In a Q&A posted to The Hollywood Reporter‘s “The Live Feed” blog by James Hibberd, Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly spoke on a broad variety of topics, including but not limited to a number of projects that Blog@ readers hold dear.  Some highlights:

• Calling the show “a keeper,” Reilly strongly implied but stopped short of actually confirming the network’s plans to renew Fringe next season.  He added about ratings, “I would not expect it to take off after ‘Idol,’ but I do think it will tick up another level.”
• Whedon’s Dollhouse also rated a few comments, with Reilly telling The Hollywood Reporter “Joss Whedon does a certain kind of show. He’s right in the zone again on that. It’s the kind of show that we know has a core passionate audience.”  He said that the show will, at minimum, be given 13 episodes to “play out” and a compatible lead-in, as it’ll go on the air right after Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
• Reilly did concede, though, that both Fringe and Dollhouse remain “tough sells” to advertisers.
• Regarding Cleveland, the new animated comedy centering around Family Guy‘s Cleveland Brown, which was referred to internally and by the press as a spinoff (including by Cleveland himself during a recent episode of Family Guy), Reilly issued a tweak of the language, saying, “It’s not a spinoff. It’s really become its own show … with, frankly, a sweeter tone than Family Guy.” (No word on whether he would frequently find his house damaged and himself sliding down the side of the broken building in a bathtub in the show.)
• Reilly also revealed the the Virtuality pilot from Battlestar Galactica mastermind Ronald D. Moore, has been cut from two hours back to one.

In the last half an hour or so, Marvel Comics issued a press release announcing the return of formerly DC-exclusive artist Carlos Pacheco (who did some great work for DC on Green Lantern and Superman) to the House of Ideas.  This’ll be his first Marvel work in more than five years.

Along with the illustration below, of Pacheco’s variant cover for an upcoming issue of Secret Warriors, Marvel discusses at length what DC would call the “legacy” heritage of the characters depicted in that series and even throws out a (shockingly positive) Ghost Rider film reference.  Check it out here.

At a time when both Marvel and DC are downsizing their mainstream superhero lines, and potentially decreasing their public visibility, in an effort to scrape a few pennies together in a bad economy, those who thought (I’ve heard them before, and I know they’re out there) that Wizard Entertainment was going to be able to bolster its struggling magazine with revenue from its big-ticket Wizard World conventions have just discovered that they’re sadly mistaken.

The reality is (as pointed out in the linked story above), The Wizard World conventions have been struggling for a few years now, and the fact that Wizard Entertainment has been shifting management around and laying people off all during that time probably hasn’t helped them to form a cohesive business plan to make the cons viable again, frankly.  Three years ago, you could have gone to five Wizard World conventions, whereas the announcement today of the Los Angeles and Texas closings brings the number in 2009 down to only two.

This can’t be good for the comics-convention business at large; while DC and Marvel weren’t actively participating in either of these shows on a meaningful level, they were still “high-profile” shows that drew in big audiences in big cities, and Wizard Entertainment still carries some brand recognition with fairweather fans who came aboard during the heyday of the ’90s comics boom, back when EVERYONE was reading Wizard: The Guide To Comics.  That recognition is valuable in the marketplace, as looking at the Comic Book Convention Calendar for 2009, I can only see maybe a dozen cons that outsiders or even casual fans might recognize by name–and that’s being quite generous.

The reality is, with the exception of San Diego, there aren’t many conventions that can persuade their fans to relocate to attend.  What that means is that with Wizard closing these two conventions, we won’t see that revenue stream into New York and HeroesCon; it will likely simply vanish.  There had been rumblings last year that Marvel was interested in taking over Wizard’s convention business, which seemed at the time to be a terrible idea (didn’t Marvel already try to have their “own” conventions a while back and spectacularly punt that one?), but if it would keep shows open and dollars streaming in, maybe it’s not as bad an idea as I’d first thought.

In the wake of the box office and critical disaster that was The Spirit, I got to thinking about bad comic book movies. There are some films—Daredevil and Fantastic Four spring to mind—that are widely perceived as terrible, but first of all I think they get a bad rap. Secondly, even if you want to take for granted that they’re bad, they still don’t hold a candle to some of the more daunting stinkers out there like, say, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. I wanted to take a look at some of my personal Hall of Shamers and then solicit opinions from you, my dear readers.

Before I get into a list, though, let me preface this with a little disclaimer: there are certain movies (let’s say Elektra) that you can hear about the project and just know it’s going to be wretched. With these films, the expectations are so low that I’m never disappointed in them. In order for me to consider a film truly horrible, I have to have some expectation of quality. Now, that said, there are some movies on my list that no sane human would have expected quality from. That’s just me. Try not to be too distracted and let’s just enjoy the awfulness together. I’m also going to say that, for the purposes of this list, TV pilots are not “movies.” So anything that was intended to be a TV show (like the unaired pilots for The Spirit and Justice League of America, or the pilot for Gen 13) won’t be on my list. There’s plenty of badness even without those.

