Category: News

Heroes and live toons

  • News
  • April 3, 2007

While waiting for Heroes to return on April 23, fans can now help Hana, the former Mossad agent.  She’s looking for interested viewers to aid her attempts to stop Linderman’s still-unexplained plot.  Details are at NBC.com.

Meantime, Susan Sarandon and John Goodman have been named as Speed Racer’s parents.  The Wachowski Berothers’ are set to begin filing this live-action adaptation of the popular Japanese anime this spring for a summer 2008 release.  Whether Goodman will sport Pops Racer’s trademark mustache remains to be learned.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Who knows what evil lurks…? Part 1

  • News
  • April 3, 2007

Meet Anthony Tollin.

I did, more than 30 years ago, at DC Comics. Anthony was tall, friendly, didn’t look like a New Yorker, and wasn’t. He came to Manhattan from Minneapolis in 1973, worked a couple of jobs, and then landed at DC, where he stayed for 20 years, proofreading, color-coordinating, helping Jack Adler manage the production department – necessary chores, done well away from the spotlight, that transform the raw materials of artwork and script into a printed artifact. Along the way, Anthony got married, and divorced, moved to another state, and when he retired from DC, settled in Texas, where he lives and single-parents his lovely and gifted daughter, Katrina.

If you talked to Anthony much, you soon discovered that he had a number of pop cultch enthusiasms, not the least of which was comic books. But his real passions – I don’t think the word is too strong – were always The Shadow novels, mostly written by Walter Gibson under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant and published in the 30s and 40s in the pulp magazine format, and old radio shows, particularly the crime and adventure programs that were the first cousins of the pulps and comics. If ever I had a question about either of these subjects, Mr. Tollin was always my first go-to guy. I never needed a second.

Those passions are still part of the Tollin gestalt, and now he’s found a new way to both share and make a living from at least one of them. Since July, a company Anthony started has, in partnership with something called Nostalgia Ventures, been issuing reprints of The Shadow books. The price is $12.95, quite modest considering that in one volume you get two novels and reprints of the original illustrations, a feature that’s both unusual and, I think, a real value-adder. The book that’s on the desk next to my computer would certainly be mistaken for one of the old pulps – same size, same kind of cover and font – until you picked it up and found that, in fact, both the cover stock and the interior stock are considerably better than anything that bore the original work. Inside, there are the novels, plus a couple of pieces by Will Murray, another expert and go-to guy, and an adaption of a Shadow radio show.

And as a comics fan you should care… why?

(more…)

Dying to get on television?

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

The SCI FI Channel is hosting a national casting call/contest for entrants for its "SCI FI Saturday: The Most Dangerous Night of Television". One viewer will win a Die-On role in a future SCI FI original movie which will debut within the Saturday 9pm time period. The winning entrant will be selected at random and receive a trip for two to the filming location of the SCI FI original movie. The deadline to enter is May 26, 2007.

With any luck, you’ll be cast in Mansquito 2: The Itchening. But personally, I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those films.

Addicted to videogames?

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

A new Harris Survey suggests that video games are truly addictive and this addiction is increasing.  The report states that, in the United States, 8.5% of gamers between the ages of eight and 19 can be classified as "pathological" or clinically "addicted.  At the same time, 23% say they have felt "addicted to video games" including 31% of males and 13% of females.

Nearly four fifths (81%) play video games at least once per month, including 94% of all boys.

The survey was conducted online between January 17 and 23 this year.  Harris reports that 1,178 children and teenagers participated.  Among the findings:  The average 8- to 12year old plays 13 hours of video game per week, while 13- to 18 year olds play 14 hours per week.  Girls play about a third less than boys.

Dr. Douglas Gentile, Director of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University and the director of research for the National Institute on Media and the Family, states, "It is important that people realize that playing a lot is not the same thing as pathological play. For something to be an addiction, it has to mean more than you do it a lot. It has to mean that you do it in such a way that it damages your life. This is why we based our definition on how pathological gambling is diagnosed in the DSM-IV. Almost one out of every ten youth gamers show enough symptoms of damage to their school, family, and psychological functioning to merit serious concern."

The genius of Gollum

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

Andy Serkis – a.k.a. Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilory – has been cast as Albert Einstein in an upcoming HBO / BBC co-production, Einstein and Eddington. The "Eddington" part of the title refers to astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the man who actually understood Einstein’s theory of relativity and promoted it to a skeptical scientific community back in 1920. This particular Sir Arthur will be played by David Tennant, who is wrapping his third season as the lead in Doctor Who.

