Category: News

Where do you draw the line between fantasy and reality? Can that line be the same for everyone, or can it be redefined from person to person? Those questions are addressed in the charming and quirky Griff the Invisible, opening nationwide this Friday.

Griff lives in a fantasy world, one with electronic surveillance and a red hot line phone connecting the costumed Griff with the commissioner of police. He is an athletic threat to the scum and villainy that prowl the streets of an unidentified British city. The real Griff literally blends into the scenery as shown early on by the writer/director Leon Ford. He works in a nondescript job, trying to keep to himself but becomes the butt of jokes from office bully Tim.

His only friend appears to be his older brother Tony, who has protected his brother and intimations are made that Griff has suffered in the recent past, forcing his sibling to relocate his life in order to keep an eye on him. Tony, though, has met Melody and is besotted despite her own shy and quiet ways. She lives in her own fantasy world, certain she can find the exact point where her molecular structure can line up with that of a wall allowing her to pass right through the seemingly solid barrier. While Griff has trouble interacting with the exterior world, Melody functions better but is clumsy and apt to trip over her own feet with amazing regularity.

When Griff and Melody meet, it is also the meeting of two complementary fantasy worlds, igniting a truly unique love story. (more…)

A Larkspur native was charged with insider trading Thursday on allegations he made nearly $200,000 by buying Marvel Entertainment options before the comics publisher was acquired by the Walt Disney Co. in 2009, federal authorities said. The SEC said Toby Scammell turned a 3,000 percent profit in less than a month.

via Marin Independent Journal.

My Mary gets pissed-off about a lot of commercials because they’re so stupid. I remind her that, in most cases, we are not the target audience for the product. At 62, I’m rarely the target audience for most products unless they’re for erectile dysfunction or, as I like to call it, Limp Dick Syndrome.

Most products have a targeted audience, and that includes comics. In fact, it has a primary and secondary audience and it might surprise fans to know that they are the secondary audience. Who is the primary audience? Distributors and retailers – or, at least, they have been.

A quick review/primer on how comics are sold: when comics are printed they are shipped to distributors who then solicit the sale of the comics from retailers (traditionally direct sale comic book shops) who have pre-ordered the books based on how many they think they can sell. The books are then, hopefully, sold to a public who comes into the shops and buys them off the shelves.

That’s the trick. If the books don’t find their ways to the shelves, they don’t get sold. The distributor has a catalog in which the books are advertised and where and how they’re placed can determine how many copies of a given book are ordered or if they are ordered. The retailers’ goal is to sell out each book each month. Why? Because they’re stuck with each book they don’t sell; the books are non-returnable. It makes better business sense to order too few than order too many especially when you look at the volume of titles out every month.

The primary goal of the comic book companies is to make money which translates into how many books they sell. They want to convince the distributor to give them bigger space in the catalog so they can attract the eye of the retailers so that they will order more or at least the same amount as the previous month. (Many retailers I know automatically reduce their order by so many percentage points every month unless the book is in the top twenty. They assume readers drop off after a certain point. Why do they assume that? Experience.)

How do the big companies do that? They stage events – crossovers, multiple covers, guest stars (Wolverine or Batman everywhere!), revamps, new creative teams, new directions and so on. The companies hope that the fans will get excited but the real reason is to get the primary target audience to order more. So the stories that the secondary audience – the reader – sees is largely dependent on what grabs the primary audience.

And all that’s going to change. The small independent creators are proving that they can sell their comics online or in digital form direct to the fans. And the big companies have taken notice. DC is making its book available online the same day they go on-sale in shops. If it’s successful, expect everyone else to follow and fast. The secondary audience will become the primary audience.

What will that mean in terms of story? It means things could get real interesting. More on that next week.

(Editor’s note: This column was supposed to be posted on Sunday morning. That’s what the editor set everything up for. But it didn’t happen. We think this is because the editor is an idiot. Our apologies to John and all the Ostranderites all over the globe.)

A little over a week ago, the United States of America was on the verge of defaulting for the first time in its history. The chaos isn’t over – witness the roller coaster ride of the stock market over the last seven days – but that week the pundits on radio, on Fox and MSNBC and CNN, and on The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert, conservatives, liberals, progressives, Tea Baggers (excuse me, I mean Tea Partiers) – everywhere you had ears and eyes in working order, people were bloviating (to borrow a word from Bill O’Reilly) about the #1 question on everyone’s minds….

What If The United States Of America Defaults?

