Direct from The Baltimore ComicCon, it’s our Extra ComicMix Radio extended broadcast, starting with a look at the economy of the comics selling business. Graham Cracker Comics owner Jamie Graham talking about what’s hot and what is likely to get hotter with collectible comics. Want to know where the next big investment might be? Jamie shares that and more, plus we introduce you to another of those hidden gems we love to find on the floor of the con – a new publisher with a fresh approach and some interesting new titles.

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Shia LaBeouf is the new man of action as his Eagle Eye narrowly exceeded estimates and took in $29.2 million at the box office according to Box Office Mojo.  The movie averaged well over $8000 per screen and despite tepid reviews, brought in audiences.

“Eagle Eye jumpstarted the fall box office, and we couldn’t be happier," said DreamWorks spokesman Chip Sullivan, adding the movie drew men and women in roughly equal numbers. The conceit of the film is intriguing to all. Between GPS, employee codes, bank PIN numbers, this could conceivably be within the realm of possibility within a few years."

Among other opening films this weekend, the drama Nights in Rodanthe, reunited Diane Lane and Richard Gere used up a lot of tissues and took in $13,570,000. The indie film Fireproof opened to just $6,514,000, running on fewer screens, but averaging nearly $7000 per screen, much better than Rodanthe.  Spike Lee’s Righteous Kill had a poor opening with just $3.8 million earned.

Films in their sophomore week saw reasonable drops with Samuel L. Jackson’s Lakeview Terrace losing 53.3% of the crowd and brining in $7 million, good for third place. Ricky Gervais’ Ghost Town has been a disappointment, though, with just $9,239,000 to show after two weeks in theaters.

The Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading did well, with $6,514,000 added to their totals, which now stands at $45,540,000.

September tends to be a mixed bag of releases as the shift in content goes from light to serious as witnessed by Rodanthe’s romance and Lakview’s drama.  MGM’s Igor, for kids, has chugged along, in sixth place this weekend with $5.5 million.

Believe it or not, some theaters are still showing The Dark Knight and after 11 weeks in play, it has earned $524,465,000.

I was taking stock recently, reviewing the silver past and anticipating a golden future when I was struck by the fact that for the past six months I’ve given books by Kyle Baker to friends and relatives on every possible gift giving occasion and then some.  This speaks well of Mr. Baker, whose line of books now covers every possible demographic.
 
For the very young or people who just don’t like to think about a nemesis more personal than hunger or gravity, there is his autobiographical work of family theft known as The Bakers.  As a comic or a collection these gag panels, comical strips and full-length comic novellas start small and suck you in to a quite often very complicated gag, a combination of motives and subplots only a very accomplished technician such as Mr. Baker can execute.  They are wonders of timing and staging that show how valuable he must have been during his sojourn in the Hollywood cartoon business, and how his talent for real-life details would have driven the kidvid fantasists to make his work there living heck.  Everything in The Bakers universe can be imitated by a real family and has probably bedeviled your real family in its time.
 
In the book-shaped The Bakers: Babies and Kittens (Image Comics), the second book of it’s kind (after The Bakers: Do These Toys Belong Somewhere) Mr. Baker confounds the people who have spent their lives in a futile flight from cute.  Like R. Crumb, his command of the medium and knowledge of what the eye likes (before the consciousness can muck things up) seduces his audience into taking a ride it thinks it has been on before, and a kiddy ride at that.  But the plastic elephant takes a wrong turn and you’re soon in a fix that Ricky Ricardo and Harold Lloyd would shudder to consider.  He then spares us the usual sitcom sermon and leaves the world of The Bakers as delightfully unbalanced and full of comic inevitability as it was in the beginning.
 
Comics is a near perfect medium today, unencumbered by commercials, your neighbor’s cell phone, the sponsor’s amoral code of standards, the way the electronic media is really after your time.  No, you’re in the driver’s seat, Mr. Comic Reader (or should I say “Mrs.”?).  It’s your choice:  Read it one panel at a time, sit down and read the whole thing at once.  Laugh.  Read that panel over again (you don’t have to wait till summer or even to download it).  Put it down on the coffee table and read it again later, or recommend it to your roommate. (more…)

David Mack, not the Kabuki David Mack, is no stranger to the Star Trek writing universe, having written several well-acclaimed novels solo and also a couple of televison episodes with former Star Trek book editor John Ordover.  He dipped a toe into the Marvel Universe with his excellent Wolverine novel, Road of Bones (with a cover from the other Dave Mack). His latest work, the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy, spans several storylines that will change Trek literature forever.  The first volume of the trilogy is just now hitting bookstores so we thought it was a good time to catch up with Mack who was kind enough to discuss his career and future writing endeavors with ComicMix.

CMix: How did you get your start in Star Trek?

David Mack: Long story. I first set my sights on writing for Star Trek while I was a sophomore in college.  That was when Star Trek: The Next Generation announced its open-door policy for script submissions.  I collected many fine rejections but never succeeded in breaking through at The Next Generation.

I continued submitting scripts through the same venue for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and I collected many more fine rejections. I finally got my break when a college friend of mine introduced me to Star Trek fiction editor John J. Ordover. John had the connections to bypass the slush-submission process and pitch ideas to the producers; what he lacked was scriptwriting experience, for which I had been trained at film school. So we teamed up.

Working together, John and I made a sale during our first pitch session to Star Trek: Voyager, and another a few weeks later, to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The Voyager story was bought but never produced; the DS9 story became the fourth-season episode “Starship Down.”

We figured the floodgates would open after back-to-back sales. They didn’t. It was three years before we sold another story to Deep Space Nine (the seventh-season episode “It’s Only a Paper Moon”).  In the interim, to earn freelance money to help pay off my mountain of college-loan debts, I did editorial scut work around the Star Trek books office: reading slush submissions, compiling reference materials for the authors, organizing photo files, etc. (more…)