Manga are temporarily in short supply around here, so the usual “Manga Friday” slot is being taken by a close cousin. (Think of this as just another wacky hijink, Patty Duke Show-style.) Instead of manga, I have two books for younger readers that came out earlier in 2008, one very clearly for girls, and the other more gender-neutral.

Chiggers
By Hope Larson
Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Ginee Seo Books, June 2008, $17.99 (hardcover) and $9.99 (paperback)

Chiggers is set at a summer camp, and the major characters are all tween girls. (If I’ve figured it out correctly, they’re all in eighth grade.) The viewpoint character is Abby – she’s the first one to arrive in her cabin, this year, and ends up a little out of step with her cabin-mates. (Larson doesn’t tell the reader this – she doesn’t have any narration – but we see Abby nonplussed several times by her very-slightly-more-worldly friends.

Abby’s first bunkmate leaves very quickly, due to chiggers. (Look ‘em up, if you don’t know. And be glad you don’t live in the same places they do.) And she gets a new bunkmate: Shasta, who all the other girls quickly decide they don’t like. Shasta’s a little full of herself – she’s on medication, can’t do a lot of camp activities, got hit by lightning, is one-eighth Cherokee, has an older Internet boyfriend – but Abby genuinely likes Shasta.

Chiggers is low-key; there are no major events. (Even by the overly-dramatic standards of a twelve-year-old girl.) Abby and Shasta meet, become friend, squabble, make up. Abby also meets a boy who thinks she looks like a half-elf – and I’m afraid I can remember a time in my own life when I would have thought that was a nice thing to say to someone. (Luckily, Abby takes it the right way.) (more…)

From Politico:

Back in September Anne Schroder reported that actor Val Kilmer was mulling a New Mexico Governor’s run.

And now that Bill "Bolo Tie" Richardson is Commerce Secretary to Be, well….there’s an opening.

Folks in Albuquerque spotted the bloated star at a basketball game last night.

The Albuquerque Journal’s caption: What was a movie star doing at the Lobo game vs. Oral Roberts? Especially in the company of former GOP state Rep. and lobbyist Joe Thompson, left, and Santa Fe businessman Jerry Peters, a friend of Gov. Bill Richardson, to Kilmer’s right?

Admit it. You’d forgotten he’d played Batman, didn’t you? You just saw the post headline and thought this was some new hallucination of Grant Morrison’s.

After breaking the news via the Washington Post, Marvel has finally begun to reveal some of the details behind the Black Panther revamp coming in February.  T’Challa, the reining Panther, seems to be replaced by a mysterious female.  Now, Marvel says T’Challa’s fate is tied to events in the aftermath of Secret Invasion and connected to Dark Reign, 2009’s new crossover event.

The first issue will be extra-sized and will carry variant covers including one in their 70th anniversary series.

A sneak peek and interview with artist Ken Lashley has been posted at Marvel’s website.

Hudlin told the Post, "Over the course of 40 issues [over three years], we … really defined the character in a way that hadn’t been done before. … Having done that, you go: "How do we up the stakes?" Marvel is great about doing really shocking changes to their character — they don’t believe in just keeping everything as status quo."

Under Hudlin, the Panther married Storm from the X-Men and has defended his country of Wakanda from foreign and intergalactic invaders.

  (more…)

Keanu Reeves told MTV that the live-action adaptation of the popular Cowboy Bebop will take “Asteroid Blues”, the first episode and expand it into a feature. “We’ve got the rights, we’ve got a writer,” Reeves said. “He’s putting together a scene outline.”

Reeves and producer Eric Stoff acquired the rights via 20th-Century Fox in a deal announced over the summer.

The series was one of the early anime hits in the 1990s and gained a cult following for the 26 episodes, created by Shinichiro Watanabe and Keiko Nobumoto, which were produced and aired on Cartoon Network. Bandai Entertainment released the entire series and anime film Bones on DVD. It has made frequent appearances on top anime lists both here and in Japan.

“It’s got a Western quality, a Western film noir aspect to it,” Reeves said. “It’s got so much style to it, and that’s part of its appeal. That kind of Old West, bordertown, low-tech science fiction aspect.

“I think that would be a production designer’s dream. I think you just need a good production designer.”

The series, set aboard the spacecraft Bebop, is heavily influenced by American jazz music and cowboy themes.  It debuted in 1998 and reached America in 2001.
 

Torchwood producer Peter Bennett told Digital Spy about 2009’s Torchwood: Children of Earth.

"Basically from a concept, we wanted to go down the children dilemma route,” he said of the title. “Because this storyline is a subject that’s going to affect all the children of Earth, it was a natural title to come up with.”

As for the actual plot, Bennett explained, "It’s different to every other year. It’s not a story about spaceships, but it’s about a government that did a deal with aliens back in the ’60s, and they’re now dealing with the consequences of that deal when the sins of their past come back to haunt them."

The biggest change is that the third season is a mere five episodes, to be broadcast across consecutive days. "Having done 26 standalone stories, we kind of wanted to take this series to another level and by making it one story over five nights, we feel we’ve done that. It’s big, it’s epic, and it’s very different.

“Telling one story has also given us the opportunity to have one director across the whole series, Euros Lyn, who’s been incredible and taken the show to a new level."

The script was produced by James Moran, John Fay and Russell T Davies, which also deals with the team in the wake of losing two of their own at the end of season two. "We sort of bring in Gwen’s husband Rhys (Kai Owen),” the producer said. “He was always on the fringes anyway but he takes a much more active part in the storyline now. And we’ve got a new young lady who helps the team – I wouldn’t say she’s part of the team but she kind of helps them out. She’s played by a new actress called Cush Jumbo, who’s a very pretty young lady and who I’m sure is going to go on to bigger things.

“Also we’ve got new characters, people like Peter Capaldi, who’s fantastic as the government middle man caught up in the storm, Liz May Brice as a covert government agent and Paul Copely as a damaged man."

While air dates have not been announced, spring seems likely based on Bennett’s comments regarding the series’ current status.

"We’ve just started our second week of post editing and we’re in a position to have a look at our first episode. We’ve just shown our executive producers the first cut version of the first episode and this week we’re hoping to show them the first cut of the second episode. It’s a very very tough post schedule. We’ve only got one director, but we’ve got three cutting rooms running simultaneously and he’s literally running between all three. We have to deliver the whole thing, with all effects and music, by March. So to do five one-hours is a real tough schedule, particularly because we’ve got so much amazing material. I’d guess we’re two thirds of the way through and the last third is a struggle – but a nice struggle."

Iron Man 2 news continues to leak out with Latino Review reporting that Tim Robbins may be signing on to portray Howard Stark, father to Tony, a man whose legacy was extolled in the first film.  In other comments, producer Jon Favreau hinted that Howard Stark may have had something to do with the super soldier formula which would further link Iron Man to 2011’s First Avenger: Captain America.
 
“Jon [Favreau] wanted to get a good actor because he didn’t think the guy who played Howard in the last film could carry such an important scene,” the site noted.

They also report that our speculation that casting notes meant Natasha Romanov, a.k.a. the Black Widow, was expected appear to be true.  Not only that, the site says Clint Barton, the carny turned criminal Hawkeye will also appear. Both were introduced in Iron Man’s Tales of Suspense days so screenwriter Justin Theroux continues to mine the early material from Stan Lee and Don Heck.