Category: News

Slices of Galactica Pie

Slices of Galactica Pie

  • News
  • July 17, 2007

In what is certain to be received with shock and awe, the vaguely innovative Sci-Fi Channel is going to precede the November 24th broadcast of the two-hour Battlestar Galactica teevee movie Razor with a bunch of two-to-three minute "mini-sodes" (their term, not mine) that will "provide background and context" for the movie special and, no doubt, help round-out their DVD release.

The micro-story will revolve around the first Cylon War and a young William Adama (Nico Cortez). The gumball-sized mini-sodes will be broadcast on Sci-Fi in October and November. Consult your local listings for time, but don’t be too surprised if you discover nada en detalle.

Remember, while watching, you can blink, but don’t dare sneeze.

Tintin is racist, Batgirl is sexist, Punisher is black…

Tintin is racist, Batgirl is sexist, Punisher is black…

  • News
  • July 17, 2007

Department of “Shoulda Seen That Coming”: in the UK, a government minister issues a stern warning that a particular book, Tintin in the Congo, contains “hideous racial prejudice,” and that no right-thinking Briton should ever, ever read it henceforward. Result? Sales increase immediately by 3,800 percent. (Forbidden Planet International has a longer story on the complaint, including the fact that the Commission on Racial Equality – and isn’t that a nice Orwellian name? – demanded that Tintin in the Congo be banned.)

The Beat is not happy with the final cover for Showcase: Batgirl. (And there’s no reason she should be.)

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog remembers the halcyon days when the Punisher was, briefly, a black man.

Media Life Magazine thinks that Zudacomics is a really swell idea and the most wonderful thing since sliced bread – but they also think that comic books are “almost an industry,” so I’m not sure if we should believe them.

The Chicago Sun-Times looks at DC Comics’s new teen-girl-focused Minx line.

Bookgasm reviews the newest reprint trade paperback of the Fables series, Volume 9: Sons of Empire, written by Bill Willingham and illustrated by Mark Buckingham and others.

Publishers Weekly reviews a number of comics this week, including House by Josh Simmons and the first volumes in two maanga series, Gin Tama and War Angels.

Dana’s Marvel Comics Reviews, at Comic Fodder, hits the week’s high points, starting with New Avengers # 32.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Do You Believe In Magic?

DENNIS O’NEIL: Do You Believe In Magic?

  • News
  • July 17, 2007

Here it is Tuesday evening and we’re still debating. Should we go to the 11:59 showing of the new Harry Potter flick at the local 21-plex or catch one of the early showings in the morning?  Pros and cons on both sides.  But we will see the movie within the next 24 hours; count on it.

Although I’ve enjoyed the previous films, I can’t call myself a Potter fan.  I haven’t read any of J.K. Rowling’s novels, though I love Ms Rowling’s bio: single mom writing in a café becomes hugely successful author, celebrity, and megamillionaire within about a decade, without becoming a robber baroness.  But Marifran’s read the books.  Oh yes indeed.  And so have daughters Meg and Beth.  So I’m pretty up on the Hogwarts scene and when the final volume in the series arrives in a couple of weeks, I expect my conversations with my wife to be conducted in monosyllables until she reaches the last page and learns Harry’s fate.

I’m surprised that these things are so popular, as I was surprised at the resurgence of interest in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings saga and the huge success of the movies made from Tolkein’s trilogy. The reason is, I thought we were past believing in magic. 

Oh, sure, you don’t have to actually believe in something to enjoy stories about it.  But we do have to be able to accept it on some level. It helps the willing suspension of disbelief your English teacher told you is necessary to the enjoyment of fiction if you can allow that what you’re being told about exists, or could exist, or at least might have existed. Hero stories are about as old as civilization, and the tale-tellers always supply a reason why their protagonists have extraordinary powers.  In classic Greece, for example, and later in Rome, superpowers were explained by their possessors either being gods, or half-gods, or children of gods, or gods’ special pals.  Then plain ol’ magic, origin unknown, was used to rationalize superhuman feats in folk tales like those in A Thousand and One Nights. 

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Dial S For Shadow

Dial S For Shadow

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

Over here on ComicMix, we’ve been talking about The Shadow a lot recently – prompted by Denny O’Neil’s fine columns and Robert Greenberger’s first-rate interview with Shadow pulp reprint editor / publisher Anthony Tollin. Without belaboring a point, I’d like to refer you to another remarkable effort concerning comics’ most influential icon.

