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The Point Radio: Farewell To LOST GIRL

It’s the fifth and final season for the SyFy supernatural show, LOST GIRL. Series star Anna Silk talks about her favorite moments (and the things she grabbed from the set on the last day) plus BITTEN’s Laura Vandervoort talks more about her show’s new season and what it was like to be TV’s first Supergirl.

We are back in just a few days and so is the hit Game Show Network series, THE IDIOTEST. We take the test – here – no holds barred!   Be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

The Law Is A Ass

Bob Ingersoll: The Law Is A Ass #353: WAYNE ENTERPRISES NEEDS TO BATMAN DOWN ITS HATCHES

Batman wasn’t always a thief.

Early in his history he wasn’t, because early in his career, Batman built the Batmobile. 2013-01-02_164926_Batmobil.jpg.phpHimself. Okay, Alfred and Robin helped. But Batman designed the car. He assembled it. He supplied the equipment. He installed the options. Batrays and Batchutes don’t exactly come factory-installed. He even knew what wheels to grease in order to get the thing declared street legal. (I mean wheels on the car, silly. I’m not suggesting that Batman would ever stoop to something as crass as bribery.)

Same was true of the Batcave, batcave-bigthe Batplane, the Batboat, the Batcycle, the Batcomputer, the Batcopter, the Batshield, the Batarang, and for those barbecues in the Batyard, the Batula. (Bruce was so fixed on his leitmotif, I don’t understand how Robin never got an inferiority complex from living with all the eponymous accoutrement day in and day out.) And, while we’re at it, Bruce also made the strange costumes of Batman, the amazing inventions of Batman, the Bat-signal, and everything else we marveled at in Batman Annual v1 #1. All those 1001 secrets of Batman and Robin? Batman built them all. All by his lonesome.

Of course back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and even well into the 70s, Batman had to build them all himself. Bruce Wayne was an incredibly wealthy man who inherited a lot of money from his incredibly wealthy father. And he funded his war on crime himself. Bruce was so rich, he probably had enough in the Wayne Manor spare change jar.

Then in the late 70s, something changed. Batman got retconned so that he wasn’t just the rich son of a rich doctor. Starting with Batman v1 #307, Bruce Wayne was the head of Wayne Enterprises. He was a captain of industry. The latest scion of a long-standing family of incredibly rich industrialists that dated back to the 19th Century when Judge Solomon Wayne started up WayneCorp and used the money he earned to found Gotham City. Over the ensuing decades – through Alan Wayne, Kenneth Wayne, Patrick Wayne, Thomas Wayne, and up to Bruce Wayne – the family fortune never waned.

And WayneCorp became a multi-national conglomerate with subsidiaries such as Wayne Pharmaceutical, Wayne Mining, Wayne Weapons, Wayne Aviation, Wayne Airlines, Wayne Oil, Wayne Energy, Wayne Manufacturing, Wayne Botanical, Wayne Studios, Wayne Records, Wayne Stage, Wayne Television, Wayne Automotive, Wayne Electric, Wayne Retail, Wayne Industries, Wayne Medical, Wayne Electronics, Wayne Entertainment, Wayne Biotech, Wayne Aerospace, Wayne Chemicals, Wayne Shipping, Wayne Steel, Wayne Shipbuilding, Wayne Foods, and, most important of all, Wayne Technologies. (How’d they miss out on the dating service, Wayne Will I Find Love?) The only things about WayneCorp that changed were its fortunes – they got much bigger – and its name. In the 1980s, it became Wayne Enterprises.

When Batman’s history was retconned to include Wayne Enterprises, Batman didn’t have to build anything on his own anymore. He had a huge, multi-national conglomerate piggy bank he could raid whenever he wanted to. And he did want to. Frequently. Batman no longer needed to develop or build his equipment anymore. Wayne Technologies did it for him.

Problem was, Wayne Technologies didn’t know it was designing and building all those wonderful toys for Batman. After all, Bruce Wayne couldn’t exactly go to Wayne Technologies and say, “Hey can you build me a new car with armor plating, puncture resistant tires, a mobile crime lab. Oh yeah, and scalloped batwings for fenders?” Not without someone getting suspicious.

So Bruce started appropriating the discarded prototypes built for projects that fell through or that Wayne Technologies abandoned. Rather than have those prototypes gathering dust and cluttering up more garage space than Jay Leno’s http://www.nbc.com/jay-lenos-garage car collection; Bruce took them, retrofitted them, and adapted them to be used as Bat-whatevers.

