With only a few more months to go before the big movie release of GI Joe: Rise of Cobra, Hasbro has announced the launching of a brand spankin’ new GIJoe.com.

This is supposed to be a hub for all things Joe, with links for the toys, the comics, the TV shows, as well as the upcoming movie.

I think my favorite part of this (history addict that I am) is a 45-year retrospective on the Joes, which you can check out by clicking here. (I won’t lie, I had a strange double-take to suddenly see a friend of mine from college get interviewed on that.)

GI Joe: Rise of Cobra, is due out in theatres August 7. Also — is anyone else totally surprised that Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be playing Cobra Commander in the film? Gotta say, I’m curious to see how he approaches the role, even if he seems fairly dismissive of the film to Leonard Maltin.

It’s always interesting to hear how a film or TV product will mutate from beginning to end: House, for example, was originally going to be a medical procedural not unlike E.R., with the idea of House himself not even being created until AFTER the project was greenlit! (Or you could look at Superman Returns, which could have been Kevin Smith writing robots fighting polar bears and giant mechanical spiders.)

So this article on SciFi Wire discussing Terminator 4 is also really interesting. Apparently, the role of John Connor was a fairly minuscule one, until Christian Bale opted for that role as opposed to that of the proto-Terminator Marcus Wright (now being played by Sam Worthington):

“What can you do when you go and say, ‘Hey, Christian, I want you to play Marcus,’ he says, ‘I want to play Connor’? You say, ‘Maybe we need to go back and make this a little bit more of a two-hander,’” McG said.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that comment sounded a touch hostile, which is perhaps no surprise given Bale’s angry outbursts (which were recorded by the insurance company as “collateral,” presumably so he wouldn’t potentially walk off the set, and was eventually leaked to the web).

But my two cents is that this movie wouldn’t be nearly as compelling without John Connor being front and center. The Terminator series has always been about sweeping character development and parallelism: while Sarah Connor is the damsel in distress in the first film, she becomes a tough-as-nails guerrilla fighter in the second. The murderous Terminator of the first film becomes an unwavering protector in the second. John Connor, at least in the first two films, is first a passive nonactor (considering he isn’t even born yet), and then a surprisingly effective target in Terminator 2.

I think is the reason why the third film left such a bad taste in my mouth: while having a flawed character is well and good for this series, the third film downgraded John Connor into a weak damsel in distress, giving him little agency to fight his own battles. Considering he was trained from birth by Sarah to wage war against the machines, Terminator: Salvation’s John Connor feels like a better fit to the franchise, sharing a bit of his mother’s overzealousness and resourcefulness, but working the parallel of the son rescuing the father (with Anton Yelchin’s Kyle Reese being the all-important target in this film), as well as Connor and the Terminator finally seeing each other as equal partners. What do you think, Rama readers? Sound off!

A plan so crazy it might just work: Okay, so last weekend X-Men Origins: Wolverine raked in $85 million, and this weekend Star Trek had a $24 million opening day, and is on track to do at least $65 million as I write this (which is as I read this). Two big movies that both earned pretty big box office, right? So just imagine how much money an adaptation of 1996’s Star Trek/X-Men crossover would make! (Yes kids, that comic is real. The nineties were…well, they were a special time).

I admire each and every headline writer who manages to resist using “The Wright Stuff”: For example, this Calgary Herald piece about the work of Doug Wright, which getting a great deal of reconsideration thanks to Drawn and Quarterly’s recent The Collected Dough Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist, went with “Reviving Canda’s Master.”

“I changed it simply because I was looking for a pretentious-sounding pseudonym”: And that’s why the artist known as Seth came to be called Seth, according to this well-written profile piece in The Globe and Mail. Apparently, Seth used to be Gregory Gallant, which is an awesome name for a cartoonist. Or a cartoon character. That’s one of several interesting facts I learned about the It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken and Wimbledon Green creator in this piece.

“It’s funny because for me it’s like stepping back to where I wanted to go in the first place. If you look at the Slam Bradley stuff… the roots of this work are right there”: Tom Spurgeon interviews Darwyn Cooke about his forthcoming adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter, and crime comics maestro Ed Brubaker rides shotgun. And the book’s editor Scott Duniber is there too. It isn’t a one-on-one interview, it’s three-on-one! Can Spurgeon handle it? You’ll have to click the link to find out!

