Tagged: Iron Man

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News of the World

  • News
  • August 1, 2007

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SF Diplomat deconstructs Iron Man. I don’t see what all the hubbub is about. So he’s an alcoholic, workaholic, control-freak millionaire military contractor who is his own superpowered bodyguard and often runs his own foreign policy — what’s the big deal? I don’t see anything odd there…

Neil Gaiman was kissed during the Eisner Awards by U.K. TV star (and major comics fan) Jonathan Ross, and has posted the snogging on his blog for all to see.

Forbidden Planet International examines the website for the Watchmen movie. I imagine, if you ask them, they’d also read tea-leaves to see how good the movie is going to be.

Industry News has some documents from Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s 1947 lawsuit against National Periodical Publications, part of a larger collection of material from the lawsuit that is now for sale.

I thought Comics Reporter had already done his big Comic-Con wrap-up, but here’s another one.

Again with the Comics goes there to wonder how Ben Grim makes sweet, sweet love. [via Journalista!]

USA Today profiles Neil Gaiman.

DC is getting some impressive press coverage for their new Minx line – why, they even cracked the powerful York Journal today.

Paul Kincaid at Bookslut admits that he likes Philip K. Dick’s mainstream novels as he reviews the last previously-unpublished Dick book, Voices from the Street. Ah – he’s the one!

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Saturday Noon

  • News
  • July 31, 2007

dennyoneil100-7400785Saturday noon, and it still hadn’t arrived. Voldemort’s work? Or the machinations of something a bit more prosaic – book ninjas, maybe, or gremlins? But no. We fretted in vain. At about three, the doorbell rang, and there he was – Mr. Delivery Man, bearing our own copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

(I don’t think a spoiler warning is really necessary at this point – is there anyone who doesn‘t know Harry’s fate? – but what the hell, consider yourself warned.)

Soon, Marifran was in bed, reading – yes – the end of the novel. I asked her if Harry survives and she said that he does. Whew. The next evening, daughter Meg phoned from Seattle. She’s already finished it, all 759 pages. Do all bank vice-presidents spend their weekends reading?

What kind of people are these? What sort of mutated family did I marry into?

Me, I plan to wait for the movie. But I’m glad the book’s doing well. Better that gobs of money go to J.K. Rowling, who comports herself with some dignity, than to yet another deluded, sad young woman who calls attention to her desperate self by displaying what, in gentler times, would be seen only by her mate or her gynecologist.

Of course, not everyone is profiting by Ms. Rowling’s success. Independent bookshops, in order to compete with chains and on-line venues, are selling the book at such steep discounts that their profit is slim to none. And news reports tell us that just because a lot of kids are reading the Potter series doesn’t mean that they’ll read anything else. Apparently, Harry’s sui generis and after Deathly Hallows, it’s back to the tube for many.

But surely some kids will try other printed entertainment, once Harry teaches them that what’s printed can, in fact, be entertaining. Or so those of us who worry about the future of these United States can hope. Al Gore’s new and excellent book, The Assault on Reason (which I recommended last week) tells us that “…the parts of the human brain that are central to the reasoning process are continually activated by the very act of reading printed words…the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process…An individual who spends four and a half hours a day watching television is likely to have a very different pattern of brain activity from an individual who spends four and a half hours reading.”

So, my understanding of Mr. Gore is, reading is not virtuous because it’s what grandma and grandpa did for fun, but because it stimulates a part of the brain that may be both underused and useful.

Is Harry Potter our new, albeit fictional, messiah? Well, no. We don’t want to take it that far. But given the current crop of wannabe saviors, we could do worse.

RECOMMENDED READING: Understanding McLuhan, by W. Terrence Gordon, illustrations by Susan Willmarth.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

DENNIS O’NEIL: “No wizard left behind”

  • News
  • July 24, 2007

At the end of last week’s exciting episode, the cute schoolteacher and I were involved in a tense debate about which showing of the new Harry Potter movie we would attend. (Yes, we media people do have lives that throb with excitement.)

We decided, and went.

The schoolteacher, who really does carry Potter devotion to an extreme, at least in one Muggle’s opinion, was enthralled. The Muggle – me – thought it was a pretty good summer flick. I’m a Muggle who can enjoy some good, old-fashioned, British Acting-with-a-capital A, and the Potters are full of A-list thespians. (There may be a pun in there somewhere, but, trust me, it’s not worth the effort needed to find it.) I think British movie acting is still partly influenced by its grandiloquent, stage-bound forebears, and that makes it appropriate to material that is the antithesis of realism, much as Brando’s naturalistic Method acting was appropriate to Tennessee Williams’s realism.

