Bad Machinery by John Allison just might be our favorite graphic novel series. The 7th mystery: The Case of The Forked Road. This one has time travel, science, and a great story for the girls to solve. You don’t want to miss this book — or our discussion about it!
So all hail, Princess Diana! For the second week in a row, she has conquered the all mighty Box Office!
You commerce-and-finance majors might consider declaring a holiday. Liberal arts dweebs like me will be satisfied with being grateful for a genuinely satisfying movie-going experience.
There’s a lot to be said for the film and no doubt a lot of it is already being said, with, again no doubt, more to come. It’s the kind of flick that prompts après theater discussion, which is kind of rare these days, especially among those of us who have logged a load of birthdays. We were so happy with the afternoon’s entertainment that we didn’t mind not remembering where we left the car.
I’d like to focus on only one aspect of it and maybe get in some opinions about superhero movies in general. And it affords a chance to blather about something that’s been bothering me for years.
Somewhere in the mists, when I was first creeping into the writing dodge, someone must have told me about the storytelling virtues of clarity. In order for the story, whether you’re experiencing it on a page or on a screen or by hearing it on a recording device, to be fully effective you must know what’s going on: who’s doing what to whom and if we’re pushing our luck, why. Where are the characters? How did they get there? Where are they in relation to one another? How did they get whatever props they’re using? How did they get the information they’re acting on?
Et cetera.
I’m particularly annoyed at lame fights. Surely, way out west, the movie crowd is aware that there’s entertainment value in well-choreographed kickass. If there’s any doubt, let them unspool some Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee, the patron saint of cinematic brawling. Many modern action movies – or maybe most of them – render action in quick cuts, blurs, blaring sound effects. Not my idea of amusement, at least not in mega-doses.
Back to Wonder Woman (and maybe we can, please, have an end to complaining?) None of what I’ve bitched about applies to WW. While in the darkness, I never found myself wondering what was happening on the screen. This, the director was kind enough to show me and thus allow me to relax into her work.
A word about the lead actress Gal Gadot: she’s extraordinarily beautiful (duh!), but her face is not only gorgeous, it is expressive – it seemed to change from shot to shot. And that quality is a blessing for a performer.
So, yeah, all hail to Wonder Woman, I don’t expect to see a better movie this year.
Everybody’s got to eat. And if you want to make a career out of creative work, you’re probably going to find yourself, more and more, telling stories that people want to hear. That’s not a bad thing — people are your customers and audience, and most creative folks want both of them — but it does mean that early idiosyncratic work tends to smooth into more genre-identified work as a creator matures and lives and wants to stop eating ramen noodles every single day.
Maybe that’s why Hope Larson moved from the near-allegory Salamander Dream and dreamlike Gray Horses to the more conventionally genre Mercury and Chiggers, and followed those up with writing a script for the adventure-story Compass South, first of a series. (In comics in particular, there’s a tendency for cartoonists to turn into writers over time, since a person can generally get done more units of writing-work (than art-work) in the same amount of time.)
Compass South is an adventure story for younger readers, in which red-headed twins (and orphans, more or less) Alexander and Cleopatra start off as petty criminals in 1860 New York and go on to get involved with pirates, secret treasure, and another set of red-headed twins of a similar age on their way to San Francisco, where they hope to pose as the long-lost redheaded twin sons of a rich man.
It’s a genre exercise, but a good one — Cleo dresses as a boy, of course, and there are swordfights and chases through jungles, long-lost mysteries and potential new love. Alex and Cleo get separated, as they must, and mix with the other team of would-be fake San Francisco heirs, each becoming friendly with the ones they’re thrown in with, and somewhat making common cause as young poor redheads all alone in the world.
And I expect those young readers will like this better — most of them, anyway, that vast conventional audience — than Salamander Dream or Gray Horses. It’s a fine book, exciting and fast-moving and colorful and gung-ho. If I didn’t like it quite as much, well, you have to remember that I’m not a redheaded young person.
Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
You would think Universal would be happy with the money they’re making.
The last two Fast & Furious movies made over a billion dollars each. They were the top grossing studio in 2015 and this year are on track for a second place finish. No one is worried about the studio going broke or the lot being shut down or even serious cutbacks at their amusement parks. Things are good. I have no idea why they feel the need to invest so much in this Dark Universe nonsense that gave us this version of The Mummy.
