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Disney Eats Marvel – Update 2

  • News
  • August 31, 2009

Walt Disney reached an agreement to purchase Marvel Comics for a combined cash and stock deal valued today at $4 billion. According to a report at Marketwatch, the acquisition was approved by both Boards of Directors over the weekend and is subject to SEC approval.

In a statement, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said “adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation.”

Those holding Marvel stock are expected to receive $30 per share in addition to approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own.

A shareholders’ conference call was scheduled for later today and no doubt Marvel will have their own comments for the press. The deal is not expected to close for some time and how the integration will work, including the comics properties owned by Disney and Marvel will be announced in the future. In addition to Disney’s own characters, they purchased the assets of CrossGen some years ago and have done little with them, much I the same way as Marvel has yet to fully exploit the Malibu Comics characters they acquired in the 1990s.

Disney has been moving more into the graphic novel field through their publishing division, notably announcing works based on their forthcoming film The Prince of Persia, based on the video game. One can only expect Disney to entrust projects like this and others to Marvel.

Isaac Perlmutter, Marvel’s CEO, will continue to oversee the Marvel properties and is expected to be an architect of the integration along with Disney execs.

Disney To Buy Marvel

  • News
  • August 31, 2009

Disney Entertainment, owner of damn near everything in the entertainment world, is planning on purchasing Marvel Entertainment. The purchase price is purportedly $4,000,000,000. That’s four billion, for the zero challenged.

No word on what will happen to the current crew of Marvel employees, but as of this writing the House of Idea is not expected to move to the west coast.

More as this story develops.

Review: ‘Syncopated’ edited by Brendan Burford

  • Uncategorized
  • August 31, 2009

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Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
Edited by Brendan Burford
Villard, May 2009, $16.95

For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running
through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by
occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other
areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year.
And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics,
stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically
didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the
undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be
found on the comics page.

That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of
new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and
histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from [[[Perseopolis]]] to [[[Fun Home to Cancer Vixen]]]. And
that flood has brought attention to cartoonists who write about true stories
that aren’t their own, like Joe
Sacco. Slowly, nonfiction is creeping onto the comics shelf – it may be mostly
memoirs now, but I hope that we’ll see ever more biographies (like Rick Geary’s
J. Edgar Hoover) and histories
(like Larry Gonick’s work) and even diet books (like Carol Lay’s [[[The
Big Skinny]]]) and less likely things. Maybe,
if I can be optimistic for once, in twenty years there will be comics (or
graphic novels, or whatever you want to call a couple of hundred of drawn pages
in a coherent narrative) in every bookstore category, filling the shelves with
real stories as well as made-up ones.

If that does happen – and I hope that it is
possible – Brendan Burford’s [[[Syncopated]]] will become a signpost on the way to that new world. Syncopated has sixteen original stories by sixteen
distinctive voices (Burford among them), on various nonfiction topics. It splits
fairly neatly in half between memoirs and personal reminiscences on one side
(seven pieces, by my count) and works of history and current events outside of
the artist (also seven pieces), with two portfolios of drawings, by Tricia Van
de Burgh and Victor Marchand Kerlow, to finish up.

(more…)

Something Awful ‘improves’ Superman

  • Uncategorized
  • August 30, 2009

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And wackiness, of course, ensues:

For every good book like Red Son or The Superman/Madman Hullabaloo,
there are hundreds of stories where Lex Luthor comes across more of the
incredibly rare Kryptonite and uses it to make something stupid like
kryptoteeth for an army of bank-robbing robots.

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How to do comic and manga ‘speed lines’ in Photoshop

  • News
  • August 29, 2009

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Finding myself in an art creating deadline crunch this weekend, so I’m going to pass on some art tips for you. I just came across this tutorial on creating speed lines in Photoshop, and creating a brush to do the process.

It looks to be one of the more useful techniques, and will be interesting when I find a place to use it.

(Hat tip: salfield.)

It’s summer, it’s Friday, it’s late, here’s Dr. Manhattan

  • News
  • August 28, 2009

Missed this last month when the DVD came out:

Update: CollegeHumor decided to put their embedded videos on autoplay. Once they give us a setting for turning that off, we’ll embed the video again. Until then, you can go watch it on their site.

The Point Radio Inside WAREHOUSE 13

  • News
  • August 28, 2009

It’s a little like that last scene in INDIANA JONES, but really so much more. SyFy’s newest hit is WAREHOUSE 13 and we begin our backstage tour with actors Eddie McClintock & Joanne Kelly. Plus what’s Warren Ellis up to these days, is there really a MAGNETO movie in the works and a film based on Facebook?
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Review: ‘Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter’ by Darwyn Cooke

the-hunter1-6670019Richard Stark’s Parker, Book One: The Hunter
Darwyn Cooke
IDW, July 2009, $24.99

Richard Stark’s Parker novels come out of a particular
period in literary history: the heyday of the disposable paperback for men.
Paperbacks had appeared in their modern form just before WWII, and servicemen
got used to carrying small paperbound books in whatever pockets they could jam
a book into. The boom continued through the postwar years, with a flood of
short thrillers, detective stories, and soft-core porn – all to stave off
boredom for a man waiting for dinner time on a business trip in some hick town,
or hanging out at the PX on his army base, or riding the streetcar home at
night.

[[[The Hunter]]] was
published in 1962, at the height of that boom – a good decade before the ‘70s
taught publishers that women were even more dependable consumers of paperbacks,
and the long shift to romances and their ilk began. At first glance, Stark’s
hero is right out of the mold of the great hardboiled Mikes (Hammer &
Shayne) – tough, violent, single-minded, implacable. But Parker was less
emotional than the usual hardboiled hero – cold where they were hot,
calculating where they were impetuous. Parker could kill when he had to – and he
did it quite a bit – but he never killed for fun, or just because he could. As
the Parker novels went on he avoided killing as much as he could, simply
because deaths attract more attention than he wanted.

Hardboiled heroes came from both sides of the
law – Mike Shayne and Mike Hammer were detectives, but there were plenty of
law-breakers before Parker, from writers like David Goodis and Jim Thompson.
They usually weren’t series characters, though: Parker’s amoralism went beyond
his own actions to his world, and his stories told how a master criminal could get away with it – if he was smart and tough
enough.

(more…)

‘Dollhouse’ provides employment for Whedon regulars Glau and Denisof

  • News
  • August 28, 2009

In a recession, you do a mitzvah find work for your friends and people you’ve worked with before. No one follows that maxim more nowadays than Joss Whedon.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Whedon’s Dollhouse added five new cast members: Summer Glau (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Firefly/Serenity) as Bennett, a Dollhouse employee who shares a past with character Echo (Eliza Dushku); and Alexis Denisof (Angel) is a US Senator heading a witch hunt to track the hidden organization. Also joining up are Battlestar Galatica veterans Jamie Bamber, who will play a charming businessman and husband to Echo; and Michael Hogan joins the cast hoping to stop a killing rampage.

We also understand that Keith Carradine (Dexter) becomes an arch rival of Dollhouse leader Adelle, but we can’t figure out what role he played on Buffy the Vampire Slaye— oh! He must have been one of the Gentlemen from “Hush”.

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