Category: News

I think I-Con, I think I-Con

I think I-Con, I think I-Con

ComicMix‘s own Robert Greenberger reports on the panels in which he’ll be participating at this year’s I-CON out in Stony Brook on Long Island, and points to their long-awaited programming schedule (PDF file), which has finally been posted.

Naturally, since we deal with "all types of fantastic media," which is right up I-CON’s alley, ComicMix will be out in full force for this one!  We’ll try to report live on-site, but it’s all wifi dependent.

You can check Robert’s panel appearances on his weblog, and if you squint at the Sunday-at-3 PM slot on the schedule you’ll see my name somewhere as well.  I cannot recommend this convention enough, especially for folks local to Long Island.  The campus is lovely, the atmosphere very relaxing, and the dealers’ room a lot of fun.  Pack your checkbooks and your allergy medicine.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Scattershot – TV Spots

When I and Mary, my sweetie, sit around doing the couch potato thing, it’s always best to head for the commercial free stuff because it’s guaranteed that a high percentage of the commercials are going to offend her to the point of a rant. Not that the rants aren’t entertaining but I have to keep reminding her, “It isn’t supposed to make sense; it’s trying to sell something.” Or “It doesn’t work for you because you’re not the target audience.”

Generally, I try to let the commercials just wash over me without really registering them but every so often some do. On rare occasion, such as with the Mac/PC commercials, it’s because I genuinely enjoy them. More often, something sticks like tar in my mind because either a) it is incomparably stupid and/or b) my brain, warped by years of pop culture, does something with it the makers of the commercial never intended. Such as our first scattershot target.

LUNESTRA. It’s a prescription sleep aid and, in the commercial, restless people in their beds at night are visited by a luminescent green luna moths after which they close their eyes. The ad-makers, of course, want us to interpret this as Lunestra bringing gentle, natural sleep. Given the moths’ glowing green nature, however, I’ve become convinced it’s stealing their souls and that the people shown are dying. To Mary’s vast amusement (and my own) I’ve taken to screaming at the TV when these commercials come on as if it were a horror film. “LOOK OUT! IT’S STEALING YOUR SOUUUUUULLLL! FOR GOD’S SAKE – WAKE UP! OH NO! IT GOT THAT WOMAN, TOO! CAN NOTHING STOP IT?!?” Try it the next time you see the commercial; great fun.

THE CLONE OF ORVILLE REDENBACHER. When Orville Redenbacher first brought out his own line of popcorn decades ago, he also made himself the company spokesman, always telling us his popcorn was better than these others yadda yadda yadda “. . . or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher.” Well, Orville was no spring chicken when this all started and eventually died. Recently, they brought back some of the old commercials and that was all right. Kind of a nice retro feel; I thought they worked nicely. That evolved, however, so that they got somebody made up to look like him with a make-up job that makes him look more like a Disney animatronic. And they use the same tag – “. . . or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher.” It isn’t. We know it isn’t. This Orville has an embalmed look that makes him really creepy.

THE BURGER KING. The only creepier company spokesman on TV right now is the Burger King. You’ve seen him. Human body and an oversized plastic head that seems modeled after a young Henry VIII. The effect is like one of these licensed characters you see walking in a parade or in a theme park. Then they put him into situations that frankly make my flesh crawl. One of the commercials for BK’s breakfast line-up had a guy waking up in the morning and the Burger King was there in bed with him. The tag was “Have breakfast with the King.” The only thing I could think of was, “Dude, I don’t care how much you drank last night or how late their late night window is open, this is just wrong.” Not because the BK might be gay; it’s because he’s not human. Note to commercial makers: I don’t buy products where the commercials creep me out.

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Jon Favreau blogging Iron Man shoot

Jon Favreau blogging Iron Man shoot

While filming Iron Man, director Jon Favreau is taking a bit of time to update his MySpace page. If you go there, Favreau will tell you that the first week of photography was "extremely challenging," but went off "without a hitch." He goes on to praise the efforts put forth by his cast and crew, saying "Robert Downey was definitely the right choice."

Via our friends at Cinematical.

Captain America still dead

Captain America still dead

In case you didn’t get to your comic shop today, Steve Rogers is still dead after two weeks. That is all. Carry on, if you can.

Courage.

TONY ISABELLA: Big man on campus?

TONY ISABELLA: Big man on campus?

Our pal and ComicMix Podcast contributor would like to offer a message of critical importance. Take it away, Tony…

Want to see and hear me live and in person?

Well, for a limited time only, you can do both at Lakeland Community College’s 4th Annual Comics Symposium, Saturday, March 24, in Kirtland, Ohio.

I’m one of two keynote speakers. I’m scheduled to speak from 10-10:50 am on my 35 years of experience in the comics industry. After that, the Symposium is providing me with a room/space/something so I can continue sharing my painfully earned wisdom, answer any questions that didn’t get asked earlier, look at portofolios, and judge the entries in the Symposium’s Comics Contest in the area of Graphic Fiction. It’s my intention to be available to Symposium attendees as long as I can, but that depends on how I’m feeling that day.

For more information on the event, go here:

http://www.lakelandcc.edu/comics/

I hope to see some of my online friends and readers there.

MARTHA THOMASES: More fun

MARTHA THOMASES: More fun

In her book No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Kniting, Anne Macdonald describes the Puritan roots of our country and how getting together to knit, quilt or sew was one of the few ways colonial women could get together to socialize. The only way they could justify the pleasure they took in each other’s company was to do some “productive” work.

