Tagged: Batman

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.

 

Demons Speak Directly To You!

The choices are many and the product is great this week on the comics and DVD shelves, from clever trade paperback collections to classy hard covers and some nifty DVDs – it’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas – and ComicMix Radio previews it all, just in time for your holiday hinting!

Plus:

• Now that you’ve seen Demons Of Sherwood – FREE right here on ComicMix – get the inside story from creators Bo Hampton and Robert Tinnell on where it came from and where it’s going!

• Batman gets another sales boost from Ras Al Ghul

• Can you guess what the Top Ten Most Searched-For TV shows are on the web? Would you believe Heroes isn’t one of them?

Do What The Lady says – Press The Button!

Nudity and the Editorial Process, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 4, 2007

3202470258-9273812In my dotage, I’m coming to believe that a little adolescent rebellion is usually a good thing, and if the rebellion creeps a year or two into full, card-carrying adulthood, that’s okay. Much after the fact, I learned of some things my kid did in his Greenwich Village youth: I’m not sorry he did them and I’m glad I didn’t know of them until much later.

(As for myself…let me note that the principal of my high school told my mother after graduation that they never, ever wanted to see me again. I must have done something…)

Father does not always know best and either does Mother. Like generals, they’re fighting old wars and kids are caught in new wars, which means the kids have to find their own way, which is a process of experimentation, which means that Junior and Pops can’t and shouldn’t march in lock step,

We will now retire the military metaphors and explain what any of this has to do with our current topic, the evolution of superheroes.

(more…)

Speaking Ill Of The Dead, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • December 3, 2007

51zhqnwb11l-_ss500_-2489854As we were driving back east from two weeks in Detroit, Columbus, Chicago and Toledo – next time, I’m getting a campaign bus – we heard the news of Evel Knievel’s death. No, this blather isn’t about him, although I do think that saying you’re going to take your motorcycle and jump over 50 school buses loaded with nuns and orphans and then strapping rockets to the bike is cheating. Nope, this blather is about Irwin Allen, noted dead movie and television producer/director/writer and former cover story in Modern Asshole magazine.

Allen was best known for his disaster movies, “disaster” in the sense that the plots involved some sort of serious event (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure). His connection to Knievel? When I was at DC Comics back in 1976, he called me in a fit of pique about his upcoming movie, Viva Knievel! It seems he heard we were doing a big ol’ comic book teaming Superman up with Muhammad Ali, and he thought a Batman vs. Evel Knievel companion volume was a lovely idea.

I didn’t, and as it turned out somebody quoted my arguments to him. Irwin was more than mildly annoyed. He called to try to talk me out of it, not that the decision to make or not make such a comic book was anywhere near my capabilities at the time. His technique was rather unique: instead of sweet-talking me or convincing me of the error of my ways, he used invective and attack. He wanted to know where some 26 year-old pissant got off sabotaging (honest) a big Hollywood macher like him. He started screaming an unending list of curse words that would have impressed George Carlin. He threatened my unborn children, promised to destroy my career (coming short of “you’ll never have lunch in this town again,” as I was in New York City) and I think there was something in there about my mother and an orangutan.

(more…)

schepper__mike_hamme_60417h-4232768

Is Iron Man Mike Hammer? by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 27, 2007

schepper__mike_hamme_60417h-4232768So where we at?  For the past month or so, we have, in a scattershot and disorganized way, been discussing the various elements involved in the evolution of superheroes.  I don’t think we’ve come to any conclusions worthy of being preserved for the ages, nor should we: things change, darnit. But maybe a little tentative upsumming would not be inappropriate.

Upsumming:

Haberdashery: There is currently a trend away from putting superdoers in costumes, though the big bucks movie heroes are still wearing the suits and, judging from the films I know about that are in development, this will not change in the foreseeable future.  But most entertainment consumers — I’m excepting comics fans here — get their heroism, super and otherwise, from television and maybe because of tv production hassles, costumes aren’t common.

Powers: We’ve agreed (haven’t we?) that for a long time the superbeings of mythology and folklore got their powers from some supernatural agency: they were gods, or demi-gods, or friends of ol’ Olympus,  or something.  Or they were agencies of darkness — black magicians of one kind or another.  Then science became the rationale, most famously with Jerry Siegel’s extraterrestrial origin of Superman.  Last, and decidedly least, there was technology allowing the good guy to do his  stuff. And now…well, it’s anything goes time.  Look at the current television offerings: we have a superhero private eye whose abilities are due to his vampirism, which we can call magic; a technology-enabled superhero(ine); and a whole bunch of peripatetic whose gifts have “scientific” explanations, or so it currently seems.

(more…)

Shopping Bag People, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • November 24, 2007

As you read this, the shopping malls are jammed. Many opened in the dark, with special sales to attract the first shoppers. The news programs will have stories about how many people got trampled trying to buy an item marked down a lot, and perhaps a heartwarming piece about a child who buys something for a poor family.

It’s the holidays.

Most of the world’s religions, major and minor, celebrate the passing of the Winter Solstice when the days stop getting darker and the light begins to return. It is a hopeful time. Whatever your traditions, you probably enjoy gathering with family and/or friends, eating and drinking, celebrating the return of the sun.

