Approximately several hundred websites are reporting Dennis Hopper might be guest-villaining in Doctor Who next season. ComicMix is now officially number several hundred and one. It’s also being reported by the London Sun and the British magazine TV Times.
Evidently, the one-time Easy Rider star and two-time G. W. Bush supporter is a big Whoer. When the BBC discovered this, they moved with uncommon speed to get at least a cameo out of the noted actor.
The Big ComicMix Broadcast is back with a bang after the 4th with a tip on how to latch on to those Ultimate Spider-Man #100 covers, Girls gone wild in our Summer Reading Rundown and The Top Ten in the Comic Shops last month … plus the eternal question of when does a hit not sound like a hit?
Press The Button – maybe your crusty old Dell will transform into an IPhone?
There’s a thread going on over on The Engine where Warren Ellis is practicing knuckleballs with Molotov cocktails again and taking a snapshot of comic book piracy. The thread has some interesting points, and it reminds me who really made piracy popular.
Not the first comics pirate, incidentally — people have been making fake copies of comic books as far back as Warren’s Eerie #1 and, later, Dave Sim’s Cerebus #1, and it probably predates that with the undergrounds. Nor are we discussing printers overprinting copies and selling them without reporting them to the publisher — we aren’t even talking about scanners of comics, who have been doing it and trading them ever since scanners started showing up at work– in fact, the first bootleg scans I ever got were from other comics professionals, the folks whose oxen are theoretically getting gored.
No, I’m talking about the guy who made it important to pirate comics, to distribute scanned copies far and wide, and to make it cool to read bootleg copies of the Internet.
His name? (more…)
There are some parties at San Diego that are impossible to get into. Sometimes, it’s better to get into a nice quiet upscale dinner, and even those can be amazing — I happened to be at one two years ago where the food was great and the stories were stunning.
But this might be the topper for the year: Joss Whedon (Astonishing X-Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain America’s surrender in Civil War) is auctioning off five seats at a dinner table with him at the San Diego Comic-Con this year. Bidding is up to over $4000 a seat with a week to go. Here’s a link to one of the seats, but check on eBay as there are five separate ones and eBay didn’t set this up as a Dutch Auction.
Dinner will be on July 27th in San Diego, and 100% of the proceeds will go to benefit Equality Now. Here’s Joss making a speech for them:
Hat tip: Heidi MacDonald.
The fifth issue of Helix, a free on-line magazine dedicated to publishing stories too extreme for regular print SF/F magazines, has just been published, with new stories by Esther Friesner, Brenda Clough, and others.
Locus, the newsmagazine of the SF/Fantasy field, has mailed their July issue, and posted a profile page about it on their website. The July issue includes interviews with Peter S. Beagle and Paolo Bacigalupi, results from this year’s Locus Poll, and lots of news and reviews.
There’s a new issue of SF Site for July, with lots of reviews, a listing of new books received, and whatnot.
Strange Horizons has an update every Monday, and this week is no exception; new this time is a story by Jerome Steuart and a poem by David Lunde. (more…)
It’s America’s birthday and what better way to celebrate than with fireworks? Yeah, I know – the Fourth of July was yesterday but if your neighborhood is anything like mine, people have been setting things off since last weekend and will probably continue through this weekend. So let’s see if we can set off a few here.
I hold these truths to be self-evident.
Item: Democracy is a radical experiment and one that could still fail. The notion that all men – and, as we have come to understand it, all women – are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights was certainly a radical notion in a world where the right to rule came by birth or by force of arms. Instead, we maintained that People could, should, and had the right to govern themselves and the right of any government to rule rested within the consent of the People. That’s just crazy talk – or so much of the world in the late 1700s thought. That was chaos – anarchy. Heck, it scares a lot of people today and that includes our own citizens, a lot of whom would be more than willing to trade freedoms (well, certainly OTHER peoples’ freedoms) for a little more security for themselves and their own. In the overall scheme of things, folks, two hundred twenty five years is nothing. We blow it and it’ll just be noted as an interesting aberration.
And we’re really close to blowing it. Voting is a pain and we can’t be bothered to turn out in real numbers even for the Presidential elections; we abide rigged elections and voting machines; we let ourselves be led like lemmings by polls and attack ads.