“Spiralmind is the superhero who uses the power of phi (pronounced fee), or the golden ratio, a number that occurs in many natural and man-made objects”: Here’s a local paper’s story about two local creators’ self-published superhero comic book, Spiralmind: Rabbi’s Lament. The golden ratio isn’t a superpower I can recall ever seeing any superheroes use before, so they deserve at least one point for originality.

I would have just wrote “No,” but that would have been a very short article: Bill Christensen answers the question “Can you have bones like Wolverine’s?” in this interesting piece, which includes talk of “amorphous metals” and “atomic layer deposition.”

Given the media attention Wolverine has received this month, it’s probably safe to assume everyone’s heard some version of his real-world origin by this point. He was created by writer Len Wein, designed by John Romita Sr., first drawn in a story by Herb Trimpe and first used as an adversary in a 1974 issue of The Incredible Hulk. He was given new life, and his incredible popularity by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and John Byrne, during the seminal X-Men run that began in 1975′s Giant Size X-Men #1.

I imagine that a lot of readers have also encountered some theories as to what it was exactly that made Wolverine so popular, to the point where his popularity has only increased as the years have passed. Is it the fact that he has knives that pop out of his hands? Is it the haircut and sideburns? The mysterious origin? The fact that he says “bub” a lot? His Canadian-ness?

I don’t know, nor do I think anyone knows for sure, or else DC and Marvel would be pumping out a lot more new Wolveirnes (Actually, Marvel has tried just that, given variations of his origins, attitude and hand-knives to more and more characters, most notably in X-2, a teenage girl version of Wolverine, and Daken, the son of Wolverine soon to appear in a title called—no joke?—Dark Wolverine).

But of the theories I’ve encountered in my own cursory reading of whatever comic book and superhero news my Google News alerts deposit in my email each morning, I think a particularly convincing one is that Wolverine stood out—and continues to stand out—because of how sharply he contrasted with the other characters in the X-Men. The character may not have been a team player, but he was also on a team for a good decade before he started spinning-off more and more (Hang on, I’ll get to Wolverine: Prodigal Son eventually, I swear).

All heroes should stand out as different from the rest of the characters in a story in some way shape or form, but Wolverine stood out from the rest of heroes in the stories he was in, by virtue of being more troubled, more haunted, more violent and more willing to just totally kill someone if he has too. (This specialness has worn off completely in Marvel comics, now that Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic and Spider-Man are perfectly okay with exterminating alien invaders and one of the half-dozen team books Wolverine appears in is X-Force, the premise of which is a whole X-Men team made up of nothing but Wolverines. But the character’s appeal as The Least Boring One on the team is certainly on display throughout the first three films).

I wonder then if rather than appearing as an X-person, if Claremont and Cockrum or Byrne had introduced the character as a solo star in a 1975 Wolverine #1 if he would have ultimately been as popular as he turned out being. Like, if he didn’t spend a few years butting heads with Cyclops and calling Jeanie “darlin’”  and Nightcrawler “Elf” and being fastball-special-ed by Colossus and threatening to skewer his enemies allies in berserker rages and getting swept up in mutantkind’s melodrama, would he currently be in a movie, and starring in four ongoing comic books with the word “Wolverine” in the title, in addition to all his X-Men and Avengers titles?

I don’t have an answer of course, it’s just something I’m wondering about, having just finished reading the first volume of Wolverine: Prodigal Son, the first of the Del Rey books re-imagining Marvel’s X-Men characters as manga-style characters in original manga-style stories.

It’s not very good.

I don’t know that it has much to do with not doing the character justice or anything like that; I’ve read far more terrible Wolverine stories than good ones over the years, and in the very best ones tend to be where he’s part of a larger ensemble cast. As is the case with any (well, most) other character(s), there’s little that’s inherently good or bad about the character of Wolverine, and writer Antony Johnson and artist Wilson Tortosa keep many of the design and story elements that seem to be rather integral parts of the character.

