Tagged: Superman

Happy Birthday: Marv Wolfman

homeland-1397145Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946, Marvin A. “Marv” Wolfman got his start in comic book fandom before joining DC in 1968. In 1972, he moved to Marvel Comics under editor Roy Thomas.

After Thomas left, Wolfman’s friend Len Wein became editor-in-chief, but  a year later he passed the position on to Wolfman. Wolfman missed writing, however, and chose to step down as editor-in-chief a few years later so he could return to creating the comics himself.

While at Marvel, Wolfman wrote for Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Doctor Strange, but he is possibly best known for his work on Tomb of Dracula, including the creation of the vampire-hunter Blade.

In 1980, Wolfman returned to DC and created The New Teen Titans. He worked on Superman and Night Force, revived Dial H for Hero, and then launched the pivotal Crisis on Infinite Earths.

During the ’90s, Wolfman focused more on animation and television, and in the 2000s he has written a novel based on Crisis on Infinite Earths, the novelization of Superman Returns, and an animated movie, Condor, for Stan Lee’s Pow Entertainment. Wolfman recently took over the writing for DC’s Nightwing series.

In 2007, he wrote a nonfiction book, Homeland: The Illustrated History of the State of Israel, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award, among other honors.

The Weekly Haul: Reviews for May 8, 2008

Simply put, a huge week in comics, with a full load of books even before we get into Skrullapalooza 2008. Though a few decent indies came out, superheroes dominated the shelves, and Marvel’s superheroes especially, including a couple of big debuts.

Book of the Week: Nova #13 — A comic has to be pretty dang good to overcome a cover like the one at right, which seems to show Nova and Silver Surfer en flagrante as Galactus serves as an interstellar peeping tom.

Despite that, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s space book shows no Annihilation hangover, keeping the pedal all the way to the floor. Back to trying to serve as a cop of the cosmos, Nova responds to a world being destroyed by Galactus. In a great catch, Nova realizes the world is already doomed, so he focuses instead on the rescue mission (with nice allusions to FEMA and Hurricane Katrina).

As if that wasn’t enough, the writing crew throws in the complicating villain Harrow, a malevolent and vague force that feeds off suffering — a clever parallel to Galactus’ appetite.

No kidding, this is one of the best superhero comics right now, and easily the most enjoyable space story in recent years.

Runners Up:

The Boys #18 — The comic known for its raunchiness is as bellicose as ever, with a constant peppering of cursing that almost makes Deadwood seem prim and proper. While that’s what the series has come to be known for, this issue surprises in how well it captures interactions among the characters in low-key ways.

Of course, there’s also a lengthy scene of a floating corpse peeing all over…

The All-New Atom #23 — Escalating craziness is the proper description for this series. Ryan is now in some sort of alternate universe, where his friends (thought to have been eaten by last issue’s monster) are fending off bizarre monsters. A classic bad-to-worse issue, with lively art from Pat Olliffe and another great cliffhanger ending.

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What I Can’t Write About, by Elayne Riggs

So last week my column was criticized for not being primarily about comics, the same day that my fellow columnist John Ostrander got over a dozen comments writing about politics, not one of which queried the appropriateness of his subject matter. Obviously people who have written and drawn comics for a living (Denny, Michael, etc.) can get a little more slack than someone who’s only ever written four comic book stories and had them all published. Not that I’m bitter! Oh no, indeedy; I’m actually grateful those critiques have given me fodder for this week’s column!

As I mentioned in my reply to this criticism, I understand some readers’ frustration with me not writing about comics more often. Even my mom asks me why I don’t focus on comics more often, and she doesn’t even read the stuff! But after all, ComicMix is a pop-culture site dominated by people heavily invested in the artform. Heck, that’s what CM 2.0 is all about, giving our readers original comics content. And we haven’t yet introduced a separate tab for our columns to distinguish them from our regular pop-culture news, so it’s probably reasonable to expect that we columnists will focus on comics as much as our news reporters do. And I love reading comics, but… but…

But nowadays, when I talk about my favorite reading material and hobby and community, I can usually only discuss what’s happened recently, not what’s going to happen in the near future or even Right This Very Week. As many of you know, this wasn’t always the case. About 10-15 years ago I did weekly comic book reviews on Usenet and CompuServe under the header "Pen-Elayne For Your Thoughts." I’d get the books on a Wednesday and most of the reviews would be up by Friday. My job at the time allowed me to do this, I was being somewhat under-used (technology and outsourcing would eliminate that position in ’97) and I had plenty of energy when I got home. Then I got a new job which proceeded to harness a lot of that energy, so the reviews had to go, I just couldn’t keep them up any more.

When I married Robin, I stopped buying most DC books the week they hit the stores, because as a regular freelancer for DC he receives a comp box each month of all the "pamphlets" they put out. For a time the comps were usually current to within a couple weeks of what was in the stores, so I could still keep up as plot discussions moved from Usenet to message boards. But by the time blogs became big, the synching had fallen a bit behind. (The new comp box arrived at our house on Monday, and I now have all the Countdown issues up until "04," when of course the current big discussion is about the final issue.

