Saturday, January 28
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The comics-to-film exchange is still in full force, as Magnolia Pictures has just released a poster for its upcoming film Centurion, illustrated by none other than the hard-hitting artist of 2000 AD/Lobo/other assorted badassery Simon Bisley.
The film focuses on a toughened Roman soldier, who is forced to survive behind enemy lines when the commander of his legion is killed by the Pict tribe. The film, starring soon-to-be-Magneto Michael Fassbender and Olga Kurylenko, is due out August 27.
Trina Johnson and Kelly Tindal, you two are my new favorite team in comics.
That’s because they’ve teamed up to do a webcomics series called “That’s So Kraven,” transplanting the plucky teen Raven with the hirsute hunter and Spidey-foe, Kraven the Hunter.
According to the first installment, the authors have said “wherever possible we chose to keep the dialogue and situations from the original TV show unaltered, thus highlighting Kraven’s ability to fit into the world of a teenage girl.” I think he fits in fantastically.
(Also, the idea that Spider-Man only refers to himself in the third person is comedy gold.)
The comic updates on Wednesdays, and is currently on its third installment. Run, don’t walk, to the web browser!
Siren Song: A Profile of John Everson
by Jess Peacock
“Siren was a little different for me,” confides John Everson regarding his most recent novel. “I didn’t want to do vampires. I didn’t want to do zombies.” A cursory glance at retail bookshelves over the past several years does indeed bear the burden of tiresome and predictable subject matter. Without the endless variations on undead adventures and flesh eating apocalypse epics, genre choices have proven somewhat anemic.
“I started thinking about what hadn’t already been done a million times before,” Everson continues. “And then I thought of the siren, which has a solid mythological base, and has never really been the subject of a horror novel as a lead character.”
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“Wallace Wells Vs. The World”: At After Elton, Jamie Maurer takes a look at how Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series does with “the gay best friend” character type, ultimately giving Scott and Bryan Lee good grades.
I’m about 1000 times more likely to watch a Taco Bell-themed superhero cartoon then I am to ever actually eat anything from Taco Bell: Brandweek‘s Brand Freak offers a look at the fast food chain’s stoner-focused ad campaign featuring the Super Friends-like “Super Delicious Ingredient Force.”
Warren Ellis will have a new Marvel series, closer to Nextwave then Astonishing X-Men: And his announcement of the series, which he himself regards as a non-announcement, leads to a pretty amusing Ellis-esque post about how the post should have been better.
Is this the precise moment in which the devil first entered Lucy Van Pelt?: At his Roasted Peanuts blog, John Harris draws attention to a 1952 strip, which seems to be the first time Charlie Brown’s major antagonist shows spite, destroying the happiness on Chuck’s face in a matter of seven panels. (Via…I forget who, exactly. Probably Spurgeon, but possibly Deppey).
“I have been interviewed several times and my view is that this is not specifically a problem for comics, but for the whole of Swedish society”: Writing for The Comics Journal, Fredrik Stromberg discusses Sweden’s child pornography laws and the unfortunate ways they can be applied to comics in the country and, in fact, recently have. In addition to the standard screwed-up logic that the difference between photos of children and drawings of imaginary children means no one gets hurt in the case of the latter, Sweden’s laws have other illogical aspects. For example, in Sweden you can legally have sex at 15, but that sex can never be depicted in, say, an autobiographical comic about losing your virginity and that because it’s illegal to even look at images, it’s impossible for anyone to decide whether something is actually illegal or not. Stromberg therefore doesn’t have examples of the exact images judged illegal in the case he discusses, but offers some popular manga that would be in Sweden’s “danger zone,” like Dragonball and Love Hina (both of which feature a little nudity and copious near-nudity, but no actual intercourse).
Aw, what the hell, let’s end on an up note: Here’s more of Fake Stan Lee, this time coming face to face with Genuine Stan Lee. Naturally both of them note how handsome the other one is.
Werewolves of Montpellier
Written & Illustrated by Jason
Translated by Kim Thompson
Published by Fantagraphics
Ostensibly about a jewel thief who dresses as a werewolf running afoul of real werewolves, Jason’s Werewolves of Montpellier stands out as yet another genre-mashing, hilarious send-up from the superb one-named cartoonist. In truth, while the werewolves’ presence is noteworthy, most of the book is given over to the wry and awkward social interactions of Jason’s protagonist.
