Tagged: Green Arrow

A Billion Dollars Worth Of Respect, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • August 5, 2008

You saw the story, posted here on our own beloved website a couple of days ago: comic book movies have earned over a billion United States dollars this summer, despite an iffy economy that may or may not have something to do with those loveable funsters who frolick near the Potomac.

(I’m writing this Sunday evening. A hundred and sixty nine days. Tickticktick… And please excuse the digression.)

So the aspirations of those folk we mentioned last week – to be respectable and accepted and part of the mainstream – has been realized, though only a few of them are still around to enjoy whatever perks this brings.

Check it out. A billion-with-a-B-dollars! Oh sure, we comics guys have not had to hide our shame for quite a while now. There are the postage stamps and gigs at places like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian and classes taught at major universities and whole sections of bookstores devoted to comics material and if you donate the graphic novels you won’t read again to your local library, they’ll probably be accepted, maybe even with a smile. But in our world, and in most others that I know about, material goods are the emblems of what the citizenry considers success. And that bil will buy a lot of material goods.

Someone – I have no idea who – observed that one of the ways to discern a society’s values is to look at its architecture: in the middle ages, in Europe, the cathedral was the biggest building in the burg. Now? Well, about a mile from where I’m sitting is the biggest, and some would say ugliest, structure in Rockland County and it ain’t a church, amigos, it’s a shopping mall.

(more…)

Speaking Up, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • July 29, 2008

The comic book veteran was smiling as he leaned forward to read the lettering on the button fastened to my lapel: Let’s Legalize Pot. His mood changed instantly, to one of anger. He snatched the pin off my jacket, flung it into a wastebasket, and stalked from the room.

That was in 1965 and before I relate another incident from the same era, let me offer a quick clarification. I don’t like marijuana. Never have. The circumstances of my rather bumpy life have, at times, put me close to it and of course, like William Jefferson Clinton and maybe just one or two other pols, I sampled it and found it usually did little for me. Which is not to say I didn’t have addiction problems. No siree. My love of alcohol cost me a marriage and a job and a lot of dignity and some trips to the hospital. But pot? Usually just made me cough. That button? Well, although the evil reefer was not my drug of choice, I thought that if booze and nicotine were legal, evil reefer should be, too.

This was not conventional wisdom in 1965 (and still isn’t) and, although, as we discussed last week, comics guys like the man I outraged were outsiders, they were not rebels. No, they were outsiders by birth and circumstance, not choice, and their values were pretty much those of mainstream America. They wore suits and ties to work, they paid taxes and owned homes, went to church or temple, voted, behaved themselves. Many had served honorably in the war. They were patriots, they were good citizens. They knew, because they had not learned otherwise, that our nation was menaced by godless Communism, that elected officials were as honorable as they themselves were, that what was good for General Motors was, in fact, good for America, that the atomic bomb was an invaluable part of Liberty’s Arsenal and, oh yeah, that the Devil’s Weed would likely corrupt any youth who got a whiff of it. They were my parents, my relatives, and the folks in my old neighborhood.

(more…)

SDCC Interview: Justin Marks on the ‘Hack/Slash’ Movie [UPDATED]

  • News
  • July 27, 2008

hack-slash-omnibussmall-6443094[EDITOR’S NOTE: Our original link to this interview didn’t play nice with the formatting of the film’s title, so I’ve fixed the link and reposted the article here on ComicMix. -RM]

Writer Justin Marks has come a long way as a Hollywood screenwriter in a relatively short span of time. After working as a producer’s assistant for several years, while writing scripts in his off-hours, Marks has achieved nearly A-list status by writing several high-profile screenplays including Streetfighter and He-Man. He’s also worked on Supermax, co-written with A-List scribe David S. Goyer, and featuring the DC Comics hero Green Arrow who, after being wrongly incarcerated, has to join forces with the very villians he put behind bars in order to escape.

Marks is also writing another big-budget Hollywood film, this one an adaptation of the very popular comic series Hack/Slash, created by writer and artist Tim Seeley and published by Devil’s Due Press. I caught up with Marks at the San Diego Comic-Con to talk a bit about the Hack/Slash film, what we might expect story-wise and the film’s current status.

COMIC MIX: Hey Justin, thanks for talking with me. How did you get involved in the Hack/Slash movie?

JUSTIN MARKS: It was a book that was given to me about a year or year and a half ago. at the time it was already set up as a movie and I thought that was great because I thought it would make an increadible movie. Actuallly, I was kinda jealous.

But then a few months ago I got a call, I was actually in Bangkok working on the Streetfighter movie, and the producers of Hack/Slash asks if I would be interested in working with Todd (Lincoln) the director on the script to sort of push it throuhg and get it ready for production.

So I got on a plane for seventeen hours back to LA to try and get that job.

CMix: It seems you really wanted the job?

(more…)

SDCC: Kevin Smith to do Batman miniseries

  • News
  • July 25, 2008

From today’s DC Nation panel at San Diego, Kai Connolly and Arthur Tebbel send the news that Kevin "Silent Bob" Smith will be doing a Batman five issue miniseries.

Titled "Cacophony", it features the return of the villian Onomatopoeia from Smith’s run on Green Arrow, as well as Deadshot, Joker, Mr. Zsasz, and will be drawn by Walt Flanagan. Those familiar with Smith’s View Askewniverse will recognize that name as Smith’s longtime friend, actor and character in his film, most notably as Walt Grover the Fanboy.

Noting Smith’s, shall we say, tardiness on certain comics projects, we’ve been told that solicitations won’t happen until scripts are in hand. Nevertheless, the firstissue is expected out in November.

And with Onomatopoeia as the villian, we can safely assume that somewhere in this Batman story, we will have lots of Pow! Biff! and Sock! action. Just when we thought we were done with all of that…

Getting Respect, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • July 22, 2008

dark_knight_onesheet-795949-7861483Well, it is certainly a superheroic weekend here in New York, and maybe where you are, too. The latest Batman flick has already set one box office record and who knows what others it may yet conquer? The second Hellboy movie is still kicking box office butt. And a while ago, I was paging through the Arts and Leisure section of my Sunday New York Times when I saw a familiar face staring up at me from a photo: my old colleague Frank Miller, grim and determined looking. The accompanying story was about Frank’s writing and directing of The Spirit movie, based on work by yet another old friend, the late Will Eisner, produced by yet another old friend, Michael Uslan. (Good heavens! Whom don’t I know?)

Last week, the loyalists among you, if any, will remember that I strongly recommended a book titled The Ten Cent Plague, by David Hajdu. Since then, I’ve recommended it in conversation a couple of times, and may do so again. Damn good book. One of the points Hajdu makes is that comics were the outsider’s medium: the first bunch of creators and promoters were primarily Jewish, guys who had trouble getting work elsewhere. This is one of the reasons the Establishment may have felt threatened by the four-color trash sprouting from the newsstands like crab grass on a lawn; these were not their kind of people and who knows what kind of anarchy these grubbies might promote, given the opportunity? Decent folk practically had an obligation to put them in their place!

When I entered comics, about a quarter century into their history, the field was still dominated by outsiders, or anyway at least ex-outsiders. As for my cohorts… maybe one of the writers who came into comics at about the same time after I slithered in may have been destined for a respectable career in respectable institutions among respectable citizens, but the rest of us were hippie-rebel, anti-establishment types. If that hadn’t been true, why were we there? Comics publishing didn’t have an established career path, there didn’t seem to be really serious money to be made, at least at the editorial level, and Lord knows we weren’t reputable; only a decade or so earlier, our chosen endeavor had been crucified in magazines and on editorial pages and even in congressional hearings. We weren’t exactly bracketed with axe murderers, but you probably wouldn’t want your daughter marrying one of us.

(more…)

The Knows Have It, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • July 15, 2008

stanlee_t-3780122Right up front this week, let’s publish our (forgive me for shouting) RECOMMENDED READING: Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now Magazine from TwoMorrows.

The issue I’m touting, number 18, dated Summer, 2008, is devoted to Stan Lee on his eighty-fifth birthday and it’s full of tributes and reminiscences about the Smilin’ One, who is without doubt the most influential guy in comics. After dozens of pages by others, writers and artists mostly, there is a special treat, headlined: Stan Lee’s Top Ten Tips For Writers. Well, who among us is going to pass that up?

I won’t presume to reproduce all ten of Stan’s tips, but I will give you a condensed version of the first. Herewith:

Write about things you know. If you don’t know, Google the stuff and start learning. Or else be so vague that no one can pin you down…So, to summarize – be totally factual or else be so vague that you can get away with knowing nothing about your subject.

Okay, we can all accord that an amen. It hearkens back to a subject we explored a few weeks ago, that of the uses of science in science fiction. We agreed, I think, that if a writer is using factual science in a story, said writer should bother to get it right. If the science is not factual, why slow down your pacing by explaining something that doesn’t exist anyway?

Don’t lie – Google! Or hold your peace.

Now, allow me to add a modest postscript to Mr. Lee’s wisdom.

(more…)

Education, by Dennis O’Neil

Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe that not everyone gets the same education, even if schools and transcripts are identical. Some folk mentally compartmentalize: church goes here, family here, school stuff here, life in general there. So when they pass tests on what they’ve heard in classrooms, and at the end of a span of time, usually16 years and some august personage hands them a rectangle full of fancy lettering, they’re done with it. No more schooling, and no learning above what’s needed to live comfortably. Schooling in its compartment yonder, not touching this compartment, which is where we live.

That seems particularly true for liberal arts types, and vastly less true for engineers, doctors, dentists – students who go to the universities to acquire skills.

Although it’s been encouraged and enabled by the current “No Child Left Behind” calamity, which seems to be all about passing prefabricated tests and not at all about learning, this just pass the test attitude is not new. My favorite college professor, from whom I took at least six courses, told us that we’d better join the Book of the Month Club; if we didn’t, we’d probably never read another book after graduation. He was admitting that he wasn’t in the business of encouraging curiosity and a love of books and what’s in them. Rather, his task was just to help us grind through the requirements, pick up the sheepskin and…what? Remember to pay taxes. Don’t raise a fuss. Hang the sheepskin in the foyer, where visitors will see it.

The problem, I think, is this: There might be information over in the school compartment that is relevant to the contents of the living compartment. It might supply answers, or at least stimulate thinking.

Left in the ghetto of the school compartment, denied access to other compartments, and it is useless, and it will die. Worse, its lack might cause you to blunder.

(more…)

Dennis O’Neil’s Moving Words

Sunday afternoon. Two hundred and four days left before he gallops on back to Texas and that consarn brush that always seems to need clearing.

Listen, I want to make an offer… George and Laura, if you need help moving, just give me a call. I can be at the White House in five or six hours and, sure, I’m not as young as I once was, but I can still lift a box or two, and I’ll be more than happy to buy the pizza.

And now for something completely different…

Last week, we mentioned crossovers – specifically, how Marvel’s movie division seems to be getting ready to emulate the comic book division’s old, old ploy and engage in crossovers. The trick, as I’m sure you know, is simple: take a lead character from one series and put said character into another. Comics have, as mentioned in the earlier column, have been doing crossovers for a long time, probably beginning with Sub-Mariner and The Human Torch hassling in the early 40s. I’m not counting DC’s Justice Society title, which assembled a small herd of super doers, because these guys and gal weren’t moving into each other’s magazines, but into a separate venue. (Does anyone know of any crossing over earlier than that of Subby and The Torch?)

It didn’t stop with the comics, even way back then. About once a year, Batman and Robin took over bad-guy-catching chores from the radio version of Superman for a week or two while the Man of Steel was indisposed and the actor who voiced him, Bud Collyer, took a vacation.

(more…)

Marvel Gets Smart, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • June 24, 2008

As I begin to type this, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, there are only 211 days left before someone else lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, near the Potomac. I tell you this, not because it has anything to do with what follows, but to perhaps lend a note of cheer to your hour.

Now then:

I didn’t stay through all of the Iron Man flick’s end credits, but I should have because my friend Ken Pisani told me that Samuel L. Jackson has a brief scene in which, in the persona of Nick Fury, he reveals to Robert Downey’s Tony Stark that he represents an organization called, in acronym-crazed Sixties fashion, S.H.I.E.L.D. Dissected, that meant Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law Enforcement Division when the organization first appeared in 1965. It was later changed to stand for Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate, which was probably more au courant, but is no less a mouthful.

It is a nifty coincidence, but no more than a coincidence, that S.H.I.E.L.D. makes a big screen appearance at about the time as another espionage-themed entertainment with roots in the spy-mad decade of peace and love, Get Smart, gets into the malls.

It is not a coincidence that the current tv promos for another popcorn movie, The Incredible Hulk, tells us that Marvel has done it again, thus making a solid connection between theaters and comic shops. So, we don’t go to the multiplex to see a superhero movie, we go to see a Marvel superhero movie. This is called “branding” and it means, as I understand it, the identification of a group of products as a single, collective entity. You, fashionista that you are, don’t buy a suit, you buy a Brooks Brothers suit because the Brooks Brothers label guarantees a certain level of quality and a certain approach to the creation of clothing. (And aren’t you a bit young to be dressing so conservatively?)

(more…)

Getting Reality Right, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • June 10, 2008

Vinnie Bartilucci said it better than I did. Commenting on a couple of columns that asked, sort of, if the science in comics should be real, Vinnie wrote, “… once a writer chooses to mention actual, proper science, he should get it right.”

Yes. Exactly. Well put.

But I wonder if we shouldn’t extend the idea to other real life areas. Social problems, for example.  Or such knotty personal problems as addiction. One of the difficulties is, there isn’t the kind of consensus on personal and societal quandaries that there is on the basics of, say, physics. All but the most skeptical – or reactionary – can agree that Newton’s three laws are on the money and Einstein was right about relativity, both general and special, and even Heisenberg’s principle doesn’t seem terribly uncertain these days.

But, to pluck just one example from the ether…addiction? What, exactly, is it? My imperfect understanding is that many, if not most, addictions are caused by environment acting on genetics. In other words, nature and nurture combine to rot out somebody’s life. But, with patience, determination, and rigorous self-honesty, the addict can put his demons in the coal bin, and if he’s able to continue being patient, determined, and honest, they’ll stay there until he dies and they die with him. Addiction is not exactly a disease, in the conventional sense, but it’s more that than character defect.

That was, more or less, the version of addiction I posited in an extended comic book continuity some years ago, and most people who saw the stories seemed to agree with me. But not everyone. A source I trust told me that a person much higher on the corporate food chain than either my editor or me thought that the fictional addict should have just…I don’t know – snap out of it? (In fairness to all concerned, the executive in question never confronted me personally, so I am taking a trusted somebody’s word for what happened.) On another occasion, an excellent artist, a man I respect, refused, politely, to draw a one-page shot of a hero dreaming he was drunk – just dreaming, mind you – because, in the artist’s opinion, heroes don’t behave like louts, even when snoozing.

(more…)

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks