Tagged: ComicMix

Neal Adams does the ComicMix Big Weekend Broadcast

The weekend is here – and the ComicMix Pop Culture Buffet is wide open with healthy servings of sold out Marvels, stuffed bookshelves from DC, a sprinkling of Michael Ian Black, Neal Adams laying claim to Batman, farewell to Rourke & Tatoo and a bit of hard love from the guy we loved as Lamont Cranston, "clutching forks and knives, to eat the bacon…"

Lots of Wonder Woman from the 40s and the black-and-white 50s, revisit one of Superman’s various deaths, and we put some uncomfortable music to the Dark Knight. All this and all that, by pressing this button:

MARTHA THOMASES: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

  • News
  • April 21, 2007

3178_2_001-7722403The horrific events this week at Virginia Tech have elicited the usual pompous political rhetoric about the evils of Hollywood entertainment – violent video games, rap music, movies and television are to blame. “Our kids are being trained to be murderers,” thunder the politicians. “They learn to shoot at their enemies instead of reasoning with them. They become calloused by this violence, which dehumanizes others. Let us regulate this evil, lest our children slaughter us in our beds.”

Except that’s not how it works. If the media were that effective, we would all be effective code crackers, physically fit from our active lifestyles, enjoying out fabulously large New York apartments. That’s what the non-violent media teaches.

I’ve been a non-violent activist since high school, where I regularly risked expulsion by distributing an anti-war magazine. I dropped out of college for 18 months to work with the War Resisters League, and I now serve on the Board of Directors for the A. J. Muste Institute (http://www.ajmuste.org). Doing this work, I’ve met a lot of people who are deeply and thoughtfully concerned about popular culture, and think it degrades people. After decades of rational and reasonable conversation, I need to disagree.

In Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, author (and sometimes comic book writer) Gerard Jones examines why children enjoy playing at violence, and why it can be a good thing for them. If I may grossly over-simplify an entire book into a few sentences, he says that children play to work out their feelings, including anger, frustration and helplessness. It’s far better to pretend to kill the monsters with rayguns or laser beams than to hit another kid because he’s got better stuff in his lunchbox than you do.

Kids aren’t the only ones who feel this way. As a human being and a New Yorker, I face frustration dozens of times a day. The traffic lights are slow, the tourists don’t know how to walk down a city sidewalk so other people can pass them, my neighbors don’t clean up after their dogs. I think about killing them all the time. Because I’m an adult, and because I understand that actions have consequences, I don’t do these things. Instead, I watch Kill Bill or read Punisher.

I also understand that other people have feelings. This understanding did as much to shape my politics as anything else – I saw people on television, dying in Viet Nam, realized I didn’t want to die, and the people I saw, even the Communists, probably didn’t want to die, either. From there, I could see that the people making the decisions to go to war weren’t the ones fighting, but they and their friends were getting rich. (more…)

MATT RAUB: Your weekly Who review!

  • News
  • April 19, 2007

picture-1-6586209Hey gang, Matt Raub back again, and that can only mean one thing – it’s Who time! So here we are, already a quarter of the way through another explosive year of Doctor Who. And what better time to start the season three story arc than in the 727th produced episode, beating out all of the Star Trek series combined!

In the episode, entitled “Gridlock,” the Doctor and Martha travel on their third voyage together, this time to the future city of New New York. Some of you may remember that we’ve been to New New York, and fairly recently (Don’t worry, Martha brings that up too). Last time, the Doctor and Rose visited a sick friend in very chic hospital above ground, but this time we find our traveling duo deep in the city’s bowels and on the New New York Motorway, which reaches all the way to New New Jersey. Fun thing about this motorway is that, due to the traffic, it takes about 10 years to go four miles. Well, in all the chaos, Martha is kidnapped by two motorists hoping to get into the express lane. The doctor then does his doctor thing and declares he will find her if it’s the last thing he’ll do.

The greatest part of this episode isn’t a quirky part of dialogue, or interesting plot point, but the way the episode was shot. The majority of this episode is going from car to car, whilst the doctor searches for Martha. Now, each car is shot in the exact same set, just with a change of furniture and a few new actors. This makes for an incredibly cheap budget for the episode, and while this is completely unnecessary for the BBC’s top rated show, it reflects some of the ingenuity that American TV lacks. My hat is tipped to executive producer and episode writer Russell T. Davies and the boys and girls overseas for this particular stunt.

Back to the episode, while looking for Martha, the doctor comes across an old buddy – in fact, the same old buddy he came across the last time we were all in New New York: The good ol’ Face of Boe. Those of you who remember the last encounter with that giant head-in-a-jar, remember that Boe said he would meet the Doctor a final time, and then he would tell him the great secret. So now here we are, and that big secret is? **SPOILER WARNING**

(more…)

DENNIS O’NEIL: Who knows what evil lurks…? Part 2

  • News
  • April 17, 2007

Suddenly, the air was full of bats!

The “air” here is metaphorical and if you’d allow me to fully ripen the trope, possibly to the point where it emits a faint odor, it might read, The air of popular culture in the 30s and 40s was full of bats.

Let’s see.  There was a Mary Roberts Rheinhart novel and an early talkie adapted from it, both called The Bat, and there was a pulp hero also called The Bat and, a bit later, another pulp do-gooder who labeled himself The Black Bat.  Am I forgetting anyone…?  Oh yeah.  A comic book character that was introduced in Detective Comics #27, dated May 1939, as Batman.  Like an estimated eighty percent of your fellow earthlings, you may have heard of him.

And, again metaphorically, standing behind the Batman and maybe some of the others was one of the greatest pulp heroes, The Shadow.  The writer of the early Batman stories, Bill Finger, made no secret of his admiration for the Shadow novels.  He went so far as to admit that the Shadow’s influence on his batwork was extremely direct when he told historian (and author and artist and publisher) Jim Steranko, “I patterned my style of writing Batman after the Shadow.”  And: “My first script was a take-off on a Shadow story.”

Which brings us to Anthony Tollin.  Remember him?  I introduced the two of you a couple of weeks ago in this very feature. I told you that a company Anthony owns has been issuing reprints of the Shadow books. Recently, he sent me an early copy of one of those books, titled Partners of Peril, and suggested that I might want to compare it to the first Batman adventure, The Case of the Chemical Syndicate. 

Of course there are differences.  After all, the Shadow novel is probably around 50,000 words long and Batman’s debut is six comic book pages.  But there are also similarities.  I won’t even try to describe them all – see Robert Greenberger’s ComicMix article, or Anthony’s text piece in the book itself – but they are manifold.  In a phone conversation a few hours ago, Anthony mentioned the most obvious, among which are:

  • Both are about a – yes! – chemical syndicate.
  • The heroes of both get involved in the proceedings while visiting a law-enforcing friend.
  • Both feature virtually identical death traps, which each hero beats in the same way.
  • Both heroes offer the same whodunit-type explanation at the adventure’s end.
  • Both heroes spend a lot of time on a rooftop after a safe robbery.
  • The denouements of both stories are, again, virtually identical.

Et cetera.

As I wrote in the earlier column, anyone with even the dimmest interest in pop culture or comics history, or who just wants to sample the kind of entertainment that kept pops or granddad reading by flashlight under the covers, or who’s just in the mood for capital-M Melodrama combined with capital-H Heroics, might want to see if the Shadow has anything for them.

For me, the stuff has another aspect, one which is as modern as hip-hop. But that’s for next week.

RECOMMENDED READING: Awww…you know.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

MIKE GOLD apologizes to William Shatner… and Denny O’Neil

  • News
  • April 16, 2007

mikegold100-6415215I realize the whole concept of a public apology has become somewhat tainted, but I hope Mr. Shatner and Mr. O’Neil each accept mine in the spirit in which they are intended.

When the first episode of Star Trek was aired, I thought the show was rather lame. I had just turned 16 and I wasn’t all that much of a teevee viewer. That summer I took up an interest in a young woman who was a dedicated Trekker, long before the term was invented. Ergo, my interest in the show waxed. As we headed towards the awesome events of 1968 my interest in television in general waned as, sadly, so did my relationship with the aforementioned young lady.

As Star Trek’s popularity picked up in syndication, I managed to catch all the episodes, but with growing popularity grew derision towards its star. I found the jokes made about Mr. Shatner’s stylized performance to be hilarious, and I even did my own on radio. At the time I knew better: I remembered his fine performances in The Twilight Zone (perhaps the most famous episode of that praiseworthy series), on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (where he co-starred with both Leonard Nimoy and Werner Klemperer), and most significantly, in the lead on The Andersonville Trial, an astonishingly brilliant teevee movie directed by George C. Scott and co-starring Cameron Mitchell, Richard Basehart, Jack Cassidy, Martin Sheen, Buddy Ebsen, Albert Salmi. That’s one of the best casts ever assembled for a broadcast, and Shatner – its star – was more than up to the task.

Mr. Shatner proceeded to healthy runs on numerous series, but the jokes went on and on. My own attitude began to lighten up when I realized he had a strong sense of self-awareness about Captain Kirk. His own parody of the character in the movie Airplane: The Very Stupid Sequel (I think I’ve got the title right, but iMDB doesn’t list it as such) was brilliantly self-effacing. I figured somebody else wrote that part. But his performance as William Shatner at a Star Trek convention on Saturday Night Live – the famous “get a life” moment – well, even if somebody else wrote it, Shatner wasn’t playing a character. He was playing himself with a truth and honesty essential to successful comedy.

Damn. That was good.

Since then, Shatner showed his comedic prowess in a variety of television commercials, most notably those for Priceline.com. But the world moved and changed when David E. Kelley hired him to play the part of Denny Crane for a run on The Practice, knowing the show was to spin-off into Boston Legal, unless ABC changed its mind (ask our friends – off the record – at DC Comics about Lois and Clark). (more…)

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (Again)

  • News
  • April 11, 2007

fg2-8270183The Sci-Fi Channel is going dipping into the golden age of comic strips and resurrecting Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon for a new television series.

Eric Johnson has been named as the latest actor to portray Flash in this radical reimagining of the series.  Johnson is best known to ComicMix fans as Smallville’s Whitney Fordman, quarterback and love interest for Lana Lang.

Dale Arden, Hans Zarkov and Ming the Merciless have yet to be cast with production of the 22 episodes set to begin in, where else, Vancouver on May 1.

The series will debut on the channel in August, date and time to be announced.  Rick Rosenthal, who worked with Johnson on Smallville, and has also handled Sci Fi’s The Dresden Files, will direct the first two episodes.  While the original strip featured the story of the planet Mongo threatening Earth and Flash journeying into space to save his planet, the television series will dramatically alter the premise.  Mongo will now be another dimension with Flash giving up his original polo in favor of other pursuits and being located in the pacific northwest.

The last time a live action Flash was on the small screen was in 1954 in an eight episode series starring Steve Holland, who later provided the visual look for James Bama’s Doc Savage paintings.

Flash Gordon has been previously portrayed by Larry “Buster” Crabbe in the three Universal movie serials from the 1930s and later, by Sam J. Jones, in the tongue-in-cheek Dino DeLaurentiss travesty from 1980.

ELAYNE RIGGS: Polly wanna press release!

  • News
  • April 11, 2007

elayne200-2304378When I was first offered the position as ComicMix‘s news editor, Mike Gold outlined his vision for how I was to treat press releases. Rather than parroting verbatim everything I read or was sent, I should first determine the release’s newsworthiness, then I should rewrite everything that I felt merited ComicMix‘s attention in my own words wherever possible.

I could not have been more delighted.

