The Mix : What are people talking about today?

More Heroes for Second Season

  • Uncategorized
  • June 21, 2007

The casting announcements for the second season of Heroes have been flowing of late, with the  cast set to start shooting next week.

The biggest name to join is David Anders, best known as the chaerming villain, Sark, on Alias.  He will play, surprisingly, Takezo Kensei, Hiro Nakamura’s childhood idol.  As viewers recall, Hiro now possesses Kensei’s sword.

 

Nick D’Agosto has been cast as Clarie’s boyfriend and will also have undisclosed super-powers.  D’Agosto has been largely seen in television guest roles from House to ER.  She is expected to return to her cheerleading habit when she winds up in California.  She will be dealing with Lyndsy Fonseca (Big Love) and Dianna Agron (Veronica Mars) as fellow cheerleaders, one bitchy, one sweet.

Eriko Tamura, a pop star and actress in Japan, will be playing a Japanese princess.  She has ten albums and has become quite the idol.

Barry Shabaka Henley (The Horseman) will be a New York police detective named Fuller with Holt McCallany (Vantage Point) as leader of an Irish street gang.

Bugs Bunny Artist Armstrong Dies

  • Uncategorized
  • June 21, 2007

According to today’s Los Angeles Times, noted Bugs Bunny cartoonist Roger Armstrong died of a heart attack two weeks ago at the age of 89. Among Armstrong’s other credits included Donald Duck, Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, the Pink Panther, the Beagle Boys,The Flintstones, Little Lulu, Scamp and other features published by Dell and Gold Key Comics. He also drew the Bugs Bunny newspaper comic strip from 1942 to 1944 as well as for a time in the 1950s.

Writer / historian Mark Evanier told the TImes "He was a pioneer of doing funny animal comic books, taking an animated property from the screen and adapting it to the comic book page." Mark worked with Armstrong on both The Flintstones and Super Goof comic books in the 1970s. "He was in those books for decades doing this wonderful work and kind of setting the bar for the other artists who drew for those comics."

Armstrong was also a past president of the National Watercolor Society and served as director of the Laguna Art Museum from 1963 to 1967.

LICENSING SHOW Day 3: Cute Stuff

  • News
  • June 21, 2007

five_tiger_m-7170002On its last day, the Licensing Show at New York City’s Javitz Center was just as crowded, just as large, and just as overwhelming as it was on Day One.  This time, however, I knew where I was going and what I wanted to see.

And I wanted to see cute!  I’m female, damnit, and I wanted to see soft and wide-eyed and colorful.  I wanted Katz Fun!  The three luckiest animals in the world, designed to fit together to be even more lucky! 

Or, possibly, I wanted heroes.  Not dark, dour, gloomy heroes, but bright heroes.  Sunny heroes.  Perhaps what I wanted was Sunny Hero: Operation Sun God.

Both of these, were from Taiwan.  And both were adorable.

But wait!  There’s more! (more…)

Rosario Talks and Fat Momma Squawks

  • Uncategorized
  • June 21, 2007

It’s the first full day of summer and we heat things up with our middle-of-the week Broadcast, starting with News on some new cartoons, anime and games, a talk with Fat Momma from Stan Lee’s Who Wants To Be A Super-Hero, the first part of our visit with Hollywood Fan Girl Rosario Dawson, and a trip back to when Bond was Steele.

Rosario was impressed the way you PRESSED THE BUTTON last time – do it again!

iron-man-8378199

LICENSING SHOW Day 2: Plenty o’ Pix

  • News
  • June 21, 2007

iron-man-8378199A pretty big outcome for the second day of the 2007 Licensing Show. Lots of movie pushes, of course with this being one of the biggest franchise summers in film history. Warner Bros was there in the same form as last year, showing off some of the new cars from their new flicks. We got the first peak at the The Dark Knight’s brand new BatPod (and no, you can’t play music on it, its just a cooler name than Bat-Cycle) also we got an up-close look at the new Mach 5 from next summer’s Speed Racer.

flash-gordon-9464980Also in the movie department, we got a bit of a tease over at Marvel’s booth for both The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man slated to come out next summer as well. Nothing too exciting over there, but the New Line booth was surprisingly pretty popular. To promote next year’s Golden Compass, there was a nine-foot armored bear, and despite popular belief, not only do I like girls, but I am also really looking forward to this film. Based of the series of His Dark Materials books by Phillip Pullman, this is the first of the series, and looks to be even better than last year’s underachiever in The Chronicles of Narnia.

dark-knight1-4523879They also were promoting a film that I have heard absolutely no buzz about up until today entitled Inkheart starring Brendan Fraser, Paul Bettany, and Helen Mirren, based on the book by Carnelia Funke of the same title.

