In a short period of time, two 20^th anniversary box sets have been released, both using XX in their titles. The wonderful Canadian band Great Big Sea just had their celebratory two-disc set come out and now comes Tarantino XX, a more appropriately named set, commemorating the filmmaker’s two decades in the business.

Quentin Tarantino began like so many of did, obsessed with movies and television and pop culture. His tastes ran along the fringes such as the Hong Kong martial arts fare and the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. A walking, talking cornucopia of film lore, he was the perfect video store employee, never at a loss for a recommendation regardless of taste. He fortunately turned those interests to filmmaking, bringing his knowledge and passion to screenplays for others and his own works.

If you had to write one line about his work it would be “Always shoot first, ask questions later” as his films are often violent blood fests. For those who appreciate his storytelling skills, you accept and enjoy the bloodshed since it’s all so over the top as to be step over the line between real violence and cartoon violence. Instead, you’re captivated by seeing fresh ideas, original and memorable characters who spout crackling, idiosyncratic dialogue.

He made us sit up and pay attention to his skills with Reservoir Dogs, a blend of mayhem and character that was filled with excellent dialogue and sharply delineated characters. After that, he came out with the brilliant Pulp Fiction and he became an actor’s director, always giving them something unusual and fun to play. As a result, his movies have been stuffed with actors from all corners of Hollywood, having the time of their lives. Why? It’s because his films are tightly structured pieces that pays as much attention to structure as it does to dialogue, making these riveting experiences.

The box set contains all seven films from his director’s chair – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown,  Kill Bill Parts 1 and 2, Death Proof (Tarantino’s contribution to Grindhouse), Inglorious Basterds, plus True Romance which he wrote but the late Tony Scott directed.  All that’s really missing is “The Man from Hollywood” segment of Four Rooms. While all have been previously released on Blu-ray and come complete with their usual extras, the box comes with five hours of new material spread over two discs.  The films look and sound as one would expect so there’s nothing to fear about keeping your originals but for Tarantino fans, the extra material is worth having. For anyone with gaps in their collection, the box is well worth having and revisiting before seeing Django Unchained later this month.

Disc one contains the complete unedited version of the Critics’ Corner: The Films of Quentin Tarantino (4:50). Much of this has been sprinkled throughout the extras of many of the solo releases but you can hear some interesting critical thoughts from Scott Foundus, Stephanie Zacharek, Tim Lucas and Andy Klein. They work their way through Tarantino’s films, one by one, and their insights are useful in placing the films in context. It’s not all laudatory as the talking heads express preferences for some films and rejections of others while still appreciating the craft. Many interesting insights are offered up such as the alternate reality World War II tale, Basterds is all about language.

The second disc begins with Quentin Tarantino: 20 Years of Filmmaking (2:13), a fabulous career retrospective that traces his career from initial screenplays to first sale. Lawrence Bender, Robert Rodriguez, Pam Grier and Robert Forster show up to tell some funny anecdotes while Stacey Sher compares Tarantino to Roger Corman which is probably high praise to Tarantino even if I find it a little off the mark. Sally Menke, Tarantino’s perennial editor nicely receives her due here. Then there is Jackie Brown Q&A: A Film Independent at LACMA Event (32:15) as columnist Elvis Mitchell talks with Grier, Forster and Tarantino. Pleasant but nothing earthshattering here. We’re rounded out with Django Unchained—Coming Soon (10:43) which is a collection of trailers.

If you’re like me, who loves the musical stings that harken back to other projects or adore seeing character actors given something fresh to do and don’t mind the violence and gore, then you’ll probably appreciate sitting down with this fine set.

Various and sundry thoughts from the mind of Mindy this week:

The USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the eighth U.S. Navy vessel to bear that name, was decommissioned this week after 50 years of service. The world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier made her maiden voyage on January 12, 1962 and her first mission was tracking and monitoring the first orbital flight of Project Mercury, with Lt. Col. John Glenn aboard the Friendship 7 capsule. In popular culture, the Enterprise was the home base of Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) in Top Gun, with the late director Tony Scott filming and incorporating flight deck operations into the film, and it was the flagship of the U.S. Navy fleet participating in The Hunt For Red October.

