Actor Reggie Lee’s character in the NBC thriller GRIMM is going through a few changes, and he talks about how they affect not only him but the future of the show as well. Plus Fox renews a bunch of shows early and it seems everybody is playing AVENGERS ALLIANCE these days.
Beginning tomorrow afternoon and every Thursday thereafter, ComicMix will run a video podcast featuring twin 11 year-olds Maddy and Anya Ernst. The San Diego sisters will discuss their most favorite (and sometimes their least favorite) aspects of pop culture.
The girls come by their expertise naturally. Anya was named Anyanka in utero by her mother, Jen, after the character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Madeline, Maddy for short, was named after the French children’s book character. They love The Hunger Games (and their Katniss Barbie doll), Doctor Who, and My Little Pony. Less nerdy, they also adore musical theater, drag queens and Disneyland.
“Maddy and Anya represent the very next generation of fandom, and they do it with wit, style and tremendous enthusiasm,” ComicMix editor-in-chief Mike Gold babbled. I couldn’t be more excited about having them join our ComicMix team.”
The Tweeks will debut with their review and analysis of the new Doctor on Doctor Who, as well as a discussion about the upcoming 50th anniversary episode. Future video webcasts will discuss Phineas and Ferb, My Little Pony and the latest Lenore graphic novel. The webcasts will be co-produced and abetted by ComicMix editor Adriane Nash.
“Maddy and Anya are twins, they’re tweens and they’re geeks,” Nash noted. “That’s how they came up with the name “Tweeks!”
“And in each universe, there’s a copy of you witnessing one or the other outcome, thinking – incorrectly – that your reality is the only reality.”
– Brian Green, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.
• • • • •
Who are you?
Are you sure?
• • • • •
Are you Buffy Summers, the Slayer, the chosen one of her generation who stands alone against the vampires, monsters, and demons who threaten the world? Or are you Buffy Summers, a schizophrenic patient in a psychiatric hospital battling the unleashed horrors of your own id?
Doctor: Do you know where you are?
Buffy: Sunnydale.
Doctor: No. None of that’s real. None of it. You’re in a mental institution. You’ve been with us now for six years.
Spike: Put a little ice on the back of her neck. She likes that.
Buffy: Some kind of gross, waxy demon-thing poked me.
Xander: And when you say “poke”…?
Buffy: In the arm!
Buffy: They told me that I was sick, I guess crazy, and that Sunnydale and all of this — none of it was real.
Xander: Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous. What? You think this isn’t real just because of all the vampires, and demons, and ex-vengeance demons, and the sister that used to be a big ball of universe-destroying energy…?
Willow: Okay, all in favor of research? Motion passed.
Doctor: In her mind, she’s the central figure in a fantastic world beyond imagination. She’s surrounded herself with friends, most with their own superpowers.
Doctor: Together they face grand, overblown conflicts against an assortment of monsters, both imaginary and rooted in actual myth.
Doctor: Buffy, you used to create these grand villains to battle against. And now what is it? Just ordinary students you went to high school with. No gods or monsters, just three pathetic little men… who like playing with toys.
“Normal Again”
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Season Six, Episode 17
• • • • •
Who are you?
Are you sure?
• • • • •
Are you Buddy Baker, married to Ellen Frazier, father to Cliff and Maxine, and living in San Diego? Or are you a character in a comic book called Animal Man, which was written by Grant Morrison and published by DC Comics?
(to read this page at full size, double-click on the image)
• • • • •
Who are you?
Are you sure?
To be continued…
At least, in this universe!
(citations copyrighted by their respective owners)
Plenty of individual panels have been freeze-framed in my head all afternoon, but none of them have led to any kind of sequential storytelling. This is the worst part of being a writer with a weekly column – watching the hands on the clock inexorably winding down to zero hour, the time by which I need to get the thing e-mailed to Mike and Glenn.
You never know where ideas come from. My column Baby’s First Fooprints came about from a little joke I made at Alix’s sonogram; today I was listening to the soundtrack of Angel and I realized that, while I’ve talked a lot about the intrepid Slayer, I’ve hardly ever mentioned it’s a spin-off; in fact, few people ever talk about it, which in its own way was just as riveting as its parent show. Angel continued the story of Buffy Summer’s vampire lover, played by David Boreanaze, who left Sunnydale at the end of season 3 of Buffy because he realized that he and the Slayer had no future. Her path was one of growth and exploration, and his was of acknowledging the past and seeking redemption for its sins.