He’s got the hair and sideburns (with Tortosa drawing it so so that he has an almost Inu-Yasha-like, canine ear shape to it from certain angles). He’s got the claws (although they’re bone instead of metal), as well as the heightened senses, the healing factor, and the propensity toward berserker rages. He has a mysterious past that’s so mysterious even he doesn’t know about it, and he hangs out in the snowy wilderness of Canada.

That seems to be more than enough to keep Wolverine Wolverine, doesn’t it? Especially considering that this is a continuity-free, do-over sort of take on the character, similar to what we’ve seen in Ultimate X-Men, or the X-Men movies and cartoons, or Marvel’s previous, in-house attempts at manga versions of the character.

(more…)

(Yes, that’s Gambit. Shut up, I’m a Gambit fangirl.)

My moviegoing companion, not a comics person but yet the friend who’s accompanied me to every comic movie I’ve seen in the last year, enjoyed Wolverine more than she did Watchmen.

I don’t know if I’d go that far–or perhaps, if the metric is “enjoyed,” then yes. Watchmen, after all, isn’t something to be enjoyed so much as knocked sideways by, sent spiraling into thoughts on the end of the world, what it means to be human, superhuman, and in the comic, anyway, what it’s possible to do with the medium.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, by contrast, is meant to be enjoyed. You are meant to giggle at the sarcastic banter, lust after the pretty boys (and goodness, so many of them to choose from!) or the pretty girls (OK guys, for once you only get Lynn Collins, not that she’s too shabby), be impressed at the action and generally come out of it not a bit smarter or more thoughtful, but having had a fun, escapist two hours. It’s a popcorn movie at its finest, and the biggest contribution it can be said to have had is that the CG effects were never awkward or jumpy–oddly the fakest-looking part was Wolverine’s claws.

(Possible spoilers)

(more…)

If this show is canceled, there is no justice on television (oh, wait…). Dollhouse is sci-fi done right, with action aplenty, eye candy all over the place, and yes, plot twist on top of plot twist.

But what makes Dollhouse really worth watching is that it asks tough questions and indicts the viewer–each time you like the way Echo or Sierra or November (or Victor) looks all dressed up, each time you think “wouldn’t that be nice,” you are just as bad as the customers of the Dollhouse. You cannot simply write off its characters as bad guys or good guys, because it constantly makes you decide with whom to identify, and then proving you wrong.

I’ve tried to keep this review relatively spoiler-free, at least for this episode, but it’s hard to write about this show without referencing some of the twists, so it’s below the jump, just in case.

(more…)

“It isn’t intimidating. It isn’t impressive. Mostly it just looks dumb”: That’s writer Daniel Way discussing Wolverine’s costume, noting he’s been in an elevator with guys dressed in Wolverine costumes at conventions before. It’s from  a nice little Q-and-A with Way that the News Tribune did with him to promote a book signing. The interview is nice, but I’m not so sure about the headline, “Wolverine writer gives snarky hero his edge.” Is Wolvie a snarky hero? I’ve never really associated him with snark before.

More practical than a tiara in winter: The Wonder beanie.

Some more, not very helpful clues as to the identity of Batgirl: The other day, David re-posted DC’s teaser image of the new Batgirl, and now it looks like the company is doling out a little more info—the creative team. It will be written by Bryan Q. Miller, a Smallville writer who will also be writing July’s issue of Teen Titans, and drawn by Lee Garbett and Trevor Scott, while the teaser image itself was generated by cover artist Phil Noto. This reveal doesn’t do much to help one figure out who the new Batgirl is (and let’s hope it is a new Batgirl, because cancelling Cassandra Cain’s book to streamline the Bat-books a few years ago just to relaunch it when there are even more Bat-books seems a strange strategy), at least not as much help as it would be if the new writer were, say, Misfit creator Gail Simone or Spoiler creator Chuck Dixon.

“You look at super-heroine cheesecake, and you get a sense of a boys’ locker-room cluelessness so intense that it is indistinguishable from disdain”: The always link-able Noah Berlatsky pens an excellent, example-filled essay about the way the level of quality involved in cheesecake art can impact the level of offensiveness to it—or, in other words, the worse it is, the worse it is. In comparing recent works from Ed Benes and J. Scott Campbell to masters of illustrating the female form Jack Cole and Dan DeCarlo, Berlatsky makes a point I attempted to make about the work of Guillem March last week much more elegantly and effectively than I did:

In short, the artists seem to care about women enough to have looked at one or two of them at some point.

Not that I’d argue that good art can’t be sexist; craft and talent aren’t everything, or even necessarily all that much, in these matters. But they are something. Even if you’re pandering, doing a professional job of it implies a certain minimal level of respect not only towards your audience, but towards your subject as well.

Well worth a read if you’re intersted in the issue. And if you’re reading this, than I know you’re interested in comics and art.

I don’t envy Dwayne McDuffie.

A long-time comics writer and a fairly successful presence in the animation world, he seemed to hit the jackpot with his latest assignment for DC Comics: Writing Justice League of America, which, at the time he took over in late 2007, was the company’s biggest hit, thanks in large part to the previous writer Brad Meltzer’s short run.

So not only was McDuffie getting the opportunity to write DC’s number one team made up of some of the biggest and most popular superheroes in the world, it was already a massive hit. It sure seems like it would have been a dream job, at least from where I sit.

Well, as it turns out, it looks like it may have been one of those blessing-is-actually-a-curse, your-son-comes-home-from-war-but-is-a-zombie, monkey’s paw type situations. The book seems to have come with a lot of strings attached.

During the twenty issues and one special that constituted McDuffie’s run, it has been used to launch, set-up or tie-in to miniseries Tangent: Superman’s Reign, Salvation Run (itself a Countdown tie-in), Final Crisis and Justice League: A Cry For Justice, as well as introducing the Milestone characters into the DCU and, in the latest few issues, reflecting the changes in various other books (Wonder Woman, the Superman and Batman books, etc). That’s a lot of writing about what other people are writing about to cram into 22 pages a month, while still maybe trying to tell your own story around the edges (made more difficult by how much the previous writer left unresolved, for whoever followed him to either completely ignore or clean up for him).

By Chris Eckert’s count, there have been sixteen pencillers and twenty-three inkers so far, leaving McDuffie without a real partner to help establish a look, feel or tone for the book (as well as furthering the image of a book lurching in a different direction month after month).

Back in February, a commenter on McDuffie’s message board asked him if he even enjoyed writing JLoA since “it just seems to be constant editorial rewrites and bad art,” and McDuffie responded rather simply, “No, I don’t.”

On Monday, gossip columnist Rich Johnston trawled a long thread on the DC message board for juicy quotes from McDuffie about his work on the title, and the results were revealing.

McDuffie speaks plainly (and, it should be pointed out, quite politely) about some of the difficulties of writing DC’s flagship title, since most of the cast is on loan from other writers and editorial offices (That is, if the Batman creators are killing of Bruce Wayne for a year and putting someone else in the cape and cowl, obviously Bruce Wayne will be missing some Justice League meetings).

While he doesn’t say so, I imagine this is all the harder given DC’s current publishing strategy of doing big, DCU-shaking events like Final Crisis and Blackest Night, with smaller, character-specific events like “Battle For the Cowl,” and “World Without Superman” and so on occurring in between.

So not only were his long-term plans constantly being changed to reflect the rest of the DC line’s stories, he increasingly found it hard just to fill the chairs around the meeting table:

Beyond that, The Hawks, Green Arrow, both Atoms, Captain Marvel and almost everyone I think of as either a big gun, or a traditional JLA favorite are likewise not available. So as we wait for things to settle down in the other titles, I’m doing “Cap’s Kooky Quartet.” Of course, in this case Captain America isn’t available, either.

I gave that some thought for much of the week, as Justice League line-ups have been on my mind a lot lately, ever since Dan DiDio asked Newsarama readers, “What would you consider the perfect team for the Justice League of America, and why?”* (Although, honestly, I spend a lot of time thinking about the Justice League anyway).

And you know, as big as the DC Universe is, so much of it does seem off-limits to League membership at the moment. Of the original seven, Batman, Aquaman and Martian Manhunter are all (temporarily) dead,  Superman’s on vacation and Wonder Woman’s…busy, I think she said.

