Category: News

MATT RAUB: The Pirates 3peat

johnny_depp3-1402989So here we are, smack-dab in the middle of the unforgiving Summer Blockbuster Land of 2007, we’ve already got 300 Spartans, a few talking turtles, a spider, an ogre, and a whiney Kurt Russell under our collective belts, and we still have so much more to get to. But here we are with the culmination of the summer in Disney’s third installment to their Pirates of the Caribbean franchise entitled World’s End.

Now, going into this film I had pretty high expectations, which I normally don’t, but this film had enough build up in the first two films to get just about anybody excited for an outcome. So with that said, I had a few issues with the movie as a whole, but before we get to that, so as not to ruin tradition, lets break down the film into the specified categories.

Starting off with the best element of the film, the acting, I was more than pleased with the performances of the cast. Geoffrey Rush returns as Captain Barbosa and did an amazing job playing off of Depp’s Captain Jack. His performance is full of creepy glances and pirate lingo which I had completely no idea what it meant, but it still sounded awesome. Knightley was impressive in stark comparison to her role in the first film, this film was meant as the “all grown up” point in her life where she’s no longer the dainty, naïve Governor’s daughter, and has embraced the pirate way of life. Orlando Blooms role, while large in the last 20 minutes of the film, was somewhat lacking in the other 2 hours and 40 minutes. There seemed to be way too many different parties to give enough screen time to each of them. Bill Nighy did an amazing job, of course.

Which brings us to the final member of our massive leading cast, Captain Jack Sparrow. I only had two major problems with this film, we’ll get to number two later, but the biggest one was the unnecessary, force fed comic relief in this film. It isn’t even considered to be comic relief because it consumes 90% of the movie, which just makes the other 10% well needed dramatic relief. I was happy in the first two films where our comedy came mostly from our two would be pirates Pantel and Ragetti, and the occasional wackiness from Depp’s Sparrow, but in this film, Captain Jack ends up going crazy in Davey Jones’ locker, which apparently makes everything, yes everything he says sound like it was written by Larry David. Now normally I’m the first one to complain that a movie is taking itself too seriously, but this became ridiculous after three hours of zany one liners and slapstick visual jokes. I was rooting for the major death at the end of the movie, only because the audience needed a shellshock to help us realize that it wasn’t a Night at the Apollo.

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Manga Nobels established

Anime News Network reports, "In a press conference following a meeting of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s cabinet on Tuesday morning, Japanese Foreign Minister Tarō Asō announced the creation of an ‘International Manga Award’ for manga artists and creators from outside Japan."

Asō, known for being an outspoken manga fan, said "I want to make the award like the Nobel Prize of manga, to enhance the voice of Japanese pop culture and subculture." Asō will lead the task force which will establish the award, funding for which will come from the Japan Foundation, Japan’s endowment to support international relations.

Candidates for the prize will come from general applications and recommendations by publishers in Japan and overseas. Slice of SciFi reports, "June 22 will be the day the Award Committee, comprised of manga artists and publishers, releases their list of final nominees for the award. Japan’s governmental body of ministers will pick the winner and three runner-ups on July 2, 2007."

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Kesel and the Jets

nationaltriumph-5484738In the category of "familiar names in not so familiar places," editor Barbara Randall Kesel (late of CrossGen, Dark Horse and DC) has a new gig — overseeing a comic entitled The National Triumph League, which will be cowritten by New York Jets fullback Darian Barnes.

The Jets’ official site is already publicizing this venture, including an interview with Barnes where he discusses the comic (about 4:50 into the video) and mentions their nascent web home

A bit more from the book’s colorist, Jason Embury: "The National Triumph League is the story of super powered teams, battling to capture villains in a competitive environment for points, and deals with the real life issues concerning the pressure and notoriety of being a professional athlete and life in the public eye.  A fun new twist on standard superhero fare."  Barnes is cowriting the book with Josh Goldfond, and the art will be by Jim Muniz, with coloring by Embury and lettering by Jason Hanley.

Barnes notes that the book is still looking for a publisher, but one assumes that a professional NFL player won’t have any trouble funding this kind of enterprise.

Superman takes Bollywood

Today’s YouTube find comes courtesy of BoingBoing, so you’ve probably already seen it, but what the heck. Presenting Govinda as Superman and Kimi Katkar as Spider-Woman:

Govinda’s shoulders may not be all that broad, but he really knows how to work that cape. I wish they still made American musicals like this…

Happy anniversary, Star Wars!

A long time ago (30 years ago today) in a galaxy far, far away… actually, for me it was the old Fox Theater on Route 347 in Setauket, on a screen the size of a battleship… a little film called Star Wars was released.

Worlds lived, worlds died, and the cinematic universe would never be the same again.

As for us, we here at ComicMix will be pulling up all sorts of personal memories all day, along with other Star Wars oddities we find on the net, and John Ostrander is already out at Celebration IV in Los Angeles signing copies of the new Star Wars: Legacy trade paperback at the Dark Horse booth with Jan Duursema, so if there’s any breaking news, he’ll let us know.

But really, how could we be bigger fanboys than Steve Sansweet? He literally wrote the book on the matter.

In the meantime, to kick things off, here’s a little bit of what we love about it.

Congrats, George. Love It. So when’s Clone Wars coming out?

MICHAEL DAVIS: I’m with the band… not.

michael-davis100-9345750I am a huge believer in personal choice. I think that you should be allowed to make up your mind freely on all matters. If you don’t like something you have every right to say so. If you do like something then you have the right to say that also. You don’t have to believe what I believe and vice versa.

For the most part I’m a liberal.  Well I’m a liberal except when it comes to violent crime, then I’m so conservative it hurts. Get it? Violent crime? Hurts?