It was a dark, gritty, film-noir type of show, with its main character struggling for atonement from his evil past. The first episode opened in a bar, and the first time we see Angel he is apparently drunk, which, not too subtly, set the tone of the series – just as the recovering alcoholic is always just one drink away from losing his or her life to the bottle, Angel will forever be just “one drink away” from losing his soul and become Angelus again. Even the supporting characters are struggling for atonement from their past sins – Doyle is a half-demon carrying a secret burden; Wesley is the failed Watcher (and, we learn later, the son of an emotionally abusing father) who must prove to himself that he has something to offer to the world; and Cordelia must expiate the sins of her selfish and cruel high school persona and become a mature and caring woman.
With the introduction of the law firm Wolfram & Hart and the attorneys Lindsey McDonald and Lilah Morgan, the induction of the innocent Winifred “Fred” Burkel and the street-smart Charles Gunn as part of the “We Help The Helpless” team, Angel’s themes became more and more about trust and deceit, hate and love, innocence and guilt, and the duplicity of good and evil. Finally, the show, I think, became the story of the necessity of sacrifice for the greater good, with the ultimate sacrifice being Angel’s renunciation of his promised return to humanity (the Shanshu Prophecy) in the penultimate episode.
A lot of people I know who were major fans of Buffy didn’t like Angel, and rarely watched it, if ever. They said it was too dark for them, too morbid. But I think the shows were bookends – if Buffy was about the empowerment of the dumb blonde in the dark alley attacked by a monster, then Angel was about the monster who wanted to stop living in that dark alley and let the girl escape. If Buffy was about telling women to step out of the shadows and embrace themselves, then Angel was about telling us, all of us, men and women, to use the shadows in our lives to makes us stronger.
I was thinking about heroines the other day, which led to thinking about fictional role models for girls and young women growing up over the last twenty years or so. Role models which, I think, have reflected the way American society thought about women during that same time period.
Heroines and role models with the names Buffy Summers, Bella Swan, and Katniss Everdeen.
On March 10, 1997, a series called Buffy The Vampire Slayer debuted on the fledging WB Network. I thought it was based on the schlock movie of the same name that had come and gone in the theatres and occasionally popped up on the TV screen at 3 A.M. So I ignored it, even though, as a credentialed geek, I loved anything to do with gothic horror and vampires. But word of mouth and e-buzz finally got me to tune in sometime in the summer of 1997, when I caught a rerun. I think it was the one in which Xander is seduced by a giant female praying mantis, and the effects were, let’s face it, kinda cheesy, but…
Boy, was I wrong.
The central concept behind Buffy, as Joss Whedon has stated (and I’m paraphrasing) was to turn the horror movie concept of the dumb blonde chick who only cares about clothes, boys, and her hair and ends up getting sliced and diced for her sins upside down. Yes, Buffy Ann Summers started out as a “valley girl,” but Buffy was also something else…
“Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer.”
…and Buffy was that Slayer.
Buffy was a hero for the post-feminist age. She was the daughter of Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Betty Friedan. Though at times she grew tired, though at times all she wanted was to be was that Valley Girl with nothing on her mind but clothes, boys, and her hair (“God, Mom, even just upstairs doing my homework!” – Season 2, Becoming, Part Two), she realized that it was up to her; and she not only accepted her responsibility, she embraced it.
And then came Isabella “Bella” Swan.
Twilight, the first in the book in The Twilight Saga, hit the bookstands in 2005, three years after Buffy left the airwaves. Many of the women I knew at work were reading it and adored it. So one day at Borders I picked it up and browsed through it. My first impression: How the hell did this writer get published? She can’t write for shit! My second impression: What a piece of crap! My third impression: Bella is the anti-Buffy.
Bella was the perfect character for the reactionary cultural shock caused by the shock of 9/11; she was Phyllis Schafly as a teenager in the early 21st century. She didn’t argue, she was polite, and she was all about taking care of her father, an “abandoned” husband. But why did Bella’s mother and father break up? And isn’t Bella the least bit angry about the destruction of her family? Why does Bella come to live with her father? Does she feel deserted by her mother, who has remarried? Was her father a rotten husband?
Like America in those early days after the 9/11, we weren’t interested in answers. We wanted to create our own scenarios, and in Bella we found a character to fit our need to that, because Bella was a cipher. Bella was empty, because we were empty.
