Tagged: Disney

I Like Sex, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • January 4, 2008

 

Happy New Year!!
 
Ah, an election year! It’s time we express our will as Americans! It’s time we hear about all the grand new ideas that our candidates have to offer!
 
It’s time after seven years of…eh…of…
 
I’m not sure what the last seven years was about, but it’s time to elect a new President! 
 
As long time readers of this column know, I am a Liberal Democrat. What you most likely don’t know is I should be a Conservative Republican. Yep! I’ll say it again: I should be a Conservative Republican! 
 
Why?
 
I hate big government.
I’m tough on crime.
I believe in a strong military.
I want America to the biggest and strongest MF on the planet. 
 
There are plenty of other reasons why I should be a conservative. The reasons I’m not are few and simple. 
 

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Leftovers/Third Helpings, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • December 30, 2007

 

Ah, holidays: a time to get together with family and friends … and watch all the DVDs you missed during the year. In my case, it’s with my teen and preteen nieces, so sooner or later they get control of the remote, and they call the shots. So it was in this cozy, tinsel-lined environment that we settled in to watch the special features on two of the second sequels that so galvanized marketing types a few weeks ago.
 
First up: Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End, which more than half of the nation’s critics found loud and confusing. But I, a market share of one, have always felt that they missed the point. Lurching, unfocused, overstuffed, yes. But this effort was nothing short than a largely successful attempt to dismantle, then refashion, what it means to be a “Disney Film," a seeming attempt that successfully continued with Ratatouille and Enchanted. 
 
This, after all, is a film that starts with the death by hanging of a ten … year … old … boy, then continues with piles of corpses, cutthroats staring up Keira Knightley’s dress, extended existential sequences in the land of death itself, and a central appearance by the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. The extras on the Two-Disc Collector’s Edition don’t rip the wrapping paper off this concept and slap it in your face, but there’s enough hints in the giddy declarations of director Gore Verbinski and writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio that something was up their sleeves besides arm hair.
 
Basically all of them contend that they were given the freedom to have fun and entertain themselves. Even so, none were absolutely sure that this independence (and the more than 200 million which bought it) wouldn’t come back to bite them. At one point, coming from the bright-eyed, sheet-eating grinning face of one writer was the passive/aggressive statement that the boy-hanging opening was his idea … except it might not have been, depending on the then-up-coming audience reaction. 
 

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Happy 12th birthday, Toy Story!

  • News
  • November 23, 2007

On this day in 1995, Disney and Pixar released Toy Story, the first full length CGI movie. It grossed $191,773,049 in the United States and it went on to take in a grand total of $354,300,000 worldwide, and was nominated for three Academy Awards, including for Best Original Screenplay, for Joel Cohen, Pete Docter, John Lasseter, Joe Ranft, Alec Sokolow, Andrew Stanton and… Joss Whedon.

I plan on celebrating by playing with my t– action figures.

Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and the High Price of Irony, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • November 19, 2007

Last Thursday, Alex Rodriguez signed a 10-year contract in excess of a quarter billion dollars that allows him to continue working for the New York Yankees, a team about which, in the interest of full disclosure, I couldn’t care less. A couple hours later, the government indicted San Francisco Giants player Barry Bonds for lying to a grand jury.

That’s a nice slice of irony. When Rodriguez “quit” the Yankees he announced his decision during the final game of the World Series, effectively destroying the momentum of the business’s most holy event – particularly if you’re from Boston. Still, it was bad form and I enjoyed seeing those chickens come home.

So now A-Rod (not to be confused with L-Ron or Kal-El) gets a nice locker at the new Yankee Stadium. But what goes around comes around and then goes around again: part of Rodriquez’s deal is that he gets all kinds of bonuses for accomplishing major feats that will inure to the financial benefit of his employer. Among these is breaking Barry Bonds’ home run record. I love irony.

That’s just become a whole lot easier. Bonds is without a contract and is now, effectively, unemployable. Like Willie Mays, he’s now standing still and breaking his record is much easier. Not that A-Rod doesn’t already have enough money to buy Mongo air-turf from Prince Vulcan, but still, we probably won’t have to worry about asterisks for very long.

While still wallowing in the synchronicities of irony, I listened to Dave Ross’s editorial on CBS Radio. Dave pointed out that Bonds is over 18 and if he wants to pump dangerous drugs into his veins, that’s his right. Dave lives in Seattle; they think like that up there. If it violates the rules of Major League Baseball, that’s the business of Major League Baseball and not our courts. He lied to a grand jury in 2003? It didn’t physically harm anybody except himself and gamblers. If a grand jury looked into lies that actually harmed people in 2003, Dave pointed out, they wouldn’t have any problem finding people to indict.

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MW: A Review

  • News
  • November 17, 2007

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It’s difficult for an American to appreciate the place Osamu Tezuka held in Japanese popular culture. Tezuka created the first massively popular character and storyline in manga, Astro Boy – something on the level of Siegel & Shuster’s Superman. But he also owned that character, and ran a studio to produce stories – something like Will Eisner. (And he went on to create more adult, complex works later in life, also like Eisner.) But Tezuka was also a major force in animation – roughly the Walt Disney of Japan. And he was massively prolific for forty years; his “Complete Works” (collecting just over half of his manga) runs 80,000 pages through 400 volumes, and his animation work was similarly large. So his impact is absolutely colossal; I’ve seen some commentators claim that every single Japanese comics sub-genre derives from something Tezuka did.

I’ve only read a few of those four hundred volumes – in my defense, most of them aren’t available in English — but I’ve found Tezuka an interesting but quirky artist. (I’ve reviewed the first six volumes of his Buddha series on my personal blog, and here at ComicMix I’ve looked at Ode to Kirihito and Apollo’s Song.) MW is another graphic novel in the vein of Apollo and Ode: dark, adult, violent and occasionally sexual. It’s from the late ‘70s, several years after Apollo and Ode, and originally appeared in the Japanese manga magazine Biggu Komiku (whose name I never fail to find humorous).

Unlike Ode and Apollo, MW has no supernatural element, and it’s even bleaker than those two works (neither one terribly cheerful). Fifteen years before the story began, a massive, horrific event occurred on a remote Japanese island, and that event bound together a boy and a man. When the story begins, the man, Garai, is a Catholic priest – from what I’ve seen, Tezuka was fascinated by Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, returning to its iconography and doctrines over and over. The man is tormented because of his relationship with the boy Yuki, who has grown into a dangerously attractive young man – and who was warped into a sociopath by the event they lived through.

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Coming Soon To A TV Near You, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • November 12, 2007

The television and movie writers strike is entering its second week. The picket lines are being staffed by more stars than there are in the heavens. The writers are looking for their fare share of DVD revenue – currently, approximately three to four cents per sale – and of commercial Internet action – currently, zilch.

Ironically, as teevee shows are starting to go on early hiatus, us folks back home are beginning to turn to DVD purchase and rentals to fill the downtime, lest our sets stare blankly back at us.

This one seems simple. If somebody is making money off of your work, you deserve a fair share of the action. Or even a taste. Anyway, something more than an insult. Collective bargaining is genuinely American; it mirrors the very values of fair play that we were all taught in school. Just like “socialized medicine,” there is nothing left wing or communistic about it – despite what some of our right wing politicians, corporate magnates and the liars at Fox News babble incessantly babble.

We need to look no further than the deposed leader of Disney, Michael Eisner. “It’s a waste of their time. “(The studios) have nothing to give. They don’t know what to give.” Oh, really? These clueless number crunchers who “earn” eight digit compensation packages strictly solely off of the sweat of the artistic community (writers, directors, musicians, performers – 90% of whom are largely or completely unemployed at any moment in time, et al) have nothing to give? How about starting with me, and give me a break. (more…)

Happy birthday, Winnie the Pooh!

  • News
  • October 14, 2007

81 years ago, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh was published, sparking generations of happy fans to revel in Pooh’s adventures. Yes, our beloved fuzzy bear is a pretty old guy — and a good thing for it. Had he been introduced today, Pooh might have been shunned as figure of obesity what with his addiction to honey and prescribed Rozerem to get through sleepless nights of Heffalumps and Woozles.

Yet despite an increasingly uptight audience, a glossy make-over by Disney to account for it, countless empty jars of honey and a conversion to Tao Buddhism, Winnie-the-Pooh remains as ever, our silly, willy-nilly, old bear. Good timing, Mr. Milne!

For extra fun throughout time and space, we suggest Peter David’s The Tardis at Pooh Corner.

Hump Day Briefs

  • News
  • September 26, 2007

fursvsklingon-5759623A little mini-browsing around the internets the last few days has come up with the following:

  • There is no Furries vs. Klingons bowling tournament this coming Saturday in Atlanta.  But dang, that poster is still cool.

  • Nick Mullins at The Comics Reporter notes two main reasons for the kerfuffle over the teacher who got fired over giving a 9th grader Eightball #22: the book is recommended by the Library Journal for 10th grade and up (and that recommendation applied to the series as a whole, where individual issues may vary in their amount of mature content) and, more importantly, mature situations involving art and other visuals will almost always raise more of a ruckus than those involving only words (George Carlin aside). There’s your thousand-to-one ratio at work again.

  • Nintendo has surpassed Canon to become the second biggest stock in Japan.  Toyota still rules the Japanese market.  If they come up with a car that has built-in Wii and can take pictures, it’s a lock.

  • Parallel universes have been mathematically proven to exist.  Yeah, on Earth-Geek!  Oh no wait, we are Earth-Geek aren’t we?

  • Because women aren’t exploited nearly enough in our subculture, there’s the Miss Horrorfest contest.  Self-exploit and you may win $50,000!  So there, Oscar Wilde; we’ve already established that and there’s no haggling over the price!  Is there a corresponding "Master Horrorfest" ("master" being the male equivalent of "miss" once upon a time)?  I didn’t think so.