They take what could be a perfectly good story about a scary, driven, magical lady mummy and fill it with exposition for movies that won’t be out for years and a “shared universe” with nothing anyone has any real attachment to. There’s no one out there dying for a Creature From the Black Lagoon reboot, but here we are with pregnant pauses on a jar with a flipper in it in hopes it becomes the next Avengers or some such nonsense. The Mummy is overloaded with ideas and starved for coherent storytelling, and it’s not a good combination.
The Mummy opens, like all good movies about an ancient Egyptian monster, in 12th century England. I’m not entirely sure why we need the movie to start with a bit about crusaders except to start laying pipe for the insane shared universe they start building to later, but whatever. We quickly move to ancient Egypt and the story of Prnicess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), the titular Mummy, and her thwarted inheritance and the horrible revenge she took that led to her being turned in to the kind of being that lives more than 3000 years and throws curses every which way. It’s an interesting story and her character is more immediately gripping than any of the other characters. You have Tom Cruise in this movie playing an army officer who loots antiquities and the movie spends the whole time falling over itself to praise him for the smallest bit of human decency. Then you have Annabelle Wallis as an archaeologist who spends so much time keeping and revealing secrets that we never get to an actual character. We spend 70% of the movies with those boring nothings of characters, while a much more electric villain languishes on the sidelines causing wordless havoc.
I get that this is trying to build to some bigger set of movies and that you would much rather have Tom Cruise as your linchpin than Sofia Boutella, but it isn’t just star power that makes Robert Downey Jr. the best part of The Avengers, it’s that they give him things to say or do that feel like they matter. As someone who sees a lot of movies and plans to continue to do so I’m interested in the story hooks they leave at the end of The Mummy, but I’m not excited to spend any more time in this world or with this thieving soldier turned supernatural figure if his defining character trait is going to be “mostly a prick but not to this one woman he slept with” for an indefinite number of films. That said, he’s got some A+ costuming in the last scene and Cruise is the biggest movie star of a generation, so there’s reason to hope there.
Otherwise you’ve got a horror action movie that isn’t particularly scary and has few memorable action beats. The sequence with the crashing airplane is wonderful and something I haven’t seen before. Or, rather, it would be something I haven’t seen before if it hadn’t been in all the trailers. Other than that, it has a bunch of zombie-esque chase beats, and a fight scene that was a redux version of Black Widow and the Hulk. There were better action beats in the 1999 Brendan Fraser version and that movie wasn’t very good either. We don’t even get a good Tom Cruise running sequence and why even hire the guy at that point.
The Mummy is a frustrating movie not because it’s objectively bad or anything but because it’s so very boring. Maybe it wouldn’t be so boring if they hadn’t been compelled to cram so much material in to build to more Dark Universe films. If the story they’re actually telling in this film had gotten more room, instead of being dedicated to stuff that might be in movies we never see after the poor box office reception this weekend, it could have been saved. We could have gotten more time with the supporting characters that were more interesting than the mains. We could have focused on the mythology we were interacting with here, instead of needing to tie all evil in to one amorphous blob we could draw on later or being force-fed quite so much Dr. Jekyll. Rather than get a nearly two-hour commercial for a product I’m not sure I want, The Mummy should have tried harder to be something worthwhile in its own right.
Fun
By Paolo Bacilieri
SelfMadeHero/Abrams, 296 pages, $24.95
Life is never perfectly sequential, with one event cleanly leading to another. There are interruptions, asides, flashbacks, diversions, and the like. In some ways, it is not dissimilar to the crossword with its black spots, horizontal and vertical intersections, and clues that are either easy or confoundingly complex.
Turned into a graphic novel, it would resemble something close to Paolo Bacilieri’s Fun. The work is his American debut although the 52-year old creator from Milan has a large European following. This ambitious work is an interesting but flawed volume for all the reasons above.
Ostensibly about Professor Pippo Quester, an Italian celebrity novelist, and his work-in-progress, a history of the crossword puzzle, it is about so much more. The linear and most “American” aspects of the work are all the sections about Quester and his meticulous tracing of the crossword, introduced in the New York World, in 1913 and how it quickly spread around the globe by World War II. Along the way, we get snapshots of the key creators of the daily puzzles from its inventor, Arthur Wynne, through the Italian Giorgio Sisini.
