Yesterday we presented R. Crumb’s tribute to the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff. Today, we further illuminate this horrific tragedy by presenting a number of tributes by King Features Syndicate comic strip artists.
I should note that on its website King Features also offers numerous contributions from their editorial cartoonists. Unlike the strip artists who must turn their work in six weeks to two months prior to publication, editorial cartoonists see their work in print the next day.
As for Charlie Hebdo, their first post-assault issue was published today and released in France, as well as certain select other cities including Quebec, London and New York. Their print run was 3,000,000, up from their average circulation of 40,000 copies. They sold out in minutes, and that was after some newsdealers limited purchases to one copy each. Charlie Hebdo has since gone back to press.
First, we introduced this page with the work of Dustin creator Jeff Parker. Below, Snuffy Smith artist John Rose:
Next, Hagar the Horrible‘s Chris Browne:
Followed by Bill Griffith‘s Zippy. The first balloon translates to “I Am Not Having Fun,” a twist on Zippy’s trademark “Are We Having Fun Yet?”
Next, Eric Reaves on behalf of the Hi and Lois creative team:
It’s not that hard to make a sequel to a popular movie. You take the basic formula from the original movie and do all of the same things with slight changes. To make Taken 2 they took just about everything from the original movie and changed it just a little. It wasn’t France it was Turkey, it wasn’t the daughter who was kidnapped it was the mother, it wasn’t about human trafficking it was about revenge. It’s very hard to make a third movie because the audience will make fun of you if you do the exact same things again, the same things they praised you for the first two times they will bury you with the third. Taken 3 tried very hard to find new ground to cover and while they made a very different movie, it’s not a good movie.
Like you, we first fell in love with Amber Benson during her days on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. The feelings only grew as we watch her evolve into a director, producer and most of all a successful author. Amber’s latest project is WITCHES OF ECHO PARK and she talks about why going “magical” seemed like the next step for her. Plus actor Jon Tenney, from MAJOR CRIMES and SCANDAL, talks about the great parts of being a working actor in todays’ exploding entertainment mediums.
I’m Kyle Gnepper, writer for Unshaven Comics on the books Disposable Razors andTheSamurnauts since 2008. I’ve recently launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for the production of the all-ages graphic novelToolbox: Robot Justice is Efficient Justice.
Toolbox is the story of an inventor on an off-world human settlement who reprograms a construction robot to protect them from the planet’s dangerous wildlife and the ruthless bandits that terrorize the area. Equal parts Science Fiction and Western Adventure, Toolbox is a story about technology, sisterhood, character, and what it means to be a family.
We see the story unfold through the eyes of Sem and Merry, two orphaned sisters whose village is constantly under threat of roving gangs, led by the sinister Crim. Their only hope for salvation rests in the mind of genius but eccentric inventor Willy, whose fantastical ideas could be the key to wresting control of the town away from Crim and his men.
Changing technology and its daily impact have been a pervasive part of my life. I grew up loving stories like Caves of Steel and Bladerunner for their use of robots as something other than mindless machines. In recent years, we’ve seen fewer stories showing mankind’s mechanical creations as something other than bringers of doom. I wanted to develop a story in which robots could be trusted and even loved.
The artwork is provided by Kristen Gudsnuk, the New York City-based creator of the webcomic Henchgirl. You can see her amazing work online at www.henchgirlcomic.com
Pledges as low as $15 will get a physical copy of the graphic novel sent to you. We also have an array of awesome packages for those who love getting swag and personal interaction with creators.
Two decades after it hit theaters and became an SF classic, 12 MONKEYS is being retooled as a new TV series, but does it still have the DNA to survive? Stars Amanda Schull and Aaron Stanford talk about the transition and why it works. Plus it’s the first big industry move of 2015 as IDW acquires Top Shelf Comix.
All eyes are on Marvel this week with the debut of AGENT CARTER, and our first full look at The Marvel Universe post CAP and pre AVENGERS. Series star Hayley Atwell talks about her feelings on playing what has become a key part of the mythos. Then, we sit down with the cast of TNT’s THE LIBRARIANS who give a lot of solid reasons why if you aren’t watching, you might just be missing something good here.
We jump back into pop culture by wrapping up our visit with Janet Varney including her cut on what makes her JV CLUB Podcast so unique. They we talk with Jason Schwartzman about his newest project, MOZART IN THE JUNGLE, streaming right now on Amazon Prime.
