Plot synopsis released for X-Men Origins: Magneto

The latest issue of Production Weekly includes a plot synopsis for David Goyer’s planned X-Men Origins: Magneto — one that includes an altered role for a certain bald telepath:

“The original X-Men film began with a prologue that showed the character as a child being led to a concentration camp by Nazis and that is the period in which the Magneto film will take place. This setup will allow a future villain to at least flirt with the designation of protagonist since the character will be seen almost exclusively in his formative years. The storyline will heavily involve Professor X, the wheelchair-using X-Men leader. That character was a soldier in the Allied force that liberated the concentration camps. The professor meets Magneto after the war and while they bond over the realization that they are alike in their special powers, their differences soon turn them into enemies.”

According to David Bentley of the Coventry Telegraph, an early draft of the script featured Charles Xavier as a staff member at an Israeli hospital, not as an Allied soldier.

It’s unclear when Magneto will begin production. In August, Goyer said he hadn’t decided whether to tackle this project or The Invisible Man next.

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The judges have been announced for the 2009 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. The five-person panel selects the nominees, who are then voted on by eligible members of the comics industry.

The 2009 judges are:

• Amanda Emmert, owner of Muse Comics & Games in Missoula, Mont., and communications coordinator for ComicsPRO

• Mike Pawuk, teen-services public librarian for the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Parma, Ohio

• John Shableski, a sales manager for Diamond Book Distributors

• Ben Towle, cartoonist, educator and creator of Midnight Sun

• Andrew Wheeler, comics reviewer, blogger and former senior editor of the Science Fiction Book Club

Stan Lee does what he does best — promotes his latest book, this one a collection of his old Marvel Soapbox columns, in the video below. The book benefits the Hero Initiative.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to try out some of the comic book applications that have been popping up in the iTunes application store, here’s your chance to try them out and help a good cause.

iVerse, a company that’s turned Shadowhawk, Proof, Flash Gordon and several other comics titles into iPhone applications, will donate half of all proceeds from a “Hero Initiative Spotlight” book each month to the charity. The program kicks off this month with Shadowhawk v.2 #1, which is 99 cents in the app store.

“I think it is terribly important to support the creators that helped build this industry.” said iVerse owner Michael Murphey. “We are working on the future of this industry with these digital comics – but it would be completely impossible for us to be where we are, without the amazing work that these creators have done, and we’re honored to be able to work with Hero on this project.”

You can find out more about iVerse and the titles they offer (including several free ones) at their website.

Neil Gaiman, voice actor Tom Wayland and several others will attend a reading from Gaiman’s Sandman series to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The event will take place at the Helen Mills Theater in New York City on Saturday, Nov. 8 at 7:30 p.m. More details are available here.

• Artist Jim Rugg shares a commission he did for a local comic shop.

• Joshua Dysart has started a blog on his site about his Vertigo title The Unknown Soldier, where you’ll be able to check out a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff like script excerpts, pencils, layouts, etc.

• Friends of Lulu is looking for nominees for treasurer, reporting secretary and membership secretary for their board of directors. Lulu President Valerie D’Orazio has more details.

• Mark Evanier reports on the death of Tom Fagan, who was responsible for the annual Halloween parade in Rutland, Vt. “Writers and artists from the industry journeyed to Rutland to participate in the festivities, often in costume, and art began to imitate life: Many comic book stories were done that were set in Rutland involving DC and Marvel heroes actually attending,” Evanier writes.

• Austin English has a new blog where he’s interviewing various comics creators like David King and Dylan Williams.

• Just in time for your Halloween viewing pleasure, SLG Publishing posts a creepy story on their website — “The Addlepated House of Odds” by Kurt Hartman.

• The Sardinian Connection posts Mike Carey’s afterword from an Italian tribute book to Watchmen (the afterword is in English, BTW).

• Don MacPherson wonders why he hasn’t seen more about Stephen Colbert’s comic book tie-ins on The Colbert Report.

• Shannon Smith takes a look at the minicomic anthology Not My Small Diary #14.

Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, founded in September 2006 by Diamond Comic Distributors CEO Steve Geppi, is more than $700,000 in debt.

Maryland’s Daily Record reports the Baltimore pop-culture museum has accrued about $622,500 in unpaid rent to the Maryland Stadium Authority, and owes more than $77,000 in late fees and unpaid electric bills dating back to February 2007.

According to the newspaper, the stadium authority has worked out an agreement with the museum so the outstanding rent will be paid off by the end of the year.

