Tagged: DC

If You’re Not There, You Just Won’t Get It – Conclusion, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • August 29, 2008

This is the last segment in this month long saga. If you are anything like me, you are sick of this. I mean four weeks of me reliving history is a bit much even for a guy who LOVES history. To that point, all I watch on TV is All My Children (the greatest show ever!), news, and The History Channel. I don’t even watch the shows I write or have created. I’m not kidding. I have never watched an episode of any show that I have been involved in.

I love history and I thought when I started writing this it would fill me with a wonderful sense of nostalgia.

Wrong. Now I’m just pissed.

Don’t get me wrong, Milestone is and will always be a BIG part of my life and career and I’m very happy to clear up some misconceptions about Milestone… particularly my involvement. Take a look at the previous installments to read about some of those misconceptions surrounding Milestone, Christopher Priest and DC’s “ownership” to name but a few.

Here’s my BIGGEST problem and the misconception that burns me to this day. There have been many, MANY articles and or books that have featured Milestone. A lot of them have said that I left Milestone quick, fast and in a hurry.

That, like the promise that Bush would be a good president, was a compete and utter lie. There’s more truth in the belief that the world is flat and women in L.A. don’t care about what you drive.

I was there the moment Milestone was created. I did not leave until two and an half YEARS after that. The writer Les Daniels (who’s books I enjoy, by the way) wrote in his book, DC Comics Sixty Years Of The World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes (1995) “A fourth partner, Michael Davis, quickly left to run Motown Animation.” (more…)

Millar and Harris Talk ‘War Heroes’ and Kirkman

  • News
  • August 28, 2008

kickass002-1458099Laura Hudson (Publisher’s Weekly, Comic Foundry Magazine) interviewed writer Mark Millar and artist Tony Harris at Midtown Comics.

Along with discussing their new series, they also shared their thoughts on Robert Kirkman’s recent video concerning creators pursuing original characters.

MILLAR: "To me, it just seemed exciting, the idea of doing a no-holds barred super-hero war comic. I touched on a lot of this stuff in The Ultimates 1 and 2. And a lof of theses ideas I was going to bring in to The Ultimates 3 but we thought, we’re never getting away with this … We just thought, why not just go out and do our own thing? And he same thing happened with Wanted … That started off life as a proposal for DC Comics … We took risks that we wouldn’t have done with company-owned characters … Our time’s finite. We’ll always own Kick-Ass. We’ll always own Wanted … I do think there are a couple of good reasons for working at Marvel and DC. Kick-Ass would not sell … if we weren’t the Ultimates guy or the Civil War guy."

Go to Laura Hudson’s own blog to check out the full video interviews.

Given You A Number, by John Ostrander

  • News
  • August 28, 2008

It’s a good thing for this column that I listen to NPR. I don’t know if I’d have the number of column topics that I’ve had without it. This time I was listening to a debate between a former college/university president and the head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The topic was whether the drinking age should be lowered to 18. I like to think I would have been more Pro on the topic back when I was 18 myself, but the fact was in those days I was so square I was cubed.

Both sides had pretty fair arguments, but the one that struck home most for me was this: a young man or woman can sign up for the Armed Forces, be taught to kill, be put in situations where they can be killed, and are expected to exercise quick and accurate decisions between friend and foe, even when the foe dresses like everyone else. Yet, those same young people cannot be expected to responsibly decide how much to drink. They can die for their country but they can’t have a beer because they’re too young.

Is it just me or does anyone else think this is pretty screwed up thinking?

Both eighteen and twenty-one are “magic numbers.” Are we really “adult” by either one of those birthdays? Some folks are, some aren’t. Some never are. If you’re one of those whose criterion for voting for a particular candidate is whether or not you would want to have a beer with them, then you’re not old enough to vote. I don’t care how many birthdays you’ve had; you’re not old enough. (more…)

Truthiness in Advertising, by Elayne Riggs

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  • August 27, 2008

The 2008 Democratic convention is currently well underway. It being the Age of Reality Shows That Aren’t Real, every bit of spontaneity is of course tightly scripted to allow for maximum media control, not unlike all those Beijing Olympics stories that practically write themselves. What you see is pretty much what they tell you you’ll get.

