Author: Marc Alan Fishman

Chicago’s new mayor isn’t the fake one we actually wanted.

Listen up, you mutha-cluckers… Chicago has a new boss in town. Why does this matter to you? Because I said so. Why did I say so? Because the Second City is known for a few big things: The Chicago Style Hot Dog, Deep Dish Pizza, Da ’85 Bears, and maybe just an eensy-bit of good old fashioned corruption. But now it can be known for one more big thing. Our new mayor? Former White House chief-of-staff Rahm “The R-Bomb” Emanuel. When our current boss mayor, Richard Daley announced he’d retire this year from his post… Emanuel left his job in Washington to take his home city by the horns. But it’s been a long journey to get there. He took 54% of the vote, despite having his Chicago residency being challenged. He beat out the former city chief of staff, the former city clerk, and a former U.S. Senator for the title. But if you ask me? He didn’t beat one important candidate, his psuedo-self. In a paradoxical sub-dimension high atop City Hall, in a secret greenhouse known only to our beloved Mayor Daley… and @MayorEmanuel, the dimensional doppelganger of Chicago.

What’s that you say? You’ve not heard? @MayorEmanuel is the twitterverse’s Rahm Emanuel clone. The account started shortly after the “real” Rahm declared his intention to run. And boy did things escalate from there. @MayorEmanuel’s story unfolded over the months, and became an epic yarn with a full cast of characters. It began as a string of foul-mouthery perhaps poking a jovial jab towards the obvious; Rahm is known for his temper, his drive, and his competitive nature. He raised 11 million dollars to take his campaign to the streets of Chicago. He shook hands and kissed babies. We can only assume he attended secret cabal meetings, and struck backroom deals that we kindly city-folk won’t find out until they hit the nightly news a few years after his mayoral run ends… if it ends. His twitter counterpart followed the whole ride, as only a comedic four-letter-word-dropping twitter clone could do. And as the race for mayor drew closer to the vote, so did the drama.

Twitter to many is just that little corner of the interwebs where we drop a snarky one liner, or tell people where we are at. It might be a place for celebrities to tell us how normal they are, shopping for soup and whatnot, or how not-normal they are, like other Chicago Celebutaunt Kanye West. @MayorEmanuel used twitter to create a piece of short fiction (OR IS IT!?) that was truly original. A few bloggers followed the best of the posts and relayed just how awe-inspiring they were. And important people took notice. The “real” Rahm made and attempt to bribe his twitter-sibling with a donation to charity, to “out” himself. Smartly the anonymous fingers behind the 140 character-at-a-time hasn’t shown his face. Perhaps he escaped down the aforementioned time well in his tweets.

Give a gander at the saga, and kick yourself for not living here (that is, if you don’t…) and living through this live alt-meta-super fiction happening. In the mean time, the real Rahm is prepping his mayoral suit, and perhaps, setting aside a bit of our future city tax dollars towards a special “find @MayorEmanuel and break his hands” task force. I think I’ve said too much. All Hail Rahm! All Hail Rahm!

How Are We Going To Save The Comic Industry? Flashpoint Buttons!

Dateline: Dallas. The ComicsPRO Annual Membership Meeting. Improving comic stores and growing the market were the themes at this year’s ComicsPRO Annual Membership Meeting. Comic book retails descended upon Texas to meet with over 20 sponsors… including top comic publishers and distributors. This year’s topic? “Ideas for marketing and metrics to improve efficiency in comic book store sales.” Simply put: How do we get our asses out of the fire, just a little bit longer?

Many notable names and faces spoke, including Spawn’s creator (you do remember Spawn, don’t you?) Todd MacFarlane, IDW’s CEO Ted Adams, as well as DC big-wigs, Dan Didio and Jim Lee. While we won’t bore you with all the details… suffice to say? We’re not holding our breath for a revolution. As tablets become prevalent with hipsters and the Beiber-clan, so will digital comic distribution. And while the big boys have made a few comments regarding integration of digital comic purchasing THROUGH comic stores… face it. If you can buy comics in your underwear in mom’s basement, or have to actually put on pants… we’re betting at  least SOME people will choose to stay home. That’s less business for the stores. With 2010 comic sale’s down from the year before, and many stores facing diminishing returns… it was DC’s marketing initiative that caught our eye.

So, what did DC bring to the table to help the local comic store drive the unwashed masses to their brick and mortars? Buttons! Glorious Flashpoint buttons! Less plastic then those Blackest Night rings you all died to get… But perhaps with a pointy end, allowing you to proclaim to the world your love of Cyborg,  or Casino-Batman via your trendy messenger bag.

