On this day in 1995, Disney and Pixar released Toy Story, the first full length CGI movie. It grossed $191,773,049 in the United States and it went on to take in a grand total of $354,300,000 worldwide, and was nominated for three Academy Awards, including for Best Original Screenplay, for Joel Cohen, Pete Docter, John Lasseter, Joe Ranft, Alec Sokolow, Andrew Stanton and… Joss Whedon.
I plan on celebrating by playing with my t– action figures.
The tradition of late night TV hosts is a rich one here in the U.S. but today ComicMix Radio takes you across the boarder for a preview of a show that has been around for at least a couple of decades. Meet Ed (he’s the sock puppet) and Red (that would be the girl) from Ed & Red’s Night Party, which is now accessible here – and wait until you hear about their comic connections.
And, on this Thanksgiving Day, we’ve got:
• Dynamic Forces digging up The Adolescent Hamsters
• GI Joe getting his Baroness
• Donald Trump, Gene Simmons & Goofy, all headed back to the small and big screens
Have a great holiday. We’ll talk to you again late Saturday from the floor of The Mid-Ohio Con in Columbus. Until then, drop the drumstick and Press The Button!
And while Santa Claus is toodling down Broadway and we start playing Alice’s Restaurant, we bring you the wise words of Warren Ellis:
Don’t forget, my Yanqui readers, the true meaning of Thanksgiving: give your neighbours an infected blanket this Thursday and then move into their houses after they’re dead.
Eat hearty, give thanks, and if the Lions game bores you, take some time and read some comics.
Today is Thanksgiving and a hearty Happy Thanksgiving to you all.
As it turns out, it’s also the birthday of my late wife, Kimberly Ann Yale, who would have been 54 today. This is a day for stopping and giving thanks for the good things in your life and so I’ll ask your indulgence while I remember one of the best things in mine, which was Kim.
For those who don’t know her, never met her, how do I describe her to you? My god, where do I begin? Physically – heart shaped face, megawatt smile, big blue eyes. Champagne blonde hair which, in her later years, she decided should be red. That decision was pure Kimmie. She looked good, too, but she also looked good bald. More on that in a few moments. She was buxom and damn proud of it. Referred to her breasts as “the girls” and was fond of showing them off. She was about 5’8” so that when she was in heels we were about the same height. Basically had an hourglass figure although sometimes there were a few more seconds packed into that hourglass than maybe there should have been. We both fought weight problems and I still do.
All that, however, is mere physical description. Photographs could tell you as much and more and still tell you so little about Kim. Not who she was. Kim was an extrovert to the point of being an exhibitionist. She was flamboyant sometimes; I have described her at times as the world’s most innocent narcissist. She loved the spotlight but with the delight of a child. Yet, she also loved nothing better than to be in the corner of a tea shoppe or coffee house, drinking her cuppa, writing in her journal, totally absorbed into herself and the moment.
No, not Stan Lee, his 87th birthday isn’t until December 2009. Today is the birthday of Hall of Famer Stan Musial, #6 for the St. Louis Cardinals with a .331 lifetime batting average, and a man so respected in the game that Brooklyn Dodgers fans never booed him at Ebbets Field.
Happy birthday to the Donora Greyhound!
Modernism and self-referentiality have been rampant in superhero comics for a good twenty years now; Alan Moore was the main instigator, with his great final Superman story and the Watchmen “pirate comics” motif. Some of the best and most entertaining stories since then have been knowingly "comics," from Grant Morrison’s "The Coyote Gospel" in Animal Man to John Byrne’s pleasant run on She-Hulk. But self-referentiality can also curdle like milk, or gnaw away its own belly like the fox under the Spartan boy’s cloak. There’s a huge streak of allegory in modern superhero comics – actually, "allegory" gives it too much credit; what we actually find are naked bids for audience identification and equally naked scornings of any connection to or interest in the supposedly puerile and retrograde wishes of that audience. (Pop quiz: who does Superman-Prime represent and why?)
