You have to admire Kevin Smith. Growing up in New Jersey, he found himself a circle of likeminded friends who took his scripts and performed them in a sort of comedy revue that wowed audiences in Red Bank. Inspired, he went on to Vancouver and film school where he met his producing muse, Scott Mosier. Back home, they scraped together $27,500, recruited Smith’s friends and shot the semi-autobiographical [[[Clerks]]]. The black and white film, mostly a series of vignettes tied together by the two leads, wowed audiences and became a cult hit.

From there, Smith got hired by Universal to make a second film, the $5 million [[[Mallrats]]] but Smith and the studio system clashed and the result was a critical and commercial dud. Still, Smith used many of his friends and made new ones, casting with a keen eye towards nascent (and cheap) talent. He also found a girlfriend, Joey Lauren Adams, and as we learn, a confluence of events led Smith to shoot [[[Chasing Amy]]] as his third film and second hit. Mallrats is now considered the multi-million dollar screen test.

Smith is good to his friends and apparently is a good director for actors, most of whom have stayed loyal despite going on to greater fame and fortune. He went on to direct the wonderful [[[Dogma]]] (which he wrote as his Clerks follow-up) which scared the beejeezus out of Miramax so they sold it off to Lionsgate and missed the cash. Instead, Smith gathered everyone once more for 2001’s [[[Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back]]], in some ways a farewell to the first chapter of his career.

We can watch the evolution of the director and some of his cast with the Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection, out today from Buena Vista Home Entertainment which includes the Blu-ray debut of Clerks and Chasing Amy, plus Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. The three movies are individually packaged inside a cardboard box. Having never seen the bookend films, it’s interesting to watch how much surer a hand Smith has by the third film. Clerks is raw and very unpolished with genuinely horrible performances from the supporting cast. The writing is all over the place and you wonder how the clerks in question, Dante and Randal, maintain a friendship given what a screw-up the latter is. Still, Smith works in some harsh truths that give the movie its heart and soul. It’s truly the first close-up look at the slacker culture that exposes their wasted potential and lack of ambition.

(more…)

After growing up from the little science-fiction show Gene
Roddenberry created in the 1960s, the venerable Star Trek franchise in recent years had just about worn out its
welcome in the eyes of all but its most devoted followers. Enter J.J. Abrams and
his high-octane, supercharged re-imagining of the classic series, resulting in
one of 2009’s most commercially and critically successful films, released today on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Star Trek’s
unprecedented popularity at the box office has also revitalized interest in
past adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Many such tales have been chronicled in comics form
since the 1960s—while the classic series was still on the air! After
boldly going into our vast archives, we have emerged with six stories that we
consider worthy representatives of the more than four decades of Star Trek comics history.

In order of publication:

1: “The Museum at the End
of Time” – Star Trek #15,
Gold Key Comics, August 1972

Love them or hate them, the Gold Key Star Trek comics occupy a special place in the hearts of old-school
Trekkies. The 61 issues—complete with crazy character likenesses as well
as the Enterprise belching fire from
its warp engines—helped to fuel fans’ needs for new Star Trek stories in the early 1970s. This story features the
Enterprise pulled through a cosmic vortex into a mysterious region where time
has no meaning. There, the crew finds all manner of trapped spacecraft and captive
beings—along with a ship full of angry Klingons! A tale typical of the
Gold Key run, this issue is noteworthy as being an apparent inspiration for
“The Time Trap,” an episode of the animated Star
Trek series produced a year later by Filmation Associates. 

(Reprinted in Star Trek: The Key Collection, Vol. 2
, Checker Book Publishing Group,
December 2004)

(more…)

It seems the least Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza could do was offer a full scholarship.

Ryan announced on the Least I Could Do website on Friday that they have created “The Rayne Summers Webcomic Scholarship”, at The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont:

Beginning in the fall of ’10, we will be covering the full tuition for
the selected applicant. The applicant who, I might add, is working
towards a career in webcomics. Over the course of the next 5 years, we
plan on adding 1 student per year, thus by 2015, the Scholarship will
be putting 5 students through the program per year.

This scholarship will be managed by Blind Ferret, though there will be
heavy involvement from others in our field, in the form of a board of
Directors and a selection committee.

More information will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks,
including fund raising events, application rules and deadlines and
more. Keep an eye on this space.

Applause, applause, gentlemen. And this actually hints at a bigger question– why hasn’t any other comics company stepped up to fund such a scholarship? There’s the Dave & Paty Cockrum scholarship at the Kubert School that’s funded from the sale of Dave’s personal collection and through the tireless efforts of Paty and Clifford Meth, and Diamond and First Second also had a scholarship at CCS, although it’s not clear if that was just a one time thing.

Why doesn’t DC or Marvel have any? Do they actually have some that are so poorly promoted that I’ve never heard of them? Or would they rather just draft straight from high school into the major leagues?

(Note: of course, DC and Marvel both have internship programs, I went through one from DC. But they do require you to be where the office is, and you have to be there during 9-5 hours, which is hell on a college class schedule.)

Oh, not by the comic itself. The book reads well, is entertaining, puts our boy Stephen in a different place than he was, and the art by Emma Rios is fun and quirky, calling to Ditko without ever calling to Ditko.

It’s just that Mark didn’t do what clearly needed to be done… the tale should have been titled “[[[Strange Sports Stories]]]”.

Really, guy, you’re slipping.