Category: News

In last Monday’s New York Times Media Watch columns, they ran a list of the ten films released this year that had the highest box office ion their opening weekends. What’s amazing to me is that the top five (Marvel’s The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Hunger Games, Amazing Spider-Man and Twilight: Breaking Dawn: Part 2) can all be classified in the fantasy genre, or, as I like to call it, nerd stuff.

Of the next five (Skyfall, Brave, Ted, Madagascar 3 and Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax), three are aimed primarily at children, and one is a James Bond film, which has its own separate but overlapping geek audience. Only Ted could be considered a movie aimed at what was once the wide, mainstream audience, and even then, because it is an R-rated comedy, that limits the wideness.

When did our beloved nerd culture become so dominant? I was certainly the only girl in my high school (which was all girls) who read superhero comics, and if anyone else read science fiction or fantasy, they were in the closet about it.

Even in the 1980s, when Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman were publishing work that attracted mainstream media attention, there wasn’t much spillover to the medium of graphic storytelling.

When I first went to work for DC, the most common reaction I encountered when people learned what I did was, “Do they still publish those?”

For that matter, even today, the success of the movies listed above doesn’t do much for comics. There’s a history of tie-in films boosting the sale of books (for example, Gone With the Wind), but that doesn’t always overlap to your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, or comic book store.

Still, I don’t think fans like us can claim to be outsiders anymore. We might not be the cool kids, but we aren’t unwanted loners, either. What are today’s nerds about?

Is it Steampunk? Is it libertarian politics? Are there still obscure rock bands to follow, or has everything been American Idol’d to a bland pap. What distinguishes the kids getting beat up and/or ostracized today?

Besides being queer, I mean.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman and This Week’s New DC

Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode, The Snowmen. Travelers are advised against the use of weapons, teleportation, and religion.

In this episode, it looks like it’ll be a fabulous evening’s apocalypse, but The Doctor and Rose find out that there’s a chance they may be in danger during…

The End of the World
by Russell T Davies
directed by Euros Lyn“Moisturize me, moisturize me!”

Rose wants to visit the future – The Doctor takes her to the year 5.5/apple/26, five billion years on, the day the Earth will be destroyed by the sudden expansion of the sun as it dies.  Humanity has long since moved on throughout the galaxy, and the death of their homeworld is seen as more of a celebratory experience.  Platform One, a massive force-shielded spacestation is the floating ballroom for a huge party to watch the planet get the finger, and that’s where Rose and The Doctor have landed.  Enjoying the opportunity to hobnob with extraterrestrials, Rose begins to notice that some…THING is wrong on Platform One.  The force fields are brought down, and Lady Cassandra stands revealed as behind a plot to put everyone in danger solely to collect on a massive compensation suit.  As The Doctor says, five billion years later, it all comes down to money.

We’ve seen in the first episode how well the new Who crew can do a story set on Earth, so they chose to impress us quickly and go big with a quick trip into the future.  A wide assortment of wonderful makeup, mechanical effects and CGI provide a solid and believable experience, with no “wobbly sets” as they playfully reference in the commentary and on confidential the occasional cheesiness of the original series.  Davies keeps a good balance of the dramatic and the silly here.  Billie Piper gets some great scenes as she comes to grips with the fact that she hopped into the proverbial car with a total stranger, and stands a severe chance of getting burned over it. Literally.

There’s quite a few first appearances in this episode.  In addition to recurring characters like the Face of Boe and Cassandra O’Brien, it’s the first appearance of the Psychic Paper. Another brilliant little idea to explain how easily the Doctor can get into any situation so smoothly, it’s a tool that’s rapidly become as commonplace and popular as the Sonic Screwdriver.  It’s also the first time a running concept was used clearly – when the TARDIS travels into the future, the Time Vortex is red, when they travel into the past, it’s blue.  When Tennant and Smith take over the role, that color theme carries through to their costumes – check the colors of Ten’s outfits, and Eleven’s bowtie.  And assuming you already know how the season ends, you might notice this is the first mention of “Bad Wolf” – two aliens are chatting, and one mentions that this is “The bad wolf scenario”.

Davies starts another tradition going here as well – spectacular characters who appear once alone yet appear fully formed.  Jabe of the Forest of Cheem is the first person to sacrifice herself to help The Doctor,  She’s also the first to reveal a bit more about the Great Time War. It was mentioned in the previous episode; the war was the reason the Nestene food planets were lost, and The Doctor admits he couldn’t stop it.  But here we learn that the rest of the Time Lords are gone, and his world is destroyed.  The details are yet to come, but it’s a major departure from the previous series.  The Time Lords were always seen as unassailable, undefeatable.  For them to fall shows that no one in the universe is infallible.  And that carries through to The Doctor.  In the new series, he makes mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes put people in danger.  It gives the Companions a chance to save the day, and generally increases the sense of drama: The Doctor will not always have the answer.

