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Top Shelf Holds Major Sale

  • News
  • September 3, 2008

Chris Staros at Top Shelf sent out the follow news regarding a sale worth sharing:

To celebrate The Surrogates movie wrapping principal photography, surviving San Diego, and all the cool new summer and fall releases, for the next ten days — thru Friday September 12th — Top Shelf is having a giant $3 graphic novel web sale. When you visit the site, you’ll find over 125 graphic novels and comics on sale — with 90 titles marked down to just $3 (!) and a slew of other key titles just slashed!

To go directly to the list of items on sale, just click here:
http://www.topshelfcomix.com/specialdeals

But here are a few sample sale items:

— $3 Books: Comic Book Artist, I Am Going To Be Small, Lower Regions, Regards from Serbia, That Salty Air, Alec – After the Snooter, The Mirror of Love, The King, Fox Bunny Funny, plus 90 more!

— Slashed Prices: From Hell Hardcover, Lost Girls, Blankets, Too Cool To Be Forgotten, Owly, Korgi, Super Spy, Essex County Trilogy, Incredible Change-Bots, The Surrogates, and more!

— Freebies with every order: Yearbook Stories,  The 2008 Top Shelf Sampler, and Owly & Friends!

Please note that Top Shelf now accepts PayPal (as well as Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and Discover — all secure), and that this sale is good for "direct market" retailers as well (and comic book shops will get their wholesale discount on top of these sale prices).

LEGO Batman Becoming TV Show

  • News
  • September 3, 2008

“Where does he get those wonderful toys?” Batman gets them at the LEGO store, Joker.

At last week’s Games Convention in Leipzig, game developer Traveler’s Tales confirmed that the upcoming LEGO Batman videogame will be transformed into a 20-minute animated cartoon with an eye towards creating a series. The show will be produced using the same in-game engine used to produce the game. No details about when the show is coming out or who’s producing.

It’s kind of like licensed merchandising version of the childhood “pass it on” game. LEGO Batman cartoon is based on the LEGO Batman videogame which is based on the LEGO Batman toys which parodied the Batman comic books. Let’s see if DC Comics will continue the chain with a comic based on the LEGO Batman show.

And just because it’s so cute, here’s the latest clip featuring LEGO Alfred kicking bricks.

 

Tarzan Returns to the Big Screen

  • News
  • September 3, 2008

Tarzan is returning to the Big Screen but not as an animated musical sequel from Disney but a played-for-straight adventure from Warner Bros, and director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy). Variety reports this morning that Sommers and Stuart Beattie will be co-writing the screenplay. The duo last worked together on 2009’s G.I. Joe film for Paramount, which recently completed lensing.

Producer Jerry Weintraub has been trying to mount a new live-action version of Tarzan since 2003, working from a screenplay by John August (Shazam!) and at one point Guillermo del Toro was in talks to direct the film.

Ever since Edgar Rice Burroughs first wrote about his man raised by the apes in 1912, it has been repeatedly interpreted for serials, movies, radio, television and comic books. Burroughs penned some 23 books featuring his character in addition to creating other fantastic realms and characters including John carter, Warlord of Mars and Pellucidar.  While Johnny Weismuller’s performance informed the image in the minds of a generation or two of moviegoers, today more people probably know him from the 1999 Disney animated feature.

This will be Warner’s second go-round with the Lord of the Jungle after 1984’s underrated Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes from Hugh Hudson.  The film introduced us to actor Christopher Lambert later known for Highlander.  Warner’s television network, the CW, had a disastrous version of Tarzan in 2003.
 

MoCCA Celebrates Kim Deitch’s Career

  • News
  • September 3, 2008

We just received word that The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is opening a retrospective in honor of Kim Deitch’s distinguished career.  The exhibition will run from September 9 through December 5 at MoCCA in Manhattan.

