The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Mix Picks Chicks Flix, by John Ostrander

  • News
  • November 8, 2007

Generally speaking, I’m a guy. When I get dressed, I’m usually not worried about the ensemble, just about whether it’s relatively clean. I’m not concerned about my “looks,” considering that at my age I haven’t got many looks left to consider. My sweetie Mary likes how I look and that’s good enough for me.

Thing is – I’m not really a “guy’s guy.” I don’t follow sports all that closely but that’s because I’m mostly interested in my home teams. Because I’m at heart a Chicago boy, that means that – with the exception of certain comparatively rare periods of time – following sports is an exercise in masochism, especially as I am a Northsider, which makes me a Cubs’ fan.

I’m not into the whole “alpha male” thing, either. Never was, never will be. If “winning” is that big a deal to the other guy and it’s not over anything important to me – fine, I don’t care. He wins. If the jerk in the other car HAS to zoom around me, cut me off, and gain 2.5 seconds – okay. I continue on, generally catch up at the next stoplight, pull in behind him and then mime laughing at him, pointing at his car, so he can see me in the rear view mirror. I never said I wasn’t petty.

I also don’t always give in. People who assume that get a surprise when it’s on something that matters to me – or I’m just feeling contrary and cranky. (more…)

Batman Pisses Off Hong Kong

  • News
  • November 7, 2007

Hong Kong is generally considered to be one of the most polluted major cities in the world. Its beautiful skyline is virtually invisible due to a permanent haze, and the water is so dismal that the producers of the next Batman film, The Dark Knight, killed a scene where Batman was to drop from a plane into the harbor because the water quality could pose a significant health risk to the stuntmen.

Well, now the shoe is on the other foot. The Dark Knight producers asked the owners of 60 buildings facing a waterfront to keep their lights and signboards on all night for a week to make for a more visually stunning scene.

For some reason, environmentalists went ape. The amount of energy that would be wasted by such a stunt would be insane in a city half as polluted as Hong Kong.  "We welcome the filming of Batman in Hong Kong, but why do we need to keep the lights on to make the backdrop?" Green Sense project manager Gabrielle Ho told The Associated Press. "It seems like film-making is coming before environmental protection. We believe producers are able to create the same effects via post-productions works, but instead they are asking us to turn on so many lights, wasting so much energy," Ho concluded. (more…)

A Few of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • November 7, 2007

elayne100-1811653Back in the days of Usenet, I used to hear a lot of variations of “Why are there so many negative reviews and so few positive ones?” As one of those reviewers who not only discussed the art half of comic books but who also wrote a lot of positive reviews in my 4½ years of doing Pen-Elayne For Your Thoughts, I would see this manifest more as “Why are the threads responding to the few negative reviews so long, as opposed to those on the far more numerous positive reviews?”

The answer was pretty self-evident to most of us reviewers. In general it’s much easier for people to perpetuate clever putdowns, or to pile on a negative thread, than it is to engage in the vocabulary of positive discussion. One of the things we would identify as a next-to-useless post would be someone merely typing “Me too” or “Ditto.” It added nothing of substance to the online dialogue, it just took up bandwidth. But it had the opposite effect of the real-life etiquette advice that “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It became “If you can’t add something of substance to a discussion rather than just agreeing with the original poster, you’re better off not contributing at all.” I suspect that what some of them actually meant was “Bored now. You’re being too nice; throw us some raw meat.

And of course, that was a shame. I’ve never found it that hard to say good things about comic books. I love comic books. I buy and read quite a wide variety of graphic literature, and as I’m generally not in the assumed demographic for much of it I’ve learned to adjust my tastes accordingly — that is to say, there’s still some subject matter that doesn’t appeal to me, but I’ll generally try to give most of my chosen reading a fair chance, and I think I tend to be easily pleased. Nitpicking details, while worth noting in a review, has never weighed as important to me as how the work made me feel, whether it held together as a whole and moved me during the time it took me to read it.

(more…)

Star Wars Legacy – The Cat’s Out Of The Bag

  • News
  • November 6, 2007

ComicMix Radio celebrates Election Day by doing what any good politician would do – assaulting your wallet, but in a good way with a stack o’ new comics and DVDs this week plus:

• GrimJack creator John Ostrander updates us on his Star War Legacy series

• The Writers Strike already has Heroes producers reshooting an episode

• The Hero Initiative unveils their 52 Library of great comic collections and adds original sketches to each

Press The Button  – it’s your civic duty!

Happy 35th birthday, Rebecca Romijn!

  • News
  • November 6, 2007

On this day in 1972, Rebecca Romijn was born in Berkeley, California. After a successful career as a swimsuit and lingerie model, she made the transition to acting, appearing in such movies as Femme Fatale and Rollerball, as well as The Punisher and all three X-Men films as Mystique.

Currently, she’s appearing on Ugly Betty as a– well, never mind, it’s too preposterous. And I’m saying that after watching her do backflips in full-body blue makeup.

Happy birthday to a woman many have referred to as the Jolly Blond Giant. I don’t know why, she seems like a nice normal height to me…

rom-annual-2-100-2046026

A Tribute to Bill Mantlo on December 6

  • News
  • November 6, 2007

rom-annual-2-100-2046026Floating World Comics will host a benefit show for comics writer Bill Mantlo, who suffered severe head trauma when he was struck by a car while rollerblading in 1992. He currently resides in a brain injury rehabilitation nursing home.

Jason Leivian, the owner of Floating World, has asked "hundreds of artists" to donate an illustration of Rom the Spaceknight, a minor Marvel character, toy figure and cult icon that most recently appeared in an episode of South Park. All proceeds from the December 6 show will be delivered to Bill’s brother and caregiver, Mike Mantlo.

Aquaman Co-Creator Paul Norris, dead at 93

  • News
  • November 6, 2007

Artist Paul Norris died yesterday at the age of 93.

Along with writer/editor Mort Weisinger, Norris created Aquaman, one of comics’ most enduring superheroes and one of only five to be continuously published since earliest days of the medium. A versitile and gifted artist, Norris also drew such major characters as Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Sandman, Secret Agent X-9, Magnus, Robot Fighter, Jungle Jim and – most notably – Brick Bradford, an assignment he maintained for 35 years. He continued to draw and make convention appearances until recently.

"I decided to color Aquaman green and orange, and the editors really liked that," Norris once said. "He’s worn green and orange almost the whole time he’s been around, and I still get royalties for every time they use those colors with him!"

Norris was one of the very last of the major golden age of comics creators.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 6, 2007

Before we get to this week’s official topic, a continuation of our discussion of how superheroes have been evolving, I’d like to remind you all that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I’m sure all you fans of the late 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel – and I know you’re legion – remember that this means that the development of an organism exactly mirrors the evolutionary development of the species.

Okay, now that that’s settled…consider any given story genre the organism and storytelling as a whole the species. The first stories, maybe told around campfires, were not long on characterization. According to some anthropologists, they were basically religious, an effort to give an identity to the forces that shaped people’s lives, the forces they were already acknowledging, maybe, with rituals. Not much characterization in these yarns. They were more about what happened – some deity decides to create the world – than the nuances of the protagonists’ personalities. As storytelling evolved, from an element of religion to entertainment, the characters began to have personalities, sort of, until by the time Homer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre the good guys and bad guys were acting for reasons peculiar to who they were. And by the time of Greek drama, which, again, was part of religious festivals, they were pretty individualized.

Shoot forward about 2,500 years…Along came comic book superheroes (as opposed to all the other kinds of superdoers, who are a bit outside our boundaries, though I’m sure they’re very nice) and…well, they weren’t quite as uncharacterized as those campfire deities. But we do find ontogeny-recapitulating phylogeny, sort of. Clark Kent was, after all, “mild mannered” and Lois Lane was ambitious, but the stories were plot driven – the stuff was more about what the heroes did rather than why they did it. (Batman comes close to being an exception; a few issues into his initial run in Detective Comics, writer Bill Finger actually motivated him. But unless there are a lot of stories I haven’t read, the emphasis on what makes Bruce Wayne tick came later.)

(more…)

Gordon Lee trial ends in mistrial

  • Uncategorized
  • November 5, 2007

Straight from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

The case against Gordon Lee took another in an ongoing series of bizarre turns this afternoon when statements made by State prosecutor John Tully during opening arguments led to a mistrial.

Lee and his legal team, paid for by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, appeared in court this morning for jury selection and returned in the afternoon to begin the actual trial. Before the jury was brought in to begin the trial, lead counsel Alan Begner argued an oral motion in limine asking the judge to instruct prosecutors that they could not admit statements from their witnesses alluding to Lee’s character and previous legal actions Lee has been party to. Prosecutors assured the court that they had instructed their witnesses not to address Lee’s previous conviction for selling adult comics to an adult. Then during opening statements in front of the jury, prosecutor Tully said witnesses will testify that Gordon was defensive and that Gordon had told police, “I’ve been through this before,” a clear reversal of his earlier statement to the judge that prosecutors would not be entering such statements into the record.

When Tully made his statement, defense counsel stared at each other in disbelief before Begner leapt up to demand a mistrial. Judge Larry Salmon put his head in his hands and called a 15 minute recess.

Upon returning to the courtroom, as a result of Tully’s statement, Salmon declared a mistrial, because the statements alluding to the prior incident contaminated the jury beyond repair for a fair trial.

(more…)

Masi Oka supporting One Laptop Per Child

  • News
  • November 5, 2007

Heroes star Masi Oka will be serving as global ambassador for the non-profit One Laptop Per Child initiative headed up by MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte, which has set out to design, manufacture and distribute laptops to developing countries for under $100 each.

The Brown University Math/Computer Science grad is a dual threat in the digital space, known not only as an actor but also as a SFX guru with George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic.

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