Then, of course, there is Star Trek – and did you know that Gene Roddenberry’s original starship name was the USS Yorktown? But the fame and status of the sea-going Enterprise led to starship being rechristened the USS Enterprise NC-1701. (Art Director Matt Jeffries – yes, for whom the Jeffries Tubes are named – used the USS Enterprise CVN-65 for scale when designing the original starship.) Star Trek and her fans – through a massive letter writing campaign and, I’m sure, encouraged by not a few NASA employees – returned the favor when NASA’s first Space Shuttle was named Enterprise. And in Star Trek: First Contact, we see that models of all the ships named Enterprise hanging in a showcase in Jean-Luc’s office. (“You broke your little ships,” says Lily Sloane, played by Alfre Woodward, after Picard goes “Ahab” in his desire vengeance against Borg throwing his phaser rifle through the glass walls of the showcase.)

Staying with Star Trek…I just rewatched J.J. Abram’s remake last night, and the more I see it, the more I love it. I continue to be especially impressed by Karl Urban’s Dr. Leonard McCoy – if I closed my eyes, I’d be hard-pressed not to say it was DeForest Kelley speaking.

Again, speaking of “all things Trek” – although I am generally not a fan of comic adaption of live-action TV shows and movies, I gotta say I’m loving IDW’s Star Trek, written by Mike Johnson with art by Claudia Balboni and Stephen Molnar. Johnson is following the original series story lines, with just the right twists of plot to adhere to the “new” Trek and doing an excellent job of capturing the personalities of Kirk/Pine, Spock/Quinto, Scotty/Pegg, Uhura/Saldana and the rest of the crew with his dialogue. Kudos to the entire team!

On the other hand…Dark Horse’s Spike mini-series sucks. I mean, Spike on the moon? Gimme a fucking break! In fact, generally speaking, their whole Buffy line sucks. Really disappointed. Oh, well, dropping it will save me money.

After almost 30 years, my local comics shop, Vector Books, has closed. Joe and Tina and Frank have been a part of my life for all those 30 years, and I wish them love and health and all the best in the future. But a new comics emporium has opened to take over from Vector (and with Vector’s blessing). It’s Manifest Comics And Cards, and I’ll be interviewing its young owner, Michael, in the future to find out how nuts (and brave) he is to open a shop at a time when so many are closing.

What fucking world do the Republicans live in? Who the fuck cares what Grover Norquist thinks? Attention John Boehmer!!!! Your job is to lead, not to follow the bug-fucked extremists and Tea Party wingnuts or to worry about losing your position as Speaker of the House! Get the deal done, for Christ’s sake! You can’t blame Obama this time! Like we said in the 60s, the whole world is watching!

How many of you had to Google labia majora and labia minora from my column last week? (Thanks to Mike Gold for this.)

Over at The League Of Woman Bloggers on Facebook, there is mucho discussion going on about the attack on girl geeks by boy geeks. Much geekiness is ensuing.

Okay, who here is a Homeland fan? Is Brody now a triple agent, again loyal to Nazir? What didn’t he tell Carrie, Saul, and Quinn in the debriefing? What did he make up? (I’m betting the being tied to a car battery part.) How long did it take before you realized that Virgil and Max were in Quinn’s apartment? (I thought they were in Roya’s.) Who is Dar Adal, the guy that Quinn met on the bus? (Yeah, yeah, I know he’s F. Murray Abraham…) Who is Quinn – FBI? Black-ops CIA? Mole? (I don’t think he is – too obvious.) Was the whole “terrorist attack on returning veterans” a MacGuffin, and the real attack is still coming? Is Estes as incompetent as he seems?  Why did he send Quinn out to kill Brody? Why did Saul go to Philadelphia, knowing that Quinn would find out? And why does Jessica keep calling her husband by his last name?

Later.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

Cover by Kieth Birdsong

Fight Card Books’ December publication, Fight Card: The Knockout, is now available for Kindle via Amazon. Says Fight Card’s Paul Bishop of the new release, “This time up the venerable Robert J. Randisi is behind the mask of Jack Tunney. Bob Randisi is a tremendously prolific author who has written in many genres. Many of us also know Bob as the founder of the Private-Eye Writers of America, the organization behind the prestigious Shamus awards. A great guy, a great writer, and a great addition to the Fight Card canon.”

About Fight Card: The Knockout:
Brooklyn, 1954

Frankie ‘The Piston’ Corleone was an up-and-coming light heavyweight fighter until a broken hand took him out of contention. Now, Frankie works as a private eye, occasionally taking sparring work to stay in shape make ends meet.

Cappy O’Brien has trained a lot of fighters, including Frankie. But Cappy has never had a real contender until now … Candy Marquez is the real deal, and after being battered by Marquez during several rounds of sparring, Frankie has to agree. But the fight game is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and other trainers and the mob all want a piece of Cappy’s best prospect.

When Cappy winds up dead, it’s time for Frankie to take off the gloves and take The Piston’s punching power to the street to knockout a killer …

You can order your very own ebook copy of Fight Card: The Knockout here.

2013 looks to be a watershed year for the Fight Card series. January brings Fight Card: Rumble In The Jungle from our own man down under, David Foster … This is a very pulpy tale with an international setting in South Africa. February, will see Fight Card: Against The Ropes visit the 1920’s with a tale by Terrence McCaulley, which is a prequel to his current novel “Prohibition” from Airship 27 Productions (with whom we will be cross-promoting).

Much more to come including a new issue of Fight Fictioneeers Magazine.

One of the interesting developments in the past few years in comics, for me, is that stuff you’ve done earlier in your career gets bundled together and re-packaged. That can be especially nice if you have some sort of royalty arrangement (or incentive or participation or whatever they’re calling it now) because you know that means that at some point the company will issue you a check. That’s like found money; any writing you did was done long ago and you were paid for it already.

That’s not to say the money is unearned. In my view, if the company is getting a second bite of that apple, so should the creators who did the work. Seems fair to me, although the companies have a history of not being fair. And they also usually give a copy or two or three of the volume for your own library. That’s good because I rarely can find my original copies of the work.

Recently, I got copies of the last two volumes of the gathered Batman epic No Man’s Land. Our resident legend here at ComicMix, Denny O’Neil, was editor on the books at that time and asked me to do the Catwoman issues tying into the saga. I really enjoyed working with the character and would’ve enjoyed playing with her more but the book was cancelled at the end of that series. Catwoman, however, has more than nine lives and has gotten her own title back at least twice since then.

I have to admit, however, that I wasn’t too crazy about the whole No Man’s Land concept at the time. The main idea was that Gotham City, following an earthquake and a virus outbreak just seemed in general to be too toxic to reclaim so the federal government declared it a … wait for it … No Man’s Land. The citizens were ordered to get out and those who chose to stay (or were unable to leave) were kept in when the bridges and tunnels to the city were blown up. Any attempt to escape (or get in, as I recall) was prohibited and that was enforced by the Army. Very Escape From New York (a really fun movie, by the way; is Batman the comics’ Snake Plisken?).

At the time I found the premise too far fetched for my tastes. Okay, the main character dresses up like a bat to run around to strike terror into villainous and cowardly criminals but, yes, I found the central premise of No Man’s Land a little over the top for me. Gotham City was a major city in DCU’s USA. No federal government, in my opinion, would just abandon it like that; there would be howls of outrage throughout the country. Every city, every state, would fear that the same would happen to them. It simply wouldn’t be allowed. No U.S. government would be that cruel. It wasn’t politically feasible in my view (and I come from Chicago and, believe me, I’ve seen lots of outlandish governmental behavior that turned out to be very politically feasible.).

And what’s happened since No Man’s Land first came out? Let’s start with Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans and poor people stuck in the city and the horror stories of living in the Superbowl and a federal government’s response that was inept and way too slow in responding. There were people then who argued that New Orleans should be abandoned. The devastation was too great and, besides, it was a wicked, sinful city and the hurricane was God’s punishment yadda yadda yadda. New Orleans still struggles in the aftermath.

Let’s look at Hurricane Sandy. Better federal response this time but, again, the devastation was so widespread and so pervasive that it will take years for the area to recover fully, if it ever does.

Let’s look at Washington, D.C. right now. A fiscal cliff looms, one that was created by government, and one that government should be able to solve. As I write this, the two sides have gotten entrenched in their respective positions and each side is waiting to see who blinks first. A quicker resolution would help the Christmas buying season and, oh, might also keep the U.S. credit rating from being lowered again, but I’m not betting they’re going to get it done by the January 1st deadline.

No Man’s Land no longer seems that farfetched to me. I may still have a quibble or two with certain plot elements but the central premise? No, that’s become all too believable Maestro O’Neil, I tender my apologies. “I was wrong and you was right,” as usual. I should never doubt you or underestimate just how perverse reality can get.

My, this crow is tasty!

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

This morning a li’l post by Jim Zub, the author of the indie book Skullkickers, hit the viral airwaves. His post entitled “The Reality of Mainstream Creator-Owned Comics” set a plethora of shared Facebook posts ablaze in ‘likes’ and comments. Even my close and personal friend Gene Ha placed it on his wall with a very nice send up. By the way, when I say Gene and I are “close and personal friends,” I mean to say that he recognized me at Baltimore Comic-Con, actually talked to me for more than 10 minutes, and we once had pizza at Matt Wright’s (my Unshaven cohort) house. The article in question laid out in basic math how a comic on the rack of your favorite pulp store breaks down. It’s a sobering, but near perfect (as far as I can tell) account on how we little folk of Artist Alley aren’t in the business for the piles and piles of cash.

I won’t waste your time recanting the article verbatim. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait. Back so soon? Great. I’d simply like to take up my little corner of the Internet this morning to add to Jim’s ending thoughts. He retorts “Skullkickers is the most expensive hobby I’ve ever had :D” Truer words, my friend, truer words. I decided to do some math myself. When you look at our meager books, you’ll see that things are actually looking up for us. After a year toiling on the con trail we have enough money in our little cash box to afford being able to register for the 16 conventions we wish to attend next year. And that’s it. It doesn’t cover the hotel rooms we’ll have to stay in. It doesn’t cover the gas to drive to them. It doesn’t cover the food we’ll eat. It doesn’t even cover the cost of printing the books we actually sell at the table. And we’re doing awesome. Not even kidding, kiddos.

When we started in the business, Kickstarter was just an incubating idea in some hipster’s noodle. Our lucky break, The March: Crossing Bridges In America netted us a whopping $500; it took us the better part of a year to complete. Mind you, we were as green as they came, and worked only on nights and weekends. And with many of those nights and weekends, we watched tons of cartoons, ate terrible food, and played Versus CCG until we fell asleep on the couch. But, if you distilled the man hours – from outlining the script, to taking the reference photos, to penciling, inking, lettering, coloring, and laying out the 54 page book? Easily 150 man hours. Simple math then dictates each of we three Unshavenauts earned a whopping $1.12 an hour to create the book. Take away from that total the $350 it cost us to buy our table at Wizard World Chicago? Well, I think you’re starting to get the picture.

They say the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting different results. And for five years, we have toiled mercilessly over our own books, driven halfway across the country to sit in convention centers 10 hours at a time, and pumped hundreds of thousands of unpaid hours of labor all to sell a whopping 1,408 copies of our wares in 2012 alone. But the kicker is we’re not insane. We never expected different results. Zub said it best – this is the most expensive hobby we could have ever had.

But unlike building model trains, collecting stamps, or memorizing the IMDB in hopes of crushing people at “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”… making comic books has produced something no other hobby could. The fact that I say without a quiver to my lip that “I Make Comics” is a badge of pride. Even ten years ago, when going to conventions as a fan became part of my vernacular, I didn’t honestly think I’d have it in me to sit on the other side of the aisle.

Now, it’s part of my identity. With Unshaven Comics, I have rubbed elbows and broke bread with industry legends. I have had some of the best meals with some of the greatest conversations I’ve been privy to in cities I would have never thought twice to visit. And most important … I’ve sold books (I dare not say thousands lest I make it sound better than it actually is) to complete strangers who then have returned to my table the following year to ask me “what’s next?” It’s a feeling I assure you no model train ride could touch.

And yes, there’s no smoke-screen to be had here. We indie folk all (probably) share that pipe-dream that our books will be noticed by some muckity-muck who will Pretty Woman us out of the Artist Alley and into the hearts of America. For those really daring, making comics is even a full time job (a luxury I could not afford, nor fathom). The reality of the numbers though prove what a zero-sum game it all is. Through the Image channel as Zub is doing, or the “out of our cars with a wish and a dream” as Unshaven Comics… being in the industry (if only on the very outer most ring of it) is a costly endeavor we do not for the bling. We do it for the love of the medium. We do it for the rush of having a fan. We do it because the movies and cartoons that play in our heads when we close our eyes can’t be turned off – they can only be crudely captured and splattered on a page. It may never pay our bills… but it fills our soul.

Simply put, this is an industry unlike most others. This is an industry being held together by duct tape, dreams, and desire. For those lucky few who are making the big bucks, we in the gutter don’t wish them ill will. We celebrate their successes as our successes. It’s a community. To be on the other side of that aisle – be you a long-time veteran, or a first time ash-can publisher… it’s a collected universe unto itself. One well worth the toil, the long drives, the longer conversations… and yes, the debt.

By the way, if you’d like to fill my soul, or any of the other starving souls here at ComicMix, do us a solid, and check out our holiday gift guide and spread the love.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander