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Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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3 Responses

  1. It’s the eternal question – where’s the balance between doing an absolutely perfect adaptation that will only appeal to current fans, and making changes that only MAY open the character/story up to more people, at the risk of alienating your core (guaranteed?) audience?

    DC took a BIG risk in the New 52 by doing a great deal of the latter, and it appears to have paid off. As good as the stuff Dynamite et al have been doing with the classic characters, one wonders if the number of readers could be opened up a bit if things were modernized.

    NOW’s not-so-recent Green Hornet book may be the best update of a classic character to come along in a long while. The recent Flash Gordon, not so much. Garth Ennis’ Dan Dare was stellar, but was hobbled by being virtually unknown in the US.

    • Mike Gold says:

      Ennis’s Dan Dare WAS great, but you’re right: I was well familiar with the character. I think newcomers who have any experience reading contemporary comics will get the cultural grounding — the British traditions — but I’m not sure they’d be as appreciative of the characters themselves.

      Dynamite has, I think, done varying degrees of modernization. Not crazy about the changes in The Spider, I think I’m more tolerant of Flash Gordon than you are (I like the Ming mini-series), The Shadow appears to be a nice pastiche of the radio and pulp versions, although I’d advocate a stronger use of the supporting cast. But I think The Shadow defies modernization. Zorro also defies modernization, but the approach we’ve seen in the recent Zorro Rides Again is quite contemporary in style and technique.

      As for the New 52, I’d liked perhaps a dozen of the titles by the third month, but since then I’ve probably cut that list in half at best. That’s pretty much back to the number of DCU titles I liked prior to the reboot.

  2. Dynamite’s Shadow is awesome. I think I read Ennis is leaving it, though; if true, I’ll be bummed.

    His Dan Dare was fantastic, too, but like you said, a reader not familiar with the character might not get it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though I was disappointed by pretty much every other Virgin book I looked at.