This week kicks off our 8th year – and we are back to our twice-a-week schedule in a few days. We start by talking AGENT CARTER with Hayley Atwell and a visit to the set of THE LIBRARIANS!
The Interview is a movie doomed to collapse under the weight of all the external nonsense forced upon it. It is not a movie worth being called an act of war. It is not a movie worthy of being the standard bearer for free speech against real or imagined tyranny. It’s not a movie worth the total public embarrassment of Sony Pictures. It’s just a stupid comedy. I don’t even mean “stupid” pejoratively here, it is in the same grand tradition of stupid comedies that has brought us movies like There’s Something About Mary and Caddyshack. Both movies I like a great deal, neither of them worth an international incident.
When it’s on, The Interview is quite funny. The bit with Eminem that I saw all over Facebook this weekend is my favorite so it’s a shame that that’s in the first ten minutes of the film. Otherwise the film hits on more joke attempts than it misses. Seth Rogen and James Franco have an undeniable comedic chemistry and it’s just fun to watch them bounce of each other. Randall Park is outstanding playing Kim Jong-Un, as is his Veep co-star Timothy Simons in a terribly small part. It’s also important to recognize Diana Bang who is fantastically funny as the leading lady in this film, a part that often doesn’t get a ton of space under the Apatow-Rogen film umbrella but Bang is electric and hopefully gets to do bigger and better things in comedy going forward.
The entire movie is dragged down to mediocre by a poor second act. After the first round of North Korean hijinks, the movie grinds to a halt as the characters slowly get in to their positions or the finale. This leads to a seemingly endless number of scenes of conversations that move the plot along at a glacial pace while not being particularly funny. It’s inexcusable. Add this to the frequent book-report-esque need to put in North Korea facts and statistics and there’s a lot of drag pulling down what might have been a better movie set in a fictional country.
I appreciate that Rogen, along with his directing partner Evan Goldberg, are continuing to be ambitious with their visuals. It would be very easy (and probably profoundly more profitable) for them to continue making Superbad knockoffs until they all died when their houses collapsed from carrying too much money, but much like This is the End there’s a lot going on here. Sure, they’re taking advantage of the fact that no one has any idea if North Korea looks like the outskirts of Vancouver but there are some real sets here and an honest-to-goodness war at the end. When you compare it to the costless dreck that you get from Adam Sandler or the Twilight movies and it’s just so nice to see people take a simple guaranteed paycheck and make a movie that’s actually interesting to look at on a screen. This sounds like an incredibly backhanded compliment but it’s becoming less and less common.
In a recent interview with Steven Moffat, I had the opportunity to discuss The Doctor’s companions with him. He shared his opinions on whether or not we always need to have a dramatic departure for his friends, and whether or not we couldn’t see a more polite and happy departure where his friend says “Thanks for the fun, I’m off to buy new sheets now”. His response was rather emphatic:
“Yes that would be the least talked about moment in television history wouldn’t it? I mean really if you did a scene ‘I’m going to buy some sheets now,’ no one is ever going to write a fan letter about that one. So no, we’re not going to do that”.
He also called foul on the popular thought about The Doctor’s companions always ending up worse for the wear. “I mean, that’s not true about all the Doctor’s companions. It’s maybe what the Doctor thinks in his darker moments and when he’s dying in “Let’s Kill Hitler.” He worries that he might’ve done them terrible harm. But Rose is off in a parallel universe. She’ll be with her – with a human version of the Doctor. She’s fine. Martha learns to stand up for herself and got over her crush on the Doctor and she soars off. Yes Donna has a more miserable thing. But she doesn’t know she’s miserable. She ends up actually quite happy and married to a good bloke. Rory and Amy are perfectly happy in New York. They’re dead, but, you know, everyone from that year is dead so that’s all right. They lived to a ripe old age and had a lovely time.
“The Doctor – so he’s not – they all don’t leave under terrible circumstances at all. I think the tragedy when Amy and Rory went was the Doctor lost them not – and that in the end they, you know, of course that, you know, Amy would choose Rory over the Doctor in a heartbeat. And he actually had some trouble quite dealing with that. But the fact is, no he doesn’t ruin their lives. He can induce a certain amount of trauma, it must be said. But no they’re not all destroyed by any means. And no, every time, every time the Doctor loses a regular character from this show it will happen in a moment that makes people talk. Because the episode that you described no one would talk about that. That wouldn’t be thrilling.
“If a friendship is severed for good or for bad reasons, that’s a big moment in your life. And if you walk away from a great friend but then you’re not crying a little then you’ve not been reading the memos frankly. You’ve not been paying attention. So, no, Doctor Who will not take the un-dramatic path because we’d like to stay on television and popular.”
So far in the new series, all the Companions have been from modern day Britain. That wasn’t always the case in the old series. You’ve got Leela. You’ve got Dodo. You’ve got folks from different places, different times. Still human looking so you save money on the makeup. But how likely or how perhaps harder or different to write is it to write for a companion that isn’t just from modern day Earth?
“Well if we found that difficult,” he replied, “then we’d have tremendous difficulty writing the main character wouldn’t we? It’s not a question of whether it is difficult to do or not. It’s a question of whether it’s the right thing to do or not. Now in fact, the old series doesn’t do a hell of a lot of it. If you looked at the vast majority of the companions come from contemporary era. Even the ones who don’t come from contemporary era are pretty much normalized ones like with Jamie and Victoria. Then it’s hardly any time at all before Victoria is wearing short skirts. No Victorian would actually do that. You know, so the problem is – and I don’t say it’s an unsolvable problem, but the majority solution will always be a contemporary companion. But the problem is you need an anchoring point for the audience. You need someone who represents their world and their point of view. And the simplest, purest and best answer to that is somebody from their world.
“Now somebody who’s watched Doctor Who for an unseasonably long time like I have, like possibly you have, I don’t know, might get bored of that and say ‘I wish it was, you know, a two headed alien from the planet Prang’. The new audience don’t think that. They want an anchoring point on that mysterious alien the Doctor. Doesn’t mean we’ll always do it this way. But the reality is it’s always going to be somebody from contemporary era or somebody who ends up being very like somebody from contemporary era.
“I think it was great – the one that broke the mold really I would argue was Leela. We actually went for somebody who was quite different. I would sort of say that Jamie and Victoria ended up – when I was a kid watching I wasn’t particularly aware that they were historical characters. And I do remember watching them. And Romana just came across as, you know, in the end like a very, very clever young woman. She wasn’t that different from Liz Shaw. It’s going to be – it’s going to be the relatable half of the partnership. Keep in mind Doctor Who has to not just appeal to sci-fi fans, it has to appeal to a huge mainstream audience who dwarf the sci-fi audience. You sort of need that way in for them. Having said that, you know, who knows maybe there’ll be a robot dog next. I don’t know.”
One thing that has changed about the companions in the new series is we’ve seen much more about their family lives. Time was they’d be whisked away and dropped off with nary a word about who they left behind, save for the odd joke about a maiden aunt of perhaps a pot on the stove. Clara doesn’t even travel with The Doctor full time. Is that the “New Normal” as Peter Pachal from Mashable asked, or will we see a more traditional companion relationship in the future?
“Well, I mean there’s never going to be a ‘new normal’. Everybody who comes aboard the TARDIS will have a different story and do it a different way. You know, it’s not a dictate of any kind it’s just – Clara’s personality did not suit the idea of simply abandoning everything else she does and running off with the Doctor. I mean you wouldn’t believe it if I wrote that scene. Yes I’ll just go move into the TARDIS with you and I’ll keep in the spare room and you tell me where to go and you drive. That’s just – Clara’s never going to do that in a million years, just wouldn’t.
“But Amy the night before her wedding, all anxious about whether she’s getting married too young. She can run away from awhile. But once she gets married of course she’ll do that. I think you’ve got to look at the Doctor as somebody who’s got a fantastic car that likes to take you for a spin now and then. That doesn’t mean you move in. Now Rose was in a very different place, wasn’t she? She lived in a council estate. She didn’t like her job. She had a vexed relationship with her mother. She had a, you know, she had a boyfriend she wasn’t sure of. She ran away because that was right for her character. It’s purely whether or not you want to run away. And whether or not you might need the idea that you might be number two in this particular relationship.
“Clara is never going to – from the first moment you meet her she’s never going to be somebody who thinks that they live in the spare room while his nibs drives the TARDIS. That’s just not what she’s like.
“Doesn’t mean that the next one won’t be like that. Who knows?”
