Once again, a look into the future, with some very interesting looks at the past, including the reprinting of a comic that was never released in America in the first place, the infamous Elseworlds 80 Page Giant that was pulped because of concerns about Superman’s babysitter.
And of course, a whole lot of #3 issues, which is traditionally the issue where Spider-Man guest stars.
Shall we? Surely!
As usual, spoilers may lurk beyond this point.
We talk more with Allison Scaglotti on the rest of WAREHOUSE 13‘s third season, her reaction to the cancellation of sister SyFy show EUREKA and her character’s “dark side”. Plus Marvel continues to play coy with the resurrection of The Human Torch.
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Where do you draw the line between fantasy and reality? Can that line be the same for everyone, or can it be redefined from person to person? Those questions are addressed in the charming and quirky Griff the Invisible, opening nationwide this Friday.
Griff lives in a fantasy world, one with electronic surveillance and a red hot line phone connecting the costumed Griff with the commissioner of police. He is an athletic threat to the scum and villainy that prowl the streets of an unidentified British city. The real Griff literally blends into the scenery as shown early on by the writer/director Leon Ford. He works in a nondescript job, trying to keep to himself but becomes the butt of jokes from office bully Tim.
His only friend appears to be his older brother Tony, who has protected his brother and intimations are made that Griff has suffered in the recent past, forcing his sibling to relocate his life in order to keep an eye on him. Tony, though, has met Melody and is besotted despite her own shy and quiet ways. She lives in her own fantasy world, certain she can find the exact point where her molecular structure can line up with that of a wall allowing her to pass right through the seemingly solid barrier. While Griff has trouble interacting with the exterior world, Melody functions better but is clumsy and apt to trip over her own feet with amazing regularity.
When Griff and Melody meet, it is also the meeting of two complementary fantasy worlds, igniting a truly unique love story. (more…)
A Larkspur native was charged with insider trading Thursday on allegations he made nearly $200,000 by buying Marvel Entertainment options before the comics publisher was acquired by the Walt Disney Co. in 2009, federal authorities said. The SEC said Toby Scammell turned a 3,000 percent profit in less than a month.
My Mary gets pissed-off about a lot of commercials because they’re so stupid. I remind her that, in most cases, we are not the target audience for the product. At 62, I’m rarely the target audience for most products unless they’re for erectile dysfunction or, as I like to call it, Limp Dick Syndrome.
Most products have a targeted audience, and that includes comics. In fact, it has a primary and secondary audience and it might surprise fans to know that they are the secondary audience. Who is the primary audience? Distributors and retailers – or, at least, they have been.
A quick review/primer on how comics are sold: when comics are printed they are shipped to distributors who then solicit the sale of the comics from retailers (traditionally direct sale comic book shops) who have pre-ordered the books based on how many they think they can sell. The books are then, hopefully, sold to a public who comes into the shops and buys them off the shelves.
That’s the trick. If the books don’t find their ways to the shelves, they don’t get sold. The distributor has a catalog in which the books are advertised and where and how they’re placed can determine how many copies of a given book are ordered or if they are ordered. The retailers’ goal is to sell out each book each month. Why? Because they’re stuck with each book they don’t sell; the books are non-returnable. It makes better business sense to order too few than order too many especially when you look at the volume of titles out every month.
The primary goal of the comic book companies is to make money which translates into how many books they sell. They want to convince the distributor to give them bigger space in the catalog so they can attract the eye of the retailers so that they will order more or at least the same amount as the previous month. (Many retailers I know automatically reduce their order by so many percentage points every month unless the book is in the top twenty. They assume readers drop off after a certain point. Why do they assume that? Experience.)
How do the big companies do that? They stage events – crossovers, multiple covers, guest stars (Wolverine or Batman everywhere!), revamps, new creative teams, new directions and so on. The companies hope that the fans will get excited but the real reason is to get the primary target audience to order more. So the stories that the secondary audience – the reader – sees is largely dependent on what grabs the primary audience.
And all that’s going to change. The small independent creators are proving that they can sell their comics online or in digital form direct to the fans. And the big companies have taken notice. DC is making its book available online the same day they go on-sale in shops. If it’s successful, expect everyone else to follow and fast. The secondary audience will become the primary audience.