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One of the great things about being a critic is that I have a chance to make bold declarations that I don’t necessarily have to back up.  The fact that Newsarama and Comic Related publish me grants me some kind of imaginary credibility.

…Well, maybe not really, but that’s how I can talk.  At any rate, most folks could probably make a pretty good guess as to what my choices are going to be for the Best Of and Worst Of for the year (particularly those who read a similarly-themed article I wrote at the end of November).  It’s shamelessly commercial stuff, for the most part, and a lot of the choices here are books that I pimp on a monthly basis via my postmortem columns over at Comic Related.  Still, it’s worth recognizing the really great things that brought us entertainment this year–and waving people off some of the bigger messes that have come out of the last little while.  And so, without further ado…!

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After a pair of lackluster seasons (the second, in my opinion, being worse than the much-maligned third), NBC’s Heroes ended its third “volume” this week and will resume in January with a fourth—this time titled “Fugitives.”

Based on the teaser run at the end of this week’s episode, the premise of this new story arc is that Nathan Petrelli, one of the central heroes of the first two seasons and one of the central villains of the third volume, has taken his case that the superhuman population needs to be brought under control to the President, effectively rendering our central characters—many of whom don’t even have powers anymore—enemies of the state.  Under threat of internment, Nathan’s brother Peter (as well as Hiro, Parkman and a number of other still-living characters in the wake of the finale’s tertiary-character bloodbath) will be pursued by law enforcement who have, thanks to Senator Nathan Petrelli, detailed information on all of them.

Aside from the fact that this seems like a fairly standard retread of an X-Men story we’ve all see about forty times before (including, notably for mainstream non-comics readers, in the X-Men films that really jumpstarted the superhero-movie craze), this series seems to be chock full of interesting decisions, which may or may not pay off.

One of the things that turned a lot of longtime viewers off of this season, frankly, was the confrontational dynamic that existed for most of the story between Hiro and Ando.  In the worst of times, their friendship was still warm and believable, and gave a four-color fantasy on film a little heart and something that ordinary folks could relate to, even if they never read Watchmen or The Dark Phoenix Saga.  My guess is that the scene Hiro thinks he saw—with Ando blasting him into oblivion with red energy—will be an effort at some key point next season to jumpstart Hiro’s pilfered powers using Ando’s newfound ability to “lend” juice to the powered people around him.  It’s interesting because while they attempted to give Ando the power of time-travel, operating on the strange logic that the formula that lends abilities would give him whatever he wanted because the powers imbued to Parkman and the speedster he’s dating resemble so closely what they’d always wanted to have, that attempt failed and instead gave him a power that is useless on its own, but locks him into permanent “sidekick” status.  Uselesss on his own, he’s now indispensable to most of the heroes, who have taken a pretty decent beating at the hands of Arthur Petrelli this season.

Look for Ando’s and Hiro’s relationship to get better next season, and expect the writers to know better than to screw with that comfortable dynamic in the future.  Also: don’t be surprised if poor Ando becomes somebody’s battery.  Think about Alex Luthor’s Multiverse tower, powered by superheroes from multiple different “earths” during Infinite Crisis or even the Kimiyo “Doctor Light” power source that Max Lord used in Booster Gold’s “Blue & Gold” arc.  This is a familiar gimmick, and his powers are EXACTLY what you’d expect from somebody like Sylar, who already has a ton of power and wants a ludicrous amount instead.

Another interesting choice on the part of the Heroes folks is that they appear to be setting it a little more firmly in the “real” world now.  While I have never been a religious watcher of the show, so maybe there were Bush references that I missed, the Obama appearance at the end of this week’s episode was a bit jarring.  This poor guy is just a mess, as far as the superhuman community is concerned: naming Norman Osborn to be head of S.H.I.E.L.D. over at Marvel and now attacking the good guys on national television?  And all this before he’s even taken his oath of office.  This isn’t the kind of change I can believe in!

Joking aside, though, one of the things that DC and Marvel have done over the years (especially as continuity got to be more of an issue) is to divorce themselves from “real” political events and figures, only really using them in special situations (such as the recent Amazing Spider-Man Iraq War story).  While I guess part of this is to keep the characters from aging—something that you can’t do on television with real actors—it does seem unwise when the politicians are doing something very unsavory to put “real” figures in that position.

Overall I think the finale was pretty good, considering how miserable the show has been more or less constantly for about a year and a half now.  It’ll be interesting to see if this new, more seemingly tame storyline can right the ship or if this is, Lost-like, destined to be a phenomenon that fades quickly and has to be put on life support and die gracefully.

