Category: News

The Darkness and Will Ferrell

  • News
  • December 10, 2007

No matter what your holiday is, these next couple of weeks will be as fast paced as a Jack Kirby plotline. Here is a couple of quick hits for those “goof off" minutes I know you will grab:

• Landlord star Will Ferrell will be criss-crossing college campuses next February to promote FunnyOrDie.com and Semi Pro, his latest feature from New Line Cinema. The site will also release a new video starring Ferrell and his co-star Andrew Daly each week leading up to the film’s premiere on Leap Year Day, Feb. 29th.  The "Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die Comedy Tour" pairs Will with three of the site’s regular stand up comedians, Zach Galifianakis, Demetri Martin, and Nick Swardson. Meanwhile, if you have no idea what’s Will’s Landlord videos are yet – go here (http://www.funnyordie.com)

• Dale Keown returns to the Darkness, with The Darkness #3 in February. He will pencil a special flashback sequence in that issue scheduled for release in February 2008. Meanwhile, The Darkness #3 will feature two covers by Keown and Stjepan Sejic (First Born, Witchblade) and can be previewed here (www.topcow.com/darkness). (more…)

Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil Review

  • News
  • December 10, 2007

The old Fawcett Captain Marvel (as opposed to all of the other Captains Marvel since him) is a character that pretty much all comics kibitzers agree should be handled with a light, semi-humorous touch, kept out of tight continuity, and allowed to be fun. But we’re usually left deploring the situation when he’s given yet another grim ‘n’ gritty makeover to be “relevant” and to shoehorn him into continuity. But Jeff Smith is on our side – as a million comics bloggers have mentioned before me – and his Captain Marvel is much closer to Otto Binder & C.C. Beck’s than it is to Judd Winick’s.

Smith spent his first decade-plus in the comics industry working on one long story – the bestselling and critically acclaimed Bone – so the first thing The Monster Society of Evil does is prove that he’s not just a one-trick pony. (It also shows, by implication, that the center of gravity of the field has still not shifted: even a massively successful independent creator, who could do anything at all for his second major project, will still have a tendency to want to work on a superhero for the Big Two, featuring a character created decades before he was born and owned by an international conglomerate.) Smith, as we all suspected, is just a good storyteller, and the odds are that he’ll have a lot more stories to tell over the next few decades.

The Monster Society of Evil is a very loose retelling of the story from Captain Marvel Adventures of the same name, serialized over more than twenty issues during World War II. (Which, incidentally, proves that it wasn’t all “Done in One” stories back in the Good Old Days – there have always been different kinds of stories.) The original story was very much a serial, like the movie serials of the day, with cliffhanger endings and escalating dangers from episode to episode. It’s a fun roller-coaster ride, but, re-reading it these days, it’s also very much of its time. (more…)

Presidential candidate Ron Paul picks his super-hero favorite

  • News
  • December 10, 2007

ronpaul_flag-3417888As part of the run-up to the presidential primaries next year, ComicMix asked Texas Congressman Ron Paul who his favorite comic book super-hero might be.  We think this is at least as revealing as their favorite movies, favorite books, or favorite chocolate-chip cookie recipes.

Candidate Paul, running for the Republican nomination on a Libertarian platform, was happy to respond. From Congressman Paul:

 

"My favorite comic book superhero is Baruch Wane, otherwise known as Batman, in The Batman Chronicles.  "The Berlin Batman," #11 in the series by Paul Pope, details Batman’s attempts to rescue the confiscated works of persecuted Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, from Nazi Party hands. 

“Batman’s assistant Robin writes in the memoirs, "[Mises] was an advocate of individual liberty, free speech, and free thinking… and so, should I add, the Berlin Batman." Batman, a Jew in hiding in Nazi Austria, was willing to risk his life for the sake of the promulgation of freedom, and I find this to be super-heroic."

batman-chronicles-11-pg18-4306055

From The Batman Chronicles #11, written and drawn by Paul Pope, colors by Ted McKeever, letters by Ken Lopez. ©1998 DC Comics.