When Quester seeks someone to do additional research, he turns to his former colleague, Zeno Porno, a Disney comics writer. Apparently Zeno is a recurring player in Bacilieri’s work and is seen as the artist’s alter ego. Either way, he seems a sad, almost pathetic figure, who is also never seen actually working. It is through Zeno we get many tangential anecdotes and stories that spin off from the book’s axis. One such digression focuses on Spider-Man foe Hammerhead (properly crediting it to Gerry Conway and John Romita) and leaves you (and Quester) confused. Some of these are done in color while the remainder of the book is in black and white—make of that what you will.
Things turn tragic, though, when young Mafalda Citicillo stalks the pair and shoots them. As Quester recovers, Zeno tracks her down once she’s out of prison to ask the big question: why? Her response sends him close-reading one of Quester’s previous novels in search of answers that do not come easily. In fact, once the reader is told the answer, it is almost immediately undermined leaving readers to wonder where the truth lay.
Originally published as two volumes – Fun and More Fun – they are presented to American readers on one thick volume which makes for a more satisfying experience. Bacilieri worked on this between 2009 and 2014 based on his occasional signature and the artwork itself is exquisite, detailed illustrations that bring different eras and locales to life. His pages are filled with things to look at and while I can quibble with some of the word balloon placement, the page design and storytelling is varied and never dull.
We’re more accustomed to stories with a clear beginning, middle, and ending so some of the narrative ambiguity undercuts the novel’s strength but there is still plenty to like here. I suspect the core story, on its own, would not have been anywhere near as interesting.
ComicMix’s crack legal columnist Bob Ingersoll is more than just a lawyer with a great wit, although that would be enough. For decades, Bob has been my go-to guy on the subject of television minutiae. So, it came as no surprise when he was the first to tell me and a group of our friends that Adam West died.
Yep, that sucks. Last week at this time, it would have been difficult to find a nicer guy in show business. Most of us are well aware of West’s résumé and I won’t bore you with it at this late date. Here’s the IMDB link – be sure to come back now, y’hear? But there’s one fun fact we tend to overlook.
Adam West saved the American comic book industry.
It was not a great time for the comic book racket. The founding families still owned most of the big players – DC, Marvel, Harvey, Archie – and unless you were Dell Comics, you were pretty much entirely dependent upon newsstand sales. The problem was, the newsstands were disappearing faster than a speeding bullet. The mom ‘n’ pop candy, grocery and magazine stores were dying off like the last reel of a Michael Crichton movie. The neighborhood newsstand, a product of our larger cities, were being urban-renewed into oblivion. Local drug stores were vaporizing before our very eyes.
What replaced all this stuff were big chain stores and huge shopping malls. The problem with these places was profitability. These stores measure profit in “turns” or how fast the product sells, and in “per-square-foot” increments. In response, the Comics Magazine Association of America developed large spinner racks that could hold maybe 500 comic books in a few square feet. The problem here is that policing comic book racks is expensive and takes a lot of time, and there’s not much profit in a 10-cent item.
In response, in 1961 the publishers raised the cover price 20%. Too little, way too late. It turns out there’s not much profit in a 12-cent item, either.
Publishers had been going out of business since the market started to turn south in the late 1940s. By the mid-50s some of the big guys – Quality, Fawcett, Fiction House, EC Comics – no longer survived. You’d think Fredrick Wertham had written another book. Despite Marvel’s slowly growing success, things looked bleak indeed.
And then, in January 1966, ABC-TV started broadcasting a twice-weekly series titled Batman, starring Adam West. The show went through the roof… and virtually all of the surviving comics publishers started adding more superhero product to their line. And these books sold. Some outlets that didn’t carry comics started doing so. For the first time, paperback reprints from a wide variety of publishers became widespread. Tower Comics (T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, et al) burst onto the scene in the fall of 1965, just as the Batman hype was gathering steam. As such, they were a bit ahead of the curve.
Tower was joined by King Comics, Archie’s superhero imprint Mighty Comics, Lightning Comics (Fatman the Human Flying Saucer, Super Green Beret), and Myron Fass’s M.F. Enterprises (Captain Marvel, Eerie Publications – which was a horror imprint).
Television fads suffer from the laws of gravity, and the Batman craze only lasted a couple years. The other shows produced by Batman’s William Dozier either died after one year (Green Hornet) or never got off the ground (Wonder Woman, Dick Tracy). None of the aforementioned new publishers lasted very long, with the exception of Fass’s Eerie Publications.
However, in their wake, they left a much stronger DC Comics and an even stronger still Marvel Comics, particularly after Marvel got out from under their distribution deal with DC Comics’ Independent News Distributors – later known as Warner Publishing Services – in 1969.
I place the success of the Batman show and its dramatic impact on the American comic book publishing field at Adam West’s feet. Of course, if West had not been cast the program might have been as big a success. That’s something that we cannot divine. But Adam West did pull it off and he did so masterfully. West had the perfect approach for the material, simultaneously being heroic, “unknowingly” ironic, paternal, and strong of ability, spirit, and character. No easy feat.
More important, West had a great attitude about his work. After a brief period of trying to break out of the stereotype, he embraced the cape and cowl and renewed his work as Batman in television specials, in animated cartoons, and in public appearances. In fact, his last such effort – Batman vs Two-Face, starring West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar and William Shatner as the titled bad guy – will be released later this year.
His death last week made the top of the CBS radio news. It received break-ins on all media and the headline zippers on cable news shows. It set the Internet ablaze. Adam West was, and remains, a part of our American culture.
Adam West was, and remains, a major part of comic book history.
I had something like five hundred words typed about this book — pretty much the whole post — but I deleted it instead of cut-and-pasting, and then saved over the place I was typing it.
So I’m not going to try to recreate that thought process: it’s too frustrating to contemplate. Instead, I’ll run through the high points of Raina Telgemeier’s 2016 graphic novel Ghosts in a more telegraphic way: it won’t be as pretty, and probably not as coherent, but maybe I can hit the same points, more or less.
First: Telgemeier is huge. Probably the best-selling creator of comics stories in the US right now, the center of gravity for a whole area of the industry. I think most people know that by now, but the insularity of the Wednesday Crowd is legendary.
Second: whether on purpose or not, Telgemeier has been on a memoir-fiction alternation for her recent career. This is the second work of fiction, after memoirs Smile and Sisters and previous fiction Drama .
Third: it’s the story of Catrina, a tween who moves with her family up the California coast, to the cold and windy town of Bahia de la Luna from somewhere near LA. Yes, that means leaving all her friends and surroundings; that happens just before page one.
Fourth: the family did this for the health of Cat’s kid sister Maya, who has cystic fibrosis. Maya’s condition is progressive, degenerative, and incurable: she will get worse and worse over time. Running, exerting herself — normal kid stuff — will progress it more quickly. Bahia’s cold chilly climate is better for her than the southern heat, but that’s at best a delaying tactic.
Fifth: Bahia is a town full of ghosts, says local boy Carlos. The girls meet him on their first day in town. These are the nice, friendly, dead-relatives kind of ghosts, happy to share time with you, not the haunting or angry kind.
Sixth: Cat is a rationalist, like me. She insists that ghosts aren’t real. This is true in the real world, but, unfortunately for her, is not true in this story. I’m personally not entirely happy with stories — especially those for young people — that show smart rationalists being proven wrong by inexplicable supernatural stuff, but I guess this is OK, because….
Seventh: Ghosts is, in a quiet, unobtrusive way, about the inevitability of death and the need to make one’s peace with that. Maya understands this better than Cat, and so embraces the ghosts more willingly than Cat — even though doing so runs her a huge risk of advancing her condition seriously.
Eighth: the ghosts in Ghosts are intrinsic to that theme, obviously. How better to accept death than to make friends with people who have already experienced it? I still wish Cat wasn’t so obviously proved wrong, but this story had to go this direction.
Ninth and final: Telgemeier is a thoughtful and interesting comics-maker who shouldn’t be left entirely to be enjoyed by pre-adults. I do think her memoirs are her strongest books, still, but Ghosts has its own energy, point of view, and story to tell — it’s well worth reading.
Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
BURBANK, CA (June 13, 2017) Prepare for more brainy adventures as Warner Bros. Home Entertainment brings iZOMBIE: The Complete Third Season to DVD on October 3, 2017. From executive producers Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars, 90210, Party Down) and Diane Ruggiero-Wright (Veronica Mars, The Ex List), The CW’s hit series, that nearly two million people are tuning into weekly*, stars Rose McIver (Once Upon A Time, Masters of Sex), Malcolm Goodwin (Breakout Kings), Rahul Kohli (Eastenders), Robert Buckley (One Tree Hill), David Anders (Once Upon A Time, The Vampire Diaries), and Aly Michalka (Hellcats, Easy A). The 3-disc DVD set includes all 13 episodes from the third season, plus deleted scenes and the 2016 Comic-Con Panel.
*Source: Nielsen National TV View Live + 7 Day Ratings, excluding repeats, specials, and <5 telecasts; 15-16 Season = 9/21/15-9/18/16
To accommodate fan requests, iZOMBIE: The Complete Third Season is also available on Blu-rayTM courtesy of Warner Archive Collection. The Blu-rayTM release includes all bonus features on the DVD, and is also arriving October 3, 2017. Warner Archive Blu-ray releases are found at Amazon.com and all online retailers.
Will Seattle become the capital of a zombie homeland? In season three, Liv has discovered there are more zombies living in Seattle than she previously believed, including a private military contractor employing a zombie army that is preparing for the day humans learn of their existence. Major finds acceptance in this army, and Liv and Clive investigate the murder of a zombie family that may set off an all-out zombie-human war. Ravi’s former boss at the Center for Disease Control shows up in Seattle to investigate the Max Rager massacre. Blaine finds living as a human with no memory of his evil past is more blessing than curse. Peyton pulls at a thread in one of her cases that may lead to the villain that’s pulling all the strings. This action-packed season will follow Liv, as she takes on the traits of a dominatrix, a JACKASS-style stunt man, an office gossip, a pre-school teacher, a conspiracy theorist, a dungeon master, and more.
“After three strong seasons, iZOMBIE continues to have ravenous fans who are always hungry for more” said Rosemary Markson, WBHE Senior Vice President, Television Marketing. “We think the loyal fan base will be very pleased with the special features and the 13 visionary episodes from season three.”
iZOMBIE is based upon characters created by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred for Vertigo from DC Entertainment. The series was developed for television by Thomas and Ruggiero-Wright, who executive produce along with Danielle Stokdyk (Veronica Mars, Party Down) and Dan Etheridge (Veronica Mars, Party Down). iZOMBIE is produced by Bonanza Productions Inc. in association with Spondoolie Productions and Warner Bros. Television.
13 ONE-HOUR EPISODES
BONUS FEATURES
DIGITAL HD
iZombie: The Complete Third Season is also currently available to own on Digital HD. Digital HD allows consumers to instantly stream and download all episodes to watch anywhere and anytime on their favorite devices. Digital HD is available from various digital retailers including Amazon Video, CinemaNow, iTunes, PlayStation, Vudu, Xbox and others.
BASICS
3 DVD-9s
$24.98 SRP
Street Date: October 3, 2017
Audio: English (5.1)
Subtitles: English SDH and French
Aspect Ratio: Presented In 16×9 Widescreen Format
Approx Running Time: Feature – 572 minutes, Enhanced Content – Approx. 45 minutes
I fondly recall the purity of Lego, refusing to license media properties, preferring to keep their toys pristine and unique. Eventually, the opportunity for expanding their line was too tempting and they introduce first one, then another, and now a flood of media properties to their toys allowing you build everything from the Batcave to the Black Pearl. It was only a matter of time before they migrated from the playroom to the computer screen in a series of games that morphed into direct-to-DVD features. And now we have a whole subset of children’s films featuring the Lego version of popular heroes and villains.
One reason this explosion has been sustained is that the producers and writers have been freed to go wild, tongues firmly in cheeks, offering kinetic mayhem for the younger viewers and tons of pop culture references for the parents forced to endure repeated viewings. No doubt inspired by the Zucker Brothers’ Airplane!, these films apparently are a delight.
I wouldn’t know because until recently, I have never really paid attention to one. When The Lego Batman Movie landed on my doorstep, I was intrigued because the 2017 release was a well-reviewed, box office success. Parents of the tiny tot brigade told me it was really fun so I indulged.
