How John Rogers said that 300 was unfilmable is beyond me. Here Solace Cinema has shown how Frank Miller laid it all out for the filmmakers to follow in a handy Flickr slideshow.
And people say that inkers do nothing but trace. What does that make Zack Snyder?
There’s an ad campaign on radio right now demanding that all movies that show people smoking cigarettes be handed an R rating. This is based upon the perception that despite parents’ best and most consistent efforts, kids who see somebody smoking a cigarette in a motion picture will turn into hopeless addicts.
This is amusing, as the baby boomers that are making these noises represent the first generation to turn their backs on smoking. Of course, we baby boomers were raised on cigarette commercials, our teevee heroes smoked like chimneys, our movie stars didn’t need fogged up lenses to hide the wrinkle lines, and, oh yeah, our parents and our grandparents were complete tobacco fiends.
Virtually all of our finest movies would have to be reclassified as R-rated. Casablanca, Citizen Kane, the Marx Brothers movies … I think about 95% of the movies the American Film Institutes’ Top 100 list wouldn’t make the cut. I’m not sure about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – why do you think they called him Dopey?
So instead of actually raising our young with standards and values, it’s easier to simply have somebody else erase history for us. Forget about learning from our mistakes, let’s just stick our head in the sand and pass a law demanding everybody else does the same.
Here’s a fact. Parents want somebody else to raise their children for them. Offended? If I had said “Too many parents want somebody else to raise their children for them” would you still be offended? In the 1950s we looked at comic books said “somebody should stop kids from reading that.” Then we heard rock music and said “somebody should stop kids from listening to that.” Then the villains became long hair, video games, rap music… it will never end.
The problem is, we have millions and millions of baby boomers who read comics and/or listened to rock who have grown up to be productive, or at least normal, citizens. Kinda fat, though. Maybe our parents should have spent their time bitching about Dr. Pepper and Froot Loops.
Parents, raise your children yourselves. Leave our history and our culture to fend for themselves; they do a great job without interference from lazy busybodies.
As for our children, well, they’ll make some mistakes. That’s their job. Be there to help them learn from those mistakes and remember, 99.5% of them will survive just like you did.
The Who said it best, and they said it 42 years ago: The Kids Are Alright.
Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.com. He watches a lot of old movies and he does not smoke. So there.
John August sets the record straight on his blog: Jake Gyllenhall is not considering the lead role in the Captain Marvel project which August has been tapped to write. He continues, "I can pretty much assure you he’s never heard of the project. And we’ve never discussed him. We’ve never seriously discussed anyone.
"After several months of meetings, casting has come up exactly zero times. There’s no casting list. If there were a list, Gyllenhaal’s name would probably be on it, but trust me: there is no list. There’s no start date, no release date, no movie whatsoever. There’s just a script to be written. Which I should probably get back to." Aww no, baseless internet speculation is tons more fun than doing actual work! On to the next trumped-up rumor, then: Emma Watson — in or out?
Time again for your one-stop shopping roundup of this week’s regular columns and podcasts! Here are the columns:
And here are mellifluous Mike Raub‘s podcasts:
See below for the first regular Above and Beyond column from Glenn Hauman. And don’t forget to check with us on weekends (and occasionally even during the week) for our special Opinion pieces and feature reports!
Not only are "the internets" a great place to find news (for instance, both CBR and Blog@Newsarama have the WizWorld LA scoops more than covered from the fan view, and Marv Wolfman from the pro view), but they’re invaluable as information tools if you know where to look. One of the best places to read about life as a comic book professional is from the folks living it, who often have valuable words of wisdom to pass along to aspiring writers and artists.
Becky Cloonan talks about the world of Original English Language (OEL) graphic novels from manga companies, and compares how they’re put together here as opposed to the Japanese method. A must-read for any artist planning on drawing that kind of a workload.
Stephanie McMillan examines how her own work is shifting from strictly editorial cartooning to a more strip-based focus, and how she tries to inject a more activist stance through the ideas she conveys with her writing and art.
And Colleen Doran conveys a couple of great cautionary tales about money — how little most professional writers really make, and the tendency so many creative people have toward throwing their money into get-rich-quick schemes.
We were casting about today hoping for an appropriate St. Patrick’s Day comic-related post, and the Redhead Fangirl didn’t disappoint, calling our attention to a company called Cló Mhaigh Eo in Claremorris, County Mayo in the West of Ireland.
