…Happy Festival of Lights to you all!
(And as an aside, I thought it was Reed’s face that stretched like rubber, not Sue’s.)
Incidentally, the above is from Marvel Digital’s Holiday Special, in a story written by Stan. So enjoy.
Most of us, it’s safe to say, will never be told that our sin is our very being. (Unless we were brought up in the Deep South, in which case we’ve heard it twice a day and five times on Sunday.) We’re also not going to learn that the odd new girl in our high school is actually an android. Nor will we find that we’re trying to stop the extinction of mankind, along with our brother, with only our innate psychic powers to guide and aid us. That’s what manga is for – in a manga, those things are only to be expected, and it would be a bland story without something like that happening by page five.
Pandora Hearts, Vol. 1
By Jun Mochizuki
Yen Plus, December 2009, $10.99
Oz Vessalius, scion of one of the four great dukedoms, has arrived at the mansion that his family uses only for coming-of-age ceremonies to be officially proclaimed heir to his non-present father, along with a large semi-feudal entourage. (Though this book is set, as best I can tell from the floppy, ornate manga clothes and the background details, no earlier than the late Victorian.) It seems like an awfully big place to only use for a few days every generation, but I’ve learned not to let logic get in the way of my enjoyment of a manga story.)
However, all does not go smoothly – there are signs, portents, and other weird events that don’t make a whole lot of sense – and the ceremony is interrupted by a group of knife- and chain-wielding hooded figures, who seem to be about to kill Oz for the sin of existence. But he’s saved, sort-of, by a girl named Alice, who is also a giant black rabbit, and both of them are cast into the Abyss, a punishment dimension from which no one ever escapes.
Pandora Hearts skitters about like a bean on a griddle, so it doesn’t then do anything as predicable as settling down to tell the story of how Alice and Oz travel across the Abyss for a few dozen volumes and come to trust and confide in each other. No, they get out of the inescapable Abyss in time for afternoon tea – with Oz still very suspicious of Alice’s intentions and power (and rightfully so) to meet and confront the hooded folks, who are some manner of secret police.
This is a confusing book, with explanations shouted during battles and other confrontations that don’t actually explain much, and are often written in manga shorthand that substitutes Ominous Capitals for clarity. The Alice in Wonderland parallels so far seem limited to Alice’s name and other form, and there’s no particular significance here to Oz’s name, either. Pandora Hearts is messy and loud and disheveled, like a sorority girl at 3 AM on a Friday, but it – like that sorority girl – remains oddly attractive even then. It’s not a great story, but I have hopes that it will make sense, one day.
Continuing from our earlier article: Frank Frazetta’s son breaks into father’s museum using backhoe, attempts to take $20 million in paintings
See this? It’s Frank Frazetta’s “Berserker”, used as the cover to Conan The Conqueror. It hung in the Frazetta Museum for ten years until about a month ago, when it was sold to a private collector for one million dollars.
That link is interesting, because it also mentions that Frazetta contradicted himself at times… so if he told his son to get the art and then later said he didn’t, well… that could put his son’s words in a new light.
Heidi MacDonald has been doing great work on this story, and she adds a connection I didn’t make: one of the people who assisted in the break-in was Kevin Clement, who lived next door to the Frazetta museum. Clement is a familiar figure to east coast fantasy fans are the organizer of the Chiller Theatre Expo horror conventions held twice a year in New Jersey. Clement, it is important to note, has not been charged with any crimes.
She also reports:
Over the years Frank Frazetta Sr. has held on to his artwork,
refusing huge sums to sell such iconic works as his Conan covers.
However, after Ellie’s death, Frazetta’s three other children, Heidi,
Holly and Bill retained art dealers Robert Pistella and Steve Ferzoco
to start handling the artwork, licensing and other business matters.
The two formed Frazetta Management Corp. and the way Frazetta’s art was
being handled began to change — in November for the first time one of his legendary Conan covers was sold for $1 million. Not chump change and just the beginning of a likely goldmine.It’s not exactly a secret that there are a lot of legal questions regarding Frazetta’s iconic artwork — the Frazettas had a legal entanglement
with David Spurlock/Vanguard productions, for instance. With mentions
of a family lawsuit, and other infighting it’s clear that just how to
run the family business has become a matter of contention to the point
where a backhoe was brought in.
This story is just getting started, I think.
