If you ever wasted spent hours in front of yor TV watching Gerry Anderson and his puppets, you’ll be flabbergasted by this performance by late, great Peter Cook and Dudley Moore :
Hat tip to Lisa Sullivan for finding this depravity.
Something to noodle around with this weekend: you, too, can learn how to ink digitally. Skull the Troll – okay, Scott Kurtz in a Skull hat – shows exactly how he inked this PVP strip:
Now you can do it yourself!
Not included: a $2500 Cintiq monitor.
I never, never, never want to hear another complaint about adapting film from dumb comic books ever again. And if you’re tired of articles with headlines like "Pow! Zap! Wham! Comics movies aren’t just for kids" you don’t either. But now, you have a trump card to play – Hollywood is adapting movies from paintings.
Yes, paintings. Not painted comic books. Paintings.
First Showing shows us that Lions Gate is making a film based on a single painting by Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light" in the same way that Michael Jackson is the "king of pop," called The Christmas Cottage. Peter O’Toole has been cast in it. They note: "The film is partly biographical and based on events that led American painter Kinkade to become an artist." No word on whether they’ll include the FBI investigations or sexual harassment allegations – if Peter O’Toole’s in it, I suppose there’s a chance.
It’s shooting this month for the obvious December release, because this will be the film that gets O’Toole his Oscar.
Your comics-related political cheap shot of the day:
Via The Huffington Post, or as some wags have started to call it, "the ComicMix of politics".
One of the films that might get lost in the 10 billion dollar summer is a little film called The Martian Child, based on the Hugo and Nebula award-winning story by SF writer David Gerrold which, despite the title and pedigree, isn’t really a science fiction story. It stars John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Joan Cusack and Richard Schiff, and will be in theaters June 29th so that it can be mercilessly crushed by Live Free or Die Hard.
And while I realize that it won’t have all the neat merchandizing opportunities that Spider-Man 3 will have, based on the promotional image on the website (reproduced here) and used heavily in the trailers, all I can say is:
We seem to have an unofficial theme of sorts today.
Fans of The X-Files remember the Lone Gunmen, the trio of brilliant but socially inept hackers and conspiracy experts that made comic book fans look socially un-inept. They were spun off into their own short-lived TV series, which recently became available on DVD.
But some wondered: How could a show featuring such popular characters get cancelled so quickly? Was it some sort of evil scheme? Who was to blame? Why was that guy in Fox’s programming division constantly smoking?
Finally, we have an answer – in comic book form, no less, which means that we can talk about it here and still remain within our theoretical charter.
Dean Haglund, better known as Richard "Ringo" Langly, has written and drawn an autobiographical story of what happened to the Lone Gunmen – how they found out about the series, how it lived, and how it died. The art is reminiscent of a cruder version of William Messner-Loebs, and the story reinforces every dumb story you’ve heard about Hollywood. He’s selling it on his web site for a pretty high price, but if you ask nicely, I’m sure he’ll autograph it directly to you.
Mary Lynn Rajskub, known to most as Chloe from 24 but beloved by hardcore fans as Chloe from Veronica’s Closet, is the cover girl on the current Geek Monthly, looking very much like she’s auditioning to take the role of Lara Croft away from Angelina Jolie.
But that’s not why she’s a geek goddess, nor is it because you can apparently talk to her for hours on a mobile phone without draining the battery – it’s that she’ll be appearing in the season finale of The Simpsons this year.
And no, we don’t know if there’s an unresolved cliffhanger in the season finale that leads into The Simpsons movie. We would just never believe that there could be that much advanced symmetry between Fox propertie – hmm. That’s weird. While I was writing this post, an ad for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer just popped up at the bottom of my screen. Go fig.
Cinematical had a good piece a short while ago about the script for Bond 22, the sequel to Casino Royale. We know that it will be a direct sequel to the film, and that screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade are reportedly basing their script on four of Ian Fleming’s short stories: The Hildebrand Rarity, The Property Of A Lady, Risico, and 007 In New York. Writer Patrick Walsh mentions in his piece, "I’m not a Bond expert, but some online research revealed that bits and pieces from these stories have made it into previous Bond films already."
Luckily for us, we happen to have a Bond expert handy — Mike Grell, creator of Jon Sable Freelance, Warlord, and the James Bond miniseries Permission To Die. How much of an expert? He actually drew Bond to look like Hoagy Carmichael. Take it away, Mike:
"Ian Fleming wrote 12 James Bond novels and 8 short stories, which Hollywood — so far — has turned into 21 Bond films without even touching some of the Fleming stories. Indeed, some of the adaptations (Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me, for instance) have borne precious little resemblance to the source material, while others have combined elements of several of Fleming’s short stories with the screenwriter’s own take on what a Bond movie should be.
BBC America has picked up Torchwood, the decidely more adult Doctor Who spinoff starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness. No word yet on scheduling, or how much of the racier stuff will be trimmed for American audiences, if any. As we hear more, we’ll pass it on.
Man, I’m disappointed in you guys.
We were expecting lots of joke entries from all over the web — you know, Joe Quesada buys Forbidden Planet, Jenette Kahn buys down coat filled with Donald Duck’s feathers, Classics Illustrated adapts Portnoy’s Complaint, Rob Liefeld reads an anatomy textbook — but no. Nothing from the regular comics haunts.
C’mon, I know April Fool’s day was the same day as Palm Sunday, but we all know it’s all Jews in the comics industry anyway. (And stop trying to convince us that Macdonald isn’t a Jewish name, Heidi.)
Luckily, we were able to find a few items:
And we tried to do what we could, but sadly, we accidentally put a real piece in with our April Fool’s coverage. We’re sorry, and promise to do less real news next year.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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