The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Michael Davis: Happy Birthday to the two Sharons

Two Sharon Hawkins

Today is my sister’s birthday.

She would have been 60 years old had she lived. She’s been dead twice as long than she was alive. My sister Sharon Davis was assaulted and left for dead in a South Jamaica Queens vacant lot.

People passed her all night, if just one would have stopped and gotten help, perhaps my big sister would be alive today. Sharon was my inspiration for Sharon Hawkins who any real animation and comic fans knows is Vigil Hawkins’ (AKA Static Shock) sister.

I named all of Static’ family after mine. Among them, Virgil’s mom and dad, Jean Hawkins and Robert Hawkins, named after Jean Davis Lawrence and Robert Lawrence, named after my mom and step-dad.

Sharon Hawkins was my way of honoring and keeping the spirit of my sister alive plus it gave my mom a hoot to see her family all together in a way. My mom passed away June of this year and with her went the last of my immediate family.

Sharon Hawkins was the most popular supporting character in both the comic and the show. I’m sure she will be again when the new live action show premieres next year.

I’m happy to see my mother and sister live on. Except they aren’t, not really and why is that? Because nobody outside of my peers and extended circle know I created them.

Why is THAT?

Because motherfucking hack ass websites like Variant have ignored my pleas to set the record straight and they were asked almost a year ago and have been reminded quite a few times since. I predicted some shit would happen and make an industry mistake a national one and as always I was right.

Happy Birthday Sharon, I love ya sis, and although pussies like Variant have prevented millions of people from knowing you, you do live on in dozens maybe even hundreds of people who know you’re the real Sharon Hawkins.

Box Office Democracy: “Big Hero 6”

I never dreamed that when Disney bought Marvel it would lead to something as precious as Big Hero 6. Disney took a nothing Marvel property, one I had never heard of despite reading comic books voraciously for the first 28 years of my life, and turned it in to something quite fantastic. Big Hero 6 is a great movie and is a great example of something Disney can do for Marvel that isn’t just moving all of the Spider-Man cartoons over to Disney Channel.

The plots in Disney animated films tend to be a bit thin and while I mean that as no insult Big Hero 6 is no exception. There’s a precocious kid and a tragic incident. There’s a crew of friends that must rally around the grieving kid and help him get revenge/closure. There’s a secret to be revealed that will surprise a child but no one who’s ever watched a real mystery anymore but why am I still talking about all of this nonsense when I haven’t mentioned Baymax even once yet?

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The Point Radio: Why Chelsea Peretti Owns The Internet

Comedian Chelsea Peretti has led the pack in using social media and her reach in the online community to guide her successful stand up and TV career. Her popular podcast, Twitter feed (TIME MAGAZINE called it one of the Best of 2013) and her new association with Netflix mark her as having both feet firmly planted on the edge. We talk about how she got there plus life on BROOKLYN 99. On the flip side of being funny is Fox’s BOBS BURGERS. After winning an Emmy, H. Jon Benjamin and the cast talk about their dedication to getting weekly laughs.

THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE on ANY mobile device (Apple or Android). Just  get the free app, iNet Radio in The  iTunes App store – and it’s FREE!  The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE  – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Mindy Newell: Depression Really Sucks

“…Depression… is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk… slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero…the body…feels sapped, drained.” Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron 

Sorry for the skip last week, everyone, but I wasn’t up to it – I was down. As in my depression said “Hello, again!” last weekend. No, I didn’t lie in bed for 48 hours, I’ve never given in to that, even back in the day before I was properly diagnosed with this goddamn thing. So on Saturday, though I could feel it banging on the door of my psyche’s house, I did get dressed and made the usual weekend runs to the supermarket and to the laundromat…but by Sunday Elvis was in the house, and even though I got up and put on my workout gear, I blew off my free personal training session that my gym offers to all members for their birthday, decided that I didn’t want to expose my grandson to his fucked-up grandma Mindy, and so just sat around in my workout gear, surfing the web and eating waaaaay too many potato chips. And I kept watching the clock tick away the hours thinking that I had to write my column, but I just couldn’t get the energy up and finally I let Editor Mike know I was sick, though I didn’t specify with what in my e-mail to him.