What will that mean in terms of story? It means things could get real interesting. More on that next week.
(Editor’s note: This column was supposed to be posted on Sunday morning. That’s what the editor set everything up for. But it didn’t happen. We think this is because the editor is an idiot. Our apologies to John and all the Ostranderites all over the globe.)
A little over a week ago, the United States of America was on the verge of defaulting for the first time in its history. The chaos isn’t over – witness the roller coaster ride of the stock market over the last seven days – but that week the pundits on radio, on Fox and MSNBC and CNN, and on The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert, conservatives, liberals, progressives, Tea Baggers (excuse me, I mean Tea Partiers) – everywhere you had ears and eyes in working order, people were bloviating (to borrow a word from Bill O’Reilly) about the #1 question on everyone’s minds….
What If The United States Of America Defaults?
Mike Gold and I spent hours on the phone talking about the possibility – well, to be truthful, I was the one ranting about the goddamn Repugnanticans (my own coined word for what passes as the party of Lincoln these days) while Mike –who would be described by people like Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Karl Rove and Rick Perry and Dick Cheney as nothing but a typical gadfly of the lefty Jewish intelligentsia cabal – tried to reassure me that the U.S. wouldn’t default. And in that strange way in which my mind equates things, the What If? and my column and comics and politics started swirling and mixing and merging and uniting and jumbling up all together like that giant melting pot America is supposed to be, and somehow I ended up equating the political wars of 2011 with a little Marvel comic book called What If…? and DC’s sundry imaginary stories of pick-your-favorite-DC-hero.
What If was a comic book I loved. The “Imaginary Stories” of DC captured my, well, imagination. They validated the child whom I had been, the fantasist that is still there, has never left me, and I know never will. That girl was always asking questions, always dreaming, always wanting more; she believed – still believes – that the world is more than we know, that magic is real and impossible things do happen. Things like, What If? I lay on my back and stare into the blue sky long enough, I’ll be able to see through and into and past it to the very depths of the universe, and maybe even all the way to the very end of the universe where I would see – what? God? Another universe? The Door at the End of the Universe? Things like, looking out my window late at night when the world is fast asleep and the lilac tree outside my window is gently stirring from the breath of the South Wind, perfuming my room with What If?
What better way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon than watching one of those guys from the land where it rains all the time?
This 80-minute feature produced by Respect Films and Sequart contains interviews with Morrison, along with various folks he’s worked with and inspired throughout a thirty year career writing everything from All-Star Superman to Zenith, and just might give insight for what he’s going to do when he reboots Action Comics next month. (Not included is the story of how I saved Grant’s first Doom Patrol story from being completely incomprehensible.)
Enjoy.
Some time ago, J Michael Straczynski approached Colleen Doran about developing a new look for Wonder Woman for a possible, more fantasy-oriented version of the comic series. Obviously, this did not happen. But JMS gave her permission to post the sketches…
via The JMS Wonder Woman you didn’t see | A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran.
“This isn’t about humanity! This isn’t about the future!”
So said a member of the Outcasts cast late in the show’s abbreviated run and it’s a shame because a story set in the future should be about that very thing. Creator Ben Richards wrote earlier this year,
“The inspiration behind Outcasts was the desire to tell a pioneer story, and the only place you can do that really now is in space.
“I wanted to explore second chances, most fundamentally whether humanity is genetically hardwired to make the same mistakes again and again.
“The stories that kick start the series are intense, and hopefully moving, but the world view is never cynical or willfully pessimistic.”
In other words, he was hoping for the critical success of Battlestar Galactica but told stories more worthy of Space: 1999. The BBC series ran eight weeks earlier this year while it came to America in June to meet the same dismal critical reception. Now, BBC Video releases the complete series on a three-disc set.
Never heard of the show? That says a lot about how poorly received it was on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a serious-minded SF series, a counterpoint to the more over-the-top SF from England including Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Primeval. Sadly, it may have suffered more from self-importance than bad production.