This isn’t the “official” Newsarama review of The Spirit, which can be seen on the front page right now and is permalinked here, but rather the ramblings of some dude who lucked into an early screening.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t luck as much working for two different comics media outlets, but…!

The central question on the minds of fans everywhere—at least as it pertains to next week’s release of the long-awaited film adaption of Will Eisner’s The Spirit—is whether the choice of comics legend Frank Miller to direct the film was exactly right or exactly wrong.

On the one hand, Miller’s style of art, and storytelling, isn’t exactly a dead-on match for Eisner. One of the things that made Miller’s Sin City film work so well is that he was able to closely recreate his own work, crafting a film that was visually almost identical to the source material. And starting with the monochrome palette we’ve seen in commercials, and the suit that sent thousands of irate fanboys scrambling for their keyboards, it’s clear that “identical” will not be an adjective anyone uses in describing this film to the original comics. While Miller has often cited Eisner as an early influence in his work, the press materials for the film cite their relationship as “a debate that ran for 25 years on how to make comics and how they work.”

On the other hand, Miller is clearly an advocate for comics and for good superhero stories. His Batman: Year One was the basis for Batman Begins, the film that relaunched the franchise and has led to a comics-to-film renaissance. Sure, Spider-Man was the first of this new breed, but Batman Begins was the first film to remind viewers that superhero films didn’t have to be vapid to entertain. And whether he can bring himself to be visually true to the books or not, Miller’s love for Eisner’s source material is well-known.

The result is an ambitious, fun…but a bit uneven…film. Miller, a first time director working with a well-established property, a good deal of special effects and a cadre of star-level actors, may not have given as much attention to keeping a consistency in the dialogue and production as he might have. Lionsgate describes the process of adapting Eisner’s unique universe to Miller’s vision by stressing that Eisner himself allowed the universe of The Spirit to age, always remaining contemporary in spite of the clothes and cars that hearken back to the earliest days of its creation. And so, a film that utilizes cell phones and cloning at the same time that the police car is an old steel hulk with actual rotating lights on top was intentional.

Still, it’s not this area that feels forced and artificial, but the digital effects (the red tie, the sneakers and other elements that use solid, matte colors laid over the top of the film), a la Miller’s Sin City film. In Sin City, the adaption was of a black-and-white comic by Miller himself, and the use of these effects was to as closely as possible import the imagery and feel of the source material. In The Spirit, it feels more like a gimmick—like, “Hey, look, it’s those Sin City special effects again!”

The film version of The Octopus is a highlight—not only is Samuel L. Jackson great as the formerly-faceless villain, but his over-the-top performance brings the noir-ish, brooding performance of Gabriel Macht’s Spirit into relief. Without Jackson, Macht’s performance may have been out of place and frankly, the narrating monologue that runs throughout the whole film may have felt too much like telling instead of showing—but Jackson’s performance pushes the whole film into an Old Hollywood milieu and makes all these things make a little more sense. Like Spider-Man, The Spirit is slavishly loyal to the original feel of the strip’s dialogue. Ultimately this is a little awkward, as characters who hold onto cell phones and talk about the Internet carry on like it’s the ’40s. Equally strange is the presence and portrayal of Lorelei, the underwater angel of death who frankly should have been left on the cutting-room floor. It’s possible that Miller was just trying to keep too much of the strips here, but this character feels out of place in the film and every time they cut to her, it distracts from the narrative.

The film successfully evokes Eisner’s sense of humor, and the physicality of Macht’s character (along with the stilted, prissy-girl that Sarah Paulson puts forward as Ellen Dolan) imbue these characters with the personalities of the original strip, even if the look and feel of the film isn’t entirely what you would expect from Central City’s suit-wearing hero.

In-jokes abound, as a young Denny Colt is seen reading one of the EC Comics that sparked the Seduction of the Innocent controversy; the truck that The Octopus and Silken Floss use to appear inconspicuous is for the Ditko company; and frequent mentions of eggs and cats are meant to add depth to The Octopus and The Spirit, although in reality they’re just off-putting.

The film revolves around a story wherein The Spirit runs afoul of both the Octopus (and his girl Silken Floss) and his first love, Sand Saref. While interviews and press materials have referred to the Octopus as the Spirit’s oppsite number, it’s really Sand who fits this role better; the thesis of the movie is that the city is the Spirit’s true love, and the parade of beautiful women he encounters in his travels are merely diversions (with the possible exception of Ellen), and Sand—his childhood sweetheart, for whom he still carries a little flame—hates Central City passionately, blaming it for her father’s death (he was a cop killed in the line of duty when they were teenagers). She’s back in the city looking for the Golden Fleece (yes, of Jason & the Argonauts fame) while the Octopus seeks the blood of Heracles, believing it will make him immortal if he drinks it. The inclusion of these elements of mythology may have felt a little more at home in the context of the comics, but in the film it’s distracting. The world in which this Spirit resides is essentially ours, with a few very minor modifications, and so magical artifacts feel unnatural for reasons that are hard to put your finger on—not unlike when aliens were introduced into the Indiana Jones franchise this summer.

