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MIKE GOLD: A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste

  • News
  • July 30, 2007

mikegold100-5650203I’m writing ahead so I can properly annoy people at this past weekend’s San Diego Comic Con, so here’s some massively random thoughts from a probably senile old fart.

Remember the old Batman villain Doctor Double-X? Detective Comics #261, November 1958? The idea was, this guy Doctor X could split into two villains, the second known as Doctor Double-X. Okay, he wasn’t one of your better villains. But now that I think of it – and Crom knows why I was thinking of it – when he split into Doctor Double-X, shouldn’t Doctor Double-X have been a woman?

detective-261-6934936Back when the Chicago Tribune was still running Lee Falk’s The Phantom, their feature editor told me the strip ranked first among black males. I like The Phantom, but let’s face it: the story is about 21 generations of white men who rule (they each sat on a throne) Africa and the black natives who think he is really one 400 year old man. Was there a severe self-image problem amongst those polled, or what?

You probably remember Marvel Comics’ adaptation of the Planet of the Apes. What you might not know is that what you may have read from Marvel was not their original adaptation. They did the story, printed it and received a few untrimmed copies from the printer. Only then did it come to Marvel’s attention that star Charlton Heston had approval rights to all depictions. Marvel trashed the print run, made the appropriate changes, and went back to press. But at least one of those untrimmed, uncollated copies still exists. It’s not noted in the Overstreet Guide (at least not volume 35, the one closest to me). I wonder what it’s worth on the collector’s market?

phantom-5699410Back in the height of the alternate / silver foil / prism / wacky numbering fad (as opposed to today’s alternate / pencil cover / second-printing cover fad), Mike Grell and I wanted to publish a special issue of Shaman’s Tears between issues 3 and 4. It would have been called Shaman’s Tears #π, and it would have been printed on bubble gum stock. We were overruled. Within a year or so, Marvel licensed their comics out to be printed on bubble gum. (more…)

Back to the Futurama

  • News
  • July 29, 2007

futuramairobot-8267542In the future, there will be no graves and nothing will stay dead. Motor-shock is coming.

The first original Futurama production since the series was canceled in 2003 will be a feature-length film, Futurama: Bender’s Big Score that will go directly to DVD and be available on November 27th. The new film features the show’s original cast and crew, and its release marks the second time that a Fox cartoon series has spawned a direct-to-DVD film after cancellation (Family Guy: Stewie Griffin, the Untold Story was the first). Previews were shown at SDCC with the crowd going nuts, as you’d expect.

Fox is planning to release three additional Futurama direct-to-DVD features during 2008, Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs, Futurama: Bender’s Game, and Futurama: Into the Wild, Green Yonder.  In addition to the original cast each Futurama film will feature guest stars.  Al Gore, Sarah Silverman and Coolio appear in Bender’s Big Score.

The release of the direct-to-DVD features doesn’t affect the previously announced plans to revive Futurama in episodic form on Comedy Central in 2008 (see "Futurama Revived"). The producers of the series plan on chopping up the features, adding new material and airing the resulting reconfigured new 22-minute episodes on Comedy Central during 2008 along with reruns of the original 72 episodes, much as they did with Stewie Griffin, the Untold Story. Click here to see a faux trailer.

When San Diego is too far away…

  • News
  • July 29, 2007

Yeah, I guess I’m missing San Diego, in more ways than one.  But then again, they’re missing the Del Close improv marathon here in NYC, so that makes us even.  Not.  Ah well, on to this past week’s ComicMix columns:

I haven’t even begun to keep track of all Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s Big ComicMix Broadcasts, so why don’t you do it for me?:

Tomorrow’s probably going to be a slow day while my colleagues travel and sleep, so it’s a good time to get all caught up!

Overheard at San Diego, part 6

  • Uncategorized
  • July 29, 2007

spartans-2282294Saying this place is slowing down is like saying you’re better off landing from a plane with an umbrella in hand rather than nothing, but we’re game to hold out to the last…

Right outside the Slave Labor booth: "This is madness!" "THIS! IS! SAN DIEGO!"

Mark Evanier to Peter David at the Quick Draw panel discussing their respective weight losses: "Between the two of us, we’ve lost a complete Tony Isabella."