I watched and was largely entertained in this film from writers Seth Grahame-Smith, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Jared Stern and John Whittington, and director Chris McKay. The main reason is that it focused on the less desirable parts of Batman’s persona amped up in a way to make it appear truly unpleasant. We open with Batman (Will Arnett) single-handedly saving Gotham City (again) from a mob go costumed criminals led by the Joker (Zach Galifianakis). Once the adulation fades away, he returns to Wayne Manor on Wayne Island (where’d that come from?) alone. After eating by himself, he watches Jerry Maguire, one of a ton of relationship films he uses to mask his pain. His isolation from friends, family, and foes is magnified here, even refusing to acknowledge having any connection with his polar opposite, the Clown Prince of Crime, telling him, “I don’t ‘ship.”
Alone and lonely, he finds himself pushed and shoved into interacting with others by Alfred (Ralph Finnes) at Commissioner Gordon’s retirement party, where daughter Barbara (Rosario Dawson) is introduced as the new police chief. Bruce is so smitten with her that he absently agrees to adopt an orphan, Dick Grayson (Michael Cera).
Meanwhile, the Joker apparently wanted to be imprisoned as part of his latest mad scheme to destroy Gotham and make Batman notice him. For reason that don’t really make a lot of sense, Batman decides the Joker and his ilk, need to go to the Phantom Zone and he brings along his youthful ward, now dressed as Robin despite a lack of training. There, he sees the JLA (complete with the Kenner-only heroes) having a party without him, cementing the sense of isolation.
The Joker goes to the Zone where he recruits Voldemort, the Eye of Sauron, the Daleks, King Kong, the Gremlins, a faux-Godzilla, and others to help him wreck Earth. He does, Batman pays a price for his distance, recognizes he can’t possibly do his job alone and grudgingly comes to accept he needs allies; more he needs family. Alfred is hilariously attired in the Batman outfit from the 19
60s and Babs debuts as Batgirl for the climactic battle.
The themes owe tons to the comics but the continuity is an illogical thing unto itself, undermining the connections to the source material and possibly creating a confusing entry point for future comics readers. Name a Batmobile, and you will see it somewhere in this film. Heck, even the reviled Bat-Shark Repellent becomes a plot device. I laughed out loud at the secret password to enter the Batcave and the Fortress of Solitude’s door chime.
For the adults and comic aficionados, though, the film is chockablock full of references, both verbal and visual, to tons of comic lore including references to every film, cartoon, and comic incarnation of the Dark Knight.
There are so many villains, gadgets, vehicles, and the like that it can be a bit overwhelming, no doubt demanding repeated watching just to identify everyone and everything. As a result, a topnotch vocal cast – Jenny Slate, Hector Elizondo, Mariah Carey, Eddie Izzard, Seth Green, Billy Dee Williams (once more as Harvey Dent), Conan O’Brien, Zoë Kravitz, Kate Micucci, Channing Tatum, Ellie Kemper, Jonah Hill, Adam DeVine, and even Brent Musberger — is mostly wasted since they barely do anything other than grunt or say something innocuous. I do appreciate Siri being cast as the Batcomputer, though.
The Combo Pack comes with the Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD code along with a handful of special features. Notably, there are four short shorts that are more silly than entertaining, four deleted scenes that were thankfully left unused, and six featurettes that cover aspects of the Lego world and film production.
Before I jump into this week’s column, I wanted to touch on Iceman #1 since I’ve mentioned it so many times prior to its release last Wednesday. It was a solid first issue and I really love how Sina Grace handled the dynamic between Bobby Drake and his parents. Give it a shot if you haven’t already!
Moving on… There is currently a Kickstarter up for a superhero mockumentary, Zero Issue. It’s being run by the New York Picture Company – Matt Cullinan, Zach Bubolo, and Jim Fagan. They have a little over a week left and have nearly reached their goal.
I got the chance to chat with Matt, Zach and Jim about Zero Issue, what inspires them, and where they got the tuxedos they wear in their Kickstarter video!
Joe: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me about your short film project, Zero Issue, Matt, Zach, and Jim! To start things off, can each of you give me a one-sentence pitch for Zero Issue?
Matt: Sure! Zero Issue is a superhero mockumentary about a loser hero trying to make a name for himself, and when his plans fail he has to figure out what lengths he’ll go to achieve fame.
