Author: Glenn Hauman

Overheard at San Diego, part 1

  • News
  • July 26, 2007

Seventeen years ago yesterday in San Diego, Roseanne Barr sang the National Anthem at a Padres game.

While we can’t promise you anything quite like that from any Hollywood types in town for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International, we’re bringing you the most quotable things we can eavesdrop on.

At the Newark Airport terminal: "It’s tough to tell who’s going to the convention on this flight. You used to be able to tell at a glance." "Yeah, no one’s wearing comic book shirts." "Everybody’s reading Harry Potter, but that doesn’t tell you anything."

On the floor of the convention: "We’re opening up new boxes to sell books on Preview Night. In the first hour. I hope we’ve got enough to last the weekend."

Outside the hall: "I think they’re going to use those Superman bags as tents for emergency housing."

What have you heard? Send your snippets to overheardSDCC@tips.comicmix.com, or come up to us at the show– we’re the one’s in the ComicMix shirts.

Y: The Last Man movie moves forward

  • News
  • July 25, 2007

ythelastmanlogo-8325032ICv2 reports: "New Line Cinema has announced that D.J. Caruso will direct and Carl Ellsworth will write the big screen live action adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan’s epic science fiction comic book series, Y: The Last Man.  Caruso and Ellsworth recently teamed up on the sleeper hit Disturbia, which starred Shia LeBeouf in a clever reworking of the storyline of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with wheelchair bound photographer Jimmy Stewart replaced in Disturbia by a grounded teenager played by LeBeouf (who is rumored to be a prime candidate to portray Yorick in Y: The Last Man)."

Now I know everybody’s in a rush to get out the door for San Diego, but they’re mixing their Stewart/Hitchcock films. Disturbia was a reworking of Rear Window, not Vertigo. Vertigo, as we all know, has the cool blonde in it. You know– Karen Berger.

Shore Leave report

  • Uncategorized
  • July 18, 2007

I spent the past weekend at Shore Leave, a wonderfully relaxing convention with a heavy emphasis on Star Trek and other media. I was a last minute addition to the guest roster, taking the place of fellow Mixer Bob Greenberger who had a sudden family emergency.

Among other things, this meant that I took over Bob’s traditional "Trailer Park" panel, giving a rundown of various upcoming movies. The roster of films (and one TV show) in more or less chronological order:

I also got to see the masquerade, where writer of stuff Peter David, wife Kathleen, daughter Ariel, and friend Marina Olsen won best of show for the above presentation, "Beauty and the Beast(s)". I got to spend time with a number of writers and enthusiastic fans. And I capped off the convention by appearing with Peter and Keith DeCandido in the infamous "Mystery Trekkie Theater 3000" where we proceeded to dissect the TNG episode "Conspiracy".

All in all, a very enjoyable convention, right up until the point Sunday night when my hard drive directory got erased, and I spent the next 36 hours recovering it– which is why this recap is two days after I expected it to be done. The gods just don’t want me to really relax…

Comics at the museum

  • Uncategorized
  • July 13, 2007

pic_ll_leute_tezuka-1195854On the west coast, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum is debuting an exhibit on Osamu Tezuka tomorrow. Creating over 700 manga titles during his lifetime, he is best known in the West for his cartoons of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. His prolific manga work contains two main streams: manga ‘comic pictures’ for a youth audience, including Astro Boy, Kimba and Princess Knight; and gekiga ‘drama pictures’—more seriously-toned, adult oriented narratives such as Song of Apollo and Ludwig B, that stress realistic effect and emotional impact. Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga ends September 9th, with a parallel exhibit, "Manga in the making" ending September 2nd.

On the east coast, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey is premiering two exhibits tomorrow as well: Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes and Comic Book Legends: Joe, Adam, and Andy Kubert, featuring over 150 comincs and drawings from 1938 to the present. The Museum will also be running comics-related movies under the stars over the summer, from the original Adventures of Captain Marvel serial this Tuesday to Superman and Batman Begins in August.

Coming soon to Smallville

  • Uncategorized
  • July 13, 2007

lauravandervoort-6540946supergirlfuckdoll-5524815According to Cinematical, Laura Vandervoort will be joining the cast of Smallville next season as Kara, also known as — well, we can’t call her that name if we can’t call Clark that name.

