Tagged: ComicMix

Happy 25th Anniversary, ComicMix comics!

  • News
  • November 2, 2009

Twenty-five months ago today, ComicMix debuted our first new comics online, the return of GrimJack in the tale of the Manx Cat, a series that is now available in print from our friends at IDW. It was followed within the first week by EZ Street, Black Ice, Munden’s Bar, The Adventures of Simone & Ajax, and Fishhead.

*Okay, we’ve been so crazy busy around here that we completely skated past our two year anniversary at the beginning of last month. But now we get to have a 25th anniversary!**

**Look, if X-Factor can have a 50th anniversary issue this month and a 200th anniversary issue next month, we can have a 25th anniversary today. So there.

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Review: ‘Plastic Man the Complete Collection’

plastic-man-complete-collection-5677861There are many reasons why Plastic Man has endured as a comic character starting with the imaginativeness of Jack Cole’s stories. He was the first elastic hero. The first hero who started life as a criminal only to reform when he inherited his powers. He was also one of the few truly amusing animated series from the 1970s.

[[[The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show ]]]snuck in at the end of the decade, lasting two seasons from 1979-1981, and was a fun offering from Ruby-Spears. The 35 solo Plastic Man adventures have been collected by Warner Home Video in a four disc set, now available.

While Plastic Man: The Complete Collection
is the title, it’s not entirely accurate since the Comedy/Adventure Show featured segments dedicated to Baby Plas, Plastic Family, Might Many & Yukk, Fangface and Fangpuss, and Rickety Rocket and none are collected here.

The series, which benefitted from the writing talents of comics veterans Mark Evanier, Steve Gerber, Roy Thomas, and Norman Maurer among others, was playful in a way most other Saturday morning fare was not. The show arrived at a time when networks were overly concerned with cartoon violence and how viewers may try and imitate the antics seen on screen. As a result, their other recent offerings of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1960s and 1970s contained a ridiculous warning that they were not suitable for children. Tellingly, this collection does not include that warning.

While the animation team wanted to emulate Cole’s manic style, ABC insisted on a fresh approach which unfortunately left Plas saddled with the fawning girlfriend Penny (who subsequently married him and mothered Baby Plas) and Hula-Hula, the comedic sidekick in the Woozy Winks role. The rotund Hawaiian was given Lou Costello’s character and vocal characteristics which softened his buffoonery.  They globe-trotted from case to case aboard their jet, directed by their Chief, an attractive older woman who barely tolerated her ductile detective.

Each exploit pitted the trio against dastardly villains, most of whom desired wealth and power although a few had motivations that smacked of social relevance such as the Weed in the very first episode. The foes are nicely varied and interestingly, Toyman arrives for repeat appearances which is odd considering they never fought in the comics. In fact, only two foes from Plas’ comic books are used: Dr. Dome, introduced in the short-lived 1960s series, and Carrot Man, who debuted during his more creatively satisfying series from the mid-1970s.

Like Cole’s original stories, Plas reshapes himself into a variety of objects to go undercover and viewers see him since he retains his red and yellow costumed appearance. He never takes things too seriously and has some good quips to keep things light.

The episodes are supplemented with two special features. The first is a 14 minute mini-documentary on the character’s history and appeal. In addition to the usual talking heads of Jerry Beck and Mark Evanier, ComicMix’s own Alan Kistler contributes many cogent thoughts. The other extra is the unaired 10 minute pilot produced for the Cartoon Network in 1996 by a new generation of animators, including DC veteran Stephen DeStefano. It’s a very different look but equally amusing tale and one wonders why it was not picked up.

If this is the Plastic Man you grew up watching, then this is the DVD set you’ve been waiting for. If you’re unfamiliar with the character, I strongly recommend the DC Archives volumes reprinting the Cole stories which remain inventive and fun.

Review: ‘Stitches’ by David Small — a comics memoir of an amazingly bad childhood

Stitches: A Memoir
David Small
W.W. Norton, September 2009,
$24.95

You can’t write a memoir these days unless you had a bad
childhood – call it the Law of Oprah. You have to have some horrible secrets,
either your own or those of your parents/keepers/guardians, that you can
reveal, tearfully, to an enthralled TV audience when called upon. You may not
make it to that TV-show couch, since the competition for a bad-enough childhood
is fierce, but that’s the aim. Memoirs of anything positive are utterly passé –
even a book like Eat Pray Love needs to
start with heartbreak before it can get to happiness.