Another element that didn’t fit was Eva Mendes—her performance is exactly like every other performance she’s given in her career. She’s wooden, unconvincing, unemotional and there is no logical reason why she continues to get work. She steps on every scene she’s in here, and it doesn’t speak well of Miller-the-filmmaker that in a story that leans so heavily on the Sand Saref character, that he chose such a terrible actress for the part.

Early reviews haven’t been kind to The Spirit, a film that’s a lot of fun to watch as long as you don’t think too hard, but it’ll be interesting to see more than anything else how longtime fans of the franchise will react—probably not kindly—in the coming weeks. While a fun diversion over the Christmas weekend and sure to turn some kind of profit, this movie will be unlikely to be remembered in ten years, and certainly won’t bring new fans streaming into stores looking for old Eisner issues of The Spirit—which is unfortunate, as that should have been Miller’s goal all along.

Hi, I’m Russell, and I’m a racist.

Not in the way you think, don’t worry. I’m not going to dive off the deep end with some lenghty and ill-advised tirade against someone who might be reading my column. Instead, I’m going to confess to my deep, abiding hatred of a minority group of about 100,000 living in the DC Comics Universe.

That’s right, folks. I’m here to advocate the wholesale genocide of the Kryptonian race. And before you ask—no, I don’t mean to suggest that anything bad should happen to Kal-El, who we all know can never really stay dead anyway.

But Kara Zor-El can bite the dust (again), as far as I’m concerned.

Actually, while I’m a post-Crisis on Infinite Earths fan and therefore a big proponent of Superman as “the Last Son of Krypton” as opposed to a city full of the flying folk, it’s also true that my intolerance is not limited to other Kryptonians. Let’s go down the list:

• Supergirl? I hate her.

• Wonder Girl? What’s the use?

• Red Arrow? A pale imitation of the original. They even made him a shameless womanizer, and for a while gave him a stupid little beard.

• Bart Allen? Before he was dead, I was a huge fan of Impulse. The moment he became Kid Flash and started dressing like Wally, they lost me. Most of what made Bart a compelling character was completely independent of the Flash mantle.

While I don’t think any sane person can take issue with the Green Lantern Corps right now, the reality is, I’ve never had much use for characters who are a bigger/smaller/female/alien/animal equivalent of exactly the same character. Why waste talent like Greg Rucka, Sterling Gates and James Robinson telling stories that revolve around a teenage girl version of Superman, when they could be used—at a minimum—to tell the ongoing adventures of some other teenage girl who has a different costume, a different set of powers, etc.? I feel like milking these franchises for everything they can is just another way for comics publishers to be lazy and uncreative, and then ask the fans to fork over their hard-earned cash for the privilege of reading it.

The idea that these characters and concepts were starting to be retired and/or at least replaced with somewhat more creative riffs on the same idea (see Impulse, again, as your example there), only to do a 180 and end up right back where we were in the early ’80s—with a hundred thousand Kryptonians flying around and making the DC Universe a more redundant place to live—is really a drag. The idea that Superman is being forced out of Action Comics so that stories featuring these characters and their interactions with the DCU is not only silly, but guaranteed to drive readers away from the book. If DC were going to pull a stunt like that, they at least should have worked on it in advance and made the title weekly until things return to normal, so that it would be Action Comics Weekly again and the notion of exploring a rotating cast of third-tier characters would have a logical, traceable history.

Somebody sell me on this—what’s the appeal of a character like Supergirl or Kid Flash?

What is a reasonable amount of time to give a formerly-great (or at least good enough for you) book a chance to get back on track?

In my previous post on Booster Gold, one of the readers indicated that he had almost given up on the title before this month’s issue won him back over to the cause. As a huge fan of the first year of this book, as well as of Dan Jurgens and of the character, I wondered to myself how long it would take for me to consider dropping Booster Gold if it just wasn’t doing it for me—and found that I don’t have a solid answer.

I do know the answer for books that I like, but don’t love—six months, barring extenuating circumstances. By extenuating, I mean:

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Dan Jurgens, creator of Booster Gold (the character) and writer/artist on Booster Gold (the comic) joined Comic Related and Blog@Newsarama for a chat on the most recent issue, released yesterday.  For the complete GOLD EXCHANGE column, see it tomorrow at http://www.comicrelated.com.

Blog@: So, the big question: Will we eventually see how Booster & Michelle got out of their predicament at the end of Chuck Dixon’s arc, or is there some kind of anomaly that’s caused us picking up in a totally different place?

Dan Jurgens: I don’t know if that’s so much a predicament they were in as one final thing to take care of. I believe there was enough there to let us know that they were able to solve it on their own.