So let me ask all the creators who are reading this: have you updated your will yet? How about your power of attorney? When writer John M. Ford died, Neil Gaiman was extra saddened to discover that his good friend and favorite writer had not made out a will to deal with his literary estate. So he went and commissioned a simple boilerplate will that anyone could use so no one would have to suffer this grief and creators’ works would be handled the way the creators would want.
From the AP via Yahoo: Justice Dept. won’t support Jack Johnson pardon
The Justice Department is refusing to back a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight boxing champion who was imprisoned nearly a century ago because of his romantic ties with a white woman.
In a letter obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, the department’s pardon attorney, Ronald L. Rodgers, told Rep. Peter King
that the Justice Department’s general policy is not to process
posthumous pardon requests. In cases like Johnson’s, given the time
that has passed and the historical record that would need to be
scoured, the department’s resources for pardon requests are best used
on behalf of people “who can truly benefit” from them, Rodgers wrote.
The letter was in response to one that King, R-N.Y., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had sent to President Barack Obama
in October urging a pardon. In that letter, the two lawmakers noted
that both houses of Congress has passed a resolution calling for a presidential pardon
and said they hoped the president would be eager to “right this wrong
and erase an act of racism that sent an American citizen to prison.”
Rodgers
wrote that notwithstanding the department policy, Obama still has the
authority to pardon whomever he wishes, “guided when he sees fit by the
advice of the pardon attorney.”
And he did cite two cases of posthumous pardons: President Bill Clinton’s
1999 pardon of Lt. Henry O. Flipper, the Army’s first black
commissioned officer, who was drummed out of the military in 1882 after
white officers accused him of embezzling $3,800 in commissary funds;
and President George W. Bush’s
2008 pardon of Charles Winters, who was convicted of violating the
Neutrality Act when he conspired in 1948 to export aircraft to a
foreign country in aid of Israel.
In Winters’ case, Rodgers said, the pardon request was not processed by Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, due to the department’s posthumous pardon policy.
King said in a telephone interview that he and McCain probably will continue to urge Obama to issue the pardon.
“What they’re doing here is bucking it back to President Obama,” King said. “So I would respectfully urge him to grant the pardon. This is the president’s call.”
The White House had no immediate comment on whether Obama would consider the request.
To read more on the life and times of Jack Johnson, read The Original Johnson by Trevor Von Eeden. The latest installment has just been posted today, or you can start from the beginning.
The first volume will be out in print before Christmas, and you can preorder the book now from Amazon.com, or request it from your local comic book store.
This may be one of the strangest stories in comics of the year– and potentially very sad.
Pennsylvania state police charged Frank Frazetta Jr. with theft, burglary and trespass after he and two other men used a backhoe to pull the door off the hinges of the Frank Frazetta Art Museum. Police said once inside, Frazetta stole about 90 paintings and was loading them into a truck when he was caught by police.
The elder Frazetta is known for his work on characters including Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan and Vampirella. He was in Florida at the time of the theft.
His son’s motive stems from a family feud over assets. Frank’s wife and Alfonso’s mother, Ellie, died earlier this year. According to Frank Jr.’s wife, Lori Frazetta, Frank Jr. and Ellie ran the family business until Ellie’s death, when the infighting over Frank Sr.’s paintings began. Frank Sr. is said to be suffering from dementia.
Frazetta Jr. was arraigned and sent to the Monroe County jail. Bail was set at $500,000. Officials didn’t know whether he had a lawyer yet.
A trooper who responded said Frazetta claimed he had been instructed by his father “to enter the museum by any means necessary to move all the paintings to a storage facility,” according a police affidavit.
The elder Frazetta told police that his son did not have permission to enter the museum or to remove any artwork. Frank Frazetta’s attorney, Gerard Geiger, said the stolen paintings were insured for $20 million, according to court documents.
Here’s the news story from WNEP:
In deference to the Great Old
Ones, Tor.com has devoted this December to everyone’s favorite cosmic
tentacled thing-that-cannot-be-described from Vhoorl.
We celebrate by including this image we came across (but now can’t find the source of, sorry) which we hope will inspire an upcoming episode of The Brave and the Bold. It is our hope that this will please great Cthulhu so that he will eat us first.
It was almost inevitable.
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, the third movie in Summit Entertainment’s adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books, will be released in IMAX theatres simultaneously with the movie’s nationwide release on June 30, 2010. The first Twilight movie to be released in IMAX theatres, IMAX Corporation and Summit Entertainment will digitally re-master Eclipse to enhance both the image and sound quality. Eclipse once again stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner.
