Keith Giffen on DC/Wildstorm: Dreamwar

News
January 20, 2008

dcvsws-cv2_r1_solicit-6794036 Good news for fans of Keith Giffen’s run on Legion of Superheroes: He’ll have another chance to play with the team this April, when DC/Wildstorm: Dreamwar hits shelves. The six-issue miniseries will pair Giffen with artist Lee Garbett (Midnighter).

Newsarama has an interview with Giffen about the series, the inevitability of a brawl whenever heroes meet and the relevance of the miniseries in the greater DC and Wildstorm Universes.

Legion of Super-Heroes is a concept that always exerts this weird type of siren song to me. I swear, I’m walking around, going "I’ve got to touch them again." And I wind up back toying around with them. This is something I thought would be interesting to play around with. I haven’t dealt with the characters for awhile. This is an opportunity to go in and remind people of my take on the characters without violating anything that’s gone on since I was on the book. And that’s fun. It’s fun to play around with those characters again. I’ve got a fondness for the concept.

Joe Palooka as a Weird-Menace Vehicle, by Michael H. Price

News
January 20, 2008

One connection leads to another and then another, whether via the proverbial Six Degrees of Separation or by means of random-chance Free Association. Which explains how the moviemaking Coen Bros., Joel and Ethan, and Ham Fisher’s strange trailblazer of a comic strip, Joe Palooka, come to be mentioned in a single sentence.

The Coen Bros.’ current motion picture, No Country for Old Men, took Best Picture honors the other day in a vote amongst members of my regional (Texas) society of film critix. A re-screening seemed in order, particularly because the film – an unnerving combination of crime melodrama with Existential Quandary – contains a bizarre murder gimmick that had triggered a vague memory of some other movie from ’Way Back When. I figured that a fresh look might complete the connection between the lethal device in No Country for Old Men and whatever other picture I was recalling.

And sure enough: The compressed-air cattle-slaughtering implement that Javier Bardem wields in No Country proves akin in that respect to Charles Lamont’s A Shot in the Dark – a fairly conventional whodunit from 1935, rendered weird by the use of industrial machinery in lieu of conventional weaponry. George E. Turner and I had devoted a chapter to A Shot in the Dark in our first volume of the Forgotten Horrors movie-history library, figuring that although murder per se might or might not render a film horrific, murder by unconventional means is a strong qualifier.

That slight recollection, in turn, pointed toward a batch of other weird-gizmo murder pictures, leading at length to 1947’s Joe Palooka in the Knockout, part of a series of movies spun off the Fischer strip. When odder random associations are made, the Forgotten Horrors franchise will make ’em.

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The First Presidential News Conference On TV!

News
January 19, 2008

After having been tracking it for some time, we are pleased to announce we have finally found the beginning of the end. Ladies and gentlemen, today in 1955, the very first presidential news conference was filmed for television and newsreels. All that business with the media skewing coverage for political gain these days really couldn’t have started without the help of Dwight Eisenhower, his 33 minute conference, and the cameras of NBC, CBS, ABC and the Dumont Network (the 50’s version of UPN or WB before the CW merge).

Ah, remembering a time when the news was served straight, and remembering it with the bitter knowledge of posterity and its cold corporate hand fondling Wolf Blitzer’s – ahem – I mean, CNN gives really honest and objective coverage. And so does Fox. And for whoever else is reading, I love my country and I wear red white and blue every day under my regular clothes. La, la, la, nothing to read here…

Mercury x2

News
January 19, 2008

Think of it as Battle of the Planets, round one.

Warren Ellis is preparing to launch Anna Mercury from Avatar Press sometime soon. However, Archaia Studios Press has got The Many Adventures of Miranda Mercury scheduled for February of this year.

One is a kid’s book. The other isn’t. Guess which is which.

JLA Bites The Dust

Podcasts
January 19, 2008

In comics, as in most facets of entertainment, it’s all about the concept. What fits together better than a girl, pirates and a nice, juicy curse. Aracania Studios’ Cursed Pirate Girl begins in March and we’ve got your preview here on ComicMix Radio.

Plus:

• That’s it for the JLA movie

• Green Lantern scores a sell out and Boom! has one, too

• Millar and Hitch extend their stay on Fantastic Four

Press The Button or we’ll send you an e-mail full of Cloverfield spoilers!

Or subscribe to our podcasts via iTunes or RSS!

Crash Course on Marvel’s Next-Gen Heroes

News
January 19, 2008

Over at Marvel.com, the second-tier heroes are getting a first-class treatment with "The Future Is Now," a five-week series aimed at reacquainting readers with superteams like The Runaways and The Initiative. The first part of the series, posted Thursday, focused on the Joss Whedon-penned Runaways, and featured some interior art by Michael Ryan.

Although the on-the-run cast of teens usually remains below the radar, series writer/co-creator Brian K. Vaughan dropped a startling reveal in the "True Believers" arc that kicked off the second volume of RUNAWAYS: roughly 20 years into the future, team member Gertrude Yorkes will lead the Avengers!

Doug Jones on Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

News
January 19, 2008

IFMagazine has an interview with Doug Jones, who played Abe Sapien in the first Hellboy feature film and returns in several roles (including Abe) in the sequel, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. According to Jones, Abe will have a much more prominent role in The Golden Army, including a larger share of the action scenes.

You’re going to see [Abe] with a gun in his hand firing at things. No sword, but you’ll also see him with no weapon in his hands doing a certain fighting style that Guillermo called ‘the way of the water’ and would be most reminiscent of Capeoira, that Brazilian dancing fighting style that everyone seems at least somewhat familiar with.

Jones goes on to discuss the addition of a love interest for his character, the possibility of a "Director’s Cut," and the influence of Hellboy creator Mike Mignola on the film.

Every Man a King, by Martha Thomases

News
January 19, 2008

In the kind of coincidence that seems manufactured for this campaign season, Dr. Martin Luther King is in the news during the same week that we celebrate his birth and life. In a speech last week, Senator Hillary Clinton said (among other things), “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act… It took a president to get it done.” The media pounced on this as an attack on Senator Barack Obama and his alleged lack of experience in politics.

They got it wrong.

Oh, sure, that may be what she meant to imply. And it’s certainly easier to cover a news story that’s nothing more than a war of words, a clash of personalities, a spat among gladiators in the electoral arena. It’s an easy narrative, one that pundits can discuss without having to do much actual studying or other work.

It is true that Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. It’s true that he, and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party at the time, along with liberal Republicans (yes, there were such people), were the parts of the government that worked towards this end.

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Vatican Still Not a Big Fan of Harry Potter

News
January 18, 2008

If you thought the "Harry Potter is evil" furor had ended with the publication of the final installment of the series, think again. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, recently published a pair of essays claiming to examine "The Double Face of Harry Potter."

According to one of the essays, authored by University of Florence literature critic Edoardo Rialti, the dangerous, "subtle seductions" of the Potter series blur the line between good and evil.

From WashingtonPost.com:

"[Rialti] goes on to compare Potter’s acceptance of magic to Eve’s acceptance of the serpent’s offer in the Garden of Eden."

The Swamp Thing’s Saga Continues With New DVD

News
January 18, 2008

Since his debut in 1971, Swamp Thing has remained the king of the hill when it comes to comics’ heroic muck-monsters. Granted, there hasn’t been too much competition in that category, but there’s something to be said for the fact that DC’s sad story of a scientist-turned-swamp creature has spawned not one, but two feature films, as well as a relatively successful television series. On January 22, Shout! Factory will release Swamp Thing: the Series on DVD, collecting all three seasons of the Swamp Thing television series that aired on USA Network from 1990-1993, with the episodes organized in the order they were intended to be viewed.

Comics2Film has a discussion with Dick Durock, the actor who donned the Swamp Thing costume for all three live-action iterations of the character, providing some explanation of how he got roped into wearing the monster suit and why he stuck around for more… much more, in fact.

"The costume of course was zip-on and zip-off, but all the appliances and the makeup had to stay on. In the first feature it took close to four hours. In the second feature it took close to two hours. By the time we did the series, which ironically was by far the best makeup and costume, we had it down to about 45 minutes," the actor said.

"But it was still tough. At the end of the day you’re wearing eighty pounds of wet latex, plus all the chemicals on your face. It sure isn’t sunglasses and autographs, I’ll tell ya."

Also of note is the late-paragraph mention of a new Swamp Thing film in the works, with a script by the character’s creator, Len Wein.

Heck, it can’t be any worse than Man-Thing, Marvel’s 2005 quest to bring their swamp monster to the big screen, right?

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