There’s this really great site called Dial B For Burbank. It’s operated by “Robby Reed,” who had previously run an equally amazing site called (wait for it) Dial B For Blog. I bet you thought I was going to say it was called Dial H For Hero; no, that trademark was owned by some publisher. Dial B For Blog had all kinds of wonderful articles about comics, my favorite being an in-depth look at classic letterer / logo designer Ira Schnapp, inventor of most of DC’s logos and house ads from about 1940 until the mid-60s. Schnapp also lettered title cards for silent movies and chiseled the words on the front of the New York Public Library. Robby also did some amazing production work, much of it of a satirical nature – to wit, the Adventure Comics cover shown here, with the genuine Ira Schnapp logo intact.

Let’s just assume “Robby Reed” is his real name.

More recently, Robby shifted his attention to The Shadow and launched the aforementioned Dial B For Burbank. All the effort, all the research, all the amazing production skill we saw on B For Blog is here… and more. Robby also added a 10 part video documentary called The Shadow Knows covering all aspects of The Shadow, from the pulps to radio to comics to the movies to television. He might have missed the short-lived newspaper comic strip; there’s only so much you can squeeze into 124 minutes.

Uncovering rare photographs and selecting some of the best artwork from George Rozen, Edd Cartier, Jim Steranko, Bernie Wrightson, Mike Kaluta and others, his documentary pretty much gives you the full story – not only of The Shadow and his pulp creator Walter Gibson, but of his many predecessors, successors, and imitators. Interviews and voice-overs from such folks as Gibson, Tollin, and Shadow performers Orson Welles, Bill Johnstone, Brett Morrison, and Alec Baldwin abound.

It’s a stunning effort. All the more stunning: it’s free.

You can download it from the Dial B For Burbank website; each of the 10 chapters in a quality sufficient for quality DVD burning, or in a lower-resolution QuickTime version.

If he sold this effort for, say, twenty bucks on DVD I would give it my highest recommendation. For free, well, heck, he’s not going to pay you to watch it, so that’s as good as it gets.

Fall of the House of Harry Potter Mania!

Fall of the House of Harry Potter Mania!

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

In honor of Daniel Radcliffe’s roving eyes, today here’s a picture of what Emma Watson looks like on a regular movie screen, and what she looks like in IMAX 3-D. Quite a difference, eh? (And if you want to see the photo I almost used here — which is probably not safe for work, and presumably is from Daniel Radcliffe’s stage work in Equus earlier this year in London — it’s here. The caption would have been something like "Hey! That’s not Hermione!")

NPR interviews Arthur Levine, J.K. Rowling’s American editor.

The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles J.K. Rowling.

The Guardian profiles Christopher Little, Rowling’s famously tough agent.

My god, even Eddie Campbell has gotten into the act. Must everyone in the whole wide world write about Harry Potter?

The San Jose Mercury News, running a bit behind, files the standard Harry Potter story (interviews with kids, librarians, and booksellers; lots of impressive numbers; thumbnail history) that everyone else was doing last week.

KansasCity.com thinks the Harry Potter readers will be writing their own fantasy novels in six years. (So, agents, if you start getting a flood of boy wizards in 2014, remember that Kansas City called it first.)

Newsday, from bucolic Long Island, New York, gets a bunch of people to recommend other fantasy books for Potter readers.

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Simpsons: Testify This September 18

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

The Simpsons movie is set to open in less than two weeks, meaning there will be a long, hot stretch of summer with no new Simpsons.  Thus, the anticipation for the 19th season will be even more fevered.  Adding to the frenzy will be a CD, Simpsons: Testify, from the Shout Factory. 

The soundtrack includes the vocal talents of the regular Simpsons’ cast (Dan Castallaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartright, Yeardly Smith, Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer and guest regular Kelsey Grammar) plus musical ringers like Jackson Browne, Weird Al Kankovic, Ricky Gervais, and David Byrne.

