Category: News

Death of Superman / Reign of the Supermen Double Feature Jan. 13-14

DENVER – November 9, 2018 – Superman’s greatest adventure – his death and rebirth – will be unveiled in a special two-day exclusive theatrical event as Warner Bros. and DC join forces with Fathom Events for a double feature presentation of the previously released The Death of Superman and the first in-theater screening of the all-new Reign of the Supermen nationwide on January 13 and 14, 2019.

As the second half of the double feature, Reign of the Supermen will be seen nationally in theaters ahead of its Warner Bros. Home Entertainment release on Digital starting January 15, 2019, and on Ultra HD™ Blu-ray Combo Pack and Blu-ray™ Combo Pack on January 29, 2019.

The Man of Steel meets his ultimate match when the monstrous, unstoppable creature Doomsday comes to Earth – hell bent on destroying everything and everyone in his path, including the Justice League – in the action-packed The Death of Superman. In the second half of this two-part landmark tale, Reign of the Supermen finds Earth’s citizens – and the Man of Steel’s heroic contemporaries – dealing with a world without Superman. But the aftermath of Superman’s death, and the subsequent disappearance of his body, leads to a new mystery – is Superman still alive? The question is further complicated when four new super-powered individuals – Steel, Cyborg Superman, Superboy and the Eradicator – emerge to claim themselves as the ultimate hero. In the end, will any of them prove to be the real Man of Steel?

Fathom Events, Warner Bros. and DC present The Death of Superman / Reign of the Supermen Double Feature in more than 500 select movie theaters on Sunday, January 13 at 12:55 p.m. and Monday, January 14 at 8:00 p.m. (all local times), through Fathom’s Digital Broadcast Network (DBN). For a complete list of theater locations, visit the Fathom Events website (theaters and participants are subject to change).

The two-part film is an animated adaptation of “The Death Of Superman,” DC’s’ landmark 1992-93 comic phenomenon, and features an all-star voice cast led by Jerry O’Connell (Carter, Bravo’s Play  by Play, Stand By Me), Rebecca Romijn (X-Men, The Librarians) and Rainn Wilson (The Office, The Meg) as the voices of Superman, Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, respectively. The trio is joined by Jason O’Mara (The Man in the High Castle, Terra Nova) as Batman, Rosario Dawson (Sin City, Rent, Daredevil) as Wonder Woman, Shemar Moore (S.W.A.T., Criminal Minds) as Cyborg, Nathan Fillion (Castle, The Rookie) as Green Lantern/Hal Jordan, Matt Lanter (Timeless, 90210) as Aquaman, Christopher Gorham (Covert Affairs, Insatiable) as The Flash, and Nyambi Nyambi (Mike & Molly, The Good Fight) as Martian Manhunter, as well as Cress Williams (Black Lightning) as Steel, Cameron Monaghan (Gotham) as Superboy, Patrick Fabian (Better Call Saul) as Hank Henshaw & Cyborg Superman, Charles Halford (Constantine) as Bibbo Bibbowski and The Eradicator, and Tony Todd (Candyman) as Darkseid.

“Superman is one of the most iconic Super Heroes of all time, and this double feature event will give fans an opportunity to come together to celebrate the franchise,” Fathom Events VP of Studio Relations Tom Lucas said. “We are excited to partner with Warner Bros. again to bring back The Death of Superman and introduce fans to Reign of the Supermen.”

“Warner Bros. is proud to join forces with Fathom Events to culminate the year-long celebration of Superman’s 80th anniversary with a double-feature big screen presentation of The Man of Steel’s most heralded adventure,” said Mary Ellen Thomas, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Vice President, Family & Animation Marketing. “’The Death of Superman’ was a monumental moment in comics history, and these films – expertly produced by Warner Bros. Animation and DC – capture the enormity of that story in terms of both action and emotion. Seeing both films, on the big screen, gives the fans another vehicle to unite and celebrate this beloved Super Hero and this landmark tale.”

Stan Lee: 1922-2018

Stan “The Man” Lee has died at the age of 95, according to news reports.

