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Weekend Window-Closing Wrap-up

A bunch of things that have been open on my browser, but may not deserve a full post of their own…

  • I have no idea where this Power Girl image came from, but I’m thinking that there’s a fan film out there that I don’t know about. Can anybody help me out?
  • Digital drawing tutorials in a Lackadaisical style.
  • Bobby Crosby says it really wasn’t an April Fool’s joke: Last Blood, a story about vampires protecting the last humans on Earth from zombies, is being adapted for the screen.
  • Finally, you can scan your comics without cracking the spine! As somebody who occasionally has to do this when we don’t have the original film to reproduce from, this is a godsend. Now if only somebody had a cheap tabloid scanner for the Mac…
  • Neil Gaiman gets around– here’s an article by Yvette Tan about meeting him in a Phillipine magazine.
  • The ten sexiest cartoon women…? Uh, not quite. No animated Zatanna? (Might be NSFW, depending on your workplace.)
  • Ian Gibson! (For you young ones in the audience, he did Secret Invasion 20 years ago for DC.)
  • One of these panelists is not like the others… one’s wearing a hat.
  • Dan Grauman?
  • And finally, the comic movie premiere we were all waiting for this weekend– Super Ninja Bikini Babes! …what, there was another comic book movie premiering this weekend?

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 4, 2008

Hope you all had a great Free Comic Book Day!  Here at ComicMix, of course, every day is free comics day, with all our new original graphic material!  But don’t forget the original material from our columnists as well; here’s what we’ve had for you this past week:

And while every ComicMix reader with disposable income has probably already seen Iron Man, I have a date later on with my ironing board… that’s sort of the same thing, right?

Box Office Report For ‘Iron Man’ Could Mean Sequel

It was an auspicious start for the Metal Marvel Hero, as Iron Man grossed an estimated $5.5 million at around 2,500 theaters during its Thursday night previews and made an estimated $32.5 million at 4,105 theaters on Friday, making it the 14th highest-grossing opening day on record. (You can read the ComicMix reviews of the film here and here.)

The Friday gross was comparable to X2: X-Men United, which debuted May 2 five years ago, bringing in $31.2.

Paramount big-wig Brad Grey went on record last week by saying that as long as the flick does "as well as expected", the studio wants to get a sequel in theaters for the same May weekend in 2010 — and with numbers like these, that could be more realistic than we imagined.

While this is actually a Marvel Studios-produced film, with Paramount distributing, it’s no surprise after these numbers that they will be rushing to get Downey Jr. back in the red-and-gold ASAP. Director Jon Favreau has already stated that he planned a loose structure for three movies, with the Mandarin presumably making an appearance somewhere down the line.

Keep your eye on ComicMix for more updates on how the first big blockbuster of the summer does in the box office!

Happy Birthday: Dr. Mid-Nite

Pieter Anton Cross started his association with superheroes while still in the womb—his pregnant mother was attacked one night in their native Norway by vagrants one night but was rescued by the original Dr. Mid-Nite.

The incident caused her to go into labor, and the superhero delivered Pieter before dashing off into the night. Pieter grew up to become a brilliant doctor, graduating Harvard at nineteen, and moved back to Norway for a time before returning to America to work with Charles McNider—who, unbeknownst to Pieter, was the same Dr. Mid-Nite who had saved him at birth!

Unfortunately, years later Pieter ran afoul of the evil Praeda Industries while investigating a mysterious drug A39 that they were marketing. The druglords captured him, drugged him with that same chemical, and put him behind the wheel of a car. When Pieter awoke he discovered that he had accidentally killed a woman, and that he was now blind but could see in the dark. To bring the druglords to justice he took the identity of his favorite superhero, becoming the second Dr. Mid-Nite.

Since then, Pieter has joined the JSA and become one of its guiding members, as well as its resident doctor.

shaughnessy-book-cover-2446541

Ian Shaughnessy Emerging, by Michael H. Price

shaughnessy-book-cover-2446541From V.T. Hamlin in the 1920s and Etta Hulme during the mid-century, through the Superman books of Kerry Gammill in times more recent, Tarrant County, Texas, has long yielded a wealth of storytelling artistry to the comics industry at large.

An ambitious new representative of that regional-breakout scene is graphic novelist Ian Shaughnessy, of Arlington, Texas. Shaughnessy’s books for Portland, Oregon-based Oni Press – including an edgy comedy-of-errors called Shenanigans, with the Canadian illustrator Mike Holmes – bespeak a childhood fascination with comics, filtered through a lifelong love of language and an interest in taking the words-and-pictures medium to provocative literary levels more commonly associated with the present day’s independent filmmaking sector.

“I find myself writing under the direct influence of Billy Wilder,” says Shaughnessy, 24, invoking the name of a great screenwriter-director whose career spanned from 1929 into the 1980s. “I discovered Wilder during the 1990s with The Apartment [1960], then with Double Indemnity [1944], and found myself very inspired – in a lasting way.

“With Shenanigans, I found myself attempting to honor the spirit of Billy Wilder – that mastery that he had of romantic tensions, with finding the humor in awkward situations – as a key influence.”

Any such talent needs a practical springboard. With V.T. Hamlin, the creator of a famous comic strip called Alley Oop that has survived him by many years, the springboard was a cartooning job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Hamlin spent much of the 1920s at the daily paper, generating such local-interest attractions as a serialized feature about a formidable minor-league baseball club, the Fort Worth Cats. (A retrospective collection of Hamlin’s Oop-prototype Panther Kitten cartoons is in preparation, along with an earlier Hamlin gag strip called The Hired Hand, whose booklet edition has been out of print since the 1920s.)

For Etta Hulme, the Star-Telegram’s signature opinion-page cartoonist since 1972, an early breakthrough lay in a post-WWII comic-book series about a cowboy critter named “Red” Rabbit. Graphic designer and Web publisher Kerry Gammill spent the 1980s and earlier ’90s as an illustrator with Marvel and DC, then moved into motion-picture conceptual art on such productions as 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000 and 1999’s Storm of the Century.

(more…)

ComicMix Radio: Free Comic Book Day Draws Thousands

Take two million free comics and a planet full of hungry fans, and you get the industry’s biggest one-day event. We cover it all from coast-to-coast!

Press the button for your Free Comic Book Day report, here on ComicMix Radio…

 

 

And remember, you can always subscribe to ComicMix Radio podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-3157862 or RSS!

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Review: ‘Blue Pills’ by Frederik Peeters

blue-9583352Blue Pills
By Frederik Peeters; translated by Anjali Singh
Houghton Mifflin, January 2008, $18.95

This is another one of those semi-autobiographical graphic novels; I’m not going to assume that this is all “true” (whatever that means), but I will note that Peeters’s bio says that he lives with his girlfriend, her son, and their daughter — and that [[[Blue Pills]]] is the story of a man named Fred, his girlfriend, and her son. (And the main character of this book mentions that he working on a graphic novel about their lives.) So keep that in the back of your head — some proportion of this book is true, though we don’t know how much.

Fred, the narrator of Blue Pills, is a Swiss cartoonist, still in his mid-20s, who’s lived in Geneva his whole life. He remembers Cati vividly from a pool-party late in his teens, but never really knew her well. When he moves into the apartment building where she lives, though, he comes to see more and more of her and her young son (called “the little one” or “L’il Wolf,” but not named). Before long, Fred and Cati are drifting into a relationship, and Cati has to sit Fred down and tell him something difficult — both she and her son are HIV-positive.

(The “Blue Pills” of the title refer to their drug regimen to stay symptom-free, though they’re never called that in the body of the book. The fact that most Americans will immediately think of Viagra when blue pills are mentioned is unfortunate, but neither Peeters nor Houghton Mifflin seems to have taken a moment to worry about it.)

(more…)

Happy Birthday: Parasite

parasite-5073966Maxwell Jensen was the classic, small-time crook before his own idiocy transformed him into something far greater.

Jensen was working at a plant attached to a research center and opened one of the storage containers, thinking it might contain the company’s payrolls. Instead the biohazardous extraterrestrial materials inside transformed him, staining his skin purple and giving him the power to absorb the powers of anyone he touched.

The Parasite, as Jensen dubbed himself, became one of Superman’s most dangerous foes, especially since Jensen could not only absorb Superman’s powers but also learned his secret identity.

ComicMix Radio Extra: Welcome to Free Comic Book Day 2008!

The doors are about to open at comic stores all over the world, taking part in Free Comic Book Day. ComicMix Radio has full coverage, thanks to our coast-to-coast network of retailers that include:

Golden Apple Comics in LA; Sun Coast Comics in Jacksonville, FL; Midnight Comics & Games in Houston, TX; Midtown Comics in New York City, NY; Atomic Comic Superstores in Mesa, AZ and  ComicQuest in Evansville, IN.

Join us for a few minutes as we see just how these stores are gearing up for the annual event. Then head out to the store nearest you, grab your freebies and be back here later on this afternoon for our regular Saturday Broadcast and full coverage of FCBD ’08!

 

 

And remember, you can always subscribe to ComicMix Radio podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-7995419 or RSS!

 

Flash Rising, by Martha Thomases

So Barry Allen is coming back.

I like Barry Allen okay. I was sad when he died. Not as sad as I was when Supergirl died, but sad. He seemed like a nice guy, someone down-to-earth and genuine, at least as much as a comic-book character can be. His job as a police scientist seemed exotic to me in the days before the CSI shows made put it on television every night. Even when I was a long-haired freak, I liked his crew-cut sincerity.

When Wally West took over the role of the Flash in the comic, I was grouchy about it. He was different. The way Mike Baron wrote him, he was very different. Even though I like to think I’m an open-minded, progressive person, sometimes I want my comics to stay the same. I kept reading them, though, and was soon won over. Those stories were more like soap opera, making them much more addictive on a month-to-month basis.

Wally has been the Flash for 23 years. For my son, he’s the only Flash there is. I mean, he’s my son, so he’s read an abnormal number of old comics, but the Flash he knows from week-to-week is Wally. His reaction to Barry Allen’s return, as he read about it in the New York Daily News on Wednesday, is an unenthusiastic shrug. (more…)

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