See, the thing about depression is that it drains the battery and warps the mirror. When it hits me I feel old and ugly and fat and powerless and oh! so! damn! alone! and my thoughts are all about the mistakes I’ve made and the lover(s) I’ve lost and the roads not taken and the…well, it gets pretty nasty and self-destructive, folks. And, for me, at least, it’s embarrassing, because…well, you know that old saw about how when animals are sick they hide away from the herd or crawl under the bed? I don’t know if it’s entirely true, but I always think that if it is, it’s because the animals feel shamed. And I get that, I really do, because, even though I know it’s completely illogical, I feel ashamed and embarrassed.

Which is why, I think, I try to be so open about my depression. It’s my way of fighting it. It makes me so! God-damned! angry! that I have had to deal with this shit for 25 years… anyway, it’s another old saw about how shadows disappear in the light, and I just wanted to let you guys know where I was last weekend.

But that was last weekend. It passed, as all things do….

Everybody stand up and cheer that our friend and fellow columnist John Ostrander came through his cabbage with flying colors! Yeah!!! And yes, we medical folk really do pronounce the acronym CABG that way. I do owe you an apology, though, John. I forgot to let you know about the shave job. Just be glad it wasn’t a body wax!

I’ve been binging on Star Trek: Voyager this week. Totally forgot how absolutely marvelous Kate Mulgrew (currently playing “den mother” Galina “Red” Reznikov on Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black) was as Captain Katherine Janeway. The lady had a lot hanging on her performance as the first woman to head a Star Trek series, though technically she wasn’t the first woman we saw command a starship – I believe that honor goes to Tricia O’Neill as Captain Rachel Garret of the U.S.S. Enterprise-C in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” which aired on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1990. But it’s clear in her execution that Ms. Mulgrew embraced and cherished the opportunity and the role.

All the actors were superb, but one thing I’ve always questioned is why Voyager creators Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor chose not to have Robert Duncan McNeill replay his “fallen Starfleet cadet” Nicholas Locarno in TNG’s 1992 episode “The First Duty,” instead of “bad boy” Tom Paris. It may have been just synchronicity that McNeill read for the part and won it; it may also have been that it would have been very expensive to resurrect the Locarno character, as the writers of “First Duty” would have had to receive royalties every time Locarno appeared on the screen, which would have been every episode of Voyager.

Can’t say I’m happy about the results of the midterm elections last week. I don’t understand why the Democratic candidates ran away from President Obama. Hello, Allison Grimes, did you not learn your lesson when Al Gore distanced himself from Bill Clinton? Jesus, woman, you were a delegate for Obama at the Democratic convention! Who the hell did you think you were fooling? I don’t understand any woman who votes the Republican ticket. No one’s forcing anyone to have an abortion, lady. And what business is it of yours, anyway, if another woman chooses to do so? I don’t understand why someone who is against the minimum wage, denies global warming and climate change and wants to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency (created by Republican President Richard Nixon, by the way), gets into office. Oh, I know. She can slaughter hogs.

SPOILER ALERT! STOP HERE IF YOU MISSED THE DOCTOR WHO FINALE! “Bowties are cool.” But Osgood is dead. Or is she?

Danny Pink is dead. Worse, he’s a Cyberman. Or is he?

The coordinates for Gallifrey are wrong, a lie told to the Doctor by the Master – uh, the Mistress. Or are they?

Clara and the Doctor have ended their relationship – or did they?

Is that really Santa Claus?

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Hey, at least I’m not depressed anymore.

 

Unlock Kate Stewart in Doctor Who: Legacy

  • News
  • November 9, 2014

Are you playing Doctor Who: Legacy? Would you like to try the new special levels with an extra friend by your side? SPLENDID!

