The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Broadcast blog’s weekly wound-up

  • News
  • January 13, 2008

Political bally ho and slightly skewed polls have driven us the web to be entertained this week. Let us share our links from our podcasts:

  • More fun than Bill O’Reily, we have Atom Films election-themed site of games, music videos and gags. Our favorite is the Kung-Fu game which invites players to choose their favorite candidate and take them into battle against a political enemy (that Hilary has a mean round house kick!)
  • Archie Comics’ new expanded web site is live. There are expanded message areas for all their titles and most of their individual characters like That Wilkin Boy, Dilton, Captain Sprocket, and even Reggie. By the way, all posts will be read by a member of the Archie Comics staff prior to posting so that parents will be able to feel safe when their children are visiting the Archie Comics site.
  • Virgin Comics’ sold-out Dan Dare #1 can now be seen online as part of their Widescreen Digital Comic Book series. Segments are being posted every Monday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, Dan Dare #2 should still be in comic stores now and #3 is scheduled to street on January 23rd. Virgin Comics’ Dan Dare is written, of course, Garth Ennis which probably explains the sell-out.
  • Yoko Ono introduced the new John Lennon Educational Tour Bus at CES last week and you can see it, plus the tour schedule, at http://www.lennonbus.org/. The goal of the bus is to provide kids with a free hands-on opportunity to create and record their own music, produce videos and take digital photos, and will continue to offer tours and workshops. Throughout 2008 the bus, which features a recording studio and a range of great state-of-the-art equipment, will make stops at high schools, colleges and university campuses, and retailers.

Back on the Broadcast in a couple of days with our rundown of new comics & DVDs, then later on we continue our poll for “favorite hero”. This time we get a response not from a comic creator, but an actual character himself. Catch it on ComicMix Radio this week!

Or subscribe to our podcasts via iTunes or RSS!

ComicMix does time

  • News
  • January 13, 2008

Thank goodness OJ Simpson and Marion Jones are serving time, making the world safe from rich,  self-indulgent (and presumably murderous, in one case) black former athletes!  Can rich treasonous white oilmen be far behind?  Well, yeah, actually.  Welcome to America, 2008!  Fortunately, our ComicMix columnists have just the thing to take your mind off these weighty matters, and here’s the roundup of what we’ve done this past week:

At least they can’t take away our dreams yet, so I can still fantasize about Karl Rove being frog-marched into a precinct house, can’t I?

Big Miserable Love, Juvenile Attell, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • January 13, 2008

Welcome to the January doldrums, where, even if the Writers Guild of America wasn’t on strike, there’d still be precious little good new product, since this is the season where studios dump their loss leaders … I mean, this is the month where studios allow their most challenging productions to find their audience.

Actually, both estimations are true, and the titles considered in this column will reflect that. But since I also have a little breathing space, I want to take the opportunity to toast the year of the bummer. If the movies produced at the end of 2007 are any evidence, we’re all feeling really bad. How else do you comprehend a holiday when the most lauded films share a p.o.v. so bleak and unremittingly tragic that the bitter ending of Gone With The Wind seems positively giddy? 

No Country for Old Men, Sweeney Todd, There Will Be Blood, and Atonement – all … to quote George Harrison in A Hard Day’s Night: “a drag, a well-known drag.” In fact, Atonement not only shoves your face chin-deep into misery, but holds out a small, shiny piece of possible happiness, only to take great pleasure in then ramming it into your eye socket so it can shatter against your brain. Not to say that these aren’t great films, but to quote John Cleese in the fine farce Clockwise: “It’s not the despair. The despair I can handle. It’s the hope…!”

This is where the HBO Comedy Special DVD Dave Attell: Captain Miserable comes in. I’ve been a fan of this “functionally alcoholic” comedian since the days (or should I say nights) of his Comedy Central series Insomniac, where he’d go out after his act and see what the town he was playing in had going on in the wee hours. This is his first HBO special, following in the footsteps of George Carlin, Robert Klein, and Chris Rock, among others.  (more…)

cloverfield-6517630

Cloverfield: Big-Monster Flick, or 9/11 Allegory?, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • January 13, 2008

cloverfield-6517630Ringed with popular anticipation in view of its producer’s involvement with the hit teleseries Lost, director Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield proves to be something more than the moviegoing customers might have expected.

The film is an American Godzilla, and I don’t mean the bloated Hollywood Godzilla of 1998. A larger-than-life disaster film, Cloverfield addresses the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in much the same way that Inoshiro Honda’s Gojira, or Godzilla, of 1954, helped Japan to come belatedly to terms with the bombings in 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And yes, I know: Giant-monster movies are dime-a-dozen fare, and so what do we need with another one? We don’t so much need another one, as we need somebody capable of doing one right – the way Fritz Lang did with Siegfried in 1924, or Honda with the original Godzilla. Cloverfield makes the cut, okay.

Such impossible menaces, after all, have served since ancient times to literalize humanity’s fears of threatening forces beyond reasonable control, from the Tiger Demon mythology of primeval Siam through the Germanic and British legends of Siegfried and Beowulf. (Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 version of Beowulf is more a matter of digital-effects overkill than of mythological resonance.)

Never mind that the American movie-import market had treated the 1954 Godzilla as merely another creature-feature extravaganza, drive-in escapism with trivialized English-language insert-footage and enough re-editing to diminish the myth-making allegory. In its authentic Japanese cut, Godzilla is a national epic on a par with Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai – same year, same studio. It took a while for America to catch on: The fire-breathing creature known as Godzilla is the A-bomb, re-imagined in mythological terms.

Yes, and it takes time for the popular culture to get a grip on a real-world disaster. Hollywood dealt at first with the 9/11 destruction of New York’s World Trade Center by dodging the issue, then gradually addressing the loss in such lifelike dramas as Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002), whose allusions to Ground Zero pointed toward an explicit depiction of the crisis in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006). There have been other such striking examples – but you get the idea. 

(more…)

The Love And Capes lowdown on the ComicMix podcast!

  • News
  • January 13, 2008

Even guy (and girls) who wear tights and capes need a little romance, but as Lois Lane will tell you, it isn’t easy to achieve. One popular indy comics explores the subject with humor and hits the mark every time – Love And Capes! In case you might have missed the title, we talk to creator Thom Zahler and even do some fantasy casting for a L&C Tv series – Plus:

  • Dan Dare goes online
  • DC and Marvel each chalk up another sell out
  • Yoko actually creates the "magic bus"

We know you’re a big softie at heart – so Press The Button!

 

 Or subscribe to out podcasts via iTunes or RSS!

The Rules of Travel, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • January 12, 2008

You can tell it’s January by the seed catalogs in the mailbox. No matter how dark and gloomy the day might be, Burpee and other seed spreaders assure you that someday, soon, the sun will shine and plants will grow.

I’m thinking about a vacation.

“But, Martha,” you say. “You’re a glamorous, successful woman! You have an exciting career that takes you all over the country, where you get to hang out with interesting creative people, all expenses paid. Your job is comics. Why should you need a vacation?”

It’s true that I’m extremely lucky. I get to work in my chosen field and get paid for my work. I get to live in New York City, the veritable Center of the Universe™. Every time I get up in the morning, I have the opportunity to see masterpieces of the visual, audio and kinetic arts. Some of the finest merchants on the planet have their flagship stores within a few miles of my apartment, easily accessible by inexpensive mass transit. Restaurants compete to see who can offer the most exotic, the most exquisite, the most yummy of foods. Why would I need a vacation?

All of this is true. I spent most of my adolescence scheming of ways to visit New York. As soon as I moved here, I met people in the comics business, and exploited them to the best of my ability so that I could learn how to get into the business (thanks, Denny!). I’m livin’ the dream, baby. (more…)

Manga Friday: The Leopard Who Walked Like a Man

  • News
  • January 11, 2008

This is another complicated bit of backstory: in 1979, Kaoru Kurimoto started a series of epic fantasy novels about a warrior-type named Guin who woke up amnesiac with a leopard mask permanently affixed to his face. There are at least a hundred and eighteen novels in the main series, plus some unspecified number of “side stories.” (I don’t know what makes them “side stories,” either.) One of those “side stories” was adapted into a manga series, and collected into three volumes. Now Vertical is in the middle of publishing the manga based on the side story based on the main story of the leopard-headed warrior named Guin. (Who lies in the house of Bedlam, Elizabeth Bishop would add.)

The first two volumes are out in English already; the third is scheduled to follow in March. And I read those first two volumes today (Thursday), to let you, the manga-starved hordes of ComicMix, know what they’re like.

And they’re OK.

Hm. You probably want more than that, right? All right. Guin is your standard post-Conan mightily-thewed barbarian type, with impossibly bulging muscles and a big sword he whips out and swings around phallicly at the appropriate moments. In the manga, his leopard “mask” looks just like a head – the jaw moves, the eyes move, and the whole thing is disconcertingly too small for his overmuscled body. Also in Conan fashion, he’s hacked his way to being king of a civilized nation, marrying the beautiful princess along the way. (Unlike Conan, though, the princess is not exceptionally enamored of her husband.) (more…)

Legends of the Dark Fleece

  • News
  • January 11, 2008

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of ewes?  It’s the Ovine Princess, the Dark Fleece Detective.  We were lucky enough to meet this secretive heroine at the Pennsylvania Farm Show.  She seems to be a big fan of ComicMix, pausing in her contemplation of villainy (and the straw in the stall) to notice the logo on our t-shirt. 

Oddly, we never seem to see glamourous socialite Lani Lind (LL!) when this dominoed dare-doll puts in an appearance.

(Editor’s note: Martha, we told you we wanted you to work on promoting our online edition of The Black Lamb by Timothy Truman, formerly published by Helix/DC Comics. This ain’t what we had in mind. –Glenn H.)

 

 

I Want That! by Michael Davis

  • News
  • January 11, 2008

Wow!

What a difference a week makes! I mean can you believe what happened last week? I write a column about politics and personal choice and I get zillion comments and now the biggest event in the history of the USA political system occurs! This event makes me so proud to be a black man! 

History was made last week and I’m sure you saw it unfold on television as I did. I still cannot believe that…

Britney Spears lost her mind and went to the hospital.

Wow! I, one day will be able to tell my grandkids that I saw this crazy little twit get carted away in an ambulance. She looked like she was on the kind of drugs that make hard core drug addicts say “Oh Hell no, I’m not taking that! I’ll stick to heroin.” 

Did you see the number of police cars that were there?  (more…)

Happy 78th birthday, Tintin!

  • News
  • January 10, 2008

Today is the anniversary of a great comic debut: the funny pages revealed in 1929 the adventures of the worldly Tintin. That weird little mohawk, that smart, itsy dog, who knew the French could come up with something so, that is, tres, charming? Tintin was so popular in fact that it has been translated into over 50 different languages. But trulee, you ‘ahven’t experee-unst ze real Teenteen unteel you ahv red eet een zee oreejenal wan.

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks