Happy 50th Anniversary, Lego!

  • News
  • January 28, 2008

LEGO On this day in 1958, the first Lego brick was sold. Eleven minutes later, it was lost under a couch.

Children all over the world have played with Lego bricks for the past 50 years, and Lego sets are still right at the top of many wish lists. Industry and trade associations also recognize the Lego success. Just before the turn of the millennium, the Lego Brick was voted “Toy of the Century,” one of the highest awards in the toy industry, by both Fortune Magazine in the US and the British Association of Toy Retailers.

Of course, we recognize their various media tie-ins, like what they’ve done with Star Wars, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, and Batman, among so many others. And over the years, they’ve given back to film themselves:

 

 

So let’s go build something!

Heath Ledger’s Funeral to be Picketed

  • Uncategorized
  • January 23, 2008

As much as sites like TMZ are picked on for being media whores, they’ve got nothing on Fred Phelps. Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church announced that it would picket the funeral of Heath Ledger, presumably because he starred in Brokeback Mountain.

"God hates fag-enablers," the WBC proclaimed in a news release issued yesterday, concluding with: "Heath Ledger is now in Hell and has begun serving his eternal sentence – beside which, nothing else about Heath Ledger is relevant or consequential."

Phelps and his followers are known for other fun picket-sign messages such as:

  • "Thank God for 9/11"
  • "Thank God for the Tsunami"
  • "Thank God for Katrina"
  • "Thank God for Dead Soldiers"
  • "Thank God for IEDs"
  • "Thank God for California fires"
  • "Thank God for AIDS"

Hat tip: Lisa Sullivan.

Edward D. Hoch: 1930-2008

  • News
  • January 21, 2008

From Mike W. Barr:

I have just learned that prolific short story writer Edward D. Hoch died Thursday, January 17, 2008.  Ed created many fondly-remembered characters including Simon Ark, who claimed to be 2000 years old and a warrior against Satan, and Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a New England physician who constantly found impossible crimes to solve.  He had a story in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine since May, 1973 (the issue in which my First Story was published).  He could also be construed as a tie-in writer, having written stories about Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen.

His output and his quality were an inspiration to us all.  He’s already missed.

Hoch (pronounced hoke) was born in Rochester, New York and began writing in the 1950s; his first story appeared in 1955 in Famous Detective Stories and was followed by stories in The Saint Mystery Magazine. In January 1962 he began appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. In December 1962 he kicked off his most successful collaboration, with the appearance of his first story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; in the years since EQMM has published over 450 of Hoch’s stories, roughly half of his total output. In May 1973 EQMM began publishing a new Hoch story in every monthly issue; as of May 2007 the author has gone an astonishing 34 years without missing a single issue.

In 2001 Hoch was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, the first time a Grand Master was known primarily for short fiction rather than novels.

And every so often, he even blogged.

Hail and farewell. You’ll be missed.

Mercury x2

  • News
  • January 19, 2008

Think of it as Battle of the Planets, round one.

Warren Ellis is preparing to launch Anna Mercury from Avatar Press sometime soon. However, Archaia Studios Press has got The Many Adventures of Miranda Mercury scheduled for February of this year.

One is a kid’s book. The other isn’t. Guess which is which.

Will the writers strike affect the San Diego Comic-Con?

  • News
  • January 15, 2008

My Magic 8-Ball says "ALL SIGNS SAY YES". Valerie D’Orazio links to this piece in Wired‘s blog (which links to Marc Bernadin, which links back to Heidi MacDonald and Peter Sanderson):

Comic-Con is a ways off, but people are already talking about the effects the Writers Guild (and possible Directors and Actors Guild) strike will have on the geek event of the summer.

The second half of the TV season is already a doozy, and if production doesn’t start soon next season may never start. Since TV shows like Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost draw in a large part of the crowd at Comic-Con, can we expect a way smaller audience this July? … To make matters worse, if the Directors and Actors Guilds follow-suit with their own strikes, will movies that are expected to promote themselves in San Diego, like Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince, Watchmen, Star Trek, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and G.I. Joe, show up without their stars? If a movie promotes itself and no one is around does anyone see it?

The real question will be the ripple effects outwards. Will we have Kristen Bell and Hayden Pantierre doing even more conventions? Will the autograph tables at WizardWorld start having actors from Grey’s Anatomy? And most importantly: will I be able to get a hotel closer to the San Diego Convention Center than National City?

On the other hand, we could get great shows like this one: Murder, Unscripted:

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