Just take a look at our recap of the Doctor Season finale Death in Heaven to find a special code to automatically download Kate Stewart, Chief Scientific Officer of UNIT.

If you’re new to the game, you can also use the code 1212-1212-1212-1212 to get  a care package of bonuses to get you started properly

Doctor Who: Legacy is free for Apple, Android and Kindle devices, as well as playable online via Facebook.

REVIEW: True Blood: The Complete Seventh Season

true-blood-the-complete-seventh-season-blu-ray-with-digital-hd_500-e1415467787782-7913238All things come to an end and the true death arrived for HBO’s True Blood earlier this year. This week, HBO Home Entertainment offers up The Complete Seventh Season along with a mammoth complete series box set. In looking back on the series, it probably hung around a little longer than necessary, especially as things spiraled from over-the-top to insane crazy after series creator Alan Ball left.

true-blood-season-7-e1415468047318-6568879The seventy episodes veered further and further from Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels and even she wrapped up her prose stories recognizing the time had come.

Bon Temps is under attack as things open up, picking up where season six dropped us. The Hep V Vampires are running amuck as many of our favorite supporting characters have been threatened. Pam continues her hunt for Eric leaving Sookie as the calming voice of reason and she’s not feeling all that steady. Meantime, Bill is on his own and every scene brings us closer to the end of his arc and there’s a sense of inevitable melancholy from the beginning.

true-blood-bill-s7-e8-e1415468074301-9508350His arc is the only one that gets the right amount of time to resolve. While things ratchet up in intensity, we watch one familiar face after another die in vastly imaginative ways. But it also brings several sub-plots to hasty or abrupt conclusions. Luke Grimes, who played James, walked away when he was unhappy with his story and was replaced with Australian actor Nathan Parsons, who is fine. The uneven pacing also serves to winnow down the cast for the final two episodes when the main figures take center stage. As usual, poor Tara gets the worst treatment as if the writers could never get a handle on her after the first brilliant season. Alcide’s departure barely gets noticed.

On the other, it’s nice to have Hoyt back and reaching a satisfying hoyt-3877081conclusion with Jessica so it isn’t all gruesome. With Jessica back in Hoy’t sarms, Jason needed someone to love – as befit his character from the first episode. However, how quickly he found it with Bridget and received Sookie’s blessing came way too fast for my taste.

true_blood_season_7_trailer_1_hbo-e1415468152341-2934458And then we’re down to Bill, Eric, and Sookie the enduring triangle that was twisted like so much Silly Putty across the years. Is it entirely a happy or unhappy ending? Your call but it does wrap things up in a tidy package which is fine. The show grew more and more uneven through the seasons so this was about as good a wrap-up as one can expect. (And there’s a lovely cameo of novelist Charlaine Harris in the final episode, her way of saying bye-bye.)

tumblr_mp8jgvwyyw1qc5buuo1_1280-e1415468185773-2619978As we have come to expect, the three disc set comes packed with the usual assortment of special features starting with audio commentaries for five of the ten episodes. Directors Howard Deutch, Gregg Fienberg, Angela Robinson, and, Simon Jayes; screenwriters Kate Barnow, Daniel Kenneth, Craig Chester, and Brian Buckner; and actors Kristen Bauer van Straten, Carrie Preston, Lauren Bowles, Chris Bauer, Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer all weigh in on the stories. It’s nice to hear from Paquin and Moyer in the final episode since they carried the emotional load and saying farewell to the show they fell in love with (along with one another).

There’s the fifteen minute True Death: The Final Days On Set, an informal look as the cast and crew wind up their work. Then there’s True Blood: A Farewell To Bon Temps, a twenty-eight minute retrospective that explores the attraction of vampires with Ball, Buckner, and the main cast offering their well-earned observations on that and other aspects of making the series. An updated True Blood Lines timeline is offered once again along with the previews and recaps.

