Batman: Assault on Arkham enjoyed a rousing reception at its July 25 premiere at Comic-Con International, delighting a room of 4,250 fans for the screening and panel discussion amongst actors Kevin Conroy (Batman), Matthew Gray Gubler (Riddler), Troy Baker (Joker) and John DiMaggio (King Shark), and producer James Tucker, director Jay Oliva, screenwriter Heath Corson and dialogue director Andrea Romano.
Toward the end of the panel, producer James Tucker announced the DCU slate for 2015:
– Coming in early 2015, the Aquaman origin story, Justice League: Throne of Atlantis
– Arriving sometime in the first half of 2015, Batman vs. Robin, which will feature the first-ever animated appearance of The Court of Owls.
– And potentially premiering at Comic-Con 2015 will be Justice League: Gods and Monsters, marking a return to the DCU films by animation legend Bruce Timm for this special film. Timm developed the original story and many of the character designs for “Justice League: Gods and Monsters,” and is producing the film. (Note: James Tucker will continue serving as DCU producer following Gods and Monsters)
As the Tweeks recover from their whirlwind Comic Con 2014, here’s a recap of their adventures at the San Diego Convention Center. There was a lot of fan girl apparel, comic books, and toys purchased, as well as many interviews conducted. Keep a look out for more coverage on their hometown Con.
So there I was, in an elevator, being stared at by these huge faces. What or who were they? Well, okay, they were elements of an advertisement trying to get me to consume something – a cable television show, I believe – and if I watched that show it, in turn, would try to persuade me to consume something else. A car? A soft drink? A set of videos that would reshape my aging corpus into a mesomorphic splendor that would make Mr. America shudder with envy? All of the above?
And what the heck were ads – big ads – doing in a hotel elevator, anyway? But, as Hunter Thompson might have said, cazart! Could these visages be, not adverts, but deities? I mean, they were outsized and their gazes did not waver and doesn’t that remind you of someone/thing – a cosmic entity, perhaps? And if so…why were they staring at me like that?
Aieee…what did I do, oh mighty avatars of whatever you’re avatars of and please forgive me for not knowing? Did I not consume enough? (In your infinitude, please remember that my wife and I paid almost fifty bucks for breakfast this morning, but maybe that wasn’t enough?) Then, woeful wretch that I am…did I have a thought? And if I did so transgress, must I wear sackcloth and ashes, or will a Duck Dynasty t-shirt suffice?
Well, maybe these hallucinatory musings were prompted by our watching Noah on the in-room video gadget. (We’re old! What did you expect us to do after dinner, go clubbing?) Or…maybe they weren’t hallucinatory. There is a certain justification for thinking this because the other thing in the elevator that your average Luddite might question was a small television screen mounted just above those face-bearing doors, where it was hard to miss if you were looking forward and it was never turned off. Granted, it was displaying The Weather Channel, which has been a favorite of mine for decades, a destination whenever I, uh…want to know about the weather. But The Weather Channel does run commercials and that makes it at least partly about consumption and money and that, dear auditors, brings us to the finger-wagging portion of the discourse. (By the way, “finger-wagging” is in the dictionary, so spare me accusations of stealing from Stephen Colbert.)
Research has shown that people primed with thoughts of money, even subliminal thoughts, tend to be more selfish than their peers who aren’t thus primed, and aren’t we lagging in science and technology and such brainy stuff and couldn’t a culture of non-cooperation be partly to blame? I mean, aren’t selfishness and lack of cooperation at least fraternal twins? And that television set: don’t continual distractions such as this deprive us of opportunities to heed whatever small interior voices are trying to generate doubts or stimulate curiosity? I don’t know. But no harm in asking.
Think I’m being grumpy now? Then don’t get me started on the plane trip!
Well, Muppets Most Wanted didn’t quite work as one had hoped but it was still entertaining. With the home video release due out on August 12, Walt Disney has released this bonus clip featuring the great curmudgeons Mike and Glenn, er, Statler and Waldorf.
The distribution system that provided us with books, magazines, newspapers and comics started falling apart some 60 years ago. The term “newsstand” is no more relevant today than the term “buggy whip,” newspapers are folding so fast it’s affecting fish sales, and magazines are mostly sold at the bookstore chains that are going out of business faster than a speeding bullet. So it’s no surprise that I think the tablet computer is the greatest thing to happen to the publishing industry since Guttenberg learned how to spell.
The problem with comic books is that, while they look better and read better on tablets, for the past 20 years or so we’ve repositioned comic books into collectibles, with a half-dozen collectible covers and multiple printings and all sorts of folderol. Do people buy comics for the stories any more?
Well, yes we do, but more and more in the form of trade paperbacks, omnibus editions, and electronic downloads. The average sale of a traditional 32-page pamphlet comic book, even those featuring most major characters, is embarrassing. Sales have been growing lately, but a publisher wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning if he or she had to justify all that expense and lousy cash flow strictly by pamphlet sales.
History has shown us comic book readers like to keep their comics around. I don’t know why; the idea that you’ll want to refer to them in the future is enticing but impractical. Nonetheless, we usually keep our comics around for a while.
This is why I think last week the comic book medium quietly entered a critical new phase. ComiXology, the leading distributor of electronic comics, has entered into agreements to allow you do keep your downloads on your computers and sundry storage media. You will no longer be dependent upon access to decent Wi-Fi to get the comics you paid for, you will no longer live in fear that the electronic distribution service might go out of business and obliviate your collection.
In other words, you get to keep your comics. You pay for it, you keep it.
