Tagged: ComicMix

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BIG BROADCAST: John Ostrander Goes To The Bar!

insomniac_p1_jpeg-2458027There is no better way to end a week than a little trip to the local bar – and in comics the bar "local" to EVERYwhere happens to be Munden‘s!  For about 70 issues of GrimJack, Munden’s Bar was a fan favorite and now its coming back – and FREE – to ComicMix on Friday, October 5th. The Big ComicMix Broadcast sneaks you in the back door for a peek at the bar’s Grand Reopening as we talk with writer/co-creator John Ostrander and ComicMix rabble-rouser and editor-in-chief Mike Gold, plus offers a wake-up call for 24 Hour Comic Day, tells you how Nancy Drew (!) solves the DS (?), what Paul Dini’s up to, where Death Note is going, and how Daredevil sells out!

Pour us a cold one and PRESS THE BUTTON!

JOHN OSTRANDER: Devil’s Advocate – Iraq

  • News
  • September 27, 2007

john-ostrander100-2474439I’ve got something nibbling at my mind and perhaps the only way for me to sort it out is to put it into words. It has to do with our adventure in nation-building, a.k.a. the Iraq debacle.

I’ll start by saying that I was for the invasion of Afghanistan. Then and now, it seemed to me the necessary response to 9/11. Al Quaeda appeared responsible; they had their camps in Afghanistan with the full knowledge and support of the Afghan government, the Taliban. You get hit, you hit back at the ones who hit you. Hard. As Al Capone said, “That’s the Chicago way.”

On the other hand, I was not for the invasion of Iraq from the beginning and I said so. I didn’t buy the “imminent danger” from the “weapons of mass destruction,” especially since there were UN weapons inspection teams on the ground inside the country. The fact that the Bush Administration was so stridently insistent made me ask “What else is going on here?” At first I thought it was about the oil (and now Alan Greenspan says it was); I came to believe that it was a NeoCon vision of transforming the MidEast by creating a functioning democracy in the middle of it. Now I think it’s about the oil, about the NeoCon vision, and certain select Bush-friendly companies making a bucket of money there.

I believe that the NeoCons thought that the Iraqis in exile would just step in, set up a new government, we would be hailed as liberators, and it would all be done in six months. I believe it was on the agenda to do before 9/11 happened; that tragedy just enabled the Bushies to push the plan through without thinking it through. The only plan the current administration seems to have for dealing with the mess is to leave it for the next administration to clean up. Instead of nation building, we seem to have created a geographical area of chaos. It’s a constant drain on both our military and our national finances; Iraq seems like an open wound.

My disgust with all of this is long standing. We had no business going into Iraq in the first place. The WMDs were a lie and the Administration knew it or, at very least, should have known it. The Dems were elected to Congress on the promise to end the war and the low low low approval rating of Congress at the moment stems on their failure to even staunch the flow. Since I didn’t believe we should be there in the first place, it stands to reason that I think we should get out at first opportunity.

BUT. . .

Colin Powell is purported to have said to Bush about Iraq before the invasion that “If you break it, you’ve bought it.” And there’s my problem. I think there’s truth to that. Before we invaded, Iraq was a functioning country: it had electricity, people had jobs. Yes, it also had a murderous dictator in charge; lots of places around the globe do and we don’t seem to have bothered ourselves about them.

So now what have we got? Sect fights sect and sects fight internally and they all hate us. It’s chaos and we brought it. We, the People. This country. You, an individual, may have, like me, been against the whole misbegotten enterprise from the start but I’m talking about the collective We. The We that elected not only the President but the members of Congress that sustained him, as well as the Democratic Party that has no spine. (more…)

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The Girl and Her Dinosaur

  • News
  • September 26, 2007

sa-md-coverwrkng3-2733659Coming this October to ComicMix –The Adventures of Simone & Ajax! This is the story of Simone, a fun-loving 20-year-old girl, and Ajax, her friend who happens to be a small, green dinosaur. Together they find themselves in a series of strange and wacky adventures, taking them to many different lands, times, and places. Simone is not so much the leader of the duo, but more the instigator, looking to have fun and often acting before she thinks, getting herself and Ajax into trouble and so into their adventures. She’s not dumb, just over-zealous. Ajax, the dinosaur, is the more sensible of the two. While deep down he loves adventure, too, he’d rather ponder and worry before leaping into the fray.

