Category: News

The Golden Compass and the Golden Rule, by John Ostrander

  • News
  • November 15, 2007

Well, the film adaptation of the novel The Golden Compass hasn’t even opened yet and the Christian right-wing is already foaming at the mouth about it. The book is the first in a children’s fantasy trilogy called His Dark Materials by British author Phillip Pullman. Pullman is an agnostic/atheist (depending on the article that you read) and has said he is promoting his views through books to children, much as C.S. Lewis did promoting Christianity with The Chronicles of Narnia.

You’ve probably already seen the previews and commercials for The Golden Compass at the movies or on the TV. It’s got Nicole Kidman and a pretty cool looking armored polar bear (which may disturb Stephen Colbert even more than the atheist slant – assuming the writer’s strike ends in a timely fashion for him to comment on it). It’s also got Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, upset. That’s another point in its favor, insofar as I’m concerned, since I really dislike Donohue.

A note or two about the League and Donohue. The League’s full name is The Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights. From their own website: “Founded in 1973 by the late Father Virgil C. Blum, S.J., the Catholic League defends the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.” The League’s office is located in the headquarters of the New York archdiocese. Donohue is its main and some say virtually only employee. The site claims "The league wishes to be neither left nor right, liberal or conservative, revolutionary or reactionary.” Donohue, however, is an adjunct scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation and his frequently bombastic statements link him with the blowhards on the Right. (more…)

Happy 34th birthday, Dana Snyder!

  • News
  • November 14, 2007

Today is Dana Snyder’s 34th birthday.  Most of us only recognize him when he is playing a narcissistic talking milkshake with a penchant for irrational shenanigans, but the voice over artist is a favorite all across the Adult Swim board, not just as Master Shake in the absurdist hit, Aqua Teen Hunger Force.  His voice has been featured on Minoriteam, Squidbillies and even Robot Chicken. 

What most of us didn’t know is that his most famous character, Shake, is pistachio flavored.  Fancy that.  You hear of pistachio ice cream, but you never see a pistachio milkshake.  Why is that?  Too chunky?  But Shake isn’t made from pistachio ice cream: he’s made from pistachio flavored ice cream and that’s different.

Mmmm, pistachio ice cream.

Excuse me.

Residual Effects, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • November 14, 2007

elayne100-1758150I was going to continue my review of art I like, but since last week the new DC comp box arrived and I want to catch up before I write any more about that. Plus, I had a fairly major lifestyle change, more about which later. Meantime, the Writers Guild of America strike is into its second week and, while a resolution still seems fairly far away, I think it’s done a lot of good already in terms of consciousness raising. As with other recent revelations a lot of Americans have had, many people are starting to question why such a modern and powerful country seems so backwards when it comes to its citizens fairly sharing its bounty, whether that means providing health care for all or living up to its humane ideals in its treatment of captives or celebrating and supporting the collective strength of productive workers.

I think the WGA strike has resulted in a lot of folks who’ve never heard anything but anti-union talk since before Ronald Reagan fired the PATCO workers rethinking that knee-jerk (but craftily cultivated) attitude. They’ve learned that about half of WGA members are unemployed or underemployed in a given year, and they don’t buy the studios’ insistence that the strike is “millionaires versus billionaires.” They’ve learned that professional writing, like a lot of other entertainment-related professions that seem all-fun from the outside looking in, in fact represents a lot of hard work and long hours. They’re learning to deeply mistrust the line they’ve been fed for so long, a version of the famous Peter Stone dialogue from 1776 that “most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” Nowadays it’s become imperative to protect the reality of being able to survive. And they understand that residual payments are the way most WGA members survive between the relatively few successful gigs they’re able to score.

(more…)

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More on Marvel’s subscription service

  • News
  • November 13, 2007

mighty-marvel-money-5896004In an interview between ICv2 and Marvel president Dan Buckley, the following exchange takes place:

Do you plan to put up all new issues of the titles that are on the "Current Favorites" or "Young Reader Series" lists?

No, we do not plan on putting up the new issues of "Current Favorites" nor do we plan on keeping complete runs of top selling trades like Astonishing X-Men up on the site for prolonged periods of time.

Did you catch that? We don’t plan on keeping complete runs up for prolonged periods of time. In other words, they plan to remove titles after you’ve already paid for your subscription. If those titles are too successful, you should go out and buy the trade in addition to the money you’ve already paid for the subscription. Nice.

And from our earlier article about Marvel’s new online archive, we quoted Marvel president Dan Buckley from USA Today saying "We did not want to get caught flat-footed." What he should have said is that Marvel didn’t want to get caught flat footed with the Internet again.

Marvel has never been the fastest company to adopt to the Internet. They weren’t the original registrants of marvel.com, for starters. That had already been registered by a software company in Washington by 1995, and later had to be acquired by legal manuverings. Nor were they the original registrants of what the obvious fallback name was, marvelcomics.com.

I was.

(more…)

Countdown Still Counting Down…

In a week with the near future of TV up in the air and Broadway all but dark, we have a few bright spots to share here at ComicMix Radio. As usual, there’ s a big stack of new comics and DVDs landing in the stores this week, plus:

• Sean McKeever tells us why Countdown is still exciting every week
• Break your piggy bank if you want to see Marvel Comics online
• Another Messiah Complex sell out for the X-Men
• NYC’s National ComicCon is days away and we talk to one of the celebrity guests. Farscape fans will be happy to know that Gigi "Chyanna" Edgerly is taking her career farther than ever.

Press The Button! This one is a biggie!!