The museum, located in the upper floors of Camden Station, began having financial problems shortly after its high-profile opening. The Daily Record notes Geppi’s began missing rent payments two months after it opened, and a legislative audit of the stadium authority criticized some expenditures.

The 16,000-square-foot museum is home to several permanent exhibits, including displays of rare comics, early 20th-century collectibles, and a look at changing American pop culture in the ’60s.

Charities have realized that comics characters are an effective way to get money and attention, but for every authorized use — such as the Met’s superhero fashion exhibit or Diane von Furstenberg’s Wonder Woman collection — there are countless other examples of charities using comic-book icons without permission. Every so often, a publisher clamps down on one of these initiatives–and their reward is typically negative press. Just this month, for example, DC Comics was criticized for not giving the Heroes Initiative permission to include pictures of DC properties in The 3-Minute Sketchbook.

Singling out DC is a bit unfair — Marvel has had its own share of charitable controversy, and DC has allowed its characters to be used for other charitable projects — but the broader question raised by such incidents is not unreasonable. After all, if the money is going to a charity, why shouldn’t a publisher just let its characters help a good cause?

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At last night’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City, both presidential candidates delivered pretty funny speeches, taking jabs at each other and themselves.

But while Sen. John McCain’s address probably was funnier, Sen. Barack Obama may have scored more points with the nerd crowd with two comics references.

The first came in his opening when he said, “I was thrilled to get this invitation and I feel right at home here because it’s often been said that I share the politics of Alfred E. Smith and the ears of Alfred E. Neumann.”

The second, and far funnier one, was when he addressed a repeated question from the McCain campaign — “Who is Barack Obama?” — and the mocking, and rather messianic, label “The One.”

“Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger,” he told the crowd at the white-tie charity roast. “I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father Jor-El to save the Planet Earth.”

You can watch the McCain and Obama speeches at YouTube, or read the transcripts here.

Established in 1946 by Francis Cardinal Spellman and named for the former governor of New York, the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation supports the poor, sick and underprivileged in the Archdiocese of New York.

• Richard Gehr from the Village Voice went to the The New Yorker Festival earlier this month and brought back a report on Lynda Barry and Matt Groening’s chat. “I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling a label off a beer bottle while somebody tells you about a dream they had,” Barry said.

• Fortune examines Marvel’s recent success — not in the world of movies, but in the world of comics publishing.

• The horror webcomics site Split Lip‘s got chills, and they’re multiplying … the site is posting new stories every Sunday throughout the month of October.

• The new Comic Foundry magazine was delayed until this week, but you can read Laura Hudson’s update on a couple of Comic Book Legal Defense Fund-related cases from the magazine over at its website.

• “So why is it that I know more about Tony Stark’s heart condition than I do my own father’s?”

• First Second’s Gina Gagliano posts a Q&A with Get Graphic, a literacy advocacy program that uses comics in Buffalo, N.Y.

• And finally, the greatest headline of the week so far.

The Hero Initiative has released some more details on their upcoming collection of all of Stan Lee’s “Soapboxes” from 1967-1980 that ran in the back of Marvel’s comics. The 144-page book will be available both in softcover for $15 and limited-edition hardcover version for $35 … unless you ant your hardcover signed, then it’s $99.

The third annual Wonder Woman Day, a benefit to raise money in New Jersey and Oregon for domestic violence shelters, will be held Oct. 26 in Portland, Ore. and Fleminton, N.J. The event is organized by Andy Mangels.

The events include silent art auctions featuring a variety of artists, including Adam Hughes, Matt Wagner, Phil Jimenez, Terry Dodson, Joëlle Jones (who did the painting at the top of this post) and many more. Bidding will be conducted on site and online. More details are available at the link above.

Devil’s Due Publishing, Hypergraphia, the Hero Initiative and the American Cancer Society are teaming up for a benefit to help artist Josh Medors, who is currently battling cancer. The event will be held in Brooklyn next Saturday, Oct. 4. More details can be found here.

Liz Farmer at the Maryland Daily Record is reporting that the Geppi Entertainment Museum has been embroiled in a rent dispute with the state agency that leases its space for more than a year:

Puddester would not say exactly how long the dispute had been going on, or if founder Stephen A. Geppi had simply missed rent payments or was not paying rent at all out of protest. But he did say the rent became an issue when the Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards, the tenant in Camden Station below Geppi’s, had its rent payments reduced in June 2007 because the nonprofit was struggling to make ends meet due to unexpectedly low admissions revenue.

