It might surprise you that a writer who spent so much time writing coverage on Warner Bros. film scripts for DC and won an award for an animated TV series about Batman … Hates. Comic. Book. Movies.

Usually. Not always, but most of the time. There’s a reason for that, though.

By virtue of my peculiar set of writing credits, I am a graduate of the Berlitz course in Geek-to-Hollywood translating. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, just make enough bank off it to pay back the student loan.

Ever since comic book artist lizards first started crawling out of the four-color slime and evolving into knuckle-dragging primates with Panaflexes on their shoulders, the meme that comics are little more than frozen movies – when what they more closely resemble is storyboards with half the frames cut out of every scene – has visited a host of unfortunate consequences on the medium we supposedly celebrate here.

For one thing, the intrusion of the Hollywood mentality on mainstream comics often results in exactly the sort of Big Mistake that Hollywood itself makes. (Mistake in the art crime sense, mind you, not the ka-ching, ka-ching sense.)

“Auteurs” we have up the wazoo, but directors who write their own stuff are seldom well-served by their writers. The two disciplines aren’t necessary mutually-reinforcing. And it’s a far rarer creature than we generally assume who can do both well. Which is why I think most talented comic book artists probably should have their typing fingers broken. Not everybody who graduates from UCLA film school is Orson Welles, and not everyone who buys a diploma from Joe Kubert’s school is Frank Miller.

And, to put a metaphor into the Cuisinart and push for “puree,” this epidemic of the sins of one medium being visited on another is a two-way street. You can’t get good movies out of styling or constructing a film as if it were a comic book, though Chthulhu knows Hollywood now seems to be trying to.

The two media aren’t the same. Each has a grammar of its own which is part of its unique appeal. (After too many instances of watching Robert Downey, Jr. debase himself and repudiate his profound talent by playing flying Spam, I hesitate to use the word “charm.”) And if you conflate the two, IMO you dilute the unique appeal of both.

That, uhm, whack Batman TV series in ‘66 not only proved that, but leveraged those differences to create its signature whackness. By “transliterating” — as opposed to adapting — the tropes and conventions of one medium (the “Meanwhile…” V.O.s, the POW!s and the ZAP!s, the “I’m a duly deputized law enforcement officer” even though I look like I just escaped from Liberace’s closet) into a completely different medium, it commented on the absurdity of superheroes from a non-Geek perspective. Which is why Geeks hated it.

No amount of redesigning the Spandex as Tutti-Frutti Kevlar can hide the self-evident fact that any grown-up celebrity-wannbe who goes outside looking like that will do his 15 minutes of fame in Celebrity Rehab. But I preferred the Batman: Animated stuff because it worked in animation: everything was stylized, appropriate to the surreality of it all. You could accept that Batman existed when he stood next to a Commissioner Gordon who looked like an inverted pyramid with eyes, in a suit jacket whose lapels grazed his earlobes. By contrast, Christian Bale’s teeth-gritting just looks silly.

The live-action stuff used to make me giggle. Now, of course, it just pisses me off as much as mainstream comic book pacing does: you can’t figure out WTF is going on in any of these things unless you’ve seen the previous five entries in the series. And date night at the Octoplex still costs more than five “floppies.”

All that said, I eagerly look forward to being dragged to see Sin City: A Dame For Our Rape Culture, secure in the knowledge that I won’t be too pissed off to fall asleep on it. If Frank and Rodriguez light this one the same way they lighted the first one, I won’t be able to see WTF is going on there, either, and won’t have to care.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

The Shadow Fan podcast returns for Episode 37! This time around, New Pulp Author Barry Reese reviews “The Seven Drops of Blood” (1936), “Death from Nowhere” (1939) and The Shadow # 14 (Dynamite Comics). Plus: Listener Feedback focuses on Dynamite’s Masks series! It’s a packed episode, all of it dedicated to pulp’s greatest crimefighter!

If you love The Shadow, this is the podcast for you!

Listen to The Shadow Fan Podcast Episode 37 now at
http://theshadowfan.libsyn.com/death-from-nowhere

On July 1 -3, Fight Card Books is making Fight Card: King of the Outback available for Free at Amazon. You can find it here.

About Fight Card: King of the Outback:

Outback Australia 1954

Two rival tent boxing troupes clash over a territorial dispute in the Outback town of Birdsville. In the sweltering heat, tensions simmer, tempers flare, and as things reach boiling point, a boxing tent is burned to the ground.

Fighting men know only one way to solve their disputes, and that’s in the ring. The solution, a show-down, smack-down, winner take all bout between the two rival outfits.

In the blue corner, representing ‘Walter Wheeler’s Boxing Sideshow’ is Tommy King, a young aboriginal boxer with a big heart and iron fists.