 

Let’s Go Burn Some Books, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • December 10, 2007

I haven’t seen the movie The Golden Compass, but I will, and soon. I don’t care if it’s a complete piece of crap – I want to see it because the Religious Right told me not to.

They say that sort of thing a lot. Here’s what pissed me off. They said the author of the books upon which the movie is based, Philip Pullman, is an atheist. They’re afraid that if your children like the movie, they might actually pick up the book and read it. Somehow, the book will destroy their belief in the unigod.

Now that seems a little paranoid to me, but even if it happens, well, damn, we sure don’t want kids to make up their own minds – overruling the evidently flimsy influences of their parents, their relatives, their pastors, and their friends just by reading a damned book, right?

This sort of thing frightens me. According to these folks, we live in a Christian nation, founded by good Christian god-fearing men who were really, really stupid when they built religious freedom into our Constitution.

I’ll tell you what scares me even more. Last week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, and I quote, “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.”  Say what? Historically, organized religion and its militant outreach has been an astonishingly awesome suppressor of freedom. That’s history, folks, and we’ve had a hell of a lot of wars, crusades, pogroms, inquisitions, cross-burnings, and Jihads to prove it.

“In recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning,” Romney went on to say. “They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.” (more…)

ComicMix columns burn brightly

  • News
  • December 9, 2007

As some of us celebrate the Festival of Lights, it’s time once again to catch up with our ComicMix luminaries and see what they’ve brought us this past week:

Remember, don’t fill up on too many latkes and donuts!

Bourne Potter, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • December 9, 2007

I have a special relationship with Jason Bourne. But, before I elaborate on my entirely self-manufactured rapport, let’s establish something at the outset. Bourne (and/or 24’s Jack Bauer, for that matter) literally wouldn’t exist without James Bond. You don’t think that all their initials being “J.B.” is a coincidence, do you? In fact, the late author Robert Ludlum created the Bourne book series with the brilliantly simple and engaging high concept of “what if 007 got amnesia?”

   

So, perhaps I should rephrase my declaration: I have a special “bond” with Jason Bourne. Dr. No was the first “adult” film I ever saw. The Bourne Identity is the most recent movie I saw with my brother at a cinema. I saw its sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, on Christmas Eve, the last day of my first tenure as Santa Claus at the Danbury (CT) Fair Mall. Sitting alone in a dark hotel room as the snow fell outside, watching director Paul Greengrass’ frenetic, yet somehow followable, chases on a hotel’s small TV screen – prior to heading out for a Christmas celebration with my family – created an evocative memory.

   

Now there’s The Bourne Ultimatum, out this coming Tuesday as a single, non-special edition DVD. I originally saw the film at its New York screening, but truly appreciated seeing it again on an HDTV, since the DVD remote control allowed me to slow down the frenzied editing so I could truly enjoy the jigsaw-designed chases and hand-to-hand battles (especially a frantic fight in a cramped apartment where Bourne proves that the book is mightier than the knife).

   

Although it remains one of the worthiest second sequels in film history, I still found the DVD lacking for two small reasons. First, despite truly fascinating featurettes on the action sequences – “Rooftop Pursuit,” “Planning the Punches,” “Driving School,” and “New York Chase” – character building “deleted scenes,” which were excised when Greengrass decided that he was making a “violent ballet” rather than a character-driven drama, and a doc called “Man on the Move: Jason Bourne,” none (or all) of them really don’t communicate how agonizing the film’s production actually was. (more…)

Tippy Tacker’s Yuletide Travails, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • December 9, 2007

tippy-tacker-1997-01-cover-7913124December of 1938 saw the arrival of an ad hoc comic strip called Tippy Tacker’s Christmas Adventure, signed by one Robert Pilgrim and distributed to the daily-newspaper trade by the Bell Syndicate.

The feature appears to have run its month-long course with little fanfare and only desultory, though complete, documentation of its passage. The microfilm archive in which I had found Tippy Tacker shows no advance promotion, no front-page come-ons, and no particularly prominent placement. The daily installments appear away from the formally designated Comics Page, plunked down at random amongst the general-news and advertising columns. Just a business-as-usual, matter-of-fact deployment, with no attempts to steer the reader toward a Yuletide-special attraction.

