Tagged: comics

I Pity the Poor Immigrant, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • December 8, 2007

According to my reading of the nightly news (between 4 PM and 7 PM, we watch CNN, BBC, and NBC), illegal immigration is a huge issue as we go into the primary season for the various presidential nominations.  According to various estimates, there are as many as 12 million people living in the United States who are in the country illegally.  Some entered legally, as students or tourists, and didn’t leave when they were supposed to.  Others snuck in without going through the proper channels.

Neither party has a consensus on what its position is, but, to greatly oversimplify, the Democrats want to find a way to more quickly legalize the illegals while the Republicans want to deport them.

My opinions on the subject are greatly influenced by the comics I read now and read growing up as a child.  As a DC fan, I know:

  • Superman is an illegal immigrant (since granted citizenship), whose adopted parents committed perjury when they claimed he was their biological child. (more…)
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Manga Friday: Wandering Assassins

  • News
  • December 7, 2007

gin-5066764Manga are just as full of fossilized genres as any other popular media, as I’m coming to discover. A case in point is this week’s haul: three series, all from the same publisher, all of which can be vaguely characterized as being about a wandering assassin.

OK, I’m stretching the term too far with the first book, Gin Tama. Our title character, Sakata Gintoki, is a samurai on a near-future Earth economically dominated by aliens, where carrying a sword has been outlawed. He doesn’t actually go around killing people for money – though he will kill them along the way to doing other things, if they really deserve it – but instead works various odd jobs, which tend to require violence by the end. At the beginning of the book, he picks up a sidekick, our viewpoint character, Shinpachi – who was also trained to be a samurai, but has few skills and is in the book mostly to be the reader identification character (pop-culture- and food-obsessed, slightly overweight, glasses wearing – these Japanese creators know how to pander like no one’s business). They pick up a third member of their team in the middle of this volume, but I shouldn’t give away her secrets ahead of time.

Gin Tama doesn’t take itself all that seriously; it’s clearly a historical story (set in the Meiji period, more or less) moved bodily into a SF setting, with only minor changes to make things fit. And, like a lot of comics, it’s easier to enjoy something mildly silly if it knows that it’s silly – Gin Tama is quite aware that it’s quite generic, and quite hard to believe, but it’s ready to entertain anyway. I appreciate that, even if I find the winking at the audience and obvious melodrama a bit much. This isn’t the greatest samurai comic out there, but it’s a fun samurai comic that I don’t expect will ever get terribly serious, and there’ll always be a market for that.

(more…)

Romance! Action! Prose!

  • News
  • December 7, 2007

It used to be, the most successful comic book heroes would eventually wind up in prose.  These days, with superheroes fully integrated into mainstream America, it’s no surprise that several novelists have taken their own, unique looks at the genre.  Already this year we’ve had the well received Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman and Perry Moore’s Hero.  It’s no surprise, then, that the romance genre would also introduce their own take on the subject.

 

Long-time comic book fan and one-time DC Comics staffer Elizabeth M. Flynn, writing as Ellis Flynn, has produced Introducing Sonika.  The novel is an eBook, available from Cerridwen Press as of December 13, 2007.

 

According to the publisher, “Sonika is actually 28-year-old Sonya Penn, a Gen Y gal working hard as a physical therapist in order to pay off the enormous medical bills that remained after her parents’ deaths. Like so many of her generation, her career has left her no time for romance. But unlike so many others like her, the medical bills she’s working hard to pay off were incurred when her super-hero parents were killed by their arch-nemesis, Gentleman Geoffrey.

 

“Sonya could hardly know that when she met her newest client, he would not only turn out to be John Arlen, the heir to an engineering fortune, but that he, too, was injured by a super-villain. (more…)

Jasmine, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • December 7, 2007

About a year and a half ago my very good friend Giselle Fernandez (yes that Giselle Fernandez) called and asked me to dinner because she wanted me to meet a young lady named Jasmine.

Never one to pass up free food, I said yes. Truth be told if Giselle would have said; “Michael, Bigfoot is in my backyard break dancing, can you come over? I think you should meet him.” I would have believed her, dropped what I was doing and gone to her house.

I love Giselle Fernandez. She has been like a sister to me since the moment I met her. In the often BS world of Hollywood she is exactly what she appears to be, a warm, SUPER talented, genuine person. Trust me, that is as rare in Hollywood as a bacon eating Muslim. I still think she was robbed when she was on Dancing With The Stars a few seasons ago.

