Category: News

Heroes: Origins coming to NBC

heroes-5635550To stretch the normal 22-episode season of Heroes, which faltered after its long hiatus this year, NBC is adding Heroes: Origins to the summer break. The spinoff will introduce a new character each week, and viewers will select which one stays for the following season. The two series will have 30 new episodes for a year combined.

A brilliant move. Combine the storytelling of a scripted show with the "must watch in real time" necessity of a reality show, as those "must watch in real time" shows are the only ones that are getting quantifiable ratings (no time-shifting from DVRs, etc.). I have to hand it to them, this is a unique way of trying to solve the problem, and could very well work.

Now let’s see the real corporate synergy in action– combine it with sister network’s Sci-Fi Channel’s Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

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2006 Eagle Awards Announced

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Since you couldn’t watch a new episode of Doctor Who this past Saturday, maybe you were at the Eagle Awards, as part of the Bristol International Comic Expo.

Established in 1976 by Mike Conroy, the Eagles are the comics industry’s longest established awards. Acknowledged as the pre-eminent international prizes, they have been featured on the covers of leading US and UK titles across the last three decades with such diverse titles as X-Men, Swamp Thing, Preacher, 2000 AD and MAD among those proud to display the Eagle Award emblem.

Winners are after the jump.

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Fate gets real

4094830691-5473050Steve Gerber reports his Doctor Fate series, already announced, solicited and then rescinded, will be appearing in a new double-length, double-feature book along the lines of DC’s recent Mystery In Space and Tales of the Unexpected titles. It should be coming out in September.

Personally, I think this is good news. It’s quite rare for me to get excited about still another plow-over of an old superhero, and Doctor Fate had some good runs over the decades. But Gerber and Fate seemed like a perfect match, and I look forward to his new series once again.

(Artwork copyright DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.)

 

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More Groo for you

groo25th-8221232Ready that cheese dip, your favorite mendicant is about to return!  Groo writer Mark Evanier has just announced that on August 1st Dark Horse will release The Groo 25th Anniversary Special, to be followed in September by debut of the four-issue miniseries Groo: Hell on Earth.

Groo — it’s one of those books where, if you have to ask, don’t.

Only really, do.  According to the solicitation, the anniversary issue will feature our hero battling the menace of "The Plague," as well as presenting The Groo Alphabet, a primer of friends and foes (mostly foes), followed by a special illustrated text story on how this comic came to be and why it just won’t go away. Plus other silly features.

As if the features already listed weren’t silly enough.

(Artwork copyright Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones. All Rights Reserved.)

Pros name 50 most influential visual effects film

On Friday, the Visual Effects Society announced the results of a membership poll, naming the 50 most influential films of all time in terms of special effects.  According to VES Executive Director Eric Roth, hese films have had a significant, lasting impact on the practice and appreciation of visual effects as an integral, artistic element of cinematic expression and the storytelling process."

Comics fans will be arguing about the placement of Sin City (43) and Superman (44).  No other comic book-inspired films made the list.

The films will be the backdrop of the 2007 VES Festival of Visual Effects, which those of you in Los Angeles can enjoy at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills from June 7 through June 10.  There, a panel that includes Douglas Trumbull, Richard Edlund, Dennis Murren and maybe John Dykstra (he’s tentative as we write this) will discuss the list. 

After the jump, the whole list.

 

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A mother of a week

Friday the 13th done fall on a Sunday this month, so we’re off to celebrate Mom’s Day with family members.  But first, here’s our round-up of regular weekly columns, now including our weekend regulars:

Don’t forget to check out the debut column from Ric Meyers, DVD Xtra #1: The Thai’s have it, and of course our regular weekly podcasts, courtesy of Mellifluous Mike Raub:

Happy Mother’s Day, everybody!

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies

price-brown-100-1768211I’ve gone into some detail elsewhere about how my Forgotten Horrors series of movie encyclopedias (1979 and onward) dovetails with my collaborative comic-book efforts with Timothy Truman and John K. Snyder III. More about all that as things develop at ComicMix. This new batch of Forgotten Horrors commentaries will have more to do with the overall relationship between movies and the comics and, off-and-on, with the self-contained appeal of motion pictures. I have yet to meet the comics enthusiast who lacks an appreciation of film.

Although it is especially plain nowadays that comics exert a significant bearing upon the moviemaking business – with fresh evidence in marquee-value outcroppings for the Spider-Man and TMNT franchises and 300 – the greater historical perspective finds the relationship to be quite the other way around.