The piece came to light around 1990. I was rummaging through the files of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, my home-base newspaper for a long stretch, in aimless pursuit of who-knows-what. The Depression-era back issues had yielded considerable raw material for my contributions to the original Prowler comic-book series, along with motion-picture advertisements relevant to my Forgotten Horrors series of movie-history books. Robert Pilgrim’s Tippy Tacker cropped up during one such eyestrain marathon at the microfilm station.

Sometimes, obscurity alone is cause for a resurrection, even though many outpourings of the Popular Culture (“history in caricature,” as the novelist and cultural historian James Sallis puts it) will lapse quite deservedly into obscurity. But I happen to have built a career around the defeat of that Old Devil Obscurity — starting with the Forgotten Horrors books and progressing, or digressing, from there — and Tippy Tacker’s Christmas Adventure seemed to fit that pattern.. (more…)

Well, Not Quite Like A Virgin, a review by Mike Gold

  • News
  • December 8, 2007

If I were to tell you that a major British icon has returned, and you hadn’t read the headline above, what image would first pop into your head? Winston Churchill? The Union Jack? Pete Townshend?

Well, all those icons are still around, but I’ll admit that if I weren’t a comics fan, Pete jumping in his jump suit would certainly come to mind. But I am a comics fan, so that space in my filing lobe belongs to Dan Dare.

In case you didn’t know, Dan Dare was to the Brits what Superman is to Americans: their seminal comics hero. This makes Judge Dredd the Brits’ Spider-Man, which, to me, is a funny image. Sadly, Dan hasn’t fared quite as well as the Man of Steel, and he’s suffered through almost as many “reboots.” Created in 1950 by Frank Hampson, who drew most of the stories in that decade. A number of artists succeeded him, first and foremost the astonishingly talented Frank Bellamy. Since the Brits tend to favor (okay; favour) the anthology format, Dan Dare appeared in Eagle (after which the awards were named) and later in may different titles, including the birthplace of the “modern” British comics movement, 2000 A.D.; Dave Gibbons was among the artists on that venture. Much of his career has been chronicled in album reprints and he’s had his share of video games, audio dramas and spud guns.

Dare was a science fiction hero in the classic sense: perhaps more like Buck Rogers than Flash Gordon, but with the requisite sexless British stiff-upper lip. He’s been referenced in rock songs, and a band named itself after his Doctor Doom, a little green tyrant named The Mekon.

Okay. That’s the backstory. The new story is, Virgin Comics has leased the rights and relaunched the series, the first issue of which is on sale now. And it’s damn good.

This is no surprise. Garth Ennis and Gary Erskine are the creative team, under alternate covers by Bryan Talbot (pictured) and Greg Horn. Virgin honcho Richard Branson is a long-time fan and has also glommed onto film, television and video game rights. (more…)

For Better Or For Worse, Lynn Johnston Speaks!

  • News
  • December 8, 2007

For nearly three decades, artist Lynn Johnston has entertained millions with her daily For Better Or For Worse comic strip. Now, she has taken the already innovative property in a totally new direction – and she tells ComicMix Radio just what’s ahead. Plus

• Superman gets a new artist

• Dale Keown returns to Darkness… for a bit

• Another sellout for The Sword

• Meet the group that eventually became The Archies. Anyone remember The Detergents?

Hey! Lynn’s waiting to speak to you… so Press The Button!

Happy 57th birthday, Rick Baker!

  • News
  • December 8, 2007

Today is the birthday of one of Hollywood’s most employed make-up artists, Rick Baker. Baker made an impressive career start on The Exorcist, helping make the otherwise innocent Linda Blair into a believable demon. He went on to films like Star Wars, The Rocketeer, Men in Black, The Nutty Professor, Planet of the Apes, Hellboy and many, many others.

He was also the first person to ever win an Academy Award for Best Makeup for An American Werewolf in London (pictured here) and he’s won five more since.

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