Chris Ryall, IDW Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, recently posted this new, untitled promo art by Nick Roche for an upcoming Transformers project.
That’s about all there is to say about it, other than the fact that it’s now my new desktop background.
Apart from some chronic bouts of concentrated cliffhanger enthusiasm in visits with the pioneering Texas cartoonist-turned-fine artist Frank Stack, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention in recent years to the extinct form of Hollywood filmmaking known as serials, or chapter-plays.
Sure, there have been a lot of recent announcements regarding the live-action G.I. Joe feature film, but they all pale in comparison to this one, folks: Larry Hama, the architect of much of the G.I. Joe mythology for several decades now, will be joining the G.I. Joe film in some capacity!
According to The Latino Review, an announcement is expected later today, but it’s believed that Hama will be a creative consultant for the film.
Hama is well-known for writing the Marvel Comics’ G.I. Joe series that ran for 155 issues (1984-1992). He also wrote the "file cards" on the G.I. Joe action figures produced during that period, and many of the characters are named after Hama’s friends, family and favorite historical figures.
In other G.I. Joe news of note, Devils Due Publishing will not have their contract renewed with Hasbro, owners of the G.I. Joe license.
First reported over at IESB, it’s speculated that Marvel or IDW will receive the license, with IDW the more likely recipient due to their current contract with Hasbro for the Transformers license.
Devils Due was widely regarded as a savior of the G.I. Joe property when they acquired the license in 2001, publishing numerous critically praised stories under the G.I. Joe banner, including the 2006 Snake Eyes: Declassified miniseries.
With the G.I. Joe feature film scheduled for a 2009 release, it appears as if Hasbro is looking to consolidate its film properties with a single publisher, much to the disappointment of G.I. Joe comics fans.
Calling movie actors “stars” was appropriate when I was a midwestern lad, long ago, because they seemed as distant and unattainable as those celestial twinklers that speckled the summer sky. None of my friends or relatives were movie stars — they were butchers or clerks or drivers or printers — and what the stars did, acting, wasn’t a real job and so those who did it weren’t real people. They were…stars. But if you knew someone who knew, or at least had spoken to, one of these distant beings who lived in places you never expected to visit, the stars became somehow real — or maybe realer, anyway. They were, if not people, then some sort of demi-people.
Clark Gable was a star. But Rock Hudson was both more and less than a star because I knew a girl who had worked as an extra on one of his films. Julia Adams…heck, she was a person, because she did a personal appearance at the grocery co-op my father belonged to when she was co-starring with Tyrone Power in Mississippi Gambler and people I knew actually saw her in the flesh. And didn’t that make Power a demi-person, too, by association?
Which brings us to Heath Ledger. I was never in a room with him, never saw him on the street, spoke to him on the phone, none of that. But when a heard about his death a few days ago, I felt just a tiny bit worse than I usually feel when someone whose work I admire passes. Why? Mr. Ledger and I lived in two of the same neighborhoods, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan, though not at the same time, and my big 2007 project was writing a novel based on the script of a movie Mr. Ledger performs in. Somehow, all this makes me feel a dim and distant connection to him.
How did we love IDW in 2007? Let us count the ways:
1. The kickoff of their new Star Trek comics
2. The first collection of Terry and the Pirates strips
3. The big-screen debut of 30 Days of Night
4. The announcement that they would be publishing comics based on the BBC series Doctor Who
5. Transformers, Transformers, Transformers
6. …
You know what? We’re probably better off just pointing you to this interview with IDW Publisher Chris Ryall over at ComicBookResources.com, explaining the company’s editorial philosophy and what they have in store for ’08.
Who’s your hero?
Starting today, that’s a question ComicMix is posing to a number of folks inside the comics industry and then sharing the results with you.
DC mainstay Jamal Igle steps up for the first crack at the query with some interesting results. Here’s a hint – his fave isn’t on this Teen Titans cover, but he is INSIDE.
Plus:
All that and more is just a Button Press away!
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• Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in the Iron Man movie. I can’t think of a better casting choice, except maybe for Howard Chaykin – and I’m not sure Chaykin could pull off the moustache thing. Downey’s got the right look, the right attitude… we’ll see if he gets the right screenplay.
Are you tired of the Christmas spirit? Clifford Meth and Rufus Dayglo’s Snaked is guaranteed to wash all that away.
In one of the more audacious acts of counter-programming in comics, IDW is releasing Snaked today, in the skip-ship days between December holidays. And Snaked is about as far from Christmas treacle as you can get.
If you’re already a Meth addict, you probably suspected no less. Clifford Meth is a man who does benefits for Bill Loebs and Dave Cockrum– but as a storyteller, he would take Harlan Ellison calling him bugfuck and use it as a cover pullquote. Clifford’s stories have often been dark and mean and nasty and this is no exception. His story hints at, in no particular order, violence, politics, mayhem, cannibalism, September 11, the Bush Administration, the Clinton legacy, and prison rape. Rufus Dayglo’s art reminds one of collages compiled from lunatics’ sketches with crayons drawn on newspaper clippings of murder and corruption trials.
Like I said, the feel-good story of the season.
I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re trying to smile after a few days with the in-laws*– Snaked is a brutal piece of work. But if you’re looking to dispense with plastered on holiday smiles, this book is the comics equivalent of listening to speed metal to get Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer out of your head. And that’s a good thing.
* Unless you’re hoping your in-laws meets the sort of fate that happens to some of the characters. And if so, I don’t want to know about it.
Paul Cornell reveals a true horror story hidden inside a mystery, and writes a Dr. Who story of the season for the London Telegraph.
Newsarama has previews of the upcoming series from IDW. A very Brady Christmas indeed.
And it took a little longer than I predicted, but the first of the Dr. Who Christmas episode segments (featuring David Tennant and Kylie Minogue) are now up. Here’s part one of a promised eight-parter by an enterprising Whovian:
One in-joke that’s probably not really an in-joke but which I appreciated tremendously is the appearance, about three minutes in, of Geoffrey Palmer, probably best known on this side of the pond as Lionel in As Time Goes By (co-starring Dame Judy Dench), but who also did a terrific reading of A Christmas Carol a couple years ago.
The opening Jan. 8 of Texas’ Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo, a hardy and adaptive survivor of the 19th century, marks not only a continuation of the region’s most emphatic reminder of its economic basis in agriculture. The occasion also nails the 50th anniversary of a major-league show-business breakthrough for the Stock Show. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans arrived in Fort Worth in 1958 to serve as hosts for the first comprehensive network-television coverage of an authentically Western rodeo.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
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