Twenty five years ago today, the musical Cats debuted at the WinterGarden theater on Broadway. Featuring music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, the show drew its lyrics from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The show ran for 7,485 performances over nearly 18 years, breaking the record for longest-running Broadway musical in 1997. The show closed almost seven years ago, and sadly, they still can’t get the cat smell out of the theater.
Wow, it’s been some week for ComicMix, and we appreciate all the kind words of support and terrific reviews we’ve seen so far! Please let us know where you’ve seen our comics discussed, we don’t want to miss any feedback! In the meantime, here’s your weekly wrapup of our regular columns:
As you can see, Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s Big ComicMix Broadcasts are now all accessible right from our front page, so no need to recap them here any more; just scroll down on the right sidebar and there they are! In fact, it just so happens that all of the above columns can currently be accessed from our section entitled "More Comics News" at the bottom of our front page, mixed in with our news items. Can a separate column archives be far behind? Well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?
Needless to say, it has been a rather eventful week here at ComicMix, but not so much that we can’t take the time out to WELCOME all of you who may have just discovered us via news of our new, weekly and FREE comics. If you missed some of our Big ComicMix Broadcasts this week, here are some things we pointed you toward:
Even if you hate CSI: Miami, you will still enjoy this montage of cheesy David Caruso one-liners <a href=”
, then take a trip here for some ideas on making your own montages and getting CBS to use them!
That preview of the new Wallace and Gromit special can be seen here. Actually it is a short film about the next TV special, Trouble At’ Mill, which will debut on BBC One in fall/holiday 2008.
If you are lucky enough to own any original Jack Kirby art from Captain Victory, Image Comics needs your help in order to produce the best looking hardcover of this project. Drop them a line here. (more…)
The 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival in North America occurred in 2004. So what else is new? That occasion could hardly be treated as commonplace nostalgia, so urgent has the influence remained. Witness Julie Taymor’s newly opened film, Across the Universe. Nor can mere nostalgia account for the significance of the 50th anniversary of a similarly intense cultural phenomenon known as Shock! Theater.
The likening of Shock! to the Beatles’ impact, and to rock music as a class, will become more evident, so bear with me.
Depending upon one’s hometown locale, some folks might remember Shock! Theater under some other proxy local-teevee title. My immediate North Texas readership recollects the syndicated-television breakthrough of Shock! Theater under the localized name of Nightmare. That Fort Worth version premiered in September of 1957 over a scrappy and innovative independent channel – a distinctive presentation of a nationwide syndie-teevee blitz.
In reviving a wealth of Depression-into-WWII movie chillers from Universal Pictures Corp., Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems syndicate left the style of presentation up to the individual stations. A channel typically would assign a local-market announcer to pose as a creepy personality (such as John “the Cool Ghoul” Zacherle, in Philadelphia and New York) who would introduce the various Frankensteins, Draculas and so forth and then intrude at intervals to present blackout gags.
There probably hasn’t been a generation since the late 1950s that, in some way, hasn’t been touched by Mad Magazine. Born out of the Comics Code ravaged EC Comics, it went from four color comic to traditional magazine and broke circulation records that have yet to be topped. Today The Big ComicMix Broadcast begins our talk with Al Feldstein, a mainstay of EC’s glory days and the man who helped Mad on the map. Plus, The Hardy Boys get gamey, Image pulls the Kirby book and we take another step closer to Transformers 2.
Now PRESS THE BUTTON, please!
It’s great to have the comics on ComicMix now. I knew they were always planned to be part of the site, and so the site seemed to me to be a bit empty without them. Now the place seems to be filling in nicely, like a garden in mid-May.
Besides enjoying free comics from the comfort of my home, able to get them without even putting on pants, I find this format is great for my calling as a leading comics’ missionary.
Ever since I grew out of being a kid who loved comics, I’ve tried to encourage people to join my in my love of the medium. It wasn’t easy. When I was a teen at boarding school, there were a few other girls who like to read romance comics, and we would amuse our dorm-mates by reading them aloud. Unfortunately, it was the romance part that was most appealing to my peers (which was demonstrated when they also read True Confessions magazines out loud), and no one really wanted to read anything else.
In college, underground comix were cool, so I found people who shared my interest. These were heady days (in more ways than one), with all kinds of new stories from Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Trina Robbins, Skip Williamson, Jay Lynch, Spain and many many more. The National Lampoon had comics pages in every issue, and people like Neal Adams did spot illustrations. My Superman habit was still considered kind of weird, but no weirder than anything else – certainly much less weird than Spiro Agnew.
And then, I moved to New York, and the world opened up. The direct market was a newborn, and there were six comic book stores within a mile of my apartment. Some specialized in undergrounds, some in superheroes, and some mixed it up. It was great. I could find anything I wanted.
Everything except people that I knew. My then-boyfriend (now husband) would come with me to Forbidden Planet, then the largest store near by. He didn’t like comics as much as I did, but he would look at the books about film and animation.
Competition and market forces closed down most of the direct market accounts in the Village. Forbidden Planet shrank. The stores that were left, quite naturally, sold the merchandise that was available. Since a lot of such product was T & A, the stores started to seem seedy and creepy. People who might be interested in comics didn’t want to go into a lot of these stores. Women, especially, were skeeved out by the impossible physiques of the women on the covers and in figurines. If I could talk them inside, they would want to get out as quickly as possible.
Wow, the site looks great! I really like those drawing of the columnists that…oh, they’re not there. Well I’m sure if there was an issue, the artist (who knocked himself out taking time out of his VERY busy schedule to draw them, sorry I mean the award winning artist who wrote the curriculum for the Museum of Modern Art’s art school) would have been told before he looked at the site and saw they were not there.
I’m sure of that.
Sorry. As Peter David would say, I digress. This column is about girls!
Girls, Girls, Girls!
When it comes to girls we comic book, movie, TV, video game and toy fans have been labeled geeks, nerds, losers, and fanboys – to name a choice few. In most popular culture fair we are often portrayed as the hapless idiot who has no idea how to talk to girls.
Sadly, this is true.
We are those geeks, nerds, losers, and fanboys that people think we are. Well, I’m not, I picked up girls like they were lint and I was a dust buster. You know why? Because I’m FUNNY! Look, you may not think I’m funny, but I am funny! How do I know that I’m funny? Because I’m paid to be funny!
I have written funny TV shows, funny comics, and funny columns. So if someone writes YOU a check for being thin even if strangers come up to you on the street and scream “Have you called Jenny yet?” then you are thin.
And even if nobody wrote me a check, I would still be funny! Not in a Brokeback way, but in a ha ha kind of way.
See? That was funny!
Not as funny as not telling the artist who broke his back working with horrible photos to help develop a new look for a website and not telling him that there was an issue (the same artist who has a building named after him at a magnet school of the arts) no, not, that funny. But it was funny!
A sense of humor is sooo important with chicks! The problem with some of us (read: YOU) is that what you think is funny requires background information for it to be funny.
Consider this, that girl you are talking to (trying to talk to) may not get that Halo 3 joke you just told her. That blank stare you are getting is a good indication that she does not get the joke or get you. It’s possible that the young lady doesn’t have Halo 3. It’s possible (sit down this may floor you) it’s possible they may have never heard of Halo 3.
Ever think that there are at least parts of your life that would make an interesting comic? Artist Kurt Dinse did and from there he added a little drama and created One Year In Indiana, an intriguing indy comic spotlighted today on THE BIG BROADCAST!
Plus: What is the deal on all those Marvel Zombie variants? How about Princess Bride coming to the game market? The new Tintin trilogy? And today, we fondly remember Mrs. Hart.
Let us entertain you while you read the all-new, all-free Black Ice… PRESS THE BUTTON!
Nikki Finke points to Keith Boesky‘s comparison by the numbers of the release of Halo 3 (the video game) to Spider-Man 3 (the movie). Pretty impressive at first glance…
Even though the media trumpeted how the launch of Halo 3 was the largest single day financial event in entertainment history, the articles fail to address how much larger. The retail vs. box office numbers show revenue for first day sales of Halo was about 13% higher than Spider-Man 3, this year’s biggest movie opening weekend. This is pretty cool. However, when you compare the bottom lines, it is beyond pretty cool. It is really f’ing cool and cannot even be touched by the movie business. When you consider the nearly 50% audience growth over Halo 2 despite a nearly 50% smaller installed console base, it is even more incredible.
…BUT: Boesky’s numbers don’t count the millions of extra coin generated by Spider-Man 3 tie in products, including, for example, video games. And I really doubt anybody is going to be making Halo slippers any time soon. Without the licensing money, it’s a very incomplete picture.
Here’s a comic book so big it makes those old tabloid editions (Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) look like a Jughead Digest. It measures 16" by 21.25", but even if it’s not the biggest comic book ever published, it certainly is one of the best.
On November 24, 1918, a new newspaper comic strip debuted named Gasoline Alley. It’s still around today, making it the longest continuously published continuity strip – an incredible achievement, as continuity strips have been anathema in the newspaper world for decades. Revolving around the adventures of nonagenarian Walt Wallet and his family and their friends, Gasoline Alley actually didn’t become a continuity strip until Valentine’s Day 1921, when Walt discovered baby Skeezix abandoned at his doorstep. The child wasn’t from Krypton.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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