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Gene Autry’s Empire – ‘Phantom’ or Otherwise, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • November 18, 2007

“So how did I get to be a movie star, anyhow?” Gene Autry (1907–98) asked George E. Turner and me in 1985.

George and I were consulting with Old Hollywood’s preeminent make-believe cowboy about his donation of a large collection of motion-picture footage to the Southwest Film & Video Archive at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. (I had begun working with the SMU film library in 1983 in connection with the preservation of an extensive batch of black-ensemble movies from the 1920s –1950s that had been salvaged from an abandoned warehouse in East Texas. Hence the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection, which amounts to a story for another day.)

Anyhow, on this 1985 occasion, Autry had recognized George and me as the authors who had taken him to task a few years earlier – politely, of course – for his having usurped the greater celebrity that had belonged to an authentic cowboy-become-movie star named Ken Maynard.

Now, being admirers of Maynard, George and I had assumed a resentful attitude in a book called Forgotten Horrors. The movie that at once cinched Autry’s stardom and signaled Maynard’s decline is The Phantom Empire (1935). And yes, The Phantom Empire is a horror movie, with nuclear-age science-fictional foreshadowing. And a Western adventure. And a country-music showcase, on top of all that. Only in Hollywood. (more…)

Happy Life Day, Star Wars fans!

  • News
  • November 17, 2007

Today in 1978 was the one and only time the Star Wars Holiday Special aired on CBS. Why just that one time, you might ask?  Doesn’t a trip with Han Solo and Chewbacca to Chewie’s home planet sound like it would be on syndication forever? In it, Solo hangs out with Chewie’s family, while they are being pursued by the Galactic Empire. Somehow the whole visiting of family made sense in the realm of the Holiday season, but maybe it hit a little too close to home for people who have to drink a lot in order to be around their hairy in-laws who yell a lot, don’t make too much sense, thump their chests and if pushed, rip people’s arms out of their sockets. I don’t know about Wookies but that sure sounds a lot like how my in-laws behave.

Actually, that’s just the least of the sins of this show. We’re going to expose you to a truncated version of the show, and we’ll see how much of your sanity remains intact afterwards:

Kyle Baker Appears, Frank Frazetta Disappears

The great thing about comic conventions in New York City is the fact you can literally run into anybody. Creators  show up as guests and fans, too, so you never know who might be standing next to you digging into that long white box full of half-price Lois Lanes. On the floor of this weekend’s National, we ran into an old friend who also is one of the most creative people in the business – Kyle Baker – and we’ll share that comment here on ComicMix Radio, plus:

• Another Frank Frazetta comic disappears from the shelves

• Shut off the TV – there are some very cool new shows on the web including new Lost!

• Asterix hits the gaming world

Press The Button and let the weekend fun begin!

mw-5615364

MW: A Review

  • News
  • November 17, 2007

mw-5615364

It’s difficult for an American to appreciate the place Osamu Tezuka held in Japanese popular culture. Tezuka created the first massively popular character and storyline in manga, Astro Boy – something on the level of Siegel & Shuster’s Superman. But he also owned that character, and ran a studio to produce stories – something like Will Eisner. (And he went on to create more adult, complex works later in life, also like Eisner.) But Tezuka was also a major force in animation – roughly the Walt Disney of Japan. And he was massively prolific for forty years; his “Complete Works” (collecting just over half of his manga) runs 80,000 pages through 400 volumes, and his animation work was similarly large. So his impact is absolutely colossal; I’ve seen some commentators claim that every single Japanese comics sub-genre derives from something Tezuka did.

I’ve only read a few of those four hundred volumes – in my defense, most of them aren’t available in English — but I’ve found Tezuka an interesting but quirky artist. (I’ve reviewed the first six volumes of his Buddha series on my personal blog, and here at ComicMix I’ve looked at Ode to Kirihito and Apollo’s Song.) MW is another graphic novel in the vein of Apollo and Ode: dark, adult, violent and occasionally sexual. It’s from the late ‘70s, several years after Apollo and Ode, and originally appeared in the Japanese manga magazine Biggu Komiku (whose name I never fail to find humorous).

