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Tumbleweeds Tumbles Its Last

  • News
  • December 30, 2007

Tom Ryan’s Tumbleweeds ends its 42 year run in the newspapers today, at the request of the artist.

The always entertaining big-foot western strip launched an animated teevee series, a musical and a theme-park, as well as appearing in hundreds of newspapers throughout the years. Ryan continues a trend of creators retiring their strips at the end of their careers instead of allowing the syndicates to turn their creations over to others, transforming their work into minor family annuities.

Bamboozled by Bat Masterson, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • December 30, 2007

 

Every time I backtrack to some last-century comic book or movie or teevee show that purports to portray Bat Masterson, I come away with a greater appreciation of the historical model as a bigger-than-real figure. Granted that some of Masterson’s real-life exploits and con-games aren’t quite the stuff of sensationalized melodrama, I’ll take the genuine article every time for Puckish wit and adaptability to wildly differing environments.
 
Back in the not-so-long-ago 1960s, the Standard Oil Company unearthed a long-hidden mess when it undertook to lease a great deal of property around the townsite of Old Mobeetie, in Texas’ Northward Panhandle region. The transactions proved abnormally complicated because, as an executive from Standard’s Oklahoma City office complained: “It cost us a fortune to get those land titles straightened out because of all those crooked survey lines.”
 
One of the old-time landowners allowed as how the Standard Oil bigwigs might be surprised to learn who had been responsible for all that erratic surveying. The surveyor in question was Bat Masterson, one of the many colorful and controversial denizens of Mobeetie’s earliest days.
 

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Logan Gets Mr Bean’s Girl

wolverine-1776701Some important Wolverine casting news and our list of late comics end the year and ComicMix Radio covers it all!

Plus:

• Marv Wolfman comes back to The Titans – sort of

• Mark Waid splits from The Flash

• The Justice League director may not "get it"

And Sean McKeever shares what he enjoyed reading in 2007.

Press The Button now and we promise to save you from Zombie Dick Clark!

Happy 40th birthday, tribbles!

  • News
  • December 29, 2007

On this day in 1967 — well, actually, on Stardate 4523.3, but you get the idea — Cyrano Jones sold Lt. Uhuru an adorable little fur ball of the species polygeminus grex that quickly began to multiply like a rabbit on steroids. The creatures found their way into every nook and cranny of Deep Space Station K-7 and the visiting Enterprise, endangering the crew and their mission in the premiere of "The Trouble With Tribbles."

Of course, the concept was revisited in 1996’s Deep Space Nine episode, "Trials and Tribble-lations". Here’s a brief comparison between the two episodes:

And remember, when you’re up to your ass in tribbles, your initial assignment was to poison the grain.

A Tribble is expected to have a cameo in the upcoming Star Trek prequel movie.

UN Teams with Marvel

  • News
  • December 29, 2007

The Financial Times reports that the United Nations Office for Partnerships will be working with Marvel Comics to create "a comic book set in a fictional war-torn country with superheroes working alongside UNICEF aid workers and U.N peacekeepers."

Notes UPI somewhat sarcastically, the partnership is designed in part to bolster the UN’s "international image damaged by the unilateral diplomatic efforts of some Western countries by teaching children the value of international cooperation."

And by "some Western countries, " read "the scary guy with the mustache who wants to lop off the building’s top ten floors yet somehow got a recess appointment to be our ambassador to the organization, and who was forced out in deserved disgrace about a year ago."  The UN hopes to distribute the comics to about 1 million US children initially, and one can only hope Spider-Man & co. are more powerful than Ornery Moustache Dude.

Happy 84th birthday, television!

  • News
  • December 29, 2007

Geez, this is the week for medium birthdays, isn’t it?

On this day in 1923, Russian scientist Vladimir Zworykin, working for Westinghouse, filed the patent on his "television system," laying the groundwork for the one of the most powerful cultural forces of the late 20th-century.

Didn’t you always suspect television was a Russian plot?

What are you doing New Years Eve? by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • December 29, 2007

 

When I was a girl, I’d spend New Years Eve watching my parents get dressed up to go out. My sister and I would be in our pajamas, and my mom would put on her make-up with extra care. Lipstick and perfume. We’d wave as they went away, and then try to get the baby-sitter to let us have extra popcorn, or stay up until midnight. In the morning, we’d go downstairs to breakfast and find noise-makers and gilded hats made out of cardboard, souvenirs of the party. It seemed so glamorous. At my parents’ suggestion, my sister and I would make New Year resolutions. I’m not sure if this was to better ourselves, or to keep us quiet on a hung-over morning, but it was fun.
 
When I was a teenager, I was miserable on New Years Eve. I would be home from school, hundreds of miles away from my friends, usually alone. My parents would still go out, but I wasn’t so interested in watching them get dressed. I’d stay up, watching people on television having fun. In the morning, I’d resolve to kill myself before I’d ever be so miserable again. 
 
As an adult, I’ve gone to some fabulous New Years Eve parties. One year, John and I went to five parties. After all, we live in New York City, the center of the known universe, and we know Very Important People. You, a mere reader, cannot possible imagine the things I’ve seen at these veritable happenings. (Okay, that’s not in any way true. You can imagine what I’ve seen. I’ve seen adults – some of whom are dressed in very expensive but unflattering clothes — having a few drinks, eating and talking, usually about real estate prices.) For a few years, I’d make resolutions, if only to please my therapist. Lipstick and perfume? Not so much.
 

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Happy 112nd birthday to the movies!

  • News
  • December 28, 2007

On this day in 1895, the Lumiere Brothers opened the world’s first movie theater at Paris. Their opening night feature is a collection of 46-second shorts, including the riveting verite masterpiece ‘Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory.’

Gene Shalit raves, calling it one of the best films of the year.

Blue Pills: review

  • News
  • December 28, 2007

Blue Pills was previously published in Europe, where it won the Premios La Carcel de Papel in Spain and the Polish Jury Prize at Angouleme. It has sold over 20,000 copies in its original French edition, and now Houghton Mifflin is publishing it in the United States. This graphic novel by Frederik Peeters is a personal memoir of his relationship with a woman and her young son, both HIV positive. Intimate, emotional, deeply personal, it’s exactly the kind of story I thought I wouldn’t like.

I was wrong.

Let’s start with the main thing I thought I wouldn’t like: the artwork. Peeters uses a very blunt line, without a lot of detail. The impression is rough rather than smooth, sketchy rather than finished. The pages are, for the most part, variations on the six-panel grid. It doesn’t feel like something that can easily convey complex feelings, and yet, cumulatively, it does. (more…)

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