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‘Smallville’ Says Goodbye to Lex, Hello to Doomsday

Fans of The CW’s television series Smallville knew that this season was going to be the final one for actor Michael Rosenbaum, who plays Lex Luthor in the popular reinterpretation of Superman’s angsty youth. His portrayal of Lex’s descent into evil has been as fascinating to viewers as Tom Welling’s portrayal of Clark Kent learning what it means to be a hero.

IGN broke the news recently that the next season will introduce two new villains. One they can’t talk about yet, but the other is Doomsday (pictured at right in his original comic appearance).

Doomsday is best known for his fight to the death with the Man of Steel in Superman #75. The monster gained notoriety doing what no other villain had managed to do: kill Superman. Fans later learned that Doomsday was a prehistoric Kryptonian experiment that resurrects and adapts to whatever manages to kill it. Doomsday was last seen in DC’s big Infinite Crisis event, and was defeated by Superman and pre-Crisis Superman.

The IGN story also stated that there would be a new female villain that would be familiar to comic book fans. Her story, according to executive producers:

Intelligent, brilliantly manipulative, and dangerously sinister, our gorgeous new villain has one more weapon in her arsenal: Her mutual attraction with Clark may prove to be as deadly as kryptonite for him.

Hmmm. Who could that be?

GrimJack: The Manx Cat – Back to the Future!

John Gaunt is himself again in today’s brand-new episode of GrimJack: The Manx Cat, by John Ostrander and Timothy Truman. Now that he knows how dangerous the Cat is, will he be able to get to Black Jack in time?

Credits: John Ostrander (Writer), John Workman (Letterer), Lovern Kindzierski (Colorist), Mike Gold (Editor), Timothy Truman (Artist)

More: GrimJack: The Manx Cat

 

 

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The Comics-to-Film Review: How ‘Iron Man’ Matches Up

If you read fellow ComicMixologist Matt Raub’s review of Iron Man, you already know the new Marvel Studios movie is a relentless blast of entertainment. Even for those who’ve never picked up an [[[Iron Man]]] comic, it’s a top-rate summer film.

But there are also those of us who have picked up an issue (or a few hundred) of Iron Man over the years, and for us the movie is a different experience, as we can’t help but compare and contrast it to the comics that have come before. So, in that respect, how does the film hold up?

Tony Stark is the place to start, as he’s always been the real draw of any Iron Man tale (though the costume is plenty cool). In the comics, Stark is a calculating man both as a hero and in the business world. He enjoys his wealth at times, but is more taskmaster than playboy.

Robert Downey Jr.’s take on the character is much more like the raconteur persona that Bruce Wayne takes on, only for the movie version of Stark, it’s no act. Much like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, Downey Jr. offers a weird riff on his role that’s entirely new and impossible not to enjoy. Count that as a win for the film.

The film’s plot, meanwhile, is essentially an updating of the classic Iron Man origin story, and the modernization is handled quite well. There’s nothing directly lifted from the comics, and instead the comic references come in an array of winks and nods (S.H.I.E.L.D., War Machine, Nick Fury, Tony’s drinking, etc).

My main problem with the movie is a fault it shares with the comics, in how the plot tries to incorporate real-world issues without really delving into them. Comic books regularly feature stories set in vague, war-torn countries in the Middle East, and the Iron Man film follows suit with its shallow usage of terrorism and Afghanistan.

But those are forgivable defects, and Iron Man easily makes a successful transition from page to screen, thanks to a director and cast that know what elements to take from the books, and which to leave behind.

Manga Friday: Yoshihiro Tatsumi says ‘Good-Bye’

This week, I’m giving over all of Manga Friday to the manga I was most looking forward to this year – a collection of dark, psychological stories from the creator who invented gekiga but who has been almost forgotten at home.

good-bye-1835066Good-Bye
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi; Translated by Yuji Oniki; Edited by Adrian Tomine
Drawn & Quarterly, June 2008, $19.95

This is the third in Drawn & Quarterly’s series of books reprinting Tatsumi’s groundbreaking gekiga stories of forty years ago; this book reprints and translates stories from 1971-72, as The Push Man and Other Stories had stories from 1969 and Abandon the Old in Tokyo drew from 1970. It opens with an introduction by Frederik L. Schodt, author of Manga! Manga!, and ends with a Q&A conversation between Tatsumi and Adrian Tomine, the series editor. You won’t be able to find it in stores for about another two months — though better comics shops will probably let you add it to your pull list, if you ask nicely. (And online booksellers, as usual, are already taking preorders.)

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Happy Birthday: Jerry Scott

Born in Elkhart, Indiana in 1955, Jerry Scott initially went into advertising. He got his start in comics by submitting gag strips to magazines in the mid-1970s—and sold one of his first ones to the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1983, he was asked to take over the Nancy comic strip, which he worked on for the next twelve years. In 1990 Scott and longtime friend Rick Kirkman created a new strip, Baby Blues. In 1997, Scott and Jim Borgman collaborated to produce Zits. Both Baby Blues and Zits are still running, and combined appear in over 2000 newspapers around the world.

Zits won the National Cartoonists Society prize for best newspaper comic strip in 1998 and 1999—Baby Blues won the award in 1997. In 2002 Scott received the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.

Robert Downey Jr. and the ‘Iron Man’ Review

First off, right out of the bullpen, I want to warn readers that this review of Iron Man, the first self-financed feature film from Marvel Studios, WILL HAVE SPOILERS. Normally, I try to keep any stories involving a new release free of them, but as you will read, this film is just chock full of little “fanboy delights” which enhance the experience and are an important part of the overall product.

