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Happy 65th birthday, Michael Crichton!

  • News
  • October 23, 2007

47 years ago, my dad played center on his high school basketball in Patchogue, NY. He told me that one of the tallest guys he ever played against was the center for the Roslyn high school team, standing about 6’9". That center would go on to write novels under the pen names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson, so as to disguise his medical career. Lange, incidentally, means "tall one" in German, Danish and Dutch, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a dwarf in the court of Queen Consort Henrietta Maria of England.

Eventually, he started using his own name, writing such works as The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Jurassic Park, and Sphere, and writing and sometimes directing such films as Westworld, Looker, Runaway, and Twister, and creating the long running television series ER.

We could not let this day go by without a big tip-o-th’geek hat to you, so happy birthday, Michael Crichton! (But Charlie Pellegrino still thought of how to find dinosaur DNA first.)

Jim Lee Can Be Heroes

  • News
  • October 23, 2007

If you haven’t ordered your copy of the Heroes trade paperback collecting the first 34 chapters of NBC.com’s online comics and you happen to be a Jim Lee fan, you’re in luck. Jim’s got his own special version; yep, that’s the cover above.

Heroes –The Graphic Novel hits the stores November 7th. Heroes – The TeeVee Show is on the tube all the time, and is even available for download.

Isn’t that Saturn Girl up there on the right?

30 Days of Steve Niles!

30_days_of_night-2124336ComicMix Radio kicks off the week with a visit from 30 Days Of Night creator Steve Niles who fills us in on his reaction to the how his project looked on the big screen as well as his new series at DC… plus updates on:

• Comic creators turning up on Numb3rs

• The TV season posts its first causality, but Bionic Woman and Journeyman get new leases on life,

• And our full rundown of this week’s long box full of new comics and DVDs including a new Batman-based mini series from DC, DVD Special Editions of The Shining and 2001 and no less than three more zombie variants from Marvel.

If that doesn’t make you Press The Button – what will?

bobgreenberger100-3642068

Is Manga a Passing Fad?, by Robert Greenberger

  • News
  • October 23, 2007

bobgreenberger100-1138724Well, duh.

That was my first reaction when I read USA Today’s story regarding Manga’s loosening grip on readers in Japan.

After all, we lived through it in America starting some 30 years ago, where three things happened around mid-decade:

  1. Cable television was introduced and began snaking through the country, suddenly captivating television watchers and keeping them watching with extra channels, premium movies and so on.
  2. At much the same time, the first home video games were also capturing peoples’ attention.  I still remember being fascinated playing Pong on the playroom television and then flipping to watch an uncut movie on HBO.
  3. The rise of the direct sales distribution system for comic books, which began an evolution away from readers finding comics at the local stationary shop and towards hole-in-the-wall outlets that sold comics and related stuff.

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Costumes Revealed, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • October 23, 2007

There may be some practical reasons why the grown-for-television superheroes dress in plain clothes rather than the colorful garb of their comic book and movie counterparts.

(For those of you who came in late: we’re continuing last week’s discussion of superhero costumes.)

I remember visiting the set of one of Joel Schumacher’s Batman flicks and watching costumers take a long, long time – 15 minutes? More? – just to fit Batman’s mask on a stunt man, a process that involved putting plastic wrap on the guy’s head and then trimming it after the mask was in place. And that was just the mask. Imagine what efforts went into getting tights, cape, boots and all to fit properly. Dash into a closet – a phone booth? – for a quick change? Maybe not.

Though I have no firsthand knowledge of this, I understand that there is actually a closetful of batsuits for the actor and his various doubles; which one gets worn in a particular scene depends on the scene’s content. Are we fighting? Running? Driving our spiffy car? Standing dramatically silhouetted against the skyline? We must wear the appropriate outfit!

Subtract all this time, effort and expense from the task of garbing your good guy and you have…what? Well, have a look at either of the Batman movie serials made in the 40s for your answer. The Superman and Captain Marvel suits from that era are better, but they don’t approach the panache of the average Curt Swan or Jack Kirby drawing.

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Happy 69th birthday, Derek Jacobi!