Women of Color at MoCCA

  • News
  • November 13, 2007

As mentioned previously on ComicMix, last night’s "MoCCA Monday" panel was held in conjunction with Friends of Lulu and the Ormes Society, and featured three enterprising women of color working in the comics field.  Moderator (and Ormes Society founder) Cheryl Lynn Eaton interviewed Rashida Lewis, Jennifer Gonzalez and Alitha Martinez about their various projects, experiences in comics as both fans and creators, and hopes and expectations for the future.

The event was so well-attended that MoCCA volunteers were putting out extra rows of chairs to accommodate the crowd.  This seemed to speak to comics fans’ need to see and support images represented in their favorite hobby, both on the page and behind the drawing board, that aren’t always the white male default.  Even so, the very talented women seemed to want to keep an arm’s distance from the mainstream comics scene.  Lewis has a nice portfolio of work for Marvel Comics but felt constrained by corporate dictates, and is following her muse by painting and working on her upcoming manga title Yume and Ever.  Gonzalez takes her inspiration from Mad Magazine, underground and even horror comics to continue in the alternative world with Too Negative and her other dark humor works.  And Lewis has expanded her Sand Storm series into a downloadable game soon to be available for mobile devices, and is intrigued by the world of animation in general. (more…)

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Mighty Marvel MONEY Society

  • News
  • November 13, 2007

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They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s a shame they didn’t get it right.

Several months after ComicMix started posting serialized new comics for free, several weeks after ComicMix started posting complete previously-published comics for free, and, what, about a year after Newsarama started posting Powers and Kabuki and other titles for free, our friends at Marvel Comics have started reprinting their classic fare online – for ten bucks a month.

"We did not want to get caught flat-footed with kids these days who have the tech that allows them to read comics in a digital format," Marvel president Dan Buckley told USA Today. "Our fan base is already on the Internet. It seemed like a natural way to go."

Well, Dan, welcome to the club. We’ve been saving you a seat for a while now. By the way, since you’re charging so much money for all this, how much cash do the writers and artists get?

Power!, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 13, 2007

So you wanna be a superhero. Okay, where are your powers going to come from?

For years – nay, hundreds of years; nay, thousands of years – the brief answer was: From out there. Somewhere. The first superbeings in popular culture (the only kind there was, back then) were either gods, or pals of gods, or imbued with magical abilities, the origins of which weren’t necessarily clear or important. What was important was…wow! – look at what he/she/it can do! And so much the better if it, whatever spectacular thing it is, is being done for reasons I approve of.

That’s still what’s important. But our minds seem to be wired to want reasons for what we see, which is certainly why there’s science and may be why there’s art and civilization. But, oddly, once a reason is supplied, many of seem to be satisfied and require nothing further. The great cosmic snortlefish created the oceans? Swell, now I know why there’s all that water and what’s for dinner?

By the time Jerry Siegel got around to thinking up Superman in the summer of 1934, magic wasn’t terribly fashionable and it had long since become divorced from religion. But science…ah, science was going to deliver us and besides, it was real. And Jerry was a reader of science fiction, which, in those happy days, at least claimed to be rooted in physics and chemistry and astronomy and stuff like that. So it was natural, maybe inevitable, that he would give his übermensch a science rationale. Guy comes from another planet, sure – that’d be why he could be so powerful. Makes sense. Made sense to Jerry in 1934, probably would have made sense to me when I was the age Jerry was when he created Superman, if I’d thought about it.

(more…)

We’re Going To Get Our Flying Car

  • News
  • November 12, 2007

Baby boomers have been whining about this since the turn of the century. Well, we’re about to get our wish. Sort of.

According to Sharon Gaudin at IDG, we’re about to get our flying car. Terrafugia Inc. is currently creating a prototype of The Transition, a 19-foot, two-seat "roadable light-sport aircraft" that is both road-worthy and air-worthy.

I know you’ve got to start somewhere, but the prototype kind of misses the point. "We’re not going to have a flying car, as people think of it, for a while," chief operating officer Anna Dietrich told IDG. We don’t have the infrastructure to deploy roadable planes. We need runaways instead of roads, and the FAA is likely to demand drivers have a pilot’s license. Typical government buzz-kill crap. Actually, since you’ll need a pilot’s license and you’re restricted to airport take-offs and landings, there’s no real benefit to The Transition over traditional small airplanes which seat twice as many people, except you won’t need to take a cab to the airport.

The flying car will be available in 2009; they’ve already taken orders for about 40 of them. This means there will likely be more Transitions in the air than there ever were Tuckers on the road. The machine will sport an anticipated price of $148,000; chrome detailing will be extra.

(Thanks and a tip of the hat to Rick Oliver.)

A Whale of an Anniversary

  • News
  • November 12, 2007

Today marks the anniversary of the first governmentally exploded whale. Yes, you read right: whale explosion.

37 years ago today, in an effort to dispose of a rotting carcass, the Oregon Highway Division set out to blow up a dead sperm whale with a half ton of dynamite.  The resulting explosion sent blubber flying and totaled a car a quarter of a mile away. The incident was made famous in 1990 when columnist Dave Barry wrote about it with graphic hilarity, and the news footage of the disposal has since gone on to become the fifth most watched video on the Internet, according to the BBC.

And if you’re wondering why "governmentally" exploded was the necessary modifier, it’s because whales have been known to spontaneously blow up by themselves. Recently in Taiwan a dead sperm whale beat its transporters to the punch during a postmortem move when the gas inside its decomposing body built up enough for it to, well, you know what. If you thought your job sucked, just think of the janitor who was responsible for that clean up. Oddly enough, whales are not the only self-explosive animals; maybe just the funniest.

To no one’s surprise, there’s a web site devoted to this at theexplodingwhale.com. What is surprising is that there’s currently a one man show running in Chicago about it. Countdown: The Story of the Exploding Whale runs Wednesday nights at 8pm from October 10th through November 28th at the Apollo Theater, 2540 N Lincoln Avenue. Bring the kiddies.

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