Category: News

Dark Tower to be filmed

  • News
  • February 20, 2007

darktwr001_cover_1-9203575First it was the Marvel comic — now the Hollywood Reporter tells us that Stephen King and J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias) are in talks to bring The Dark Tower to the screen. No word as to whether it will be for movies or TV.

The article also notes that Abrams co-hort Damon (Ultimate Wolverine/Hulk) Lindelof is also a huge King fanboy, bringing along a rare first edition of "The Gunslinger," Book 1 of the series, for King to sign at a recent round-table for Entertainment Weekly.

No word how this will affect Star Trek XI or any of the other myriad projects that have Abrams’s name attached.

Previously:

The Dark Tower: Interview with Peter David

Dark Tower signing at Midtown Comics

George Takei responds to Tim Hardaway

  • News
  • February 19, 2007

George Takei, recently seen on Heroes but always thought of as Mr. Sulu, recorded this reply to recent homophobic comments made by former NBA all-star Tim Hardaway, as aired on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Show.

You go, George.

Milestones in new comics media

  • News
  • February 19, 2007

I may be typing this on a MacBook but mostly I’m old.  Ever so much older than I used to be. A real 20th century kinda gal.  So I’m way behind the curve on what those crazy kids are up to when they’re not trampling my theoretical lawn or treating the comics shop like a reading room. 

lab_brats-6657958For one, they’re reading lots of comics online — by one estimate there may be as many as 36,000 different web-only comics out there, and that’s not even including syndicated print comic strips reproduced online.  There’s just no time to read them all, so we rely on others to announce special events, like today’s online ceremony for the 2007 Webcartoonists’ Choice Awards (congratulations to all the winners!), or the announcement that Ed Dunphy’s and Max Velati’s science humor webcomic Lab Bratz has just hit its 100th weekly episode.  At least the latter milestone makes us feel a bit better, as Dunphy used to write for such print titles as Munden’s Bar, Mongrel, Slash and Splatter.

I got those credits from ComicSpace, a sort of MySpace spinoff for comics folks.  Feel free to befriend me there; I don’t know how it works anyway.  It’s apparently "a community of over 12,500 comic fans and creators… hosting over 3,000 comic galleries… containing over 28,300 comic pages!" so, you know, who has time for that, a full-time job and sleep?  Well, MySpace now has its own comic book section, with over 20,000 "friends" so far.

The Internet is rapidly becoming the most expansive force in comics. It’s exciting to watch it grow.

Mike Gold: War is over

  • News
  • February 19, 2007

No, not that war, I regret to say. That war is going to take a while. And probably a major turn-out at the polls late next year.

According to our good friends at Diamond Distributors, Marvel’s Civil War ends this week with the shipping of the seventh issue of the core mini-series. Joey Quesada and his roommates are to be congratulated, not only for finishing it off (believe me, I know how much work is involved) but for pulling off a remarkable task.

This whole mega-crossover event thing started inadvertently back in the summer of 1963 as a two-issue meeting of the Justice League and the Justice Society. It was a great story and an even better event. It put into action a bunch of characters most of us had only heard about, and it changed the nature of the DC universe forever. Twenty-one years later, Marv Wolfman and George Perez did a 12 part mini-series called Crisis on Infinite Earths, purportedly to straighten out DC’s continuity hiccups and train wrecks. They did a fine job. In fact, Marv and George established the benchmark for all future mega-crossover events.

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Plenty of plans for NYCC

  • News
  • February 19, 2007

Colleen Doran will be there (and posts her panel schedule).  Keith Champagne will be there.  The Chemistry Set webcomics collective will be there.  Becky Cloonan will be there. It’s getting easier to enumerate who won’t be at the New York Comic Convention than who will be! 

Some words of advice: At this point a lot of pre-planning may be in order – take some time this week to print out the panel schedule and circle the ones you want to attend; to contact folks you want to meet there and specify day, time and place (either at someone’s booth or, even better, a less hectic spot in the Javits Center outside the exhibition hall); and to get your gear together (water bottles, camera, currency).  It’s going to be a long and crazy weekend! 

And remember, it’s trade-only on Friday until 4 PM, so that’s a good time to queue up for entry and solidify any last-minute changes.