The most prominent example of this was in the movie Batman Begins, where Bruce Wayne took the abandoned prototype for an army vehicle called the Tumbler and turned it into the Batmobile. He also used the prototype nomex armor developed by Wayne Enterprises for another abandoned project to build his bat costume. But it wasn’t just the movies, the Bruce Wayne of the comic books did the same thing, too.

And at that point, Batman was a thief. Every time Batman did this, he was embezzling.

See all those prototypes that Bruce Wayne converted into bat paraphernalia weren’t his. They were the property of Wayne Enterprises. As Wayne Enterprises was a corporation and not a sole proprietorship, Bruce Wayne didn’t own Wayne Enterprises; the shareholders did.

If Bruce Wayne were the sole shareholder of Wayne Enterprises, there would have been no problem. He would have been the only owner, so, in essence, would have been stealing from himself. But there was more than one other. Several Bat stories mentioned other shareholders including, but not limited, to Lucius Fox. So Batman was stealing from himself and the other shareholders.

Wayne Enterprises may have been a closely-held corporation with very few shareholders. And Bruce was probably the biggest shareholder. He may even have held 99.99 % of Wayne Enterprises. But the other shareholders still owned a fractional part of the company, including a fractional part of all the equipment Bruce appropriated for his own personal bat-use. Didn’t matter if the only purpose the property served was to sit around in warehouse gathering storage fees, the fractional owners had the right not to have that fraction taken.

As one of my law school professors used to say, “He who takes what isn’t hissen, must make good or go to prison.”

And when you’re the CEO of a large multi-national conglomerate who takes corporate property for your own personal use, you’re embezzling from the company and stealing from the shareholders. You’re also breaching your fiduciary duty to the shareholders, but that’s another topic for another day.

So first Batman wasn’t a thief. Then he was. Then, recently, he wasn’t again. But why he wasn’t again is part of that fiduciary duty discussion that’s another topic for another day.

Wow, Batman and a cliff-hanger. Guess I should close with, “Tune in next week! Same Bat-Time! Same Bat-Channel!” 

Martha Thomases: New York is Comics Country

There used to be a wonderful street fair on New York’s Fifth Avenue in the fall, usually on a Sunday, called “New York is Book Country.” Publishers would show their wares. A few bookstores would set up shop on the sidewalk in front of their shops (there were still bookstores on Fifth Avenue then), and one could stroll down the middle of the street, meeting authors, finding new treasures, and enjoying the city that was, then, the center of American publishing.

That was where I met Madeleine L’Engle, a true high point of my existence.

New York used to be Book Country and, even more, it was Comics Country. Comics were born here. The largest comic book companies were here (or, in the case of Archie, in our suburbs). The business was small enough so that one could no everyone in it. An outsider (like me) could become an insider by learning where people hung out and arranging to be in those places often enough to become friends.

Last week, DC Comics moved its offices to Burbank California, and many noted that this was the end of an era.

Yet just as I might have tumbled into a pit of nostalgic regret, the very next day saw the beginning of this year’s MoCCA Festival. In the heart of the hyper-hip Chelsea gallery district, MoCCA was a breath of fresh air. Literally, in that it was housed in a building with a lovely rooftop terrace.

MoCCA is unlike most of the other New York comic shows in that it doesn’t include retailers or dealers. There are a few booths from publishers (including Abrams, Pantheon, .01, Fantagraphics and others), but mostly it is individual creators, selling their own creations. And while sometimes this can make me feel like an old fart, it’s also exciting and energizing. Every year, there is so much eager new talent.

As I walked down <a href=”

West 22nd Street from Tenth Avenue, I noticed that almost all the other pedestrians were women and girls. I think most of the people inside the facility were also women and girls. Klaus Janson tells me that more than half of the people who take his class at the School of Visual Arts are female.

Another sign that this is a new era for comics.

The very next evening after MoCCA ended, there was a panel discussion at Columbia University about the work of Denis Kitchen, who just donated his archives to the library’s collections. He spoke, along with a few academics and Howard Cruse about the early days of underground and independent comics. At one point during the Q & A part of the conversation, one of the academics said he looked forward to a time when comic book studies were considered to be just as important as film studies.

Still another sign.

In two weeks, the City University of New York will host a two day conference titled, “08,” which will feature keynote speakers Howard Cruse and Alison Bechdel. Alison’s keynote is already sold out.

Publishing comics might not rely on New York City anymore, but it’s still home to a lot of people who love to read them.

 

Tweeks: WonderCon Haul Part 1

As you can imagine, we bought a lot of stuff at WonderCon.  And if you know anything about tween/teen YouTube viewing habits, you know hauls (shopping show & tells) are key.  So, this week we bring you Part 1 of our WCA Haul! We’ll show you which geeky chic items we’ve added to our collection and which “vintage” comics caught our eye. We also review Joie Brown’s Heavenly Kibble Guardian Corgi issues 1 & 2 and Crystal Cadets by Anne Toole and Katie O’Neill. 