Blog@: …The Mona Lisa? So you’re certainly keeping up the Quantum Leap vibe from Geoff & Jeff’s run. Can you walk us through what you’re planning on keeping versus what you’re going to be shooting for, in terms of tone?

DJ: I think the general tone that was established during the first 12 issues works well and is worth keeping. Booster Gold will always have a bit of lightness to it, in a fun way, that will always be a part of the story.

I’ve always felt that time travel stories, in general, are too often weighted down by the Enormous Circumstances inflicted on the characters. Adding a bit of levity is appropriate. Let’s face it… traveling through time would be fraught with danger as well as fun.

Blog@: (And apparently everyone during the Italian Renaissance spoke English?)

DJ: Anyone who has a Legion flight ring could have a universal translator, could they not?

Blog@: …Well played. I feel like Booster’s enthusiasm toward the action figures scheme is really indicative of a certain change in attitude for him from what we’ve seen since the end of 52. What’s the motivation behind returning him to his commercial roots?

DJ: Remember that Booster had and will maintain the facade of a lightweight hero. While Batman will know otherwise, most heroes and the general public will think of him as a publicity-thinking hound who’s interested in his own agenda. To them, Booster is an opportunist.

Blog@: As a point of order, do you think a Time Sphere Action Figure would be a problem for Booster’s current mission and his need to be anonymous?

DJ: Not at all! Who’s to say the existence of a toy would mean such a thing actually exists?

Blog@: It’s interesting—I remember reading 52 and when Ralph said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” thinking that Booster wasn’t the kind of guy who would have known in advance about Sue. Now, he’s traveled back in time and been asked a direct question. Was it your intent to kind of give that moment in Booster’s history a little shuffle?

DJ: Yes. The way I’ve always played Booster and Skeets is that they might know the general broadstrokes of history’s major events. For example, they’d know of any World War, alien invasion or natural disaster that took numerous lives.

Something like Sue Dibny’s death would have been more vague to them. It was natural of Ralph to assume Booster might have known, but not necessarily accurate.

Blog@: This is a PACKED story—while there are some nice splash pages, it’s got a whole bunch of pages that are five, seven panels on a page. The end result is a rather frantic pacing. By the end of this four-issue arc, it looks like you could have told as much actual story as in the six issues of 52 Pick-Up or Blue & Gold. Is that intentional, or just a byproduct of being a somewhat older writer? Geoff does come from a generation of writers who are used to “writing for the trade.”

DJ: I think it’s much more a product of me wanting to get a lot of stuff on the menu so my diners would know what they’re in for. When a book changes hands that way I’ve always felt the new writer should probably get a little more “on stage” than typical. It helps readers get the feeling that new scribe has a handle on the characters as well as an idea of where he/she wants to take the book.

Blog@: Is there any kind of hidden message to be had from the error message on Skeets and the Time Sphere when they’re retreating from Leonardo?

DJ: No.

Blog@: How did Booster not consider that there might be a “defense mechanism” that Rip Hunter’s lab has to kick itself out of time or into the distant past if there’s a threat? Rip has it himself.

DJ: We’ve probably played a bit too fast and loose with some of those concepts. You’ll see some aspects of the time sphere and lab get clarified as we move forward. Rip’s status will get a bit of the same treatment. Is he really a master of time or a scientist who’s still exploring the nature of time?

Blog@: Why does Booster zap Ralph AFTER Ralph has started to deduce that he’s a “future friend?” It seemed as though his time of being unreasonable had ended.

DJ: I think of it more as a slight sting to get him off attack mode and onto the more urgent problem at hand. One of those, “Will you listen already?” moments.

Blog@: Just a thought: If you were Ralph, and you’d seen that purple-and-white costume and how silly it looked, would you still wear it? This guy just has a legacy of shabby clothes!

DJ: Good point! But there were a lot of bad costumes floating around comics at that particular time! It’s like a single bad designer took over and went nuts!

Blog@: True. Let’s not think too much about Black Canary…! So, Is the shadowy intruder with the knife the SAME shadowy intruder from earlier in the series? Having no identifying marks except for the general outline, it begs the question if he’s the one who cleaned Daniel’s clock and stole the Supernova costume.

DJ: No. That was Booster’s father. This, however, is the same shadowy intruder we saw in the museum at the end of Booster Gold #12, page 21.

Blog@: Aww. And here I had a bunch of friends, fans and readers hoping and thinking that might be Ted Kord! So here’s another issue–Between this guy and the Chronos Twins, it seems like way too many badguys are getting an idea of Booster’s schtick. Is the secrecy of his game going to be less of a concern in your run?

DJ: Stay tuned.

Blog@: Will we see Daniel anytime soon? I’m guessing Rip has some kind of plan by now, but now that we have Michelle & Skeets, Booster, and Rip & Daniel all stranded at different points in the broken timeline, I’m hoping that all the stops will be pulled out during this arc!

