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RIC MEYERS: 36th Chamber of Rome

  • News
  • August 5, 2007

ric-meyers-100-6772298Well, I’m back from the San Diego Comic-Con, and if you’ve been reading ComicMix’s coverage, you can probably guess that it was no place to actually write a DVD review column. Get info, acquire more product, see what’s happening, sure, but actually write reviews of other DVD special features? Fergettaboutit.

   

Between my 8th Annual San Diego Comic Con Superhero Kung-Fu Extravaganza there, which takes up three hours of prime time for a couple thousand hard-core martial art movie fans, and the many DVD companies/people I hobnobbed with, I had no time to tell you that the discs to grab this week are the 300 Special Edition and Hot Fuzz. But I’m hoping you already figured that out.

   

36thchamber-2992162So too late there. But since I was up to here as the “kung-fu guy” at the con, I can use this space to clue you in on some discs I should’ve mentioned weeks ago, as well as letting a monumental box set being released next week bring other recent travels into pretentious, self-absorbed focus.

First off, head to your sales place of choice and get the Dragon Dynasty editions of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and My Young Auntie. When I began this column almost three months ago, I promised myself not to inundate you with kung-fu, samurai, or other such Asian titles. But what can I do? I originally discovered these films thirty years ago, because, to my eyes, they were comic book come to life — with actual people doing Daredevilly and Spidermanny things without the benefit of wires or sfx.

Since then, I’ve discovered, through research, that they’re much more than that, yet the original exhilaration I felt is still being revealed to fresh eyes … hopefully like yours. Especially since companies like Dragon Dynasty, controlled by the Weinsteins, are finally revealing the glory of timeless 1970’s classics in a manner befitting their excellence.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: A Pair of Minxes

  • Uncategorized
  • August 5, 2007

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DC Comics caused a bit of a ruckus late last year when they announced their new Minx line of comics. Minx was avowedly an attempt to drag the large audience – mostly young, mostly female – for translated Japanese [[[manga]]] back to American creators by giving them books in formats and styles similar to manga. Some feminists took an instant loathing to the name, and to the fact that most of the announced creators were male, but everyone seemed to think that the idea was a good one. (Though I’m still surprised that no one has done the obvious thing: spend the money to start up an American equivalent of Shojo Beat. The manga system works so well partly because the periodicals act as try-out books and party because popular series can be sold twice, as periodicals and books. Trying to create a manga-like market with only collections is like trying to ride a bicycle on one wheel – you can do it, if you’re Curious George, but it’s difficult and slow.)

I’ve recently read two of the four Minx launch titles, and thought it would be interesting to look at them together. (The other two, which I haven’t seen, were Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm and [[[The P.L.A.I.N. Janes]]] by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg. And more books have already been announced to follow.) I’ll admit that I’m not the target audience for Minx’s books – I’m about twenty years too old, and sport the wrong variety of wedding tackle – but I am definitely the audience for a new book by the creative team behind My Faith in Frankie, and for a new book written by Andi Watson. And I’m certainly part of the audience for interesting, new American comics done well, no matter who they’re supposedly aimed at.

Let’s start with Re-Gifters, which is both more essentially conventional in its story and more successful in the end. It is a reunion of the crew behind [[[My Faith in Frankie]]], down to the publisher and editor – and the story has certain parallels to Frankie, as well. Our main character is a dark-haired young woman (Jen Dik Seong, aka Dixie), with a blonde best friend (Avril, who starts to narrate the story but is stopped quickly). Dixie thinks she’s crazy about a blonde boy (Adam), who turns out to be not quite as all that as our heroine at first thought. The narration, in Dixie’s voice, is also a bit reminiscent of Frankie’s. But that’s about the end of the parallels: Dixie’s story is completely down-to-earth, without any gods or other supernatural elements. (It’s also aimed at a younger audience than Frankie’s, so there’s no sex, either, and Dixie is a couple of years younger than Frankie was.)