Giselle’s husband John is also a great guy…dammit!

Anywho, I get to this dinner at this swanky restaurant on Sunset Blvd. and there at Giselle’s table sitting quietly among some real heavy Hollywood playas was Jasmine. Jasmine is very pretty singer from Fiji. Giselle told who ever was sitting next to her (I think he was the head of some mideast oil generating country) to move and I was seated next to Jasmine.

She and I started talking and in the brief hour or so that we spoke I learned a lot about this beautiful young lady. One of the many things I learned was…she did not have a clue, but she was not stupid.

She had come to Hollywood with a real following from Fiji, gotten the attention of a manager and had set out to take the American music world by storm. She told me how her manager was “setting up deals for her.” I asked “what deals?” She said nothing had happened yet but he was working on it. (more…)

Spider-Man toys: It Takes a Donald Trump…

Just a little over a decade ago, you were wishing for Santa to bring you as MegaZord or maybe even your own Pink Ranger. Now, a new comic brings you that same morphing-style action for grown ups as ComicMix Radio digs up an indy gem called Code Name Power... plus

• What are the Top Award Winning toys this season – and why isn’t there a super-hero to be found on the list?

• Spider-Man toy collectors need to start seeking financing now

• 2008 will be a great year for the Browncoats!

Okay. Stop humming the Power Rangers theme and Press The Button!

Fifty ultimate weapons, plus a few more

  • News
  • December 5, 2007

talesofsuspense80cosmiccube-5420199At Mid-Ohio Con this year, there was a Sunday night dinner between Mixers Mike Gold, Michael Davis, Martha Thomases, me, and a few other folks including Brian Pulido , and we got onto the discussion of ultimate weapons in comics– Warworld, the Cosmic Cube, the Anti-Life Equation, the Ultimate Nullifier, and so on.

I don’t know how we missed him, but Chris Ward must have been eavesdropping. He’s got his own list of fifty ultimate weapons.

Granted, he had to go outside comics to do it, but he does a pretty good job. But really– as long as you’re going outside comics, no Doomsday Machine? No Death Star? No Shadow Planet Killers? No Tox Uthat? Not even Lexx?

Certainly you have to include the Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator…

Happy International Creep Like a Ninja Day!

  • News
  • December 5, 2007

Yes, International Creep Like a Ninja Day! From the same sorts of people who brought you International Talk Like A Pirate Day, only instead of dressing in flamboyant clothing and making loud "Arrrrr!" noises, you spend the day being very very silent and dressing in black. Of course, we all know pirates and ninjas are mortal enemies…

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So let us honor the ninja and their constant forays into comics– for without them, Frank Miller would only be able to lift from noir films instead of kung-fu flicks, and then everybody else in the industry would have even left to lift from.

P.S. We were going to include a picture of everyone’s favorite comic book ninja babe Elektra here, but we couldn’t find any that were really of her– all we found were pictures of a Skrull pretending to be her. Damn you, Brian Bendis!

Heroes – Volume Two, a bitchy review by Mike Gold

  • News
  • December 4, 2007

Warning! Spoiler Alert! If you’ve got the past half-dozen episodes of Heroes TiVoed, you just might want to skip this review. On the other hand, if you’ve got the past half-dozen episodes of Heroes TiVoed, I just might be able to add six hours to your life.

 

Once upon a time, some clever Hollywood people hired some talented comics people to help create a teevee show about a bunch of human with abilities far beyond those of mankind. It was a pretty good show – maybe it could have benefited from the loss of any three characters – and it was successful. The Peacock gods smiled upon the program, and thus it was renewed.

And it turned into a meandering piece of crap.

“Heroes – Volume Two” consisted of the first, and because of the writer’s strike maybe only, 11 episodes of its second season. Having a story arc that was a half season long was a good idea. It was their only good idea.

They introduced a number of new characters, and most of them seemed to have been killed off. They played the “good guy is really the bad guy is really the good guy” bit like Ginger Baker played the drums on “Toad.” By the tenth episode, you couldn’t tell who was being naughty and who was being nice – except for Sylar, the show’s only consistent villain. And the actor, Zachary Quinto, went straight from Heroes to Spock The Next Generation, which makes him a de facto good guy for ever and ever. (more…)

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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…)

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