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Roger Avary arrested for manslaughter and DUI

  • News
  • January 14, 2008

This just in from AP:

Oscar-winning screenwriter Roger Avary has been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and driving under the influence after a Ventura County car crash that killed a man and injured Avary’s wife, authorities said.

Avary, 42, was the driver in the single-car collision shortly after midnight Sunday in Ojai, said Capt. Ross Bonfiglio of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Killed in the accident was Andreas Zini, 34, a resident of Italy who was apparently visiting the couple. Firefighters cut Zini from the car with Jaws of Life, and he died several hours later at Ventura County Medical Center.

Avary’s wife Gretchen, 40, was ejected from the car and found in the road by deputies, Bonfiglio said. She was hospitalized in stable condition.

Avary was booked but later released on $50,000 bail, Bonfiglio said. He did not know whether Avary has hired an attorney.

Avary won an Academy Award along with Quentin Tarantino for writing "Pulp Fiction," and was also a co-writer of the recent epic "Beowulf." He and his wife live in Ojai, a popular artists’ colony and tourist destination 14 miles north of Ventura.

We’ll post more as we hear about it.

UPDATE: Neil Gaiman writes:

I just read the news about Roger Avary, and am mostly posting this because people have already started writing to let me know about it, and to stop that turning into a flood. (I still can’t access Blogger except via a sort of email work-around right now.)

 

According to the news reports (and I have no other information), Roger crashed his car yesterday. His wife Gretchen was thrown out of the car and is in hospital with serious injuries, and the passenger, an Italian friend of Roger’s called Andreas Zini, was killed. Roger has been arrested for suspicion of manslaughter and DUI, and released on bail.

 

And I’m worried about all of them. Worried about Gretchen and their kids, worried about the family of their poor friend, and worried about Roger (who, it’s probably worth mentioning, I’ve known well for over a decade, and who barely drinks).

Paris Review

  • News
  • January 14, 2008

Paris collects a four-issue mini-series set in that city in the early ‘50s, written by Andi Watson and illustrated by Simon Gane. Watson is fairly well-known these days as the writer-artist of such relationship-oriented comics as Slow News Day and Love Fights, but I haven’t heard of Gane before. (From a quick perusal of his blog I think that’s because he’s mostly worked in the UK and for music magazines.) Gane has a very ornate, ornamented, even rococo style, which is a good artistic choice for a historical comic – it clearly distances the action, and keeps it from feeling contemporary.

The story of Paris is pretty straightforward, and focuses on two young women from elsewhere living in that city. Juliet is an American, studying at the Academie de Stael by day and painting society portraits by night to pay her rent. Deborah is an English aristocrat chaperoned by her hideous aunt Miss Chapman. (more…)

Editing Comics In The 21st Century, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • January 14, 2008

As you may know, as part of the ComicMix ruling triumvirate I spend my spare time editing comics published on, and soon by, ComicMix. It’s the most fun part of the job, and I really enjoy the catalytic experience. I’ve been editing for a million years, much of that time editing comics, and I try really hard not to get set in my ways. Having a short attention span helps.

So does working on the Internet. Case in point:

I’ve been working with John Ostrander and/or Timothy Truman since the week before fish crawled out of the ocean. It’s one of my happiest experiences; it’s great fun to work with talented people with whom you share culture, worldview and personal history. But I’m always concerned that creatively we’ll fall into a rut and take things for granted. So far, so good.

Our process (and this differs for each creative team as well as on each project) is simple. Either John or Tim comes up with an idea and we kick it around in an endless series of witty and self-referential e-mails. Eventually Tim decides he’s read enough. John and I continue for a bit just to make sure Tim didn’t change his mind (or maybe just to annoy him; I can’t tell anymore). Then John writes up a plot for the first chunk of story. Before the Internet, that would usually be a 22 – 24 page segment; now, it’s whatever John feels like. We kick it around a tiny bit, and Tim takes it away and draws whatever he feels like drawing. John dialogues it. At each step of the way, I make snarky notes and cultural references that would confound Dennis Miller.  (more…)

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Happy 51st birthday to the Frisbee!

  • News
  • January 14, 2008

ultimate-frisbee-9821186Watch out, onlookers, what those naked athletes are throwing around was produced exactly 51 years ago today!

After all, Ultimate Frisbee wouldn’t be ultimate, heck, it just plain wouldn’t be without the plate-shaped plaything. The Frisbee was produced today way back when by Wham-O, inspired by the shape of a popcorn tin lid and using the name of a pie manufacturer (I wonder what Frisbee pie tasted like…)

Today, the Frisbee is best known for being chewed and slobbered on by hyperactive dogs, being thrown around on vacation, or competitively used in the game, Ultimate Frisbee (traditionally played by serious teams in the nude).

Thanks for all the good times, Wham-O.

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…)

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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!

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