Tagged: Superman

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending April 28, 2008

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  • April 27, 2008

Last weekend’s New York Comic Con affected ComicMix columnists in different ways, with Michael, Martha and myself all musing about the con experience (and Dennis and John discussing other events of note from that same weekend).  Here’s what we’ve written for you this past week:

Michael’s column totally wins for "best byline" this week..  He probably wins for  "best comment thread," too.

The Weekly Haul: Reviews for April 24, 2008

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  • April 24, 2008

This week in comics was all over the map, a schizophrenic jumble of thrills, idiocy, fun and pulp. The good books were great, and the bad ones were terrible. At the very least, it was entertaining from start to finish.

micetemplar-1-7644301Book of the Week: The Mice Templar #4 — After the third issue of this series came out a couple months back, I wrote that while it was a good read, I was still waiting for the story to diverge from the rote fantasy plot. Writer Bryan J.L. Glass sent me a note saying just wait for issue #4, when things take a big turn.

Sure enough, the latest issue marks the point when The Mice Templar went from good to great. This isn’t just a fantasy tale featuring mice, it’s an intricately detailed epic and one of the best stories on comics shelves today.

In issue #4, Karic and Pilot continue their journey, with Karic showing both his potential as a great Templar and his youthful uncertainty. As they go along, Glass draws readers deeper into the massive mythos he has created, a back story that is mysterious but not confused. The issue ends with a too-good-to-spoil moment of "nothing will ever be the same." My only complaint is having to wait two months for the next issue.

Lastly, Mike Oeming’s art on this series improves with every issue, and it started out strong. He manages to make scenes of fighting mice into tense, dramatic moments, and his watercolor work in the concluding pages expands on the perceptions of what comic book art can be.

The Runners Up:

The Mighty Avengers #12 — Those of us who bailed out on the end of the horrifically delayed Secret War finally have an answer to the question of "Where the hell did Nick Fury go?" In this potboiler of an issue, Brian Michael Bendis diverges from the boring Mighty team to trace Fury’s movements while in exile, starting with the one-eyed wonder finding out about the Skrull infiltration.

From there, a paranoid Fury pushes forward as covertly as possible, investigating anyone and everyone to determine who the Skrulls are. The issue ends with an exhausted and uncertain Fury standing before a wall of photos of heroes, some marked as Skrulls. The issue follows in tone the great Gene Hackman thriller The Conversation, and is perhaps the best Secret Invasion lead-in yet.

Fall of Cthulhu #11 — This Lovecraftian tale from BOOM! Studios has been up and down over the first storylines, but the latest (The Gray Man) starts off like a perfect blend of Lovecraft’s stories and an old issue from EC Comics. A mysterious girl — you know trouble’s brewing when her nickname is Lucifer — is pulled into a sheriff’s office, and the authorities struggle to figure out how she’s connected to all the recent trouble in Arkham.

Michael Alan Nelson’s script work because he perfectly sets up the sheriff and his deputies in the role of the unknowing everymen who’ve stumbled into some ugliness far beyond their comprehension. This is a genuinely creepy book.

(more…)

59, by John Ostrander

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  • April 24, 2008

Numbers represent. They don’t really mean.

Any meaning associated with numbers – or words for that matter – are what we assign to them. My social security number identifies me to the government but it’s not who I am. It has importance, yes, and if unscrupulous people get a hold of it, it can have a terrible impact on my life. It is not, however, my life. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The road map is not itself the road.

I turned 59 last Sunday and I’ve asked myself “What does that mean? Am I different in any essential way than I was on Saturday?” No. “Do birthdays have meanings?” If we give them some – yes. I like to celebrate the birthdays of those close to me more than I like to celebrate my own. I celebrate the fact that they were born, that they entered this world, and I get to be a part of their lives. I don’t dislike my birthday; I don’t have a problem with having one. I am thankful for the thoughts and good wishes expressed and any excuse to have a double chocolate cake is a good one.

The real use to me of my birthday these days is a bit more meditative. The number 59 has meaning in context with numbers 1 to 58. They are mileposts in my journey thus far. Milepost thirty-three – my first published comic book work. I remember that because I was pleased to be a rookie at anything at 33. Milepost thirty-eight – I married Kim Yale. Talk about being a rookie! Milepost forty-seven – Kim died and the world collapsed only to begin again a few mileposts later with Mary Mitchell. Life goes on. Death gives way to new life. (more…)

Happy Birthday: Myron Waldman

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  • April 24, 2008

Born in 1908 in Brooklyn, NY, Myron Waldman always loved to draw. He went to Pratt Institute and majored in Art, graduating in 1930.