Fueled by Jason’s staccato panels (eight panel-grids on every page, without variation) and dry, humdrum-of-life pacing, Werewolves of Montpellier revels in examining the routines of Sven, the book’s erstwhile hero. Whether it’s debating with a friend what parts of women to stare at or engaging in awkward dates with girls who realize he’s in love with another woman, Sven’s interactions are clumsy and forced, but intentionally and entertainingly so.
He made you believe a man could fly.
The Hollywood Reporter has news that Tom Mankiewicz, who worked on the screenplays for the first two Superman films, died last week at 68, after suffering “a brief illness” at his Los Angeles home.
Mankiewicz was brought in by Richard Donner to work on his scripts when the initial stories were too clunky for his tastes. According to THR, Mankiewicz was cited as a “creative consultant” even as Donner and the Writers Guild butted heads.
“Making ‘Superman’ was only possible because when Tom came in, he brought his sense of humor and brought those characters to life,” Donner told THR. “A lot of people in this town have ‘the gift of gab.’ Tom’s was unique; there was always a true emotional center.”
The writer also worked on several of James Bond’s adventures, including Diamonds are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Man with the Golden Gun and Moonraker.
The mystery of Inception continues to deepen beyond even the reels of the film — just yesterday, we heard that Matthew Vaughn scrapped 12 pages of the X-Men: First Class script after seeing the movie, and today the blogosphere is absolutely consumed with the fact that the plot of Christopher Nolan’s latest hit is oddly similar to an Uncle Scrooge comic book, in which the dastardly Beagle Boys invade Uncle Scrooge’s dream, leaving Donald to have to go in and save the day.
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!
Thought the trailers for the live action Edgar Wright-directed Scott Pilgrim vs. The World looked like Bryan Lee O’Malley‘s comics coming to life? How about a cartoon?
As Albert Ching noted the other day, the Elseworlds logo is returning to the cover of a DC comic in the first time in a long time tomorrow, after being put in retirement over the couese of the last few years. What’s the big occasion marking it’s return? Longtime Super-scribe Cary Bates has a new miniseries, a three-parter entitled Superman: The Last Family of Krypton.
In this version of the Superman story, baby Kal-El isn’t the only member of the -El family who rides that rocketship to earth. Renato Arlem provides the interior art, Felipe Massafera provides the exterior art, and the 55-page book will run you $5. They’ve got a preview of the first issue on the main site, which you can see by clicking here.
Amazing Spider-Man #639: I’m not really interested in Joe Quesada and Paolo Rivera’s “One Moment in Time” arc, explaining what happened in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 after the “One More Day” retcon instead of what happened in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 the first time you might have read it, but I just wanted to take a moment to point out this cool cover by Rivera. I just love little plastic cake-topping Spidey’s formal wear.
Animal Academy: Hkobune Hakusho Vol. 5: This is a pretty charming all-ages manga series about a teenager who accidentally enrolls at a private school for magical transforming animals who are trying to learn to be human in order to pass in the real world. (I just read the first four volumes the other day, and wrote about them at some length on my home blog, if anyone’s interested). The fifth volume is $11 and about 190 pages long.
Avengers/Invaders: This is a big, fat, $35, 350-page trade paperback collecting the 2008 12-part limited series in which the WW II-era Invaders get tossed through time to appear in the modern Marvel Universe, and some of the modern Marvels go back in time to World War II. It’s by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, Steve Sadowski and Patrick Bekenkotter, and I thought it was a hell of a superhero book, providing a refreshing contrast to the talkier Brian Michael Bendis Avengers and their more paranoid plots about superhero politics. Also, this series features a panel or two of Baby Namor.
Baltimore: The Plague Ships #1: This is the first issue of a miniseries based on the Lord Henry Baltimore character from Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s prose novels, featuring a story by Golden and Mignola (who provides the cover) and artwork by Ben Steinbeck. More Mignola can be found in Hellboy: The Storm #2, by Mignola and Duncan Fegredo.
Brain Camp: I wasn’t very enamored with Susan Kim and Laurence Klavan’s script for this young adult ogn about two misfits who are surprised to find themselves enrolled in a prestigious summer camp for gifted student, only to find sinister forces at work there, as the there are too many too-familiar plot points borrowed from too many too-familiar movies, but a younger reader likely hasn’t seen as many movies and might not find as much cliché about it. The book does boast beautiful Faith Erin Hicks art, and First Second’s typically top-notch book design, making for a gorgeous graphic novel. It’s $17, 160-page trade paperback.
I’m sure that “Who will be the new Man Without Fear?” parodies will be proliferating in the next few days. So, before the action begins, let’s check out a couple of suspects.
