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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending April 6, 2008

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  • April 6, 2008

Hollywood icon Charlton Heston is no longer with us.  Cineleet has a nice overview of his roles in three classic sf movies, but of course he was so much more, both on the screen and in real life.  Whatever one might think of  his politics, the fact that he and his now-widow Lydia were married for 64 years is enough to earn my respect and admiration.  As April is National Poetry Month, feel free to add your poetic thoughts about Heston in the comments section, and don’t forget to check out this past week’s ComicMix columns:

Godspeed, Chuck – not that you need it, you probably have the inside track after all those Biblical epics…

The ‘Paper Comics Deathwatch’ Continues

  • News
  • April 6, 2008

In the recurring "Paper Comics Deathwatch" feature over at Flashback Universe, the blog’s authors chronicle the events they believe to be hastening the demise of comics in printed form. It’s an interesting read occasionally, and I can’t help but laugh at the way "PCDW Points" are assigned to each event.

Recent subject matter for PCDW includes all of the love publishers are showing MySpace around the comics scene, an analysis of Joe Field’s address at the recent Comics Pro retailers conference and the Wizard crew pimping an advertising partner’s scanner as "Comic Book Collectors’ Heaven."

Heck, they’ve found so much fodder for this feature that they’re taking art submissions for a PCDW logo and awarding some prizes for the winner.

(DISCLOSURE: Readers can always get free, online comics published every every day of the week here at ComicMix, so there’s a distinct possibility that we might be showing up in that PCDW feature at some point, too.)

In related news, Vaneta Rogers recently tackled the best ways to attract new readers to comics in her always interesting Q&A feature over at Newsarama. A variety of industry creators weighed in with their thoughts on how to get a foot in the door with readers outside of the hardcore comics scene.

Christos Gage offers up some of his thoughts:

Like, if you rented a film noir movie, then there would be an ad at the beginning of the DVD, just like you have ads for other movies, but it would be for Criminal by Ed Brubaker, or something like that. I’d like to see ads that tie-in not only with comic book movies — like if you enjoy the Iron Man movie, then you’ll like Iron Man comics. But something where it says, "Hey, if you like James Ellroy, you’ll like Criminal."

Chuck Dixon also makes a nice point:

I wish someone other than Archie would make a digest-sized comic for the "impulse" aisle at the supermarket. A Batman/Superman or Spider-Man or Star Wars comic would go nicely in the pocket recently vacated by the cancelled Disney Adventures digest in thousands of market checkout lines. Disney cancelled their book because it was only selling a million copies a month!

 

(semi-via Journalista)

‘Dragonball’ Set Pictures Online

  • News
  • April 6, 2008

ComicMix previously reported that the Dragonball film has been pushed back to 2009, but now Joblo has posted some exclusive pictures from the set of the movie that should help hold you over until then.

Based off of the popular manga series and animated program, the movie follows Goku as he tries to find Master Roshi and collect all of the Dragon Balls in order to save the world from the evil Piccolo.

If you’re worried that all of this will look a little ridiculous in live action, well, you’re right, but isn’t that half the charm?

The set photos include pictures of Justin Chatwin in his Goku gear, Chow Yun Fat as Master Roshi, and Emmy Rossum as Bulma. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see James Marsters in his Piccolo get-up yet. Oh well, it’s always best to save the best for last.

Why ‘Little Lulu’ Works

  • News
  • April 6, 2008

Over at Comixology, Shaenon K. Garrity offers up her thanks to Dark Horse Comics for publishing Little Lulu reprint volumes en masse, and provides a great analysis of what made the comic strip work.

Simply put, I’m quite certain this is a quality piece of commentary because it actually made me want to hunt down a few volumes of Little Lulu, a strip that never really piqued my interest in the past.

The thing about the Little Lulu reprint project is that, brilliant as Little Lulu is, no one really needs 19 volumes of it. It’s a very repetitive comic. The adventures of Lulu Moppet, Tubby Tompkins, and their many small neighbors were published in a time when kids read their comics and threw them away; a month later, they were ready for more of the same. John Stanley and his nameless assistants worked out a series of reliable formulas which play out, often with only slight variations, in issue after issue after issue:

Garrity goes on to describe each of those "reliable formulas" in detail, explaining the typical set-up inherent to each formula, the payoffs readers could expect to see, and why the strips kept readers coming back. The author also provides examples of the small slices of zen served up by many of the strips:

Although Tubby was unable to carry his own spinoff comic for long, the Tubby-centric stories in Little Lulu are some of the best, and many of them feel autobiographical. When Tubby saves up his pennies to eat at a diner on the outskirts of town because real live truck drivers eat there, and he eagerly asks every man at the counter if he’s a truck driver until—joy of joys!—a bunch of truck drivers come in and sit down right next to him, the story transcends the formulas of kids’ gag comics and becomes a perfect moment drawn from life.

 

 

(via Journalista)

Happy Birthday: Brainiac

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Though not truly alive, Brainiac can date his creation to April 6, the day the Computer Tyrants of Colu created him. The green-skinned humanoid wreaked havoc across the galaxy, including shrinking several cities to subdue their populaces.

One of those cities was Kandor of Krypton. Years later, Brainiac encountered the man who would become his chief nemesis, Kal-el of Krypton—better known as Superman. It was a battle with Superman that forced Brainiac to destroy his original body and create a new, metallic skeleton form.

Brainiac has taken on several different forms since then, and his origin story has changed several times as well—sometimes he is an actual Coluan man instead of an android—but his twelfth-level intellect and his hatred for Superman continue unchanged to this day.