DJ: Between this arc and the next I think we’ll satisfy your curiosity. This first one will center more on Booster, Skeets and Michelle, who really hasn’t received a lot of character definition so far.

But we haven’t forgotten Booster’s favorite intellectually-challenged ancestor!

This just in, from the MC Theater in New York:

World Premiere
May 6 – June 20, 2009
Coraline
music and lyrics by Stephin Merritt
book by David Greenspan
based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
directed by Leigh Silverman

Produced in Association with True Love Productions

Subscribe Today!
Packages begin at $79!
Click here or call 212-279-4200

Go to mcctheater.org

UPDATE: For those who didn’t like the original headline, sorry.  I’m, like, the worst New Yorker ever.  I got the e-mail via a “Broadway discounts” site I subscribe to and since I don’t know my way around once I leave Chinatown or the East Village, I assumed.

It was a heck of a coup for Dynamite Entertainment when they got rising star Christos Gage to kick off their new monthly series based on the iconic western character The Man With No Name.  Six issues later, Gage has finished his first arc and is riding off into the sunset.  But unlike the enigmatic Blondie, we’ve convinced him to sit down and answer some questions first.

Blog@: Are we to understand that, come the end of the story, Blondie has given up all of his treasure from the end of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, or just a sizable chunk?

Christos Gage: I don’t think he gave it all up. But the sheer amount of it was causing him more trouble than it was worth, so he lightened his load. He probably kept enough to keep him in cigarillos for a while.

Blog@: Will you be revisiting this character again anytime soon? The next couple arcs have been announced already, but the series has been widely regarded as a success for Dynamite.

CG: You never know. I have a pretty full plate, so there are no immediate plans, but I certainly have other story ideas. It’s a matter of timing and me recharging my Western batteries a bit.

Blog@: This arc really felt like it could fit well as another one of the movies. The general sense of chaos in the last couple of chapters, particularly, gave that feeling that you had in all the Man With No Name films that he had “some plan” in the back of his head, even if it appeared to make no sense in application. Was that intentional?

CG: Definitely, and I’m glad to hear it came through!

Blog@: So–can you walk us through what motivated that particular ending for The Ghost? Will his story be told elsewhere?

CG: I liked the idea that this feared, almost mystical figure was actually a dirty, scrawny, flea-ridden mountain man who essentially lived in the hills and did nothing but shoot anything that moved. To be that good at something, you have to practice it to the exclusion of all else, and he did. In his own way, he was as devoted to his calling as the monks. I have no plans to tell his story further, but again, never say never.

Blog@: Was the bone-in-the-serape always in the cards, from the moment you introduced that relic? It fit really seamlessly in.

CG: Yeah, it was always part of the plan.

Blog@: Have you been to any conventions or signings, to get a sense of how fans–particularly older fans who have seen the movies over and over–are feeling about the book?

CG: At Wizard World Texas, a lot of people brought it to me to sign. They seemed to like it, and the reviews have been largely positive. So I’m pleased about that…that’s the audience the book was aimed at, and who we knew would be hardest to please!

Blog@: Not only were you taking on the first arc of this series, but sequelizing one of the greatest films of all time. Did you feel, going in, that this story just had to be told, or was it more of an editorial thing to tie the first arc into the films directly?

CG: No, it was a matter of choice. I just always wondered what happened to all that money and where Blondie rode to after the end of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, and I figured others might have wondered too. I also wanted to pick up on The Good, The Bad & The Ugly’s exploration of the Civil War–not the battles themselves, but more of what was going on at its periphery.

Blog@: It’s interesting to me that Father Ramirez tends to be such a pushover–he voices concern and objection to a lot of the things that Blondie (or others) want to do, but then very quickly flips and does what he needs to do. How did you approach making his character believable with that as part of the makeup?

CG: To me, Ramirez was not so much arguing with Blondie as with himself. I was intrigued by the character in the film and the implication that, in his youth, he was as much of a rogue and a violent man as Tuco…that he could have easily ended up like his brother. The difference is that Father Ramirez wants to be a better man. He works at it. He wants to be redeemed.

Blog@: I was a bit surprised to see Father Ramirez make it out of this one–as often as not, Blondie’s friends seem to buy the farm by the time all’s said and done. Do you know if you, or Dynamite, have any plans to see him again?

CG: Nothing specific from me, but the possibility is always there!

Blog@: I know that, going in, you were acutely aware of the pressure on you in terms of working with a character like this. Having completed the arc, what are your thoughts on working with such an icon?

CG: In a lot of ways it’s the most challenging thing I’ve done in terms of using an established character. It’s not like there have been multiple interpretations of him the way there have been, say, James Bond, so it’s a lot easier to mess up. It’s tough, but rewarding as well. I guess the final judgment has to come from the readers. I hope they enjoyed it.