So Bella drifted. So Bella didn’t have any ambitions. Until she saw Edward Cullen, the sulky, withdrawn “James Dean” of Bella’s high school. And then she became all about him.
Swans mate for life.
I have a problem with the Twilight saga because Bella is always defined by men, not to mention the many subliminal messages within the story. To her father she will always be the good girl who takes care of him and the housekeeping, even though she lies to him constantly throughout the series, and most dramatically, in Breaking Dawn, when she does not tell him the truth about her new vampiric status and about Renessme, the daughter she and Edward conceived. Yes, in the first two seasons Buffy lied to her mother and kept things from her, but after the truth was revealed, the relationship between the two changed and evolved; there were repercussions, both good and bad. To Edward she is the girlfriend as the sacrosanct virgin; then she is the wife, whom Edward claims sexually; and finally, she is the mother of his child. To Jacob she is the girl who got away, until he “imprints” upon the infant Renessme, and isn’t that a creepy stance on pedophilia?
And then came Katniss Everdeen.
The Hunger Games was published in 2008, as America was regaining its footing and starting to ask hard questions again about our society, hard questions with no easy answers. And Katniss, the story’s heroine, asked those hard questions for us; she was our rebuttal to Bella Swan.
The book is set in a future North America in which there is only one nation, Panem, which is divided into districts; no individual countries exist. Long ago there was a rebellion; the center of Panem, known only as the Capitol, successfully put it down, but the 13th district was obliterated, its people killed by the rebels before that happened. As a result, and as a continuing punishment to sap the will of the remaining population, the Capitol that one girl and one boy from the remaining 12 districts, each chosen by lottery, must participate in the annual Hunger Games, a brutal gladiatorial event in which the participants – called tributes – fight to the death until the last girl or boy is standing
16 year-old Katness Everdeen lived in District 12, the poorest of the districts with her mother and younger sister. Better at killing squirrels and birds than she is at expressing her emotions, Katniss does what she needs to do to keep her family alive and together. Intrepid, tough, and a skilled hunter, she supplements her family’s table with birds, squirrels, and anything else she can take down with her arrows or bargain for on the black market, despite the automatic death sentence for anyone caught foraging outside the district’s boundaries. When her young sister’s name is pulled in the Hunger Games lottery, Katniss volunteers in her place.
In an article in The Nation, author Katha Pollit described Katniss as “a version of the goddess Artemis, protectoress of the young and huntress with a silver bow and arrows like the ones Katniss carries in the Games. Like the famously virginal goddess, Katniss is an independent spirit: she is not about her looks, her clothes, her weight, her popularity, gossip, drama or boys.”
Thematically, The Hunger Games is about fairness, morality, and the struggle to survive in a world in which the abuse of power is the norm. Katniss was the slate on which Suzanna Collins writes her thesis that the strong must always protect the weak and sick, the young and old; all those who cannot protect themselves. It was this moral coral that drove Katniss. She killed only in self-defense, to stay alive and to win the games for her mother and her sister, for the winners of the Hunger Games became celebrities, rewarded with a life of luxury and ease for themselves and their families.
The Mayan Apocalypse has been averted… but who did it? Superman? The Doctor? Buffy? Chuck Norris? John Constantine? Sam and Dean Winchester? Booster Gold (yeah, right)?
Cast your vote now! We want to know who to put on speed-dial when we have a boom tomorrow. There’s always a boom tomorrow. Sooner or later– BOOM!
One of my favorite episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is Season 2’s “Lie to Me” in which a friend of Buffy’s from her old school in Los Angeles comes to Sunnydale with the (secret) intention of giving Buffy to Spike in exchange for having Spike sire him… i.e., turn him in to a vampire.
Buffy escapes the death trap, and, in the coda, she and Giles are in the cemetery, standing before her friend’s grave.
It turned out that Buffy’s friend was dying (as described by the friend, it sounds like some form of cancer) and he was so desperate to live that he was willing to make the “devil’s bargain” with Spike. Buffy is trying to make sense of this, and as her friend rises from the grave.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” says Buffy.
“You don’t need to say anything,” says Giles.
“It would be simpler if I could just hate him. I think he wanted me to. It’d make it easier for him if he was just the villain of the piece. Really I think he was just scared.”
“Yes, I suppose he was,” says Giles.