But the Pottery pleasure the teacher and I could share equally began when Dolores Umbridge entered the story. Miss Umbridge, splendidly embodied by a pink-clad Imelda Staunton, is an educational bureaucrat whose saccharine exterior conceals a heart of bile. She’s a stooge for the local politicians whose mission is to insist on a largely useless curriculum and on tests which accomplish nothing except make it impossible for real educators to do their jobs.

“No wizard left behind,” I whispered to the schoolteacher, who nodded vigorously.

I don’t know much about J.K. Rowling, Potter’s creator, but I do know that she must have been writing the novel on which the current movie is based about seven years ago, and that she works and lives in England. Those facts make it unlikely that in conjuring up Miss Umbridge she was commenting on and/or satirizing the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind farce. So maybe art was anticipating life. Whatever the reason, Miss Umbridge could step from fantasy into the real life milieu of those involved in the president’s – ahem – educational efforts and feel right at home.

Spoiler alert!

Miss Umbridge gets hers, though it appears that she survives to be rotten another day, and I rejoiced. I think schadenfreude is a pretty crummy emotion when it’s directed toward people we know, but it’s perfectly acceptable, and maybe even expected – maybe even desirable – when aimed at creatures of the imagination. And despite what the schoolteacher might want to believe, J.K. Rowling does write fiction.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Do You Believe In Magic?

  • News
  • July 17, 2007

Here it is Tuesday evening and we’re still debating. Should we go to the 11:59 showing of the new Harry Potter flick at the local 21-plex or catch one of the early showings in the morning?  Pros and cons on both sides.  But we will see the movie within the next 24 hours; count on it.

Although I’ve enjoyed the previous films, I can’t call myself a Potter fan.  I haven’t read any of J.K. Rowling’s novels, though I love Ms Rowling’s bio: single mom writing in a café becomes hugely successful author, celebrity, and megamillionaire within about a decade, without becoming a robber baroness.  But Marifran’s read the books.  Oh yes indeed.  And so have daughters Meg and Beth.  So I’m pretty up on the Hogwarts scene and when the final volume in the series arrives in a couple of weeks, I expect my conversations with my wife to be conducted in monosyllables until she reaches the last page and learns Harry’s fate.

I’m surprised that these things are so popular, as I was surprised at the resurgence of interest in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings saga and the huge success of the movies made from Tolkein’s trilogy. The reason is, I thought we were past believing in magic. 

Oh, sure, you don’t have to actually believe in something to enjoy stories about it.  But we do have to be able to accept it on some level. It helps the willing suspension of disbelief your English teacher told you is necessary to the enjoyment of fiction if you can allow that what you’re being told about exists, or could exist, or at least might have existed. Hero stories are about as old as civilization, and the tale-tellers always supply a reason why their protagonists have extraordinary powers.  In classic Greece, for example, and later in Rome, superpowers were explained by their possessors either being gods, or half-gods, or children of gods, or gods’ special pals.  Then plain ol’ magic, origin unknown, was used to rationalize superhuman feats in folk tales like those in A Thousand and One Nights. 

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DENNIS O’NEIL: (Hey, Dude, ain’t he ever gonna git done yakkin’ about) Continued Stories

  • News
  • July 10, 2007

Last week, we were discussing the cons of continued stories, specifically what’s wrong with them, and we posited that they have a major problem in the difficulty new readers (or audiences) have in understanding the plot and characters. I said that there were remedies for this problem and now I’ll suggest, a bit timidly, that though remedies exist, nothing is foolproof.

Which brings us to the second difficulty with this kind of narrative, one closely related to the first. A potential reader who knows that the entertainment in front of him is a serial and that he’s missed earlier installments might think he’s come to the party too late, and so he won’t be tempted to enter it. Admittedly, this has more to do with marketing than stortytelling, but anyone who thinks that sales departments and creative departments aren’t entwined tighter than the snakes on a ceduceus isn’t paying attention.

There are probably more cons, but let’s let the subject rest with those two – we don’t want to beat anything to death, do we? – and proceed on to the pros.

Pro number one: Serialized stories build audience/reader loyalty. If you like the story you’ll want to learn what happens next and how the problems are solved and you’ll keep returning to satisfy your curiosity.

Pro number two (and this, to me, is the biggie): Serials present storytelling opportunities rare in other forms, if they exist at all. Continued narratives allow the storyteller to present a complex plot and a lot of subplots, as well as stuff that might not directly relate to the plot(s) but is, well, amusing.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Continued stories revisited yet again…

In last week’s installment of what some of you may be beginning to think is an endless blather, when I was discussing movie serials I neglected to mention that serials were among the first non-comics forms to use superheroes. During that decade, lucky young popcorn eaters could see Superman, Batman, Captain America and, in my opinion the best of them all, Captain Marvel in the continued chapter plays that were a staple of Saturday matinees. (That probably doesn’t exhaust the list, but memory is not my greatest gift… At least I don’t think so…) Having seen some of the above-mentioned entertainments, and having, within the past two weeks, seen the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four movies, I realize that the serial makers were born too soon.

Because, let’s face it, some of the serialized costumed do-gooders look kind of silly. That’s because the directors lacked the technology to make them not look silly. It takes an army of costumers, model makers, CGI wizards, animators and, probably, guys whose jobs I’ve never heard of to produce, on the screen, what cartoonists produced with ink on paper in large quantities for lousy pay. Of course, we comics readers had to bring some of our own imaginations to the artists’ static, silent images, but that was okay, we could do that.

Consider the preceding two paragraphs a digression, please. And now we return to our regularly scheduled topic –

What about these continued stories, anyway? Good or bad? Pro or con?

Let’s begin with the obvious con. If you come in late, maybe you’ll have trouble understanding the story. There are remedies for this problem. The serial makers mentioned in the opening digression showed the last minute or so of the preceding chapter before getting on to new material. The old radio serials used a similar technique, and a lot of current television shows begin with a voice over intoning something like, “Previously, on Your Father’s Moustache…” and then we get brief takes of the scenes that will escort us into the new action.

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DENNIS O’NEIL:Continued stories continued some more…

  • News
  • June 26, 2007

Now, where were we…?

Oh yeah. We were discussing continued stories and I was telling you that continued characters have been around a long time, since the classic Greek dramatists at least, but continued stories were a pretty recent phenomena. You might recall my claim that Julie Schwartz and Stan Lee introduced them to comics, but they already existed in radio drama. One form I didn’t mention, but am pleased to do so now, were the “chapter plays” in movie theaters, which I suspect had some influence on the early comics guys. You can probably rent some examples of these at your local video store, but in case you don’t want to bother…

They were continued movies, these chapter plays, also called just plain serials, with a plot that played out over between ten and fifteen installments. Each segment ended with the hero or another sympathetic character in dire trouble, about to plunge over a cliff or be impaled on spears at the bottom of a pit or like that. (Check out the Indiana Jones films, which were partly inspired by the serials, to get an idea of the kinds of scrapes these folks got themselves into.) Then, the segment would end with the suggestion that you come back the following week to learn what happens. The idea was, you, the breathless kid in the front row, would just have to return to witness the good guy’s miraculous escape or, if you were a bit twisted, you hoped you’d watch him get offed.

If you have ever suffered through one of my comics writing classes, or were lucky enough to take a Robert McKee film writing course, you know that some professional wordsmiths set a lot of store by structure, and that the most reliable structure is called the three act structure. (For more, and better, on this, see the recommended reading below.) I’m not about to presume to teach a class here, but most briefly – the three-act structure: 1, Something happens to cause the hero to act. 2. The problem gets complicated. 3. The hero resolves the problem.

Obviously, this narrative strategy won’t work for a story that’s stretched out over a whole lot of chapters, with a lot of climaxes, so the serial guys evolved what I call the “one-damn-thing-after-another” structure. Which is: the good guy and the bad guy(s) have a lot of clashes, which end inconclusively until one of them doesn’t. The good guy wins, virtue triumphs, everyone lives happily ever after.

A story doesn’t necessarily need to be multi-chaptered to be one-damn-thing-after-another; you could probably use the construction for a 10-pager. And it’s not necessarily a bad structure; a storyteller with sufficient ingenuity might make it work, though I usually advise students not to try this at home. What, structurally, it has going for it is this: it ain’t dull. Something big and, presumably, exciting, happens at least once per chapter and that keeps things moving.

We’ll get back to this topic next week.

RECOMMENDED READING: Story, by Robert McKee

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

MIKE GOLD: Perception

  • News
  • June 25, 2007

mikegold100-5317257Yesterday, ComicMix’s Matt Raub wrote a story about the possibility of noted actor Samuel L. Jackson playing Nick Fury in the upcoming Iron Man move. I hope that’s true; he would be the perfect choice.

Matt noted that this would probably be the Ultimates version of Fury. I thought about that for a while. Clearly, the perception is that since both this version and Mr. Jackson are black and the Marvel universe version is white, the movie version is based upon the Ultimates. That makes sense, but if you think about it, the only differences between the two are the character’s race, his age, and his rank. It is unlikely the movie would burden itself with Fury’s World War II backstory, and it really doesn’t matter if Fury is a colonel or a general. And unless there’s a plot point that is relevant to the story, his race doesn’t matter either, outside of a much-needed superhero role model.

The fact is, movies exist in their own universe – not in the Ultimates universe or the Marvel universe. But since Jackson is black, we (including me) are likely to perceive this relationship.

I’m reminded of this because a couple blocks from this past weekend’s New York City’s Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) wonderful independent comics convention was Manhattan’s annual Gay Pride march. Over a million strong. And the focal point of the parade is the same-sex marriage bill that’s before the New York State senate. The governor already said he’d sign it.

Of course, there’s plenty of opposition. Some people – for reasons that completely defy me – feel their marriage and the entire “institution” of marriage would be threatened if this bill passed. That makes no sense. There is a perception on the part of some that this is true, but the only proof they offer is that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” which is asinine, or that the only purpose of marriage is procreation, which spits in the face of heterosexual couples who cannot conceive, either for reasons of health or age.

This is what we call bigotry. The Nick Fury story is not.

There is also the perception that churches would be forced to violate their principles by having to perform same-sex marriages. This is also asinine. Churches get to make such exceptions all the time. Some will not perform interfaith marriages. Some will not perform burials unless the deceased had met, in life, certain criteria. Religion, enjoying the privileges of the First Amendment, is exempt from performing functions that violate its principles.

As Jon Stewart has said, “You mean, I don’t have to marry a guy? Then what’s the problem.” Live and let live. Let’s not get bent out of shape about how the folks down the road want to live their lives.

Just as we hope the only criterion for casting Nick Fury is the quality of the actor’s work.

Is Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson?

  • News
  • June 24, 2007

pic-7358439After about a week of watching what looks like another “Crispen Glover as Joker” rumor, we here at ComicMix have decided to go with the story that Samuel L. Jackson has been added to Jon Favreau’s Iron Man cast as none-other-than Nick Fury.

Aint It Cool News first broke the story on Thursday with an impenetrable source: seeing Jackson physically on the set. Again, those of us who remember the constant tug-of-war game between the truths and jokes that many alleged Internet journalists like to play with us are pretty weary about this news, because it seems TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE!

If this were the case, Jackson would evidently be portraying the Ultimate version of the character, of which he was originally modeled after. Not only is this the biggest casting news for next May’s film but for future Marvel projects as well, opening the door for a spin-off franchise – and an Avengers film, which Marvel is already discussing.

The most interesting thing about this story is how the Internet fan base seems to be torn into two camps over the news: one that is jumping for joy over the news, and the other that is up in arms, saying that it would be another “Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin.". So I put the question to the fans here at ComicMix: What say you, Funny-Book Fans? Comment now!

LICENSING SHOW Day 2: Plenty o’ Pix

  • News
  • June 21, 2007

iron-man-8378199A pretty big outcome for the second day of the 2007 Licensing Show. Lots of movie pushes, of course with this being one of the biggest franchise summers in film history. Warner Bros was there in the same form as last year, showing off some of the new cars from their new flicks. We got the first peak at the The Dark Knight’s brand new BatPod (and no, you can’t play music on it, its just a cooler name than Bat-Cycle) also we got an up-close look at the new Mach 5 from next summer’s Speed Racer.

flash-gordon-9464980Also in the movie department, we got a bit of a tease over at Marvel’s booth for both The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man slated to come out next summer as well. Nothing too exciting over there, but the New Line booth was surprisingly pretty popular. To promote next year’s Golden Compass, there was a nine-foot armored bear, and despite popular belief, not only do I like girls, but I am also really looking forward to this film. Based of the series of His Dark Materials books by Phillip Pullman, this is the first of the series, and looks to be even better than last year’s underachiever in The Chronicles of Narnia.

dark-knight1-4523879They also were promoting a film that I have heard absolutely no buzz about up until today entitled Inkheart starring Brendan Fraser, Paul Bettany, and Helen Mirren, based on the book by Carnelia Funke of the same title.

hulk-7797584 The BBC booth was also there promoting the hell out of Doctor Who, which I had absolutely no qualms with. This big push was due to the American release of series three to the Sci-Fi Network next month. Also coming to Sci-Fi in August, and came to me as a huge surprise was a remake of Flash Gordon. Now before I dusted off my Queen soundtrack and started to dance, I did a little bit of research, and the creative team consists of some of the minds that brought us Relic Hunter, Beastmaster, Young Blades, Andromeda, and oh, yes: Painkiller Jane. So before we all get excited and break out the champagne, I’d bet on this show being off the air before the bottle runs dry.

dwho-1187444Finally, and by far my favorite part of today’s show was the news about Xip3, a new jacket company buying the rights to Transformers to release a “Transforming Jacket” that will be released with the DVD in November. I got to see first hand how this works, and it’s pretty cool. The jacket is black with silver accents, and can “transform” from a sports jacket to a backpack to a pillow in seconds. The unisex jackets will all be numbered and in sizes extra small to extra large. You can reserve your copy starting in July over at the Xip3 website.

Overall, a great show and I can’t wait to hear what wonderful things await for the ComicMix crew for day three!

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