Category: News

MICHAEL DAVIS: I’m with the band… not.

MICHAEL DAVIS: I’m with the band… not.

I am a huge believer in personal choice. I think that you should be allowed to make up your mind freely on all matters. If you don’t like something you have every right to say so. If you do like something then you have the right to say that also. You don’t have to believe what I believe and vice versa.

For the most part I’m a liberal.  Well I’m a liberal except when it comes to violent crime, then I’m so conservative it hurts. Get it? Violent crime? Hurts?

No?

I firmly believe that if you commit a violent crime you should rot in jail or rot in Hell. If it were up to me, first you would rot in jail, then you would rot in Hell. But hey, that’s my belief. You can believe in rehabilitation if you want to, but let me see you hire that convicted murderer when he gets out of jail. Me? Oh hell no. Now that I think of it, I’m very conservative on many things. The reason I have not joined the conservative ranks fully is because they tend to want to tell you what to think. Usually it’s under some "moral" banner. They also throw God in the mix a lot.

Funny, as much as they bring up God, they never bring up "free will." That seems to never make the moral argument. Also, some seem to think that their God is the God. That’s OK but why can’t I believe that my God is the true God without them calling me wrong or wanting to change my mind? Failing both, some conservatives would want me to simply disappear.

I think that whatever you believe is your right and if I disagree that’s all it is, a disagreement. We don’t have to go to war as some countries do. I think that disagreeing on faith to the point of war is the single stupidest thing on the planet. I frankly don’t believe that Allah has a problem with Jehovah.

So I hope it’s clear from my too long intro that I believe people should think for themselves. So, why don’t they?

I go to this great Karaoke bar in L.A. The KJ (that’s the host) loves Elvis so someone in my Karaoke group suggested that we do an Elvis night for his birthday. The sheer venom that rocketed across the insuring emails made it look like Elvis took part in 9/11. This from a group of people I love hanging out with. These are good people. Every year I get invited to great New Years Eve Parties given by A-list celebrities. I prefer to be at this Karaoke bar because the people are just really cool.

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What kind of car would The Punisher drive?

What kind of car would The Punisher drive?

Did the survivors of Heroes save themselves – to the viewers? The Big ComicMix Broadcast digs into that while it’s all fresh in our minds. And what kind of car would Green Arrow or The Punisher tool around in? We’ve got that covered plus news on more 52 stuff from DC and the story of a woman whose music career was jump-started by a DJ.

Not bad for a Thursday, huh? So go on… Press The Button!

 

 

Americans spend half of their leisure time online

Americans spend half of their leisure time online

It’s not all that surprising, but still shocking when you see it spelled out: Americans now spend roughly half of their spare time online during a typical weekday, according to the Netpop I Play report from Media-Screen, and more than half of this time is spent on entertainment and communications activities.

Forty-eight percent of young broadband users say they learn about entertainment through their online community of social networking sites, blogs, review sites and video sharing sites. Only a quarter of them say they learn about entertainment options through television. And that’s why Paul McCartney debuted his latest music video on YouTube last night.

Meanwhile, TV networks devalue their own brands by running advertisements for shoddy products, as Mark Cuban points out — which, come to think of it, has an eerie parallel in DC and Marvel Comics’s recent moves of dumping unsold ad inventory to put in house ads or ads for comics stores.

Grindhouse genre comics

Grindhouse genre comics

Greg Hatcher has an incredibly fun essay up about what he calls grindhouse comics: comics that are so heavily steeped in the pulp traditions that they make your teeth ache. Think Blade before he went Hollywood, and then dial it down a bit:

And it was a pretty easy leap, talking amongst fans, to start kicking around the idea of grindhouse comics. But here we ran into a little bit of a snag. Because, really, to be fair, from their beginnings on up through the early 70’s, they’re ALL “grindhouse” comics. That’s just the way it was….

The short version — for the sake of boiling it down to something that I can use here, I’d narrow the definition of ‘grindhouse comics’ to the comics I thought of in my youth as the B list. Comics that were, y’know, just okay. These were the books that I knew I could walk in on any time, that I knew would achieve a base level of entertainment that I would enjoy.

But I would not ever worry about missing an issue of one of these titles. They’d be there waiting for me when I got around to them again and nothing would change: they’d still be fun, continuity-free, amusing ways to kill half an hour. They have that Roger Corman vibe, that cheerful sense of, yeah, this is just something dumb and completely without social merit. We know it. So let’s all stop thinking about Art and just have a good time. Floor it.

Truthfully they were what I read in between issues of the books I REALLY liked. Used to be, when your favorite book was hung up because the writer was taking too long to craft his brilliant epic or the artist was late AGAIN, we just bought something else and read that instead. I did, anyway. You get a hanker on for a comic book, you want a comic book, damn it. (Nowadays I think the alternative impulse buy’s gotten to be too expensive a proposition for most of us; we end up just taking to the internet and bitching about late books instead.)

Go take a look at the article to see what he’s talking about, and you might get a better idea as to why everybody is trying to remake those kinds of books today, from Astro City’s Dark Age to Waid & Perez’s Brave and Bold, which Hatcher points to as Exhibit A of a grindhouse book — which makes sense, as it’s a double feature and all.

Our idea of a great grindhouse comic: Revenge Of The Prowler.

Artwork copyright Price, Snyder III and Truman. All Rights Reserved.