With that said, this film should be labeled “FFBF”, meaning “For Fanboys, By Fanboys” because director Jon Favreau seems to know what the comic fans wanted to see. One gets the impression that if he were sitting in the seats, he’d want the same thing from this comics-famous tale of a millionaire, arms-manufacturing playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) who decides to craft a supersuit and fight evil. Over the course of the film, anyone familiar with the character and the greater Marvel Universe will likely enjoy the references (sometimes subtle, but not always) to things ranging from War Machine to the Mandarin… even to S.H.I.E.L.D.

So make sure to pay attention, and most importantly, stay in the theater until after the credits! (more…)

Sound Bites For Dummies, by Michael Davis

"Every time I think I’m out they drag me back in!”

Al Pacino. Godfather 3

I had another article all ready to go. A lighthearted article about how I really loved comic books and how proud I am that I work in this industry on so many levels. I did not want to write another article on race, but thanks to Jeremiah Wright here I go again…

Some time ago I was given a gift certificate to The Burke Williams Spa. For those of you who don’t know, it’s an upscale health resort. Those who know me know that the last thing I’m about is anything “up scale.” I like simple. “Upscale” to me means a bunch of people who think they have a right to look down on other people. I know that’s a wide net to cast, but that’s how I feel. So when I got the gift certificate I was a little hesitant to go but man was I in a bad way and I really needed a massage. The gift certificate was for a massage and a milk bath…A MILK bath.

Look, I’m a MAN from the projects and a milk bath should have made me very uneasy, but truth be told it sounded so good. So I put my reservations on hold and made my way to Burke Williams. When I arrived I notice that the spa was staffed with women.

Beautiful women. Tall, shapely, sexy women.

When I checked in at the front desk I’m asked if I want a man or a women for my massage I say “woman,” thinking about all he foxes that are floating around. The receptionist looked at me strange, so much so I said “What?” I was starting to feel like this was exactly why I did not want to go to an upscale establishment. I’m a pretty simple guy. I like things simple. I hate interaction with people when my goal is to do something else. As an example when I walk into a Starbucks I just want a cup of coffee. I don’t want to buy a CD; I don’t want to hear about the new Booty juice latte, just give me my damn coffee. In fact if I walk in and there are more than two people on line, I walk out. BTW, I like my coffee the way I like my women…with soy sauce. (more…)

New ‘Incredible Hulk’ Trailer

The second trailer for this summer’s The Incredible Hulk is up at Apple’s trailer site. We get to see a lot more of the story, which looks to be lots of Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) running around the world, fleeing the military, then a string of battles.

Most notably, this trailer also shows a lot of Tim Roth as the Abomination, and how he gets to that point. Still a ton of question marks on this one that the trailer doesn’t dispel, most notably whether the CGI is up to par on the big monsters, which is what everyone wants to see out of a Hulk movie anyway.

The trailer’s also up at YouTube, which you can see right here.

CBLDF Interview With Charles Brownstein

With the recent resolution of the Gordon Lee case, in which a comic shop owner was arrested for accidentally giving a copy of a Free Comic Book Day  title that contained male nudity to a child, there’s been quite a bit of attention on the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and their significant financial support for Lee during the trial.

Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter has posted a lengthy, comprehensive interview with Charles Brownstein, the executive director of the CBLDF, that touches upon the Lee case, its impact on the comics industry and the group’s other current and future projects.

As always, Spurgeon conducts a great interview that really gives you all you could ever want to know about the group and why there’s a genuine need for it. In this excerpt, Brownstein discusses the group’s ability to wage future legal battles, given the expenses incurred by the Lee case, and what types of legal issues are most worrisome to CBLDF:

What really makes me lose sleep is the prospect of getting a case under the PROTECT Act’s horrifying provisions equating drawings of teen and juvenile sexuality with actual child pornography. I’ve seen a couple of convictions for anime and manga that was ruled to be child porn. These were dirty people who also had real child porn, and who deserved their convictions for that material, not for repugnant art. There’s a difference between photographic evidence of a crime and drawings.

Those are the cases where we really need the community to stay firm in their support of the First Amendment. I think a lot of the content in the sexually oriented manga is pretty repugnant, but it’s lines on paper. The thing that raises my ire about PROTECT and the current slate of child pornography laws is that in attempting to create stronger resources against sexual predators, they create categories of thought crime. Child pornography is photographic evidence of a crime. To lower that bar to include dirty drawings and uncomfortable, if not repugnant, ideas muddies the waters in a way that disrespects the severity of the crime, and the victims of it.

For the full interview — which I highly recommend reading — head over to The Comics Reporter.

ComicMix Radio: Hot Girl In The Comic Shop!

That got your attention, didn’t it? Then come on in and meet Belkis, co-host of The Comic Book Novice radio show and a fresh fan with an interesting perspective on the industry, plus:

— Marvel collects X-Force and reprints another Hulk

— DC has a spot on the new KidsWB

— Galaxy Quest finally makes it to comics

— The Top 10 hottest sellers for March

Just before you press the button, make plans to join us Saturday for our special coast-to-coast coverage of Free Comic Book day. But even before that, be sure to shop the FCBD Retailer near you!

 

 
And remember, you can always subscribe to ComicMix Radio podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-8345799 or RSS!

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