Then there’s the unrelated but equally unsettling
requirement that only non-fictional graphic novels can be taken really seriously by the outside world. From [[[Maus to Persepolis]]], from [[[Fun Home to Palestine]]], it’s only respectable if it’s real. As far as our mothers and cousins and next-door neighbors know, “graphic novels” means expensive comic-book stories about either superheroes or the author’s tormented relationship with his family.

[[[Stitches]]] is perfectly positioned at the intersection of those two publishing trends: it’s the true story of author David Small’s appalling childhood, told as comics pages with cinematic “camera motions” that will appeal to readers not used to reading comics. Even the art style Small uses in Stitches adds to the seriousness; Small has a sketchy, loose line of variable width here, strong to define the figures and lighter and looser for backgrounds, and washes in various tones of grey. In fact, the whole
book is grey – even the black line looks like just another shade of the murk.

(more…)

Fathers and Sons: reviews of Danica Novgorodoff’s ‘Refresh, Refresh’ and ‘The Big Kahn’ by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani

  • News
  • September 30, 2009

I should start by quoting something weighty – the most
obvious would be that old Tolstoy saw about happy and unhappy families – but
let’s take that as written, shall we? Comics have given short shrift to
families for the past seventy years – at least, the American comic-book
industry has, though strip comics grew fat and bloated on the hijinks of
aggressively “relatable” families for that long and longer.

Even the undergrounds – typically about countercultural
types, who occasionally complain about their parents but try to avoid them as
much as possible – and the modern alt-comics movement (Alienated Loners R us!)
avoided family dynamics. Sure, there are exceptions, from Will Eisner to art
spiegelman, but the average American comics protagonist is an orphan – or wishes
he was.

Maybe that’s starting to change, or maybe I just have a couple
of anomalies on my hand. Either way, today, I have two books where that isn’t the case – not to say that these dads might not be
dead, absent, or problematic, but they’re definitely part of the story. And
their sons care who, and what – and where – their fathers are.

Refresh, Refresh
A graphic novel by Danica
Novgorodoff, adapted from a screenplay by James Ponsoldt based on the story by
Benjamin Percy
First Second, October 2009,
$17.99

What do men do? For many in the comics reviewing world,
that’s an easy question: men punch each other in the face. But they don’t have Refresh,
Refresh in mind when they say that. This graphic
novel is set in a small Oregon town, just a couple of years ago, where most of
the adult men are off fighting with the Marines in Iraq. And their sons –
mostly Cody and Josh and Gordon, three highschool-aged boys who are at the core
of this particular story – talk about joining up when they’re old enough, or
working in the local factory, or maybe even getting out.

But Refresh, Refresh
is based on a literary short story, and if there’s one thing we all know, it’s
that there’s no getting out of a story like that – it’s all doom and gloom
until the moment-of-clarity ending. So this town is stifling and without any
options, the boys drifting – from backyard boxing to underage drinking in bars
to racing around on motorbikes and sleds – as they rebel without any fathers to
drag them into line. (The narration – presumably taken from the original Percy
story; I don’t want to blame Novgorodoff for any of it – is particularly
heavy-handed in that area, such as this sequence from p.83: “We didn’t fully
understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only understood that they
had to fight. ‘It’s all part of the game,’ my grandfather said. ‘It’s just the
way it is.’ We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh,
refresh, hoping they would return to us.”)

What they hit “refresh, refresh” on is their e-mail
in-boxes; that scene recurs several times in the story. Oddly, though, it’s the
only incursion of modern technology into a story that could otherwise be
Vietnam-era. They don’t follow their fathers’ platoon on CNN.com or an Armed
Forces website; don’t call each other on cellphones; don’t think about or track
or seem to notice the war on TV or the Internet; even their laptops seem to be
screwed down to tables, for all the moving they do.