Shortly after that, Waldman got a job with Max Fleisher Studios. He started as an inker, but by 1934 was one of Fleisher’s lead animators, working on Betty Boop, Popeye, Raggedy Ann, and even Superman. When war broke out, Waldman joined the Army, and served for three years—upon his return he went to work for Paramount’s Famous Studios, handling Casper the Friendly Ghost.

From 1958 to 1968 Waldman worked for Hal Seeger Productions, reviving the old Fleisher series Out of the Inkwell and helping to create Milton the Monster. Waldman also drew the 1940s comic strip Happy the Humbug, and wrote Eve: A Pictorial Love Story, one of the earliest American graphic novels.

In 1997, he received the Windsor McCay Award for lifetime achievement in animation. Waldman passed away in 2006 but his influence is still felt by animators and cartoon artists everywhere.

New York Comic Con: The Brain-Dump Roundup

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  • April 23, 2008

Here we are, two days after the beast that is New York Comic Con settled back into hibernation, and all that’s left of the big show are piles of discarded promo cards, comics with dinosaurs fighting tanks, and a bunch of skrull masks missing their rubber-band straps. Welcome to my post-NYCC highlight reel, folks.

All things considered, the convention was a fine time. Sure, the bar was set pretty low when you consider the debacle of the first NYCC show, but even when one adds all of the other recent conventions to the frame of reference, this year’s NYCC fared pretty well. With a few exceptions, it felt like just the right level of crowd — not packed to an uncomfortable San Diego Comic-Con level, but not the empty, depressing little ghost towns of Wizard World Texas and Philadelphia. The creators I spoke with seemed happy about the show, too. They weren’t hustling to cover the cost of their attendance or feeling frazzled by crowds, contradicting policies or inevitable scheduling issues that pop up at these types of events.

Friday was manageable, Saturday was tolerable and Sunday was actually somewhat relaxing. The temperature allowed attendees to dress comfortably — no winter jackets to increase the sweat level once you enter the building, and no oppressive heat outside to raise the humidity levels before you even reach the front door. The big programming dust-up on Saturday, in which a perfect storm of late-running panels and big-name guests prompted the convention staff to close the panel area for a short time, was the only major problem I had with the show — and only because it made me slightly late to the panel I planned to attend. (more…)

We Become What We Deserve To Be, by Elayne Riggs

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  • April 23, 2008

It’s now been three days since NY Comic Con 2008 ended, but I had to save my con report until now because it usually takes me this long to fully recover and gather my thoughts. The older I get and the more convention time I’ve logged, the more a few patterns begin to present themselves, and this con pretty much ran the gamut for me.

Friday was our longest stint at the con, and is pretty much a blur to me now. I’d had no set plan other than touching base with the ComicMix office and wandering around Artists’ Alley to see friends, but I was determined to give the exhibition hall as thorough a perusal as possible during the "trade only" portion of the con in the morning. But between the non-comics media stuff and the dealers in which I had little interest, it all ran together far sooner than I’d expected, and I quickly found myself in "seen one, seen ’em all" mode, wishing I’d prearranged specific meetups with blog friends and such. Thing of it was, though, I wanted to wing it. I’ve had to insert so much structure into my life what with the job search that I just wasn’t up to organizing anything having to do with fun, leisure activities.

Speaking of organization, I should mention that this was hands-down the best run NYCC yet, even with the reported surge in attendance. The volunteers were helpful without being intrusive, polite to a fault (one even asked if we needed help finding anyone in Artists’ Alley) and extremely professional. What a total pleasure! We saw a queue on Friday to get into the Javits, but nothing like the chaos of previous years. And here I must confess that part of the reason we may have seen only the sunny side was that we’d decided to truncate our time on Saturday and Sunday to about four hours rather than the entire day.