Jim: I think mine would be “take every crippling fear of failure you have, mix it with your love of comic books and comedy, and watch them make a beautiful baby.”
Zach: I like that. Mine is “imagine if The Office, Chronicle, Avengers, and Best in Show were mashed into one movie, and you’ve got Zero Issue”.
Joe: You all list a lot of inspirations for this story in the Kickstarter which are great. How did this idea come to be though? Did one of you share the begins of an idea with the others, did you all have a eureka moment watching a movie together, or was it something else entirely?
Matt: Development was actually a long process.
Jim: Yeah, we were doing a lot of pitch creation for other people and we felt “hey, we need to go back to doing our own thing again…” we all knew we wanted to make a short film, share our voice with new people, connect to new parts of the industry… we just had to figure out what we wanted to say.
Zach: To generate ideas we actually use this collaborative process called “Design Thinking” and after rounds of brainstorming, cutting up magazines, writing ideas on post-it notes, we had a eureka moment in this coffee shop in Queens.
Jim: We were talking about genres we loved (and maybe it helped we were in Spider-Man’s home neighborhood of Forest Hills and next to a comic book shop) and we said: “what would our version of a superhero movie be?”
Joe: This is a superhero mockumentary. How did you decide that this was the best way to approach this particularly story?
Jim: I love the genre – it’s the reason I work in film and TV – that kind of story is the kind I’ve always wanted to tell: unfiltered, raw access to your characters. It takes any subject matter and makes it feel real and insanely funny. As far as the three of us go, it helps we have a shared obsession with the IFC show “Documentary Now” – once we knew Dale’s story and the story of this Superhero Festival we started thinking about an episode of Doc Now that shows you a whole world of an Al Capone Festival in Iceland in 22 minutes. It’s a perfect fit.
Zach: We also loved Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows (about vampire roommates in Wellington, New Zealand). That proved you could make a hilarious and compelling sci-fi story as a mockumentary.
Matt: Plus, early in our careers, Jim and I cut our teeth making reality and non-fiction television so as a genre we had a lot of experience executing it for networks.
Joe: The main character, Dale Dinkle, has super powers and wants to be famous. Can you tell us a bit more about Dale? What kind of things can we expect from Dale over the course of the story?
Zach: Dale is a bit of all three of us – he has a little bit of talent, he was told he’s special his whole life, and now he’s a 30-something and decidedly not special. He is desperate, confused, and disappointed that he hasn’t made it to the big time.
Matt: His power is that he can move objects with his mind – which is cool – but he’s not super powerful. He can’t float the Golden Gate Bridge like Magneto.
Jim: His mind-moving power is probably like Yoda in Empire. He could move an X-wing, but it would take a lot of effort… and he doesn’t tap into that until he gets a little dark side in him.
Matt: Ohh, is that a tease?
Jim: Maybe.
Matt: Over the course of the story expect of lot of him scrambling in desperation to prove how special and important he is.
Joe: What other kinds of characters and super powers can we expect to see in Zero Issue?
Jim: Another hero we’re excited for is Sarah Smith. If Dale represents the 90’s era superhero movies with ill-fitting nylon suits, she’s the Netflix-Snapchat era hero. No costume, just a cool attitude, and deadly powers.
Zach: She’s like Jessica Jones, but with the power of Phoenix.
Matt: But she gives no fucks. Which is awesome. Another aspiring hero is Hoover, a teen with a lot of social-anxiety. We thought that kind of character would be an original addition to the superhero genre.
Zach: He can literally suck the life out of a room, like Rogue, but he doesn’t absorb any powers. And like Sarah, he’s scared to fully use his powers.
Jim: The Zero Issue Universe is how our brains feel when we think about all the characters from all the decades of comic books we love. It’s like when you’re a kid and you take out your action figures from 12 different sets – X-Men, HeMan, Batman – they don’t care they’re from different “worlds” they just wanna kick some ass. Only in our movie, they attend symposiums on getting a superhero talent agent.
Zach: There’s the leather clad, machine gun wielding Miss Mayhem and Sir Chaos from the 80s, there’s Lady Marvelous, who is an aging Golden-Age hero from the 50s, and Hercules, the original superhero, who is literally from 200 BC.
Joe: Switching gears for a minute, there are a lot of Kickstarters out there lately and people like knowing that they’re pledging to accomplished professionals, which you all are. Could you each name one or two professional projects you’ve worked on that you’re particularly proud of?
