How to apply Elvira makeup
Time to commence with the Halloween puns and posts, and we’ll start with something that might almost be useful: how to apply makeup in the style of Elvira.
Oh, and don’t forget the wig.
The Mix : What are people talking about today?
Children of all ages, by Elayne Riggs
I’ve already spoken about how October is my favorite time of year, what with the baseball post-season and the foliage displays and the crispness in the air and, in 2007, my imminent lifestyle change and ComicMix Phase II debuting. There’s another reason I love this month — it culminates today in one of my favorite secular holidays, Hallowe’en.
[I emphasize "secular" because I distinctly remember when, as I kid, I was blatantly discouraged from trick or treating and otherwise celebrating the day, on the basis of the holiday’s etymological origin being the Christian commemoration of All Hallow’s Eve and therefore the holiday itself must be Christian. This is the same logic used by some fundamentalist Christians to denounce the holiday as Satanic — the flip side of Christian, and therefore Christian as well because non-Christians don’t really have this Satan thing going — because it emphasizes the supernatural. In fact, as with most seasonal celebrations coopted by early Christians, the holiday actually has pagan roots — in this case Samhain — which I’m perfectly fine with honoring, as those ancient nature worshippers may be the closest thing we have to modern sensible secular rationalists. I’m even half-convinced Christmas is becoming okay to celebrate because, despite the name, it’s essentially a corruption of the Saturnalia holiday. But I digress.]
One reason Hallowe’en is so cool for me is because of its emphasis, at least when I was growing up, on being a holiday for kids. As far as I can discern this mentality came about with the holiday’s commercialization (just check out the Wiki on Hallowe’en to see how many modern rituals involve spending money, from parties to costumes to decorations to candy), and of course since hyper-capitalism cannot be confined to just that segment of the population largely dependent upon others’ pursestrings, today it’s big business with "children of all ages." But I still think Hallowe’en has a particular power over children’s sense of wonder about the world around us, whether or not the lines between living and dead, between the ordinary and the magical, can indeed be blurred during the time of year when (the northern half of) the Earth starts preparing for its winter slumber.
So I like to give out comics to those few straggling trick-or-treaters who find their way to the group of houses hidden behind the main road where we occupy our top-floor apartment. Because I believe that, like Hallowe’en, comics still have tremendous appeal to kids, even as hyper-capitalism has led to their greater acceptance by and obsession for many adults. And so during the year I cull the Cartoon Network books from our DC comp boxes and go through the stuff I have from Free Comics Day to see what’s all-ages appropriate.
I do have a bit of a dilemma with the latter, though — I like all-ages stories. Most of the time, I like them more than the teen-targeted or "mature" readers-only books. (more…)
The Flash Movie Strikes Again!
‘Twas the day before Halloween and ComicMix Radio dug deep into the spookiest place we could find – your wallet. We had to make sure there was enough there to cover this week’s Big List of cool comics and even cooler DVDs that invade the stores. Plus we also cover :
• DC Comics on the big screen, including a newest Flash movie director
• Image puts Darkness on the schedule at last
• More Marvel Zombie variants … including one hard to find version of Anita Blake Vampire Hunter.
Press The Button or we’ll come over and egg your hard drive!
The Big Little Book Time Machine
I’ll admit: I’ve got a thing for self-published fan projects. Nothing shows fannish commitment better than these books, and over the years a wealth of encyclopedic information about our culture has been gathered in such efforts.
Once upon a time, there was a whole category of comic books that measured just a couple inches wide but were about a full inch thick. Actually, they weren’t really comic books – they were illustrated fiction. But many, if not most, featured comics characters such as Popeye, Dick Tracy, and Flash Gordon – complete with illustrations often by the creators and their studios. They were called Big Little Books – BLBs – and were highly collectible. And so they remain.
A fan named Larry Lowery has self-published a fantastic reference book on BLBs, with great cover repros and every detail you can imagine. The 400 page compendium lists all the Whitman BLBs and peripherals related to Big Little Books from 1932 through 1980, as well as similar publications by Dell, Saalfield, Lynn, 5-Star, and such. It’s a great reference book for serious collectors with photos of every BLB. Check it out here.
Thanks to our pal Dean Mullaney for the lead.
On this day: War of the Worlds broadcast
Sixty-nine years ago tonight, the radio program Mercury Theater on the Air presented Orson Welles’ production of H.G. Wells’ "War of the Worlds", a fictional drama about a Martian invasion in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The program sparked a panic among listeners who believed the play was an actual news broadcast. Of the six million listeners who heard the show, more than 1.7 million reportedly believed the story was true.
Those who were lucky enough to tune in from the start of the show were alerted to its fictional nature and were spared the fate of the others who went into nationwide panic over alien invasion. Most creative artists in the fantasy field only hope to convey the emotional reality of fictional circumstances. Welles was able to make those circumstances real, if only for an ephemeral hour and if only for a gullible few.
We salute you, Mr. Welles and Mr. Wells, for setting the standards of illusory paranoia, and giving the rest of us something to aspire towards.
If you’ve never heard it before, have a listen.
Top 7 reasons to root for a writers strike
I didn’t think I’d be writing this, but I think I’m actually looking forward to Hollywood having a writer’s strike.
Why? What sort of un-American bastard would be hoping for the shutdown of production across TV shows and movies across this great land of ours? My god, man, you might force the audience to think or something! Sorry, no. I can think of seven good reasons.
1. The writers deserve to be compensated. First and foremost, this is the biggie. As Mark Evanier points out, "the same studio execs who say there’s no more money are elsewhere bragging about record profits and taking home seven, eight and even nine figure annual salaries." Some studio heads are saying that they need to cut upfront costs. My reply is that it’s the studios’ own damn fault, because nobody trusts them to ever pay out any money on the back end. If you could be trusted, you wouldn’t have to shell out all the money in advance. If you were fair in sharing the revenue from home video and DVD sales in the first place, you wouldn’t be in this fix now. (more…)
The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 8: Review
Yes, we’ve hit the point where reprints of medium-level ‘80s comics can run to eight volumes – and, since the comic in question is GrimJack, that is perfectly dandy with me. Since GrimJack was gone for a good decade (before the recent Killer Instinct miniseries, and, of course, these trade paperback reprints), I suspect that some of you might not know what the man and his world.
Well, let me quote myself to bring you up to speed:
John Gaunt, aka GrimJack, is a cop/secret agent/PI in an aggressively multi-dimensional (and arbitrarily immense) city, and he walks down those mean streets, yadda yadda yadda. It’s hard-boiled fantasy adventure, in a setting where anything can pop up and probably will. Everybody betrays everybody (especially the dames), and everybody but our hero is corrupt as all hell. This is the kind of comic that the comics world thinks of as being vastly different from superheroes, even though John Gaunt:
- wears the same clothes all the time, which instantly identify him
- saves people (and the world) regularly
- has what amounts to a codename
- has a couple of similar friends who he "teams up" with on occasion
- appears in 4-color pamphlet form
This volume reprints issues 47 to 54, right in the middle of the 81-issue run, with stories that originally saw print at the end of the ‘80s. Most of this book consists of the end of a long storyline that started in the comics collected in Volume 6 and saw John Gaunt killed and resurrected, among other changes. That big storyline (which doesn’t seem to have an official name) had kicked off when Tom Mandrake took over penciling this series, which was the first time he and Ostrander worked together extensively. (They would later rack up long, successful runs on Spectre and other series at DC.) (more…)
Fear Factor, by Dennis O’Neil
Boo.
Did I scare you?
About that boo…Frankly, it’s a sleazy and probably ineffective way to get your attention. But it is sort of appropriate because it’s a word often encountered in late October and I’m perpetrating this opus a few nights before Halloween, which seems like an appropriate time to be both booing and writing about comics. Because, you know, comics and Halloween are kissing cousins.
Comics, like Halloween, often deal with unearthly phenomena and unlikely characters and, yes, costumes. Both comics and Halloween offer reassurance that after sojourn spent confronting ghouls, goblins, ghosts, vice-presidents and assorted other hellish manifestations of ghastliness, you can retire to someplace comfy and safe.
Fairy tales do that, too, and despite people, including me, frequently comparing comics to mythology, they’re at least as much fairy tale as myth. They don’t, after all, offer cosmic explanations of why we’re here and where we come from, as myths are wont to do, and they almost always end happily. According to a psychologist named Bruno Bettelheim, those happy endings are what make fairy tales useful to little kids. The message is, you can confront ghouls, goblins, ghosts and even vice presidents and you can prevail – you can go home again and maybe score some hot chocolate.
Wanted: your feedback!
It’s been four weeks since the rollout of ComicMix: Phase II. You’ve seen the first four installments of GrimJack, EZ Street, Black Ice, Munden’s Bar, Simone & Ajax, and Fishhead. You’ve used our comic reader, you’ve listened to the podcasts, you’ve played with the site, and we’ve still had the same great columnists.
In that time, our site traffic has spiked and the number of page views have grown by leaps and bounds.
But we’re still not satisfied. So we’re asking you: What do you think?
How can we improve ComicMix? What would you like to see? What have you seen enough of?
Consider this an open thread. Feel free to tell us what’s not working for you, what we should add to the site, what we should improve. Do you want more columnists? More news? More previews from other publishers? More comics?
Inquiring minds want to know. And while we try to read what other folks are saying elsewhere on the net, we don’t catch everything. So please, take the time and tell us here, so that we can continue to make this a better site for you.
Happy 50th birthday, Homer Simpson!
D’oh! We meant the voice of Homer Simpson, Dan Castellaneta, an incredibly talented actor in his own right. Besides voicing Homer (and Grampa Simpson, Barney Gumble, Krusty the Clown, Groundskeeper Willie, Mayor Quimby, Hans Moleman, Sideshow Mel, Itchy, and Kodos) he’s also voiced the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin tv series, Scarface and the Ventriloquist in the Batman animated series, Doc Brown in the Back To The Future animated series, and even portrayed Harvey Pekar in a stage version of American Splendor.
He even played Homer Simpson in an episode of LA Law.
A happy birthday to the man who now co-holds the record for the longest running portrayal of a fictional character on prime-time American television. He has portrayed Homer Simpson on The Tracey Ullman Show and The Simpsons from 1987 onwards, beating the twenty-year record held by James Arness for Gunsmoke and Kelsey Grammer for Frasier Crane.