This is supposed to drive us back to the stores in droves? This is what will save a dying comic store from shutting it’s doors? 2 cents of plastic and tin, with nifty logo celebrating yet-another-crossover we’ll likely mock and or forget by next year? Well ComicMixers… what do YOU think?

New Full-Length Thor Trailer Delivers

New Full-Length Thor Trailer Delivers

We, the fair and proud gentlemen of mirth, aka Comic Book Enthusiasts, have a new reason to celebrate forthwith! The mighty gods from the House of Ideas has given birth to a new trailer for their forthcoming magical visage of the thunder god himself. Yay, my brethren, Marvel hath beseech-ed unto us several minutes of the mighty Thor in action. Behold, through the power of the interwebsphere… and the arcane magicks of “embedded code”… THOR! (Cue the lightning. Wait. We don’t have lightning? Come on! I’m trying to set the mood here. What do you mean the mic is still on? I don’t believe you. Wait. Oh crap. Just play the danged video now, OK?)

Beware the Tides of March… err… Bill O’Reilly

So, not so long ago, the American Atheist Group decided to buy a few billboards. So their president, one David Silverman, wanted to perhaps start a national debate on religion. Good idea? Well, we’ll leave that one up to the Lord (be it Allah, Ganesha, Buddha, Yahweh, Inky the Magical Leprechaun, or Stan Lee if you prefer). Billboards go up, and guess who get his panties in a bind? The answer rhymes with Shrill O’Bile-ly. Cut quickly to the O’Reilly Factor where Silverman was interviewed. And here’s where things get spicy.

During the interview, the debate whether the word “scam” is offensive is debated. And then the big guns get fired. Once Silverman dares to call organized religion “mythical”, Billy goes on the attack. “Let’s just be two guys. Not an atheist and a catholic. Just two guys…” O’Reilly throws out. Get this folks: The Tides. “They come in, and go out. Come in, and go out.” And why? According to O’Reilly… “It just happens. You can’t explain that.” Silverman, who didn’t have his high school physics book handy, forgot to PWN Bill by explaining tides move according to the gravity pull of Earth’s moon. He attempted a sidestep by saying “it doesn’t matter” that he couldn’t explain it, because at the root of his argument… explaining anything by way of an invisible man in the sky is silly. But Bill was Bill. He’d have nothing of it.

Enter the Internet. Now it’s become its own meme-in-the-making. So, ComicMixers… let’s discuss… what is there out in PopCultureLand that also can’t be explained by anything else than the mighty G-O-D? Consider this a contest folks. Use this meme-maker and post it in the comments below. Funniest meme gets a piece of the holy cross. Or a radioactive spider. Or the mighty Mjolnir. We’re not sure yet.

Happy 20th Birthday, IMDB!

Happy 20th Birthday, IMDB!

Did you know that Dougray Scott was cast to play Wolverine, in the summer blockbuster X-Men? He had to leave the project because of his work on Mission: Impossible II. Did you know that in Batman: Forever, strings can be seen on the helicopter after it explodes against the “Lady Liberty” statue? Did you know that Simon Weisse, prop-maker of Hellboy, was an uncredited model maker for Inglorious Basterds!?

Of course you did! And it’s all thanks to the Internet Movie Database, IMDb.com… which turned 20 today, October 17th, 2010.

Nerds, cinemaphiles, and popular comicbook/pop culture bloggers have been turning to this amazing source of sometimes useless, sometimes shocking, always acutely specific database of movies and television information now for two whole decades. Just ask yourself, where would you be without it? How many bar fights did you prevent by using your iPhone to assure your comrades that Wil Wheaton did win the 2002 Melbourne Underground Film Festival’s award for Best Actor for his performance in Jane White Is Sick & Twisted? How much money did you win in that local trivia contest because you knew that the imcomparable John Hoyt played Sire Domra in the episode Baltar’s Escape in the 1979 Battlestar Galactica? And how would you ever have wooed your eventual wife, if you didn’t amaze her by knowing that there was a video camera inside Ludo’s right horn that fed to an external video monitor inside it’s own stomach, assisting the puppeteer perform in Labyrinth? Suffice to say, the unbridled girth of information available to the populace thanks to the IMBd has allowed all of us to become living wikipedias of information!

Speaking of wikipedia…how about a little history, shall we? The IMDb was born from a pair of lists generated in early 1989 by participants in the Usenet newsgroup
rec.arts.movies. In each case, a single maintainer recorded items
emailed by newsgroup readers, and posted updated versions of his/her list
from time to time. The founding ideas of the database began with a
posting titled “Those Eyes”, on the subject of actresses with beautiful
eyes. Hank Driskill began to collect a list of attractive actresses and
what movies they had appeared in, and as the size of the repeated
posting grew far beyond a normal newsgroup article, it soon became known
simply as “THE LIST”.