“Nothing’s ever simple anymore. I’m constantly trying to work it out. Who to love, or hate, who to trust. Seems the more I know the more confused I get.”
“I believe that’s called growing up.”
“I’d like to stop then, okay?” says Buffy.
“I know the feeling.”
“Does it ever get easy?” Buffy asks her Watcher.
As that moment, Buffy’s friend rises from the grave, a vampire. Buffy makes quick work of him, and as his dust settles to the ground, she stops and looks at it, and continues the conversation.
“Does it ever get easy?
“You mean life?”
“Yes. Does it ever get easy?”
“What do you want me to say?”
Buffy looks at him. “Lie to me.”
Giles pauses for a brief moment before answering.
“Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their horns or their black hats. We always defeat them them and save the day, and no one ever dies, and everyone lives happily ever after.”
“Liar,” Buffy says.
On Friday, December 14, a young man named Adam Lanza killed his mother in their home, and went to the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, CT, and killed six adults, including the principal and the school psychologist, and 20 children, ranging in age from 6 to 8.
Why?
On Friday, December 14, the Michigan State Assembly passed Bill 59, which allows an individual to carry a concealed weapon into what were considered so-called “gun-free” zones: schools, churches, synagogues, mosques (all places of worship), day care centers, sports arenas, bars, hospitals, college and university dorms, and casinos. Governor Snyder said he will sign it.
Local Man Uses Kickstarter to Realize His Hollywood Dreams
Ventura, California – December 7, 2012 – Doing something creative that you love is a challenge. Finding an audience for your work and getting paid for it is even harder. Andres Salazar understands those struggles. Andres is a stand-up comedian, has directed and produced short films, written screenplays even sells his paintings at craft fairs. Most recently Andres has turned to the crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.com to find an audience and realize his dream of being a creator.
His latest project is a graphic novel titled Pariah, Missouri–a supernatural story set in pre-civil war. He wrote it originally as a television pilot script in hopes to get attention from the cable networks. “I pitched it as Deadwood meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but nowadays you gotta have the script, a cast and director attached and half of it shot before they will look at you, and that’s only if you have an agent, manager and have previously worked on three shows,” says Andres.
So instead of beating his head against Hollywood’s doors, he turned to other mediums to tell the tale. “When I conceived Pariah, I wanted something that I could tell graphically since comics have been my love as a kid. It’s much cheaper of course to generate a comic and this is a good way to build a fan-base and that is always something that Hollywood wants to see,” says Andres. Turning an hour drama script into a comic book is not without it’s challenges. An artist needed to be found so Andres turned to sites such as Deviantart.com to find affordable and dependable artists.
“That was a challenge. I mean, I could have drawn it myself, but comic book art takes an incredible amount of time, plus there is value in adding others creative juices to the mix. I was lucky to find a great artist like Jose,” says Andres. Jose Luis Pescador is no stranger to the comic book world. He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and has worked on a number of independent graphic novels and has shown fine art in galleries across the country.
His super-team was assembled, but Andres still needed funding. Enter Kickstarter.com Kickstarter is a new phenomenon in what is dubbed crowdfunding which gives creators a chance realize their ambitions by asking others to “back” their project. From films, music albums to food, Kickstarter generates hundreds of projects daily in the hopes that they meet their funding goal. If the goal is achieved, backers then receive rewards according to their pledge amount.
Having worked for Howard Chaykin as an assistant, Andres learned much of the business from his mentor. Andres also wrote and directed SAG short film After Cheri and stated , “We are very excited about our Kickstarter for Pariah, Missouri! It will be an exciting story for the next 30 days to see how we progress through the campaign. I will be posting videos and updates often so backers really get a sense of the “behind the scenes” of what it takes to make a comic book. Please check us out.”
For a 23 page preview of Pariah, Missouri- go HERE.
Local Man Uses Kickstarter to Realize His Hollywood Dreams
Ventura, California – December 7, 2012 – Doing something creative that you love is a challenge. Finding an audience for your work and getting paid for it is even harder. Andres Salazar understands those struggles. Andres is a stand-up comedian, has directed and produced short films, written screenplays even sells his paintings at craft fairs. Most recently Andres has turned to the crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.com to find an audience and realize his dream of being a creator.