Warren Ellis on writing Lara Croft as a feminist icon: "In my story she’s stark naked, but she’s wearing an eighteen inch green strap on with the head of Chtulhu, so I figure I’m covered either way."

Melanie McFarland, TV reporter for the Seattle P-I, on ABC’s decision to blow the Lost surprises at the Television Critics convention instead of SDCC: "The very idea that a room full of socially awkward types who get paid to obsess over people and worlds that do not exist would be passed over in favor of a convention center stuffed with socially awkward types who obsess over people and worlds that do not exist — while wearing costumes! — was simply unacceptable. We are the true nerd herd, the gatekeepers of stupid information!"

More SDCC wrap-up as soon as we get back to the office!

SDCC Day 4 on The Big ComicMix Broadcast!

The San Diego Comic-Con 2007 goes out with a mega-size bang as they crank out yet another sold out day, and we at The Big ComicMix Broadcast do our best to close off all our loose ends. SciFi is reviving FARSCAPE … but at least one cast member isn’t ready, we uncover a great forgotten comic series … direct from the artist and then we evesdrop as DC’s writers and editors cop to their biggest mistakes.

PRESS THE BUTTON and let’s take this puppy home!

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Saga of the Bloody Benders

benders-9425765It’s been twenty years since Geary’s original A Treasury of Victorian Murder was published – and who would have thought, then, that a slim book of arch graphic short stories about little-known murders in Victorian England would be the beginning of the comics Geary would spend most of the decades to come creating? The first of the smaller-format, single-case volumes, Jack the Ripper, followed in 1995, with a new book every other year through 2005’s The Murder of Abraham Lincoln. Then 2006 saw The Case of Madeleine Smith, and this year yet another new Geary murder case.

Except for the first volume, each “Treasury of Victorian Murder” is a small book – about 5½ “ x 8¼” with roughly eighty pages of comics – about a particular, somewhat famous murder case from 19th century England or the USA. He’s covered the deaths of two Presidents – Lincoln and Garfield – and the cases "H.H. Holmes," Lizzie Borden, and Jack the Ripper. The remaining two books – about Mary Rogers and Madeleine Smith – are about famous sensational cases, crimes of passion.

The Bender “family” – there’s some doubt as to whether they were actually related, as they claimed to be – of Labette County, Kansas are not quite as famous as most of those cases (though I hadn’t heard of Madeleine Smith before, either). But they were certainly actively murderous and impressively mysterious, so their story gives Geary quite a bit to dig into. The Benders arrived in that raw, rural area of Kansas in 1870, very soon after the Civil War and not much longer after Kansas became a state in 1861. They set up a single-room (divided by a hanging canvas) inn and grocery on the major trail through the area, and settled into the community – considered eccentric, certainly, but basically accepted.

(more…)

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MICHAEL H. PRICE: Jiggs & Maggie Go to the Movies, and Vice Versa

  • Uncategorized
  • July 29, 2007

jiggs-maggie-out-west-1s-5170951George McManus (1884-1954), once a household name via his long-running domestic-shenanigans comic strip Bringing Up Father, stands as a practical embodiment of the comics’ industry’s cinematic possibilities. The last of his comics-into-movies adaptations, Jiggs and Maggie Out West (Monogram Pictures; 1950), came to hand recently during the excavation process for a fifth volume of novelist John Wooley’s and my Forgotten Horrors film-book series.

What? Bringing Up Father’s Jiggs and Maggie in a horror and/or Western movie? Well, not precisely so – but close enough to fit the Forgotten Horrors agenda. The books’ greater point all along has been that of isolating the weirdness in a range of motion pictures beyond the narrowly defined genres of horror and science-fantasy. And more peculiar than William Beaudine’s Jiggs and Maggie Out West, they don’t hardly come.

Born in St. Louis to Irish parents, McManus registered early in the last century as a newspaper cartoonist capable of finding a resonant absurdity in everyday domestic life, and of veering into dreamlike fantasy in the manner of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. With McCay, during the 1910s, McManus began exploring the finer possibilities of cartoon-movie animation: It is McManus, in a live-action prologue to the 1914 animation-charged Gertie the Dinosaur, who stakes a wager with McCay about the challenges of bringing a prehistoric beast to a semblance of lifelike motion. McManus’ larger filmography dates from 1913, as source-author, animator, and occasional actor.