Writer Fred Van Lente and artist Dennis Calero made an appearance today at Jim Hanley’s Universe in New York, to promote the sold-out first issue of X-Men: Noir.

With a story that sounds a bit like Super Human Resources combined with Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, Marvel has unveiled a description and nine-page preview of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ upcoming Incognito #1, about a supervillain who is suffering through depression and boredom while in the Witness Protection Program.

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A schedule of appearances all over Western Massachusetts.  These are good folks who make good comics, so go see them if you’re close:

Fr. 12/12 5:30-7:30pm North County Perp #2 release party (North Adams MA) – MCLA Gallery 51, North Adams, MA (map) will host a release party for the second issue of the North County Perp, a free humor magazine edited by Howard Cruse. Come out and celebrate! http://www.northcountyperp.com

Sa. 12/13 11am-8pm Tidings of Joy (Holyoke MA) - A group art/craft show, bake sale, printing workshop, and much more, to benefit Doctors Without Borders. Trees & Hills will have comics available (50% of proceeds will be donated). This event will be at the studio of Gonzo Comics diva Rebecca Migdal at Paper City Studios, 80 Race Street, Holyoke, 11am–8pm. http://papercitystudios.wordpress.com/

Su. 12/14 Stars & Skulls Craft Fair (Hadley MA) – American Legion Hall at 162 Russell Street (Route 9) in Hadley, MA (just a bit east of the intersection of Route 9 and Route 47).  Anne Thalheimer, E.J. Barnes, Sam Leveillee, and Trees & Hills (staffed by Colin Tedford) will have tables at this craft fair for “freaks & geeks”. http://www.myspace.com/starsandskullscrafts

Also tomorrow’s Pioneer Valley Comics Schmooze will happen at 7pm at the Teapot restaurant, 116 Main Street, Northampton, MA. Hang out with cartoonists! Email E.J. Barnes (art@ejbarnes.com) for more info.

We currently have about 20 copies of Seeds left, out of the 300 we printed in September. Look at us go! We expect those copies to be gone by year’s end, and plan to reprint for the spring. If you want one of those copies and can’t make it to this weekend’s events, hurry over to Trees & Hills Comics Distro: http://www.treesandhills.org/distro/2008/10/29/seeds/. We are proud to announce that Seeds is also available online through Microcosm Publishing (http://www.microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/zines/2664/) and Parcell Press (http://www.parcellpress.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=215 – look at that nice photo!).

Rick Lowell of Casablanca Comics sends exciting news for the spring: “The Maine Comic Arts Festival will be held in Portland on May 17th, 2009. This event is intended to be very much like SPX and APE by focusing on creators/ writers/ artists and publishers. It will be held at the beautiful Ocean Gateway Center overlooking Casco Bay … We will be working with the Maine College of Art and the Portland Public Library as well as other local arts organizations. We are working on the website for the festival and will start with registrations soon. The blog for our event is up: http://mecaf.blogspot.com/ The website will follow soon. … We are also on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=48705984560 Trees & Hills will certainly have a table as soon as they are available.

www.treesandhills.org

Having today received a press release from Chuck D (of Public Enemy fame) regarding the collected edition of his comic Public Enemy, Vol. 1, Welcome to the Terrordome with Adam Wallenta, it came to occur to me that I hadn’t read a single thing about this floppy as the series was happening.

While, to be sure, the Public Enemy comic sounds like a bit of a train wreck to me, that’s true of any number of celebrity “reality” shows that have managed to make a fortune.  And I remember that while KISS, Nicolas Cage, Insane Clown Posse, Tori Amos and more have put out licensed comics, those books sell more like indie books, with a few thousand people picking them up.  What happens with licensed properties is that a handful of hardcore fans of the person/band/property and a handful of hardcore comics fans pick them up.  Ultimately instead of being able to capitalize on the popularity of the thing you’re covering, you end up cheapening the overall community by introducing one more thing that’s not popular, doesn’t do well and seems to be just a piece of merchandising rather than art.

It seems bizarre to me that this happens–that popular people and media are constantly brought into comics and then succeed in only drawing in a fraction of the audience that those people would have had in their own medium–and that we continue to welcome them in.  Why not simply say, “A Public Enemy comic that’s not good enough to cut the mustard at a mainstream publisher, shouldn’t be on the shelf through a small press?”  It seems to cheapen all of comics, in my opinion, to see that the expectations for our form are often so much lower than those for prose, music, cinema, etc.