We have to face facts — these days, even in our home town, a full convention day takes a lot out of us, between all the walking and the hour-plus bus rides (which turned into two hours going back, as the crosstown bus from the Javits tended to arrive at Sixth Avenue moments after our express bus departed, leaving us to wait another 30 minutes for the connection). We’re not about to keel over or anything, we make it up and down the two flights between our apartment and the sidewalk just fine, but neither are we cut out any longer for the more frenzied activity we could handle ten years ago. (more…)

Superman Blue … Archie Orange, by Mike Gold

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  • April 21, 2008

In the comments section of my column of two weeks ago, I told Van Jensen that today’s broad spectrum of color could not be printed on the cheap toilet paper employed in the days of yore. That stuff would soak up ink like a spirit gets sucked into Harold Ramis’s ghost trap. Back in those days just after the invention of papyrus, color artists were limited to a palette of three values each of red, blue and yellow, plus black. Not a lot to work with.

Still, as Van implies, the end result was fine. It didn’t bother us, just as riding a horse to work didn’t bother us. Except… except … it bothered me.

To be specific, blue hair bothered me.

I understand why hair was blue: if it were black, it’d just look like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne had a big blob of India ink atop their brainpans. You couldn’t make it look like hair, and not everybody could have brown, red, or blonde hair. The blue stuff was supposed to suggest highlights, but with a few dozen colors to choose from, what can you do?  (more…)

NYCC Photo Gallery: Costumes, Costumes and More Costumes…

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  • April 20, 2008

After a mediocre Friday, the costumed crowd made their presence known Saturday at New York Comic Con. All of the standards were there, including Supermen, Slave Leias and Stormtroopers, but the convention soup was spiced up a bit by the addition of a few great, original takes on the standards, like the "Mr. Freeze" seen in the gallery below.

A special bit of comic cred goes out to "Superwoman" (also pictured in the gallery below) from Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman. It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t get an image of one of our favorite "costumed" guests — the guy wandering around the show with a music player ambushing attendees and rickrolling them with "Never Gonna Give You Up." Brilliant.

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NYCC: Steve Gerber Memorial

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  • April 19, 2008

The memorial panel for the late great writer Steve Gerber was about as eclectic as he was.  The panel began with a slideshow tribute to Steve’s work, set to the tune of the Beatles’ “Revolution.” Moderator Mark Evanier and Steve’s friends and relatives made sure Gerber’s spirit was as much in attendance as it could possibly be — his ashes were present on the panel table:

Mark even made a joke about how appropriate it was that the box bearing the ashes had gotten a little cracked.

Gerber may have had a cracked sense of humor, but what emerged from the anecdotes told about him by those who knew him well and those he inspired was his tremendous generosity.  Mark recalled an incident when the two of them had heard a scream coming from outside, and in the few seconds Mark began to act on that sound Steve was already outside hoping to help the situation.  While the noise turned out to be a false alarm, Mark pointed out how it was indicative of Steve’s “immediate compassion for a stranger.” (more…)

NYCC News: The Scoop on the ‘Iron Man’ Videogame

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  • April 19, 2008

To coincide with the start of the New York Comic Con, Sega released the demo for the Iron Man movie videogame over Xbox LIVE. Marvel had the demo running at their booth. Watching the attendee reaction was Michael McHale, Senior Producer for the game. He took some time out to give us some new info.

When asked about the long list of videogames based on movies that fail to live up to the hype, he simply responded, "I don’t think anybody sets out to make a bad game."

To prevent the curse of bad movie-based games, Sega took advantage of the fact that Marvel was producing Iron Man themselves and got access to the materials earlier to allow for a longer development cycle than is usual for licensed games. For instance, early on they got the suit CGI models Industrial Light and Magic created for the movie — so the suits in the game are the same ones in the film.

The challenge for the game was, since Iron Man is pretty versitile, they had to make huge maps for him to fly around in but make them detailed enough so when he hovered or landed it still looked decent.

"You get to take on the mission objectives in any order you want," said McHale. And his abilities also make the game unique. Asked what games it compared to, McHale briefly mentioned the Superman Returns game, but the speed reminded him more of the Ace Combat jetfighter series. "I don’t think there’s another game like it to be honest."

"We definitely go beyond the film," he continued. "About 30-percent of the content is based on the film. The rest is drawn from the Marvel Universe. You battle aganst guys like Titanium Man, Whiplash and other famous villains. We’ve got factions like A.I.M. and the Maggia involved. Lots of fun things drawn from the comic books."

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