The interesting question: for how long? New Moon had a huge opening and didn’t last long, so it will only stay in IMAX for two weeks, then be replaced on July 16th by Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
Vatican Hustle
Greg Houston
NBM, December 2009, $11.95
There are stories that are inextricably mixed up with their original media, stories that would make very little sense translated into another form. Imagine a Gothic Romance novel as a puppet show, or a John Wayne Western as an opera. Until the moment I opened this book, I thought “[[[Blaxploitation]]] movie as a comic” was another example.
(I’m not completely sure I’ve been convinced otherwise, either.)
[[[Vatican Hustle]]] is a Blaxploitation movie done as a comic – when it’s not being a parody of a Blaxploitation movie, or vaguely wandering off into Chester Gould territory, or just being terrifically proud with and impressed by itself. If the art style – fairly well described by the publisher as “a hilarious mash-up of Ralph Steadman, Basil Wolverton and Chester Gould’s bad guys,” though that misses Kevin O’Neill, whom I’d list first and foremost – doesn’t tip you off that this is wacky with a capital Wack, the fact that the hero is named Boss Karate Black Guy Jones will certainly do the trick.
It’s set in Baltimore, in an unspecified time that could be the ‘70s as well as today, and our hero – whom I will refer to as BKBGJ for brevity – is, of course, a black dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks. (Literally – the book begins post-coitally, with BKBGJ walking his latest conquest to the door and chatting about his “shorty robe” before dealing with the inevitable arriving gangsters who arrive to take him, by force if necessary, to see their boss.) BKBGJ is the absolute best, feared and respected even by the mob, and so is hired by that mob boss to retrieve his beloved runaway daughter before her boyfriend uses her in donkey porn.
The trail leads to Rome – as the title implies, or promises – and to the Pope. The Pope is also a tough guy: hard-drinking, hard-living, perhaps the only man in the world who can stand up to BKBGJ. But that implies much more of a linear plot than Vatican Hustle provides – this is a loose-limbed book, sprawling in all directions in search of laughs or snickers from clowns with leprosy, “theme hobos,” dive bars, Gould-level deformed faces, and anything else Houston can think up and throw in.
Vatican Hustle isn’t consistently funny – not even in the places where it’s deliberately trying to be funny. But it is consistently weird, and Houston either has no fear or no filter – and whichever one it is, it makes for a succession of bizarrely fascinating pages. This is definitely the work of a unique talent, and there isn’t anything else like it. I’m not sure whether to hope that Houston settles down and learns to modulate his talent to consistently replicate his hits and avoid his misses, or to expect that he’ll get even more extreme and bizarre. Either way, Vatican Hustle is like no other book you will read this year, and that’s damn impressive.
Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.
When I read this headline, I thought that Doctor Who had gone back to November 22, 1963– the day that Doctor Who premiered on the BBC, by the way– and had tried to save John F. Kennedy.
But no. The story merely notes the passing of Dr. Malcolm Perry, who was the ER doctor on duty in Dallas on that fateful day.
But we all know the Doctor was there, right? No? Well, then perhaps you may want to read this, with an even more confusing title:
Originally published by Virgin Publishing Ltd in 1996, Who
Killed Kennedy has long been out-of-print and consequently has become much
sought-after by Doctor Who book collectors, but is now available online as an e-book.
Kars4Kids, the nationally recognized car-donation program, has received a generous, unique donation from the estate of Dave Cockrum. But it wasn’t the artist’s car. Hundreds of comic books, from the personal collection of the man who co-created many characters from Marvel Entertainment’s X-Men franchise, were given to Kars4Kids to benefit children.
“Dave loved to help people—he was generous to a fault,” said Paty Cockrum, widow of the popular artist who died in 2006 from complications resulting from diabetes. “He was extremely happy that the characters he created—such as Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler—became a part of the childhood memories of millions of children. He knew that was his legacy.”
The donated comics were part of Cockrum’s personal collection. “I’m delighted that more kids will benefit from them,” said Mrs. Cockrum.
Kars4Kids.org is a national organization providing for the spiritual, emotional and practical needs of children from impoverished or dysfunctional families. The national, 501(c)(3), non-profit organization was established in 2000.
For more information, contact Josh Smith at 732-730-8595, ext. 108.
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