The other project, started by Chuck Musciano, was briefly called the less capitalized
“Movie Ratings List” and soon became the “Movie Ratings Report”.
Musciano simply asked readers to rate movies on a scale of one to ten,
and reported on the votes. He soon began posting “ballots” with lists of
movies for people to rate, so his list also grew quickly.

In 1990, Col Needham collated the two lists and produced a “Combined LIST & Movie Ratings Report”. Needham soon started a (male) “Actors List”, while Dave Knight began a “Directors List”, and Andy Krieg took over THE LIST, which would later be renamed the “Actress List”.
Both this and the Actors List had been restricted to people who were
still alive and working, but retired people began to be added, and
Needham also started what was then (but did not remain) a separate “Dead
Actors/Actresses List”. The goal now was to make the lists as inclusive
as the maintainers could manage. In late 1990, the lists included
almost 10,000 movies and television series. On October 17, 1990, Needham
posted a collection of Unix shell scripts which could be used to search the four lists, and the database that would become the IMDb was born.

In celebration of it’s 20 year history, IMBd is hosting plenty of party games. By party games, we mean video clips (today’s features funnyman Will Ferrell alongside his director/writer in crime, Adam McKay), retrospectives, and tons of stuff to keep your thumbs  a’scrollin’. Head over to their Anniversary Page to do what we all do on IMDb… waste a ton of time learning factoids we’ll never need… but can’t stop quoting.

NYCC: The Indy After Party 2010, Saturday night

NYCC: The Indy After Party 2010, Saturday night

After you’ve perused the aisles of merch and schwag, sat in the panels of talented professionals, and received autographs from all the D-Listers you can handle… it’s time to throw on your best Dragonball bowling shirt, and party with Indy creators in the Big Apple! Sponsored by Brooklyn Comics and More, Blue Line Pro, Red Zone Girls, and a handful of other awesome sponsors, the Indy After Party will be held Saturday, October 9th, at Blaggard’s Pub at 8 West 38th Street, between 5th and 6th avenue… just 6 blocks east (and 2 north) from the Javits Convention Center. 

The party is set to be awesome to the Nth level. With artwork, prizes, promo items, and a performance from the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano and his band, the Ryans! And just in case that’s not enough fun to blow those socks right off your Chuck Taylors… there’s even a sneak peak of Summit Entertainment and DC Comic’s RED!

So, ready to show off your meticulous rendition of the robot to all the hip con-goers? Stop by the Indy After Party booth and pick up a pass! If you forget though, no worries. Tickets are available at the door for $5. The party starts at 8PM. Be there or be four equal sided polygon!

Skultar Chooses His Next Victim…

Skultar Chooses His Next Victim…

So, at the beginning of last month, we told you all about the White Elephant Music Club’s first songwriting challenge. You remember that, right? Oh, we know you do, because we scared the fluids right out of your nether regions when we announced it. Since the prizes include a visceral death at the hands of Skultar in his upcoming graphic novel, it was no surprise that the White Elephants got some great submissions. Good on all of you, you weak and pathetic bards! Skultar told me personally he was so inspired by the contest, he’d considered picking up a Gibson Flying V and writing his own awesome theme song. Lucky for the contestants, though, Skultar opted not to do so, because he realized playing guitar and ripping metal riffs would only get in the way of all the murdering.

All that being said, we here at ComicMix would like to congratulate the winner, Chris Cogott, for his winning tune, the aptly named “Skultar.” The contest was judged by our friend Russ Rogers, Mark Wheatley (Skultar’s co-creator), and Julia Sherred.

Since the White Elephant Music Club is totally rad, you can visit their bandcamp page and download the entire album of finalists for free! In addition to Cogott’s winning tune, you’ll get an awesome metal romp from Kevin Savino-Riker (“Skultar’s Blade”), a hilarious spoken-word comedic piece by JoAnn Abbott (“The Ballad of Skultar“), a lounge-lizard schmoozefest from the well-named wait, WHAT? (“S-K-U-L-T-A-R“), and more! And for the price (ahem, FREE!), you can’t beat it. We suggest you hop over, download the tunes, pop ’em in your iPod, and go pillage a village. Hmm, that rhymes. Now, all I need is some murderous riffs, and I’ve got an instant classic.

Take it away, Skultar!

NaGraNoWriMo Day #1: Writing Resources

NaGraNoWriMo Day #1: Writing Resources

Are you in for National Graphic Novel Writing Month? We hope so. And because we’re generous people, we thought we’d give you some reading material to help you start on your masterpiece.

The books above could be considered the holy trinity to the world of sequential art. Scott McCloud presents how to write and build a comic book, by deconstructing the art form into its basic principles and components. We can’t recommend this books enough. And once you get through those, consider:

Before Scott McCloud, there was Will Eisner… the legend that spawned an industry. If you don’t know who Will is… we recommend you just buy these books now and thank us later. And if you’ve finished these, why not take a gander at:

Living legends in their own rights, this trio of books could be considered the followup courses after you’ve polished off both Eisner and McCould’s contributions. All of these books will help you, and are available at decent comic
book stores, through your local library, or by following the links to
purchase through Amazon.

After you’ve boned up on your structure, have your basic plot in mind, and your word doc opened… why not get a graphic novel that gives you access to the final working script, so you can compare structures! We recommend:

We also have to point to the excellent work of Tim Simmons and the Comic Book Script Archive, where you can see a number of scripts in various styles and levels of development. (We’ll probably have a few more to add by the time we’re done.)

What books do you recommend? Sound off in the comments.

Calling All Superheroes: Megamind Attempts To Break Guinness World Record– With Your Help!

Calling All Superheroes: Megamind Attempts To Break Guinness World Record– With Your Help!

Not happy with just being one of the funniest actors in the last few years, Will Ferrell wants to do more than make you laugh. He wants to set world records. But, just like Ricky Bobby needed Cal, and Ron Burgundy needed Brick, Champ, and the Bri-Man… Megamind needs you!

In his attempt to set the world record for the most superheros assembled in a single spot, Will Ferrell and DreamWorks Animation are asking all willing and able-bodied cosplayers in the L.A. area to come out. If Will can assemble 1,501 participants to show up in recognizable super-hero costumes (that means Batman, Superman, Spider-Man… not your indie character ‘Can’t-Get-A-Date-Man’ or his sidekick ‘Emo, the Kid Crier’) he will set a new world record. Will knows it takes time to assemble all those bits to your utility belt, and drop a few pounds to fit into your leotard… but you only have days. Saturday, October 2nd, at the L.A. Live Complex, at 10 AM is the call. Will you answer it?

Dust off your favorite codpiece and cape combo, and go party with (hopefully) 1,501 other costumed vigilantes. Sources close to ComicMix assure you this isn’t a plot by Megamind (of the upcoming DreamWorks movie) to capture heroes and remove potential threats. It’s just a friendly get together. There even might be punch and pie. But don’t quote us on that.

Tip of the hat to AICN for turning our heads.

Obama and Palin Meet… Archie Andrews?

Obama and Palin Meet… Archie Andrews?

The fine folks in sunny Riverdale have a pair of powerful visitors, sweeping into town later this year. Scratch that. The fine folks in Riverdale have one powerful visitor and one ex-governor / tea-party activist sweeping into town later this year. Why? Because student politics is a national level issue when it’s Archie Andrews vs. Reggie Mantle! The fate of Riverdale High, and by proxy, all of our nation comes down to who will take over the student body. Think about it. Unemployment is still rampant throughout the states. The war in Iraq is over, but we’re swimming in debt over it. The mighty dollar isn’t what it used to be. But it all will come down to who will represent the student body… everyone’s favorite every-kid, Archie, or that rule-breaker, Mantle “The Magnificent”. While we’re not even sure how the President and Mrs. Palin will find Riverdale, given that it, like Springfield of The Simpsons fame, exists devoid of a literal state address… we can be positive though, that the visit will make history.

Hitting comic book shelves in late December, and then January, the Obama / Palin two-part storyline should draw politically minded fans to the rack quicker than Jughead dashes to Pop Tate’s on new flavor day. We here at ComicMix wanted to share the pair or covers for the December/January solicits. Give a gander at our sitting President and the media’s favorite Hockey Mom as they shed their animosity for one another, all over a chocolate malt.

ARCHIE #616
“Campaign Pain” Part 1.

President Barack Obama and famed politician Sarah Palin get involved as Student Government campaigns spiral out of control at Riverdale High! The race between Archie and Reggie gets hot as campaign chaos reaches to the top, forcing an impromptu visit from these big-name politicos, who get pulled into the fray!

Script by Alex Simmons, art by Dan Parent, Jack Morelli, and Digikore Studios. Cover art by Dan Parent and Tito Pena. On Sale at Comic Shops: DEC 22, 2010, Newsstands: Week of JAN 4, 2011

ARCHIE # 617
“Campaign Pains,” Part 2

When President Obama and famed politician Sarah Palin arrive, Riverdale becomes the center of a national crisis! Archie and Reggie have each claimed support from one of these political powerhouses, but they don’t! Now Riverdale is in chaos and when the Secret Service gets involved it only gets worse!

Script by Alex Simmons, art by Dan Parent, Jack Morelli and Digikore Studios. Cover art by Dan Parent
On Sale at Comic Shops: 1/26/11, Newstands: Week of FEB 8, 2011