According to a press release:

“Kim Deitch: A Retrospective will display original comics pages and other work covering the artist’s entire career to date, beginning with full-page comic strips drawn for the East Village Other in the sixties up to recent graphic novels including The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Alias the Cat, Shadowland, and Deitch’s Pictorama. The exhibit will also feature rarely seen work including elaborate preparatory drawings, hand-colored originals, animation cel set-ups and lithographs.
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attackofthepumas-8308565

Getting Catty, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • September 3, 2008

attackofthepumas-8308565Humans have been fascinated by felines both big and small since the beginnings of recorded history. At times we’ve both worshipped them (as did the ancient Egyptians) and reviled them (as did medieval Europeans, thus opening themselves up to the spread of the Black Plague when the witchcraft-associated kitties weren’t around in sufficient numbers to keep the rats at bay). And they’ve probably always been a big part of our mythology and folklore, including making multiple appearances in comics, from superheroes like Catman and Kitten to adult stuff like Fritz the Cat to funny animal and anthropomorphic fare.

But lately two big-cat names have infiltrated our culture to the extent that we’re all probably sick of them by now. I’m secretly hoping for Matt Groening to include them in his Forbidden Words list for 2009 so we never have to deal with them again, because they — like a number of other catty terms (such as, um, “catty”) — are used to impart negative attitudes towards women. And being one of those women-types, I tend not to like negative things directed at me simply because of my internal plumbing.

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Review: ‘Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!’

 

american-flagg-1794127Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
By Howard Chaykin
Dynamic Forces, July 2008, $49.99

Science Fiction has never been quite as successful in comics form as it seemed it should have been. Oh, sure, there have been plenty of vaguely SFnal ideas and premises – from [[[Superman]]] to [[[Kamandi]]] to the [[[X-Men]]] to the [[[Ex-Mutants]]] – but they were rarely anything deeper than an end to the sentence “There’s this guy, see? and he’s….” One of the few counterexamples was Howard Chaykin’s [[[American Flagg!]]], starting in 1983 – that series had many of the usual flaws and unlikelihoods of near-future dystopias, but it also had a depth and texture to its world that was rare in comics SF (and never to be expected in even purely prose works, either).

American Flagg! suffered from Chaykin’s waning attention for a while, and then crashed and burned almost immediately after he finally left the series, with a cringe-making overly “sexy” storyline utterly overwritten by Alan Moore. American Flagg! limped from muddled storyline to confused characterization for a couple of years afterward – but the beginning, when Chaykin was fully energized by his new creation and the stories he was telling, is one of the best SF stories in American comics.

The series has never been collected well, though a few slim album-sized reprints were once available, and may be findable through used-book channels. This Dynamic Forces edition, reprinting the first fourteen issues of the series, is quite pricey. (Especially for a book with no page numbers, and one in which the pages are precisely the size of the original comics – not oversized, as those previous album reprints had been.) This book has a strong, thoughtful introduction by Michael Chabon – which has already appeared in his [[[Maps and Legends]]] collection, presumably due to the delay in the American Flagg! book – a gushing afterword by Jim Lee, and a new short story written and drawn by Chaykin.

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SPACE Award Finalists Announced

  • News
  • September 3, 2008

Small press efforts are being recognized in 2009 at Canada’s SPACE show. Previously, there had been the Day Awayrd, selected and presented by Dave Sim in recognition of the work done by the late artist Gene Day.  Sim withdrew the Award for 2009 and it has been replaced with the SPACE award, with the 2007 winning team of Matt and Carol Dembicki and Tim Corrigan selecting the winner.

The finalists were just announced:

Birth by Michael S. Bracco
Blink: Barefoot in America by ONWARDStudio
Breathers 1 by Justin Madson
Clockwork Creature: Chapter One by Kyle Strahm and Wesley Craig Green
Concepcion by Rickey Gonzales
The Secret History of the Ineffables Part 1 by Craig Bogart
Lackluster World 5 by Eric Adams
The Serial Squad! by Paul E. Schultz and Jon Hodges
A Thorn in the Side by Bill Knapp

‘Kick-Ass’ Starts Shooting Shortly

  • News
  • September 2, 2008

One of the surprise hits for Marvel this year was Kick-Ass, the series from Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr. In addition to sell outs and multiple printings, it was optioned for a film prior to the first issue hitting the stands this past winter.