New Who Review – “Death in Heaven”

When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.  As Cybermen.  See what he did there?  The Master is back, and has been working on this plot for QUITE a long time. Some old friends return for the fight, we say goodbye (for now, anyway) to some others, and oh goodness, were there still surprises.  I don’t know why you’d be reading this recap before you saw the episode, but if you are, don’t.  Because it makes much more sense to know about the…

DEATH IN HEAVEN
By  Steven Moffat
Directed by Rachel Talalay

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John Ostrander 2.0

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. Better than he was before. Better… stronger… faster. – The Six Million Dollar Man

So – where were we?

I’d had a 7 mm. golden nugget lodged in my right kidney. That got removed but then I went into the hospital with sepsis and acute urinary infection. That led to the discovery that I’d had a heart attack, much to my amazement. I’d felt nothing; it was revealed in chemical markers. Further investigation showed that while the heart itself was okay, I needed a triple bypass.

Well, that was a stunner.

The procedure is called a coronary artery bypass graft, known as a CABG, sometimes called a “cabbage.” Which is a little disconcerting. Working on my heart is a cabbage.

It’s a relatively recent procedure, starting up in the ‘60s. It’s not uncommon now and they’ve gotten pretty good at it but nonetheless it is major surgery. In the literature they give you before the operation, they tell you that heart attack, stroke, and death are possibilities. It’s open-heart surgery and, among other things, they can stop your heart while you’re hooked up to a heart/lung machine. Think about that. Usually, when your heart stops, you’re dead. Here they stop it and then fix you and then bring you back from the dead. That’s pure science fiction a century ago. Or maybe Frankenstein.

My day started with a requirement to be at the hospital at 6 AM. I’m sort of a morning person but not that early a morning person. Still, I figured I’d make it up later when they knocked me out. So I’m in operating prep, lying on a gurney in my very attractive open-backed hospital gown, and this female attendant comes in and announces that she is going to shave the front of my body from the neck line to my ankles.

Huh.

Didn’t see that coming.

I assumed they would remove my chest hair because, after all, that’s where they’d be working, but shave my entire front? I wound up naked as a babe or a male porn star.

Not that I would know what a naked male porn star would look like. I’ve … heard reports is all.

Then I was wheeled into surgery and the deed was done. Actually, I sort of had the easy part at that stage. I was out of it. My Mary and members of her family as well as members of mine had to sit in the waiting room for about five hours to find out if I survived it all.

Spoiler Warning: I survived.

I woke up in the CCU (Cardiac Care Unit) with tubes down my throat and wasn’t that uncomfortable. Necessary but uncomfortable; the goal was to keep my lungs open. My Mary says it looked like I had a face-hugger from Aliens on me.

Actually, I had lots of tubes sticking out of me, draining this, siphoning away that. I felt like I was in Young Frankenstein. I almost (but not quite) broke into a chorus of “Putting on the Ritz.” With the tubes down my throat, I probably could only have managed “Rargle gurk guk rozzick.”

I’m making good progress in my recovery; all the nurses and doctors are pleased and I’m appreciative to them and to the friends, fans, and acquaintances who have sent prayers and good wishes. They do mean a lot.

So, from here, I work at getting better and figuring out something else to talk about next week other than myself.

Wish me luck.

Editor’s Note: Loathe as I am to add material to somebody’s column, but John left out the very best part – he returned home mid-week, safe and sound.

And, of course, that’s when the furnace exploded. Afternoon temperature yesterday was 42 degrees. Ahhh… good times!

 

Adam West Discusses His Favorite Bat-Episode

The countdown to the release of Batman: The Complete Television Series is at three days. Tuesday, November 11, sees the  arrival of the mostly wanted DVD set for comic book fans this millennium.

In anticiaption, Warner Home Entertainment has released this clip from one of the bonus features, as Adam West recounts his favorite episode.

Our review will be appearing sometime this coming week.