  • News
  • October 23, 2007

Today in 1938, the classically trained turned fantasy actor Derek Jacobi was born. Sir Derek (knighted twice over, no less) is probably best known to older audiences for his critically acclaimed portrayal of Claudius in the series, I, Claudius and Brother Cadfael in the Cadfeal mysteries. Younger audiences may recognize him for his work in The Secret of NIMH, Dead Again, Jason and the Argonauts, Underworld: Evolution, the remake of Doctor Who and the much anticipated The Golden Compass.  He also won an Emmy in 2001 for parodying his Shakespearean backround on an episode of Frasier:

While Jacobi trained at the University of Cambridge alongside the great Sir Ian McKellen, he never knew until much later in life that Sir Ian had a crush on him that McKellen now admits was "a passion that was undeclared and unrequited."   Alas, poor Ian… although it looks like things pretty much worked out for the both of them.

Frank Miller Gets Sent Up

  • News
  • October 22, 2007

There are a lot of people who owe a LOT of their careers to parodying Frank Miller. Exhibit A: Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Now, sadly, it looks like the movies are following suit.

We are not particularly proud to present Meet The Spartans, starring (left to right) Carmen Electra, Diedrich Bader, and Kevin Sorbo. Brought to you by the same people who bring you Scary Movies, I suspect that the only surprise in the film is what you see in this photo: that Diedrich Bader actually has a six pack.

We’re going to just recommend you save the price of a ticket and ninety minutes of your life and go watch United 300 instead:

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Postcards edited by Jason Rodriguez

Everyone has a story – at least one. Every human life could be told in some way, to illustrate a point, or evoke an emotion, or just entertain an audience. Postcards attempts to tell some of those stories, or to create stories based on tiny pieces of real people’s lives, almost randomly – to invent stories out of the smallest of seeds.

Jason Rodriguez, author of the Harvey-nominated Elk’s Run, gathered up a bunch of vintage postcards, sent them to various artist-writer teams he knew, and asked for comics about the people who sent the postcards. In theory, it’s a great idea. (Of course, everything is wonderful in theory.) In practice, this particular collection of postcard-inspired stories are nearly all sad, depressing tales, and the relentless one-note gloom keeps any of the stories from really standing out. It’s not clear whether Rodriguez’s instructions were responsible for this, of if the choice of creators led to the unremitting bleakness, or if it was just bad luck. Rodriguez’s prefaratory notes to each story do make him seem like a micro-manager, though, with explanations that he gave this postcard to this person expecting X, and that he was sure another artist would be just right for another postcard because of Y.

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Gore, Mayhem and Violence, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • October 22, 2007

Unless you’re new to  or you’ve been avoiding our online comics (hey, c’mon, they’re FREE!) or our comments sections (where the real action is), you’ve probably figured out that I am among a number of cultural recidivists who hang out in this corner of the ether. Mark Wheatley, Andrew Pepoy, John Ostrander… well, damn, most of us, now that I think of it.

So it will come as no surprise that I’ve been reading Girasol Collectibles’ Pulp Doubles series (orderable at your friendly neighborhood comics shop and dozens of other online sources), featuring the original Master of Men, The Spider. The real one. The original. The man who best typifies pulp virtues, where the extreme is commonplace and New York City is destroyed every month.

It’s Jim Steranko’s fault. In the first volume of his History of Comics (and, yes, I, too, have been waiting patiently for volume three for over 35 years), he started off writing about the various costumed pulp heroes who influenced (or, in some cases, were blatantly ripped off by) sundry comic book creations. I had never heard of The Spider before, but Jim praised it as being so purple it would make a French king wince in pain.

Instead of filling space telling you what that means, I will instead tell you some of the plot points in The Spider #49, “The City That Dared Not Eat.” It’s one of my favorites, and it’s in Girasol’s Pulp Doubles #1. I don’t know how you can better that title, but, damn, author Wayne Rogers (no relation to Trapper John) certainly beats it to a pulp. Here’s just a few of the story’s highpoints:

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Dr Who Meets Dr Who Again For The 1st Time

  • News
  • October 21, 2007

The London Sun reports the fifth man to play the Doctor, Peter Davison, will team-up with the tenth man to play the Doctor, David Tennant, this November 19th on a special BBC-TV "charity bonanza" for Children In Need.

This is hardly the first time the sitting (wandering?) Doctor has met up with his past, but it’s the first time since the series was brought back to life almost four years ago. There’s a 20 year age difference between the two; the elder doctor told the Sun “It’s an honour for me to make the connection.”

This should not be confused with the rumored season four Doctor Who final episode, wherein at least four of the doctor’s companions team up with the Doctor and Captain Jack.

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