Here’s the Star Trek Into Darkness announcement teaser. So what do we know so far?

When the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise is called home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within Starfleet has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis. With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction. As our heroes are propelled into an epic chess game of life and death, love will be challenged, friendships will be torn apart, and sacrifices must be made for the only family Kirk has left: his crew.

Star Trek: Into Darkness brings back Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin, John Cho, and Bruce Greenwood, and adds Benedict Cumberbatch and Peter Weller to the cast. It’s written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Damon Lindelof, and directed by J.J. Abrams. The film is scheduled to hit theaters May 17, 2013.

Hosted by New Pulp Authors Derrick Ferguson and Thomas Deja, the Better In The Dark podcast takes a look at documentary filmmaking in their latest episode.

141. Better in the Dark Get Reel-y Real!
In this episode, Derrick and Tom go out of their comfort zone to discuss the rather large world of documentaries. Join the Boys Outta Brooklyn as the talk about some of their favorite docs, examine the way the genre has transformed and become more entertaining that some fiction films, and celebrate some of the best documentarians out there! Plus, lots of talk about an election that has since passed, and a reference to a forthcoming episode that’s already aired! You know, Troy Duffy thinks this show is unfair, so get to clicking!

Listen to Better In The Dark episode 141 here.

Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode, The Snowmen. Come along.

Shop girl Rose Tyler was not expecting much to change in her life.  In a very brief time, she faces down animated plastic shop dummies, teams up with a 900 year old time traveler, and helps save the world.  There’s no doubt why the episode was named after her…

ROSE
By Russell T. Davies
Directed by Keith Boak“Nice to meet you, Rose; run for your life!”

After a long dark silence, peppered only with books, audio adventures, comics, magazines and…well, ok, but no new TV adventures, Doctor Who returned to the air with a lot to prove, and not a lot of time to do it in.  Russell T. Davies had to grab the new audience, and at the same time, assure the old fans that the show was in good hands.  He achieved it all brilliantly.

Billie Piper as Rose Tyler is very much a new style of Companion for The Doctor – sure of herself, independent, and much more likely to fight than to scream.  We also see another change to the companions; we meet her family and friends.  The glorious Camille Coduri as her Mom, Jackie, and her boyfriend Mickey as played by Noel Clarke are different from other Companion’s family in they’re not dead, usually killed by the monster of the week, if we see them at all.  They give Rose more of a grounding; she’s happy to go off and explore the world, but there’s people waiting for her at home, and that naturally brings them back to Earth often, something that doesn’t hurt the budget.

And at the center, Christopher Eccleston as a very different and modern Doctor.  His clothing is nondescript, his manner gruff, his opinion of Humanity seemingly dismissive, but when he speaks in their defense, it’s clear he loves them.  His tongue is sharp; his first few lines to Rose are delightful, telling her to go off and eat her beans on toast, but congratulating her for coming up with a logical explanation for what she’s seeing. But shortly later, he gives a peek at the emotion he’s feeling every day, about he can actually feel the planet spinning under his feet.

Davies and co chose well for the series first villain; the Nestene Consciousness and its plastic commandos the Autons.  Only seen twice in the original series, they were obscure enough that it’d please the fans, but easy enough to explain to the newcomers.  From the dramatic scenes of gun-handed mannequins taking people out left and right in a mall to the ridiculous scene of Mickey getting kidnapped by a garbage bin, the show did what it always did well – take commonplace things and make them scary.

In this episode’s commentary, we hear about how they chose to keep the first appearance of The Doctor very underplayed, as opposed to giving him a big dramatic entrance. Also, the episode ran sort of short, and the scene with The Doctor talking about how he can feel the rotation of the Earth was added later, and then re-shot, as Chris decided he could do it better. One of the few times they had time to re-shoot something for quality.

The episodes of Confidential on this first series are the edited versions that appeared later on the website and other locations, not the full half-hour version that were run after the original broadcast.  They’re still quite interesting to get a look at how the show was put together.  It’s interesting to see the interviews with Chris Eccleston, both here and in additional extras on the disc.  Remember by this point he’d already decided to leave, they’d already filmed the whole series, and they already had his regeneration in the can.  But he’s happily giving these interviews, talking about what a joy it was, and gamefully smiling and nodding when asked how long he plans to stay with the series.

In one episode they do a perfect job of reintroducing the character to a new audience.  It was kept simple, but let everyone know the show was very much to be taker seriously. The special effects were very much up to modern standards, and the writing of Davies did not talk down to the show’s traditional primary audience of children.  Like it had been before, there was no guarantee the show would fly, but it got a damn fine running start.

Artwork © Thomas Floyd

Here’s a sneak peek at an illustration-in-progress by Thomas Floyd from KI-GOR THE JUNGLE LORD, “War of the Beast-Men”, written by Martin Powell.

Coming from Moonstone Books in 2013.