The Mix : What are people talking about today?

The Super Powers Myth, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • October 28, 2007

The last time I’ve spoke to Jackie Chan he said to me: “I’ve done everything three times” – meaning that he’s finding less and less ways, and reasons, to top himself. Unfortunately that also results in schizo, ultimately unsatisfying, films, further hampered by his unwillingness to mature his screen persona. Even so, he keeps looking for ways to challenge himself and keep busy, despite the repetition of his movie and charity work.

But Jackie’s last great film was Legend of Drunken Master (HK: Drunken Master 2) in 1994. He’s made two dozen movies since then – all which included some exceptional sequences, but none which held together anywhere close to his classics of the mid-1980s. Clearly his best films are the ones which showcase his kung-fu, but as he grows older, he keeps trying to avoid that by dwelling on vehicular stunts or repeated attempts to balance his physicality with cgi.

Even so, Sony Entertainment has taken on the task of selling his most recent productions to the American DVD market. Their latest release, and one of Chan’s most creatively bold conceptions, is The Myth, hitting stores on October 30th. It’s also one of the most expensive films in Hong Kong history, and is, if nothing else, a visually splendid treat. Sadly, the film’s central flaw is showcased by Jackie’s admonition that he wasn’t brave enough to make what his director/co-writer Stanley Tong originally wanted: an entire film about a Qin Dynasty general. (more…)

The Latest ComicMix Radio Hot Links!

  • News
  • October 28, 2007

Yesterday on ComicMix Radio we talked about the ultra-rare, ultra hot limited edition comic. Here is where you can check out that very rare variant for The Lone Ranger series from Dynamite Entertainment. It is being offered by Comic Collector Live and is limited to just 250 copies.

Artist Colleen Doran comments here about her work being used as props in an upcoming episode of the CBS show Numb3rs . The episode, titled ‘Graphic,” airs November 23, right at the end of sweeps, so slap a sticky note on your TiVo before you forget.

There are still a few days left before Halloween, which should give you plenty of time to dive into the horror-themed interactive series,  “How To Survive A Horror Movie: All the Skills to Dodge the Kills”. Based on book of the same title by Seth Grahame-Smith, the two-minute webisodes can still be seen here.

Lewis Trondheim, award-winning cartoonist behind the Dungeon books and other best-selling graphic novels, now has a cartoon blog on NBM Publishing’s website.  NBM, which is collecting Trondheim’s blog postings into the upcoming book Little Nothings, delivers one entry per day here. Little Nothings Volume 1: The Curse of the Umbrella is due out in January and features funny snippets from everyday life, with the cartoonist drawing himself as a chicken-headed Everyman. (more…)

R. Crumb’s Music Madness and Me, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • October 28, 2007

The life and times of R. Crumb, a mensch among men and one of the more steadfastly brilliant practitioners of American (resident or expatriate) cartooning, have been sufficiently well covered in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film, Crumb (1994), and in Peter Poplaski’s The R. Crumb Handbook (M.Q. Publications; 2005) and innumerable column-inches of The Comics Journal, that I feel no particular need to pursue any generalized biographical tack here.

In a recent letter, Crumb brings things somewhat up to date: “I’m in the middle of a big project – comic-book version of the Book of Genesis, approx. 200 pages when finished.” This involvement had prevented his traveling to Texas in 2006 to take part in a new experimental-theatre staging of R. Crumb Comix with director Johnny Simons and Yrs. Trly. Simons’ Fort Worth-based Hip Pocket Theatre troupe has adapted Crumb’s stories on several occasions since 1985.

Robert Crumb’s larger career might reasonably find itself crystallized in two warring viewpoints: The authoritative critic Robert Hughes’ earnest likening of Crumb to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, greatest of the Sixteenth Century’s Flemish painters, vs. this published declaration from Crumb his ownself: ‘Broigul I ain’t… let’s face it.’ (more…)

Dick Ayers Reveals More!

  • News
  • October 27, 2007

Weekend ComicMix Radio continues our look at the career of Dick Ayers and how a simple coincidence brought him to the office of Stan Lee and made him part of the birth of the Marvel Age Of Comics. Plus we toss out a few trick-less treats like:

• A new and VERY limited Lone Ranger comic book

• NBM and Lewis Trondheim turn a blog into a graphic novel

• How you can win prizes by playing the online "bidding game"

And much more including a look back at a year when one of the bigger songs featured a shout out to Kelly Bundy. Stop drooling at the art and Press The Button!

Devil’s Arcade, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • October 27, 2007

In honor of Halloween, here are some things that have scared me during my lifetime.

  • Dell Comics. When I was ten years old, my friend Kenny Raffle had a big pile of comics he let me read. In the stack was a Dell horror comic about a giant hand that would come out from under the street through manhole covers, grab people, and devour them through holes in its palm. It was stupid but terrifying. Several years later we had squirrels in the walls of our house, and when they ran around in the middle of the night, it sounded like fingernails on the wall. I’ve since learned that Dell didn’t submit their material to the Comics Code, arguing they were inherently wholesome. I mention this not to defend the Code, but to demonstrate that what seems wholesome to one person can terrify another. Stephen King was afraid of the “twi-night double-header.”

  • High School. I know now that it’s almost impossible to be an interesting adult if you had a good time in high school, but it still haunts me. I dream about finding myself still there, despite my insistence that I’m an adult, I graduated college, and I can’t live in an all-girls dorm anymore. Also, I can no longer fit in my uniforms.

  (more…)

Happy 34th Birthday, Seth MacFarlane!

  • News
  • October 26, 2007

Today we celebrate the birthday of a man who has given us so much cause for hilarity, Seth MacFarlane, the man-child responsible for the shocking and hilarious television series, Family Guy.  In addition to being the show’s chief creator and writer, his malleable timbre is behind many of the show’s characters, including Peter Griffin, Brian, Baby Stewie, Tom Tucker the Anchorman, Glenn Quagmire and a host of supporting characters.  Although Family Guy was cancelled in 2000 and then again in 2002, it is the first show to be resurrected based on DVD sales.  And let’s not forget to acknowledge the thousands of us who watched reruns on "Adult Swim."  All those nights of bong hits and brownie binges were well worth the effort.

Thank you, teenagers and stoners nationwide, for your commitment to topical and nerd-material-citation humor.  No one can deliver a Star Trek reference like MacFarlane can. Or for that matter, a Commencement Day speech at Harvard:

Dagwood Sandwich Shoppes

  • News
  • October 26, 2007

In the "gosh, nobody tells me anything" category: Dagwood’s is a franchise development and expansion company structured to become one of the fastest growing chains in history, built on the power of a brand that is famous across the world, and is synonymous with all things sandwich. Most of them are down south, so if anybody has actually been to one of these, let us know how they are.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Del Rey Manga Round-Up, Part Two

  • Uncategorized
  • October 26, 2007

Welcome to the second week of Manga Round-Up! This time, we have four more books from [[[Del Rey Manga]]] – all first volumes in series, as new-reader-friendly as it’s possible to be – which are aimed at a slightly older audience (sixteen and up) than the books I looked at last week.

And you know what “older audience means,” don’t you? That’s right – gore! (Did you think I was going to say “sex?” That’s the 18+ manga, which none of the publishers have sent me yet.)

Leading off the parade of blood-spattered stories is Hitohi Iwaaki’s Parasyte, in which alien spores drift down to Earth and creep into people’s ears to eat their brains. The parasites, who have no name for themselves – no culture or language of any kind, actually – then eat other humans, in very violent ways. It’s hinted that this is possibly a reaction by someone or something to save the Earth from us horrible humans. (But only hinted, at the beginning, and not brought up again.)

Our viewpoint character is a teenage boy named Shin, saved from having his brain eaten because he had his earbuds in while he was sleeping. (Possible life lesson #1: never, ever stop listening to music. Possible life lesson #2: don’t sleep on the floor, as the Japanese do.) Unfortunately, the parasite still got into his body – it just took over his hand instead. Shin names the parasite Migi (since it is his right hand, and that’s the Japanese word for “right”), and tries to live with it. But the parasites are utterly amoral and protective of their secrecy, so the mere fact that Shin knows they exist means that other parasites (the ones that ate brains, and so control whole bodies) want to kill him as soon as they learn about him. And getting along with an amoral, alien right hand that can transform instantly into whirring engines of death is not easy.

(more…)

How to network at conventions

  • News
  • October 26, 2007

We’re in a lull between major comic conventions, and so we’d like to take this time to point you to Diana Rowland’s tips for convention networking. Although written for science fiction conventions, the advice applies quite well to comic cons. Examples:

• Don’t bug the crap out of the pro or semi-pro who has been kind enough to take you under his/her wing for the con to introduce you to agents/editors at the con. Really now, these agents/editors probably meet several hundred shiny-eyed newbies at every con they go to, and dutifully and kindly pass along their business cards, and as soon as they’ve extracted themselves from the encounter will likely forget your name. Yes, even if you’ve pressed your business card into their hand.

• Again, if you’ve been fortunate enough to have a pro/semi-pro take you in hand, don’t stick with that person for the entire con. Dare to break away, especially if you find yourself waiting for them outside the bathroom. Trust me, they don’t really need to pee that much. They just need a break from you. Take the hint. Go to some panels. Go to the dealers room. Go wander around the con suite.

Because I Said So, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • October 26, 2007

My mother is almost 60 years old. She has been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for almost 40 years. I don’t smoke. In fact I think it’s a stupid habit and I’m glad she told me not to do it.

She told me not to smoke. I listened. I’ll get back to that in a sec.

As I write this there is a raging debate over who can adopt and raise DOGS in this country. The talk show host Ellen DeGeneres gave a dog away she adopted. The agency said (and it was in the contract Ellen signed) you couldn’t give away an adopted dog so they went and took the dog away from the little girl Ellen had given the dog to. So Ellen goes on her talk show crying like a girl and tells the world of the injustice that has been done to this little girl. So what happened? Well the dog agency owners start to get death threats and Ellen’s legal team threatens “legal action” against the dog adoption agency.

What do I think? I could care less about Ellen, the dog agency, or the dog.

I am a wee bit concerned about this: why there is so much of an uproar about who raises a dog and virtually none about who raises kids? (more…)

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