This season, NBC’s PARKS AND RECREATION has been focused on the big wedding of Leslie (Amy Poehler) and Ben (Adam Scott), but was that game changing episode a “jump the shark” moment for the show? Amy, Adam and producer Michael Shure all explain to us why that isn’t the case. Plus the FANTASTIC FOUR movie reboot moves forward and Mark Hammil says “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe” on STAR WARS
It’s the second coming of Warren Murphy and Gerald Welch is riding shotgun!
Forgotten Son is the first book in the new Destroyer spin-off series, Legacy. Violence is escalating at the US/Mexico border. Smugglers run rampant while decapitated heads decorate billboards like Christmas tree lights. But the cartels choose the wrong place to conduct their business when they decide to cross the Arizona border belonging to the Sinanju tribe.
That’s where Ex-Mossad agent Benjamin Cole comes in. Ben has just been tapped to head a secret new government agency responsible for stopping terrorist acts. He is only given two field agents, but fortunately for him, Freya Williams and Stone Smith are the daughter and son of a certain Remo Williams.
This is old-school Murphy at his best, with explosive action, biting satire and engaging characters. Welch, coming off strong from the first five books in his Last Witness series, brings a spark of magic to the mix, but you kind of expect that from someone who has an honest-to-God lightning bolt scar on his forehead.
Fans of the Destroyer are going to love Forgotten Son and if you’re one of the four people on Earth who have never heard of the Destroyer, then buckle your seatbelt, because you’re in for a ride. If this book is any indication of what we can expect from future Legacy books, then Forgotten Son will be long remembered.
PRESS RELEASE: FORGOTTEN SON BY WARREN MURPHY AND GERALD WELCH
It’s the second coming of Warren Murphy and Gerald Welch is riding shotgun!
Forgotten Son is the first book in the new Destroyer spin-off series, Legacy. Violence is escalating at the US/Mexico border. Smugglers run rampant while decapitated heads decorate billboards like Christmas tree lights. But the cartels choose the wrong place to conduct their business when they decide to cross the Arizona border belonging to the Sinanju tribe.
That’s where Ex-Mossad agent Benjamin Cole comes in. Ben has just been tapped to head a secret new government agency responsible for stopping terrorist acts. He is only given two field agents, but fortunately for him, Freya Williams and Stone Smith are the daughter and son of a certain Remo Williams.
This is old-school Murphy at his best, with explosive action, biting satire and engaging characters. Welch, coming off strong from the first five books in his Last Witness series, brings a spark of magic to the mix, but you kind of expect that from someone who has an honest-to-God lightning bolt scar on his forehead.
Fans of the Destroyer are going to love Forgotten Son and if you’re one of the four people on Earth who have never heard of the Destroyer, then buckle your seatbelt, because you’re in for a ride. If this book is any indication of what we can expect from future Legacy books, then Forgotten Son will be long remembered.
The paranormal doesn’t stand a chance as SyFy launches a new season of FACT OR FAKED next Tuesday (April 17th) at 9pm ET. Join us as we talk to investigators Ben, Austin & Lanisha about what dark things these new episodes will uncover. There’s also more with Jessica St Clair and Lennon Parham, creators and stars of NBC‘s new comedy, BEST FRIENDS FOREVER. Plus it had to happen – comic book sales begin to shoot DOWN in March!
Since the color editions of Bone began appearing nearly a decade ago, Jeff Smith’s delightful series has become synonymous with Scholastic’s Graphix imprint. In 2009, Scholastic concluded a deal that allows them to publish expansion material set in the Bone universe such as the Tall Tales collection that came out a while back.
Last year, a new series, Quest for the Spark, began but what made this unique was that these books would be illustrated prose works. Tom Sniegoski, who collaborated on Tall Tales, has been penning the stories while Smith (with colorist Steve Hamaker) has provided the covers and spot illustrations. Volume two is due out momentarily with volume three coming this summer.