Refresh, Refresh is a very traditional story about young men in
small towns; I could probably quote half-a-dozen Bruce Springsteen songs on
roughly the same topic, and with pretty much the same moral and tone. (And that’s
without diving into the world of the realist short story, where kitchen-sink
dramas almost require young men with promise to be squandered.) Novgorodoff
tells this version with a bit too much self-conscious artistry – too many deer
looking up at airplanes, too many of those explaining-the-theme narration boxes
– but she keeps the focus tight and specific, on these three boys and their
world, their choices and possibilities. A story like this is nearly always
about badchoices, though, so it
would be best to come to Refresh, Refresh with a MFA-teacher’s fatalism, and not expect anything so comic-booky
as a happy ending for the boys who punch each other in the face. (more…)

‘Superman/Batman: Public Enemies’ on Sale Today

  • News
  • September 29, 2009

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is released today in a variety of formats: Blu-Ray Hi-Def edition, a special edition 2-disc DVD, and a single disc DVD. Warner Home Video will distribute the action-packed movie, which will also be available OnDemand and Pay-Per-View as well as available for download that same day.

nightshade-01-1645282As you know by now, this animated feature is based on the Jeph Loeb/Ed McGuinness graphic novel collecting Superman/Batman #1-6. Bruce Timm is executive producer. Michael Goguen is supervising producer. Sam Liu is directing a script written by veteran Stan Berkowitz.
In the film, United States President Lex Luthor uses the oncoming trajectory of a Kryptonite asteroid to frame Superman and declare a $1 billion bounty on the heads of the Man of Steel and his “partner in crime,” Batman. Heroes and villains alike launch a relentless pursuit of Superman and Batman, who must unite – and recruit help – to stave off the action-packed onslaught, stop the asteroid, and uncover Luthor’s devious plot to take command of far more than North America.

ComicMix will be reviewing this in the near future. For now, enjoy the clip below.

Mark Millar To Rescue Superman After All?

  • News
  • September 22, 2009

It’s no secret that top comics writer Mark Millar wants to write the next Superman movie. He’s given lots of interviews, and ComicMix has run a whole bunch of news items about this going back over two years. The story stalled when it appeared such a move was not going to happen.

Now, maybe, yes.

It turns out Mark was misunderstood when it was reported Warner Bros. could not afford him. That seems logical for two reasons: 1) Warner Bros. can afford damn near anything, and 2) with the clock ticking loudly on their Superman movie rights and their miserable track record with this movie franchise, meeting the Wanted co-creator’s financial demands just might inure to everybody’s benefit.

Might. It’s Hollywood. No guarantees. According to Mark’s
board: “I don’t think I said they couldn’t afford me now. If I did I was joking
because writing Superman would be a massive payday so if I said that I was
obviously laughing at the time. It’s possible though as I like being glib.”

Mark had also stated “a very well-known American action director heard about my love of Superman, approached me and asked me to team-up with he (sic) and his producer to make a pitch.” Hmmm… I’m sure Warner Bros. appreciates the consideration.

Of course, there’s no word either way as to Warners’ feeling about the matter. We should know soon. In the Siegel estate fight, the courts mandated Warner Bros. produce a new Superman movie by 2011 or lose their rights to one of their brightest corporate jewels.

Stay tuned.

the-hunter1-6670019

Review: ‘Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter’ by Darwyn Cooke

the-hunter1-6670019Richard Stark’s Parker, Book One: The Hunter
Darwyn Cooke
IDW, July 2009, $24.99

Richard Stark’s Parker novels come out of a particular
period in literary history: the heyday of the disposable paperback for men.
Paperbacks had appeared in their modern form just before WWII, and servicemen
got used to carrying small paperbound books in whatever pockets they could jam
a book into. The boom continued through the postwar years, with a flood of
short thrillers, detective stories, and soft-core porn – all to stave off
boredom for a man waiting for dinner time on a business trip in some hick town,
or hanging out at the PX on his army base, or riding the streetcar home at
night.