Stay tuned for Part 2 (maybe even part 3 — we took home a lot of comics) for more reviews.

Dennis O’Neil: The Neil Gaiman Digressions

So what I’d like to know is, how come Neil Gaiman looks better in photographs than I do?

There I was, paging through the latest issue of the AARP magazine and… Wait! Isn’t that a familiar face? Yes! It’s my old friend Neil!

Looking, as always, grave, thoughtful, wise… authorial. You see my pic, you wonder when J. Puddingpuss Chromedome hit town.

(Now, let us indulge in a digression. Seth Kuchner’s picture of me, which one of my students dubbed “Denny noir,” does not make me look like Mr. Chromedome. Seth posed me on a fire escape in a Chinatown alley, about a half block from Canal Street and maybe because you can’t really see much of me, the result was pretty nifty.)

(And while we’re digressing…You might want to check out Leaping Tall Buildings, a book of Seth’s photos of comic book people accompanied by Christopher Irving’s biographical essays. Might make a welcome gift for the comics reader in your life.)

But where were we? Oh yeah, Neil Gaiman.

(Before we go on, though, answer me one question. Just exactly what is a pup like Neil doing in a magazine published by the American Association of Retired Persons? Do you youngsters have to take over everything? Can’t we dodderers have a single thing that’s ours? You don’t find us going to your raves or mosh pits or whatever you call those noisy and perverted gatherings.)

(Once, it must have been shortly after I got sprung from military service, I did go to one of those “music clubs” in some city or other, probably hoping to encounter some not-overly-picky young woman seeking male companionship for the evening and who knows where that might lead? Picket fences, maybe? But the music – that’s what they called it, “music” – was so loud that I found conversation to be impossible and even if I knew sign language, I doubt that I could have initiated a lifelong relationship using it and don’t we all, really, yearn for lifelong relationships?)

(And for those of you who may think I’m a pacifist – yes, I put in my time wearing a uniform and though I was arguably the worst sailor in the history of the United States Navy. I don’t regret it. When I enlisted, I was buying the whole load of bushwa about how we had to stop the commies in Viet Nam, yada yada yada… Pacifism came later, post-discharge, and then became modified when a book by Sam Harris convinced me that there were god-fearing folk who feel that their passport to heaven is my infidel’s dead body and they won’t listen to reason and so self-defensive combat is the only option. Which does not begin to justify the numerous wars to which the Land of the Free seems addicted.)

But where were we? Oh yeah, digressing. But digressing from what? Dunno. But I guess it doesn’t make a whit of difference. Not very much does.

Round 3 of the Mix March Madness 2015 Webcomics Tournament! EXTENDED!

  • News
  • April 15, 2015

Ding ding ding…! Round 3 of Mix March Madness April Armageddon, it’s the Terrific 32… and you have until Friday, April 17 EXTENDED to Saturday, April 18 at midnight, to vote!

Congratulations to everyone who made it through Round 2, and we’ve raised another $42 for the Hero Initiative. But now it gets even tougher, as we’re down to only 32 webcomics… and we know that every vote counts from you and all your friends, so make sure to share and tweet about it, because Round 3 starts now!

(more…)

Molly Jackson: Re-Embrace Nostalgia

Last week they announced a remake of 1970s cult classic The Rocky Horror Show. Social media collectively said “Are you &)$!* kidding me?” and expressed their righteous anger to the world. I was among them, filled with fury.

The biggest outcry to these remakes/reboots/retcons is that our media tends to forget the original in favor of the newest one. The first time I noticed this is with the movie Yours, Mine and Ours. I adore the original 1968 movie starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda. Every time I saw it was on, I watched it. That is, until the remake starring Renee Russo and Dennis Quaid came out in 2005. Then, I never saw the original playing on TV. It was like the media world forgot about it.

Then, a few months ago, Marvel released a number of pictures hinting popular stories would be reprinted starting in 2015. We know now that is due to their upcoming Secret Wars universe reboot. Still, they gave off the air of “Let’s just give them what we think they want, which is the same story over and over.” I complained about that one too. If I really want to read Civil War, I’m going to grab the original before anything else. Granted, me complaining about lack of innovation in comics isn’t new. Still, enough is enough.

I have decided not to let the remake of comic books, TV shows, and movies get me down. If I loved something, remaking it doesn’t affect my personal feelings for it. Or, at the very least, it shouldn’t.  I can still love the ‘90s live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies without cursing Michael Bay’s name – even though he deserves it. His crappy movies don’t change my love for the Turtles or those films.