Simone & Ajax’s adventures take them around the world, and off it, as well as to any time or place, be it Atlantis, the Moon, Santa’s Workshop, Victorian England or the grocery store. Sometimes strange adventure comes to them at their home in the ruins of Rene de Chartre Cathedral. Their adventures are "a bit like the best issues of Cerebus, and a mood that harkens Bone" (Toph, Overstreet’s Fan #21). It’s a buddy strip, but all in all, The Adventures of Simone & Ajax is a fun and exciting comics series that will attract readers of all ages looking for exciting, zany adventure stories.

Creator Andrew Pepoy was born in 1969. After abandoning such worthless pursuits as becoming the President or an accountant, at age 10, he decided to draw comics. Soon after, he met the classic Buck Rogers artist, Rick Yager.

After many years of publishing fanzines, and while still attending Loyola University Chicago, Andrew sold my first professional work and was soon working for Marvel, DC, and other major comic book publishers on such characters as Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, The X-Men, Mutant X, Scooby Doo, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Simpsons, Betty & Veronica, Godzilla, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, and many more. Starting in 1995 I also wrote and drew my own comic book feature, The Adventures of Simone & Ajax.

In 2000, he was asked to redesign the Little Orphan Annie newspaper strip, which he drew for the next year. Andrew is currently working on various comic books, including writing and drawing a revival of Katy Keene for Archie Comics, and developing new ideas for comic books and comic strips.

Andrew lists his influences as “Roy Crane, Dan DeCarlo, Russell Keaton, Bob Lubbers, Matt Baker, Alex Raymond, Charles Schulz, Mark Schultz, Steve Ditko, Enoch Bolles, George Herriman, Henk Kuijpers, Francois Walthery, Wally Wood, Bob Oksner, Don Flowers, and so many more.”

You’ll find Andrew living in a condo with a turret on the north side of Chicago with his wife (and assistant), Chris Atkinson, and two odd cats.

Here’s what Andrew had to say about the upcoming stories.

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MIKE GOLD: Enough Is Enough

  • News
  • September 24, 2007

14546__harvey_l-8584543There’s an old saying in the criminal law business, particularly as it applies to those who don’t have a lot of money: if you go to jail for something you didn’t do, pretend it’s really for something you actually did.

I don’t know if O.J. Simpson ever heard this, and – here’s the important part – I don’t care. So, of course, I’m going to write a whole column to explain why.

This sophomoric little sideshow has dominated the media while our nation is sinking further into the deepest of quagmires. And by “sophomoric,” I’m referring to what O.J. purportedly did this time around, by the Vegas dog-and-pony shows with the convenient tape recordings and Imax tapings, for all I know, but mostly by the media’s asinine coverage.

Here in New York, O.J.’s getting out on bail eclipsed the also-breaking-at-the-same-time story about how Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was denied permission to visit the World Trade Center site this week. Yeah, I know, the guy hates us. Fine. But a lot of our “enemies” have toured Ground Zero in the past six years. That’s been real easy, as we’ve been incapable of actually building anything there since 9-11. Iran wasn’t responsible for the bombings, and world leaders are permitted to attend the opening of the United Nations in New York each year. Even our oldest living bugaboo, Fidel Castro, has attended a whole bunch of times. So why are we being so bratty about this guy? He hates America? Everybody hates America. Thank you, Mr. President.

People want O.J. in jail because he got away with murder. I can understand that. Personally, I wouldn’t even hire Blackwater to bodyguard him – the job’s too risky. But let’s face it: O.J. got away with it. If you want to jail someone, try one of the clowns responsible for his prosecution. We know they’re no good in court. The great irony of the murder trial is that Simpson vastly overpaid for his legal team: the prosecutor’s office was so inept Harvey Birdman could have gotten him off. Their top witness was a compromised bigot, and their best evidence was a pair of gloves that did not fit. Gee, I know a lot of lawyers, and not one is dumb enough to let that go through.

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Fall into ComicMix

  • News
  • September 23, 2007

All hail the autumnal equinox, which crept in at 5:51 AM today!  Yes, we were awake for it, thanks to affection-demanding cats.  For us, autumn is the season of excitement and change, and that certainly applies to ComicMix, as you all know.  But one thing that’s staying the same is our great lineup of core columnists; here’s what we’ve had for you this past week:

Meanwhile, Mellifluous Mike Raub has reached that pinnacle at last, the hundredth Big ComicMix Broadcast!  Here’s that one and the ones surrounding it:

Way to go, Mike!

BIG BROADCAST’s Stories Behind The Stories

  • News
  • September 23, 2007

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Nine is the magic number here at ComicMix – nine days until the giant ENTER key is pressed and ComicMix Phase Two launches (sounds like a prop from the old BatCave, huh?). If I said things are busy, that would be an understatement, but we DO have the time to share a few things with you, following up on news heard this week on The Big ComicMix Broadcast:

• If you want to get a copy of that (one time only) Steve Canyon revival, here is the information direct from the folks at the USAF: "People outside the newsstand radius can buy single copies by calling
our customer service department (800.368.5718) or sending e-mail to
order@mil-mall.com. Each issue will cost $3 (plus $1.50 shipping) the
 week the paper is on the newsstand. Thereafter, it’ll cost $5 plus 
shipping."

• Feel an inner flair for clothing design? The place to go might be here, It’s the home for Viper Comics and their new Sketch 86 line of t-shirts, plus it ‘s where you can submit your own designs for cash and prizes.

• Shades of the original “soap" operas! Mobile and broadband content provider GoTV Networks introduced the initial chapter of a 10-episode made-for-broadband series with Tide laundry detergent called Crescent Heights (as in the West LA neighborhood). Available on here among other places. Ther series features the work of writer Mike Martineau from Rescue Me.

This week, look for more previews of the features debuting here free on ComicMix on 10/2. Meanwhile on The Big Broadcast, we’ll let those creators tell you about their projects in their own worlds!  And do we have to tell you it’s going to be a BIG week: Halo 3, the return of Family Guy, Heroes and Smallville and more – and, wait until you see what’s coming to comic stores in justa few days! 

Take a deep breath and meet us right back here for The Big ComicMix Broadcast on Tuesday!

MICHAEL H. PRICE: What’s A Fishhead?

  • News
  • September 23, 2007

jpg-cobb-irvin-s-7955816jpg-fishhead-title-page-3342739Continued from last week …

We had left Robert Bloch hanging in mid-conversation last week, speaking of Irvin S. Cobb as a forerunner of the “bizarre pulp” movement in popular fiction.

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (1876–1944) was a crony and occasional collaborator of Will Rogers, and a key influence upon Rogers’ droll sense of humor. He can be seen as an actor in such Rogers-starring films as Judge Priest (1934; deriving from Cobb’s folksier tales) and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), both directed by John Ford. It was for other works entirely that Robert Bloch remembered Cobb.

“Have you ever read Irvin Cobb’s ‘Fishhead’?” Bloch asked me around 1979-1980. “Well, if it was good enough for Howard Lovecraft to single out as a nightmare-on-paper [in the 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Fiction], then I was ready and willing to tear into it. Which I did. Changed my entire direction, that one story did.”

I can relate, all right. In 1995, independent publisher Lawrence Adam Shell and I set about to adapt as a graphic novel Cobb’s 1911 tale of righteous vengeance, “Fishhead,” in which a swamp-dwelling hermit of grotesque aspect runs afoul of malicious neighbors. If Irvin Cobb had drawn upon regional folklore to lend his title character a gift of supernatural communion with the wildlife, then our crew reckoned we must treat Cobb’s story itself as folklore – subject to sympathetic re-interpretation and elaboration as a condition of respect.

And otherwise, why adapt at all? Cobb would have done a greater service to scholarship than to popular literature if he had contented himself merely with compiling the various old-time rumors about reclusive souls presumed to possess spiritual bonds with the wastelands. The audacious job that Cobb called “Fishhead” backfired at first, accumulating rejections from one magazine after another on account of its unabashed gruesomeness and its sharp contrast with his gathering reputation as a sure-fire humorist. One editor, Bob Davis, of an adventurous magazine called The Cavalier, wrote to Cobb in 1911: “It is inconceivable how one so saturated with the humors of life can present so appalling a picture.”

But after Davis had relented and published the yarn in 1913, “Fishhead” proved a watershed, helping to trigger the so-called “bizarre pulp” explosion that would gerrymander the boundaries of mass-market fiction during the two-and-a-half decades to follow. By mid-century, when Cobb’s lighthearted and bucolic tales had become by-and-large forgotten, “Fishhead” was still reappearing as a magazine-and-anthology favorite.

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BIG BROADCAST: A Girl and Her Dinosaur

ajaxfront-2884329The Big ComicMix Broadcast starts our Second One Hundred with an exclusive preview of another Phase Two Project cooking up FREE from ComicMix. You take a cute girl, toss in a cartoon dinosaur and stir up a lot of wacky adventures and out pops Andrew Pepoy’s The Adventures of Simon & Ajax!

Plus Superman has the Deadline Doom, the Top Ten Comics & Graphic Novels are revealed and we play a game of “Where Did I Hear That Before”??

Simone likes people who PRESS THE BUTTON

MARTHA THOMASES: Hungry Heart

  • News
  • September 22, 2007

332903958-3622645Before he started to host The Daily Show, I saw Jon Stewart do his monologue on one of those charity benefits organized by Denis Leary. Comparing Yom Kippur to Lent and, therefore, Jews to Catholics, Stewart said, “You give up something for 40 days. We go one day without eating. Even in sin, you pay retail.”

When this is posted, I’ll be fasting. It’s true that, as a Jew, a woman and a New Yorker, I appreciate a bargain. However, that’s not why I don’t eat. It’s also true that going without a few meals is nothing new to me, being the compulsive bad dieter that I am. Most Saturdays, I eat a piece of fruit for breakfast and then, because I have a zillion chores, nothing else until dinner. So, this Saturday, I won’t have my morning apple. It’s not a big sacrifice.

The sacrifice is forgoing the errands. On Saturdays, I go to the Union Square Green Market. In the fall, it’s a riot of color and smells, with fresh herbs, heirloom tomatoes, summer and winter squash, and dozens of different apples, pears, peaches and pumpkins. For this city girl, it’s a reminder of the natural world, with its cycles of life and death, fertility and harvest. Going to the Green Market is a way for me to forgo the usual cerebral products with which I clutter my day, and to be a mom and a wife, caring for my family and being a part of my community. Plus, I get to talk to farmers, which is a rare and glamorous thing to do in Manhattan.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the culmination of the Days of Awe. I should have spent this time examining my behavior, accepting responsibility for my mistakes, and doing my best to fix them. Instead, I’m thinking about what I’ll be missing for one day. This is something I should fix. Ah, the circle of life.

There are many Jews who are fine people who don’t, for one reason or another, fast on Yom Kippur. There have been years when I haven’t fasted, when I went to work and ignored the holiday. I was in my twenties, determined to recreate myself as an individual separate from my family. For the last two decades, however, I’ve gone to services and enjoyed them. I enjoy them. It feels good to say the prayers on the same cycle every year, as my ancestors did. It’s funny to listen to the stomach grumblings of the people around me, the contrast between our spiritual and biological impulses.

Fasting is supposed to give your body a chance to detoxify, to eliminate the crud we accumulate in our regular lives. Fasting for one day probably doesn’t get rid of many toxins, but it allows me to clear my head, to consider how lucky I am to be able to go without food by choice, instead of being forced to starve by circumstances. Saying ritual prayers and fasting separates me from the mundane, and lets me see life as a glorious blessing.

When I walk out the synagogue doors, the air is usually clean and clear, and Central Park is bathed in sunlight. When the sun sets, and I dip my apple slice into honey, it can sometimes be so unbearably sweet that it makes my cheeks hurt. I’m so grateful to be alive that I know this year will be worthwhile.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess of all things ComicMix, promises to write about comics next week.

MariFran O’Neil On The Mend

  • News
  • September 20, 2007

MariFran O’Neil, wife of columnist, comics sensei, and dear friend Denny O’Neill, is recovering from a stroke she suffered late last week.  She’s out of the hospital, in a rehabilitation facility, and we have no doubt that she’ll be out and teaching her students very soon.

ComicMix sends best wishes for a speedy recovery.

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