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MICHAEL H. PRICE: From ‘Barefoot Gen’ to ‘White Light/Black Rain’

  • News
  • August 5, 2007

price-brown-100-3155046Steven Okazaki’s documentary feature White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will arrive August 6 over the HBO premium-cable network, marking the 62nd anniversary of the arrival of thermonuclear warfare. The film’s harrowing impact has been a matter of record since its in-competition run during last January’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

Though hardly the first of its kind, White Light/Black Rain proves a timely and emphatic reminder. It possesses a sharp consistency with the pioneering Barefoot Gen manga-turned-anime tales of Keiji Nakazawa, and with Masuji Ibuse’s novel Black Rain, as filmed in 1989 by Shohei Imamura. Okazaki’s film brings full-circle, East-meets-West, a persistent question raised by one history-in-the-making Hollywood epic of 1947, The Beginning or the End, which traces the Manhattan Project to a climax at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (In its very title, The Beginning or the End had declared thermonuclear weaponry a topic of perpetual relevance. Further outcroppings since then have included 1982’s The Atomic Café, a pageant of A-bomb boosterism propaganda; and 1995’s The Plutonium Circus, concerning the Texas town most thoroughly identified with nuclear “preparedness” as a tax base.)

i-saw-it-cover-b-6665488White Light/Black Rain finds its more persuasive voice in interviews with survivors of the bombings, illuminated by a gauntlet of harrowing archival footage. Its appreciation requires context, lest White Light/Black Rain be mistaken for an unprecedented re-examination. Its nearer origins lie in the graphic novels of Nakazawa, whose first-hand account of Hiroshima – he professes to have noticed the approach, followed by “a million flashbulbs going off at once” – yielded two Barefoot Gen animated movies of the 1980s. Nakazawa has aligned himself with Steven Okazaki since the 2005 documentary The Mushroom Club, a short-film stage-setter for White Light/Black Rain.

The bombings have amounted to fodder, both imaginative and factual, for the American motion-picture industry since well before that turning-point of World War II. In a time of reciprocal hostilities, the U.S. entertainment industry felt a duty to commit propaganda as a function of advocating an any-means-necessary end to the war.

WWII, of course, no more ended with the bombings than it can be said to have begun at any absolute moment. One war bleeds into another, like the ocean ignoring its explorers’ charted boundaries, over the greater sweep of history. It is a simpler matter to cinch the moment at which Hollywood – itself an occupied territory at the time, given the influential presence of the armed forces’ motion-picture production bureaucracy at studios large and small – began anticipating a bombing run over Japan as a matter of meeting the Axis powers’ aggression in decisive terms. (more…)

The Big ComicMix Broadcast’s Home Game!

The Big ComicMix Broadcast for the weekend offers up news on getting AC/DC on your phone, the comic character who is headed to the big screen before he shows up in the comic stores and the start of another round of sold-out comics. Then there is the artist who shares his story of getting his dream job in comics just by watching TV, plus that little girl from New Jersey who took on The Beatles.

Want to know the Truth? Then Press The Button!

Bender’s Back!

  • Uncategorized
  • August 4, 2007

bender-9790100At last, the first of the new Futurama productions is about to be released… and just in time for Christmas cheer!

On November 27th, a D2DVD entitled Bender’s Big Score will precede Futurama’s return to Adult Swim. The plot is simple: our heroes have to save Earth from nudist alien Internet hustlers. In order to do this, they must solve the secret of time travel – a mission that requires close inspection of Fry’s, ah, butt.

So, of course, Al Gore joins the Futurama cast in the made-for-video movie, along with Sarah Silverman and Coolio.

The D2DVD boasts the usual assortment of bells and whistles, including a new episode of the series complete with futuristic commercials.

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Things That Make Your Eyeballs Go Huh?

  • News
  • August 4, 2007

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Three words you never expected to see all at once: KISS. yaoi. manga.  Our illustration today is, I’m afraid, only the beginning… [via Journalista!]

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog not only reviews a bunch of new comics, but also has a picture of Jughead with a jetpack.

Speaking of Jugheads, the Joplin Independent is in love with Archie’s Double Digest #5.

Greg Hatcher of Comics Should Be Good admits to loving Stan Lee’s Who Wants To Be a Superhero? despite the fact that it’s completely insane.

Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review has been on a Walking Dead kick – he’s just reviewed (and loved) volumes two through four.

Historical fantasy author Alice Borchardt has died at the age of 67; she turned to writing as a second career after working in nursing for thirty years. Borchardt was also the older sister of Anne Rice.

SF Scope analyzes the story choices in Gardner Dozois’s latest Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology.

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MARTHA THOMASES: Space Oddity

  • News
  • August 4, 2007

x-1225417Jerome Bixby’s Man From Earth is a profoundly unfashionable film. Written by Bixby before he died and directed by Richard Schenkman, it’s a science fiction movie with no aliens, no space ships, not even any explosions. It’s a thoughtful movie, intimate, with adult actors dealing with complex philosophical ideas.

When I was first reading science fiction, I liked the books with lots of talking and big ideas. I liked Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and the robot books, where scientists explained large concepts and the societies these concepts would inspire. I liked it so much that I could often overlook inane plots and cardboard characters. When the books were more literate, that was even better.

Jerome Bixby is a science fiction writer from the old school. He wrote episodes of Twilight Zone and Star Trek, including “Mirror, Mirror.” He wrote screenplays, including Fanatastic Voyage, which was based on his short story. Just before he died, he wrote the screenplay to The Man From Earth.

It’s a small film, produced on a shoestring budget of $200,000. The closest thing to a celebrity in the cast is William Katt, formerly the star of The Greatest American Hero. Also in the cast is Richard Riehle, a character actor you’ve seen in a zillion movies, Annika Peterson, Ellen Crawford, John Billingsley, Tony Todd, Alexis Thorpe and David Lee Smith as the central character, John Oldman.

There is only one set, a cabin in the woods, and the entire story takes place over the course of a single day. John Oldman is a university professor packing his belongings to leave for a new job. His friends, other professors and a student, have come with food and drink to wish him well. Over the course of the day, he tells them that, to the best of his knowledge, he’s 14,000 years old.

For the rest of the film, these highly educated, polite people argue with each other about whether or not such a thing is possible, or is Oldman pulling some kind of cerebral practical joke. They consider religion, anthropology, history, and the other fields in which they are expert. No one attacks Oldman for a DNA sample to run tests, no one pulls out an old photograph or other evidence. The devout Christian character feels threatened, but does not condemn Oldman to Hell, nor does she stone him. They talk from mid-afternoon until night, when the last few people at the party go out to look at the stars. (more…)

Spike and Mike, Sick and Twisted

  • News
  • August 3, 2007

Warning: Not necessarily office-friendly words abound.

Unless you go to an animation festival, and you should go to an animation festival, the only way to see independent animation is to look out for the traveling cartoon programs.  For a while it was Fans Only.  We clustered in this or that museum auditorium for the International Tournee of Animation, now defunct.

 

This was the traveling hothouse for the short cartoon, where animation lived on as an art form, not a commercial proposition.  The films came mainly from studios run by a government or a college mixed in with a few made by individuals.  And the individuals almost always had a grant.  Civilians in the audience were always surprised that at least half of these pictures are serious, not made to make you laugh; quite often a meditation on unpleasant things or a non-linear succession of disturbing images.

 

That’s show biz.

 

Then came Spike and Mike.  They were into animation, going to a festival or a traveling program now and again.  As showmen, they were dismayed that only, say, 20 percent of these films, on a bad day, would be what you would call entertainment.  They were all worthy of contemplation by the prepared, patient mind, but keep ‘em in their seats, keep ‘em hollering for more?  No.

 

Spike and Mike made change.  Their Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation began with a core of cartoons from the museum shows that were fast, stupid jokes or slightly slower jokes that were quite filthy.  They packed the rest of the program with other funny or gross films too low for the museum crowd.  They marketed it to regular theaters, to be shown as a regular attraction, not the weekend midnight slot.

 

They’ve been at it so long they have created their own sub-genre (and I certainly don’t mean than in a derogatory way, unless that would make you more likely to attend, then yes, I mean “sub” in the most demeaning, degrading sense possible).  Spike and Mike is now a learning tool, like a video game, that teaches you how to do something very specific, in this case to make a cartoon that can get past the gauntlet.

 

Consider if you will an audience.  An audience of mostly men, like what you used to see at the San Diego Comic-Con.  If the center wasn’t dry, a lot more of these people would be working on a cheap high, a perfect attitude for the gauntlet.  They’ve been whipped up by having free t-shirts thrown at the crowd.  They say, “Fuck Stoners,” or “I Fucked a Backstreet Boy;” a few are kind of rude.  Then they’re ready for the gauntlet.

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Scott Kurtz’s entry for Zuda Comics

  • Uncategorized
  • August 3, 2007

At San Diego, DC’s new online project, Zuda Comics, was handing out lots of postcards that cartoonists could fill in as a sort of tryout for their website so that you could get all the advantages of DC’s name recognition and traffic.

Scott Kurtz, whose PVP webcomic gets about twice as much traffic as DC’s entire website, produced this:

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Hear, hear.

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