So this is the current League line-up, according to the roll call in the last issue of the title:

Green Lantern John Stewart
Dr. Light II
Firestorm II
Vixen
Zatanna
and mmmayybe Black Canary.

DC has so many team titles at the moment—Titans, Teen Titans, JSoA, Outsiders—that just about every hero primarily associated with another franchise is already starring in another team book, making promoting most of them to the JLA difficult. In fact, these books have even re-absorbed recent League members (Flash and Red Arrow are in Titans, Black Lightning and Geo-Force are in Outsiders). Even the DC teams that don’t actually have ongoing books or miniseries at the moment seem to still be extant off-panel, with The Freedom Fighters, Doom Patrol, Metal Men and Shadow Pact eating up even more of the DC’s superheroes with League potential. Oh, and the New Gods are all out too, pending the end of their post-Final Crisis fallow period.

If McDuffie wanted to use former Leaguers, and pick ones that aren’t currently on a superhero team or involved in a status quo that would prevent them from joining (like Booster Gold or Fire, for example), well, he’s limited the likes of Huntress, Steel, Plastic Man, um, Blue Jay…Maya…Faith, and, um…is Green Arrow II still alive?  How about Tasmanian Devil?

So yeah, despite the thousands of characters, many of them with unrealized potential, McDuffie doesn’t seem to have a lot to choose from at the moment, certainly not any that will make his current kooky quintet seem any less kooky.

He could always create new characters, of course, as he does have a pretty rare opportunity to inject some original creations into the fabric of the DCU, but it’s quite understandable why any writer might be reluctant to do so, given the current realities of the comics industry. (If McDuffie has a great idea for the next Superman, or even the next Booster Gold, why sign it over to DC when he could benefit more from a creator-owned endeavor with the character?)

So what’s left?

Well, McDuffie could just go ahead and do something super-crazy. It’s clear the Justice League book is in something of a temporary holding pattern, waiting for current and near-future storylines to end before moving forward, giving the writer the opportunity to try something really, really unexpected.

Here are some probably  extremely unrealistic suggestions:

(more…)

The San Jose Super-Con, taking place next weekend on May 16th and 17th, has announced that it will have some additional guests to its star-studded lineup!

Margot Kidder (Lois Lane of the original Superman films), as well as artists Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan, the Boys), Whilce Portacio (Wetworks, Spawn), and Humberto Ramos (Avengers: The Initative) will now be in attendence for this convention.

The convention — which already has a decent-sized list of talent — will take place at the San Jose Convention Center.

I should be doing something else right now, but instead, I am bringing you links. Because I love you. Look grateful.

1. Rock Out With Your Spock Out: an almost-geek girl’s guide to the new Star Trek for non-Trekkies. Which would include me, but this might change my mind. Highlight: comparing Spock to Amelie, noting the hipster cred of his baby bangs (and noting the appeal to geek boys of said baby bangs).

2. More Star Trek, from my editor at my other regular writing gig. Natalia IS a Star Trek fan, and it shows. She too is a Spock fan. Highlight: “With his mod haircut and cool, inquiring gaze, the new Spock might even edge out Legolas as the pointy-eared sexgod of cinema.”

3. For a girl who isn’t a Star Trek fan, I’m sure bringing you a lot of Star Trek links, aren’t I?

4. I swear, this is the last one. Looking Back at Star Trek, with response by Leonard Nimoy.

5. Is Wolverine the most homoerotic superhero movie ever? I don’t know, because I still haven’t seen it–I’m working on it!–but this kind of makes me want to see it more. Don’t hate me. I do wonder, though, why anytime a movie has lots of man-pretty in it, it’s assumed to be targeted to gay men rather than to straight women.

6. On a more serious note, this is an excellent piece on “Mary Stu and Marty Sue”–examining “Mary Sue” characters in all their permutations, in comics and novels. Highlights: the section on Wonder Woman and this final line: “The appeal of Mary Sue, in other words, is that she is a love you can wear like drag.” (h/t When Fangirls Attack)

7. Still serious, an excellent reading of Storm as the “Black Fantasy” character. (h/t Comics Worth Reading)

8. Sin City 2 will include new Sin City stories, according to Splash Page.

Mothers. Everybody’s got one (unless you’re Superboy, who has two dads).

