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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.

(more…)

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!

Casting News Notes

  • News
  • September 25, 2007

jessica_biel_ww-6142690Comic fans love to play imaginary casting games.  Now that comic book movies have become big business, the folks with real money have the means to make those games come true.  Here’s the latest casting news, both rumored and factual (at least for now):

  • Jessica Biel to play Wonder Woman in the upcoming Justice League movie?  Variety reports talks are in progress.  At least she won’t have to dye the hair this time.  (Oh no, wait, that was Jessica Alba, wasn’t it?  Sometimes all Jessicas look alike to me…)
  • Sarah Paulson of Studio 60 has joined the cast of the Frank Miller-directed The Spirit.  She will probably not be playing Dolphin Girl.
  • English actor Dominic West is slated to play the villain Jigsaw in The Punisher: War Zone flick.
  • The cast of Repo! The Genetic Opera includes Paris Hilton, Sarah Brightman, Paul Sorvino and Alexa Vega.  "Set in the not-so-distant future, the production tells the story of an epidemic of organ failures that devastates the planet, killing tens of millions.  As scientists feverishly make plans for a massive organ harvest program, a multi-billion dollar biotech company called GeneCo begins to manufacture salvation — for a price — offering simple payment plans to those lacking the necessary funds to purchase new body parts outright. But all financed organs are subject to default procedures, including repossession at the hand of the notorious organ repo men." And it’s a musical.  My head hurts just thinking about this one.
  • Lastly, Nichelle Nichols gives some advice to Zoe Saldana on playing Uhura in the upcoming Star Trek prequel movie.

As with any casting news, this could all change tomorrow, so stay tuned!

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Boondocks Back For More

  • Uncategorized
  • September 25, 2007

boondockshuey500-2197247While watching my TiVoed Frisky Dingo last night (and thanks, Timothy Truman, for the recommend – I’d never be able to say "My TiVoed Frisky Dingo" without you!) I caught the Adult Swim promo for the long-delayed second season of Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks It goes up Monday, October 8 at 11:30 PM.

This season will run 15 episodes and, true to Simpsons form, will feature a zillion guest voices,  including Busta Rhymes, Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, Donald Faison, Aisha Tyler, Kym Whitley, Tichina Arnold, Marion Ross and teevee’s own Granny Goodness, Ed Asner.

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