Jim: Yeah, and we think that’s something special we bring to the project. This isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve made shows for networks and brands – I’m particularly proud of my work running a show for ABC called People’s List and my work on PBS’ Danny Elfman’s Music From the Films of Tim Burton.
Matt: A lot of my work is in the documentary television space. I probably peaked when my childhood dreams came true and I worked with Mark Hamill on a piece called Raiders, Raptors, and Rebels: Behind the Magic of ILM. I also recently wrote and produced When We Rise: The People Behind the Story for ABC.
Zach: As an actor I loved working on the video game Grand Theft Auto V, and as a producer, I’m actually going to say that I loved our work on NYPC for Cooking for One with the Crying Chef.
Matt: Plug!
Joe: Whenever comic book fans hear about someone doing a project about superheroes, they like to hear about the comic books that inspired them. What comics have you read over the years that gave you an appreciation for the superhero genre?
Zach: My dad was a comic book collector in the 80s, and he loved showing me the milestone issues of the comics he collected: like Silver Surfer #1 or when Spider-Man got the symbiote suit, or the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Eastman and Laird, or The Phantom. Recently, I’ve been really into Faith and the Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther series “A Nation Under Our Feet”.
Jim: I think my introduction was through Saturday morning cartoons. The X-Men show was pretty influential to me. Everyone hum the theme song to yourself, I’ll wait… good. And when the New 52 came out I was obsessed with the new spin on Aquaman. And in the past year or so, I’ve really liked the Star Wars comics, specifically the Darth Vader run.
Matt: Honestly, I feel like early on in life a lot of my exposure to the world of comics came through the world of video games. So X-Men was huge for me. I spent a lot of time playing those games on the Sega Genesis (shoutout to Nightcrawler). Even more than video games, movies have always been my gateway to comics: the Burton/Keaton Batman films, TMNT, and later Hellboy, Blade, and Spawn. And graphic novels. Oh, and Y: The Last Man. I’ll stop now.
Zach: Other non-comics, but books we love and that give us a deep appreciation of comic lore are Soon I Will Be Invincible and Grant Morrison’s Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human.
Joe: In the Kickstarter video you’re all wearing tuxedos. Did you rent them or do you own them?
Jim: Mine is my dad’s! It’s ill-fitting!
Matt: Yeah, I bought mine when I was a best man for a wedding. I give a helluva toast.
Zach: I ordered mine from Amazon. Only ninety dollars!
Jim: Less if you return it after!
Joe: Though the initial goal is to raise $30,000 you have a stretch goal of $100,000 to produce a full-length feature film instead and the script is already written. Can you tell us more about what we can expect in a feature film and why it’s so important that you make it to $100,000?
Matt: Yes, the dream is to make a feature. But to make a movie with lots of special effects and lots of locations, characters, and cool costumes you need a whole lot of cash.
Jim: The feature would focus not just on Dale but other aspiring heroes. In this short, we introduce you to Sarah and Hoover but in the feature, they take over a bit more. The short is Dale’s story, our story… the feature is a bit larger in terms of story. You would also see a lot more of the “normal,” the townsfolk, and how the divide between the two groups would become irreconcilable. Christopher Guest is a master of creating a movie with several leads that you’re all cheering for.
Matt: The short would be the first third of a larger story. We’d move past the point where our movie ends and follow these three characters as they develop beyond the competition and intersect when their powers have all matured.
Zach: We think the short is incredibly strong – we tell a compact story, with one lead and a huge supporting cast, in twenty-two minutes. It’s going to have everything you could want from a superhero story: powers, humor, characters you care about, and a climactic battle.
Joe: Thanks again for taking the time to chat with me about Zero Issue! Before we wrap this up, anything else you’d like to say about Zero Issue and where can people go to follow you on social media and follow Zero Issue and your future projects?
Zach: The best place for people to go right now is the Kickstarter page – no matter how much you give, whether it’s one dollar or one thousand, you’ll get on our mailing list and get all of our updates. Last week we released some insanely cool concept art early to our backers.
Matt: Plus you’ll be supporting the creation of a brand new superhero movie!
Jim: After the Kickstarter, the best place for all our news and updates is our Facebook page.
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