Category: News

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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Fall of the House of Harry Potter Mania!

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

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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. (more…)

Simpsons: Testify This September 18

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

homer_1024x768-3652991The 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

New Star Trek ‘toon feature debuts at Convention

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

borgwartrailerhighres_b-1844248Geoffrey 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

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

mikegold100-9759129About 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. (more…)

Behind The Big ComicMix Broadcast

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

benturpin-1110741As 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!!

A midsummer’s weekly reading

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

Another glorious summery weekend here in the New York metro area, so with the necessary errands all done (why is it that most of them seem to involve spending money?), it’s time to catch you up on what ComicMix columnists have written this past week:

Hey, Mellifluous Mike Raub has reached a milestone with his big ComicMix Broadcast #65 and beyond; does that make him eligible for senior citizen privileges?

Lastly on a personal note, a huge thanks once again to Andrew Wheeler for all his comics link posts during my extended day-job swampitude! I hope to be back here full time before y’all know it (but not before Sandy Eggo)…

RIC MEYERS: Hard Dorm

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

dorm-8367722It’s about time I got around to Tartan – specifically Tartan Asia Extreme, since they’ve been inundating the DVD market with every Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai “horror” movie they can get their well-manicured hands on. I put horror in quotes, because, in reality, many of their releases are actually episodes of The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt with delusions of cinematic grandeur – essentially familiar ghost revenge sagas pumped and/or padded to feature length. I also say “well-manicured,” because, whatever the overall quality of the film they’re presenting, Tartan’s packaging is uniformly classy.

On the one hand, if you’ve yet to have Tartan’s special editions of South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance” trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and Old Boy), acquire them with all speed (and watch them in the aforementioned order, despite their actual release dates). On the other hand, I showed eighteen hours of Tartan’s other Asia Extreme releases at last year’s World Science Fiction Convention and didn’t see a single film that rated above “okay.”

So warned, let’s judge some of their latest releases from the special features perspective. First, there’s Dorm, a Thai award winner that strives to be like Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone. Both concern what happens to a young man in a creepy private school, and while del Toro connects the ghosts to the Spanish Civil War, director Songyos Sugmakanan weaves it within the universal loneliness of an outcast new student. It’s a well-made mood piece more than anything else, and a fine one, but, as previously mentioned, it would have been well-served as a ninety minute (or less) chiller, rather than the 110 minute saga it is.

Tartan attaches an interesting audio commentary with Songyos and some of his cast, in addition to a “making of” (which is really a ten minute on-set home movie of the complications that come of making a film with a pre-teen cast), a “behind the scenes” (which are actually a bunch of short prevue pieces detailing the cast and plot), fittingly eerie deleted scenes, a special effect featurette, and a welcome “character introduction,” which is like a visual program book. All in all, it’s a satisfying job. (more…)

Links & News & Interviews & Cats

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

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Time magazine, which manages to get so much wrong so much of the time, oddly is very accurate and interesting on the subject of LOLcats. [via The Beat]

Not science fiction, but only because it didn’t happen: the British military is denying sending giant, man-eating badgers to terrify the citizen of the Iraqi city of Basra.

The New York Times’s PaperCuts blog looks at the cover of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

David Louis Edelman, at DeepGenre, ponders The End of Science Fiction.

Paranormal romance writer Sherrilyn Kenyon is now listed in Cambridge Who’s Who, and sent out a press release to tout that.

The Readercon brain trust compiled the semi-official canon of Slipstream writing. Great! Now we can go back to arguing about what “slipstream” actually means…

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If you happen to be in Luxembourg (and I can’t tell you how often I’ve found myself in Luxembourg without thinking about it), you might want to pop your head into the Tomorrow Now exhibition at the Mudam Luxembuorg, which “explores the relationship between design and science fiction.”

I’d expected something really weird from the Montgomery Advertiser’s reference to “Faulkner’s Narnia” — just think about that for a moment, if you will – but it turns out that Faulkner University is putting on a stage adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as Narnia. Still, the idea of a Prince Caspian/As I Lay Dying mash-up is still out there for the taking… (more…)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Moe Lester – Román Noir, or Roamin’ Nose?

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

moe-lester-bust-6090552The ungainly fellow pictured alongside is a concoction of my grammar-school days, modeled originally after an authoritarian physical-education teacher who took immense delight in reminding us younger kids that soon we would matriculate to the intermediate grades where he held sway. Talk about your incentives for under-achievement!

Because one must ridicule that which one cannot combat outright, I proceeded to reduce this intimidating presence to a cartoon character – exaggerating his pronounced nose and chin, as well as his intense Texas-redneck dialect – and set about subjecting him to sundry humiliations within the pages of a Big Chief composition tablet. These pages in turn were duly, if guardedly, circulated for the amusement of sympathetic classmates. The confiscation of these prototypical Underground Comics (ca. 1955) was long in coming but inevitable: I was having too much fun in plain view of a cheerless society.

The agent of my character’s simultaneous popular discovery and christening was one Mrs. M.E. Jenkins, third-grade home-room teacher and Tireless Champion of the Status Quo. Inquiring as to the contents of my sketch-pad, Mrs. Jenkins noticed its star player straightaway – and invited me to explain his raison d’etre to the assembled class. I improvised: “Aw, he’s just this goofy ol’ guy who gets in trouble a lot.” Then she asked: “And what is his name, Michael?”

Gulp! Well, now, no way was I going to identify my dreaded life-model – and so I made up an alias on the spot: “His name is Moe Lester, Miz Jenkins.” (Pre-emptive crisis-control tip: Never speak in puns to people who neither Get It nor want to do so.)

“A molester!?!” bellowed Mrs. Jenkins, grabbing me by one ear and leaving the classroom to its own snickering devices as she hupped me down the cavernous hallway to the Principal’s Office.

moe-lester-krime-3231523Not quite nine years of age, and already the author of a Banned Book. Over Mrs. Jenkins’ shrieks of outrage, Principal Howard Amick prevailed with somewhat a saner voice: He found the pages worth a chuckle but, even so, pronounced them a Waste of Talent. Damnation by faint praise, in other words, within a public-school system whose elementary art curriculum consisted of finger-painting and construction-paper cut-outs.

The menacing teacher who had served as an unwitting life-model for Moe Lester found himself transferred before I could reach fourth grade. So whew, already. But others like him have cropped ever since and all along, in the form of schoolyard bullies, college deans, petty bureaucrats, dim-witted newspaper editors, police officers of a maverick bent, and so forth. Abuse of authority is rampant, as if you didn’t know, and those who can’t bring themselves to buy in are well advised to find what humor they can in its ridiculous essence.

A recurrent, if not entirely current, incarnation of Moe Lester dates from 1969-70, when as a college undergraduate I based a revamped version upon such influences as (1) a uniformly lunkheaded and malicious campus-cop department at West Texas Suitcase University, (2) Lyndon “Beans” Johnson, and (3) a big-shot rancher-turned-political agitator named J. Evetts Haley, who at the time was holding forth as the Phantom President of W.T.S.U., my alma mater, such as it was and is – in hopes of marginalizing the on-campus outcroppings (yes, even in the provinces) of such influences as the Panthers and S.D.S. A primary aestheticable influence would involve the likes of Basil Wolverton, Walt Kelly, Gene Ahern, Al Capp, and Boody Rogers – masters of convoluted wordplay and cartoonish exaggeration. Many of the more recent Moe Lester pages, including a 1993 appearance in Heavy Metal and a couple of stories-in-progress with fellow Texas-bred cartoonist Frank Stack, date from times more recent. But the template was struck long beforehand.

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