But in comics, motherhood has always been a major part of a hero’s psyche, for better or for worse. Which is why we wracked our brains to bring you a Special Mother’s Day Treat — a light-hearted compilation of the Top 20 Best and Worst Mothers in Comics!

Top 10 Best Mothers in Comics: Finding decent mothers in comics is no easy task, with many of them vying for space in the back of Kyle Rayner’s refrigerator. (What, too soon?) But the best of heroes always have a better mother behind them, and the best of the best have made the list:

10. Animal Man’s wife, Ellen Baker: She kept her family in one piece while her husband was considered MIA for a year, following the events of Infinite Crisis. And yet she still stayed strong, and kept her two kids hopeful during all that time. That automatically puts her on the list. (more…)

People.com has a brand new pic of Robert Downey, Jr. chillin’ on the set of the in-production Iron Man 2.

Not quite as spine-tingling as Don Cheadle in a tie, but still pretty cool, no?

The new “Trending Topics” Twitter sidebar is usually filled with things that bore me: today it was Manny Ramirez, KFC, and….Dollhouse?

I had to check and see why Dollhouse was suddenly a hot topic of conversation, and I found a “Tweet to save Dollhouse!” campaign in action. BuddyTV is starting a campaign to try to keep FOX from cancelling Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku’s show.

Step One. Leave a comment below.  Tell us exactly what it is that you love about Dollhouse. It can be anything. Is it the plot, the characters, the writing style, the suspense, whatever it is we want to know! The more specific the better.  We will take all of the feedback from the comments and send it to the network explaining for our fans why Dollhouse needs to see a second season (and many more after that).

Step Two. Spread the word.  We want you to talk about it on twitter! Log on to your twitter account and tweet out this message (exactly as it appears):

Support Joss: Save Dollhouse. Fans get their voices heard @BuddyTV http://tinyurl.com/SaveDollhouse Please ReTweet and join the cause.

Of course, BuddyTV seems to be as interested in getting you to follow them on Twitter as they are in saving Dollhouse, but their Twitter campaign appears to be spreading, if you can believe the Trending Topics sidebar. And since I love the show–even if I rarely watch it at its Friday 9PM time, usually catching it on Hulu–you should help out. All it takes is a tweet.

A Sherlock Holmes mystery is solved. There’s been a lot of buzz over a reported graphic novel attached to the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie starring Robert Downey Jr. As reported by USA Today, May 6, 2009, one of the movie’s producers,  Lionel Wigram, wrote a graphic novel and had an artist depict Sherlock Holmes in comic book form in order to help sell the project to studios.

The artist hired to do the pitch is John Watkiss and it wasn’t a graphic novel but a series of illustrations. An artist representative described the process: “As I understand it, John was contacted a few years back by Lionel Wigram in order to put together a similar series of pitch images for the Sherlock Holmes film, based on Wigram’s story treatment at that point. What followed were 14 amazing, large-scale black-and-white illustrations, which Wigram brought to a variety of production companies and Warner Brothers. Wigram credits John’s images as being the leverage that ultimately resulted in the film getting made.”

John Watkiss is a notable artist with a long history of doing film work, having worked extensively on Disney’s Tarzan, Atlantis, and Treasure Planet, storyboarding the entirety of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and an impressive series of paintings for a proposed trilogy of films of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

And there you have it, the image that turned the tide in favor of Sherlock Holmes with studio executives: the sword and nunchuck toting Holmes. And, along with that, another concept shot in the boxing ring. It certainly looks like the start of a successful graphic novel. I definitely support the idea of turning these illustrations into a book.

I beg your indulgence for a few moments, but I’m going to totally abuse my ability to post things on this blog for a second in an effort to maybe get an answer to a question I’ve wrestled with for years.

When I first started writing about comics and kept finding the word “penciler” popping up in spell checks, I went to whichever comics were handy to check the credit boxes for the correct spelling, and started to notice a pattern that I couldn’t find any explanation or rationale for.

Over the years I’ve asked  friends and professionals  about it before, and gotten confirmation that it’s not just in my head, but never an explanation as to why it is so. Since so many industry players, watchers and participants read Blog@, I thought I’d ask here as well, in the hopes of finally putting my mind to ease about it.