The facts and details of the Christmas episode have been kept strictly secret, and for good reason. Rumors flew that Jenna Coleman was leaving the series just as the new season was a-borning, and her go-to answer for the events of the special was “If you know if I’m staying with the series, it’ll ruin the ending”. A spectacularly surprising cameo, a hilarious guest star, and a plot that keeps unfolding like a fried onion makes for a ripping yarn for the holiday. But for most of the year, we were never sure or not if this was to be Clara’s…
LAST CHRISTMAS
By Steven Moffat
Directed by Paul Wilmshurst
Clara and The Doctor team up again after Santa crashes on her roof. You heard me – Sweet Papa Chrimbo himself appears atop Clara’s home, and before any sense can be made of that, The Doctor reappears and snatches her away. They arrive at a mysterious science base where the scientists are combating Dream Crabs, an alien species that lull their victims into a peaceful dream-state while they quietly eat their brains. Clara is attacked by one, and “awakens” at home on Christmas morning, met by Danny Pink, inexplicably hale and hearty. It’s only when she properly awakens does she, The Doctor, and the scientists realize that they may well be all still asleep. Oh, and Santa Claus keeps appearing to help.
Moffat took full advantage of the rumors surrounding Jenna Coleman’s status on the show to deliver a series of heart-gripping false moves that left the viewer exhausted, but fully entertained. Moffat has always been good at creating characters that you immediately feel for, and this is no exception. Even when it’s eventually revealed that we actually knew nothing about the people, we’re happy to see them survive.
THE MONSTER FILES – The Dream Crabs are based on a very common concept, the idea of dreams being used to cloak a slow death. Comics fans will likely already thought of the Alan Moore story For the Man Who Has Everything, which featured Mongul using an alien plant called a Black Mercy to place Superman in a dream state where he believes he had grown up on Krypton with his loving family. It was even adapted into an episode of Justice League Unlimited, adapted by J. M. DeMatteis.
Fans of Red Dwarf will also recall the despair squid, a being that takes the opposite tack – inducing dreams to make its victims despair, causing them to take their own lives in the dream. The female of said species follows more the standard trope, causing a happy dream from which the victim(s) from which would be loath to awaken. The Dream Lord tried the same thing in Amy’s Choice – Heck, you could even argue that the Master’s plan with the Nethersphere was the same scheme – a artificial reality to keep the victims placated and off-balance until they were needed. Moffat takes a page from Inception as well, folding in the idea of multi-layered dreams, resulting in never being sure if they were truly awake.
GUEST STAR REPORT –
Nick Frost (Santa) is best know in the US for his frequent collaborations with fellow Who-lumnus Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright. But he’s got a long list of solo projects in the UK as well. He starred in the Sci-Fi comedy Hyperdrive, which also starred Kevin Eldon and the delightful and huge Miranda Hart. He hosted a mock “worst case scenario” style show called DANGER! 50,000 Volts! and worked with Daisy Haggard (Sophie from The Lodger and Closing Time) on the sketch show Man Stroke Woman.
Michael Troughton (Professor Albert) is the son of Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor. He has quite a respectable acting career in his own right, including a regular role on Rik Mayall’s The New Statesman. He took several years off from acting to care for his ailing wife, who passed away recently. This episode is the second acting role he’s taken in his return to the boards. He and his father are far from the only actors in the family. His brother David played King Peladon in the classic series Pertwee adventure The Monster of Peladon, and Professor Hobbs in Tennant’s Midnight. His nephew, Harry Melling, played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films.
Dan Starkey (Ian) is well known to Who-fen as Strax the Sontaran, not to mention practically every Sontaran to appear in the last few years of the show. They chose to have him play an elf in this episode because as Moffat explains in a recent interview, “we thought it would be nice for him not to have to wear so much rubber. And I’m talking about his professional rubber not his personal life”.
Natalie Gumede (Ashley Carter)is known in England for an extended run on Coronation Street, and is currently starring in a web comedy called Sally the Life Coach. Her biggest mass media appearance was a tie for second-place showing in Strictly Come Dancing, the original British version of what came over here as Dancing with the Stars.
BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS –
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO – Apparently Jenna Coleman did initially plan to leave the show at the end of the season – the original ending of the special was for Clara to really be 80-odd years old, and would die in bed after a long-awaited reunion with The Doctor. She had a change of heart (much like Clara did mid-season) and the ending was hastily amended. It’s one of the few times where “it was all a dream” was a perfectly logical progression of the story, and not merely a desperate hat-pull.
SET PIECES – The unnamed planet upon which The Doctor was attacked by the Dream Crabs looked remarkably similar to the planet that Clara attempted to threaten him into saving Danny in Death in Heaven. That that version of that world was also only a dream only makes it more fitting that the same set be used again when it isn’t…IF it isn’t/
“It’s time to start living in the real world” – It’s always fun when one of the first things said in an episode turns out to be the solution all along, and you never notice. See also Clara’s line shortly after re-entering the TARDIS, “This is real, yeah?”