Monogram Pictures’ formal Jiggs and Maggie series spans only 1946 -1950, but the funnypapers’ Bringing Up Father – a broadly parodic but subtly satiric study of an Irish-immigrant workingman, Jiggs, and his social-climbing wife, Maggie – had become fodder for the movie business many years beforehand.

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SDCC Day 3 on The Big ComicMix Broadcast

  • Uncategorized
  • July 29, 2007

Day Three at San Diego Comic-Con 2007 was a record breaker even before the sun went up … and The Big ComicMix Broadcast is on the case, talking to new friends, seeking our a famous face or two and taking our place in the fan packed premiere of Superman: Doomsday. We talk to producer Bruce Timm about DC’s DVD future, and then we go girl watching with a guy from Kill Bill. Just a typical day in San Diego…

Blonde or Brunette? Decide and Press The Button

Big News From San Diego

  • News
  • July 29, 2007

A few news items of note from the various panels and such at the San Diego Comic-Con:

•    Marv Wolfman and George Pérez will be reunited to do Teen Titans issue #50.

•    Warren Ellis will be taking over for Joss Whedon on Astonishing X-Men next year. The title will change to Astonishing X-men: Second Stage.

•    And per some confused mumbling of Dan DiDio at a panel on Thursday: there is a new All Star Squadron project in the works. However, it will not be tales of WWII, because as Mike Carlin summed up: “Um, Hitler lost.”

In movie/teevee news, the DVD Sneak Peek panel offered up some details on upcoming DVD packages but started off with Javier Soto describing next year’s Hellboy 2: The Golden Army as “Hellboy plus Pan’s Labyrinth on steroids.”

It seemed that the opinion of the panelists was that there isn’t much new left to do in the world of special features and they are all working finding a way to provide content on DVDs that goes beyond deleted scenes. And rather want to bring audiences a more than what they got in the theater (or on TV) in the feature.

With The 4400 Season 4 DVD, we’ll also be getting the season finale director’s cut.

Twin Peaks: The Definitive Collection (out October 30th) will have both pilots, the complete series, “tons of extras including deleted scenes” and a new documentary featuring interviews with the cast today in a roundtable discussion with David Lynch. In the clip that was shared with Comic-Con attendees, Lynch came off more than a little creepy-old-man-ish when discussing a kissing scene with actress Madchen Amick, Kyle MacLachlan mutely sitting to her right all the while.

The biggest treat of the panel was learning about what will be in the box for December 18th Blade Runner: The Final Cut.  The 5-disc box set will have five versions of the film:

•    The new cut Final Cut version, which includes a CGI correction of the scene where Zhora goes through the plate glass, Joanna Cassidy came back and refilmed for it.

•    The international cut, which was described as "with extra violence."

•    The Original 1982 version

•    The 1992 Director’s Cut

•    Work print

All will feature 16 x 9 aspect ratio and 5:1 audio.

Also in the set is the all new three and a half-hour long documentary “Dangerous Days.” And, yes, they got Harrison Ford to do it.

There will be a theatrical release of The Final Cut version in October in New York and Los Angeles, which might put something or other in contention for 2007 Oscars. Maybe.

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People Reading Books

  • News
  • July 29, 2007

eyre-2938818The Seattle Times reviews Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” series.

Slate looks at Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The Agony Column reviews Alan Campbell’s Lye Street, a novella-as-a-book prequel to Scar Night.

Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist reviews Jeff Somers’s The Electric Church.

Blogcritics has what I think is their sixth review for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Honestly, I can’t keep track any more.

Book Fetish reviews a three-author linked erotic romance anthology called Hell on Heels. (Oh my God, the Twayne Triplets are back…and this time they’re porn!)

Bookgasm reviews Warren Hammond’s KOP.

Bookgasm also reviews A Dog About Town, a murder mystery told from the POV of a thinking dog, which is fantasy enough for my book.

The Henry Herald of Georgia reviews Kull: Exile of Atlantis by Robert E. Howard.

American Chronicle reviews Harry Potter and the…Half-Blood Prince. (ha HA! Fooled you!)

(more…)

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