Author: Mike Gold

When Disney bought Marvel, the movie rights to the majority of their big-name properties were tied up. They still are. But now that writer Jeph Loeb is head
of Marvel television, he’s been pitching a bunch of properties to ABC-TV, which, of course, is owned by Disney. You might have heard that The Incredible Hulk is in development – which is not the same as being green-lighted. That’s kind of remarkable as Mark Ruffalo, movie’s third Bruce Banner, has been signed to do three Avengers movies as well several Hulks.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t do television at the same time. I think Ed Norton’s chance at going green again is only slightly better than Bill Bixby’s, but Ed’s extremely talented and, hell, I don’t have to work with him.

There’s two more Marvel properties on the short list: Cloak and Dagger, which is presently sans comic book, and The Punisher, who is three movies shy of being a star. Maybe the small screen is a warmer environment.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Heroes for Hire is being kicked around;
this show would focus on Luke Cage; I don’t know if Iron Fist would be in it.
But “Heroes” IS plural. His comic book wife, Jessica Jones, is on the list with
her own show. It can’t be called Alias, so they’ve titled it Alter-Ego. This should not be confused with Roy Thomas’s character of the same name, nor his monthly fanzine of the same name.

Jack Kirby’s The Eternals is being considered. Even with CGI I don’t see this being as strong in live action as it would be in traditional animation, but I doubt ABC has the guts to do that. Stepping out of the pages of Marvel’s recent mega-crossover, The Hood is on the list. I guess ABC needs a nice family-oriented show starring a ruthless villain. Everybody’s favorite private eyes, Colleen Wing and Misty Knight, are on the list under the title Daughters of the Dragon. If they can cast the right sexy babes, this one is a shoo-in. Not so much the other two on the list.

ABC is looking at Ka-Zar. I don’t know if the teevee world is ready for the return of Tarzan, but my guess is that if it is, it would be looking for a show called “Tarzan.” Finally, there’s Agents of Atlas. Marvel just cancelled this title, which pisses me off because I love it. Is the world ready for a talking gorilla, a guy from Uranus, and a female Sub-Mariner? Well, this is an election year.

Mind you, even though ABC and Marvel are both owned by Disney, the network is not obligated to pick up any of these shows and most certainly will not pick them all up. But it would be kind of fun if they picked up a couple so they can do Marvel-style crossovers.

It has been reported that for the first time in 15 months no single comic book gathered more than
100,000 copies in orders in the direct sales market. Make that 93,459, to put a
point on it.

Conventional wisdom has it that sales have dropped because the average cover price has gone up, and who am I to question conventional wisdom? But there’s another reason. A big one.

Historically, whenever one of the major publishers (which means Marvel and DC; I’m talking superhero comics here) felt they were being challenged by one or more upstart publishers, that company would flood the market with crap, usually reprints or revivals of frequently cancelled titles. The other publisher would rapidly follow. Before the direct sales tail started wagging the dog, it was believed there was only so much space in the newsstands
and DC and Marvel could crowd the others out. That, of course, was nonsense: if the newsstands cared about comic books (how much profit is there in a 40 cent item?) nobody would have to crowd anybody out.

This philosophy extended to the direct sales market. When companies such as First, Eclipse and Malibu were making waves and racking up competitive sales, DC and Marvel started dumping product into the pipeline. How many times could you revive Kull The Conqueror? But retailers had to order at least a few copies because it was a Marvel Comic, and cumulatively all that sucked a lot of bucks out of retailers’ tills. Remember, they buy this stuff non-returnable.

But now comic book stores have dwindled down to a precious few and the big bookstore chains such as Barnes and Noble and Borders are coughing up blood, sales truly suck.

Which makes it real curious to see that Marvel is once again flooding the comics rack. Having finally lost the Kull license, the House of Idea has gone the Oreo Cookies route: they’re jerking their “going to the movies” properties as though they were crack fiends at a milk farm.

For example: the September Marvel Previews (books on sale November) lists no less than six Iron Man titles, eight Thor titles, and 13 Avengers books. There’s also two event series: Shadowland, which winds up with a mere four titles, and Chaos War, which boasts five.

I didn’t even mention the massive – and expanding – X-Men group. That’s old news.