“Clara Oswald…mostly favors travel books” – When we first meet (this) Clara in The Bells of St. John, her room is filled with travel books, starting with the one she got from her mom.
“Don’t think about them…don’t look at them” – Once again, Moffat takes a commonplace thing and makes it scary. The old joke “try not to think about a tap-dancing elephant” comes to mind here – it’s almost impossible NOT to think of something once it’s been brought to your attention. Trying to keep your mind blank was also touched on in Time Heist as well as a way to stay clear of The Teller.
“They can only see you if you see them” – The idea of a being that hacks into your senses to get a look at where they are is a neat idea, but I couldn’t keep from thinking of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, “a mind-bogglingly stupid beast; it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you” from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
“Three hundred and four minus seventeen” – The Doctor would often start asking his Companion maths questions as a method of getting them to concentrate, and keep from being distracted by the wild situations they were in. He once asked Sarah Jane Smith to recite the alphabet backwards.
“It’s Christmas Eve ; early to bed” – Santa speaks to the Sleepers like children, a trick that that worked very well for The Doctor in The Doctor Dances, written by…Steven Moffat!
“It’s a long story” is right up there with “I’ll explain later” as a standard hand-wave to get past having to provide a large amount of exposition to cover a point that really doesn’t need explaining. Moffat simply uses the cliché as an actual plot point, confounding expectations.
“That’s a bit rude, coming from a magician” – Moffat does love his callbacks. That’s a reference from Time Heist, where The Doctor says his new look “was trying for minimalist, but ended up with magician”.
“They’re a bit like face-huggers, aren’t they?” – Professor Albert points out the similarity to the egg-laying form of the Xenomorph from Alien, but did you notice that when Shona awakens at home, one of the things on her Christmas To Do list was to watch not only Alien, but The Thing from Another World?
“Four manuals” – In yet another example of the “dream trap” genre, Batman is trapped in an electronic dream by the Mad Hatter in Perchance to Dream. Books play a role in his realization of his predicament – Dreams are generated in another part of the brain than the ability to read, so when Bruce opens a book, it’s filled with illegible gibberish.
“Time travel is always possible…in dreams” – It’s the method Madame Vastra used to have a quorum across several centuries, with one person that was already dead, albeit electronically saved, in The Name of the Doctor.
“About sixty-two years” – The Doctor has shown up late for more than a few of his friends. He was too late to see the Madame du Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace and he missed The Brigadier.
“I travelled” – This may be the closest we’ll see to a clean break between The Doctor and Clara, and it’s a good look at how being a Companion changes people. After only dreaming about seeing the world as a younger girl, she up and did it in this dream-version of her time after The Doctor.
Also note that When The Doctor has to help Clara pop the cracker, it’s a mirror of Clara having to help her Grandmother pop the poem-filled cracker in The Time of the Doctor.
NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – This is a very unique scenario, in that we actually DO know what’s up next time. If only to drive home the fact that Clara (and through her, Ms. Coleman) was staying, they’ve actually given us the title of next season’s first episode – The Magician’s Apprentice. Whether that’s yet another reference to The Doctor’s new look is something we can only guess.
Jenna Coleman has been confirmed for the full series, and Peter Capaldi for the next two, so we’re in a position where we don’t have to worry about anyone leaving for at least a little while. But I must admit, as well as Jenna and Peter work together, I don’t know if the ending of Death in Heaven wasn’t the right “out”. A bittersweet ending that left both characters sad at their parting, but both feeling that they’d done something good for the other, to let them move on with their lives. Much as with Amy and Rory’s first farewell at the end of The God Complex, everybody lives. But Steven had to bring them back that last half-season and give them a more dramatic and sad finish (for The Doctor, anyway), not to mention more final departure. Not to mention that to a degree, Clara has lost a bit of her independence – the overly emotional realization of how much she’s missed the sound of the TARDIS, and yet another overly sappy statement of what she thinks of The Doctor.
When we call back to the description of wanting to keep traveling as an “addiction” – even though she was allegedly asking it about The Doctor, it’s clearly a question that could be asked to, and about Clara. I can but hope that come the end of next series, we aren’t debating whether Clara overstayed her welcome.
Yesterday we presented R. Crumb’s tribute to the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff. Today, we further illuminate this horrific tragedy by presenting a number of tributes by King Features Syndicate comic strip artists.