In the red corner, representing ‘Arnold Sanderson’s Boxing Show’, is ‘Jumpin’ Jack Douglas, a monstrous wrecking machine from the city – a man who’ll do anything to win.

The fight – brutal. In the world of Tent Boxing, in the harsh Australian Outback, weight divisions and rules don’t count for much. It’s a fight to decide, who is indeed, King of the Outback!

Learn more about Fight Card Books here.

Author Stant Litore shared the cover for his new The Dead Man tale THE DARK NEED, premiering September 2013. Cover art by Jeroen ten Berge.

Learn more about The Dead Man series here.

Mechanoid Press shared a press release with All Pulp announcing their upcoming Robot Stories anthology.

Press Release:

ROBOT STORIES Coming Soon

Contact: James Palmer
palmerwriter@yahoo.com
www.mechanoidpress.com

Mechanoid Press Goes to the Robots
ATLANTA, GA—Mechanoid Press, a small imprint specializing in science fiction and New Pulp e-books is about to be invaded by robots.

The young publisher is releasing an e-book only title called ROBOT STORIES, featuring three tales of mechanized mayhem. Included in this volume will be work by Joel M. Jenkins, James R. Tuck (author of the Deacon Chalk: occult bounty hunter novels), and Jim Kinley.

“With this many Jims involved, it’s sure to be a winner,” jokes Mechanoid Press editor James Palmer. “I’m super excited to have these gentlemen on board. It’s going to be a blast.”

ROBOT STORIES is scheduled for a mid-summer release, and will sport a classic cover by Rondo award-winning artist Mark Maddox.

About Mechanoid Press
Mechanoid Press is a new imprint specializing in science fiction, New Pulp, and steampunk e-books and anthologies. For more, visit www.mechanoidpress.com or follow the robot revolution on Twitter. You can also like Mechanoid Press on Facebook.

When I started my first term at DC Comics back in 1976, DC’s then-VP of production Jack Adler told me the story of the biggest comic book the company never published: Blockbuster. It was purported to be a mammoth reprint book, not unlike their 100-Page Spectaculars but maybe five times bigger.

But it was a set-up. Jack said there had been this young artist – now a major comics legend – who had been coming into DC’s bullpen towards the end of the day to work at space vacated by one of the production artists. When nobody else was around, he’d poke around the production product to see what was happening. He would then leak noteworthy events to the fan press… and this pissed DC off. So in order to confirm their suspicions they mocked up a gargantuan reprint book called “Blockbuster” and left stuff lying around when only said leaker was around to see it. He did, he ratted the company out, and DC confirmed his guilt.

I won’t tell you who this artist was for two reasons. Number one, I was young once myself (I am now a 14 year old boy trapped in the pathetic body of a 62 year old who deserves it back). Number two, were I in that position at that time, I probably would have done the same. Actually, I might do that today as well, but I’d do it for ComicMix. The title name was later resurrected for a weekly title featuring revivals of the Charlton heroes, but they changed it to Comics Cavalcade Weekly and commissioned a lot of work before deciding not to do it after all.

You might ask what this has to do with Archie’s thyroid. A couple weeks ago Archie Comics came out with a digest comic with serious glandular issues entitled Archie 1000 Page Comics Digest. This book, of course, reminded me of Blockbuster – except it is real.

Don’t go expecting it on the checkout racks of your neighborhood supermarket. The book is an inch and three-quarters thick. In comic book terms, that’s about, oh, 1000 pages. It retails for $15.00, which is quite a bargain, and places like Amazon have it for a hair over ten bucks. It’s also available digitally in three parts for retail price which, given the cost of printing and shipping and returns, is comparatively a rip.

Unlike Archie Comics’ other recent, slimmer tomes, Archie 1000 Page Comics Digest is mostly limited to fairly recent stories. I enjoy the early stuff quite a lot, but Dark Horse and IDW have been covering those bases with several coats of paint. No cover repros, no intros, the only additions were creator credits. 1000 pages of pure story.

I’m reminded of a time when I was even younger and the saints were battling dinosaurs. My parents would buy me one or two of those Harvey 25-centers (thinking the Archie annuals were gender-inappropriate) or maybe one of those Dennis The Menace or Disney vacation specials, plop me in the back seat of the car next to my sister (who did get those gender-inappropriate Archie annuals, which I also read) and drive off to visit my grandmother in Indiana or maybe to a wooden vacation shack in western Michigan alongside the Burma-Shave signs. They were right: those big bargain books kept me quiet for most of the trip.

If I were in my parents’ position today, I’d buy my kid this Archie 1000 Page Comics Digest in a heartbeat. Evidently Archie thinks highly of the format: they’ve got sequels set for October and December.

More power to them. At this price, you just can’t go wrong.

THURSDAY MORNING: Dennis O’Neil

THURSDAY AFTERNOON: Martin Pasko