Tagged: comics

NYCC — News in brief

  • News
  • February 23, 2007

Everyone’s getting into the podcasting act! Jamal Igle (see pictorial) will be participating in a serial podcast called The Mighty Mighty Adventures of Earl-Wayne and Chuckchuk (come on, you know you want to tune in on the basis of the name alone), which should be fun as he has such a terrific voice. And an old friend from college, David Levin, tells me his company, Brainstorm, Inc., is getting ready to do daily comics videocasts next month. With so much multimedia centered around comics, oversaturation might be a concern, but nobody ever complains about too much movie and TV coverage.

And in case you missed this news item amid the pictorial, Rob Walton’s Ragmop has been collected. This is huge news to those of us with very fond memories of that title. Lots of new words and art, updating ending, the whole shebang. Must dash and find out more stuff!

Michael Davis: Nut jobs

  • News
  • February 23, 2007

michael-davis100-5416924I said in my first article that I was a pretty simple guy. I see clear distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and Republican and Democrat. Blah, blah, blah. To that end, I think there are some things that people don’t talk about but should. Clearly in comics there is a subject or fifty that we don’t talk about. Well I’m going to talk about one right now. That subject is… nuts.

Not the nuts that come in a can, but rather people who are nuts… as in crazy.

No, I am NOT talking about people who have a real mental illness. I am talking about those people who have convinced themselves (sometimes with plenty of help from friends and family) that they are entitled to something that nobody else sees. Or their way of doing something is the only way something should be done regardless of any logical reasoning. (more…)

The evolution of the comic book

  • News
  • February 22, 2007

Hard as it may be for some of us NYCC-centric folks to believe, comic book events are also happening outside of our little enclave.  Take Northridge, for instance, whose CSU branch’s Oviatt Library features a new exhibit starting this coming Monday mapping the evolution of the comic book.  The show’s curator, university archivist Tony Gardner, notes that comcs "have a very interesting history, and I’m trying to tell that history using our collection from the 1930s to the 1990s," with particular attention given to Senator Estes Kefauver, who led the public hearings on comic books in 1954. 

The exhibit runs through August 3, in case any San Diego Comic-Con attendees want to travel up the coast this summer…

Girl meets geeks at NYCC?

  • News
  • February 21, 2007

The Hey Lady isn’t about to let anyone disabuse her of the notion that comic book conventions are attended mostly by stereotypical male comic book geeks.  Not even when they have huge manga and anime contingents (very popular with girls and women), all sorts of tie-ins with other media, and are run by professional convention planners.  No sirree, she’s a’comin’ to the New York Comic Con with the sole intent of wranglin’ her a May-un!  She seems equally intent on not noticing the many, many, MANY women who will be attending, and most likely not even paying attention to all the cool stuff around (besides male geeks) that might even interest her.

Surviving NYCC: finding the panels

  • News
  • February 21, 2007

I was at lunch today with a bunch of comics people, and they were talking about the NY Comicon and complaing how hard it was to find things on the site, like when the panels were and the like. And we’re always happy to help out here.

New York Comicon Panels

See you there.

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Seven Heroes of Victory

  • News
  • February 21, 2007

225px-ssov4-9127345Wired Magazine’s Annalee Newitz believes the plotline of Heroes bears more than a few similarities to that of the recent Grant Morrison-written DC series 7 Soldiers of Victory.  Because, you know, nobody’s ever done assemble-the-squad plotlines in the history of  television or comic books. 

Actually, her point is "the fact that I could fruitfully compare them means that Heroes is finally coming into its own as a good comic book story".  Or as, one would assume, a good dramatic story — period.

Dennis O’Neil: What Would Green Lantern Do?

  • News
  • February 20, 2007

dennyoneil1006-3309127So do the Guardians of the Universe equip Green Lanterns with bumper stickers that read: My Space Sector, right or wrong?

This question is prompted by something that recently popped up on my screen, a political blog entry forwarded by Martha Thomases, ComicMix’s commnications director and my friend of more than 30 years. The blog was by Matthew Yglesias and it likened the current U.S. foreign policy honchos to the fictional Guardians and their interstellar group of do-bes, the Green Lantern Corps, each of whom is assigned a chunk of the galaxy. Mr. Yglesias describes the gizmos that give the Lanterns their bag of tricks as “the most powerful weapon(s) in the universe,” trinkets that “let bearer(s) generate streams of green energy… (W)hat the ring can do is limited only by the stipulation that it create green stuff and by the user’s combination of will and imagination.” Mr. Yglesias continues: “(A) lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that… we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient… force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.”

(more…)

Milestones in new comics media

  • News
  • February 19, 2007

I may be typing this on a MacBook but mostly I’m old.  Ever so much older than I used to be. A real 20th century kinda gal.  So I’m way behind the curve on what those crazy kids are up to when they’re not trampling my theoretical lawn or treating the comics shop like a reading room. 

lab_brats-6657958For one, they’re reading lots of comics online — by one estimate there may be as many as 36,000 different web-only comics out there, and that’s not even including syndicated print comic strips reproduced online.  There’s just no time to read them all, so we rely on others to announce special events, like today’s online ceremony for the 2007 Webcartoonists’ Choice Awards (congratulations to all the winners!), or the announcement that Ed Dunphy’s and Max Velati’s science humor webcomic Lab Bratz has just hit its 100th weekly episode.  At least the latter milestone makes us feel a bit better, as Dunphy used to write for such print titles as Munden’s Bar, Mongrel, Slash and Splatter.

I got those credits from ComicSpace, a sort of MySpace spinoff for comics folks.  Feel free to befriend me there; I don’t know how it works anyway.  It’s apparently "a community of over 12,500 comic fans and creators… hosting over 3,000 comic galleries… containing over 28,300 comic pages!" so, you know, who has time for that, a full-time job and sleep?  Well, MySpace now has its own comic book section, with over 20,000 "friends" so far.

The Internet is rapidly becoming the most expansive force in comics. It’s exciting to watch it grow.

Riding high at the box office

  • News
  • February 19, 2007

ghost-rider_0-4683685Ghost Rider, based on the Marvel Comics series, dominated the box office this holiday weekend, opening at $44.5 million according to studio estimates.  The movie took in over twice as much as its nearest competitor, the Disney movie Bridge to Terabithia, based on the Newberry-award winning book by Katherine Paterson. 

This was Hollywood’s biggest opening so far this year, and the best opening weekend ever for comics super-fan Cage, beating his previous $35.1 million debut for National Treasure.  This showing bodes well for the movies’ continued association with comic book properties, which are still pleasing audiences despite critics’ misgivings that "the genre" is on the way out. 

Someond tell them comics isn’t a genre, it’s a format!  Sheesh.

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Hollywood does comics

  • News
  • February 18, 2007

bobgreenberger200-9748229There was a great deal of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth when word leaked out of Hollywood that Joss Whedon had left the Wonder Woman film project and David Goyer would no longer write and direct a Flash film. Similarly, people reacted in horror at the notion of Joel Schumacher having anything to do with a Sandman movie.

Here’s the thing: none of this is shocking. Disappointing, yes, but we long time fans have gotten our hopes raised and dashed countless times through the years.

For those less familiar with Hollywood’s inner workings, the studios are always looking for the next great thing, uncertain of what it might be and where they may find it. So, in addition to buying original stories from screenwriters or ideas from producers and stars then assigning the stories to screenwriters, Hollywood goes shopping. They will receive yet-to-be-published books in galley form, they will scour the news for stories to dramatize, and they will see what their kids are listening to, and so on.

(more…)

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