Marc Alan Fishman: Dear Marvel and DC…

Dear Marvel and DC,

It’s been too long since I’ve written you, and for that I am very sorry. I’d think it awkward, given that I was once a weekly reviewer of your monthly publications, but I’ve essentially all but given up on them over the last six months. And it’s not because of financial concerns, or even a matter of proximity. Certainly sparing ten to twenty bucks a week for a decent load of your wares from one of the fine comic shops mere blocks from my office was once a weekly delight. But over time, my pull list dwindled and dwindled. Each book in your respective repertoire began to feel repetitive, dull, or forced. And as insult to the injury… the shop I frequented only carried indie books they “knew would actually sell” unless I specifically sought them to be ordered and held. It was a dark time, and I flew a white flag.

I’ve done this in the past. Like a jilted lover, sometime absence makes the heart grow fonder. I figured I’d soon see the new announcements stemming from successful dalliances on TV and the multiplex. With a growing fan-base learning about Hydra and Kree maps, or hearing the name Black Adam whispered with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson being cast, there was no doubt in my mind you knew that the world was set to look at your publishing ventures as potential incubators for those next great ideas.

And then, as if you’d not learned from past mistakes, you started announcing one major-huge-epic-don’t-miss-it-or-by-Rao-you’ll-be-out-of-the-loop-for-decades event after another.

I believe in tough love. It’s never easy to swallow, I know. In my life, it’s always followed by a period of reflection and growth. My high school art teacher said I couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag. I went to art school and learned how. My college professor said I’d only get out of my art what I put into it. In response, I completed an 8′ x 10′ woodcut with a 1mm gouge. My first employer after graduation said I’d never amount to an art director. I’ve been one now for going on eight years. So trust me when I say that this comes from a place of kindness:

Your events, by and large, really suck.

Yeah, I know you’ve got sales data to prove me wrong. But you know what I have? I have an informed opinion. Civil War was cool. How did The Initiative do for you shortly after? Identity Crisis was excellent, until it got rapey. Fear Itself was novel for a hot minute until I realized it was a D&D campaign from 1996. Flashpoint, Countdown to Final Crisis, and yeah Final Crisis were worth more as toilet paper than as solid fiction. Oh, I’m sorry, I was supposed to read them in 3-D, and backwards because Grant Morrison said it’d make more sense that way? I said the same thing when I tried to convince my wife sweatpants were a viable option for date-night.

And here with both of you announcing and announcing cryptic apocalyptic coinciding crises sometime in the spring? It’s reminiscent of The Producers. I mean, how many dancing Charlie Xaviers will we need before we start guessing it’s all one big joke to you?

The fact of the matter is no amount of adjective-dropping will entice me away from my most glorious hibernation. You’ve both cried wolf far too many times now. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me thirty-two times with multiple X-Men deaths and rebirths, time-bullets, time-vampires, ret-conned continuities, and multiple-multiverses… shame on you. You seem to forget that after every one of these universe shattering events comes fallout. Canceled series of stalwart brands. Bold new books that will be canceled long before their given a chance to find a rhythm and fan base. Not to be lewd about it, but guys, you can’t shit the bed and then expect us to clean it up with a smile.

I don’t care if Tony is going to be a power-sharing super-douche. Or that Alexander Luthor never really died. Or that Wolverine is dead until Shadowcat phase-pulls his rotting corpse out of his statue-self followed by a trip back through time using Booster Gold’s leftover suit. I don’t even care if you’re exploring new What-If universes with Spider-Gwen. It doesn’t get me hot and bothered that you’re potentially ret-conning away the New52. No matter your proposed gimmick, I’m not buying it.

At the end of the day, I smell your desperation a mile away. It wasn’t like this when Mark Waid was batting 1000 on Daredevil. It wasn’t like this when Geoff Johns was expanding the Green Lantern and Flash mythos without traveling outside the borders of their respective books. You know you can be better than this, but instead are trying to win over everyone with a grand sweeping motion. It’s just not necessary.

And when you realize that? I’ll be back in the shop with my money in hand.

Sincerely,

Marc Alan Fishman

Ex-Pat. Indie Creator. Bridge Burner.

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