Riding high at the box office

  • News
  • February 19, 2007

ghost-rider_0-4683685Ghost Rider, based on the Marvel Comics series, dominated the box office this holiday weekend, opening at $44.5 million according to studio estimates.  The movie took in over twice as much as its nearest competitor, the Disney movie Bridge to Terabithia, based on the Newberry-award winning book by Katherine Paterson. 

This was Hollywood’s biggest opening so far this year, and the best opening weekend ever for comics super-fan Cage, beating his previous $35.1 million debut for National Treasure.  This showing bodes well for the movies’ continued association with comic book properties, which are still pleasing audiences despite critics’ misgivings that "the genre" is on the way out. 

Someond tell them comics isn’t a genre, it’s a format!  Sheesh.

The Sunday News, Mainstream style

  • News
  • February 19, 2007

Time once again to check in on what mainstream news sources are saying about comics:

  • It was only a matter of time before I came across another "Comics are not just for kids" header, but it’s a bit unexpected in a college paper.  The Cornell Daily Sun‘s Sammy Perlmutter discovers and reviews the Fantagraphics MOME anthology in the CDS blog.  Hey, he’s one up on me, I didn’t even know college papers had blogs…
  • The Washington Times profiles Bernie Wrightson.
  • Also iin the US capital city, the Washington City Paper takes a look at a shoujo manga exhibition running at the Japanese Information and Culture Center.
  • Lastly, down in Mississippi, the Joplin Independent’s Mark Allen reviews The Damaged by A-10 Comics.

 

Hollywood does comics

  • News
  • February 18, 2007

bobgreenberger200-9748229There was a great deal of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth when word leaked out of Hollywood that Joss Whedon had left the Wonder Woman film project and David Goyer would no longer write and direct a Flash film. Similarly, people reacted in horror at the notion of Joel Schumacher having anything to do with a Sandman movie.

Here’s the thing: none of this is shocking. Disappointing, yes, but we long time fans have gotten our hopes raised and dashed countless times through the years.

For those less familiar with Hollywood’s inner workings, the studios are always looking for the next great thing, uncertain of what it might be and where they may find it. So, in addition to buying original stories from screenwriters or ideas from producers and stars then assigning the stories to screenwriters, Hollywood goes shopping. They will receive yet-to-be-published books in galley form, they will scour the news for stories to dramatize, and they will see what their kids are listening to, and so on.

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Wright makes might

  • News
  • February 18, 2007

According to Cinematical, writer-director Edgar Wright  is currently working on two comic book adaptations on his plate: Ant Man appears to be based on the Marvel title "about a biochemist who develops an instrument that allows him to communicate with and control insects."  The other project, Scott Pilgrim‘s Precious Little Life based on the series by Bryan Lee O’Malley, concerns a man named Pilgrim who starts dating a new girl and must battle her seven evil exes, and is described "in the early idea stage."  As O’Malley and Hope Larson seem like such a nice normal comics couple, it’s hoped that "seven evil exes" bit is fictional all the way…

UPDATE: Typo corrected in headline.

Galacti-can!

  • News
  • February 18, 2007

To nobody’s surprise, the SciFi Channel has renewed Battlestar Galactica for a fourth season.  The series has garnered plenty of critical acclaim since its debut, winning a Peabody award for its high-quality scripting (including that of Superman/Batman writer and comic book veteran Mark Verheiden, who is also an executive producer of BSG) and making the American Film Institute’s top 10 outstanding TV programs two years in a row, and the ratings shot up even more with the show’s recent move to Sunday nights.

Another major factor in the no-brainer decision had to do with new viewing habits.  On the one hand, more than a million BSG DVDs have been sold, offsetting production costs considerably (SciFi admits BSG is its most expensive original series).  On the other hand, SciFi’s Mark Stern told the LA Times that 510,000 additional viewers in the 18-to-49 demographic are watching the show on DVRs, for which advertisers don’t yet pay (on the general assumption is that viewers fast-forward through ads during playback).  The Times’ Denise Martin says this "could be a crucial point for the channel, and Stern is hopeful that the business model is shifting."  The renewal could also give a greater boost to plans involving a direct-to-DVD BSG movie.

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