Tagged: DC

Pow! Zap! Dim! Thick! Asinine! by Michael Davis

  • News
  • February 8, 2008

hello-kitty-superman-9367110Have you noticed that whenever there is an article which feature comics, it almost always features a Pow, Zap, or some such idiotic way to describe comic books in the title? If not fight effects then it will begin with Holy, as in Holy Crack Whore! Comics find their way into Rehab!

As a comic book reader you no doubt want to scream your disapproval, but alas you cannot, as any action you take in defense of comic books would get you branded a geek at best or immature at worst. 
 
I am a grown man and love comic books and the industry that produces them, but I, like you am a wee bit…
 
PATRIOTS SUCK!
 
Sorry. Just had a subliminal moment and flashed back to the NY Giant’s impossible Super Bowl win. Forgive me, it won’t happen agai…
 
WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR PERFECT SEASON, SUCKERS??
 
I am so sorry that keeps happening. However, in my defense I was so sick of hearing how my beloved Giants were just a gnat on the ass of the Patriots. I was also sick of hearing about the perfect season of the Patriots, so much so, I have developed subliminalitis. 
 
Sub*lim*in*al*itis: 
The abrupt screaming out of phrases such as The Patriots got their cocky asses kicked, during unrelated conversations or writings. See: Dynasty…not. 
 
To the fans in New England, hold your head up high! You won EVERY SINGLE GAME…almost!
 
You only lost one game.
 
Only one.
 
One loss.
 
The Super Bowl.
 
I’m sure that people will forget that you lost the Super Bowl but won 18 games.
 
Sure, they will!
 
Yep, So hold your head up high! 
 
That way you can see the sign that says LOSERS!! 
 
As I was saying, I am a grown man and love comic books and the industry that produces them, but I like you am a wee bit tired of the comic book industry being look at as “kid stuff.” Just the other day I was reading the February 4th issue of The National Law Journal…
 

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Me Eat Meat, by John Ostrander

  • News
  • February 7, 2008

So there I was, in my car, tooling along, headed towards my eye doctor appointment, listening to my public radio station, WNYC, and one of their talk shows – the Brian Leherer Show. The segment was referred to as “Can Meat Be Ethical?” The guests were Joan Gussow, professor emeritus of Nutrition and Education at Teachers College Columbia University, and Gidon Eshel, Bard Center Fellow and a geophysicist at Simon’s Rock College.

I could already tell we weren’t going to be on the same wavelength for this segment.

Here are my basic ethics about meat: if it hasn’t eaten me, I can eat it.

Professor Gussow seemed relatively reasonable. She said grass fed cows are eminently preferable to grain fed and that one should shop locally for everything – meats, grains, fruits, vegetables – as that reduces the amount of fossil fuel for transport. And that we should reduce the amount of meat that we consume and treat it more like a flavoring or a condiment as many cultures do around the world. That would be healthier.

Professor Eshel would have none of it. I should probably try to separate his snide, patronizing tone from his message. The tone probably comes with his turf; Simon’s Rock, up in the Berskshires in Maine, is – according to its website – “a small, selective, supportive, intensive college of the liberal arts and sciences” whose “400 students come to us after 10th or 11th grade in high school.” The few, the proud, the elite.

Professor Eshel maintained that grass fed beef is worse than grain fed beef. Why? Because, as bad as cow shit and cow farts may be for the environment, cow belching is worse not only in volume but in kinds of gases being released into the atmosphere.  (more…)

Keith Giffen Returns to Ambush Bug

  • News
  • February 1, 2008

Ambush Bug is back… and there was much rejoicing.

According to a recent announcement on Newsarama, Keith Giffen will be returning to Ambush Bug, the character he created in 1980s to point a finger at some the silliness of some of the goings-on in the DC Universe at the time. The six-issue Ambush Bug miniseries will hit shelves in July and feature Giffen as both writer and penciller – a dual role he hasn’t filled in quite some time.

Giffen said he plans to focus Ambush Bug’s snarky sensibilities on both the abundance of "world-shattering events" happening all-too often in the DCU, as well as some of the long-lost characters that the company might rather remain forgotten.

NRAMA: Can you give any examples of something you’re trotting out again?

KG: Oh, well two come to mind right away. Whatever happened to the Green Team? And whatever happened to the Glop from Outer Space?

NRAMA: Oh, it almost seems cruel to bring back a character called the Glop. [laughs]

KG: The Glop from Outer Space was a Wonder Girl villain. He was this big blob from outer space that ate rock ‘n’ roll records. And I thought, well, there’s got to be a follow-up story, because they don’t make rock ‘n’ roll records anymore.

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Marvel and Dark Horse: Winning the MySpace War?

  • News
  • February 1, 2008

Now here’s a story you don’t see every day: ComicBookResources looks at who the highest-profile comic publishers are on MySpace and compares the strategies each publisher is using to climb the mountain of online social networking environments.

According to CBR, Top Cow has been generating a lot of buzz lately due to its "Pilot Season" promotion that asks MySpace users to vote on several recent miniseries and pick which one will ge its own ongoing series. However, it’s Marvel and Dark Horse Comics that reign supreme in the MySpace world, thanks to a variety of clever marketing strategies and online tie-ins to their titles.

As for DC Comics, well, it appears as if a "divide and conquer" approach is only good for a "divided we fall" result in the world of MySpace.

DC Comics, who welcomed 835 friends to its profile, slipped by its sister DC Nation page and now sits fifth with 16,227. With the two profiles combined, the total leaps to 32,231, which would place the publisher third behind Dark Horse and Marvel (42,513). But with DC split between two profiles, manga heavyweight TOKYOPOP takes third with 18,956 friends.

 

Free Online Alan Moore Documentary, Issue

  • News
  • January 31, 2008

A few interesting bits of Alan Moore history have found their way online recently, and you won’t have to pay a dime for them.

AlterTube has posted "The Mindscape of Alan Moore," a 78-minute documentary about the creator of Watchmen and V For Vendetta that explores his growth as a storyteller and modern-day, magical… Well, you should probably just read the plot synopsis:

The film leads the audience through Moore’s world with the writer himself as guide, beginning with his childhood background, following the evolution of his career as he transformed the comics medium, through to his immersion in a magical worldview where science, spirituality and society are part of the same universe.

If you like what you see and want to purchase a copy, check out ShadowSnake Films.

DC/Vertigo has also made a full issue of Swamp Thing #21, the start of Moore’s critically-praised reinvention of the character, available online. It’s creepy as heck, but a great example of why Moore is one of comics’ living legends.

 UPDATE: The video no longer seems to be available on AlterTube, but it’s now available on YouTube. Go figure. So here you go: <a href=”

Alan Moore Documentary on YouTube.

Rant-O-Rama, by John Ostrander

  • News
  • January 31, 2008
 
Lots of different things pissing me off this week so let’s just make this one a grab bag of rant.
 
The Flordia Primary, Part One. Some time ago, Will Rogers, the noted American humorist, said, “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.” Still true. Given the state of the country today – mired in a war that we shouldn’t have gotten into, edging into recession, a housing shortage that bids fair to upend our financial apple cart – the Democratic nominee for President should be a shoo-in. I think the DNC – the Democratic National Committee – assumes that. Not me. I still trust them to find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s a time tested Democratic tradition.
 
Cases in point – the Florida and the Michigan primaries. You’ve heard a lot this week about the Florida Republican primary but not so much the Democratic one. Why is that? Because the DNC has decided to punish those two states for moving their primaries ahead despite what the DNC told them. Furthermore, the DNC says they won’t be seating those states’ delegates at the Convention later this year. That’ll show ‘em! Naughty locals!
 
Question: what state lost the Dems the election in 2000? That’s right – Florida. There’s also plenty of votes to be had in Michigan. Mary’s family comes from Michigan and she knows some of them who have voted Democratic regularly before. This time they’ll sit it out or will vote Republican. Why? They’re pissed that the Dems have told them their delegates won’t be seated; that their votes in the primary don’t mean anything. If some people told me my vote didn’t matter, I’d find others who thought it did.
 

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Y: The Last Man Roundup

  • News
  • January 30, 2008

Sure, I heard something about Captain America and some guy named Bucky this week, but the story I really can’t avoid no matter where I turn is the conclusion of Brian K. Vaughan’s five-year series Y: The Last Man.

From MTV to CNN, the mainstream media is all over this story, and rightly so. It’s one of the best to hit comic shops’ shelves in recent years. (If you don’t agree, we’ll just have to step outside. Seriously.) Over the last week, we’ve been directing you to some of the coverage the series and its writer have received as the release date for the final issue appraoched, but the buzz around Y has noticeably spiked in the last 24 hours.

So, without further ado, let’s take a (somewhat spoiler-free) look at what’s being said about the conclusion of Y: the Last Man.

(Oh, and don’t worry about spoilers in this post, folks. I haven’t had a chance to pick up my copy of Y #60 yet, so I’m providing links to spoiler-free stories except where I’ve noted otherwise.)

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Death, Warmed Over, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • January 30, 2008

elayne-riggs-100-5281129As I type this I’m struggling through a pretty bad flu, which I am convinced I contracted on Thursday. That’s when I went for a job interview at the World Financial Center, a hermetically-sealed office and mall complex sandwiched squarely between the Hudson River and the now-cavernous World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan. I’m unsure whether it was the biting winds or the horrendously long “pedestrian walkway” past the gaping hole of Ground Zero and back to the nearest subway that could get me home now that the Cortlandt Street stations are, it seems, permanently closed, but I haven’t been the same since I shrugged off the interview suit upon my arrival home. The next day Robin met his latest deadline, and we were looking forward to a somewhat active weekend — and then it hit. And it’s still hitting me, and has started hitting him. Funny how, at my age, “lucking out” translates into “thank goodness Robin and I got sick whilst I’m unemployed and he’s between issues!”