Smallville‘s co-creator, Al Gough, says of Ms. Vandervoort in People: "She’s a combination of beauty, intelligence, a certain warmth, and great attitude. We’ve wanted a character to shake things up."

And you gotta admit that she certainly looks the part. Certainly more than some artist’s drawings of late…

Artwork copyright DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

If I ran the Zuda

  • Uncategorized
  • July 11, 2007

gh_100-4374017CHILI PALMER: You know how to write one of these?

BO: There’s nothin’ to know. You have an idea, you write down what you wanna say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words… although I’ve seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it at all. So I don’t think it’s too important. Anyway, you come to the last page you write in ‘Fade out’ and that’s the end, you’re done.

CHILI: That’s all there is to it, huh?

BO: That’s all.

CHILI: Then what do I need you for?

— from the GET SHORTY screenplay by Scott Frank, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard

So. Zudacomics.

As many people have reported by now, notably Newsarama and ¡Journalista!, DC Comics is getting into the webcomics business.

People have been asking us what we think about it. After all, ComicMix is filled with expatriates from DC Comics and AOL. Some of our staff have been involved with electronic publishing since the earliest days of the commercial Internet, and have had some of the bigger successes.

The short answer: It looks like it could be a portal for new talent, and God bless — we need all the talent we can find coming into this industry. The long answer? Well, that requires a lot more unpacking.

(more…)

Fifth Doctor Promoted To King Arthur

  • Uncategorized
  • July 9, 2007

davisonkingarthur-3957694My lord — it’s been days since we ran anything about Doctor Who. What sort of a comic book weblog are we if we don’t talk about a British TV show?

Peter Davison, a.k.a. the fifth Doctor (and star of Campion and The Last Detective), is set to play King Arthur in the West End production of Monty Python’s Spamalot. The 56-year-old, also known for his role as Tristan Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small, starts July 23.

The musical, based on 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, has won three Tony Awards on Broadway. Loosely based on the legend of King Arthur, Spamalot features flatulent Frenchmen, a legless knight and a killer rabbit. It was written by former Python Eric Idle, who incidentally recently unveiled his long-promised next project Not The Messiah (He’s A Very Naughty Boy) at Toronto’s Luminato festival.

So it wasn’t just an Idle promise.

Happy 60th Anniversary to the Flying Saucer

roswellsacbee-7966397

On this day sixty years ago, reports came  from the Roswell Army Air Field that a "flying disc" had been recovered from a nearby ranch, and an industry was born.

Since then, we’ve had books, movies, TV shows, comic books, and rock and roll music all discussing whatever happened at Roswell with varying degrees of fictionality and believability. And just remember that it all started with a crashed– sorry, we’d like to tell you, but you’re not really cleared for that.

Family Guy beta versions

Okay, technically Family Guy is a Sunday night cartoon rather than a Saturday morning one; let’s just go with it.

As you might imagine, Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy did not spring forth fully formed from the pen like Bosko The Clown did, there were earlier versions. Here we have Seth introducing a 1995 early presentation reel of a proto-Griffin that he developed while he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and yes, we have to warn you that it’s probably Not Safe For Work:

(more…)

GLENN HAUMAN: Who made comics piracy big?

gh_100-3978857There’s a thread going on over on The Engine where Warren Ellis is practicing knuckleballs with Molotov cocktails again and taking a snapshot of comic book piracy. The thread has some interesting points, and it reminds me who really made piracy popular.

Not the first comics pirate, incidentally — people have been making fake copies of comic books as far back as Warren’s Eerie #1 and, later, Dave Sim’s Cerebus #1, and it probably predates that with the undergrounds. Nor are we discussing printers overprinting copies and selling them without reporting them to the publisher — we aren’t even talking about scanners of comics, who have been doing it and trading them ever since scanners started showing up at work– in fact, the first bootleg scans I ever got were from other comics professionals, the folks whose oxen are theoretically getting gored.

No, I’m talking about the guy who made it important to pirate comics, to distribute scanned copies far and wide, and to make it cool to read bootleg copies of the Internet.

His name? (more…)

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