They’ve been around a dozen years, and publish "books in Irish for children and young people as well as a series of acclaimed Irish graphic novels… Many Irish language learners throughout the world make extensive use of books from Cló Mhaigh Eo, particularly our children’s picture books."
Here’s their graphic novel list, and you can even click on several pages for translations from Gaelic into English. Tip o’ the tweed cap for this one, redlib!
Via Cheryl Lynn, yet another online meet-and-greet club has burst onto the scene with ambitions toward dispelling stereotypes about fans being weak in the social skills department. This one’s called OtakuBooty, and specializes in bringing together "intelligent, funny, sexy" aficionados of Japanese animation, manga and gaming.
They claim, "Not all Internet communities are overrun by 13 year-olds arguing about DragonBall. Most OtakuBooty members are in their 20s and 80% of our members over the age of 18." Which of course means a fifth are still legal minors. They continue, " OtakuBooty has a tight-knit community that has banded together for countless activities: a Full Monty-style fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina victims, raising money for a member who lost his apartment in a fire, and even clothing themselves in custom-made OtakuBooty hockey jerseys… And then there are the infamous parties."
Seems to me if you have that many underage members, you might want to be more careful about advertising Full Monty-style charity events and calling your parties infamous.
The good news is that a big name, first tier, grown-up institution, the Museum of Modern Art, is doing a show on comic art.
The bad news is that we’re still being nibbled to death by ducks; the show is a rather narrow view of the medium, a look at how 13 artists are using the visual conventions associated with comic art. Sometimes it’s one convention to a practitioner; sometimes they can handle as many as a half a dozen.
The Modern (www.moma.org) is spiffy enough to have an online exhibition, which can at least let you in on the main ideas. I don’t have to tell you the value of staring at a wall-sized painting vis a vis a reproduction on a screen, but in this case especially you can understand the ideas at work here. If you don’t buy the idea, then you can probably skip a trip to the show. It fits in one of their smaller temporary exhibition spaces, fewer than two-dozen pieces altogether in about four rooms, artfully arranged, like spaces in the primate habitat at the zoo to seem like a few more.
It took me a half hour to look at it closely, most people were in and out in less time than that.
The Museum feels the need to expand their scope to “slapstick, comic strips and films, caricature, cartoons, and animation.” This says, to me, that, they still need to add things to comic art to make a show. It also says they are still bedeviled by the use of “comic” to refer to both the medium and a point of view. They are in sight of the transcendent critical vision here: that comic art is a medium, not a genre.
But that’s their contribution to critical literature; the show makes a lot more sense looking at it than reading about it.
As usual, the artists are ahead of the museums. They know the comic artists have great powers, most of them have been reading comics all their lives, just like the rest of us, at least in the Sunday paper. They know a speedline from a thought balloon, clean line from brushwork. They have such respect for comic art technique that most of them don’t go near it, as such, exploring instead the equally wide seas of painting.
Yahoo News has blown the pants off the USPS’ latest promotional gimmick, as it teams with Lucasfilm on March 28th, the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars movie, to remake some mailboxes in a familiar image.
About 400 mailboxes in 200 cities across the country will be wrapped in a special covering to make them look something like the droid R2D2 (judge for yourself at right).
The post office isn’t saying which ones, but they have a somewhat tepid teaser about the event.
The pants references above? If you’ve never played Star Wars Pants, you’re really missing something. Let’s hope it’s not those trousers, or I’d find your lack of pants disturbing.
(And if you didn’t catch the Annie Leibovitz photos from the Star Wars edition of Vanity Fair two years ago, they’re making the rounds again… love the group shot!)
Maybe it’s because of Women’s History Month, or maybe it’s the time of (wo)man. But for those of us who like to idealize (rather than fetishize or objectify) women superheroes, there’s a lot of good stuff online right now.
Besides getting their fill of Buffy and Wonder Woman, readers can linger over Alan Kistler’s exhaustive two-part profile of the Amazon princess (here’s part one and part two). On the artistic end, Project Rooftop and GirlWonder.org are co-sponsoring Supergirl Week, featuring entries from last month’s Draw Supergirl online artfest. And in the area of personal epiphany, Marvel artist Brian Denham talks about his moments of revelation and self-education about drawing women in comics. Even the lone woman character with a speaking role in the movie 300 gets a nice review/analysis from Purtek at the Hathor Legacy.
As ever, When Fangirls Attack is your best bet for links to posts on the worlds of super-females.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