The movie, to be directed by Stardust’s Matthew Vaughn, stars Nicholas Cage and as the would-be hero, 18-year-old Aaron Johnson (Angus, Thongs & Snogging). While in Australia promoting Angus, he told Moviehole he goes from Down Under to Canada to begin shooting in a few weeks.

"Next week I’ll be in Toronto. I’m still trying to get my head around it. I just came back from New York actually where I was doing an independent film. I’ve gone from one side of the world to the other. My head is going crazy. I woke up this morning and said ‘Where am I?’ I looked out the window and saw the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and I’m like ‘Wow! How did I end up in Australia?’. Have you ever seen that film Jumper? It’s like I’m in Jumper."

As the teen turned costumed crimefighter, he won’t be required to do a lot of stunt work compared with the other members of the cast. "There’s a younger girl in it. [Chloe Moretz, Dirty Sexy Money] and Nicolas Cage do a lot of the fighting. I don’t do much fighting – I get my faced kicked in a lot though. She goes around with a samurai sword cutting people’s heads off. It’s very violent obviously. It’s going to be quite a crazy one. I play an American comic book nerd so it’s very different from the sex god roles".

The movie has been adapted by Jane Goldman who previously worked with Vaughn on adapting Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s graphic novel to the screen. The film will also star Lyndsy Fonseca (Desperate Housewives) and Omari Hardwick (Saved). A 2009 release date is anticipated.
 

Actors Want Odd Parts

  • News
  • September 2, 2008

russell-crowe-picture-4-3310925Competing Sherlock Holmes movies will be racing to see who can get before the cameras faster.  Guy Ritchie (Rocknrolla)’s version already has Robert Downey, Jr. on board as Holmes but now Russell Crowe says he wants to play Watson. He was quoted in Australia’s Daily Herald as indicating this desire although an anonymous source was cited. 

Crowe is looking for a project now that his Robin Hood film with Ridley Scott is on hold for at least a year.

Meantime, also in Australia, Heroes star Milo Ventimiglia was quoted by Showbiz Spy indicating his desire to play a decided adult Boy Wonder. "I always thought I would make a great Robin. I would love to be Christian Bale’s sidekick in Batman," he told the reporter. "Even when I was younger I never wanted to be Batman." Of course, director Christopher Nolan has already said for years now that his film version of the Caped Crusader will never feature a Wonder – boy, teen or adult.

This, on the heels of the absurd notion of Cher as Catwoman, means we have years of casting rumors to endure before Nolan mounts the third film in the franchise.
 

Meltzer Begins Effort to Save Siegel Home

  • News
  • September 2, 2008

As reported across the web and in today’s New York Times, Brad Meltzer has launched a campaign to raise funds to renovate and preserve the boyhood home of Jerome Siegel, co-creator of Superman. Starting today, a four week auction of items will begin with winners gaining original artwork, VIP seats to the Colbert Report, walk ons in comic books, novels and even an episode of NBC’s Heroes.

Meltzer’s The Siegel & Shuster Society has launched and can be accessed at Ordinary People Change the World, a charitable website Meltzer founded. In addition to the auction, other items such as an Chip Kidd-designed t-shirt can be purchased or cash donations made.

The goal is to raise at least $50,000 for the necessary work on the exterior of the home, still occupied by an older couple. The website says, "It’s the right thing to do. In return, The Siegel & Shuster Society has the right to buy the house when it eventually goes up for sale.”

His latest novel, The Book of Lies, in a nice bit of synchronicity, goes on sale today.  Based on the robbery that led to Murray Siegel’s death, Meltzer’s book explores a thrilling What If? scenario that may have had more to do with Jerry Siegel conceiving Superman than the pulps he read as a child. (more…)

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