For complete track listing, please visit: http://www.shoutfactory.com/press/214/the_simpsons_testify_a_whole_lot_more

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New Star Trek ‘toon feature debuts at Convention

New Star Trek ‘toon feature debuts at Convention

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

Geoffrey James made a feature-length animated film by reprogramming computer games.  The result, the Star Trek film Borg War, with Patrick Stewart, Tim Russ and Brock Peters, will debut at the Official Star Trek Convention 2007 at the Las Vegas Hilton August 10.

According to the press release, Borg War clips have received more than a million downloads online.  If you want to see the trailer for the feature, check out http://www.creationent.com/cal/stlv.htm.

Vegas expects more than 12,000 Trekkies, and a guest list that includes William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Brett Spiner and damn near everybody else who’s been associated with the franchise and remains alive.  Also on the schedule — a Star Trek concert with members of the Las Vegas Philharmonic.

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MIKE GOLD: The Peacock Priorities

MIKE GOLD: The Peacock Priorities

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

About a month ago, our Glenn Hauman turned me on to this story and I’ve got to tell you, I’m still pissed.

According to published reports, which all carry the following verbatim: “NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”

Okay, let me first state the obvious: this man’s head is so far up his ass his eyeballs think they’re hemorrhoids. And I am in the intellectual property business: what ComicMix publishes is intellectual property, and we’d rather not see our various creators’ work, current and forthcoming, ripped off.

The whole thing about copyrights and the Internet is a little wacky and confusing. This country has lousy copyright laws and, to the extent they “protect” anybody, they tend to offer that protection more to the corporate oligarchs than they do to actual creators, let alone to any legitimate sense of history, art and culture. We’re muddling through as best we can, basically using the Grateful Dead’s policies as our starting point.

But Mr. Cotton acts as though he is an idiot. He is either woefully misinformed or he is an out-and-out liar. Intellectual property crime runs into hundreds of billions of dollars each year? Prove it. Smith Barney, hardly a communist organization, quotes the Motion Picture Association as saying such piracy cost them $6 billion in 2005. I realize there’s a lot of other stuff going on – music piracy, books, even comics – but movies and DVDs are the E ticket of the operation. If Mr. Cotton is even remotely correct, these other media have to come up with a minimum of $194,000,000,000.01 to justify his number.

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Behind The Big ComicMix Broadcast

Behind The Big ComicMix Broadcast

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

As the days roll by, I have two stacks of paper here on the Big ComicMixBroadcast Desk. One is labeled “Before San Diego,” the other is marked “Whenever.” That pretty much stands as a metaphor for things here right now as well. However, that doesn’t mean I have lost ANY of the notes I need to share with you from the week:

  •  If you are looking to (*ahem*) familiarize yourself with the actress cast as the new Supergirl on the CW’s Smallville, I found the best place to be here. It is much better than sitting through My Mom Has A Date With A Vampire – trust me!
  • The “test version” of Disney’s new free (with ads) gaming site can be seen here,  but BE CAREFUL. There are still links up fore the old subscription based site.
  • You can get info on all the deals offered & the creators appearing at SDCC from Penny Farthing Press here. A lot of these books can be ordered right from the site, too.
  • If that editorial job offered by IDW Press sounds interesting, you can get a jump on this by going here for more info.
  • You can see samples of Breaking Up by Aimee Friedman and Christine Norrie, you can go to Christine’s site. You get treated to a LOT of Christine’s other work – a real bonus!

Back at you in a couple of days as we continue to edge closer to the San Diego ComicCon, marvel at Harry’s magic boxox office and clear off the shelf for a big pile of new comics and DVDs!!

Harry Potter tops

Harry Potter tops

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

Box Office Mojo declalres Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the top-grossing film this weekend, with a take of more than $77.4 million and a per-theater average of $18,065.  Since opening on Wednesday, Potter has earned more than $140 million.

The rest of the Top Ten include Transformers ($36 million), Ratatouille ($18.019 million), Live Free or Die Hard ($10.875 million), License to Wed ($7.44 million ), 1408 ($5.01 million), Evan Almighty ($4.972 million), Sicko ($2.65 million), Ocean’s Thirteen ($1.91 million), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer ($1.585 million), Captivity ($1.55 million), Pirates of the Caribbean ($1.402 million) and Evening ($1.154 million).

Next weekend, the big premiere is Hairspray, whose major special effect is John Travolta in a dress and a fat suit.  As long as Christopher Walken dances, I’m there.

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