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MICHAEL DAVIS: All My Children…Suck

  • News
  • September 28, 2007

allmychildrenpic-1497654I know, I know, no fanboy out there in the land of Heroes, Star Wars, Star Trek and the like even watches soaps on daytime television.

Sure you don’t.

Well I do and I have done so for over 20 years. That among other reasons is why I, fanboy, have a lovely Asian goddess in my life while you identify at 30 with the kids from Superbad.

So make fun of me all you want, I don’t have to visit the “Love You Long Time” website to get my kicks. Part of that is because I watch soaps and I am sensitive.

Yes, sensitive.

I know that mostly women watch soaps but I have learned a great deal about women from watching soaps. What have I learned? Well that’s another column which I’m writing (called The Fanboy Guide To Girls) but I will give you one example of what I have learned about women from watching soaps. If you are on the phone they will pick up the extension and listen…guaranteed.

The one and only soap I watch is All My Children. I LOVE THAT SHOW!

Or I did…

What follows is an open letter to the head of ABC Daytime or the Executive Producer of All My Children who ever is responsible for turning the best show on TV into the reason I am thinking about joining a cult. For all you readers who don’t watch the show (sure you don’t) I will try and explain some of the goings on by way of AMC facts*

Dear Sir/Madam or Satan,

I am a black man born and raised in the mean streets and housing projects of New York City. I have seen people shot, been shot at, been beat up, robbed etc. In fact just about any thing your writers can come up with on the show that happened to Jessie (You remember Jessie don’t you? No? Well Jessie was that black street kid that Jackson Montgomery adopted who simply disappeared from the show.) Well, I’m the real life Jessie.

I have been watching All My Children for over 20 years. I have been a fan for that long. I own All My Children trading cards, Erica Kane Barbie dolls, and hard cover books on the series. Let me tell you something, when you are a 6’2” black man with a Erica Kane Barbie on your mantel, that’s a fan. No matter what happened to me during my day on the street I could always look forward to coming home grabbing a Cherry Coke and losing myself in the lives and loves of the citizens of Pine Valley.

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BIG BROADCAST: John Ostrander Goes To The Bar!

insomniac_p1_jpeg-2458027There is no better way to end a week than a little trip to the local bar – and in comics the bar "local" to EVERYwhere happens to be Munden‘s!  For about 70 issues of GrimJack, Munden’s Bar was a fan favorite and now its coming back – and FREE – to ComicMix on Friday, October 5th. The Big ComicMix Broadcast sneaks you in the back door for a peek at the bar’s Grand Reopening as we talk with writer/co-creator John Ostrander and ComicMix rabble-rouser and editor-in-chief Mike Gold, plus offers a wake-up call for 24 Hour Comic Day, tells you how Nancy Drew (!) solves the DS (?), what Paul Dini’s up to, where Death Note is going, and how Daredevil sells out!

Pour us a cold one and PRESS THE BUTTON!

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Trick ‘R Treat, DC/Wildstorm!

  • News
  • September 27, 2007

8216_400x600-1-9230136Yesterday, retailers received the following e-mail from Diamond, DC Comics’ exclusive distributors to comic shops:

TRICK ‘R TREAT MINISERIES TO BE RESOLICITED AT A LATER DATE

TRICK ‘R TREAT, the four-issue weekly shipping mini-series from WildStorm, has been postponed and will be resolicited at a later date.  All orders placed under the item codes AUG070318, AUG070319, AUG070320 and AUG070321 are cancelled.

This begs the question: are they going to change all the evil pumpkins into happy Santas? I can see it now:

DARK RUDOLPH!

WON’T YOU PULL SOME SLAY TONIGHT??

