When BBC America teased Wednesday that tickets would be made available for  New York City Premiere of this season’s premiere episode of Doctor Who, there was little doubt they would be highly coveted.  But when the link was released shortly after 2PM on Thursday, it was not expected that the rush of fans would crash the channel’s link forwarding service.  A direct link to the sales page at Movetickets.com was hastily released, and the crush of eager purchasers quickly brought that website to its knees as well.

In a mini-repeat of recent bottlenecks for the San Diego Comic-Con, the ticket purchase system slowed to a crawl, and access was severely limited almost immediately after the links were announced.  The site’s customer service number was jammed to bursting for several hours after tickets sold out as people attempted to see if aborted transactions resulted in a sale or not.

Those who could snag a connection and hold onto it for a full purchase session were able to secure ticket to the premiere of Asylum of the Daleks for the princely sum of eleven cents.  The site would not allow them to give the tickets away for free, so the micro-fee (plus the website’s one-dollar service charge) was their way of tipping the hat to Matt Smith, the eleventh Doctor, while still granting almost free admission to the fans.

The site sold over 800 tickets in approximately twenty minutes, selling out New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, the largest theater they were able to secure.

BBC America has made it clear they’re very thankful that the event was so zealously accepted by the fans, and apologized that the process didn’t go as smoothly as it could have done.  While there’s been no reports of a second showing, the site will be offering contests throughout the week to win tickets.  Announcements will be made via their popular Twitter and Tumblr feeds.

During the information feeding frenzy of the (still unannounced) broadcast premiere of the show, BBC America has also been undertaking a massive publicity blitz for its first original series, the period police series Copper.  Produced by Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, it tells the tale of one of New York City’s honest policemen in the wild and chaotic year 1864.  Copper premieres this Sunday, August 19^th, at 10PM on BBC America.

The Doctor Who premiere will be on August 25^th at 6PM at the Ziegfeld Theater.  It is presumed the line has already started.

Artwork © Jamie Chase.

Artwork © Jamie Chase.

Sequential Pulp Comics shared this first look at the cover for the new graphic novel adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic sci-fi adventure, AT THE EARTH’S CORE.

At The Earth’s Core is written by Martin Powell with artwork by Jamie Chase. This project is authorized by ERB, Inc., and published by Sequential Pulp/Dark Horse Comics.

You can learn more about Sequential Pulp Comics at www.SequentialPulpComics.com

You can learn more about Dark Horse Comics at www.darkhorse.com

Joss Whedon’s take on the X-Men is the series that keeps on giving. Winner of the Will Eisner Award winner for Best Continuing Series, it first it became a series of motion comics, adapting the 25 issue run, and in a few weeks, it will be turned into a series of prose novel adaptations (by Peter David, due out September 5). Why? Whedon understands character, action, and using larger than life people to work as metaphors for life. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was really about surviving high school and being a mutant in the comics is dealing with prejudice and fear of the unknown. But, unlike so many others, Whedon tends to leaven his work with humor and character traits that amuse and surprise.

Astonishing X-Men was created as a showcase series for Whedon but he was accompanied by acclaimed artist John Cassaday, who brought a photorealistic style to characters that have tended to be drawn with great exaggeration by artists ever since their 1963 debut. Grounding the visuals with Whedon’s writing style made for one of those magical pairings which seems to happen with less and less regularity.

Cassaday’s visuals work wonderfully on the printed page but less so given the limitations of the motion comic format. Serialized for the web, these have been collecting in a series of DVDs from Shout! Factory and Torn is the latest installment, out this week. As noted when we reviewed Dangerous, motion comics is this weird hybrid that is really a modern day version of the cardboard cutout animation first used in Marvel Super-Heroes back in the 1960s.

Wisely, they retained as much of Cassaday’s artwork as was practical and the dialogue has that Whedon ring, although as usual the voice casting leaves something to be desired. Cassaday worked with Atomic Cartoons and Neal Adams to bring some life to his four-color efforts.

Torn adapts issues #13-18 and pits the merry mutants against the less merry Hellfire Club – featuring Xavier’s twin sister Cassandra Nova, Emma Frost, Perfection, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and the deadly Sebastian Shaw. We learn that the enigmatic Emma Frost is conjuring up a psychic project of the villainous alliance because she was being blackmailed by Nova. Whedon also pauses to deepen Scott Summers by letting us learn of a childhood trauma that manifested in his losing control of his optic blasts.

Whedon’s affection for teen characters remains evident as it is Kitty Pryde who winds up saving the day this time.  He has some fun with the simmering Kitty/Colossus relationship, displaying some nice character-based humor. Similarly, when Emma plays mind games with the team, it mixes painful memories with humorous situations, giving us some fresh insights into the team.

The six chapters, totaling 81 minutes, are nicely adapted into animated installments and keeps the momentum moving even when the visuals are overly static. If you love this run in all its incarnations, then you want this. Or you could wait a bit and get all the motion comics series on a Blu-ray, coming later this year.

This book — collecting the cartoons Mauldin created for syndication from July of 1945 through the end of 1946 — cannot be fully appreciated by justreading those cartoons. Luckily, Willie & Joe: Back Home also includes a long, in-depth introduction by Mauldin’s biographer Todd DePastino (Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, which I reviewed in a round-up of comics-creator bios), which explains exactly how, in those cartoons, Mauldin was systematically dismantling all of his good will and success from the war years by doing the one thing an editorial cartoonist must: fearlessly telling the truth as he sees it, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.

Post-war America didn’t want to hear what Mauldin had to say; it was ready to turn back to isolationism, crony capitalism, racism, and a casual disdain for most of the rest of the world. But Mauldin had America’s ear after his hugely popular and fearlessly honest Up Front war cartoons, and he was going to keep saying what he had to say as long as he had that ear, no matter what. It didn’t last that long, and it ruined the career he had at the time — Mauldin could have made a fortune, and settled into a long and very comfortable life as a mildly left-wing all-American cartoonist, if he’d bent with the wind — but it’s a glorious thing to see with the proper background.

The worst thing, for a modern eye, is how obvious and uncontroversial many of Mauldin’s points seem now: yes, the FBI really should have worried more about lynchings, and war profiteers were bad, and education is a good thing. So Back Home would not be nearly so impressive without DePastino’s introduction — you need to see what Mauldin was fighting against to realize how hard he was fighting.

Mauldin’s art was as strong as his writing here, too: the early cartoons here especially have a loose, flowing line and lots of ominous, slashing blacks. But it’s the subject of the cartoons — and what that implies about the world in which those things had to be asserted loudly — that has the most impact here. Back Home is a fine book by one of the 20th century’s best cartoonists, and an important historical document — as much as, if not more than, his more famous wartime cartoons.