hulk-7797584 The BBC booth was also there promoting the hell out of Doctor Who, which I had absolutely no qualms with. This big push was due to the American release of series three to the Sci-Fi Network next month. Also coming to Sci-Fi in August, and came to me as a huge surprise was a remake of Flash Gordon. Now before I dusted off my Queen soundtrack and started to dance, I did a little bit of research, and the creative team consists of some of the minds that brought us Relic Hunter, Beastmaster, Young Blades, Andromeda, and oh, yes: Painkiller Jane. So before we all get excited and break out the champagne, I’d bet on this show being off the air before the bottle runs dry.

dwho-1187444Finally, and by far my favorite part of today’s show was the news about Xip3, a new jacket company buying the rights to Transformers to release a “Transforming Jacket” that will be released with the DVD in November. I got to see first hand how this works, and it’s pretty cool. The jacket is black with silver accents, and can “transform” from a sports jacket to a backpack to a pillow in seconds. The unisex jackets will all be numbered and in sizes extra small to extra large. You can reserve your copy starting in July over at the Xip3 website.

Overall, a great show and I can’t wait to hear what wonderful things await for the ComicMix crew for day three!

JOHN OSTRANDER: Backing Into The Future

  • News
  • June 21, 2007

ostrander100-2156678The new Suicide Squad miniseries got announced this last weekend and noted by many, including here on ComicMix. The series was always a cross between Mission: Impossible and The Dirty Dozen and will be again. I’ve always tried to give it a “real world” feel, even going back to its origin. And sometimes the “real world” pulls a fast one.

When I proposed the Squad, there was some concern that the premise – that the U.S. government would hire bad guys to undertake missions considered to be “in the national interest” but needed deniability – seemed a little “out there.” In between the time that the proposal was accepted and we got our first issue out, Irangate broke – where the government was using bad guys etc etc – and made us look like pikers. It looked like we were cashing in on the story rather than inventing an edgy and daring scenario.

That continued through the Squad’s run. I would read the papers and try to extrapolate events from them, concoct possible and likely scenarios and try to fit the Squad around them, and the real world would get there around the same time the issue came out. I was successful enough at one point that a friend contacted me one January wanting to know where I was setting the Squad that summer. She was preparing her summer vacation plans and wherever I was sending the Squad she wanted to avoid.

In truth, I’m not much of a seer. I simply apply what I know from writing plots – formulating a sequence of events that would lead to a given event/moment and then extrapolating the most feasible series of events that might follow from said event. I apply this method to what I see in the world. Very useful in plotting or dealing with characters; a little scarier when dealing with real-life situations.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I did it in a column concerning the sudden death of bees. Others, such as Al Gore, are doing an admirably scary job looking at climate change (a.k.a. global warming). I remember once when I was teaching a writing class at the Joe Kubert School – yes, I was teaching writing to artists – I gave an assignment on scanning the future. We started from a given factoid: oil is not a renewable resource. At some point we will cross the line where we will have taken more oil out of the ground than there is left in it. Some speculate we either already have or will within the next ten years. At that point, oil has to start becoming a scarcer commodity. Given our current rate of consumption, there are some who think the oil will give out around 2030.

We started to explore what that would mean. Not just higher costs for driving your car or heating your home but what the impact would be in other areas. For example, as the cost of transporting goods goes up so does the cost of bringing in food outside the local area. Everything then costs more from the clothes you wear to the food you eat.

Plastics are made from petroleum and as petroleum becomes scarcer, the cost of plastics goes up. Think of everything – EVERYTHING – you use that depends on plastic use – on CHEAP plastic use. The cost, of course, gets passed on to the consumer. That’s a given.

With all this, I asked them to contemplate what happens geopolitically. As oil becomes scarcer and control of it literally dictates what happens to a country’s economy, who will do what in order to control access to the oil? I don’t mean just this country; there are up and coming players as well. Hungry players. (more…)

Deathwatch: Funky?

  • Uncategorized
  • June 20, 2007

funky_winkerbean-3224241

The trade publication Editor & Publisher reports the Lisa Moore character in Funky Winkerbean will die this October, siting an article in the Cleveland Free Times. Cartoonist/creator Tom Batiuk has shown Lisa dealing with a worsening case of breast cancer over the past month; her treatment was delayed due to a mix-up at the lab. Lisa will undergo another round of chemotherapy before stopping. She will struggle with how to tell her  daughter about her situation, and testify before Congress for more cancer-research funding.

No stranger to controversy, in the past Batiuk has addressed such concerns as suicide, guns in the classroom, and teen-dating abuse. After this storyline, Batiuk  will again age his castmembers by a decade, repeating a concept he employed in the early 1990s. No Nancying around for Funky and friends.

One of the main characters in Funky Winkerbean is the owner of a comic shop and frequently wears a Batman t-shirt. Cartoonist John Byrne has been known to help out on the feature.

Artwork copyright 2007 Batom, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

ROBERT GREENBERGER talks Civil War

  • News
  • June 20, 2007

bobgreenberger100-6328820It must come as quite a shock to you. We’re talking about a profound cultural shift for the betterment of mankind, People want this, Richard. They need the superhumans of the world to be responsible, properly trained, qualified…and ultimately held accountable. That’s what the initiative is all about. We’re trying to move out of the dark ages of masked vigilantes into a brighter future where tragedies like Stamford can’t ever happen again.