As a society, we seem to have inured ourselves to accepting style over substance as the norm. We judge books by their covers all the time — even more so when we look at comics. First impressions are the lasting ones. We expect what’s on the cover to reflect what’s inside, often because we’ve been assured that it will. When the cover artist’s style doesn’t jibe with the interior art, the result can be a bit jarring. When the cover art misrepresents the story within, we can feel cheated or used.

And that’s all well and good when it comes to consumer entertainment. We’re used to being lied to, it’s all part of the advertising fake-out. If a certain type of cover art moves product, the actual interior content is irrelevant from the seller’s point of view. We accept (some more grudgingly than others) that we’re going to be subjected to this little dance every time we buy, and buy into, our culture of mass-produced entertainment.

The problem arises, as it usually does, when this mentality shifts from the fictional to the real, and we find ourselves judging people by their “covers.” (more…)

ComicMix Six: Batman’s Super-Powers

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  • August 26, 2008

green-lantern-batman-6452727There’s an upcoming story in the Superman/Batman title that will involve our long-eared Dark Knight getting superhuman abilities (albeit, temporarily). Writers Michael Green and Mike Johnson have been doing great work on the title, so this promises to be an entertaining tale.

But did you know that this won’t be the first time Batman has been given super-human talents? Here are just some of the more interesting adventures that have occurred when Bruce Wayne wound up gifted with "power and abilities far beyond those of mortal men."

PLEASE NOTE: I am not including times where Batman used technology to help him out, such as a suit of armor or a rocket pack or New God weapons. Nor am I including times when he got powers for only a few pages, such as when he borrowed Hawkman’s wing-harness and Nth metal belt or the time that Hal Jordan let him try on his Green Lantern power ring for a minute. Those times may have been cool, but they lasted for only a scene rather than a fully story. Likewise, I am not including any Elseworlds tales, so deal with it.

 

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Paul Levitz on Comics, DC and the State of the Industry

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  • August 24, 2008

dclogo-00-5982662During San Diego Comic-Con, ICv2 conducted a fairly comprehensive interview with DC president/publisher Paul Levitz to chat about the state of the comics industry and the recent past, present and potential future. The interview was broken down into three parts, and each of them has some worthwhile questions and answers from DC’s head honcho.

From Part One, some frame of reference for the decision-making process when it comes to which characters/titles to put the spotlight on:

Some people think that Watchmen is a risky movie for presenting comics to a broad audience because it’s so dark. What are your thoughts on that?

The great successes are always the things that you can’t prove in advance will work or will not work. You get a Superman because it’s a departure from what was there before. There were ancestors of him in the creative process, but it represented a leap forward. And the same reason that my predecessors were nervous about putting him on the cover of every issue of Action Comics for the first few until they got the sales figures in, were the things that in part created the potential for him to be the breakaway at this time. I don’t think there’s a lot of mid-ground for Watchmen. I think it will either be very successful or it will be a passionate cult favorite. Everything we’re seeing so far indicates to me that we have a good shot at it being a breakaway.

From Part Two, an interesting observation of the economic status of what DC believes to be the typical comics buyer:

Do you predict any differences in how sales in the different channels will respond to the economic conditions?

The comic shop owners are still more vulnerable to the high intensity-high value customer. Luckily a high proportion of our customers are in industries that have been doing relatively well—high technology kinds of things tends to pop up fairly frequently in the descriptions of jobs in our field, so hopefully that’ll be sustaining. The bookstore side of the world, I think, is just vulnerable to all of the challenges that book publishing is having now. Even if the graphic novels are a very bright spot in their world, and they seem to be, book publishing is not having an easy time right now.

From Part Three, some insight regarding DC’s plans for webcomics and their Zuda program:

The screen is a powerful method of delivery for a younger generation and it’s going to be part of our business one way or another, hopefully in a very complementary fashion. I think we start doing print stuff on Zuda in early ‘09 in the current schedule. And that will be an interesting test to see how that translates over.