I have always had strong connections to characters. If they get abused, I want to defend them. They are as real to me as the woman giving me a weird look on the subway right now. I’m going to remember my characters for who they were when I loved them, not the current shlock in which they are currently featured.

I’m still going to give remakes a chance. Some of them might even be good but most, I wager, will disappoint me. Still, I am not going to be upset that a story lives on – even in name only. I’ll just be nostalgic for the good ol’ days.

 

Mike Gold: The Magic Of Comics

At MoCCA this past weekend – that’s one of my favorite shows, by the way – a surprising number of people asked me about how I felt about DC Comics Entertainment Periodical Publications moving to the Left Coast.

It amuses me to note that only one of these people actually worked at DC, and he was being sarcastic.

In its 80 years DC Comics has moved more frequently than a family of vaudevillians. I worked at only three of their locations; I know many who worked at five or six. Every time DC moves, they relaunch Aquaman. They are now a fully integrated part of Warner Bros., so moving to LALALand is a no-brainer.

And I hope my friends at Marvel are paying attention.

Once Marvel joins Disney out in Hollywood, only one comic book leaflet publisher will be left in New York City proper, that being Valiant. (If I’m missing anybody, forgive me – you really can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and, besides, I haven’t seen Jim Shooter in about a year). If you consider the entire New York metropolitan area, that number grows to… what, two? Archie Comics is in Westchester County. If ComicMix returns to leaflet publishing, and, yeah, we’re considering it but then we collapse in a fit of giggles – then that’ll make three. The combined output of the New York comic book leaflet publishers wouldn’t amount to a fart.

For the record: I think it is absolutely great that we have comics publishers all over the nation. There’s no magic to publishing comic books in Manhattan, despite what lazy publishers told poor cartoonists between the middle of the Depression until the election of Ronald Reagan.  Actually, I think it is great that we have so many comics publishers that they can be all over the nation.

I admit: the first time I dropped my butt into my chair at 75 Rockefeller Plaza – that’s four locations and 40 years ago – I was in fanboy heaven. It was a great feeling. Jenette Kahn offered me the job at a moment when, as they say in the business, I was “between radio stations.” In 1976, stations were changing their pretty much after every third song and I saw the handwriting on the wall. It said “Work for Superman.”

The fact is, most of my best and most enduring friendships have been formed while in the comics racket. I’ve lunched with Steve Ditko, I’ve worked with Will Eisner and Peter O’Donnell, I intervened in a, ah, friendly discussion between Stan Lee and Joe Orlando. Great stuff. ComicMixers Glenn Hauman, Martha Thomases, Denny O’Neil, Mindy Newell, Bob Ingersoll, and Robert Greenberger? These folks have been my friends forever, and I met them all through comics. Yes, they have amazing intestinal fortitude.

John Ostrander is different. (I can’t tell you how much I wanted to end this paragraph right here.) I’ve known John even longer, through our common interest in both theater and comics. I brought him into this business – at his own request, so he can’t complain.

I have absolutely no doubt that there are a ton of people just out of school out on the Left Coast who will put in their time at DC Comics and come out of it exhausted but with plenty of great friendships.

And for me, that is the magic of the comic book racket.

 

The Point Radio: BITTEN Adds Some Nasty Witches

SyFy’s BITTEN is back for a new season, taking a sharp turn deeper into the supernatural with the addition of a coven of witches to the storyline. Stars Greyson Holt and Laura Vandervoort talk about how this changes the show’s dynamic. Plus Amazon Prime expands their programming with their first live action children’s show. GORTIMER GIBBONS LIFE ON NORMAL STREET is under the watchful eye of Oscar winning director, Luke Matheny who talks about making a kids show for today’s market.

We are back in just a few days with more in our exclusive talk with Laura Vandervoort (did you remember she was TV’s first Supergirl?) plus a visit with the star of LOST GIRL as their final season begins.  Be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Herb Trimpe: 1939-2015

468px-herbtrimpe11-16-08byluiginovi-1608554Herbert W. “Herb” Trimpe, best known as the 1970’s artist on The Incredible Hulk and as the first artist to draw Wolverine for publication, passed away last night at the age of 75.

Besides his work on Hulk, Herb Trimpe worked on a wide variety of books from 1962 on including The Defenders, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., G.I. Joe Special Missions, Godzilla, Shogun Warriors, and Kid Colt Outlaw. The father of four loved coming out and meeting fans of his work, and had attended the East Coast Comicon just this past weekend.

Our condolences to his family and friends. It just won’t be the same without him around.

Photo by Luigi Novi.

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