– Tony Stark to Richard Ryder, Nova #2.

World War Hulk began last week and we saw the jade-jawed giant arrive on Earth with a pretty big mad on. With less than twenty-four hours to evacuate Manhattan, Doctor Strange and his, er, estranged Avengers offer to help Iron Man clear the populace. Shellhead magnanimously offers amnesty for their help.

Welcome to the new status quo in the Marvel Universe. The dust continues to settle from the brawl that was Civil War and with all of Earth confronted by a new menace, now’s not a bad time to assess the new political landscape.

After the Mutant Registration Act, unveiled in Uncanny X-Men #181 and passed into law, required all mutants in America to be registered. Those not complying faced criminal charges. Once that was passed, a parallel super-hero or super-power act was an obvious follow up and came up during the Acts of Vengeance crossover. Fantastic Four #335 began the first serious examination of such an act. Reed Richards addressed a congressional subcommittee saying such an act was unnecessary. His odd argument that such a law wouldn’t be followed by the villains anyway struck an odd chord.

While American legislators dithered over it, the Superpowers Registration Act became Canadian law in Alpha Flight #120.

Years went by without much activity on either front with the Mutant law not being vigorously enforced and the super-human law a mere idea.

Then came the House of M. (more…)

Indiana Jones Cast Announced

  • Uncategorized
  • June 20, 2007

20070618_silo-5961184Jim Broadbent will be joining is joining Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, John Hurt, Ray Winstone and some guy named Harrison Ford in the fourth Indiana Jones movie, according to an announcement on Lucasfilm Ltd.‘s Indiana Jones website.

The movie, which is currently in production, is scheduled for release May 22, 2008. Sean Connery will not be coming out of retirement to play Indy’s father.

Broadbent won a supporting-actor Oscar for 2001’s Iris. His many other films include Iris (for which he won an Oscar), Moulin Rouge, Time Bandits, Brazil, The Crying Game, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Gangs of New York, and Hot Fuzz. He also joined Jonathan Pryce, Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Grant, and Joanna Lumley in the classic Doctor Who special, The Curse of Fatal Death.

Artwork copyright Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Comic Book Box Office Examined

  • News
  • June 20, 2007

Comic books turned into motion pictures tend to be expensive exercises given the need to create costumes, simulate super-powers and make things sufficiently larger than life to appeal to filmgoers of all ages.

The traditional rule of thumb is that a movie has to earn three times its budget in domestic revenue to be considered profitable.  This way, the cost of production, backend money to producers and performers and marketing costs could be recouped.  After all, studios receive a sliding scale percentage of the box office gross.  For example, if a movie opens with $100 million that first weekend, chances are the studio sees a hefty percentage, anywhere from 50-80% of that income and as time passes, the ratio between studio and theater change so by week 12 (should a movie last that long), the theater gets the lion’s share.  Which helps explain why popcorn costs $5 a bucket – theaters need to earn profit somehow.

International box office as well as ancillary income (pay-per-view, hotels/airplane sales, home video/video downloads, related licensing) was always considered gravy.  Over the last few years, with movie theater attendance stagnant or down, studios have crowed about being profitable by counting all the money now.  

So, with all but one of this year’s comic book related films now showing, we here at Comic Mix thought it worth taking a peek at how well the films have performed.  The numbers below show the box office income to date followed by their production budget. (Marketing costs are an additional $20-40 million depending on film.)

Ghost Rider, $115,802,596 / $110,000,000

300, $210,250,922 / $65,000,000

TMNT, $42,273,609 / $34,000,000

Spider-Man 3, $330,021,137 to date / $258,000,000

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, $58,051,684 (opening weekend) / $130,000,000

Stardust, August 10

So, from the top, Ghost Rider should have earned $330,000,000 in domestic box office to recoup costs and be profitable.  Instead, it came up short but given how it was received, how it did around the world and how much licensing it brought it, Sony can consider it a hit, albeit a modest one.

Spider-Man 3, despite a critical drubbing, is nowhere near close to ever being profitable.  Unless you look at the international numbers which has it at $800,000,000 with a bullet and will clearly make money for Sony and Marvel.

On the other hand, the all-CGI Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a flop for New Line.  It did not stimulate toy and related merchandise sales nor did it generate any real buzz for the property.

The one movie to succeed in the traditional model was 300, which earned something like $30,000,000 in box office profit before taking in any wordwide box office income or licensing revenue.  Kudos to Zack Snyder and now we know why studios are willing to gamble on him in the future (which is good news for us since his next two films should be Watchmen and Ronin).

And here’s our schedule scoreboard for the future:

2008

Wanted, March 28

Iron Man, May 2

Incredible Hulk, June 13

Dark Knight, July 18

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, August 1

2009 & Beyond

Superman Returns 2, June 2009 (may be delayed until 2010)

Sin City 2, no date

Watchmen, no date

Captain America, no date

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks