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Free Hot Comics Links For A Super Weekend

  • News
  • February 3, 2008

On this “Super” weekend, ComicMix Radio is more than happy to offer a number of surfing options to keep you busy during the parts of the SuperBowl between the cool commercials.

 
One of those commercials will be the latest trailer for the Iron Man movie from Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment. Look for it to run at around 7:30 PM. Chances are, you have already seen the tease here at Marvel. After the big game, the new ad will also be available here at Apple, and at  the official movie website. Tomorrow it will also hit sites that include Yahoo Sports! and ESPN.com, so basically you won’t be able to miss it. 
 
Brian Wood has posted his Channel Zero design book, Public Domain, as a free PDF download here. Public Domain is a collection of 145 pages of black and white artwork that includes extras generated in 1996-98 during the creation of Wood’s first graphic novel Channel Zero. 
 
Oni Press is picking up the sword and shield with North World, Book 1: The Epic of Conrad, a new original graphic novel series from cartoonist and web comic creator Lars Brown. Part Lord Of The Rings and part Gross Pointe Blank, North World is a fantasy epic that is also a webcomic that you can see here.
 
And as always, you can subscribe to our podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-3122376 or RSS!

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Across the Midnight Express Universe, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • February 3, 2008
 
This week I watched two DVDs that considered the same turbulent period, but from two wildly divergent vantage points. 
 
First, the divider. Reviewers were almost totally at odds over Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor’s “homage” to The Beatles. Homage is in quotation marks because half the critics thought its liberties and excesses were trumped by its imagination, while the other half thought it was simply, cringingly, awful. 
 
I doubt the 2-Disc Deluxe Edition that’s showing up next Tuesday will do anything to dispel the opposites. It’s obvious that Taymor – best known as the director of Broadway’s The Lion King — was aiming for the same sort of cinematic success as The Who’s Tommy or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but the nay-sayers pushed it toward 1978’s campy bomb, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band starring the Bee Gees. 
 
The talented Taymor dodged that bullet, but couldn’t Matrix them all. The Beatles are a creative touchstone, all right, but not always for the best. Just as it’s more difficult to adapt a great book to film (The Kite Runner, Love in the Time of Cholera, etc.) than it is a pulpy one (Jaws, Psycho, The Godfather), it’s also extremely problematic to create a new musical from iconic music. And there’s hardly anything more iconic than The Beatles. The new, obviously far less talented, interpreters will always come out the short end.
 
To her credit, Taymor doesn’t try to overwhelm the music with vocal gymnastics (save for one exception) or distract audiences with stunt casting (save for the welcome inclusion of Bono and Joe Cocker in the supporting cast). But, apparently she can’t resist hurling buckets of creative energy all over the Frankenstein-stitched, wedged-in soundtrack. There are two kinds of directors: those who say “I” and those who say “you”: you’ll feel this, you’ll think this. Guess which one Taymor is.
 

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War on Scientology?

  • News
  • February 3, 2008

Anybody who knows their ear from their elbow when it comes to the world and how ridiculous some of us can be knows how creepy the world of Scientology can be. Those who are unaware of this wacky world and missed the episode of South Park that explained it all, it’s a religion based on the writings of famed science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and is practiced in nearly 5,000 churches by some of the most powerful people in the world in over 100 countries.

And of course, with how open and freely accessible the Internet is, there will always be people with two cents that scream up and down about how evil and/or crazy this religion and its followers may be. While most videos and news pieces posted online against the Church of Scientology can be categorized as hogwash and petty, one-sided arguments, a new group calling themselves “Anonymous” is making quite the ruckus against the church and some of its biggest followers.
 
It all started when a video was “leaked” onto YouTube of Tom Cruise in an interview talking about his beliefs and practices with the church. The video was taken down several times after complaints from the church stating the content infringed upon their copyrights. That didn’t seem to stop some users, case in point (more…)

Megatron in New IDW Transformers Promo

  • News
  • February 3, 2008

Chris Ryall, IDW Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, recently posted this new, untitled promo art by Nick Roche for an upcoming Transformers project.

That’s about all there is to say about it, other than the fact that it’s now my new desktop background.

Capt. Marvel and Serial Retro-Mania, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • February 3, 2008

 

515n0admfrl-_aa240_-6397917Apart from some chronic bouts of concentrated cliffhanger enthusiasm in visits with the pioneering Texas cartoonist-turned-fine artist Frank Stack, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention in recent years to the extinct form of Hollywood filmmaking known as serials, or chapter-plays.
 
I’ve overcome that neglectful tendency lately with an assignment to deliver a foreword for IDW Publishing’s The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Vol. 4 (due in print by March 25), which covers a stretch of 1936–1937 and thus coincides with the early-1937 release of the first Dick Tracy serial by Republic Pictures Corp. George E. Turner and I had covered the Republic Tracy in our initial volume of the Forgotten Horrors books – but a great deal of information has come to light during the nine years since that book’s last expanded edition.
 
The transplanting of Tracy from the newspapers’ comics pages to the big screen figures in an earlier installment of this ComicMix column. So no point in re-hashing all that here, or in spilling any fresher insights that will appear in the IDW Tracy edition.
 
Anyhow, I had expected that these strictly-research refresher screenings of Republic’s Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy Returns and so forth would bring on an attack of Serial Burnout Syndrome – but no such. If anything, the resurrected Tracy cliffhangers have stoked a level of interest that I hadn’t experienced since I had been granted my first looks at the Republic serials via teevee in 1966. (Those attractions were feature-lengther condensations, roughly half or less the running time of a theatrical serial, prepared expressly for broadcast syndication, and re-titled to compound the confusion: 1936’s The Undersea Kingdom, for example, hit the tube as Sharad of Atlantis.)
 
I had wondered aloud while comparing notes recently with Frank Stack, whose lifelong fondness for the serials influences his own approach to storytelling, as to how Dick Tracy in particular could have adapted so brightly to movie-serial form – given that Republic’s adaptation had altered many key elements of Chester Gould’s comic strip. Frank’s lucid reply:
 

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‘Iron Man’ Superbowl Promo Peek

Marvel.com has posted a screencap from this weekend’s much-hyped "Iron Man" trailer scheduled to air during the Superbowl. The screencap shows Tony stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) testing a new suit.

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They also promise to post the full trailer on Marvel.com immediately after it goes on the air, just in case you were in the kitchen getting more chips when the promo appeared.

You can see a full-size version of the image on Marvel.com.

 

On This Day: Groundhogs and Base-Jumpers

  • News
  • February 2, 2008

Groundhog Day? Puh-lease. That’s what you’d expect, though, right?

But did you know that today in 1912 the very first stuntman did his very first stunt?

On Feb. 2, 1912, Frederick Rodman Law jumped off the Statue of Liberty  with a parachute, earning himself a $1,500 paycheck from a movie company, Pathe, that shot the stunt for a film. In doing so, he became the first “Hollywood” stuntman. He went on to jump into the Hudson River from an exploding balloon and jump off the Brooklyn Bridge later that year.

That’s right, this guy was probably the first thrill-seeking yokel to turn his hobby into a paid job.

Simpsons’ Artist Speaks To ComicMix Radio!

Super Bowl weekend is here, Super Tuesday is a couple of days away and ComicMix Radio talks to a dedicated creator who has been Super-Slaving away at comics for over two decades. George Broderick Jr has done work that ranged from Suicide Blonde to The Simpsons, and he fill in the gaps with us.

Plus…

  • The new Iron Man trailer hits Sunday at 7:30 – don’t get caught in the kitchen and miss it!
  • Sanctuary moves from the web to the Sci Fi Channel
  • ABC Family grabs Viper Comics’ The Middleman
  • Toy Story is coming in 3-D and Farscape joins us on iTunes

And please don’t ask us what anything on Lost meant – just Press The Button!

 Or subscribe to our podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-7125584 or RSS!

Tony Millionaire on ‘Maakies’, ‘Sock Monkey’ and ‘Drinky Crow’

  • News
  • February 2, 2008

Somewhere out there are several hundred people with drawings of their homes rendered by Tony Millionaire. I would very much like to find them.

Nick Main at Playback recently posted this interview with Tony Millionaire (a.k.a. Scott Richardson), the creator of the wonderfully old-timey, yet very much adult-oriented Sock Monkey, Maakies and "The Drinky Crow Show."

Sure, they talk Krazy Kat, toning down his Sock Monkey subject matter now that he children, and bringing "The Drinky Crow Show" to Adult Swim, but they also spend quite a bit of time discussing the different ways Millionaire has made ends meet. According to Millionaire, one way a struggling artist can earn a decent buck is by going door-to-door and sketching pictures of homes for their owners.

Yeah, I really liked doing that, because when the job is: "Here’s a house. Draw the house. Don’t screw around with it. Don’t make it arty. Don’t think of a great angle for it. Just draw the house." That’s how you really learn how to get a sense of gravity in drawing. Because you’re not really trying to do anything except draw itself. You’re not really trying to have a great concept or any other thought behind it. Sometimes I would cut the house off or try to put it at a more interesting angle, coming from behind a tree and somebody would say "What? You didn’t put my daughter’s bedroom in there!?" So I’d have to do it over.

Something you probably won’t earn much money doing, however, is running around naked in cemetaries. It might be liberating, but it usually doesn’t end well. Just take his word for it:

Did you ever go back to the South?

Yeah, but never for any crime worse than being loud and drunk…with my pants down. I say with my pants down, because one time I did actually get in trouble for running around in a cemetery naked. But that was actually worth it because they let me out the next morning, and the cemetery at night is a great place to run around naked.

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