It helps to remember a couple of things: Both movies and comics, pretty much as we know them today, began developing late in the 19th century. And an outmoded term for comics is movies; its popular usage as such dates from comparatively recent times. The notion of movies-on-paper took a decisive shape during the 1910s, when a newspaper illustrator named Ed Wheelan began spoofing the moving pictures (also known among the shirtsleeves audience as “moom pitchers” and “fillums”), with cinema-like visual grammar, in a loose-knit series for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American.

Christened Midget Movies in 1918, Wheelan’s series evolved from quick-sketch parodies of cinematic topics to sustained narratives, running for days at a stretch and combining melodramatic plot-and-character developments with cartoonish exaggerations. Wheelan’s move to the Adams Syndicate in 1921 prompted a change of title, to Minute Movies. (Don Markstein’s Web-based Toonopedia points out that the term is “mine-yute,” as in tiny, rather than “minnit,” as in a measure of time. No doubt an intended sense of connection with the Hearst trademark Midget Movies.) Chester Gould showed up in 1924 with a Wheelan takeoff called Fillum Fables – seven years before Gould’s more distinctive breakthrough with Dick Tracy. (more…)

The Secrets Behind The Comics debuts!

Just in time to butter up good ol’ Mom, the Big ComicMix Weekend Broadcast is here – and the debut of our Secrets Behind The Comics feature – we take a look at the guy in charge of making Catwoman and Wonder Woman look their best, plus news on how you can write your own ending to your favorite TV show, where you could soon find some great classic TV and how to survive Life Without Heroes, plus a trip back to when Spawn was red hot on the comic shelves.

Press The Button. Mom said it was OK!

Flash gets real

quinto1-4595847Gina Holden will be starring with Eric Johnson in the SciFi Channel’s new Flash Gordon series, debuting this August. No stranger to heroic fantasy projects, the Canadian actress previously appeared in Fantastic Four, The Butterfly Effect 2 and the upcoming Alien vs. Predator 2.

Based upon Alex Raymond’s classic newspaper comic strip, SciFi has already committed to a full 22 episode season. Jody Racicot (Night at the Museum) will play Dr. Hans Zarkov, and John Ralston (Earthstorm) will play the greatest villain of all time, Mongo’s Emperor Ming the Merciless. Anna van Hoft will play Ming’s daughter Aura, who has the hots for Flash and, therefore, doesn’t like Dale very much.

No word on who’s going to play Vultan, king of the original Hawkmen. Brian Blessed, who played the role in the 1980 motion picture, is currently filming Doctor Who.

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RSS feeds good, online comics better

RSS feeds are funny things.  They let folks with newsreaders and busy lives know when you’ve posted something new, but they (either the feeds or newsreaders) can be spotty at times and you almost miss stuff.  Take Gene Yang’s terrific responses to MySpace making American Born Chinese a featured book, an essay he calls Does acknowledging a stereotype perpetuate it?.  It was posted on May 1 but didn’t show up on my newsreader until a few days ago.  I’m still shaking my head that Yang’s essay was even necessary, as it addresses people who haven’t even read his book but are complaining about a character deliberately portrayed as offensive.  (There’s actually a blog term for folks like this; we call them "concern trolls.")

ctdwn_50-4-2035590Speaking of MySpace, all 22 pages of DC’s Countdown issue 51 are now up on the Comicbooks blog, as well as the first half of issue 50.  MySpace blogs do have site feeds (here’s the Comicbook blog’s feed) so you can read at least partial blog entries without joining the service.  The feeds are often tricky to find (you often need to be on the blog in the first place to see the "RSS" choice at the top right), but worth it if you want alerts on new posts.

I grabbed Vulture’s site feed from New York Magazine as soon as I saw they were featuring weekly graphic novel excerpts the same way many magazines feature prose novel excerpts.  This week it’s Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon.

Were it not for Becky Cloonan (who has a site feed) I wouldn’t have known at all about Amy Kim Ganter serializing the second issue of Sorcerers and Secretaries, because Amy’s site doesn’t seem to cater to RSS readers.

One of the best things about having an RSS reader is that you get to save posts to write about later.  Thanks to this site feed report, I’ve now closed four or five saved posts.

And yes, ComicMix has a site feed — stable but ever evolving, like the rest of this site.

(Artwork copyright 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.)

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