Suspect 1: Rowdy Roddy Piper. The Hot Rod’s here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and he’s all out of bubble gum. He beat up Keith David for roughly half of “They Live”‘s run-time. He hit Jimmy Superfly Snuka in the head with a coconut. He had the genetic material to save humanity in “Hell Comes to Frogtown”. He’s more plausible than Nova.
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Top Cow has announced that Brave New World Comics’ Atom! Freeman, seen on the right, has been hired as the company’s new Direct Market Liaison.
Freeman will be working with retailers to promote Top Cow’s publishing lineup through comic shops and the Direct Market.
Brave New World won the Eisner Spirit of Retail Award in 2008. “He’s been one of the retailers I go to regularly for insight and advice on the direct market and Brave New World is one of my favorite stores in the country,” Top Cow Publisher Filip Sablik said in a statement. “When the opportunity presented itself to hire Atom! to help us in our efforts in the direct market, I leapt at the chance.”
But fans of Brave New World, don’t fret just yet — Freeman’s wife and partner Portlyn will continue to run the Santa Clarita-based store.
Once more, Jess Peacock holds forth on genre and horror novels. What’s up today, sir?
A Gathering of Crows by Brian Keene
Review by Jess Peacock
Say what you will about Brian Keene, but the man has made an impact in horror fiction. Since his Bram Stoker award winning debut novel The Rising landed on bookshelves in 2004 (credited by no less than the New York times as instrumental in kicking off the zombie craze), Keene has attained a dark prose Grand Poobah status in the eyes of genre fans around the globe. With no less than eleven novels since The Rising, assorted short stories, comic book gigs, and a free ongoing serial published through his website, Keene is practically a one-man publishing industry.
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Now that there’s been a little bit of time to settle in after Comic-Con International, let’s take a look at some of the collector-minded revelations from Mattel (fear not, we’ll get to Hasbro soon). Thanks to MattyCollector for the images; you can find many more pictures at the Matty Facebook page.
For this collector, nothing made me happier than the news about the forthcoming DC Universe Classics Legion of Super-Heroes 12-pack. A massive undertaking that’s frankly unlike anything anyone’s attempted before, the set will be a MattyCollector.com exclusive next spring.
While I’m a bit disappointed that there’s only one female team member, I’m hopeful that it means that further sets are planned or that distinctive-looking individual members like Dawnstar or Blok (a perfect Collect and Connect candidate, really) can make it into the main line. On the plus side, the set comes with Proty. Can’t complain about that.
Based on its three consecutive #1 weekends at the box office and a slew of positive reviews, it’s clear that a lot of people think that Christopher Nolan’s Inception is awesome.
Count X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn among those ranks — in fact, maybe a little too awesome for his tastes.
LA Times blog “Hero Complex” shares that the writer was prompted to cut around a dozen pages from the First Class script after his viewing of the Leonardo DiCaprio-starred film, due to unforeseen similarities to scenes in Inception. It seems that some of the Inception dreamscape action scenes were too close for Vaughn’s comfort to sequences in the First Class script — which, based on Vaughn’s remarks, sound like scenes taking place on the astral plane.
Wonder Woman #601
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Penciled by Don Kramer
Inked by Michael Babinski
Colored by Alex Sinclair
Lettered by Travis Lanham
Cover art by Kramer/Babinski or Alex Garner
Published by DC Comics
Despite a mostly lifelong indifference to the character Wonder Woman and the writing of J. Michael Straczynski, I find Wonder Woman #601 a pleasant and intriguing reading experience. The set-up is simple: For reasons unknown, Wonder Woman’s entire history has been wiped away. Her upbringing with the legendary Amazon warrior women, under the protection of the goddesses of Greek mythology, has been erased. Nearly all the Amazons and their paradise kingdom have been destroyed, and orphaned Wonder Woman is charged to not only protect the few remaining of her kin, but also to undo the damage to her history, restoring her correct timeline.
So says C. B. Cebulski, freshly-appointed Senior Vice President, Creator & Content Development of Marvel Entertainment. So you know it’s no joking around. In the past, Cebulski has had some tart words for Wizard via his twitter account, most notably: “More shoddy, sensationalistic reporting in the new Wizard. Let them retweet that as it seems this is where they’re getting all their “news”.”
Ouch.
So what exactly happened here? This is an all too familiar scenario. Remember Wizard World Chicago last year or WW Philly where neither DC or Marvel had a booth? Though as of now, the WWC site still has Marvel people listed, including Cebulski himself.
So has Marvel severed ties, or are the wheels turning towards that direction? What do you readers think?
