The London Sun reports Oscar winning Sir Ben Kingsley is in "final" negotiations to join Doctor Who this coming season to play Davros, the man behind (and later inside) The Daleks.
Kingsley’s credits include Schlindler’s List, Twelfth Night, and Gandhi, for which he won the Oscar.
Wild Weather on the East Coast Friday stranded most of the Mondo Marvel panelists in New York (hmmm… wonder how ComicMix‘s E.I.C. made it out that evening), leaving Joe Quesada and C. B. Cebuliski to fend for themselves while sharing with the crowd images and news from upcoming Marvel projects.
One other panelist, Rob Liefeld, who was there to talk about his new Killraven series. Apparently thought up at a bar in San Diego last year, Liefeld and Rob Kirkman will be bringing us an all-new take on the charactertarting fresh and looking to integrate Killraven into the Marvel Universe of the future – a world where our heroes are gone but their artifacts remain, one piece of art had Killraven holding Captain America’s shield. Look for the book in mid-2008. Reminding us that the creators of comics were and are comics fans themselves, Liefeld took some time to talk about his love for the character (and his DC counter-part Kamandi) during his childhood, you could hear the 11 year old Rob coming through loud and clear.
Luke Cage is back in his tiara and yellow shirt now that writer/artist (and Cartoon Network legend) Genny Tartakovsky has gotten a hold of him. The new artist on Punisher War Journal is Corey Walker. Doing his first work for Marvel, Tan Eng Huat (Doom Patrol) will be the artist on the mini-series Silver Surfer: In Thy Name, to be written by Simon Spurrier (2000 A.D.). I wonder if that news blows the ending of the current Silver Surfer mini.
Up next for Paul Jenkins will be a limited series drawn by Paul Guluay called Penance: Relentless about “the most hated man in America.”
Quesada and Cebuliski also said there are some big shake ups (an end?) coming to the Ultimates Universe by year’s end, and we’ll be seeing the "real" Nick Fury back in action next year.
At Wizard World Chicago this weekend DC staffers sat down for another DC Nation panel and gave fans some insight into what we can expect in the Immediate" future."
Editorial honcho Dan Didio was joined by coordinating editor Jann Jones, marketeer Bob Wayne, Jim Starlin and Sean McKeever. Starting off we heard what we have down the pipeline after Countdown to Final Crisis, the aptly named Final Crisis will be a seven issue series by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones starting in May 2008.
And since the weekly format has been so successful for DC over the recent years, starting weekly in December Countdown: Arena starts bringing us more tastes of the Multiverse pitting three different versions of a character fighting out to be a leader in Monarch’s army. The results will be determined by the fans who will get to vote on the DC website for the winner. That’s right folks its reality comics!
Salvation Run will place DC villains in a penal colony, their own planet resulting from the DC heroes looking for a better solution than prisons and Arkham.
Starlin will be killing off whomever he feels like in Death of the New Gods, an eight-part mini-series starting in October. At the panel he jovially made it clear that no one is safe.
The long awaited Marv Wolfman/Damian Scott Raven has been slated for early 2008. In other Titans news we’ll see a Terra mini-series in March.
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Kyle Rayner will be joining the Challengers. DiDio suggested for everything to make sense read GL 26 then Atom #18 (Actually, DiDio was unsure of the actual issue number but assured us it’s the one after GL 26) then Countdown, all of which should be going down in December/January if I’ve done my math correctly.
Jann Jones described The Black Canary Wedding Planner (out in September) as the “girliest book” ever put out and marveled at how a man (J. Torres) could be doing such a great job writing it.
Cassandra Kane will pop up again in Gotham Underground. McKeever said to look for Manhunter to join the Birds of Prey and DiDio says the Manhunter series isn’t gone, they just want to have a few issues put to bed before they start publishing up again.
DiDio also assures us he’s got a big map of the multiverse and is plotting out what all 52 planets are to ensure the richest DC Universe possible. On a side note, Earth 26 is the Captain Carrot Earth and Vertigo is still not going to be a part of any DC Universe.
Once again we’re away from Second City comic book happenings here in the First City, but at least we can all share Chicago nickname puns as well as the Perseid meteor showers this evening from pretty much wherever we live. That, and the ComicMix columns from this past week:
As you might expect, Mellifluous Mike Raub is in attendance at WizWorld Chicago, meaning more Big ComicMix Broadcasts than usual:
The interesting thing about many vacations is how much you want to do at the beginning and how little you’ve done at the end. Mine has gone according to plan in terms of reading (see my column linked above) but not writing. Ah well, maybe next time…
You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul, as Doug Sahm would have it. No, and you can’t live in Arizona if you don’t have a sense of Yuma.
But we were talking about Texas, where you also just can’t live without an immersion in the lore of Billy the Kid. Folklore and pop-fiction, that is, as opposed to factual knowledge or even perceived truth. By the time of the post-middle 20th century, such mis-familiarity had so thoroughly outstripped the facts in the case of this most notorious badman that most of the B.T.K. legendry bombarding the youth of America – and not merely the Texas / New Mexico Plains region – came not from Texas, but rather from Texas as filtered through the movies and the comic books.
