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Jo Chen’s Comic Art Cover for ‘Fable II’

  • Uncategorized
  • July 7, 2008

fable2-3d-7190247Microsoft recently dropped some details for Fable II, one of their big games for holiday 2008. Pre-order bonus games, collectible figurines, making-of discs, yadda yadda yadda… But what’s cool for fans of Jo Chen’s amazing comic cover art (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Runaways) is that she did the box art for Fable II. (A larger version of the image is posted after the jump.)

Of course, this isn’t totally surprising since she received considerable acclaim for doing the cover art for the original Fable.

So what I want to know is, why haven’t game makers discovered the likes of Alex Ross, Adam Hughes, and J.G. Jones for videogame covers? Instead, they seem content to stick with dreck made by art students with access to Photoshop. *sigh*

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Review: ‘The Spectacular Spider-Man’ Animated Series

Seriously, folks — [[[The Spectacular Spider-Man]]] animated television series on the “Kids WB” network is one of the best superhero adaptations I’ve ever seen (and trust me, I’ve watched more than anyone will probably consider reasonable). It’s fun, it’s smart, it’s mature, it’s witty and every episode leaves me wanting more.

Supervising Producer and Story Editor Greg Weisman brings the same level of intelligence to the program that made his acclaimed Gargoyles cartoon series so succesful. Teamed up with him in developing the series for television is Producer and Supervising Director Victor Cook, whose resume includes working on the Hellboy animated film Blood and Iron, Darkwing Duck and producing the animated series based on the popular [[[Lilo and Stitch]]] animated feature film. Together, they have brought us a series that is updated for the modern-day audience but is completely faithful to the spirit and atmosphere of the first several years of [[[The Amazing Spider-Man]]] comics.

How does it compare to Sam Raimi’s interpretation of [[[Spider-Man]]] as someone who whines, mopes and cries a little more often than I’m comfortable with? Forget him. This animated incarnation of Peter Parker is a true New York teenager, cracking jokes on instinct — even when it’s not necessarily the wisest move.

spectacular-spider-man-vulture1-1945102

For example, let’s talk about a brief scene from the first episode. The high-flying villain known as the Vulture grabs businessman Norman Osborn and tosses him to his death from a great height. Spider-Man shows up, catches Osborn in mid-air and remarks, “You guys play hot potato hardcore!” The Vulture screams that the skies belong to him, forcing Spider-Man to concede, “He may be right. I only rent.”

Now that’s the kind of dialogue and Bugs Bunny-like attitude I wish I’d seen out of Tobey Maguire.

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Interview: Brian Bendis on ‘Secret Invasion,’ TV and Marvel’s MMO

secret-invasion-5_200-3438179Among comic book fans, Brian Bendis has become a household name as the architect of Marvel Comics’ "Ultimate" universe, the writer of countless stories involving just about every character in the publisher’s stable and the author of a long list of well-regarded, creator-owned projects such as Powers, Torso and Jinx.

Credited with making a host of third-tier characters relevant and merging the many worlds of the Marvel Universe into a more manageable landscape, Bendis is currently scripting Secret Invasion, Marvel’s latest, massively marketed crossover event that has readers guessing which of their favorite characters are actually shape-changing Skrulls in disguise.

I spoke with Bendis during a signing event at the recent Wizard World Chicago convention. The long line of fans that curled around the Marvel booth, through the aisles and around several other booths was a testament to both the massive list of projects Bendis has authored, as well as his genre-spanning appeal among fans. Those in line offered up everything from issues of Bendis’ long-running, creator-owned series Powers to issues of Daredevil and Secret Invasion, and many identified themselves as members of Bendis’ popular message board community, Jinxworld.

COMICMIX: It’s been a while since we’ve talked, Brian… I’m glad I could catch you for a few minutes.

BRIAN BENDIS: Yeah, this is our inaugural ComicMix interview. I’ve never been on the site before.

CMix: Well, let’s get right to it, then, as I don’t want to take up too much of your time with everyone in line here. First off, with the recent Secret Invasion reveal of Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew, as a Skrull, how does that reflect on all of the Spider-Woman stories you’ve been telling for the last few years? You’ve been building a fairly complicated history for the character, after all…

BB: It reflects perfectly, because I was writing her knowing this. It wasn’t like someone surprised me with it. I knew from the first issue of New Avengers that she was a Skrull. But the reveal and the reaction to the reveal, it was so genuine and it was a real relief. I did feel bad, though. There were a few Spider-Woman fans on my boards, one of whom had spent thousands of dollars on original art from the issues I had written. They showed me the art, and they were amazing, but the whole time I was like… Oh, no…

But the whole point is surprising people. You can’t start whispering to one person or another. Only about four people in Marvel knew that was the way things were going to play out.