In the United States for most of the last century, the holidays are also the time to balance the books. Stores that might lose money all year count on the fourth quarter – October through December – to turn a profit. The day after Thanksgiving is dubbed, “Black Friday,” because that’s the day the red ink should stop. (more…)

Power!, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 13, 2007

So you wanna be a superhero. Okay, where are your powers going to come from?

For years – nay, hundreds of years; nay, thousands of years – the brief answer was: From out there. Somewhere. The first superbeings in popular culture (the only kind there was, back then) were either gods, or pals of gods, or imbued with magical abilities, the origins of which weren’t necessarily clear or important. What was important was…wow! – look at what he/she/it can do! And so much the better if it, whatever spectacular thing it is, is being done for reasons I approve of.

That’s still what’s important. But our minds seem to be wired to want reasons for what we see, which is certainly why there’s science and may be why there’s art and civilization. But, oddly, once a reason is supplied, many of seem to be satisfied and require nothing further. The great cosmic snortlefish created the oceans? Swell, now I know why there’s all that water and what’s for dinner?

By the time Jerry Siegel got around to thinking up Superman in the summer of 1934, magic wasn’t terribly fashionable and it had long since become divorced from religion. But science…ah, science was going to deliver us and besides, it was real. And Jerry was a reader of science fiction, which, in those happy days, at least claimed to be rooted in physics and chemistry and astronomy and stuff like that. So it was natural, maybe inevitable, that he would give his übermensch a science rationale. Guy comes from another planet, sure – that’d be why he could be so powerful. Makes sense. Made sense to Jerry in 1934, probably would have made sense to me when I was the age Jerry was when he created Superman, if I’d thought about it.

(more…)

Wrestling And Killing… Batman?

headlocked-8162281Like the medium or not, you do have to admit that there are a lot of similarities between pro wrestling and comics. In years past, there hasn’t been a successful bridge between the two, but creator Mike Kingston is taking a totally new approach with his Headlocked series. ComicMix Radio talks to Mike about his project and his love of both wrestling and comics, plus:

• Fox waves the white flag & shelves 24

• A new X-Men story line heats up with a sold out comic

• ABC is going with Lost … no matter what

• Oh yeah, and they are killing Batman again?

Press The Button, or you get a chair to the head, ya jabroni!

A Few of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • November 7, 2007

elayne100-1811653Back in the days of Usenet, I used to hear a lot of variations of “Why are there so many negative reviews and so few positive ones?” As one of those reviewers who not only discussed the art half of comic books but who also wrote a lot of positive reviews in my 4½ years of doing Pen-Elayne For Your Thoughts, I would see this manifest more as “Why are the threads responding to the few negative reviews so long, as opposed to those on the far more numerous positive reviews?”

The answer was pretty self-evident to most of us reviewers. In general it’s much easier for people to perpetuate clever putdowns, or to pile on a negative thread, than it is to engage in the vocabulary of positive discussion. One of the things we would identify as a next-to-useless post would be someone merely typing “Me too” or “Ditto.” It added nothing of substance to the online dialogue, it just took up bandwidth. But it had the opposite effect of the real-life etiquette advice that “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It became “If you can’t add something of substance to a discussion rather than just agreeing with the original poster, you’re better off not contributing at all.” I suspect that what some of them actually meant was “Bored now. You’re being too nice; throw us some raw meat.

And of course, that was a shame. I’ve never found it that hard to say good things about comic books. I love comic books. I buy and read quite a wide variety of graphic literature, and as I’m generally not in the assumed demographic for much of it I’ve learned to adjust my tastes accordingly — that is to say, there’s still some subject matter that doesn’t appeal to me, but I’ll generally try to give most of my chosen reading a fair chance, and I think I tend to be easily pleased. Nitpicking details, while worth noting in a review, has never weighed as important to me as how the work made me feel, whether it held together as a whole and moved me during the time it took me to read it.

(more…)

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 6, 2007

Before we get to this week’s official topic, a continuation of our discussion of how superheroes have been evolving, I’d like to remind you all that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I’m sure all you fans of the late 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel – and I know you’re legion – remember that this means that the development of an organism exactly mirrors the evolutionary development of the species.

Okay, now that that’s settled…consider any given story genre the organism and storytelling as a whole the species. The first stories, maybe told around campfires, were not long on characterization. According to some anthropologists, they were basically religious, an effort to give an identity to the forces that shaped people’s lives, the forces they were already acknowledging, maybe, with rituals. Not much characterization in these yarns. They were more about what happened – some deity decides to create the world – than the nuances of the protagonists’ personalities. As storytelling evolved, from an element of religion to entertainment, the characters began to have personalities, sort of, until by the time Homer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre the good guys and bad guys were acting for reasons peculiar to who they were. And by the time of Greek drama, which, again, was part of religious festivals, they were pretty individualized.

Shoot forward about 2,500 years…Along came comic book superheroes (as opposed to all the other kinds of superdoers, who are a bit outside our boundaries, though I’m sure they’re very nice) and…well, they weren’t quite as uncharacterized as those campfire deities. But we do find ontogeny-recapitulating phylogeny, sort of. Clark Kent was, after all, “mild mannered” and Lois Lane was ambitious, but the stories were plot driven – the stuff was more about what the heroes did rather than why they did it. (Batman comes close to being an exception; a few issues into his initial run in Detective Comics, writer Bill Finger actually motivated him. But unless there are a lot of stories I haven’t read, the emphasis on what makes Bruce Wayne tick came later.)

(more…)

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks