The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Being A Sport, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • March 17, 2008

You might not have realized it, but this is the time of year when more Americans engage in more illegal activity than just about any other. Nope; it’s not drunk driving or tax cheating, it’s March Madness… and the crime is called gambling.

Studies suggest March Madness is the high school student’s portal to gambling. On-the-job productivity plummets. An estimated $2.4 billion dollars will be put on the line against the law, some of it with organized crime – which wouldn’t be the case if it were legal, unless you are like me and you consider bankers to be their own strain of organized crime.

I’ll admit, I don’t get it. I don’t have the gambling gene (or maybe I’m just too cheap), and I’m at best a second-tier sports fan. I follow hockey and I follow the Iditarod because being a hockey fan isn’t as weird as it used to be. I follow the Chicago Cubs because as a native northside Chicagoan I am compelled to do so. Much like Yankee fans, we believe that there’s some issue of “sports” involved with the team. And that’s pretty much it. My lifetime contribution to sports-related at-risk financial endeavors is zilch.

But I am a comics fan and a student of our culture. So I wonder, with all this interest in sports and all this money changing hands, why hasn’t there been a successful sports-themed comic book series?

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending March 16, 2008

  • News
  • March 16, 2008

Can it be?  Is convention season well and truly underway?  No, I’m not ready yet!  Need job first!  Hello to everyone at WizWorld LA, LunaCon and everywhere else I can’t afford to be.  At least I and our other weekly ComicMix columnists can engage you from the comparative safety of our home keyboards:

Forecast for the last half of March: more pavement-pounding, but at least it won’t be in the snow any more!

ComicMix at WWLA: The Screenwriter’s Panel

  • News
  • March 16, 2008

Sunday, Day Two at Wizard World in LA and this time around its the Screenwriter’s panel. Moderator Rickey Purdin introduced a distinguished group of successful screenwriters including Mark Verheiden, Carl Ellsworth, John Cox and Zak Penn. With the intros finished, Purdin launched into a short video montage featuring clips from some of the projects the members of the panel had written.

Some of these clips included scenes from The Mask, X-Men 2, Disturbia, Smallville, Red Eye and Battlestar Galactica. Following the clips, Purdin started in on the questions for the panel.

First up, how each of the writers got their various starts in the "business."

Cox started it off saying that, infortunately, he didn’t have a “sexy story" to tell. Instead, like many others, he went to film school with the intention of being a director. However, he soon found out that directing was “too much like working for a living" and decided to switch to screenwriting.

“My story is pretty sexy,” joked Penn. “I was a stripper for a couple of years. It’s a weird job. It was in a female strip club and I was the only guy there, and I stood out.”

"No, I’m joking. Obviously," he continued. "Actually, I got really lucky and wrote Last Action Hero pretty much right out of college and then sold it pretty fast. So that was it for me." (more…)

Gary Panter on ‘Omega: The Unknown’

  • News
  • March 16, 2008

Over at Marvel.com, Sean T. Collins interviews "punk comics" legend Gary Panter, who will be providing interior art for an upcoming issue of Jonathan Lethem’s Omega: The Unknown.

Panter’s ridiculously impressive resume includes work for everyone from Frank Zappa to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, designing the set for the children’s television series/weekly acid trip Pee Wee’s Playhouse, a prominent teaching position at New York’s School of Visual Arts and, among other things, a freakin’ Emmy Award.

See? I told you it was an impressive resume.

Marvel.com: What exactly will you be drawing for the series? I believe you’re providing the art that within the story is being drawn by Omega himself, right?

Gary Panter: Omega draws his own origin story in the form of a wordless comic. I draw it for him. At first I was going to draw it with really jagged lines like the punky stuff I did in the ’70s, but I decided to draw kind of like I draw these days, but even a little more retarded than usual. I figured that a [super hero] could probably draw [as well] as me, without trying very hard, but I didn’t want to draw it exactly like the other comics I’m drawing these days. I wanted it to be kind of like old Marvel comics, but spazzier.

Omega: The Unknown #7 will hit shelves on April 2.

 

Gattaca Tales, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • March 16, 2008

southlandtales-7316063Well, it’s SF week at the ol’ DVD Xtra. Not sci-fi week, but SF week, using the “official” contraction sanctified by the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was once a member. Now, if I were considering the likes of I Robot and/or I am Legend – two Will Smith vehicles adapted from far superior books – then maybe it would be sci-fi week. But, no, I’m reviewing two wildly divergent films – one totally out of control and one totally in control – that best exemplify the “genre of ideas.”

As virtually almost always, the studios green-light these projects then never really know what to do with them or how to market them. So, while both these releases should have been (and would have benefited greatly from being) glutted with special features the way Will Smith’s DVDs are, they’re both a tad light in the digital loafers (as it were). The lightest, and the most needy, is Southland Tales, another ready-made cult classic created by writer/director Richard Kelly, who had already given the world Donnie Darko<span style=”font-style:

normal”>.

Anybody involved had to know what they were getting here. It’s not like the whole thing was improvised. In fact, during the thirty minute “making of” doc called “USIDent  TV: Surveilling the Southland,” actors professed to not being able to understand the long script but signing on anyway. If any film needed an audio commentary, this one does, but it doesn’t have one. Instead, the half-hour behind-the-scenes featurette skims over a wide range of approaches – from actor interviews to set decoration to stunt detailing. Richard Kelly is much in evidence, however, vainly trying to defend and detail his base-level Dr. Strangelovian funhouse of a film.