I also now have the first issue of Tangent: Superman’s Reign so I can finally read issue #2 which Robin inked and which came out in stores the Wednesday prior to the NY Comic Con. Just to give you an idea of the lag time here.) Four years ago, when my boss moved the office out to Westchester, my weekly visits to Midtown Comics to view the new books and collect my non-DC haul became an every other (or every third) week mail order. And because I no longer had the new comics when most of the active online discussions took place, I could no longer participate. By the time I acquire and read the book featuring the return of Barry Allen, or the mostly-Spanish issue of Blue Beetle that has this xenophobe’s drawers in a bunch, it will be well into June and everyone will have long since moved on. (more…)

Wrath, by Dennis O’Neil

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Harry is homeless. Once, he was a successful venture capitalist with three lavish homes, a beautiful wife and a charming daughter, but then he lost his money in a bad real estate deal, his wife ran away with a televangelist, and his daughter started living with a crack dealer and not answering her phone. While panhandling near his old office, Harry met an friend who knew of a deal that would restore Harry’s fortune – hundred percent, guaranteed – and with his bank account restored, Harry was sure he could reclaim his family and his lifestyle. The problem was, Harry needed a thousand dollars to get in on the deal and he had no way to get it; his credit was maxed out and no one he knew would lend him another cent. He’s now passing a church, his head bowed in misery, when he sees a thousand dollar bill laying in the gutter. He can’t believe it! He is saved! He bends over to pick up the bill and…he’s hit by a truck. Laying there alone in the filth, Harry knows he’s breathing his last. He looks up at the sky and cries, “Why?” And a voice booms from beyond the clouds, “Because you piss me off.”

One of my favorite jokes and one I’ve been thinking of this weekend because, somehow, I’ve run afoul, again, of my old foe Crankus, the spiteful god of technology. Ol’ Mr. Macintosh in front of me has been acting up and the gentleman, polite but not terribly helpful, at the Mac store wasn’t exactly sure why. Larry and his friend Perri graciously offered to reinstall the Microsoft Word program, because I don’t trust myself with even elementary technological tasks, and so far, so good.

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Ian Shaughnessy Emerging, by Michael H. Price

shaughnessy-book-cover-2446541From V.T. Hamlin in the 1920s and Etta Hulme during the mid-century, through the Superman books of Kerry Gammill in times more recent, Tarrant County, Texas, has long yielded a wealth of storytelling artistry to the comics industry at large.

An ambitious new representative of that regional-breakout scene is graphic novelist Ian Shaughnessy, of Arlington, Texas. Shaughnessy’s books for Portland, Oregon-based Oni Press – including an edgy comedy-of-errors called Shenanigans, with the Canadian illustrator Mike Holmes – bespeak a childhood fascination with comics, filtered through a lifelong love of language and an interest in taking the words-and-pictures medium to provocative literary levels more commonly associated with the present day’s independent filmmaking sector.

“I find myself writing under the direct influence of Billy Wilder,” says Shaughnessy, 24, invoking the name of a great screenwriter-director whose career spanned from 1929 into the 1980s. “I discovered Wilder during the 1990s with The Apartment [1960], then with Double Indemnity [1944], and found myself very inspired – in a lasting way.

“With Shenanigans, I found myself attempting to honor the spirit of Billy Wilder – that mastery that he had of romantic tensions, with finding the humor in awkward situations – as a key influence.”

Any such talent needs a practical springboard. With V.T. Hamlin, the creator of a famous comic strip called Alley Oop that has survived him by many years, the springboard was a cartooning job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Hamlin spent much of the 1920s at the daily paper, generating such local-interest attractions as a serialized feature about a formidable minor-league baseball club, the Fort Worth Cats. (A retrospective collection of Hamlin’s Oop-prototype Panther Kitten cartoons is in preparation, along with an earlier Hamlin gag strip called The Hired Hand, whose booklet edition has been out of print since the 1920s.)

For Etta Hulme, the Star-Telegram’s signature opinion-page cartoonist since 1972, an early breakthrough lay in a post-WWII comic-book series about a cowboy critter named “Red” Rabbit. Graphic designer and Web publisher Kerry Gammill spent the 1980s and earlier ’90s as an illustrator with Marvel and DC, then moved into motion-picture conceptual art on such productions as 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000 and 1999’s Storm of the Century.

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Happy Birthday: Parasite

parasite-5073966Maxwell Jensen was the classic, small-time crook before his own idiocy transformed him into something far greater.

Jensen was working at a plant attached to a research center and opened one of the storage containers, thinking it might contain the company’s payrolls. Instead the biohazardous extraterrestrial materials inside transformed him, staining his skin purple and giving him the power to absorb the powers of anyone he touched.

The Parasite, as Jensen dubbed himself, became one of Superman’s most dangerous foes, especially since Jensen could not only absorb Superman’s powers but also learned his secret identity.

Flash Rising, by Martha Thomases

So Barry Allen is coming back.

I like Barry Allen okay. I was sad when he died. Not as sad as I was when Supergirl died, but sad. He seemed like a nice guy, someone down-to-earth and genuine, at least as much as a comic-book character can be. His job as a police scientist seemed exotic to me in the days before the CSI shows made put it on television every night. Even when I was a long-haired freak, I liked his crew-cut sincerity.

When Wally West took over the role of the Flash in the comic, I was grouchy about it. He was different. The way Mike Baron wrote him, he was very different. Even though I like to think I’m an open-minded, progressive person, sometimes I want my comics to stay the same. I kept reading them, though, and was soon won over. Those stories were more like soap opera, making them much more addictive on a month-to-month basis.

Wally has been the Flash for 23 years. For my son, he’s the only Flash there is. I mean, he’s my son, so he’s read an abnormal number of old comics, but the Flash he knows from week-to-week is Wally. His reaction to Barry Allen’s return, as he read about it in the New York Daily News on Wednesday, is an unenthusiastic shrug. (more…)

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe: Super or Silly?

  • News
  • April 29, 2008

It’s been over a week since Midway announced that the rumored Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe game was in fact real. The reaction from both comic and gaming communities has been a collective, "Huh?"

At first it seems like an odd couple, but it isn’t without precedent. In the past, Capcom combined their 2D Marvel fighting games with their Street Fighter franchise to create X-Men vs. Street Fighter, the first of many successful Marvel vs. Capcom games. Look at it this way: people know Mortal Kombat and they also know the Justice League. So, from a sales point of view, this looks like a mainstream winner.

But from a fanboy perspective, does this work? Sure, we hear the cries of "Superman would just rip the head off of Sub-Zero," but it just might be more interesting than you think. If this Superman is reigned in to a reasonable level, he could be a boss-level character — but not invincible. Think less Silver Age or post-Infinite Crisis and more Superman: The Animated Series or John Byrne’s Man of Steel. And remember, Superman’s as vulnerable to magic as anyone else, so the Mortal Kombat warriors’ special abilities could be a hassle for Mr. Faster Than A Speeding Bullet. And when you think about it like that, Sub-Zero’s freezing power doesn’t seem so, well… powerless.


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Interview: Grant Morrison on ‘Final Crisis’ and ‘Doctor Who’

  • News
  • April 29, 2008

grantmorrisoncomic-3297974As I wandered around the press gathering at the New York Legend Award ceremony for Stan Lee, I saw a familiar face — a face I first saw in an issue of Animal Man many years ago.

It was, of course, Grant Morrison, who is currently wowing folks in All Star Superman and weirding them out in Batman.

Known for cosmic-scale work in such titles as The Invisibles and various stories during his run on JLA, Morrison seemed the perfect choice to handle DC’s upcoming crossover mega-event, Final Crisis.

I spoke with Morrison about the influences and potential ramifications of Final Crisis, as well as his future as one of the primary architects in the DC Universe. We also chatted a bit about another series that has us excited: the reinvigorated hit BBC science-fiction classic, Doctor Who.

COMICMIX: First of all, you have to settle a bet for me, Grant. In the weekly series 52, the villain called "The Ten-Eyed Man" was re-introduced for the first time since Crisis on Infinite Earths, except now it was a whole cult of ten-eyed warriors who were very creepy and seemed to be mystical and demonic. That revamp had to be your idea, right?

GRANT MORRISON: Yes, yes it was.

CMix: I knew it! I said, "That is pure Morrison!"

GM: Wait ’til you meet "The Nine-Eyed Man" in Batman. He’s a renegade who cut off one of his fingers and is crazy now.

CMix: That’s just so weird, I love it.

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Del Close Close Up, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • April 28, 2008

Well, it’s about time.

Author Kim Howard Johnson, former comics newsman (the late, lamented Comics Scene), occasional comic book writer (Superman: True Brit, with John Cleese and John Byrne), and frequent ComicMix commenter, has written the definitive biography of his mentor, collaborator and friend, comedy legend Del Close.

It’s called The Funniest One In The Room: The Lives and Legends of Del Close (Chicago Review Press, $24.95), and I’ll admit right off it’s impossible for me to not absolutely love a book in which I am mentioned in the second paragraph. I could have titled this column “Me and My Ego” but, no, this one’s about Del’s ego.

Comics fans may be familiar with Del’s work in collaboration with John Ostrander on Munden’s Bar during its original First Comics run, and/or their work together on the even-more-over-the-top Wasteland, the one we did at DC Comics. In fact, it was Del who suggested the title.

Students of American cultural history know Del as a Shakespearean actor who also performed on television and in movies and plays by Steve Martin, Jules Feiffer, William Saroyan, Judge Julius Hoffman, and Kaufman and Hart. But he is best known for his work as a director, teacher and mentor to – to name but a very, very few – John and Jim Belushi; Brian Doyle, Joel, and Bill Murray; Howard Hessman; Rob Reiner; Joe Flaherty; Harold Ramis; Betty Thomas; George Wendt; Tim Kazurinsky; John Candy; Chris Farley. Tim Meadows; Andy Richter; Stephen Colbert; Steve Carell; Kim Yale… and literally hundreds more. Oh, yeah… he was also rehearsal director of Saturday Night Live for a couple years and he created the format for SCTV. (more…)

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