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Review: ‘PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On’ by Scott Kurtz

pvp-treks-on1-9014129PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On
By Scott Kurtz
Image, June 2008, $14.99

Image is a comic-book publisher, and sees everything through that lens. So, for them, this is a book “collecting issues 25-31 of the hit comic strip series,” as the cover proclaims. For most of us, though, PvP (http://www.pvponline.com/) is a daily comic strip on the web, so what’s important is that [[[Treks On]]] collects strips from June 12, 2005 through April 9, 2006. (Possibly not all of them, since several seem to be added at the beginning and others are missing at the end – and there were some duplicates in the middle, too – but most of them, at least.)

Image might think that referring to comics – which cost money – instead of to a free webcomic might increase the perceived value of their book, but are there really people – even in the inbred, hothouse environment of the comics shop – who would be a) interested in a daily comic strip about computer gaming and b) unfamiliar with webcomics?

My complaints about Image’s publishing strategy aside, this is a handsome package, with the strips shown at a nice large size, two to a page. We’re running about two years behind the current strip, so Brent isn’t even engaged to Jade yet – though he comes darn close in one storyline here. The other character relationships are close to where they are now: Francis and Marcy are friendly but not quite dating, and Robbie & Jase win the lottery in these strips.

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James Lipton Meets Hellboy

James Lipton, host of Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, ever more closely resembles the caricature Will Ferrell once played of Lipton. After self-aggrandizing turns on Arrested Development and in a Geico commercial, Lipton’s now turned up in a comic movie promo.

Check out the below ad for the quickly approaching Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, featuring an interview with Ron Perlman in full Hellboy gear. "Boo yah," indeed.

 

(via The Beat)

Why Comic Book Sales Suck, by Mike Gold

comicrak-6153652Last week, ComicMix commenter Alan Coil and I got into a brief discussion about what constitutes decent comic book sales. It is certainly fair for Alan to compare sales against current trends; I like to compare sales against sales potential in the marketplace.

There’s a market for comic books. This is borne out by the fact that ComicMix, much like Wizard Magazine and other venues over the past decade or so, attracts a bigger audience than the vast majority of all comics published in the United States, as measured by the number of different people who actually read the stuff. Yet despite all the success of comic book product in other media – from Iron Man to Road To Perdition – there has been little if any increase in domestic comics sales. How could this be? Herein lies a history lesson.

Forget about the never-ending über-convoluted and oft-retconed continuity. I’ve bitched about all that before, and, happily, our commenters comment consistently thereupon. To look to the root of this particular evil, we must set our WaBac Machines way back to, oh, around 1948. That’s when the comics publishers started to piss in their own soup.

In 1948, comic book publishers were sailing in dire straits. Average sales were down, the number of titles were up, rack space was getting crowded, and super-heroes weren’t selling like they used to. Clearly, that trend was winding down. Magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest were telling parents that comic books caused juvenile delinquency and promoted homosexuality. Neighborhood candy stores and newsstands started to disappear, as did local drug stores. Bolstered by the G.I. Bill, young adults with small children were leaving for the suburbs – a mysterious land with higher-rent open air shopping strips where drug store owners couldn’t make a buck off of selling high-maintenance items for 10 cents.

Creeping Werthamism aside, comics publishers were not alone in this situation. The diminishing presence of traditional newsstands grossly affected newspaper and magazine sales across the board. Papers raised their price from three or four cents to a nickel; a substantial increase, percentage-wise. Magazines raised their prices in a similar fashion; the dime novel, which by now was 15¢, was being replaced by the 25¢ paperback book.

So what did comics publishers do? Did they follow the other publishers in raising cover price? The other publishers weren’t fighting PTAs and major magazines and, eventually, senate subcommittee hearings as they were. They felt that increasing their price to 15¢ was a bad idea. So they cut content.

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How Comics Helped Create the Internet

Leonard Kleinrock was one of the men who helped create the Internet, and on his Web site at UCLA he gives the following anecdote that Superman played a big role in the whole undertaking.

It all began with a comic book! At the age of 6, Leonard Kleinrock was reading a Superman comic at his apartment in Manhattan, when, in the centerfold, he found plans for building a crystal radio. To do so, he needed his father’s used razor blade, a piece of pencil lead, an empty toilet paper roll, and some wire, all of which he had no trouble obtaining. In addition, he needed an earphone which he promptly appropriated from a public telephone booth. The one remaining part was something called a "variable capacitor". For this, he convinced his mother to take him on the subway down to Canal Street, the center for radio electronics. Upon arrival to one of the shops, he boldly walked up to the clerk and proudly asked to purchase a variable capacitor, whereupon the clerk replied with, "what size do you want?". This blew his cover, and he confessed that he not only had no idea what size, but he also had no idea what the part was for in the first place. After explaining why he wanted one, the clerk sold him just what he needed. Kleinrock built the crystal radio and was totally hooked when "free" music came through the earphones – no batteries, no power, all free! An engineer was born. …

Due to Kleinrock’s fundamental role in establishing data networking technology over the preceding decade, ARPA decided that UCLA, under Kleinrock’s leadership, would become the first node to join the ARPANET. This meant that the first switch (known as an Interface Message Processor – IMP) would arrive on the Labor Day weekend, 1969, and the UCLA team of 40 people that Kleinrock organized would have to provide the ability to connect the first (host) computer to the IMP. This was a challenging task since no such connection had ever been attempted. (This minicomputer had just been released in 1968 and Honeywell displayed it at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference where Kleinrock saw the machine suspended by its hooks at the conference; while running, there was this brute whacking it with a sledge hammer just to show it was robust. Kleinrock suspects that that particular machine is the one that was delivered by BBN to UCLA.) As it turns out, BBN was running two weeks late (much to Kleinrock’s delight, since he and his team badly needed the extra development time); BBN, however, shipped the IMP on an airplane instead of on a truck, and it arrived on time. Aware of the pending arrival date, Kleinrock and his team worked around the clock to meet the schedule. On the day after the IMP arrived (the Tuesday after Labor Day), the circus began – everyone who had any imaginable excuse to be there, was there. Kleinrock and his team were there; BBN was there; Honeywell was there (the IMP was built out of a Honeywell minicomputer); Scientific Data Systems was there (the UCLA host machine was an SDS machine); AT&T long lines was there (we were attaching to their network); GTE was there (they were the local telephone company); ARPA was there; the UCLA Computer Science Dept. administration was there; the UCLA campus administration was there; plus an army of Computer Science graduate students was there. Expectations and anxieties were high because, everyone was concerned that their piece might fail. Fortunately, the team had done its job well and bits began moving between the UCLA computer and the IMP that same day. By the next day they had messages moving between the machines. THUS WAS BORN THE ARPANET, AND THE COMMUNITY WHICH HAS NOW BECOME THE INTERNET! …

From a comic book to cyberspace; an interesting journey indeed!

(via Wired)

Canada Helps Take Comic to Screen

Canada has developed into a go-to spot for making movies over the past several years, and now it could become the go-to place for turning comic books into movies.

Telefilm Canada, the government-sponsored corporation designed to create distinctly Canadian properties, is sponsoring the writers of The Clockwork Girl comic book series to develop a script for an animated feature film based on the book, according to a Vancouver Sun story posted to the government’s Web site.

Terms weren’t disclosed. Clockwork Girl is published by Arcana Studio and written by Arcana president Sean O’Reilly and Kevin Hanna.

John Dippong, Telefilm Canada’s regional executive in charge of feature film, said he was very excited about this project, because O’Reilly’s treatment was a good one, and because it will have appeal on many levels.

"One of the things we’re trying to build is a multi-platform approach," said Dippong in a telephone interview. "We’re interested in finding projects that can either come from the digital world and go to the film world, or vice versa. Sean’s company has been successful with the Clockwork Girl comic, publishing it in many countries."

ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending July 6, 2008

When exactly did July 4 suddenly become “[[[Independence Day]]] Weekend?” Are we as a nation so addicted to three-day holiday weekends that we lose the original meaning of what we’re celebrating? Won’t someone think of the children? And the flags? And the sales? And what about all the ComicMix goodness we’ve brought you this past week, huh?

At least my neighbors seem to have used up all their fireworks on Friday, it’s been a blessedly quiet weekend…

The Question Spotted… at Wimbledon?

The online edition of the British newspaper The Daily Mail is reporting sightings throughout the country of faceless, well-dressed people at events like Wimbledon.

Comic fans might suspect that DC Comics’ The Question, investigator of social corruption, has crossed over to our universe. Not really, but we really wish that would happen.

Instead it’s creative marketing from car manufacturer Lotus.

That is, unless car manufacturers are up to something evil… Hmm.

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