Masters Of The Universe: The Movie — again

Masters Of The Universe: The Movie — again

Stringer Lisa Sullivan tips us off to this piece in Variety: Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver are working with Mattel to turn "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" into a live-action film. Justin Marks (currently best known to comics fans as the scripter for the Green Arrow Super Max movie) is set to write the script. Silver will produce.

As ICV2 notes: "The announcement of a major new live action motion picture initiative based on a popular property from the 1980s just six weeks before the big screen debut of Michael Bay’s blockbuster adaptation of another 80s animated series, the Transformers, a property owned by Mattel’s biggest rival Hasbro, is certainly not just coincidental. It is further evidence of a trend that also includes Warner Bros. live action versions of the Speed Racer and Voltron animated series."

Sin City video games

Sin City video games

Red Mile Entertainment has cut an exclusive worldwide licensing deal to develop and publish video games based on the Sin City graphic novels by Frank Miller. 

“Taking Sin City into the world of video games is very exciting – games offer a whole new way to bring audiences into Sin City,” said Frank Miller. “The Red Mile team has impressed me with its dedication to creating Sin City video games that will remain true to Sin City as I’ve always seen it.”

Red Mile is best known for their “Heroes of the Pacific” game, and are currently working on games based on MTV’s show Jackass. The financial terms of the deal were not announced.

David Tennant IS Luther Arkwright

David Tennant IS Luther Arkwright

Bryan Talbot’s legendary British graphic novel of the 70s and 80s, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, has been adapted to a full-cast audio drama by the folks at Big Finish Productions, the same people who bring us original full-cast audio of Dark Shadows, Sapphire and Steel, and Doctor Who. The production spans three CDs and stars everybody’s favorite 10th Doctor, David Tennant, as the title character.

No stranger to audio drama, Tennant has been featured in several Big Finish Doctor Who-related adventures prior to being cast in the current television version.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright was published in the United States by Dark Horse Comics.

Doing it for themselves at ECBACC

Doing it for themselves at ECBACC

Ask and ye shall receive.  No sooner did I muse about female representation at the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention than Mikhaela Reid comes through once again and reports on the ECBACC panel entitled "Having Our Say: Black Women Discuss Imagery"!  Do click on the link, it has lots more photos and promises a more in-depth look at the "Having Our Say" panel in Part 3 of her report.

CBS credits Kyle Baker for Ghost Chimp M.D.

CBS credits Kyle Baker for Ghost Chimp M.D.

We noted back on Monday that Craig Ferguson had been touting on CBS’s Late Late Show had been pushing a show called Ghost Chimp, M.D. — a show that seemed to be exactly like an idea that Kyle Baker had developed for CBS back in the 90’s, and wrote up for an article in Vibe magazine.

But now we are happy to report that Kyle Baker has now been credited by CBS with, in Kyle’s words, THE WORST IDEA OF ALL TIME and all is right with the world again. Watch for yourself:

Ghost Chimp M.D. © Kyle Baker. All rights reserved.

 

JOHN OSTRANDER: That’s A (TV) Wrap Part 1

It’s May which means, out in TV-land, it’s the final sweeps period of the season. Yeah, a few of the final shows have yet to air but I might as well look back on what I liked/disliked over the past season. This may not be what you watched, liked or disliked but, hey, it’s my column.

Battlestar Galactica. I finally succumbed and started looking in on the series. I’d been afraid that it would be too dense at this point, that there was too much backstory, to be accessible to late viewers like myself but I found I was able to pick things up as I went. Yes, it would be better if I knew more of the backstory and I plan on picking up the DVDs but I’ve gotten into the series. I’m not certain why finding Earth is such a good idea for these people or why so much of their culture seems to be very post-1940’s American culture but I’m willing to hang in and find out. Yes, I liked it overall.

Boston Legal. A tip of the hat to ComicMix head inmate Mike Gold for getting me to watch this series. Mary and I started watching late last season and it’s become one of our favorites. I was resistant because I’m not really a big David E. Kelley fan but this show causes me to laugh out loud. It makes brilliant use of some old pros – James Spader, Rene Aubenjois, Candace Bergen, and the simply amazing William Shatner – as it talks about current issues, goes consistently over the top, touches the heart and simply entertains me more than almost any other show in a given week.

Deadwood. Big fan of this show and I can’t tell you how pissed off I am that HBO didn’t let it continue. Yeah, they talked about two movies to finish it up but a) that’s not the same and b) I haven’t heard that those are actually going forward. Creator David Milch had said that the concept was the advance of civilization as seen through the focus of the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, originally a boom camp for the gold found in the hills nearby. Real historical figures intermingled with totally fictional creations much the same way real history was mingled with a lot of inventive writing (and serious profanity). It’s not a technique unknown to me; I did the much the same thing when I wrote my historical graphic novel The Kents. The show boasted some fine performances topped by Ian McShane’s incendiary Al Swearingen.

All that said, I have to confess that Season 3 turned out to be a disappointment to me. The through line was the gradual take-over of the town by George Hearst (given a dynamite performance by Gerald McRaney). Hearst was an actual historical figure, the farther of William Randolph Hearst who, in turn, was a model for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and that was both the attraction and the problem. The actual Hearst himself never visited Deadwood, so far as my researches showed, although he did wind up owning several big mines there.

The problem in Season 3, for me, was that it was headed for an almost apocalyptic showdown between Hearst and his men versus the citizens of the town who, although usually at violent odds with one another, were brought together by a common threat. The season built in tension to what should have been a staggering climax and then – Hearst simply decides to leave town. Go on to his next location. The tension dribbles away.

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