[[[The Hunter]]] was
published in 1962, at the height of that boom – a good decade before the ‘70s
taught publishers that women were even more dependable consumers of paperbacks,
and the long shift to romances and their ilk began. At first glance, Stark’s
hero is right out of the mold of the great hardboiled Mikes (Hammer &
Shayne) – tough, violent, single-minded, implacable. But Parker was less
emotional than the usual hardboiled hero – cold where they were hot,
calculating where they were impetuous. Parker could kill when he had to – and he
did it quite a bit – but he never killed for fun, or just because he could. As
the Parker novels went on he avoided killing as much as he could, simply
because deaths attract more attention than he wanted.

Hardboiled heroes came from both sides of the
law – Mike Shayne and Mike Hammer were detectives, but there were plenty of
law-breakers before Parker, from writers like David Goodis and Jim Thompson.
They usually weren’t series characters, though: Parker’s amoralism went beyond
his own actions to his world, and his stories told how a master criminal could get away with it – if he was smart and tough
enough.

(more…)

Let’s gossip about gossip in the comics industry

  • News
  • August 26, 2009

It’s hot out there, and we just had a weekend or two without a major convention, so we’ve all been talking amongst ourselves. And as a result, we’ve been talking about… talking.

The major flare-up has been on Heidi MacDonald’s blog, chroncling a heated discussion between Gail Simone and Rich Johnston…

Sometime in the night, the marvelous Gail Simone went on Twitter and spoke thusly: Do We Need Tabloid And Gossip Comics Journalism?
which Rich Johnston picked up at the above link. Simone is no stranger
to the message board, so the debate continues in the link and its very
own Twitter topic.

…with comment thread cameos from Mark Waid, Mark Engblom, Kurt Busiek, and Dwayne McDuffie, and since the comment thread has closed down over there, I’m reopening it over here.

Let me throw in an example, and try to give some of an idea as to what we’re trying for here at ComicMix.

Very late last night, someone IM’d me that an editor had been laid off. Reasonably impeccable source, and I know the editor. Should I post it on ComicMix?

Well, no. If it’s true, I don’t think that person would appreciate personal employment issues being broadcast to the world. If it’s false, it’s even more damaging to their career and possibly the freelancers that editor employs. So there’s a good reason to hold back on it, until confirmation.

But wait! If that editor is truly gone, then that means that an entire line of publications goes down as well! Does that make it newsworthy then?

The scales tip a bit here. Because now you’re beginning to impact a number of other professionals (who I also know) who may suddenly find themselves out of work, and a number of businesses who will suddenly have their stock (and backstock) affected because books may be canceled.

Then it’s a puzzlement. In that case, there’s a case to be made for private gossip– check with the affected pros privately to give them a heads up, mayhaps. But it’s fluid. We make our choices day by day, and yes, we have our
own sacred cows and things we don’t like to talk about. We don’t want
to tick off publishers– we’re publishers. We don’t want to tick off
retailers, we publish print editions– but then, we also do electronic
versions of our books. We could pick on some websites when they go down, but then we look like idiots when we have technical problems.

My only personal take on it the matter? Always punch up. Picking on an editor who’s doing the bidding of a large company is fair game. Picking on an editor fired by a large company? No. Or, if you prefer, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Or, simply enough– what would crusading columnist Oliver Queen do?

Review: B.P.R.D., Vol. 10: The Warning by Mignola, Arcudi, and Davis

b-p-r-d-10-warning1-9243532

B.P.R.D. Vol. 10: The Warning
Written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; Art by Guy
Davis
Dark Horse Comics, May 2009, $17.95

[[[The Warning]]] is the tenth volume
collecting the adventures of the [[[Hellboy]]]-less Bureau for Paranormal Research
and Defense, and the first in what the creators are calling the “[[[Scorched Earth
Trilogy]]].” The afterword by co-writer John Arcudi claims that events will get
bigger and more dangerous from here – though he does note that this volume
includes, among other thing, “[name withheld] gets kidnapped, … entire fleet of
helicopters gets wiped out, and gigantic robots trample [name withheld] into
rubble.” And previous volumes of this series (and, of course, of the related Hellboy)
have been no slouch in the near-Armageddon sweepstakes – particularly [[[The Black Flame]]]. That’s a lot of promise, but Mignola’s fictional
world does always teeter on the verge of utter supernatural chaos, in his very
Lovecraftian way. It would be wise to take Arcudi at his word.