I think you readers probably sense how rare this is, particularly in today’s media-saturated and propaganda-laden world. To be fair, the notion of a supposedly free press on bended knee before the people and stories it covers has been spoken of in the U.S. since at least the Reagan era if not before, but the lapdog evolution seems to have accelerated exponentially under the current administration. So, now more than ever, it behooves journalists to try to shoot down that sorry legacy wherever possible.

But hey, this isn’t world-shaking events, it’s pop culture. What’s the big deal?

The big deal for me has to do with the constant conflation of providing actual news with filling the need for websites to have new content on a daily, even hourly basis for fear of losing eyeballs and facing a corresponding drop in ad revenue. And that’s a by-product of, and to be expected in, our hyper-capitalist society. But that’s presumably where the difference between quality and quantity comes to the fore.

At this point I feel I should step back and assure you that I believe press releases have their place, and I don’t blame other pop culture news sites — many of which are run by personal friends — for repeating them verbatim. That’s one reason I don’t feel the need to; so many others have already done that job. I don’t consider my standards to be necessarily higher, just different. This could be due to my ready admission that I’m an opinion writer rather than a trained journalist. (No, not all bloggers are automatically journalists, although there are any number of writers out there who are good at both.) So perhaps I approach press releases differently than someone with more journalistic experience.

For instance, when I read a press release from a big comics company whose entire point is that such-and-such a book has sold out its print run, the first question I ask myself is “What was the print run? How many actually sold?” After all, this information is readily available after the fact from a number of sources (ICV2 comes to mind), so it shouldn’t be any sort of secret. Yet of all the press releases I’ve read in the two months I’ve been at this ComicMix gig, only one has given an approximate number for the press run which sold out, and that was the item I ran because that was actual news. (more…)

Grindhouse to amoeba?

  • News
  • April 10, 2007

10m-3779307Grindhouse executive producer Harvey Weinstein has been on a spree explaining why the movie  tanked last weekend. Without revealing the fact that the reviews and word-of-mouth generally noted people’s tastes running towards one of the two movies on the double bill and against the other – with little consensus on which is better – Weinstein said the three hour running time was a major deterrent to sales. Certainly, film exhibitors agree.

So he’s floating a trial balloon. He’s "thinking" about rereleasing Grindhouse as two individual movies: Robert Rodriquez’s  Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. That should do wonders for this weekend’s box office.

But here’s Weinstein’s dirty little secret: when they made Planet Terror and Death Proof, extra footage was shot. Yeah, that’s always the case. But in the case of these two movies, a lot of extra footage was shot. Enough to add at least 20 minutes to each movie. The plan, of course, was to release "extended versions" on DVD and to seperate the movies for some overseas audiences. Now, it looks like these extra 40 minutes (give or take) is becoming Plan B.

Thus making Grindhouse ironically the longest trailer ever released.

You can listen to Matt Raub’s review on today’s ComicMix Podcast (below) or do a search for his ComicMix print review, which we ran last week.

Convention reports collected

  • News
  • April 10, 2007

Seek and ye shall find!  Yesterday we talked about Heidi Meeley’s efforts at consolidating links to reports about the recent Emerald City Con.  Today we find two more comprehensive ECC link posts, from Laura Gjovaag and Tom Spurgeon, Tom calling his contribution "Collective Memory" which was just what we were hoping someone would start.  We’re sure somewhere on CR Tom has gathered all his Collective Memory posts, but we can’t find them in a cursory glance at his resources page.  Then again, we couldn’t find ComicMix listed either.

Yet.

Our week in review

  • News
  • April 8, 2007

This is the week ComicMix went interactive, adding our comments feature and Active Conversation/Latest Comments windows at the right.  Rest assured there’s much more to come, but in the meantime here’s your weekly catch-up on our regular columns:

And I think it’s high time I got caught up myself on Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s latest podcasts:

Listen to ’em as you work on your taxes; that’ll take the edge off!

(more…)

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