  • Somebody let Stephen Colbert too close to the Indecision 2008 website again, as the site gets onto a Candidate Casting Couch with presidential hopefuls as superheroes.  Would you rather see Simpsons cels referencing movies juxtaposed with the actual film stills?  Sure you would.

  • Goodie, HarperCollins will be reprinting Zot!, one of my all-time favorites!  And Sony’s releasing colorized Ray Harryhausen movies!

  • Greetings from Zack Snyder on the set of the Watchmen movie.

  • Condolences to the family of the still-anonymous Batman: The Dark Knight film technician who died in a car accident (unrelated to the movie).

  • The Winnie the Pooh merchandising case has been dismissed, the main lesson being that if you’re going to sue Disney it’s probably not a good idea to be discovered poking through their trash.

Living on EZ Street

  • News
  • September 19, 2007

colorpage-10-3-7188095Wednesdays at ComicMix will mean EZ Street, the new graphic story from writer Robert Tinnell and artist (and co-writer_ Mark Wheatley. It’s the story of brothers Scott and Todd Fletcher. They have a dream – they want to tell stories. Fabulous stories about heroes and adventure. They decide to create a comic book because, as young boys growing up on Ezelle Street in Pittsburgh, it’s what they can do. Scott, 14, writes the script and Todd, 12, draws the pictures about an amazing superhero, Lone Justice.

Fast-forward twenty odd years, and the brothers, older and more practical, have jobs. Todd is a graphic designer, and Scott tries to make movies in Hollywood. They want more from their lives. They resurrect their character and find that, by combining the imagination of youth with the skills earned by maturity, they can create magic.

A story about the love of stories, about ambition and dreams and fantasy, EZ Street is an involving look at the creative process, the dynamic of families, the true meaning of friendship and the quest for a really good comic.

Mark Wheatley is an award-winning creator of radically different comic books. Noted for comics with heart and integrity, he’s won the Inkpot, Mucker, Gem and Speakeasy awards and his projects have been nominated for the Harvey award and the Ignatz award. His work has been repeatedly included in the annual Spectrum selection of fantastic art and has appeared in private gallery shows. You can also find some of his original work in the permanent collection of Library of Congress.

His comic book creations include Mars, Breathtaker, Black Hood, Prince Nightmare, Hammer of the Gods, Blood of the Innocent, Radical Dreamer, Frankenstein Mobster, Miles the Monster and Titanic Tales. He’s also worked with established characters such as Tarzan the Warrior, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Argus, The Spider, and Jonny Quest; Dr. Strange for Marvel, and The Flash for DC.

Mark established the highly respected Insight Studios in 1978 as a home base for a team of talented comic creators. Insight Studios is the subject of an "insightful" coffee table style art book; IS ART: the Art of Insight Studios. In 2006 Mark was a guest lecturer on Storytelling in the Arts at the Library of Congress.

West Virginia-born Robert Tinnell has worked in the film industry for twenty years as a writer, producer, and director. Starting as a production assistant for legendary filmmaker George Romero, Tinnell used his on-set experience to gain valuable insight into the world of feature filmmaking. Starting at the age of twenty-three, he produced several independent films including South of Reno and the iconic Surf Nazis Must Die. In 1995, Tinnell traveled to Canada where he wrote and directed the ACE-nominated film Kids of the Round Table. A Disney Channel-favorite, Kids led Robert on a six-year-run with Melenny Productions. Over this period Tinnell directed Frankenstein and Me with Burt Reynolds and Louise Fletcher, Airspeed with Joe Mantegna, and Believe starring Ben Gazzara and Elisha Cuthbert)for Lions Gate.

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COMICS LINKS: Monday Again

  • News
  • August 27, 2007

idiocy-5528716

No links came with obvious top-of-the-post illustrations today, so, instead, let’s focus on the Monday-ness of today, and think demotivation.

Comics Links

Comic Book Resources looks at webcartoonists at Wizard World Chicago.

Wizard talks to Avatar Press artist Jacen Burroughs.

Comic Book Resources interviews Hugh Sterbakov, writer of Freshmen.

CBR also chats with artist Adrian Alphona, soon to take over Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane.

Comics Reporter interviews Comic-Con Director of Marketing and Public Relations David Glanzer.

Newsarama has the second half of an interview with Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics.

The New York Times’s Paper Cuts blog interviews cartoonist Dan Clowes.

Comics Reviews

The Joplin Independent reviews Modern Masters, Vol. 7: John Byrne.

Blogcritics reviews The Architect by Mike Baron and Andie Tong.

Comics Reporter reviews Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow.

Brian Cronin at Comics Should Be Good reviews Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #23.

Living Between Wednesdays reviews this weeks’ comics, starting with The Immortal Iron Fist #8.

Graeme McMillan of The Savage Critics reviews Battlestar Galactica: Season Zero #1.

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