Mike Gold and I spent hours on the phone talking about the possibility – well, to be truthful, I was the one ranting about the goddamn Repugnanticans (my own coined word for what passes as the party of Lincoln these days) while Mike –who would be described by people like Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Karl Rove and Rick Perry and Dick Cheney as nothing but a typical gadfly of the lefty Jewish intelligentsia cabal – tried to reassure me that the U.S. wouldn’t default. And in that strange way in which my mind equates things, the What If? and my column and comics and politics started swirling and mixing and merging and uniting and jumbling up all together like that giant melting pot America is supposed to be, and somehow I ended up equating the political wars of 2011 with a little Marvel comic book called What If…? and DC’s sundry imaginary stories of pick-your-favorite-DC-hero.

What If was a comic book I loved. The “Imaginary Stories” of DC captured my, well, imagination. They validated the child whom I had been, the fantasist that is still there, has never left me, and I know never will. That girl was always asking questions, always dreaming, always wanting more; she believed – still believes – that the world is more than we know, that magic is real and impossible things do happen. Things like, What If? I lay on my back and stare into the blue sky long enough, I’ll be able to see through and into and past it to the very depths of the universe, and maybe even all the way to the very end of the universe where I would see – what? God? Another universe? The Door at the End of the Universe? Things like, looking out my window late at night when the world is fast asleep and the lilac tree outside my window is gently stirring from the breath of the South Wind, perfuming my room with What If?

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This Monday, WAREHOUSE 13 gives us their most complex episode yet – and a crossover with EUREKA as well. Allison Scaglotti is back to tell us about how life was inside a video game. Plus on the set of FINAL DESTINATION 5, the goal was to have the coolest death scene. We talk to Emma Bell and Tony Todd to see who won.

The Point Radio is on the air right now – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or mobile device– and please check us out on Facebookright here & toss us a “like” or follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

[[[Bad Island]]]By Doug TenNapel224 pages, Scholastic Graphix, $10.99

Author/artist Doug TenNapel impressed me last year with his Ghostopolis, a fresh graphic novel for young adult readers. He’s back this month with Bad Island and I am less impressed. He has an ambitious story to tell, actually two stories that parallel and intertwine at times, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

The biggest problem I have is that this family of four castaways on a mysterious island react unlike real people, constantly taking me out of the story to scratch my head and wonder how that happened. The family set out on an enforced bonding vacation that the eldest child, teenage Reese objects to. What aspires to be a three hour tour finds the tiny ship tossed by a storm that leaves the shipwrecked and the crew left on a deserted island.

Their efforts at survival are given incredible short-shrift with dad, Lyle, proving fairly inept. There’s an unrealistic calmness among the quartet with way too much focus from younger daughter Janie’s obsession over her pet snake.  That dad allows her to carry the snake corpse around is inexcusable.

When there is evidence that alien life exists on the planet, they accept this way too calmly so there’s a lot of running, screaming and activity without a great deal of rational reason.

On the other hand, the other story involves aliens but it’s still a story about a father and son. The tension between them remains the same as Lyle and Reese, but both are not well-developed enough to make you care.  He gives us an unbelievable human family contrasted with an alien reality that is woefully underdeveloped.

As hinted at on the cover, there island itself is a character in the story but I don’t want to give away some of the book’s obvious fun.

While the writing fails to work this time around, TenNapel’s art and storytelling remains engaging. The color, from Katherine Garner and Josh Kenfield and an army of ten, works exceptionally well, making the graphic novel pleasing to the eye. He and the colorists differentiate the island antics and the outer space thread making it clear to readers where we are and what is happening.

I wanted to like this more than I did, but the poor characterizations and leaps from logic robbed the book of its potential power.

There used to be ten comic book stores within a mile of my apartment. Now, there are two.

To be fair, this is two more than most people have. And when I expand the radius to two miles, there are more than a dozen. Which, again, is more than most people have. There used to be a lot more bookstores, too, even before the Borders bankruptcy. Some of this is the ebb and flow of commerce, and some of it is specific to publishing.

Most of the comic book stores near me closed in the early 1990s, when the direct market imploded. Speculators stopped buying, and there simply weren’t enough reading fans to support so many stores. With bookstores, the same kind of competition had an effect. Instead of speculators, bookstores suffered from Internet offering lower prices and free delivery. More recently, the success of Kindles and other e-readers means that fewer readers are buying physical books.

Comic fans have been reading comics online for years. You, yourself, can read comics – for free – on this very site. It’s possible to illegally download comics you’d otherwise have to pay for, through a process I’ve always thought was too complicated to bother with. Also, I don’t mind artists and writers getting paid.

Starting next month, DC Comics will offer readers the chance to buy comics digitally at the same time (and at the same price) they are available in stores. Naturally, comic book stores are less than thrilled about this.

This is a long and winding way to get to my rant.

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