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Edward D. Hoch: 1930-2008

  • News
  • January 21, 2008

From Mike W. Barr:

I have just learned that prolific short story writer Edward D. Hoch died Thursday, January 17, 2008.  Ed created many fondly-remembered characters including Simon Ark, who claimed to be 2000 years old and a warrior against Satan, and Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a New England physician who constantly found impossible crimes to solve.  He had a story in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine since May, 1973 (the issue in which my First Story was published).  He could also be construed as a tie-in writer, having written stories about Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen.

His output and his quality were an inspiration to us all.  He’s already missed.

Hoch (pronounced hoke) was born in Rochester, New York and began writing in the 1950s; his first story appeared in 1955 in Famous Detective Stories and was followed by stories in The Saint Mystery Magazine. In January 1962 he began appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. In December 1962 he kicked off his most successful collaboration, with the appearance of his first story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; in the years since EQMM has published over 450 of Hoch’s stories, roughly half of his total output. In May 1973 EQMM began publishing a new Hoch story in every monthly issue; as of May 2007 the author has gone an astonishing 34 years without missing a single issue.

In 2001 Hoch was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, the first time a Grand Master was known primarily for short fiction rather than novels.

And every so often, he even blogged.

Hail and farewell. You’ll be missed.

What happens at ComicMix…

  • News
  • January 20, 2008

Wow, new ComicMix contributors Shira Gregory and Rick Marshall have really done a yeoman’s (yeo-people’s?) job filling in our news section, haven’t they?  Even I can’t keep up!  In fact, they’ve posted so fast and furiously that many of our regular columnists have fallen off the "More News" window, so it’s a good thing I do a recap every week:

And I hear a rumor that things are getting steamy over in our comics section.  Have I missed any male pulchritude?  Some of this stuff isn’t safe even for those of us not currently at work!

Red-Hot Hulk!

hulk-5431735Those of you brave enough to come out from under your beds after seeing Cloverfield might even bravely venture over to the keyboard to run down a couple of hot links we gathered for you this week:

 
Top Cow Productions pulled in over  2.5 million votes at the official home of Pilot Season here, all in an effort to determine the publishing plans of the line in 2008. Pilot Season released five self-contained pilot issues starring established characters without a current series, all done by established creative teams in 2007. Each issue set up a potential series much like a television pilot episode. In case you still want to cast a vote or two, the polls remain open until tomorrow,
 
The Hero/AtomicComics.com Hulk #1 (Red) that features an exclusive cover by Ed McGuinness, limited to only 5000 copies, can be purchased online here. This special edition of Hulk #1 runs $8 and will also be offered at the Phoenix Cactus Comicon January 26-27, and at a special pre-con party at Atomic Comics where Hulk writer Jeph Loeb and artist Ed McGuinness will be signing on January 25th. 
 
 
BOOM! Studios’ Northwind #1 will receive a second printing and the publisher has also released a trailer for the series as well. See the trailer here and get a free download of Northwind #1 here. By the way, the actual second print will have a slightly altered cover to distinguish itself from the first printing and will be available on January 23rd.
 
You can see those previews of Wildstorm’s Supernatural: Rising Son, here. Did you know that The CW has four more Supernatural episodes to go before the WGA strikes brings the series to a halt?
 
It will be business-as-usual this week on ComicMix Radio as we dig into the new comics and DVDs, and then emerge long enough to continue our quest to find out what some of the insiders in comics are reading these days – it all starts in about 48 hours right here!

Hooray For Ray Harryhausen, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • January 20, 2008

What a relief! Fellow audio-blogging ComicMixer Mike Raub put it in perspective for me as soon the credits ended on Cloverfield: “What ever happened to science?” he asked. “Remember the good old days when movie characters would actually think about why something was happening rather than immediately whip out the heavy artillery?”

Well, Mike, my friend, I do, I really do, because this week I got two new, colorized, long-delayed, two-disc special editions from the “Ray Harryhausen Presents” line: It Came From Beneath the Sea and, especially, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers. In the latter film, particularly, smart people do courageous things to foil an attack from the stars, and the literate, logical, talk – so absent in Cloverfield – would do Mr. Spock proud.

But first things first. It Came from Beneath the Sea arrived first, in 1955, with a Godzilla-esque tale of a nuclear-radiated giant octosquid attacking San Francisco. The following year saw the release of Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, which was succinct and accurate in its title. Both are being re-released on DVD now because Ray supervised their colorization, and Sony has done a nice job of presenting them in both their original B&W as well as colorized forms, with a “ChromaChoice” toggle so you can go from one to the other with ease.

Only one problem with Ray supervising the coloring: the monsters look great … but the people often also look like they’re made of clay … or used a scoonch too much liquid tanner. All in all, however, it’s one of the more successful colorization jobs, and rarely too distracting. Besides, what with Ray’s Dynamationalized characters, the whole thing has a nice sheen of artificiality anyway, which the colorization folds nicely into.

 

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The Death of Tarzan

  • News
  • January 20, 2008

Today in 1984 came the end to an iconic career: Johnny Weissmuller, better known as Tarzan, passed away.  He starred in several of MGM’s Tarzan movies, beginning with Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932. However, Weismuller was more than a pretty Hollywood face. He came ready to play the jungle man by having won five, count’em, five gold medals in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics in swimming. Although he never starred in the 1966 TV show version of Tarzan, Weissmuller’s yodelling howl is still synonymous with the ape man he made famous.

Oh yeah, today is also Bill Maher’s birthday. Holla!

 

Roger Price Retires From Mid-Ohio Con

  • News
  • January 20, 2008

The man who founded the Mid-Ohio-Con, one of the best run and most entertaining of the hundreds of comic book conventions held each year, is retiring after 27 years.

Roger A. Price issued an announcement today that essentially said it was time for a change. Having helped run a large convention (the Chicago Comicon) for merely 10 years, I can certainly sympathize. The man is leaving while on top.

He is entertaining offers from those who might be interested in taking over this classic show. Roger can be contacted at info@midohiocon.com, or at R.A.P. Promotions at P.O. Box 3831, Mansfield Ohio 44907.

Speaking for both my family and for ComicMix, Roger, thanks for all the great fun. We wish you well.

dcvsws-cv2_r1_solicit-6794036

Keith Giffen on DC/Wildstorm: Dreamwar

  • News
  • January 20, 2008

dcvsws-cv2_r1_solicit-6794036Good 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.

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