27 issues featuring Thor, Iron Man, and/or The Avengers.
Boy, you’d think there was a Thor movie coming out that, oh I don’t know, tied in to the Iron Man movies, to be followed by the big The Avengers
movie.

So, why the flood? Is Marvel worried about competition from Boom, Dynamite, and IDW? I don’t think so. They started producing material
for this latest dump just about the time the Disney takeover was ratified. They are trying to impress the Mouse.

Disney doesn’t care about their comic book profits, and nor does Warner Bros. Marvel and DC, respectively, are there as R&D, fodder for movies, television and animation – and their concomitant merchandising revenues. All Marvel and DC have to do on the publishing front is show a decent
return on investment and their new masters will be content.

It’s hard for me to think of a way Marvel could better promote comic book bootlegging.

Is there a single person on the planet who could actually make me feel sorry for that walking train-wreck, Lindsay Lohan? Well, as it turns out, there is!

Just before his 60th Muscular Dystrophy Telethon this weekend, 84 year-old Jerry Lewis discussed Lindsay Lohan specifically and some of his fellow craftspeople generically on the syndicated teevee gossipfest Inside Edition. “I think they need a fucking spanking and a reprimand,” Jerry Lewis said.

Wow, Jerry. 
So you want to spank a 24 year-old woman, huh? Well, I understand a lot of old geezers feel that way.
Okay, so you’ve got a father complex. But exactly what sort of father do you want to be? One who beats his kids?

Zeroing in on Lohan, Jerry Lewis went on to rant “I’d smack her in the mouth if I saw her. I’d smack her in the mouth and be arrested for abusing a woman.” Gee, Jerry, ya think? By the way, you’d also go down for assault and battery. And probably hate crime. “I would say ‘you deserve this and nothing else.’ Whack! And then if she’s not satisfied, I’d put her over my knee and spank her.”

If she’s not satisfied?
Is that how you satisfy women, you sad pathetic has been?

Hokey smokes, Jerry! And to think Mel Gibson got his badass self in trouble while you get to go on teevee and act condescendingly toward your children.

Lohan’s got enough of her own problems, and Jerry, so do you.
 

It’s very disconcerting when one of your heroes gets old and cranky and weird. Sadly, this happened to me last week, with respect to one
of America’s greatest living authors,Ray Bradbury.

We knew something was up with the author of such important and even vital classics as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Dandelion Wine back when he called President Clinton a shithead… but, hey, Clinton was President and calling the President a shithead is a great, time-honored tradition. He subsequently wasn’t happy about Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11, thinking
Moore was somehow piggybacking upon the fame of his stunning novel by conflating the imagery of his story of a repressed future with repression of the then-present.

However, oddly, this past week Ray attacked President Obama for his comments about freedom of religion.

No, Bradbury didn’t say that Obama should be anti-Muslim, or, conversely, that Obama should have specifically backed building the Islamic cultural center at the site for a long-abandoned Burlington Coat Factory. Ray said “He (Obama) should be announcing that we should go back to the moon. We
should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever.”

I’m still trying to find his segue. I don’t get the connection between the two. Should all future houses of worship be built in space? I don’t know, although maybe NASA should consider the concept as a future source of funding.

Attacking Ray is not going to make me any friends, particularly on the occasion of his 90th birthday. I am proud to have known him. I shared a table with Ray for an hour at the San Diego Comic Con a while ago, I was with him at the debut of his play Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, and we both indulged in a friendship with the late great Julius Schwartz. I wouldn’t trade a moment of those experiences, nor would I abandon the soul-filling wonderment I received from his writing. I will admit to being more experienced than Bradbury when it comes to being cranky and weird.

Bradbury also said we have too many cell phones and too many Internets (sic), and we have to get rid of them. He’s also opposed to electronic books. Sorry, Ray. It’s the 21st Century. Back after World War II there were a whole lot of authors who stigmatized the “cheap” paperback novels that were starting to proliferate. You know, the ones that brought science fiction
writers to a mass audience. You know, writers like Ray Bradbury.

He might not like the term science fiction – I don’t either – but Ray Bradbury was a damned important visionary. Turning your back on the future is one thing, but turning your back on the present is just sad.