In other words, our culture hates pleasure.

This might seem to be a strange thing to say when everything from beer to detergent is being sold with sexy commercials. But, see, that’s the point. Pleasure is being used to sell. It’s not being celebrated for its own sake.

Which brings us to comics and the lack of respect they get in our modern world. Comics are fun. Denny O’Neil says that comics are one of the few media that engage both halves of the brain, providing a buzz unavailable from movies or books. Even if that didn’t happen, comics are uniquely joyous. Anything can happen in the pages of a comic. Dogs can talk. Pigs can fly. The universe can be compressed into a ball, or be the staging ground for an epic battle. The battle can be between Galactus and the Avengers, or talking dogs and flying pigs.

Comics don’t have to be silly to be a pleasure. I’ve had a fine time reading Frank Miller’s Sin City, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, to name just a few, disparate titles. The pleasure comes from the books ability to get me to leave my own head and get into someone else’s, to try on another life and walk around.

Which brings us back to politics.

Back in the day (and by that, I mean the 1960s and 1970s), we thought that sex and drugs and rock’n’roll could change the world. We thought that if we showed how much fun there was in the counter-culture, no one would want to go to war.

We were right.

Comics were a major part of the counter-culture. Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, Howard Cruse, S. Clay Wilson, Skip Williamson, Spain Rodriguez and many others blew away the straight world’s idea of what comics were about. They made comics about motorcycle demons, stoner cats, fabulous furry freak brothers, girl fights and lots of other stuff that wasn’t superheroes or expanded newspaper strips. They told silly stories that ridiculed the power structure and celebrated pleasure.

The war in Vietnam ended for a lot of reasons. Public opinion turned against it, and the troops came home. Comics helped.

There’s another war on now, and yet there are remarkably few comics that offer an alternative vision. We need them. We need more fun.

Green Hornet stings again!

Green Hornet logoThe Green Hornet has been optioned for feature films once again. Columbia picutres announced yesterday that they have optioned the one-time radio and television hero from Neal H. Moritz of Original Film. Moritz, in turn, picked up the rights from Green Hornet Inc., and will serve as producer along with Ori Marmur.

The property has been under repeated option since the 1990s. At one point, George Clooney was ready to portray Brit Reid, newspaper magnate and secret crimefighter, with Jason Scott Lee as Kato, his faithful manservant. In 2004, Kevin Smith was signed to write and direct the film with Jake Gyllenhaal and Jet Li in the main roles. Smith then backed off the directing aspect and in 2006 announced he was no longer attached to the property.

The Green Hornet debuted on WXYX radio in Detroit back in January 1936 and quickly went network. The creation of George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, the two already had a hit with The Lone Ranger. In addition to the long-running radio show, the Green Hornet has appeared in movie serials, a long running and a frequently reprinted newspaper comic strip distributed by King Features and later revived under the pen of Russ Heath. The feature also enjoyed numerous comic book runs, last seen in the popular series from Now Comics. The television series on ABC lasted one season but gave the world Bruce Lee. The theme music, "Flight of the Bumblebee" (the television version was recorded by Al Hirt) has continued to thrill movie-goers, as most reccently heard in Kill Bill: Part 1.

Next Nexus

Next Nexus

Via Heidi MacDonald at The Beat, we see that new adventures of Nexus, our favorite interstellar killer of mass murderers, will be coming out in July.

Clearly, this leaves us with a large hunk of questions over here at ComicMix. After all, if Nexus can come back in this day and age, complete with the original creators, what could possibly be next?

John Ostrander and Timothy Truman on GrimJack?

Mike Grell doing new Jon Sable Freelance?

Del Close coming back from the grave for new Munden’s Bar stories?

Obviously, if we have any information about any of these properties, we’ll let you know.

Soon.

Unless something else comes along to eclipse that news.

ELAYNE RIGGS: My life with Lulu

ELAYNE RIGGS: My life with Lulu

Back when my ex-husband and I were first getting heavily involved in online comics fandom and attending lots of conventions, there weren’t a lot of women con-goers, so we all tended to stand out a bit and more or less gravitate towards one another. As I recall there weren’t a lot of "booth babes" in those days, so the women con-goers consisted mostly of either readers (what we would call "fangirls" today but which term hadn’t even come into vogue by that point) or comics creators’ spouses, with the very occasional industry pro like Colleen Doran and Maggie Thompson and Heidi MacDonald.

As I was an avid reader with professional writing aspirations, I fit the first category but hoped to also fit the last — that I’d wind up in the second as well I could not have foreseen — and as most of the active industry pros seemed to be around my age and I’d already "met" so many of them online, that’s where I hung out.

And that’s where I first heard about a new organization called Friends of Lulu, named in honor of the comics character created by Marge Henderson Buell, which Heidi and a few others had conceived of at the 1993 San Diego convention to address the gaping chasm between women’s status in comics and that of their male colleagues. I’d been an active feminist since college, and the idea of a comics industry group formed to redress injustice and give visibility to the marginalized appealed to me.

At the time, the internal debate amongst the founders was whether to even admit non-professionals; fortunately they decided to open an organizational gathering (and membership) to non-pros, so I attended my first FoL meeting in San Diego in 1994. Now, as many will attest, I don’t have the best memory for specifics, so what follows are mostly general recollections and feelings, supplemented by my collection of FoL member newsletters from Volume 1 #1 (June 1995) through the summer of 2004.

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