For years on end, my most vivid images of Billy the Kid came from Toby Press’ Billy the Kid Adventure Magazine (29 issues, spanning 1950 – 1955 and boasting efforts by the likes of Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, and Harvey Kurtzman) and from the after-school telecasts of an extensive run of low-budget movies starring, by turns, Bob Steele and Buster Crabbe. At a turning-point for such awareness, while visiting Northwest Texas’ Panhandle–Plains Historical Museum with the folks, I noticed a display containing this document:
Tascosa Texas
Thursday Oct 26th
1878
Know all persons by these presents that I do hereby sell and diliver [sic] to Henry F. Hoyt one Sorrel Horse Branded BB on left hip and other indistinct Branded on Shoulders, for the Sum of Seventy five $ dollars, in hand received.
[Signed] W.H. Bonney
Witness
Jos. E. Masters
Geo. J. Howard
“You know who wrote that, don’t you?” asked my Dad. “Your teevee-cowboy hero, Billy the Kid – that’s who. Billy Bonney.
“Except he wasn’t any teevee hero,” Dad continued. “More of a juvenile-delinquent punk, if you ask me.”
“They had juvenile delinquents in 1878?” I asked in reply, missing the point altogether. I was sufficiently flabbergasted by the revelation that Billy the Kid had been a Real Guy – or that the movies and the comic-book series (both loosely conceived and dense with internal contradictions) could claim a basis in fact – to find myself at a loss for words as to this larger issue.
The right words would occur to me later. My father had heard at first hand some harsh accounts of Billy’s dealings, via a Depression-era acquaintance with Elizabeth “Frenchy” McCormick (ca. 1852–1941), last survivor of the long-abandoned frontier settlement known as Tascosa. So Dad and I had plenty to discuss – my Hollywood-and-funnybooks perception, vs. Dad’s owlhoot-punk opinions. (more…)
Day Two at Wizard World has presented us with a lot of cool stuff to bring you on the Big ComicMix Broadcast— starting with an adorable lady who is putting her heart and soul into her love of comics and producing her own work completely on her own. Then Battlestar: Galactica‘s Richard Hatch unveils his newest passion project, The Great War of Magellan , and we give you a chance to work with him on the development of the concept! Then there’s a tip on how you can be your own comic book star – and a trip back to when there was a group on the charts whose front man was doing the pirate things a long time before Johnny Depp!
Ready to work with Richard? Then PRESS THE BUTTON!
This graphic novel is pretty good just on its own terms, but it’s an excellent object lesson. If you know of anyone who thinks that comics are essentially limited in scope to brightly-clad folks punching each other with great vigor, this will help to expand their horizons. It’s the story of Laika, a Russian dog who was the first living creature from Earth deliberately sent outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an impressively-researched story braiding a fictional back-story for Laika (and several other characters I believe are also fictionalized) with the story of the “Chief Designer” of the early Russian space program, Sergei Korolev. And all that is told in comics, and, I suspect, primarily aimed at the grade 6-12 audience.
I’m not familiar with Adadzis’s work, but the note on him in [[[Laika]]] calls him an editorial consultant who “creates words and pictures for a living and loves both equally.” According to his website, muck of his work has been for children, especially recently, though he did something called Millennium Fever
Laika
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. Fish are jumpin, and the cotton is high. Or so I’m told. Living in a major metropolitan area in the twenty-first century, I have to take such things on faith.
This summer, the fun times for someone like me are largely political. The presidential election is over a year away. The first primaries are six months away. Nothing is going to be decided any time soon, so I can pretend it will all turn out for the best.
I spent the summer I was 15 going “clean for Gene,” campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, who was running against Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination on an anti-war platform. Four years later, I ran as an alternate delegate for George McGovern. Four years ago, I nearly got arrested outside the Republican convention up the street from here. Presidential campaigns are fun!
Which is not to say they couldn’t be much more fun. The problem is that presidential candidates tend to be politicians. They spend all their time hustling campaign funds, writing policy, and meeting the public. They go on the Sunday morning news shows and show how serious they are. They go on Oprah or The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to show they’re regular folks who can take a joke.
They don’t save the world from alien invasions. They don’t even fight crime.
Presidential campaigns would be a lot more fun if, instead of Republicans versus Democrats, it was Marvel versus DC. For example debates between:
Captain America and Superman on immigration reform.
Luke Cage and John (Green Lantern) Stewart on affirmative action.
Thor and Wonder Woman about the separation of Church and State.
Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne on the inheritance tax.
Storm and Aquaman on global warming.
The Punisher and Batman on prison reform.
Professor X and Green Arrow on family values.
The Avengers and the Justice League on national security.
Today the Big ComicMix Broadcast is at Wizard World Chicago, where the US Post Office kicked off the way by unveiling the Marvel Stamp Collection, plus the debut of the Ultimate Spider-Man Project from the Hero Initiative which was unleashed here as well. DC dropped a few news bombs which we cover and then there’s a new Venom series to talk about from Marvel and so much more.
PRESS THE BUTTON now so we can dish!
My mama told me never to play pool against someone who brings his own cue. I shudder to think what she’d say about someone who brought his own pool table.
Paul Jenkins (The Sentry, Wolverine, The Darkness) is shooting pool at the Hero Initiative booth (#140) at $30 a game, 8-ball or 9-ball. If you win, you get prizes. That’s if you win. So far, I haven’t seen anybody do that. I suppose it’s possible, I mean, he has missed shots, and I wasn’t there all day, and they do have prizes there, just in case, but…
Well, it’s for a good cause. So if you lose, you can say that you planned to lose, to maximize your donation.
Yeah, right.
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