Set in the middle of the 21st Century, mankind has ruined the Earth and its survivors have been coming in drips and drabs to the world of Carpathia, a mere five years’ travel distance. The remnants of humanity are trying to forge a new society but they all come with such baggage that fresh starts seem impossible. We join them ten years after the first colonists arrived and long after regular contact with the nuclear-devastated Earth was lost. A ship, perhaps the very last from Earth, arrives as we begin the series. We then see how life tries to work with the Protection and Security team keeping the peace while the Expeditionaries goes foraging for foods and medicines while studying their new home.
Richards wrote five of the eight episodes and may have had good intentions, but his internal story logic and execution left a lot to be desired. There’s a sprawling, attractive cast ill-served by their individual storylines and they never really gel as an ensemble. His talkative scripts rob the show of momentum and its slow pacing, reminiscent of 1999, doesn’t help.
His characters all feel like ones we’ve seen before, in far better science fiction concepts. There’s the President (Liam Cunningham), the madman (Jamie Bamber), the better former VP (Eric Maibus), the man with a secret past (Daniel Mays), and so on. It’s an international group, trying to reflect humanity so there’s Maibus the American, Bamber the Brit, and the South African (busty model Jeanné Kietzmann). If only we grew to care about them.
About the freshest element in the series is the notion of the Advanced Cultivars, artificially created humans designed to survive in the alien environment and blamed for unleashing a virus that killed many of the colony’s children, threatening the humans’ future.
The thing is, each episode should be advancing stories and themes but there are a lot of retreads and flashbacks and no real sense that the society is settling in. Still, there’s something, some quality to each episode that keeps you watching, keeps you hoping things get better. By the sixth episode, things feel like they are finally coming together then the subsequent episode spins its wheels and the final episode ends on a less-than-compelling cliffhanger. One that will never be resolved because the ratings dropped so dramatically that the series was yanked from its high profile time slot after five airings and dumped on late Sunday nights when good British telly watchers had gone to sleep. The day after the finale aired, the BBC announced the show’s cancellation.
The episodes look fine in high definition and there was at least some interesting thought into the colonization of this alien world that is as bleak as the stories told on its surface. One of the set’s extras if a set tour for Forthaven, which details the thinking. The other is “Reach to the Stars”, a featurette that has cast and crew try to convince you they’re doing something unique and wonderful.
You can judge for yourself whether this was a missed opportunity or hidden gem. Either way, these eight installments are all you’re ever going to see of this world and its dreary inhabitants.
In the mid-1920’s, an up-and-coming young animator had a brief encounter with an up-and-coming child star. Although they only met in passing, Mickey Rooney remembers Walt Disney as “a very charming man.” More than 50 years later, in 1981, Rooney would find himself starring in one of Walt Disney Studio’s most beloved animated films, The Fox and the Hound. Rooney voiced the character of Tod, an orphaned fox cub who forms an unlikely friendship with Copper, a coonhound voiced by Kurt Russell. The film also stars Pearl Bailey, Pat Buttram and Jack Albertson. The Fox and the Hound and its sequel The Fox and the Hound 2 will be released in a 30th Anniversary 2-Movie Collection on August 9, 2011.
Although he is quick to deny it, Mickey Rooney is the definition of a Hollywood legend. With a career that spans nine decades, he has defied the odds in an industry that often typecasts performers. He got his start crashing his parents’ vaudeville act while still a toddler and, just a few years later, he became a silent film sensation; starring in the popular “Mickey McGuire” shorts. In the 1930’s Rooney made a successful transition to sound films, headlining in the long-running “Andy Hardy” series and teaming with his friend Judy Garland in such classic musicals as Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy. Rooney was awarded a special Juvenile Oscar at the 1939 Academy Awards ceremony and the next year was nominated in the competitive Best Actor category for Babes in Arms, the first of four Oscar nominations. He also won an honorary Academy Award in 1983 in recognition of 50 years of memorable film performances. Having also won an Emmy and two Golden Globes by that time, many actors would be content to rest on such precious laurels but Mickey Rooney, now 90, continues to work on stage, screen and television and recently wrapped a cameo role in the highly anticipated Walt Disney Pictures Holiday 2011 release, The Muppets. (more…)
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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