It also makes me wonder what I’m going to give the little kiddies this Halloween. Their parents won’t accept apples…

Geneon Go Bye-Bye

  • Uncategorized
  • September 27, 2007

139_geneonbiglogo-6340315According to our friends at ICv2, Geneon Entertainment has cancelled all of their anime releases scheduled to ship after November 6th, citing high costs, declining sales, continued illegal downloading and the collapse of its sales and marketing agreement with ADV. This leaves continuing series such as Hellsing Ultimate, Karin, Kyo Kara Maoh, Shonen Onmyoji, Black Lagoon Second Barrage, Law of Ueki, Story of Saiunkoku, When They Cry, and Rozen Maiden Traumend twisting in the wind.

Geneon was the third-largest anime distributor player in the States, after FUNimation and ADV.

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Halo everybody, Halo

  • News
  • September 27, 2007

A videogame has set the all-time record for most revenue earned in a single day by any entertainment property.  Any property.  Ever.

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That game, for anyone hiding under a rock, is Halo 3 by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft.  Who knew there were so many Xboxes out there?

CNet notes that the game "netted $170 million in sales in the U.S. in its first day. If true, that would top previous records set by the motion pictures Spider Man 3 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."  Although you really have to divide the $170 million by $60 per, rather than by the cost of a movie ticket which, I’m informed, is considerably less.

Also, over a million players have logged on to Xbox Live to play the multiplayer version,  Your news editor is not one of them.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Devil’s Advocate – Iraq

  • News
  • September 27, 2007

john-ostrander100-2474439I’ve got something nibbling at my mind and perhaps the only way for me to sort it out is to put it into words. It has to do with our adventure in nation-building, a.k.a. the Iraq debacle.

I’ll start by saying that I was for the invasion of Afghanistan. Then and now, it seemed to me the necessary response to 9/11. Al Quaeda appeared responsible; they had their camps in Afghanistan with the full knowledge and support of the Afghan government, the Taliban. You get hit, you hit back at the ones who hit you. Hard. As Al Capone said, “That’s the Chicago way.”

On the other hand, I was not for the invasion of Iraq from the beginning and I said so. I didn’t buy the “imminent danger” from the “weapons of mass destruction,” especially since there were UN weapons inspection teams on the ground inside the country. The fact that the Bush Administration was so stridently insistent made me ask “What else is going on here?” At first I thought it was about the oil (and now Alan Greenspan says it was); I came to believe that it was a NeoCon vision of transforming the MidEast by creating a functioning democracy in the middle of it. Now I think it’s about the oil, about the NeoCon vision, and certain select Bush-friendly companies making a bucket of money there.

I believe that the NeoCons thought that the Iraqis in exile would just step in, set up a new government, we would be hailed as liberators, and it would all be done in six months. I believe it was on the agenda to do before 9/11 happened; that tragedy just enabled the Bushies to push the plan through without thinking it through. The only plan the current administration seems to have for dealing with the mess is to leave it for the next administration to clean up. Instead of nation building, we seem to have created a geographical area of chaos. It’s a constant drain on both our military and our national finances; Iraq seems like an open wound.

My disgust with all of this is long standing. We had no business going into Iraq in the first place. The WMDs were a lie and the Administration knew it or, at very least, should have known it. The Dems were elected to Congress on the promise to end the war and the low low low approval rating of Congress at the moment stems on their failure to even staunch the flow. Since I didn’t believe we should be there in the first place, it stands to reason that I think we should get out at first opportunity.

BUT. . .

Colin Powell is purported to have said to Bush about Iraq before the invasion that “If you break it, you’ve bought it.” And there’s my problem. I think there’s truth to that. Before we invaded, Iraq was a functioning country: it had electricity, people had jobs. Yes, it also had a murderous dictator in charge; lots of places around the globe do and we don’t seem to have bothered ourselves about them.

So now what have we got? Sect fights sect and sects fight internally and they all hate us. It’s chaos and we brought it. We, the People. This country. You, an individual, may have, like me, been against the whole misbegotten enterprise from the start but I’m talking about the collective We. The We that elected not only the President but the members of Congress that sustained him, as well as the Democratic Party that has no spine. (more…)

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Hump Day Briefs

  • News
  • September 26, 2007

fursvsklingon-5759623A little mini-browsing around the internets the last few days has come up with the following:

  • There is no Furries vs. Klingons bowling tournament this coming Saturday in Atlanta.  But dang, that poster is still cool.