So here goes: Why is it that DC Comics are drawn by “pencillers” (with two L’s) while Marvel Comics are drawn by “pencilers” (with one L)?

If you like what you’ve read so far (c’mon, how can you not?) totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

Victor Garber (Milk, Titanic) spoke with Warner Home Video regarding his turn as the voice of Sinestro in the upcoming DC animated feature, Green Lantern: First Flight, which is scheduled for release on July 28.

QUESTION: How did you settle on the voice of Sinestro?

VICTOR GARBER: The challenge of bringing this character to life was to find exactly the right tone. My tendency would be to make it a little too colorful, but Andrea (Romano) and Bruce (Timm) gave
direction that was very specifically to modulate it and find the right tone. It was interesting because with animation, it’s all voice – at the recording stage of the process, you don’t even really know what it’s going to look like. But when I read the script, I had sort of an idea of the sound of Sinestro, because it was very specifically written – and very well written – so you could understand the sense of humor and irony in this character. I appreciated that.

QUESTION: How does Sinestro compare to other characters you’ve played before?

VICTOR GARBER: Having played the the ultimate villain as the Devil many years ago in Damn Yankees!, I found Sinestro was just kind of a modification of that character. The thing about villains is that they all think they’re doing the right thing, and Sinestro believes that what he’s doing is for the better, that it’s going to improve the universe. The scariest part about a villain is that you know, at any cost, human life or super-powered life, they will do whatever it takes to achieve their goal. They believe in their cause, and Sinestro fits that mold. (more…)

The adaptation of the Oni Press book Billy Smoke has a director, the Hollywood Reporter says.

Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who wrote and directed the Don Cheadle vehicle Traitor, has signed up to helm the film. Matthew Fox (the screamer from Lost) is set to star in the film, while Oni’s Peter Schwerin is set to executive produce.

Billy Smoke, created by B. Clay Moore and Eric Kim, is the story of a hitman who is nearly killed during a botched job. His pathway to redemption? Rid the world of all other assassins.

Comics artist Troy Nixey (who worked on Mike Mignola’s Lovecraftian tale Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham) will be teaming up with mentor Guillermo del Toro to work on “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” Variety reports.

This will be Nixey’s full-length directorial debut, following a collaboration with Del Toro on a short film called Latchkey’s Lament. Del Toro is listed as a producer for this film; already announced is that their first lead will be none other than Katie Holmes, the original pre-deceased Rachel Dawes.

For quite some time, studio executive and former Booster Gold co-writer Jeff Katz has kept comic book fans guessing as to what his next career move might be, revealing only (and repeatedly) that it had something to do with both comics and movies. As of today, the cat is out of the bag: The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Katz has launched American Original—what he’s referring to as a “multiplatform content company” and a “nerd machine” that will dabble in publishing, video gaming, filmmaking and serve as a kind of  liaison between the comics community and the TV and movie studios.

Katz has already apparently inked a deal to exec produce some properties for Top Cow, and is working with Matt Hawkins and Marc Silvestri about getting nearly-unprecedented creative and financial rights for the comic creators involved, according to the story.

Most recently the producer of this week’s #1 box office hit X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Katz began his career in Hollywood by trying—and succeeding—to create a Freddy Vs. Jason movie at New Line. He followed this up by overseeing flicks like Snakes on a Plane and Shoot ‘Em Up before heading to Fox for Wolverine. It wasn’t long, though, before he left Fox, too–apparently to get American Original off the ground.

In between, of course, Katz worked on two Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash comic miniseries and co-wrote 12 issues of DC’s Booster Gold with longtime friend and comics superstar Geoff Johns.

“I love making films and don’t think I’ll ever stop,” Katz said in a March 2008 interview with Comic Related. “But at the same time, writing comics has been a real blast for me and, actually, has had positive impacts on my day job as well. I’d like to think that I’ll spend the rest of my life doing both film and comics going forward.”

And his comics work has presumably already started to feed into American Original as well; in a podcast interview with Comic Related last year, Katz said that original characters and properties introduced in Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash 2 would be developed specifically so that they could move from the printed page to film—something that sounds remarkably similar to the business model for American Original described in the Hollywood Reporter story.