051 Condolences to Neil Gaiman

Though he’ll probably never come across this I thought it would be appropriate to send my condolences to Neil Gaiman, whose father recently passed away.

*Sorry for the lack of updates over the past couple of weeks, it’s been hectic at my day job. Tomorrow I’ll have a recap and some photos of the Festival of New French Writing conversation between Chris Ware and Marjane Satrapi, moderated by Françoise Mouly.

012 Friday Wrap-up for the week of 1/11/2009

• Comics Fairplay posted this interesting breakdown of the economics of buying your floppies every Wednesday. In the current financial climate it’s something to think about.
• The Telegraph chooses an unfortunate title for their article about Stan Lee’s new gay superhero. Do your homework people!
• It appears we may not see Samuel L. Jackson in the Marvel movie universe again after all, due to an “economic crisis in the Marvel world” (read: Sam’s trying to put them through the ringer.) Here’s a funny bit of unintentional racism: the address used by that LA Times article, entitled Nick Fury No More?, gets cut off. It just reads, “Nick Fury No Mo”. WHY’S IT GOTTA BE ABOUT EBONICS, LA TIMES?
• Here’s a pretty sweet blog where comix artists re-draw and sometimes re-imagine famous comic covers.
• Not one to be outdone by those American pigs (or black people), Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni are starring in their own comic book.
• While we’re on the subject, Erik Larsen is pissed that Marvel “stole” his idea to put Obama on the cover of a comic:

“The thing that Marvel is attempting to do is to frame the argument. To say “we’ve featured presidents in the past–this is what we do–it’s part of a pattern.” But that’s a false argument. The “stunt” was an alternate cover featuring Obama– which was something no publisher had done with any president in the past and one that received a lot of press when I did it. If Marvel had done alternate covers with Bush and Clinton or any of the others– they could legitimately claim that they were following a pattern and doing what they’ve done in the past– but that wasn’t the case. And theirs is not simply the appearance of a president in a comic book but one on an alternate cover– and one concocted to try and get some of the same attention that (I) got.”

• Oh hey, look, Marvel’s Steve Wacker responded:

“Reading Erik’s statement, he wisely (if you want to cut off all logical arguments) proclaims that the actual truth of the matter — that Marvel has a history of showing presidents in our books — is a “false argument,” but I’m going to ignore him and make the point anyway because, well, ignoring that fact is as silly as his pretend outrage.

Marvel DOES regularly show politicians and we have for years. That’s the whole point. In fact, Marvel has spent the past year putting a fake presidential candidate in most of our books. The idea that we’d follow that up by putting a Spidey-fan-made-good on our cover can’t really come as a huge surprise to anyone smart enough to be a publisher.”

Steve’s kind of twisting Erik’s argument there, but regardless I don’t think marvel “stole” the idea necessarily. The thing that really scares me here is that Wacker, a man in the comic industry, says he’s never read an issue of Savage Dragon.

• Looks like Watchmen will actually be coming to the big screen after all. Somewhere in the UK right now Alan Moore is beating his head against a wall.
• I feel like I’ve been doing this too much lately; Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan died this week. Montalban is best known as the star of Fantasy Island, as well as the title character from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Patrick McGoohan was the star of the 1960′s TV show The Prisoner.

008 Friday Wrap-up for the week of 1/5/2009

• The Dark Knight buzz has seriously been growing this week, nabbing Producer’s Guild, Writer’s Guild, and now Director’s Guild nominations. With just a single nomination at the Golden Globes is it possible that all of this buzz can influence the Academy? I didn’t really like the movie but following the story has been really interesting.
• Did you know they were making a new Street Fighter movie? If you didn’t I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s true. And it’s all about Chun-Li, the least interesting character ever! Yayyy! Here’s the new poster for the film. You might be asking such reasonable questions as, “which one of those people is Chun-Li?” or “why is she not one of the people fighting in the background?” or “who the fuck thought this was a good idea?”, and trust me I feel your pain, but unfortunately I do not have these answers for you.
• Colombian coffee growers are suing Mike Peters, of Mother Goose and Grim fame, for a strip he created making a joke about crime in Colombia in relation to the (apparently) popular slogan “a little bit of Juan Valdez in every can”. I’m not going to rail against censorship as I did in a previous post, but can someone please get this under control? The strip was completely innocuous and if Peters is punished for this it’s bad, bad news for cartoonists everywhere.
• In case you didn’t know, God does exist and he’s answered one of my prayers. David Goyer has announced that all DC movies at Warner Bros. are on hold until they “come up with some new plan, methodology, things like that” (aka they can only make a popular Batman movie and everything else they do is complete shit and the Justice League, Green Lantern, and Shazam! movies all sound terrible and they should all just stop oh I’m sorry I’m rambling let me get back to my post.) I’m disappointed.
• In yesterday’s post my buddy Matt made a few photoshopped images of Barack Obama with popular comic book villains (and MODOK). He lamented not having Dr. Doom and Obama hold hands, so he decided to go back to the drawing board if you will. Here’s the all- new, all-different Obama/Doom lovefest:



• Finally, Pat Hingle, the actor who played Commisioner Gordon in the 1990′s Batman movies, died last Saturday at the age of 84. I really liked his portrayal of Gordon, because he was so old and so flabbergasted about damn near everything that it seemed obvious Batman was needed in Gotham.

1924-2009

004 Friday Wrap-up for the week of 12/22/2008

• My roommate Joey and I saw The Wrestler this week, and it was pretty amazing (someone give Rourke his Oscar right now please), but something else we saw that I thought was pretty cool is the preview for Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman’s autobiographical animated documentary about his time in the Israeli Defense Forces. I’m not 100% sure what the animation style is, but according to Wikipedia “it utilizes a combination of frame-by-frame, computer and rotoscoping animation to capture the realism of the setting and people.” Looks like it would have made a pretty sweet comic.
• Speaking of movies and comics, The Spirit has been making it’s rounds at the theatre and boy oh boy has it been getting some shitty reviews. I’d almost feel bad if Frank Miller hadn’t turned into such a hackneyed caricature of himself. For those of you unfamiliar with Miller, he’s the guy behind Sin City and 300, as well as the inspiration for some the new Batman movies’ general ideas and plot points. Unfortunately he now does about one comic every five years, pretty much phones it in, and comes up with ideas like Holy Terror, Batman!, a story in which Batman fights Al Qaeda. Sigh. Luckily this never came to fruition. Anyway, maybe he can take this opportunity to step back,get some perspective, and see that he just doesn’t have it anymore. He can move on to the old comics creators nursing home with Stan Lee.
• This one goes out to all of my fellow JSA fans: chill the fuck out. I know Geoff johns is leaving the book but this week DC Editor In Chief Dan Didio mentioned in a Newsarama interview that the new writer on the book will be James Robinson of Starman fame, and former writer of JSA in the late 90′s. EDIT: As faithful reader Paul Mastroianni pointed out in the comments, I was mistaken; James Robinson is writing Justice League. Bill Willingham and Matt Sturges, the creative team currently behind Fables, will be working on JSA.
• And finally, rest in peace Eartha Kitt. It’s nearly impossible to follow Julie Newmar but you made one hell of a Catwoman. I like to believe she went peacefully on Christmas, laying in bed listening to “Santa Baby”.

1927-2008