Initially, only a handful of publishers are allowing ComiXology to sell their comics DRM-free. That’s “digital rights management,” for those of you who are merely semi-nerds. The initial participating publishers are Image Comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Zenoscope Entertainment, Thrillbent, Top Shelf and MonkeyBrain. These are not outfits that publish out of their garages.
All of these outfits already have dabbled in DRM-free distribution, but in their brief existence ComiXology has sold upwards of a quarter-billion digital comics. That’s one powerful distribution service. So big, in fact, that Amazon bought the company last April.
Will Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, IDW, Archie and the rest join in? I’m dubious about Marvel and DC because their parent companies, Disney and Warner Bros (and maybe soon Rupert Murdoch) react to bootlegging the way slugs react to salt. They conflate electronic distribution with bootlegging. Of course, iTunes and the rest sell a hell of a lot of DRM-free stuff and it’s actually easier to bootleg it for free than it is to enter all that information. But people pay for millions of digital downloads every day. Why should comics be any different?
Of course, that tablet will change just like every other electronic toy. Smartphones are getting bigger, “laptop” computers are getting lighter and thinner, and it won’t be long before there’s another game-changer device that will be better and cooler. I’m thinking direct chip implants to the brain. So the question is, even if comics sales thrive on tablets and computers, will they adapt to whatever’s next?
With Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season One hitting home video on September 9, one of the bonus features was made available for viewing.
Checkout the gag reel:
Synopsis:
The mind-blowing saga that began in Marvel’s The Avengers continues in ABC’s action-packed series, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — The Complete First Season.
In the wake of The Battle of New York, the world has changed forever. An extraordinary landscape of wonders has been revealed! In response, mysteriously resurrected Agent Phil Coulson assembles an elite team of skilled agents and operatives: Melinda May, Grant Ward, Leo Fitz, Jemma Simmons and new recruit/computer hacker Skye. Together, they investigate the new, the strange, and the unknown across the globe, protecting the ordinary from the extraordinary. But every answer unearths even more tantalizing questions that reverberate across the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe: Who is “The Clairvoyant”? What is Hydra’s sinister master plan; what dark secret lies behind Skye’s puzzling origins, and most importantly of all, who can be trusted?
Cast: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. stars Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson, Chloe Bennet as Skye, Ming-Na Wen as Agent Melinda May, Brett Dalton as Agent Grand Ward, Iain De Caestecker as Agent Leo Fitz and Elizabeth Henstridge as Agent Jemma Simmons.
Iron Man and Captain America join forces in a new, original animated adventure, Marvel’s Iron Man & Captain America: Heroes United available today only on Digital HD, On-Demand and Disney Movies Anywhere. Iron Man and Captain America battle to keep the Red Skull and his triggerman, Taskmaster, from unleashing an army of Hydra Brutes on the world! Enjoy surpassing twists and a special appearance by one of your favorite Marvel Super Heroes in this action packed feature featuring the voices of Adrian Pasdar and Roger Craig reprising their roles as Iron Man and Captain America, and Clancy Brown as the villainous Taskmaster.
Little Orphan Annie writer, newspaper columnist and comics historian Jay Maeder died of cancer this morning.
Jay wrote the Annie strip from 2000 to its demise in 2010, working with artists Andrew Pepoy, Alan Kupperberg and Ted Slampyak. He felt it was the crowning achievement of his long career, which included writing columns and features for both the Miami Herald and the New York Daily News after starting off at the Lorain Ohio Morning Journal. His People column was a page-two staple of the Miami Herald for 15 years. He then moved on to the Daily News, where he edited and often wrote the Big Town NYC / Big Town Biography columns as well as the Lounge Lizard column and the NewsReel feature.
In addition to his work on Annie, Jay is best known to the comics community as the author of Dick Tracy: The Official Biography and a contributor to The Encyclopedia of American Comics and to Dean Mullaney’s Library of American Comics.
Shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer, Jay successfully pitched a graphic novel concept to ComicMix. Sadly, this book, a collaboration with Rick Burchett, will not come to pass.
I had known Jay for upwards of 30 years. Influenced by the great newspaper writers of the first half of the 20th Century, in Miami he took the spirit and the energy of Walter Winchell and updated it to both the times and to the Miami environment. We both grew up fascinated by the legends of American newspaper history. Jay’s style was contemporary, but no less identifiable than Winchell’s. Jay often wore a white suit and hat and he could get away with it even in a shit storm.
I think my fondest memory of Jay revolves around a summer day at his home in Greenwood Lake, NY, one shared by ComicMix’s Glenn Hauman and Martha Thomases. His library looked frighteningly like my own, and we each coveted the other’s exclusives. The two of us just sat there discussing pop history, sharing stories about legends like Col. McCormick and the great comics creators… as well as the not-so-great.
Jay Maeder is survived by his companion, Amanda Hass, his sons Jordan and Christopher, four grandchildren, and two former wives. He was 67.
The nicest thing I can think to say about Lucy is that it is exactly how I would have remade 2001: A Space Odyssey if I had done it when I was 16 years old. I would have replaced the male astronaut with an attractive woman, kept the trippy end sequence and replaced the first two-thirds of the movie with a mediocre tribute to Hard Boiled. I also probably would have struggled to fill 90 minutes and would have added some really strange filler to get it to a marginally respectful run time like 89 minutes. Thankfully no one was willing to give me $65 million to make a movie when I was 16 (unfortunately no one will do it now) but we’re stuck with what Luc Besson made here. I was stuck at least; you might still be able to save yourself. (more…)
The nicest thing I can think to say about Lucy is that it is exactly how I would have remade 