At that time, the stadium authority voted to forgive the museum its $444,274 in back rent and also lowered its monthly rent from about $32,200 to $10,300, which Puddester said approximately covers the building’s operating expenses. The museum, which received partial funding from the state, opened in 2005.

Apparently part of the reason the musuem has not been doing well is because of declining attendance at Camden Yards.

As they did with their Ultimate Spider-Man project, the Hero Initiative and Marvel are collecting their Hulk #1 covers this December. Check out the complete press release after the jump.

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Earlier this summer there was a bit of controversy around a cover Frank Cho created for the Hero Initiative’s Hulk #1 charity project — a cover the fund ended up rejecting.

Now, via the Hero Initiative MySpace page comes a look at Cho’s second cover for the project… now with less nudity and incestuous overtones. It’s also up on eBay and bids are already over $1,100 (and probably more by the time you see this).

I was reading an article today from the Times-Picayune that details the Comic Book Project, an effort led by Dark Horse Comics to get comics into schools. The goal of the Comic Book Project is to aid educators in getting kids interested in reading:

Students — especially hard-to-reach students — find comic books less intimidating than textbooks, and they frequently can express themselves in comic book form better than they can in traditional writing classes, he said. Plus, the visual medium can be more memorable, which means more lasting learning.

Let’s face it, comics have always been in schools.

I mean, I think this is great and everything, but where the heck was the Comic Book Project when I was in fourth grade? I remember sitting there reading Fantastic Four #195 tucked safely into my spelling text book, when Mrs. Davis snatched it out from under my nose. She sent the comic and me down to Mr. Connell’s office, our gargantuanly proportioned former football player-turned-elementary school principal.

Scariest. Man. Ever.

I’ll never forget his words, “Funny books aren’t for school.”

Well, in your face, Mr. Connell! Guess we showed you, huh?

Now gimme back that book!

You know, I still don’t know how that one ends…

The site DonorsChoose.org allows teachers to ask for donations for various teaching-related projects, sort of like a Kiva for educators. “Mr. S.” in Texas is trying to raise funds to buy copies of Kingdom Come for his English as a Second Language students:

Reading is a key survival skill and a necessity that my students need to get ahead in within school and life. My students must develop good reading skills as a foundation of learning all of their school subjects. Countless research has shown that students that have a good understanding of reading and are able to read well do better in school. Research has also shown that in order to become a better reader kids must be given the opportunity to read. Unfortunately, my students can not afford to buy books and often times the books that are available for them in school is written “way over their heads.”

My goal is to put quality comic books, that are easy to read, but require high academic skills and rigor, into the hands of my students. Research has shown that while easier to read than “regular novels,” comic books actually require higher order thinking skills to understand. The same higher order thinking skills that are required in math and science. To this end I would like to provide my students with a class set of the graphic novel “Kingdom Come” and the “Kingdom Come-Author’s edition” to help my students become better readers.

He needs $546 for the books, and has already raised $150.

The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority has accused Universal Pictures of breaching violence guidelines with two posters for Wanted, and has ordered that they not appear again.

Of course, the campaign is over, so the decision doesn’t have much effect on the promotion of the movie, loosely based on the miniseries by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones.

In an adjudication report posted today on its website, the self-regulatory agency of the U.K. advertising industry ruled the posters could be seen to glamorize the use of guns and violence. (One of the posters in question can be seen above.)

“We acknowledged most viewers would understand the posters reflected the content of an action film,” the ASA states in its report. “However, we considered, that because the ads featured a glamorous actress, action poses, several images of or related to guns and aspirational text, they could be seen to glamorise the use of guns and violence.  We concluded ads (a) and (b) could be seen to condone violence by glorifying or glamorising the use of guns.”

The ASA is an independent group funded by voluntary levies on advertising costs.

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Over on the Hero Initiative blog, Jim McLauchlin has an appeal for shoppers at Ralph’s:

One supercool thing about Ralphs is the Ralphs Rewards card. It’s your standard grocery store “club card” that gets you discounts and whatnot. But you can ALSO register it with a Ralphs-approved charity, and EVERY time you shop and use the card, Ralphs will kick in a small percentage to the charity of your choice. It costs you, the consumer, NOTHING. It’s just Ralphs kicking in a couple bucks to good causes. See where I’m going with this?

Yes, The Hero Initiative is one of those Ralphs-approved charities, and since Ralphs just switched over from Ralphs Club cards to Ralphs Rewards, we need YOU to re-register your card for Hero, which is easy as pie (tho’ not quite as tasty):

Follow the link for more details if you shop at the grocery chain.