Triskadecaphobes unite!
Egads! Friday the thirteenth actually comes on a Friday this month!
(POGO and all related characters © 2007 OGPI)
Author: Glenn Hauman
Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007
The New York Times reports: "Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island."
We mourn his passing.
Anime gone wild
FUNimation Entertainment has acquired several anime TV series and movies titles from Central Park Media (CPM) for broadcast on its digital FUNimation Channel. CPM titles picked up as part of the deal, most of which are appropriate for teens and up, include: Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie; the Record of Lodoss Wars series; Roujin Z, the Project A-ko series; Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer; and Grave of the Fireflies. FUNimation airs occasionally on Dish Network and other outlets.
Spidey 3 gets sneaked for MySpace members
MySpace will host a "Black Curtain Screening" for Spider-Man 3 on April 30, 2007, exclusively for its members, several days prior to Sony’s release of the movie on May 4. Where the screening will be held is entirely up to MySpace members, who can cast their vote now for one of ten cities at http://www.myspace.com/blackcurtain . The choices are Cleveland, OH; Cincinnati, OH; Honolulu, HI; Indianapolis, IN; Kansas City, MO; Louisville, KY; Salt Lake City, UT; San Jose, CA; Savannah, GA; Tampa/St. Petersburg, FL.
And their continued assault on ComicSpace continues…
Honolulu?
Superthunderstingcar!
If you ever wasted spent hours in front of yor TV watching Gerry Anderson and his puppets, you’ll be flabbergasted by this performance by late, great Peter Cook and Dudley Moore :
Hat tip to Lisa Sullivan for finding this depravity.
Inking digitally demonstration
Something to noodle around with this weekend: you, too, can learn how to ink digitally. Skull the Troll – okay, Scott Kurtz in a Skull hat – shows exactly how he inked this PVP strip:
Now you can do it yourself!
Not included: a $2500 Cintiq monitor.
The Christmas Cottage movie
I never, never, never want to hear another complaint about adapting film from dumb comic books ever again. And if you’re tired of articles with headlines like "Pow! Zap! Wham! Comics movies aren’t just for kids" you don’t either. But now, you have a trump card to play – Hollywood is adapting movies from paintings.
Yes, paintings. Not painted comic books. Paintings.
First Showing shows us that Lions Gate is making a film based on a single painting by Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light" in the same way that Michael Jackson is the "king of pop," called The Christmas Cottage. Peter O’Toole has been cast in it. They note: "The film is partly biographical and based on events that led American painter Kinkade to become an artist." No word on whether they’ll include the FBI investigations or sexual harassment allegations – if Peter O’Toole’s in it, I suppose there’s a chance.
It’s shooting this month for the obvious December release, because this will be the film that gets O’Toole his Oscar.
Catch the evildoer, Spidey!
Your comics-related political cheap shot of the day:
Via The Huffington Post, or as some wags have started to call it, "the ComicMix of politics".
Martian Child showing its literary roots, sort of
One of the films that might get lost in the 10 billion dollar summer is a little film called The Martian Child, based on the Hugo and Nebula award-winning story by SF writer David Gerrold which, despite the title and pedigree, isn’t really a science fiction story. It stars John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Joan Cusack and Richard Schiff, and will be in theaters June 29th so that it can be mercilessly crushed by Live Free or Die Hard.
And while I realize that it won’t have all the neat merchandizing opportunities that Spider-Man 3 will have, based on the promotional image on the website (reproduced here) and used heavily in the trailers, all I can say is:
Why “The Lone Gunmen” got axed
We seem to have an unofficial theme of sorts today.
Fans of The X-Files remember the Lone Gunmen, the trio of brilliant but socially inept hackers and conspiracy experts that made comic book fans look socially un-inept. They were spun off into their own short-lived TV series, which recently became available on DVD.
But some wondered: How could a show featuring such popular characters get cancelled so quickly? Was it some sort of evil scheme? Who was to blame? Why was that guy in Fox’s programming division constantly smoking?
Finally, we have an answer – in comic book form, no less, which means that we can talk about it here and still remain within our theoretical charter.
Dean Haglund, better known as Richard "Ringo" Langly, has written and drawn an autobiographical story of what happened to the Lone Gunmen – how they found out about the series, how it lived, and how it died. The art is reminiscent of a cruder version of William Messner-Loebs, and the story reinforces every dumb story you’ve heard about Hollywood. He’s selling it on his web site for a pretty high price, but if you ask nicely, I’m sure he’ll autograph it directly to you.