Mel Brooks and Woody Allen and Drew Friedman, by Michael H. Price

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  • April 6, 2008

more-old-jewish-comedians-6769250I met Drew Friedman in 1990 through a long-standing friendship with his brother and then-frequent collaborator, the songwriter and social critic Josh Alan Friedman, while we were attending a cartoonists’ convention in Dallas as working artists and comic-book developers. Drew had built a reputation within the industry as a meticulously lifelike portraitist, capable of arraying tiny dots of ink into images of dreamlike accuracy that captured the soul – unflatteringly so, as a rule – as unerringly as it suggested a physical reality.

Poised for a leap into mass-market commercial illustration, Drew had brought to the Dallas Fantasy Fair a work-in-progress assignment for a video-box edition of a pioneering television series, The Honeymooners. The portrait of star player Jackie Gleason shone forth from the over-sized Strathmore page – Drew was working on a scale larger by far than the size of an actual videocassette sleeve – like some impossible photograph. The piece was too richly caricatured to be a photo, but it captured an essence of Gleason in a way one seldom sees in ink-on-paper.

“Needs some cleaning up,” Drew said, surveying the results. He set aside his Rapidograph, a fountain-pen drawing tool capable of dispensing near-microscopic quantities of ink, and went to work with an X-Acto knife, chiseling at one ink-speck after another with unerring near-photographic accuracy. Gleason’s face, already as convincing as if reproduced by a half-tone engraving camera, seemed to engage the observer in direct eye-contact animation under Friedman’s masterful touch.

The intervening years have found Drew Friedman moving ever deeper into pop-mainstream acclaim via such publications as MAD and Los Angeles Magazine and Entertainment Weekly – a far cry from the compassionately acerbic show-business satires that he and Josh Alan once produced for various under-the-counterculture and arts-revue publications.

(more…)

ComicMix Radio: From Battlestar To Bruce Campbell

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Now that Battlestar Galactica has started on the road to its series finale, co-executive producer Mark Verheiden is turning to other creative avenues, including his new DVD feature with Bruce Campbell, The Teen Titans and his wishlist of creator-owned comics. In our ComicMix exclusive, he shares his plans, plus:

— Stan Lee’s new manga project to debut at NYCC

— Cartoon  Network announces "Fantasy Friday"

— Fell left out with Battlestar? Here’s a quick refresher!

—  And… another  exclusive Graham Crackers Comics variant that could be in the mail to you, if you win by e-mailing us at: podcast [at] comicmix.com

Don’t mess with Bruce, just press the button!

 

 

And remember, you can always subscribe to ComicMix Radio podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-8986822 or RSS!

GraphicAudio Adapts Three ‘Justice League’ Novels

  • News
  • April 5, 2008

We’ve opined previously on GraphicAudio’s full-cast adaptations of DC Comics’ Infinite Crisis and 52. Well, actually, of Greg Cox’s novelizations adapting DC Comics’ Infinite Crisis and 52. They must have sold pretty well, as they’re expanding their offerings to include at least three more projects.

They’ll be adapting a trio of Justice League paperback novels from a couple years ago: Christopher Golden’s JLA: Exterminators, Alan Grant’s Batman: The Stone King and Roger Stern’s Superman: The Never-Ending Battle. These adaptations feature a full case with music and sound effects, not quite like Big Finish’s original Doctor Who offerings in the sense that the stories are driven by each book’s narrative voice. While they fall slightly short of being full-blown audio dramas, I’ve enjoyed their work on Infinite Crisis and 52 and I hope they are able to maintain the same cast members for these CD presentations.

JLA: Exterminators comes out in May; the others follow in two-month intervals. They are released on CD and mp3 discs and are readily available at Interstate truck stops. Previous DC adaptations were distributed by Diamond to knowing comics shops, so you might want to do a pre-order. Of course, they’ll also be available at GraphicAudio’s website, where you have the option of buying them as downloads.

Happy Birthday: Bouncing Boy

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Charles Foster "Chuck" Taine was an ordinary 30th-Century Earth boy who got a job running errands for a famous scientist. The scientist sent Chuck off one day to deliver his experimental super-plastic formula to the Science Council, but Chuck got distracted by a robot gladiator tournament and stopped to watch for a bit.

During the tournament, Chuck got thirsty and, in his excitement, he mistook the formula for a harmless soda and drank it! The drink transformed Chuck, inflating him like a ball and giving him the power to bounce like one as well. When doctors told him his super-bouncing ability was permanent, Chuck gave up his old job and joined the Legion of Super-Heroes as Bouncing Boy.

He later married his teammate Duo Damsel and retired from active service, though he remained in the Legion reserves.

The Rights Stuff, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • April 5, 2008

This has been a stimulating week for any discussion of artists’ rights in the comics field. The courts awarded a share of the Superman copyright to the heirs of Jerry Siegel, and Warren Ellis left Marvel’s Thunderbolts series, saying, “It’s as simple as this – if I don’t own it, I’m not going to spend my life on it. Joe Quesada and Dan Buckley know that, they’re fine with that, and they hire me on that understanding.”

It’s my temptation now to brag, to tell you about the time I walked around the San Diego Comic Con with Joanne Siegel, how Warren Ellis is not only someone I know, but also my Facebook friend. Then you’d envy me for my fabulous life, and my weekend would be that much better. However, that’s not really a very good premise for a column. People haven’t worked so hard, risked being blackballed by major publishers and put their careers on the line just so I can feel better about myself (although, perhaps, they should consider doing so, since it would make me very happy).

The artists and writers in the comics community face the same trials and tribulations as the creative talents in any of the popular arts in this, our American capitalist society.

The blues musicians who created the tunes still used in popular music never received the copyrights for their work. If they were lucky, the assigned those rights (in contracts they never read) to the producers of their work. In that case, they at least got paid for their recordings. More likely, a white man heard the song and sold it as his own. (more…)

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