The Warning begins with the team going
in two directions at once, urgently following up recent events – Abe Sapien
leads an assault squad out into the snowy mountains to try to find and retrieve
the Wendigo-possessed former leader of their team, and the others have a séance
to contact the mysterious ‘30s costumed hero Lobster Johnson, whom they think
will have information about the robed man taunting and manipulating firestarter
Liz Sherman in her mind. But neither one of those leads works out as the
[[[B.P.R.D.]]] hopes, and, before long, they’re face-to-face with another
high-powered menace and seeing another city being assaulted by giant robots.

And yet, remember that note from Arcudi. The plot of The
Warning turns out to be just a warm-up; the antagonists here
are not the true enemies of the B.P.R.D. Near the end, that mysterious man
claims that he isn’t their real antagonist, either. The B.P.R.D. is
fumbling in the dark in The Warning, unsure of what the
real menace is, let alone how to stop it. But they go on, because that’s what
they do.

The Warning is a great installment
of a top-rank adventure series, filled with wonder and terror, eyeball kicks
and quiet character moments. It’s a magnificent brick in a more magnificent
wall, but it’s no place to start. If you haven’t read B.P.R.D.
before, go back to the beginning with [[[Hollow Earth
]]]– or, even better, go back to the beginning of Hellboy
with [[[Seed of Destruction]]]. But, if you enjoy adventure
stories with characters who don’t wear skin-tight outfits,
you should have discovered Mignola’s world by now.

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional
for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science
Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He¹s been
reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal,
mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.

Publishers who would like to submit books
for review should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew
Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.

Review: ‘Likewise’

likewise-lg-8171227Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag

By Ariel Schrag
Touchstone, April 2009, $16

One of the nice things about reviewing for ComicMix is that people send you things that I would otherwise not consider reading or watching. Such is the case with [[[Likewise]]], an autobiographical graphic novel by Ariel Schrag. She began illustrating tales of her life while a ninth grader and had previous published [[[Awkward and Definition]]] and [[[Potential]]], the latter having been nominated for an Eisner Award, and is currently being developed into a major motion picture with Schrag herself handling the screenplay. Her writing about her growing up an active lesbian also led her to be a writer on the third and fourth seasons of Showtime’s [[[The L Word]]].

Likewise, a 360-page work is dedicated entirely to her turbulent senior year in high school. It definitely felt like I was coming in on the middle with the players already established but as the pages turned, everyone came into sharper focus. Ariel was already publishing her comics through Slave Labor Graphics and applying to college while trying to manage life without Sally, her girl friend who is now a college freshman. Her parents have divorced and her mother is apparently enjoying a second childhood, much to Ariel and her sister’s displeasure.

From the start of the term through graduation, Ariel recounts the highs and lows, the anxiety that comes with being a lesbian, a girl, a high schooler and a child of divorce. In graphic detail, we see that she is quite sexually active, seeking love and affection, reaffirmation from others while pining away for Sally, who seems to have discovered sex with men. Sally’s relationship with Ariel forms the spine for the year whether Sally is physically present or not.

Schrag’s simple style is also a detailed one, altering the amount of texture to reflect her state of mind. We go from a few scratchy lines to incredibly vivid panels that put her bedroom and classroom on display.

Given the page count, Schrag invites us into her mind, which is turbulent and very much her own. The teens talk like teens, the adults clearly differentiated without the stereotype that all adults are clueless jerks. In fact, at least one teacher comes through as genuinely helpful and sympathetic. The concerns of October are entirely gone, replaced with new ones by Christmas. There are incredibly embarrassing moments such as the night Mom invites the girls to share a joint with her and other joyous times such as the outing to buy her first dildo.

The book suffers a bit from being a bit too stream-of-consciousness and you lose track of time or decisions she has made, especially the important ones like college. Her lettering reflects the artwork’s mood so can go from typeset to an illegible scrawl and could have paid more attention to clarity. Still, these are minor nits in an overall fascinating examination on one of today’s teens. They all have their own stories, but Schrag chose to document and share her own tale, which proves to be compelling reading.

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