Unlike Ode and Apollo, MW has no supernatural element, and it’s even bleaker than those two works (neither one terribly cheerful). Fifteen years before the story began, a massive, horrific event occurred on a remote Japanese island, and that event bound together a boy and a man. When the story begins, the man, Garai, is a Catholic priest – from what I’ve seen, Tezuka was fascinated by Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, returning to its iconography and doctrines over and over. The man is tormented because of his relationship with the boy Yuki, who has grown into a dangerously attractive young man – and who was warped into a sociopath by the event they lived through.

(more…)

Reasons To Be Cheerful, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • November 17, 2007

It’s Thanksgiving week. Impossible to get anyone on the phone. News stories about crowded, delayed and cranky airports. Christmas music reaches overload levels.

Let’s talk about giving thanks, and what inspires it. Here are some of the things for which I’m grateful this year:

  • It’s a great time to be a comics reader. Even during the birth of the direct market when there were all kinds of cool independents, I don’t think we had the variety we have now. A lot of this is due to the Interwebs, the series of tubes that provides a low cost of entry for new readers and creators. A lot of this is due to the success of graphic novels in bookstores, which opens the medium to new readers who might want more than superheroes (obviously, what they want is manga). There’s comics for kids, comics for historians, comics for soap opera fans – really, the list goes on and on. Dirk Deppey, at ¡Journalista!, separates “literary” and “pop” comics, a dichotomy with which I disagree, but not in a hostile way, more of a “let’s have a few drinks and argue all night at the bar” kind of way.

  • It’s great to be back in the comics business after doing other things for nearly a decade. I’ve gone to a lot of conventions this year, and seen people I hadn’t seen for a long time. Here, in no particular order, are a few that I missed while I was gone: Marc Hempel, Mark Wheatley, Ted McKeever, Scott Hampton, David Glanzer, Richard Case, Bo Hampton, Denys Cowan, Dick Giordano, Eric Shanower, Axel Alonso, Dean Haspiel and Nick Bertozzi, Mark Millar, Joel Meadows, Stuart Moore, Maggie Thompson, Joe Illidge, Mimi Cruz, Michael Eury and a bunch more I can’t remember at the moment. And, of course, my pals here on ComicMix, like Mike Gold, John Ostrander, Glenn Hauman, Michael Davis, Brian Alvey, Denny O’Neil, Mike Raub, Kai Connelly and Elayne Riggs.

(more…)

ComicMix on the con circuit

  • News
  • November 16, 2007

This weekend, you’ll be able to see a number of ComicMix folks at the National convention in New York City. No idea where we’ll be exactly, but you should be able to recognize us by the old-school ComicMix shirts (or as I like to think of it, the Earth-2 version of our logo). Stop by and say hello, particularly if you’ve got any good stories.

Meanwhile, I’ll be down at PhilCon in Philadelphia, appearing on a number of panels (the favorite so far looks to be "Ninja, Pirate, Mad Scientist, Robot!") and hyping my new book, Star Trek Corps of Engineers: Creative Couplings. I just received a copy of it from Simon & Schuster, which means it should be available for sale any day now, and it makes a lovely Christmas present for that Star Trek fan in your life. (Buy heavily. Daddy needs a new passenger side mirror for his car.)

And contrary to popular belief, it’s not true that the reason I’m going to PhilCon instead of the National is because Hayden Pantierre took out a restraining order against me. Get your scurrilous Internet rumors right, people. Kristen Bell did.