This isn’t to say that there are NO good licensed products out there in comics, by the way.  WildStorm’s Chuck, IDW’s Transformers, Dynamite’s The Man With No Name and Dark Horse’s Aliens and Predator books are just a few of the many fine licensed comics out there in today’s market.  Still, I believe that comics publishers are so desperate for just a little mainstream attention and acceptance that these things are constantly cranked out, but what really happens?  Instead of comics getting a little love from the hip-hop community, our audience ends up giving a little love to hip-hop (or whatever…I’m just picking on poor Chuck D because it was his press release that started this) and get nothing in return.  It seems more likely to me that a comic fan went without X-Men one week to get this book than a music fan going without some iTunes downloads to be seen in a comics specialty shop.  Maybe that’s a bit of a leap, but…!

Thoughts?

Marvel has released a trailer for its upcoming Dark Reign event.  The trailer, available here, breaks very little new ground and basically just reiterates what we know…but it’ll be a nice selling point for DC zombies and other non-Marvel readers.

In spite of a spectacularly-botched relaunch of its superhero universe just a few years back, and a few ill-conceived and poorly-received crossovers with the DC Universe since then, WildStorm is proving itself to be a vital and interesting place for some non-traditional comics fare.

Marc Andreyko, whose superhero masterpiece Manhunter was recently jettisoned by DC, has set up shop at WildStorm (itself an imprint of DC) and recently published the second issue of Ferryman, his violent, darkly comic…umm, comic based on the Joel Silver-inspired characters. For Andreyko, who rose to mainstream prominence with the Torso miniseries (currently being tortured by Hollywood), the story of a man who’s using his supernatural powers to punish naughty folks in all manner of creative ways is a little bit of a homecoming (what with the exotic violence and all). It also makes me wonder whether DC’s floundering Spectre property might do well to have Andreyko take a swing at the pinata.

Not that I can ever imagine The Spectre being a marketable book, but an Andreyko version would almost certainly get good reviews and develop a cult following before collapsing under the weight of fan apathy.

One book, though, that’s been surprisingly good has just concluded its six-issue run: Chuck, based on the NBC sitcom by the same name and written by a couple of the show’s staff writers, has been a real standout as far as licensed properties are concerned. It took advantage of the comic book format and its “unlimited special effects budget” to good effect—such as traveling to Tokyo and then Rio within about six pages, something you can’t do on a TV show, especially when the economy’s mediocre—but didn’t fall into the trap of straying far from the show or becoming too indulgent in terms of big explosions, unconvincingly-strong bad guys or other such things that you’ll see as non-comics writers try to shoehorn themselves into the comics form. The miniseries was a roaring good time, and I’ll probably write it up more fully when the collected edition hits.

If there was any doubt, though, that writers Peter Johnson and Zev Borow understand the comic book culture, one need only watch their show with a keen eye. Sure, sure, everyone seems to have San Diego Comic Con stickers all over things (walls, lockers at the Buy-More, etc.), but those could be written off as token “geek” indicia. What’s less easy to dismiss, and buys the Chuck staff some Blog@ street cred as far as I’m concerned, is the Y: The Last Man poster in Chuck’s bedroom this season. Check it out, and try to support this show when it gets back on the air so that it doesn’t vanish like Pushing Daisies and, apparently, Dirty Sexy Money, a pair of shows that I really wish had stood more of a chance in today’s market.

Update: I did not realize until just this moment that NBC’s official Chuck website carries the Chuck comic books in their full, unedited glory here.  You can view them as a comic book, or as a fully-animated comic (no voices or anything, but pan & scan of the pages, word bubbles that come up as you move through, etc.).

Kurt Busiek is widely regarded as one of the great writers in modern comics, and for most fans that reputation started with Marvels. Working in concert with painter Alex Ross, Busiek reimagined important, historic stories throughout Marvel Comics’ publishing history through the eyes of freelance news photographer Phil Sheldon.

This week, Busiek returned to Sheldon’s world in Marvels: Eye of the Camera #1 (this time with artist Jay Anacleto) and sat down with Blog@Newsarama to discuss the issue.

Blog@Newsarama: What motivated you to go back into this? I feel like Sheldon’s ending was pretty satisfactory for most readers at the close of Marvels—why drag him through the wringer here?

Kurt Busiek: Well, I had another story to tell. Marvels ends well, I think — it’s a self-contained story, and ends where it ought to end. But I always had another story in mind for Phil. It’s not what we originally had planned as a sequel, but from way back, we’d talked about doing maybe a one-shot special exploring what came afterward for Phil. And while we added a lot to it — what would have been the one-shot is actually about half of #5 and the rest of #6 — this is that story, and it takes Phil to where I thought things would go for him all along.

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The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund held their 2008 Member Appreciation Holiday Party last night at the Village Pourhouse in Manhattan’s East Village.  Creators, fans and supporters of the CBLDF gathered at the popular bar to meet and greet, buy art and graphic novels and participate in raffles to benefit the Fund.  In addition to creators and editors, the retail community was represented by Jeff Ayers, the manager of New York’s Forbidden Planet store.

Images are available here, as the Blog@ photo gallery hates me and does not do what I ask of it.