But you know, in the back of my head I can’t help but wonder whether I got ill, in part, from breathing in dead people. After all, we all know how the EPA of a government renowned for its repeated lies about everything else also lied to citizens about the air quality in that area. I know it’s over seven years later, but there’s still a ton of construction kicking up dust in that area, and the “walkways” offer scant protection, particularly on a cold and windy day.

Living through 9/11, being in the city the day the towers were attacked, one learns never to take life for granted. This is my 50th It’s All Good column for ComicMix, a milestone number of sorts, and so it seems fitting that I come back around to a subject touched upon in my first column here last February 15, scarcely a month after I’d lost my best friend. In fact, this would have been It’s All Good #51 but for the untimely death of my father. Sometimes the Reaper seems inescapable. Because in the end, of course, it is. And as it touches us all in real life, personally or otherwise (as with Heath Ledger’s recent demise), some of us find much less entertainment and amusement in its fictional counterpart. (more…)

Ingagi: Gorillas in Our Midst, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • January 27, 2008

 

If a long-mislaid but vividly documented Depression-era motion picture called Ingagi should ever re-surface – in the manner that such lost-and-found titles as the 1931 Spanish-language Dracula or the 1912 Richard III have cropped up, in unexpected out-of-the-way locations – its rediscovery alone would justify a monumental curatorial celebration and an overpriced DVD edition.
 
The film probably does not deserve as much, except perhaps on grounds of sheer obscurity and an ironically monumental influence. Never having viewed the picture, I am of course ill prepared to dismiss Ingagi as an unwatchable trifle. But primary-source screening notes from my late mentor, the film archivist and historian George E. Turner, describe a muddled combination of silent-screen expeditionary footage with staged bogus-safari scenes.
 
Ingagi is hardly the first of its kind, but it appears to have established a precedent for presenting an imaginary journey into unexplored regions as an authentic record of a scientific expedition. As such, it collected a reported $4 million in box-office returns – back in the day when a buck was still a dollar – and inspired numerous imitations.
 
The cryptic title became a household word: Such comedy acts as the Three Stooges and Hal Roach’s Our Gang ensemble devoted gags to Ingagi, and as late as 1939–1940 the actor-turned-filmmaker Spencer Williams, Jr., invoked the term with an otherwise unrelated picture called Son of Ingagi. During a visit at Dallas in 1993, Julius Schwartz cited the original Ingagi and a 1937 knockoff called Forbidden Adventure in Angkor as inspirations for the recurring “Gorilla City” subplot that distinguishes DC Comics’ Flash series of the 1960s.

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Ballad of a Thin Man, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • January 26, 2008

 

Last weekend, we finally caught up with I’m Not There, the brilliant Todd Haynes movie about the myths of Bob Dylan. The director intertwines the lives of six men, each symbolizing a stage of Dylan’s artistic development and public persona. They include a wide range: a young black boy, played by Marcus Carl Franklin; the protest singer, played by Christian Bale; the walking, talking enigma played by Cate Blanchett; the egomaniacal prick, played by Heath Ledger; the romantic, Ben Winshaw; and the lonesome recluse, played by Richard Gere. I don’t know if you’d like it if you aren’t a Dylan fan, but, if you are, it’s an amazing narrative.
 
On Monday, Brian Williams reported on the NBC Nightly News that the Monday of the last full week of January is known as “Blue Monday,” because it’s the single day that the most people are depressed, and has the highest suicide rate. 
 
On Tuesday, Heath Ledger was found dead in his apartment.
 
I don’t mean to imply that he committed suicide. His body was found by a masseuse, with whom he had an appointment, and people planning suicide don’t usually get a massage first. As I write this, there’s not a lot of information about what caused his death. The autopsy didn’t reveal anything, nor was there a suicide note. Police found prescription drugs in the apartment, but they’d find prescription drugs in my apartment, too. There was no evidence that these drugs had been taken in anything other than the prescribed dose. 
 
He was only 28 years old, and he had a daughter, Matilda, age two. And now he’s gone.
 
We know and grieve over Heath Ledger because he was famous. We knew his face. We sat in the dark of movie theaters, and projected our own emotions into his eyes. He was young and handsome and talented, and it’s a loss for all of us.
 
Those of us who love comics felt a special kinship, because he was playing The Joker in The Dark Knight. The trailers and the early teasers indicate that he gave a brilliant performance, one that understands the complicated character created by Jerry Robinson and further sculpted by dozens of writers and artists over the past 50 years.
 

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