 

‘Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe’ Joker: “Want to see a magic trick?”

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  • August 23, 2008

At the Liepzig Games Convention, Midway had revealed the latest characters to appear in Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe. And is cool as it was to hear that Deathstroke the Terminator will be getting his videogame debut (we’re not counting the animated Teen Titans game), nothing beats game producer Hector Sanchez demonstrating the Joker’s fighting moves for the Game Trailers television show.

Proving once and for all that some DC characters will have finishing moves, the Joker shows how to end a fight with style. See for yourself below. (Warning: It’s rated “M” for a reason.)
 
 

Manga Friday: Lawless, Winged, and Unconfined

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  • August 22, 2008

Poking through the stack of manga to be reviewed, earlier this week, I noticed several books featuring characters with wings of one kind or another. Quick to sense a theme, I dragged them together, and here they are:

Koi Cupid, Vol. 1
By Mia Ikumi
Broccoli, April 2008, $9.99

Koi Cupid is an all-ages series about cherubs-in-training – yes, cute little girls in white outfits, running around making people fall in love. It’s not quite as kawaii (cute, often cloyingly so) as it could be, though, so I came to think of Koi Cupid as actually fairly restrained.

(Of course, that’s by manga standards – recalibrate your cuteness detectors from American settings, or you’ll be instantly deafened by the alarm.)

Anyway, the story focuses on three cupids-in-training: Ai, the cheerful one; Koi, the shy one; and Ren, the way-ahead-of-the-others one. They’re taught by a full cupid named Rin, who is deferring her own promotion to Guardian Angel to continue to mentor them. Kou actually is a guardian angel who pops in for added firepower now and then; Sister Yuuri is a winged, talking cat who supervises the cupid training program, and Lizette is a sneaky demon who tries to foil their work, but whom Ai wants to be friends with. (more…)

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“Mortal Kombat vs. DCU” Adds Wonder Woman and Deathstroke

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  • August 22, 2008

normal-greenlantern-render-00-7075831JK Parkin over at Blog@ reports that Midway Games has released the identities of two more characters in the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe videogame: Wonder Woman and Deathstroke the Terminator. A preliminary rendering of Wonder Woman is available on the site, as well as a rendering of Green Lantern (seen here) and a series of screencaps from the game featuring Green Lantern in battle, as well as other DC characters (including Joker, Superman and Catwoman).

The announcement was made at the Leipzig Games Convention, and along with the DC characters, Midway also announced the return of Mortal Kombat characters Raiden and Kano in the new iteration. The game is scheduled for release this fall. 

If You’re Not There, You Just Won’t Get It, Part 3, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • August 22, 2008

 

This is part three of my Milestone Media story I began two weeks ago. If you are reading this segment first, please read the other two installments, not so much for background but so I don’t look like a complete moron.

On a faithful day I walked into a Milestone meeting and was met with a pointed finger and this statement directed at me.  “I cannot work with this man.”

Now there are those in the industry who see me as overrated, lucky or a con artist.  That’s partly because my public persona is over the top. I tend not to explain a lot about how I do stuff, I just do it. I have never been one to share information about details on certain aspects of my business. Let me try and clarify what that means: if you invite me to a party and I say no, that’s all you are getting. You are not getting a detailed description why I’m not going or what else I may be doing or instead of going to your party. To me no just means no. It does not mean that you are a bad person, it does not mean I am. It just means no. Look; I just don’t pay attention or care about what or why anyone does anything.

I never ask personal questions when I get a no. I don’t care why you make a decision; it’s your decision. I have no right to expect an explanation from you unless it affects me in some way that matters to me. I was that way in 1991. I’m still that way in 2008 but I’m less hardcore about it.

So when a Milestone member pointed his finger at me and said “I cannot work with this man.” My first reaction was anger. I knew what I was doing to build Milestone and resented the fact that I was being put on the spot with this bullshit. I thought at the time it was all motivated by my personality, and some of it was. In retrospect I realize another part of the issue with me at the time was my methods and how I did things.  The meeting went on for a while and became heated.

Wait a sec.

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