For nearly two decades, DC Comics published a series of comics called “Elseworlds,” out-of-continuity takes on their iconic characters. The first title to display the logo was 1991′s Batman: Holy Terror, but 1989′s Mike Mignola-illustrated Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is retroactively considered the first Elseworlds comic.
Some of DC’s most critically acclaimed material — JLA: The Nail, Superman: Red Son, Kingdom Come – are all Elseworlds books. Yet in recent years, neither the name nor the logo (or the concept, for the most part) have been seen in DC’s output. The last official Elseworlds title, Paul Pope’s 2006 Eisner-winning miniseries Batman: Year 100, didn’t have the logo on the cover.
The concept, name and logo are all back as of this Wednesday, though, with Superman: The Last Family of Krypton.
The set-up is classic Elseworlds: in this reality, it’s not just Kal-El that makes it to Earth from Krypton — Jor-El and Lara do, too. Read a preview here.
More like mayflies than tortoises: At Funnybook Babylon, Chris Eckert crunches some numbers in an attempt to determine the average life span of a Vertigo “ongoing” comic.
In favor of rules: Tim O’Neil uses a Grant Morrison quote as a springboard into a discussion on the rules that govern fiction writing, especially that which occurs inside decades-old, massive shared settings of the sort pretty much unique to Big Two serial super-comics.
The best-written review of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (the movie) I’ve read so far: Joe “Jog” McCulloch is one of the better writers on comics on the Internet, and he’s not so bad at writing about movies either, so who better to address the film adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s six-volume, 1,200+ page comic series? It’s a sharp, solid piece, taking the two works of two different media on their own terms, but focusing on how they compare, contrast and interact. Spoilers for the comic and the movie though, so proceed with caution if you’re spoiler-senstive.
Er, arcade logic isn’t exactly the same thing as “zero logic,” amigo: “Michael Cera enters the zero logic, graphic novel world of ‘Scott Pilgrim’”
“Don’t piss off Zac Effron”: Does the former High School Musical star have a superpower beyond his preternatural cuteness? Cartoonist Lars Martinson has read the blurbs for Charlie St. Cloud, and suspects he might.
“A Real-Life Comic Book Superhero”: Ignore the bland headline Newsweek affixed to this sizable profile of Lily Renée Phillips and give it a read; Phillips was a rare female comics artist in the early years of the Golden Age, working for Fiction House, home of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. It’s especially enlightening reading given the existential financial and PR troubles that women-in-comics advocacy group Friends of Lulu has had over the last few years—troubles that finally went public last week. FoL is mentioned late in the story, but only to offer a quote about Phillips.
What’s a crazy Frank Miller Batman story once you take Batman out of it?: We’ll find out soon. Frank Miller recently discussed his upcoming Holy Terror book with the LA Times, revealing that the project that was originally announced as Holy Terror, Batman!, about the Dark Knight waging war against Al Qaeda, will now feature a new, original character called “The Fixer.” It’s sure to be a must-read—you’ve seen the political wallop Frank Miller projects can pack when they’re not as clearly labeled as “Batman vs. Al Qaeda,” can you imagine what it’s like when Miller’s trying to be in your face about it?—but it’s still a little sad to hear about the change in protagonists. Is All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder really as far over-the-top as Miller can take the character?
“Wealth of comic novels compete for shelf space”: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch runs a column of comics reviews, apparently for the first time in months, based on some of the books included.
Sorry, I just can’t see it: “Adrien Brody Considered for ‘Ant-Man’ and ‘Dr. Strange’”
“Four years of comics just to solve a non-problem badly”: That’s Paul O’Brien’s ultimate assessment of Wolverine: Origins, which just wrapped up, as given in his weekly review column. Obviously it’s not the kindest ultimate assessment, but I sort of admire O’Brien’s commitment to follow the X-Men being such that he’ll read every single issue of even X-titles he doesn’t much care for. Hey, someone’s gotta do it, and I’m glad it’s him.
Just six?: “Six DC Comics Superheroes that Shouldn’t Feature in Slots”
Don’t turn your back on Wedgie: Johnny Ryan’s four-panel gag strip Blecky Yuckarella, a sort of Little Lulu/Nancy parody as only Johnny Ryan could imagine such a thing, has come to its end. You can see the final strip here, but remember, all links to work by Johnny Ryan come with an implied NSFW warning.
Tomorrow’s big comics news stories…today!: Comics Reporter‘s comics reporter Tom Spurgeon lists about a half-dozen big stories he expects to get a log of play in the second half of 2010. I never felt actively frightened by rumors of DC Comics relocating to California until I read Spurgeon’s piece. Now I’m terrified!