When this was first announced, Smith noted on his website, “I was a bit unsure about this project when Tom first suggested it, but when I read the first book I laughed so hard, I agreed to do it. Scholastic was so blown away by it, that they decided to make it available in hardcover and wanted the illustrations, of which I think I’m going to do about twenty, full bleed and in color.”
The reality is the second book as 12 full page pieces along with spot art but it’s all nicely spaced out. So, what are the books about? Well, first of all, these are considered Bone: Legacy even though you the reader will call them Quest for the Spark. They include characters from the original series including the Two Stupid Rat Creatures and Roderick the Raccoon, Master of the Eastern Border, Thorn Harvestar, and Rose (Gran’ma Ben) Harvestar. While mentioned, the Bone cousins will not be seen nor are active participants. (more…)
I was going to write an article about The Boys this week. I like The Boys. It’s violent. It’s intriguing. It’s full of rich character moments, surprising plot twists, and gritty and emotionally charged artwork. It’s also very close to finishing. So, I digress. I’ll cover it after it’s over. Spoiler alert. I love the series.
With that off my plate, what to write about? I could rant about why I think it’s a silly idea to bring back the Phoenix Force. I could rant about why I think it’s sillier to bring back Johnny Storm. I could rant about why I think it’s silly that DC rebooted its universe, and it’s already suffering from continuity errors. Nah. How about I just take a big fat crap on The War of the Independents. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
So, there I was, looking over the rack a couple weeks back. See, I was a little light that week on books in hand. I gave myself an excuse to nab one more book before I checked out. And there it was at the tail end of the indie racks… War of the Independents. Why not? The cover boasts a bevy of characters from just about every nameable indie cape book you can think of. Bone. Cerebus. The Tick. Scud: The Disposable Assassin. Cassy Hack. Captain Action. Hell, even the Flaming Carrot and Gumby are on the cover. Based on that, and a name that boasts a potential war with them all? There’s no way that could not be awesome, right? It’s like communism. It works on paper. But this here rag, written and occasionally drawn by Dave Ryan, doesn’t work. In fact, if this comic were a person, it would be the drum-beating hippie downing free pints of Ben and Jerry’s at Occupy: Branson.
Disclaimer: I like the Occupy movement in theory. But standing around demanding change isn’t exactly what I’d do to change the world. But I digress.
War of the Independents should be amazing. Getting the permission to work with scads of semi-known characters in a crisis-like setting just makes my mouth water. Who here amongst you would not want to see The Tick and Scud fight alongside Too-Much-Coffee-Man and Milk and Cheese? And then you open the book. Dave Ryan, utilizing every cliché known to comics, pens a tale we’ve already read a million times over… and fails to do anything original with it.
An age-old evil is going across the multiverse killing things. It’s up to a ragtag group of no-names to assemble and save us all. When Captain Action and Madman are on the same page, it’s not the time for prophecies and posturing. When Toyboy and Pokey share page space, it’s not enough to simply have them say “I’ll fight!” and call it a day.
The issue wastes six or seven pages filling us in on a villain as bland as mayo on white. Then Cerebus shows up with a team of people I’ve never heard or seen to fight a muscular super demon… for seven more pages. That’s a little shy of half the book wasted on the kind of crap we’ve read and reread! The other half of the book is just the putting together of the team. You’ve seen this all before. Ryan just hands the reigns over to various authors to pen a panel or two featuring their own creations. And before you know it, the book is over.
Next issue? It’s the all black-hero spectacular. Michael Davis should fire up the death ray. It’s simply not enough to get permission from this pantheon of partial fame, and just plop their character into a panel or two, and hope showing them will be enough. Any fans of the parent books from whence these people came from are hoping to see more than just a silent panel. Comic characters are more than just pretty drawings. War of the Independents thinks it’s simply enough to have them assembled. It’s not.
What I was truly hoping from this book was what the cover itself promised. Page after page of crazy Pérez-packed panels with wave after wave of indie heroes knocking heads with wave after wave of… something. Anything. Zombies. Other villains. Each other. Kids. Puppies. But we never get that far. 31 pages of content yield nothing more than a single fight scene (starring nary a single recognizable hero) and page after page of singularly unimpressive moments. War of the Independents? My Jewish Ass. I’m a firm believer of under-promising and over-delivering. This book should have been called 1 Great Double Page Splash, and Then Some Nonsense. (And the Tick Yells SPOON!)
It’s not a secret that I’m an indie comic creator. Given permission to assemble even a quarter of these creations, I would do more than simply waste time showing them join together. The fun of this idea is all in the fighting. If you’ve got The Badger, The Opossum, and the Unbelievable Laundry Detergent Man coming together, forget the subtext. And for the love of God, spend some time honing the art. No offense (because I know how hard it is to make a comic), but Dave Ryan’s panels are just terrible looking. Front to back, page after page… this was a waste of paper, talent, resources, and my money. And nothing gets my ire up more than wasting my money. To steal a contrived writers trick Dave Ryan likes to use… here’s a nice quote to make me sound fancy:
It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.
Sometimes words and pictures come together in the same story. There’s more than one way of accomplishing this — comics is the most obvious, with the story told in a sequence of pictures and text (captions and/or dialogue), but there are other options — and books for pre-adults have typically made more use of pictures than those in the more adult portions of the library.
Remember: adults are dull and staid, and must not be upset or disconcerted by mere pictures in their very, very serious books. Children are more mentally flexible, and can handle the shock of the pictorial.
Teens are somewhere in between: they usually want to be adults, but they’re still young enough to question that dull stolidity, and still, sometimes, will gravitate to books with pictures in them. The two books I have in front of me today were published to be read by pre-adults of various ages — though I think the first had an older expected reader-age than the latter — and they’re chock-full of pictures. In fact, both of them are stories told through and about their pictures, in different ways — and, more interestingly from my point of view, neither of these books use the language and techniques of comics. They both use pictures as part of their storytelling, but come at it from different traditions, and don’t tell their stories from image-to-image the way that comics do.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is the more conventional of the two books; it’s a novel by Ransom Riggs (his first), illustrated by a sequence of real, mostly unaltered vintage photographs. (Riggs is clear about the “mostly unaltered” stipulation, since some of these are quite odd photographs, as with the cover shot, showing a hard-faced girl standing rigidly still a foot off the ground.) Those photos are part of the story in the most basic, literal way — every so often, a character talks about looking at a photograph, and then, lo! the actual photo appears on the next page.
I’m back, my gentle compatriots, with another webcomic for you to feast upon! I know what all of you are saying though, as you sit with arms folded in protest– ”But Marc, you’ve brought to us a rising list of the sick and macabre! Each new webcomic (be it still active, or dead, or with a glorious hard cover archive hitting shelves) has sunk to new depths of depravity. Have you found another gloriously funny webcomic, or are you simply reaching for the rafters in a pathetic attempt to appease us, your loyal and ravenous fanbase!?”
Worry not my friends, I bring to you a funny (if not so grotesque) webcomic to tickle your funny bones. I bring to you… Rogue Robot!
Rogue Robot was started in 2005 by Herron School of Art students Ben Roe and Amory Abbot. Ben initially wrote the strips and provided color, and Amory lent his pencils and inks to the strip. Over time, Ben has become a bit dormant, and Amory has gallantly picked up the slack on all chores, and has been putting out the strips ever since.
The comic had humble beginnings, but quickly gained speed, and found it’s voice. As it has progressed over the years, the strip has really tightened up it’s art, and acerbic wit. Akin to a ‘Penny Arcade’, the comic is essentially about 2 buddies (Amory and Ben) and a few other cast-mates with their own set of unique peculiarities. Humor ranges from straight-up slapstick violence, toilet humor, sex, with occasional epic (as in longer than 1 strip) stories. The comic hits the mark most of the time, and when it goes for broke, well, like so many other comics I’ve shared with you thus far– it’s laugh out loud funny (even though you’ll go to hell for laughing.). It’s also funny to note just how many comics end up dealing with not updating all the time.
Though Star Wars fandom is full of disagreements and divisions, most of us fanboys are in agreement about a few things: Jedi, lightsabers and force powers are awesome. Anything Timothy Zahn writes is going to be better than anything Kevin J. Anderson writes. And Lucas probably would have had a better script for The Phantom Menace if he’d hired a seven-year-old to write it.
Enter the Comic Irregulars (Andrew Coker, Andrew Shellshear, David Karlov, David McLeish, David Morgan-Mar, Ian Boreham, Loki Patrick, and Steven Irrgang), who you might recall from their work on the action figure/photo capture comic Irregular Webcomic. Inspired by Shamus Young’s work on DM of the Rings, they ask the question, “What if Star Wars was a roleplaying campaign that went far, far away from what the Game Master intended?”
The comic is set in a universe where Star Wars never existed, and the unnamed game master/narrator has designed the world from scratch for his game. Before the game begins, the players don’t know anything at all about Jedi, or Tatooine, the Skywalker family, because they only exist in the GM’s mind. The setting is built up over the course of the story in response to what the players do, and what they do is never what the GM expects, in a classic roleplaying maneuver known as “going off the rails.”
The plot follows Jim (playing Qui-Gon), Ben (playing Obi-Wan), and three other players who join later as they demonstrate why you shouldn’t make laser swords the cheapest available weapons, why you shouldn’t bring your little sister to roleplaying group, and how much more sense the plot of Episode I makes when filtered through the chaotic lens of a roleplaying game.
The upcoming R-rated animated feature film Red Nails, based upon Robert E. Howard’s famous Conan story of the same name, has its voice cast in place.
Co-writer and producer Steve Gold notes in his blog Ron Perlman (Hellboy) has been cast as Conan the Cimmerian, Cree Summer (Ben 10, The Boondocks) as Valeria, Marg Helgenberger (Mr. Brooks, CSI) as Tascela, James Marsden (X-Men, Smallville, Buffy, Torchwood) as Techotl, Clancy Brlown (Lex Luthor in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited) as Olmec, and Mark Hamill (Star Wars, and virtually every decent U.S. animated show in the past decade) as Tolkemec.
Vic Dal Chele is directing Red Nails. There are tons of development sketches and storyboard art on their website; Mike Kaluta handled much of the development artwork, including the piece above.
Artwork copyright Swordplay Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
is the more conventional of the two books; it’s a novel by Ransom Riggs (his first), illustrated by a sequence of real, mostly unaltered vintage photographs. (Riggs is clear about the “mostly unaltered” stipulation, since some of these are quite odd photographs, as with the cover shot, showing a hard-faced girl standing rigidly still a foot off the ground.) Those photos are part of the story in the most basic, literal way — every so often, a character talks about looking at a photograph, and then, lo! the actual photo appears on the next page.
I’m back, my gentle compatriots, with another webcomic for you to feast upon! I know what all of you are saying though, as you sit with arms folded in protest– ”But Marc, you’ve brought to us a rising list of the sick and macabre! Each new webcomic (be it still active, or dead, or with a glorious hard cover archive hitting shelves) has sunk to new depths of depravity. Have you found another gloriously funny webcomic, or are you simply reaching for the rafters in a pathetic attempt to appease us, your loyal and ravenous fanbase!?”
Though Star Wars fandom is full of disagreements and divisions, most of us fanboys are in agreement about a few things: Jedi, lightsabers and force powers are awesome. Anything Timothy Zahn writes is going to be better than anything Kevin J. Anderson writes. And Lucas probably would have had a better script for The Phantom Menace if he’d hired a seven-year-old to write it.