The script was written by Peter Moffat, who previously brought another genius – Stephen Hawking – to the BBC screen.

It’s hard to imagine Serkis playing Einstein, but at least he’ll be doing so in the flesh and not in CGI.

Serenity beats Star Wars

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

The BBC is reporting that Joss Whedon’s film Serenity topped a poll by SFX magazine as the best science fiction film of all time.  The magazine polled 3,000 fans.

Star Wars came in second, and Blade Runner was third.  Other films that made the list include Planet of the Apes, The Matrix, Alien,  Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator and Back to the Future.

SFX editor Dave Bradley said it was a "massive surprise" to see Serenity beating Star Wars.  "The TV show may have been cancelled, yet the Serenity universe clearly struck a chord with fans, thanks to its likeable characters, witty dialogue and amazing special effects."

Wallace and Gromit Go Sony

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

Aardman Animation , of Wallace and Gromit fame, signed a three-picture deal with Sony Pictures, it was announced today.  The company, based in England, had been without a Hollywood partner since being dumped by Dreamworks in January. 

"We couldn’t be more excited about working with the entire Aardman team," said Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal.

Aardman co-founder David Sproxton said: "We are delighted to find a partner in Sony that shares our vision.  We are all very excited by the potential and have a number of projects we are keen to bring to fruition with this new relationship."

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit won an Oscar.  However, it lost money, as did Aardman’s following film, Flushed Away.  These losses were blamed for Dreamworks ending a five-picture deal after only two films.

What you may have missed

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

I’m back, and on a personal note I would like to thank everyone for their very kind wishes and condolences on the death of my father, more about which on Wednesday if I can manage to make Dad the focus of my next column. 

In the meantime, things here seem a bit — different, don’t they? So let’s get caught up first before we jump into the newer stuff.  Here’s your one-click guide to the regular columns and podcasts from the past two weeks.  First the columns:

Flip through our pages for the past couple weeks to check out contributions from Martha, Robert, Kai, Matt and others in our extended ComicMix family!  And I hope that you’re as eager as I am to catch up on all our podcasts as Mellifluous Mike Raub marches on:

There you go, lots of reading and listening — and all fodder for much commentary from you, we hope!  Feel free to let fly in our brand-new comments section below, coming shortly!

MIKE GOLD: You say you want an evolution…

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

wonder-woman-6594318I like Martha Thomases’ idea of 365, as reported on ComicMix yesterday. A full-length comic book story each and every day for a year. Now that would be an event.

Sadly, most such comic book events aren’t worth the effort, let alone the price. The stories are overblown, their effects on their “universe” temporary – either in the sense that they will be countermanded or, at best, castrated in the next such event.

(Hmmm. There’s a phrase I’ve never written before. “At best, castrated.”)

By the time they’re over, most events turn out to be nothing more than marketing gimmicks, and an endless sea of marketing gimmicks doth not a universe make. As of this writing Captain America is dead but Bucky is alive – something he’d managed to avoid for over 40 years. As Denny O’Neil pointed out in his recent ComicMix column, death has no permanence in comics. As a plot point, it is hackneyed: it may have collectibility, but it has no credibility.

Wonder Woman has been redefined, resurrected, rebooted, and retold differently so many times since 1965 (arguably her first real reboot) that I’m surprised she doesn’t bump into Tony Soprano at her shrink’s office.

Of the two major universes, Marvel’s is the most consistent – but only by comparison to DC, whose universe had to be cobbled together retroactively by combining the efforts of five publishing houses over 70 years: DC, All-American, Quality, Fawcett and Charlton – and maybe Fox, depending how you, ahhh, look at Phantom Lady. But by and large, in the past couple decades Marvel’s change has been evolutionary and not stop-and-start-over. Spider-Man went step by step from being a four-eyed high school wallflower with a secret identity to becoming a publicly known married-to-an-actress superhero and, oh yeah, menace to his nation. Marvel never stopped and said “Oh, now everything you know is wrong; this is the way it is and the way it will be until we need to burrow into your pockets again.”

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Blades of Box Office Gold

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

Blades of Glory was the number one film for the April Fool’s weekend, with an estimated take of $33 million.  Disney’s Meet The Robinsons came in second, with $25.1 million.

300 came in next, with $11.2 million, followed by TMNT with $9.2 million.  If  Hollywood realizes that both films owe their existance to Frank Miller (whose graphic novel, Ronin, was the inspiration to Eastman and Laird back in the 1980s), no one admits it.

Wild Hogs, Shooter, Premonition, The Last Mimzy, The Hills Have Eyes 2 and Reign Over Me rounded out the list.

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