No?

I firmly believe that if you commit a violent crime you should rot in jail or rot in Hell. If it were up to me, first you would rot in jail, then you would rot in Hell. But hey, that’s my belief. You can believe in rehabilitation if you want to, but let me see you hire that convicted murderer when he gets out of jail. Me? Oh hell no. Now that I think of it, I’m very conservative on many things. The reason I have not joined the conservative ranks fully is because they tend to want to tell you what to think. Usually it’s under some “moral” banner. They also throw God in the mix a lot.

Funny, as much as they bring up God, they never bring up “free will.” That seems to never make the moral argument. Also, some seem to think that their God is the God. That’s OK but why can’t I believe that my God is the true God without them calling me wrong or wanting to change my mind? Failing both, some conservatives would want me to simply disappear.

I think that whatever you believe is your right and if I disagree that’s all it is, a disagreement. We don’t have to go to war as some countries do. I think that disagreeing on faith to the point of war is the single stupidest thing on the planet. I frankly don’t believe that Allah has a problem with Jehovah.

So I hope it’s clear from my too long intro that I believe people should think for themselves. So, why don’t they?

I go to this great Karaoke bar in L.A. The KJ (that’s the host) loves Elvis so someone in my Karaoke group suggested that we do an Elvis night for his birthday. The sheer venom that rocketed across the insuring emails made it look like Elvis took part in 9/11. This from a group of people I love hanging out with. These are good people. Every year I get invited to great New Years Eve Parties given by A-list celebrities. I prefer to be at this Karaoke bar because the people are just really cool. (more…)

Americans spend half of their leisure time online

It’s not all that surprising, but still shocking when you see it spelled out: Americans now spend roughly half of their spare time online during a typical weekday, according to the Netpop I Play report from Media-Screen, and more than half of this time is spent on entertainment and communications activities.

Forty-eight percent of young broadband users say they learn about entertainment through their online community of social networking sites, blogs, review sites and video sharing sites. Only a quarter of them say they learn about entertainment options through television. And that’s why Paul McCartney debuted his latest music video on YouTube last night.

Meanwhile, TV networks devalue their own brands by running advertisements for shoddy products, as Mark Cuban points out — which, come to think of it, has an eerie parallel in DC and Marvel Comics’s recent moves of dumping unsold ad inventory to put in house ads or ads for comics stores.

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Grindhouse genre comics

3696_2_1-8829927Greg Hatcher has an incredibly fun essay up about what he calls grindhouse comics: comics that are so heavily steeped in the pulp traditions that they make your teeth ache. Think Blade before he went Hollywood, and then dial it down a bit:

And it was a pretty easy leap, talking amongst fans, to start kicking around the idea of grindhouse comics. But here we ran into a little bit of a snag. Because, really, to be fair, from their beginnings on up through the early 70’s, they’re ALL “grindhouse” comics. That’s just the way it was….

The short version — for the sake of boiling it down to something that I can use here, I’d narrow the definition of ‘grindhouse comics’ to the comics I thought of in my youth as the B list. Comics that were, y’know, just okay. These were the books that I knew I could walk in on any time, that I knew would achieve a base level of entertainment that I would enjoy.

But I would not ever worry about missing an issue of one of these titles. They’d be there waiting for me when I got around to them again and nothing would change: they’d still be fun, continuity-free, amusing ways to kill half an hour. They have that Roger Corman vibe, that cheerful sense of, yeah, this is just something dumb and completely without social merit. We know it. So let’s all stop thinking about Art and just have a good time. Floor it.

Truthfully they were what I read in between issues of the books I REALLY liked. Used to be, when your favorite book was hung up because the writer was taking too long to craft his brilliant epic or the artist was late AGAIN, we just bought something else and read that instead. I did, anyway. You get a hanker on for a comic book, you want a comic book, damn it. (Nowadays I think the alternative impulse buy’s gotten to be too expensive a proposition for most of us; we end up just taking to the internet and bitching about late books instead.)

Go take a look at the article to see what he’s talking about, and you might get a better idea as to why everybody is trying to remake those kinds of books today, from Astro City’s Dark Age to Waid & Perez’s Brave and Bold, which Hatcher points to as Exhibit A of a grindhouse book — which makes sense, as it’s a double feature and all.

Our idea of a great grindhouse comic: Revenge Of The Prowler.

Artwork copyright Price, Snyder III and Truman. All Rights Reserved.

Sin City video games

sincitymarvwhite200-2773492Red Mile Entertainment has cut an exclusive worldwide licensing deal to develop and publish video games based on the Sin City graphic novels by Frank Miller. 

“Taking Sin City into the world of video games is very exciting – games offer a whole new way to bring audiences into Sin City,” said Frank Miller. “The Red Mile team has impressed me with its dedication to creating Sin City video games that will remain true to Sin City as I’ve always seen it.”

Red Mile is best known for their “Heroes of the Pacific” game, and are currently working on games based on MTV’s show Jackass. The financial terms of the deal were not announced.

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CBS credits Kyle Baker for Ghost Chimp M.D.

ghostchimp-3015220We noted back on Monday that Craig Ferguson had been touting on CBS’s Late Late Show had been pushing a show called Ghost Chimp, M.D. — a show that seemed to be exactly like an idea that Kyle Baker had developed for CBS back in the 90’s, and wrote up for an article in Vibe magazine.

But now we are happy to report that Kyle Baker has now been credited by CBS with, in Kyle’s words, THE WORST IDEA OF ALL TIME and all is right with the world again. Watch for yourself:

Ghost Chimp M.D. © Kyle Baker. All rights reserved.