If you need biographical information about his life and his achievements, we strongly recommend his autobiographies Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee and Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir, because no one could tell Stan’s story better than he could himself. (We presume if you read ComicMix, you already know how important he was to comics. ‘Nuff said.)

Our condolences to his family, friends, and fans.

 

 

Pixar Unveils The Art of Elastigirl

  • News
  • November 11, 2018

HELEN PARR (voice of Holly Hunter), known in the Super world as Elastigirl, hung up her supersuit to raise the family with husband Bob, leaving their crime-fighting days behind them. But when she’s tapped to lead a campaign to bring the Supers back into the spotlight, she finds she can still bend, stretch and twist herself into any shape needed to solve the trickiest of mysteries. In short, she’s still got it. That’s good news, too, because a new villain is emerging—unlike any they’ve ever seen before.

Bonus Clip: Elastigirl Theme Song

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Concept art features design work by Bob Pauly and Tony Fucile, highlighting the Elasticycle and Elastigirl’s costume.

Animating the Bike Sequence

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Final Season of The Librarians Checks in on Disc Tuesday

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS

There can be only one, after all. In Season 4 of The Librarians, Flynn Carsen (Noah Wyle) receives a dire warning from the past that there can only be one Librarian lest a civil war break out among the Librarians once again. This pushes Flynn to make a dire decision of his own and Eve Baird (Rebecca Romijn) to make a choice she doesn’t want to make. Her hesitancy causes the Library to put the team on trial to decide which one will finally take on the mantle of the one and true Librarian. The trial, however, leads to unexpected consequences that threaten the very existence of the Library itself.

A direct spin-off from The Librarian film series, the TV series features fan-favorite characters and continuity of plot lines with the films.

DVD SPECIAL FEATURES

  • Six Writer & Director Episode Vlogs
  • Audio Commentaries on every episode

CAST

Rebecca RomijnThe X-Men franchise, Femme Fatale
Noah Wyle TV’s ER, Donnie Darko, A Few Good Men
Christian Kane Angel, Leverage”, Just Married
John Larroquette Night Court, Stripes, The Practice
Lindy Booth Dawn of the Dead (2004), Wrong Turn, Cry Wolf
and John Harlan Kim Neighbours, The Pacific

PROGRAM INFORMATION
Type: TV-on-DVD
Rating: TV-14
Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama, Comedy, TV-on-DVD
Closed-Captioned: N/A
Subtitles: French, Spanish, English SDH
Feature Run Time: 504 Minutes
DVD Format: 16×9 (1.78:1) Presentation
DVD Audio: English 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio

National Graphic Novel Writing Month 2018

National Graphic Novel Writing Month Day 7: Sorry, There’s Math

  • News
  • November 7, 2018

National Graphic Novel Writing Month 2018

Writing a comic script is an extremely regimented process. You’re often working within an extremely tight format that leaves little room for error.

John Ostrander explained it for us a while back:

First number: the number of pages. Right now, your monthly comic book is 22 pages long. Let’s say you’ve been asked to do a fill-in story or a complete in one story for a given book. There are certain space limitations you need to take into account.

How many panels are in a page? Well, your first page is usually the splash page which means one big panel. This page also usually has the title of the story and the credits box for the creators. Here’s some rules of thumb for the other pages: when there’s a lot of action, you use fewer panels per page. If it’s a talk scene, you can have more. I generally figure that it will average out to five panels a page. The splash page is one panel so you have 21 pages times five panels. We do the match and the whole thing totals 106 panels in which to tell your story.

That’s not a lot of room to work. And as we said earlier, every panel must convey an action. You have to be able to tell your entire chunk of story under those constraints, which means you’re going to have to make every shot count. Mark Waid explains:

In a 22-page comic, figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a story, so every panel he wastes conveying (a) something I already know, (b) something that’s a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or (c) something I don’t need to know is a demonstration of lousy craft. Comics are expensive. Don’t make me resent the money I spend buying yours. Every single moment in your script must either move the story along or demonstrate something important about the characters—preferably both—and every panel that does neither is a sloppy waste of space.