I’m not a political innocent; I was raised in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. I know the difference between political theory and political reality. We, the People, increasingly vote for appearances rather than bother to look at issues. We assume that, because America has been around for two hundred years, it will be forever. History says the odds are way against that. We are an experiment and the results are not yet in, folks. (more…)
Harper’s magazine has an excerpt from Karl Schroeder’s Crisis in Zefra in their July issue, but the whole thing — a fake non-fictional account of a near-future African peacekeeping mission that Schroeder did for the Canadian army a few years ago – is also available online, in a form that makes it look creepily real.
Eric Flint posts “snippets” of all of his current novels on his blog – that sounds like little bitty things, but each day he posts good-sized chunks, and he does dozens of “snippets” for each book. For example, today there’s snippet 30 of 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, snippet 17 of The Mirror of Worlds, and snippet 52 of Pyramid Power.
John Scalzi (the most recent winner of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer) posted a list of his work that’s available for free online, which includes his entire first novel, Agent to the Stars. (Agent is pretty good, actually; it’s the first thing I read by Scalzi, and it made me want to track down his other books.)
Tobias Buckell has posted the first third of his current novel Ragamuffin on the ‘net for everyone to read.
BestSF.net has posted Jonathan Sherwood’s story “Under the Graying Sea,” originally from the Februarty 2006 issue of Asimov’s.
Don’t people have day-jobs? Accordiing to Variety, Transformers made $8.8 million on Monday, playing on 3,050 screens around the country. Today, it adds another 500 screens, and will probably make even more money. The studios behind the movie (Paramount and DreamWorks) hope to earn more than $100 million by Monday, in what they describe as a 6 1/2 day weekend.
Ratatouille earned $7.5 million. Live Free or Die Hard made $4.3 million.
Transformers stars upcoming ComicMixer Mark Ryan as the voice of Bumblebee.
Mark Evanier shows off the cover to his upcoming book Kirby: King of Comics, and explains what this book is (a big, heavily-illustrated look at Jack Kirby’s comics work) and what his next book will be (a much longer, text-heavy biography of Kirby).
Columnist Alex Stein, in the Guardian, likes to argue with a friend about the use and importance of science fiction. (He’s on the side of the angels) Sadly, Stein seems to be content to argue that there’s some good stuff out there amid the dreck, rather than calling the friend on his category error – the unnamed friend stacks the deck by using the new Transformers movie as the SF exemplar and “some new French slow-burner about adultery” as his example of “real life.” The equivalents of a good serious “real life” movie are movies like Gattaca, or 2001, or Blade Runner; if you want a “mainstream” comparison movie on the same level as Transformers, you’ll have to dig up something like Monster-In-Law. Defenders of SF need to point out that there’s just as much “real life” dreck as fantastic dreck – and our dreck at least has cool pictures to go with the lousy plots.
The Baltimore Sun reports on an exhibition of Star Wars paraphernalia at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore. The materials are all from the collection of Thomas Atkinson, who runs the Star Toys Museum. (more…)
“We’re never gonna beat this if belief is what we’re fighting for.” – John Mayer
As Americans gather today to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence 231 years ago, many of us find ourselves in quite a different place than we believe our founders envisioned for this country. Each day brings more tragic results of the radicals currently in power thumbing their nose continually at Benjamin Franklin’s observation that “Those that would give up essential liberty in pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security” and frightening the populace into constant submission so they can retain this ill-gotten power. (Hang on — creating a climate of fear, isn’t that what terrorists try to do? Guess that means They’re Winning.) And without the assurance that our government will (or even can) do its job of seeing to the well-being of its citizens, many Americans do what people in their situation have done for centuries — they turn to institutions they believe will care for them, mostly institutions that “answer to a higher authority” in which they believe.
We’ve been talking a lot about perception and belief on ComicMix this past week. First Mike Gold tackled how people misperceive personal threats to their way of life when no such threats exist. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how these ideas get into their heads, and neither can anyone in the all-pervasive corporate-sponsored conservative-pandering media. Then I talked more about subjectivity and how some folks amazingly find the exact “evidence” to support their pet beliefs, rather than the other way around (using actual scientific procedure to observe first and then create a theory based on those observations). And the capper was John Ostrander’s column about dogma, rigid belief systems (whether religious or no) whose adherents will brook no dissenting opinions. The danger of dogma is the same as that of any fanaticism — that subjective perceptions are suddenly presented as objective ones, and individual beliefs replace reason and compromise with authoritarian systems such as theocracies.
And it ought to be obvious that theocracies are not Good Things in pluralistic societies because they leave no room for diversity of opinion. (more…)
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
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