  • Nick Mullins at The Comics Reporter notes two main reasons for the kerfuffle over the teacher who got fired over giving a 9th grader Eightball #22: the book is recommended by the Library Journal for 10th grade and up (and that recommendation applied to the series as a whole, where individual issues may vary in their amount of mature content) and, more importantly, mature situations involving art and other visuals will almost always raise more of a ruckus than those involving only words (George Carlin aside). There’s your thousand-to-one ratio at work again.

  • Nintendo has surpassed Canon to become the second biggest stock in Japan.  Toyota still rules the Japanese market.  If they come up with a car that has built-in Wii and can take pictures, it’s a lock.

  • Parallel universes have been mathematically proven to exist.  Yeah, on Earth-Geek!  Oh no wait, we are Earth-Geek aren’t we?

  • Because women aren’t exploited nearly enough in our subculture, there’s the Miss Horrorfest contest.  Self-exploit and you may win $50,000!  So there, Oscar Wilde; we’ve already established that and there’s no haggling over the price!  Is there a corresponding "Master Horrorfest" ("master" being the male equivalent of "miss" once upon a time)?  I didn’t think so.

  • Somebody let Stephen Colbert too close to the Indecision 2008 website again, as the site gets onto a Candidate Casting Couch with presidential hopefuls as superheroes.  Would you rather see Simpsons cels referencing movies juxtaposed with the actual film stills?  Sure you would.

  • Goodie, HarperCollins will be reprinting Zot!, one of my all-time favorites!  And Sony’s releasing colorized Ray Harryhausen movies!

  • Greetings from Zack Snyder on the set of the Watchmen movie.

  • Condolences to the family of the still-anonymous Batman: The Dark Knight film technician who died in a car accident (unrelated to the movie).

  • The Winnie the Pooh merchandising case has been dismissed, the main lesson being that if you’re going to sue Disney it’s probably not a good idea to be discovered poking through their trash.
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The Girl and Her Dinosaur

  • News
  • September 26, 2007

sa-md-coverwrkng3-2733659Coming this October to ComicMix –The Adventures of Simone & Ajax! This is the story of Simone, a fun-loving 20-year-old girl, and Ajax, her friend who happens to be a small, green dinosaur. Together they find themselves in a series of strange and wacky adventures, taking them to many different lands, times, and places. Simone is not so much the leader of the duo, but more the instigator, looking to have fun and often acting before she thinks, getting herself and Ajax into trouble and so into their adventures. She’s not dumb, just over-zealous. Ajax, the dinosaur, is the more sensible of the two. While deep down he loves adventure, too, he’d rather ponder and worry before leaping into the fray.

Simone & Ajax’s adventures take them around the world, and off it, as well as to any time or place, be it Atlantis, the Moon, Santa’s Workshop, Victorian England or the grocery store. Sometimes strange adventure comes to them at their home in the ruins of Rene de Chartre Cathedral. Their adventures are "a bit like the best issues of Cerebus, and a mood that harkens Bone" (Toph, Overstreet’s Fan #21). It’s a buddy strip, but all in all, The Adventures of Simone & Ajax is a fun and exciting comics series that will attract readers of all ages looking for exciting, zany adventure stories.

Creator Andrew Pepoy was born in 1969. After abandoning such worthless pursuits as becoming the President or an accountant, at age 10, he decided to draw comics. Soon after, he met the classic Buck Rogers artist, Rick Yager.

After many years of publishing fanzines, and while still attending Loyola University Chicago, Andrew sold my first professional work and was soon working for Marvel, DC, and other major comic book publishers on such characters as Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, The X-Men, Mutant X, Scooby Doo, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Simpsons, Betty & Veronica, Godzilla, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, and many more. Starting in 1995 I also wrote and drew my own comic book feature, The Adventures of Simone & Ajax.

In 2000, he was asked to redesign the Little Orphan Annie newspaper strip, which he drew for the next year. Andrew is currently working on various comic books, including writing and drawing a revival of Katy Keene for Archie Comics, and developing new ideas for comic books and comic strips.

Andrew lists his influences as “Roy Crane, Dan DeCarlo, Russell Keaton, Bob Lubbers, Matt Baker, Alex Raymond, Charles Schulz, Mark Schultz, Steve Ditko, Enoch Bolles, George Herriman, Henk Kuijpers, Francois Walthery, Wally Wood, Bob Oksner, Don Flowers, and so many more.”

You’ll find Andrew living in a condo with a turret on the north side of Chicago with his wife (and assistant), Chris Atkinson, and two odd cats.

Here’s what Andrew had to say about the upcoming stories.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Still Life with Gadgets

  • News
  • September 26, 2007

elayne100-8081772As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not exactly what you would call an early adopter. I’ve tended to view many modern trappings more like modern traps. I readily admit to being one of those mean people who applauded when Apple lowered the price on its iPhone, a product I anticipate never needing nor owning, nodding at the observation that the $200 extra for the debut version (sold to people who actually queued up to buy an expensive status symbol readily available in plentiful quantity in stores and online) should be considered a sucker tax. I believe our affluent society is way too dependent on and obsessive over technological conveniences which will either soon achieve sentience at which point we’ll happily welcome our electronic overlords, or will utterly break down at the next super-solar flareup and leave us with the self-reliance level of children.

That said, I have way too many of these evil machines in my own home.

I remember a time when I didn’t. During my first marriage to somebody as wary of tech as I was, we had a VCR with a wired remote, and a TV with rabbit ears where you had to actually get up to change the channel. (We lived in The Land That Cable Forgot to Wire until about four years after everyone else in NYC was hooked up.) Our computer and printer were hand-me-downs that my office was going to throw away. Usenet and email were nice, but the behemoths were still things on which I worked more than played. Even our kitchen, which of course wasn’t ours but the landlord’s, didn’t have high-tech things like a dishwasher or garbage disposal unit or broiler the size of an oven, and still doesn’t. (I still get annoyed at TV chefs who talk about adjusting racks in the broiler; to me the broiler is found all the way at the bottom of the oven and is about two feet high with the door that opens downward and one temperature setting — turning the oven dial all the way up — and you’re lucky if it works at all without causing the pan to burst into flames. Which still beats Robin’s experience, as he tells me they don’t have broilers at all in England.)

But now, a lot of things are different. My current husband, who can reverse-engineer gadgets as easily as he takes apart and analyzes comic book panels, was born to be a tech geek. If he weren’t such a terrific artist as well, some sort of tech geekery would be how he made his living. He’s the kind of person who was able to FTP pages to DC and Marvel before those companies were even set up to receive them! When Robin emigrated to marry me, he had to leave behind tons of electronics, as British outlets are different and it just didn’t make financial sense to bring over lots of things that required American adapters and doubtless would be obsolete by the time he got settled in. Yes, Robin’s one of those early adopter types whose first reaction to new tech is "Oooh, shiny and pretty!"

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BIG BROADCAST: Comics On Black Ice

obsidian-cover-4351899Fresh off Day One of the new TV season, The Big ComicMIx Broadcast plunges ahead with out preview ComicMix Phase 2 as we discuss our Thursday series, Black Ice! Comics legend Mike Baron explains how being in the right place at the right time helped get this creation on the road. Plus we talk to some of the first people to get their hands on HALO 3, preview the new comic from the ACLU, cover this week’s new comics and DVDs and if that wasn’t enough, cap it off with a trip back for the "comeback cop."

Just PRESS THE BUTTON or you might get fragged!

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