Mainstream superhero comics have become a high-speed whirlwind of reader-response feedback done mad, with convoluted continuity one week and shredded history the next, and, no matter what, the anvil chorus of comics bloggers complaining that something or other is “raping their childhoods.” Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality is not the first series to dive into the middle of that debate – hell, most of the big crossovers now are thinly veiled attempts to seduce the audience into believing in one propaganda version of continuity or other. (“Marvel has always been at Civil War with Eastasia.”)
But Doctor 13 does have the advantage of trying to be fun – and, even better, at generally succeeding. It does feel a bit like special pleading in the end; Azzarello is yet another guy who grew up with comics and wants to celebrate the stuff he loved as a kid. (Exactly the kind of comics writer, I’m afraid, that we need less of today.) The art is also very nice: Cliff Chang has clean, confident black lines defining crisp space, and is particularly good at drawing people.
I’ve taken a break from my promised sequel about comic book artists whose current work I like because (1) I still haven’t made it through the most recent DC comp box, (2) it’s not like there’s a huge clamor for it. and mostly (3) I’ve been in a sort of weird transition mode and needed to write about that because it’s never far from my mind, but is thrown into special relief during the upcoming holiday season.
In truth, I feel like this entire year has been a transitional one for me. Losing my best friend then my father in rapid succession threw me for such a loop it seems doubtful I’ll ever fully regain my equilibrium. Then there was The Job Thing. I’d been looking for a new position for awhile but the timing never worked out. Every time my job search gained momentum, my boss would return from Europe and I had to put everything on hold. Meanwhile, lots of little downturns became bigger ones and, to make a long story which I’ll be happy to tell you in a bar sometime short, on November 9 my employer of ten years and I officially came to a parting of the ways.
I have enough severance pay for awhile and am still interviewing for a new position back in Manhattan, so this isn’t a lamentation on my lack of current employment. It’s more a realization of how lucky I’ve been again this year. Even with deaths in the family and among my circle of friends, I have so very many blessings in my life. And with my half-century mark looming ever closer (a week from Sunday, in fact) I thought it would be a nice and perhaps inspirational idea to count those blessings.
This week it’s all about the shopping, and maybe that eating thing, too. ComicMix Radio kicks it off with our preview of new comics and DVDs that hit your stores even before the bird is stuffed or the parade kicks off, plus:
• Valiant keeps bouncing back – this time with some new X-O Manowar
• Captain Marvel and Mice Templar both go *poof* – in a good way!
• Tim Burton & Disney bring back Alice
• Coming Soon – 3-D without those annoying glasses
We’ve even got a link to a sneak peek of Black Friday deals on books & DVDs, so Press The Button!
This week it’ s all about the shopping (and maybe that eating thing, too, but…) – ComicMix Radio kicks it off with our preview of new comics and DVDs that hit your stores even before the bird is stuffed or the parade kicks off, plus:
We’ve even got a link to a sneak peek of Black Friday deals on books & DVDs – so Press The Button!
To…oh, say, King Arthur, if he ever existed, you would have superpowers. I mean, look at you. You can travel 100 miles an hour (but that red light flashing in your rearview mirror can’t be good) and you can cause a blank pane of glass to light up and show you what’s happening on he other side of the world, or what happened last week, or both, and you can twist your wrist and cause flame to appear atop that table-thing in the kitchen, with no protracted fussing with flint and stone… To Arthur, it would appear that you’re employing magic.
Living when he did, Art never read another Arthur’s observation that any form of technology sufficiently advanced would appear to be magic, at least to lumps like us. (I refer to Arthur C. Clarke, but you knew that…) So Arthur, (the king, not the science fiction writer) might watch you doing your stuff and conclude that you must be magic and because you’re magic you must be special. He wouldn’t know that you bought your powers, at a discount, at that big, ugly mall about a mile west on the freeway.
Remember, he had a special sword, Excalibur, and he had it because he deserved to have it. And so it was with other talismans, amulets, and assorted weapons and mystic hoo-haws that super good guys got hold of during their adventures down through the ages.
Which brings us to Tony Stark.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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