Here, again, is where DVDs can improve the viewing experience. In theaters, Kelly’s overstuffed confection would, and did, become fairly intolerable. But taken in DVD chunks (or chapters, if you will), the futuristic action mystery musical dramedy can even be enjoyable … if only to marvel at Kelly’s hubris, and the huge cast who agreed to participate. Even as a game of  “spot the cult fave,” the film can be fun. There’s the Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Christopher Lambert, Miranda Richardson, Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith, Curtis Armstrong (Booger!), and Janeane Garofalo, as well as a bunch of past and future Saturday Night Livers and Mad–TVers.

(more…)

ComicMix at WWLA: The X-Men Panel

  • News
  • March 16, 2008

Day Two at Wizard World LA and this time around it’s the X-Men Panel, hosted by Marvel Marketing Honcho Jim McCann. Featured on the panel are X-Force co-writers and "life partners" Chris Yost and Craig Kyle, as well as Matt Fraction, Marvel editor Aubrey Sitterson and X-Factor writer Peter David. Young X-Men writer Marc Guggenheim ran a bit late but managed to phone in and confirm, via speakerphone, that he would be arriving shortly.

And so, with introductions over, McCann went right into the announcements and the slideshow.

The first slide showed three of the "Divided We Stand" titles which include X-Force, Cable and X-Men Legacy. Seeing the slide, McCann jokingly referred to Cable as "Two men, two natural arms, and a baby."

Sitterson then chimed in and talked about X-Men: Legacy, saying "There is a nostalgic aspect to it, but it’s also a story picking up directly from ‘Messiah Complex.’" He continued: "X-Men Legacy picks up what’s going on with Professor X after he takes a bullet to the brain. We’re checking in with these giants of the Marvel mutant universe. Gambit will be among those that show up in the series."

Next, McCann let the audience know about the current story arc of Uncanny X-Men — particularly why everyone seems to be heading for San Francisco. "The San Francisco stuff is not just for fun, this is definitely leading up to something," he said. ‘It all makes sense what Brubaker is doing."  (more…)

Blues Poetry: Rough-And-Raw, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • March 16, 2008

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>race-wes-cd-cover-9303079Fort Worth, Texas’ Wesley Race is a businessman in much the same way that the Chicago blues singer Little Walter Jacobs once proclaimed himself a businessman: “I’m a business<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK2″> man,” Jacobs growls on a 1964 recording called (what else?) “I’m a Business Man,” allowing songwriter Willie Dixon’s lyric to leave the nature of the business open to suggestion but permitting no doubt of a businesslike attitude.

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>Walter Jacobs had died, a casualty of a busy sideline in street-fighting, a year before Wes Race’s arrival in 1969 on Chicago’s blues-club scene in search of raw emotive authenticity. Jacobs, among such others as the singer-guitarists Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, had embodied the urbanized and electrified Deep Blues style that had drawn Race to Chicago – perhaps less for the raucous nightlife, than for the poetic ferocity that Race had long perceived in the blues.

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>Race’s path, winding but decisive, has led to the release this month of a début CD-album of his original poetry, recited with real-time spontaneity against a blues-rooted musical backdrop. The recording, Cryptic Whalin’ (Cool Groove Records), is a production of the guitarist and engineer Jim Colegrove, with instrumental contributions from such additional mainstays of Fort Worth’s roots-music scene as saxophonists Johnny Reno and René Ozuna, guitarists Sumter Bruton and James Hinkle, drummers Steve Springer and Larry Reynolds, steel guitarist David McMillan and keyboard artists Jeff Gutcheon and Ruf Rufner.

(more…)

Not-Quite-Random Video: The Muppets Do ‘Danny Boy’

  • News
  • March 16, 2008

So there I was, sitting around LunaCon today, wondering when Jameson’s Irish Whiskey became the universal drink of science-fiction fans.

When ComicMix VP Glenn Hauman informed me that Saint Patrick’s Day had been officially moved to today’s date for 2008 instead of March 17, I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical.

"Sure," I told him, "and Christmas is now in July. I’ll have you know I associate with a very dedicated, hard-drinking, allegedly Irish crew, so I would know about this sort of thing. You’ve clearly been drinking too much of that home-brewed booze sold by the costumed Klingon in room 424."

I stand corrected.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, folks.

 

 

 

On This Day: Dan Adkins

  • News
  • March 15, 2008

Born on March 15, 1937, in Midkiff, West Virginia, Dan Adkins grew up in rural areas where he could indulge his love of wandering and exploring. When he was 11, however, rheumatic fever left him paralyzed from the waist down for six months.

He passed the time by reading comics books and became fascinated with the artwork in particular. Adkins joined the Air Force after high school and became a draftsman, then an illustrator. It was during that time that he started the fanzine Sata, in 1956.

After leaving the Air Force Adkins moved to New York, where he did freelance illustration for several years before joining Wally Wood Studio in 1965, which gave him his start in comics. Since then he’s worked for DC, Marvel, Eclipse, and others, and done many magazine covers as well. Adkins is probably best known for his work on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, Strange Tales, and Doctor Strange.

New ‘Iron Man’ Game Trailer: Air Battle

  • News
  • March 15, 2008

Sick of all the Iron Man videogame news yet? If so, don’t bother reading this post… but we’re willing to bet that you’ll read it anyways. We’re diabolical like that.

For those of you who are interested in more news about the upcoming videogame adaptation of the film, or for anyone who’s simply impressed by the fact that Sega has defied expectations and made a movie-based game that actually looks good, we have you covered. (By the way, click here to see how movie-based games can go horribly wrong.)

Sega has released a new trailer for the upcoming game highlighting the golden Avenger’s aerial combat. And if that wasn’t enough to get you pumped, they scored it with Black Sabbath’s "Iron Man."

 

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