Then next week, a large number of us will be heading to Mid-Ohio Con, where we’ll be making some announcements about some upcoming projects. Watch this space…

Manga Friday: Romance Is in the Air

  • News
  • November 16, 2007

Manga Friday continues to go backwards and forwards at the same time; this week, I read the first volumes of two very popular and long-running series, and the latest volume of Path of the Assassin, a lesser-known samurai series from the creators of Lone Wolf & Cub. Our theme this week is young love…but this is manga, so we’re talking about lots of panty-shots, blood spewing out of noses, gigantic sweat-drops, tasteful nudity, and utterly gormless young men. So let’s dive right in:

Ai Yori Aoshi, I’m informed by its foreword, is a romance comic for young men. (They don’t put it quite that way, of course, but that’s what it is. And it shows just how big the Japanese marketplace for comics is when even the odd niche of a love story in a boy’s magazine is filled.) Kaoru, a young student, ran away from his terribly rich, terribly powerful, terribly conservative, and terribly controlling family some years ago, and is now in college. Aoi, his incredibly sheltered childhood sweetheart – who is the scion of a similar family, and who was betrothed to him at a very young age – runs away to find him, since she’s utterly in love with this man she hasn’t seen in a decade (or at all as an adult). They meet cute, she goes home with him – not like that, get your minds out of the gutter – and then the engine of plot complication starts to chug along.

Kou Fumizuki, who created this series, does make Aoi believable, which is not an easy achievement – she’s confused about nearly everything to do with Kaoru and modern life, and that’s the main driving factor of the plot. Kaoru is more generic, the usual audience-identification character (smart enough but not too smart, hardworking ditto, and so on), but he works, and centers the story reasonably well. I suspect that over-controlling rich families and arranged marriages are mostly things a generation or two in the past for the Japanese public, which makes them fodder for melodrama and comedy. (If they were still living institutions, stories about them would be drama.) (more…)

If I Ruled The World, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • November 16, 2007

s138-6203089Everybody that hates my guts just got a chill when they read the title of this article. Michael Davis ruling the world? Oh HELL NO!

As unlikely as that scenario is (I said unlikely but nothing is impossible and I am working on it) but in the unlikely event that I do someday rule the world this is how I would roll.

How will I come to rule the world? With love, kindness, respect and with unrelenting optimism. If that fails, I am the only person who will have a powerful DEATH RAY that could wipe anyone or anything off of Earth.

WORLD POLITICS

The French will shut the hell up about how they superior in all things art. The US will recognize other countries rights. Canada will just go away. On second thought, let’s keep Canada and get rid of France.

(more…)

Amanda Conner Speaks…

  • Uncategorized
  • November 15, 2007

alghul-2213288This face sells comics! Move over Messiah Complex, DC now has a hot story line that’s selling out  – in fact, THREE titles are long gone this week!  Meanwhile, ComicMix Radio gets ready to head to The National Comic Con in NYC and:

• We give you the latest preview of the NYC show, including some Big Guests added at the last minute

• Artist Amanda Conner gives us a preview of her new Terra mini-series on the way from DC

• Dragon ball fans get an early Christmas present

Press The Button – and then head to The Big Apple with us!

The Golden Compass and the Golden Rule, by John Ostrander

  • News
  • November 15, 2007

Well, the film adaptation of the novel The Golden Compass hasn’t even opened yet and the Christian right-wing is already foaming at the mouth about it. The book is the first in a children’s fantasy trilogy called His Dark Materials by British author Phillip Pullman. Pullman is an agnostic/atheist (depending on the article that you read) and has said he is promoting his views through books to children, much as C.S. Lewis did promoting Christianity with The Chronicles of Narnia.

You’ve probably already seen the previews and commercials for The Golden Compass at the movies or on the TV. It’s got Nicole Kidman and a pretty cool looking armored polar bear (which may disturb Stephen Colbert even more than the atheist slant – assuming the writer’s strike ends in a timely fashion for him to comment on it). It’s also got Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, upset. That’s another point in its favor, insofar as I’m concerned, since I really dislike Donohue.

A note or two about the League and Donohue. The League’s full name is The Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights. From their own website: “Founded in 1973 by the late Father Virgil C. Blum, S.J., the Catholic League defends the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.” The League’s office is located in the headquarters of the New York archdiocese. Donohue is its main and some say virtually only employee. The site claims "The league wishes to be neither left nor right, liberal or conservative, revolutionary or reactionary.” Donohue, however, is an adjunct scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation and his frequently bombastic statements link him with the blowhards on the Right. (more…)

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