The good news is that if you’re doing your own graphic novel, you can write to any length you need– but you still can’t waste any panels. So you have to figure out what actions tell your story, and that means that you need to make an outline… and that’s the next part.

National Graphic Novel Writing Month 2018

National Graphic Novel Writing Month Day 4: Don’t be a Player

  • News
  • November 4, 2018

National Graphic Novel Writing Month 2018

Day 4 of #NaGraNoWriMo! Last time, I told you that a full script for comics can look very deceptively like somethings it should never be… and those are plays: both traditional stage plays and screenplays.

Why? Because they simply don’t describe the same things.

The single most important difference between a play script and a comic book script is that a comic story is made up of single frozen moments that express something, most often either an action or an emotion.

Plays don’t do that. Plays describe ongoing action and motion, and comics are not built to do that, as they’re made out of single images. You’re not writing in documentary, you’re writing in newspaper photographs.

Take one of the most famous photographs of all time:

You can’t tell if someone just put on his hat. You can’t even tell if someone is blinking. What you can tell is that each person is doing a specific action, some of which are in reaction to other actions.

That’s the best you can hope for– that each person in the shot gets an action, and that the image expresses something.

David Mack, author of the WWII dark fantasy thriller The Midnight Front, wrote about this for us previously:

When describing a scene in a film/TV script, one can describe continuous actions with great economy. For instance, a line of action in a screenplay might read, “Porter gets up from the table, picks up the phone, and uses it to smash in Resnick’s skull.” The reason this direction works in a screenplay is that it’s a blueprint for a motion picture—emphasis on motion. That one sentence might end up being depicted with a half-dozen different shots edited together in a film, but in the script, one needs to describe only the continuous series of actions.

Comic-book scripts are not blueprints of moving action but instructions from which an artist will render sequences of static images that imply movement by breaking down an action into decisive images across any number of panels.

What that means for the story you’re telling is the one thing you may have hoped you’d never have to deal with as a writer… math.

 

The Incredibles 2 Releases Bonus Features

In case you missed it this summer, Disney Home Entertainment is releasing The Incredibles 2 on disc this Tuesday, giving you something to do after you vote. In anticipation of this release, the studio has begun sending out some of the bonus material to be found on the Blu-ray.

For starters there’s the Fashion of Edna Mode.  Edna “E” Mode (voice of Brad Bird) possesses impeccable design sense, a keen understanding of cutting-edge technology and an unmatched skillset. A creative visionary, she longs for the return of Supers so she can once again create functional yet cutting-edge supersuits.

Concept Art – Edna Mode Fashion Models – Concept art features design work by Deanna Marsigliese and Tony Fucile, highlighting Edna Mode’s fashion show and her rival supersuit designer, Galbaki, who craves fame and attention yet ultimately did not make the final cut of the film.

There’s also a deleted scene called Fashion Show that apparently never made it out of the animatic stage.

And we also have Designing Fabulous

.

National Graphic Novel Writing Month 2018

National Graphic Novel Writing Month Day 3: Plot First vs. Full Script

  • News
  • November 3, 2018

National Graphic Novel Writing Month 2018

Day 3 of #NaGraNoWriMo. Now that you’ve decided the format your graphic novel is going to take, you have to decide how you’re going to write it. For that, we have to discuss the two major schools of comics writing: Plot First vs. Full Script.

Plot First is occasionally known as “Marvel method” because Stan Lee used it a lot when he was creating the Marvel Universe and writing eight books a month in the 60s— he would pitch a plot to artists like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, etc., discuss it with them and maybe type up a quick page or two for notes. Then the artist would pencil the story, after which Stan would script the captions and dialogue to fit the art. The advantage for the writer is knowing what the art looks like, and how much room there is for text, when scripting. The disadvantage(?) is that the writer loses control over pacing and composition of the art, and may get surprised when the art comes back and there’s this silvery surfer in the middle of the story, or some other addition or omission. We don’t recommend this method at all unless you have an existing relationship with the artist and editor and trust them.

It can also lead to a sort of laziness on behalf of the writer: Frank Miller’s recent one line in a plot that John Romita Jr. turned into TEN PAGES of artwork.

Full Script: writing a complete script with panel descriptions, based on which the artist then draws the story. Advantages: the writer has more control over layout and pacing, although an artist will still find ways to misinterpret your script. Disadvantages: it takes longer to write (and may not save the artist any time), and you may need to tweak your dialogue and captions to fit the art anyway.

Because we don’t want to slough too much of the writing onto the artist for our purposes, we’re going to discuss Full Script. There’s one other method, but we’re going to save that for a bit later in our discussion, because we’re going to use elements of it in writing our script.

So what does a full script for comics look like? Well, it can look very deceptively like something it should never be… which we’ll discuss tomorrow.

DreamWorks’ She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Moves Debut to Nov. 13

  • News
  • November 2, 2018

With fan anticipation reaching a fever pitch, DreamWorks Animation Television is excited to announce that She-Ra and the Princesses of Power will now debut November 13th exclusively on Netflix. 

To celebrate the earlier release, DreamWorks has released a new trailer unveiling never-before-seen footage and a preview of the series theme song titled “Warriors.”

Inspired by the popular ‘80s animated series, DreamWorks She-Ra and the Princesses of Power tells the epic story of an orphan named Adora, who leaves behind her former life in the evil Horde when she discovers a magic sword that transforms her into the mythical warrior princess She-Ra. Along the way, she finds a new family in the Rebellion as she unites a group of magical princesses in the ultimate fight against evil.

 

Aimee Carrero (Elena of Avalor) stars as Adora/She-Ra, Karen Fukuhara (Suicide Squad) as Glimmer, AJ Michalka (The Goldbergs) as Catra, Marcus Scribner (black-ish) as Bow, Reshma Shetty (Royal Pains) as Angella, Lorraine Toussaint (Orange is the New Black) as Shadow Weaver, Keston John (The Good Place) as Hordak, Lauren Ash (Superstore) as Scorpia, Christine Woods (Hello Ladies) as Entrapta, Genesis Rodriguez (Time After Time) as Perfuma, Jordan Fisher (Grease Live!) as Seahawk, Vella Lovell (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) as Mermista, Merit Leighton (Katie and Alexa) as Frosta, Sandra Oh (Killing Eve) as Castaspella, and Krystal Joy Brown (Motown: The Musical) as Netossa.

The Orville Flies Homes Dec. 11

THE ORVILLE THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
From Emmy®* Award-winning executive producer and creator Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, Ted, Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey), The Orville is a live-action, one-hour space adventure series set 400 years in the future that follows The U.S.S. Orville, a mid-level exploratory spaceship. Its crew, both human and alien, face the wonders and dangers of outer space, while also dealing with the problems of everyday life. The ensemble series stars MacFarlane as the ship’s Captain, Ed Mercer, and Adrianne Palicki (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Friday Night Lights) as his ex-wife, who’s assigned as his First Officer. Additional cast members include Penny Johnson Jerald (24, The Larry Sanders Show), Scott Grimes (American Dad!, Justified), Peter Macon (Shameless, Bosch), Halston Sage (Neighbors, Goosebumps), J Lee (American Dad!, The Cleveland Show), Mark Jackson (That Royal Today) and Chad L. Coleman (The Walking Dead, The Wire).

*2002, 2016, 2017: Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance; Family Guy
2002: Outstanding Music and Lyrics; “Family Guy”

SPECIAL FEATURES

  • The Orville at PaleyFest 2018
  • Inside Look
  • Directed By
  • The First Six Missions
  • Designing the Future
  • The Orville Takes Flight
  • The Science of The Orville: Quantum Drive
  • The Science of The Orville: Alien Life
  • Crafting Aliens
  • A Better Tomorrow

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Street Date:              December 11, 2018
Screen Format:        Widescreen 1.78:1
Audio:                       English Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles:                  English SDH, Spanish, French
Total Run Time:        Approx. 526 minutes
U.S. Rating:             TV-14

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