His latest project is a graphic novel titled Pariah, Missouri–a supernatural story set in pre-civil war. He wrote it originally as a television pilot script in hopes to get attention from the cable networks. “I pitched it as Deadwood meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but nowadays you gotta have the script, a cast and director attached and half of it shot before they will look at you, and that’s only if you have an agent, manager and have previously worked on three shows,” says Andres.
So instead of beating his head against Hollywood’s doors, he turned to other mediums to tell the tale. “When I conceived Pariah, I wanted something that I could tell graphically since comics have been my love as a kid. It’s much cheaper of course to generate a comic and this is a good way to build a fan-base and that is always something that Hollywood wants to see,” says Andres. Turning an hour drama script into a comic book is not without it’s challenges. An artist needed to be found so Andres turned to sites such as Deviantart.com to find affordable and dependable artists.
“That was a challenge. I mean, I could have drawn it myself, but comic book art takes an incredible amount of time, plus there is value in adding others creative juices to the mix. I was lucky to find a great artist like Jose,” says Andres. Jose Luis Pescador is no stranger to the comic book world. He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and has worked on a number of independent graphic novels and has shown fine art in galleries across the country.
His super-team was assembled, but Andres still needed funding. Enter Kickstarter.com Kickstarter is a new phenomenon in what is dubbed crowdfunding which gives creators a chance realize their ambitions by asking others to “back” their project. From films, music albums to food, Kickstarter generates hundreds of projects daily in the hopes that they meet their funding goal. If the goal is achieved, backers then receive rewards according to their pledge amount.
Having worked for Howard Chaykin as an assistant, Andres learned much of the business from his mentor. Andres also wrote and directed SAG short film After Cheri and stated , “We are very excited about our Kickstarter for Pariah, Missouri! It will be an exciting story for the next 30 days to see how we progress through the campaign. I will be posting videos and updates often so backers really get a sense of the “behind the scenes” of what it takes to make a comic book. Please check us out.”
Various and sundry thoughts from the mind of Mindy this week:
The USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the eighth U.S. Navy vessel to bear that name, was decommissioned this week after 50 years of service. The world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier made her maiden voyage on January 12, 1962 and her first mission was tracking and monitoring the first orbital flight of Project Mercury, with Lt. Col. John Glenn aboard the Friendship 7 capsule. In popular culture, the Enterprise was the home base of Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) in Top Gun, with the late director Tony Scott filming and incorporating flight deck operations into the film, and it was the flagship of the U.S. Navy fleet participating in The Hunt For Red October.
Then, of course, there is Star Trek – and did you know that Gene Roddenberry’s original starship name was the USS Yorktown? But the fame and status of the sea-going Enterprise led to starship being rechristened the USS Enterprise NC-1701. (Art Director Matt Jeffries – yes, for whom the Jeffries Tubes are named – used the USS Enterprise CVN-65 for scale when designing the original starship.) Star Trek and her fans – through a massive letter writing campaign and, I’m sure, encouraged by not a few NASA employees – returned the favor when NASA’s first Space Shuttle was named Enterprise. And in Star Trek: First Contact, we see that models of all the ships named Enterprise hanging in a showcase in Jean-Luc’s office. (“You broke your little ships,” says Lily Sloane, played by Alfre Woodward, after Picard goes “Ahab” in his desire vengeance against Borg throwing his phaser rifle through the glass walls of the showcase.)
Staying with Star Trek…I just rewatched J.J. Abram’s remake last night, and the more I see it, the more I love it. I continue to be especially impressed by Karl Urban’s Dr. Leonard McCoy – if I closed my eyes, I’d be hard-pressed not to say it was DeForest Kelley speaking.
Again, speaking of “all things Trek” – although I am generally not a fan of comic adaption of live-action TV shows and movies, I gotta say I’m loving IDW’s Star Trek, written by Mike Johnson with art by Claudia Balboni and Stephen Molnar. Johnson is following the original series story lines, with just the right twists of plot to adhere to the “new” Trek and doing an excellent job of capturing the personalities of Kirk/Pine, Spock/Quinto, Scotty/Pegg, Uhura/Saldana and the rest of the crew with his dialogue. Kudos to the entire team!
On the other hand…Dark Horse’s Spike mini-series sucks. I mean, Spike on the moon? Gimme a fucking break! In fact, generally speaking, their whole Buffy line sucks. Really disappointed. Oh, well, dropping it will save me money.
After almost 30 years, my local comics shop, Vector Books, has closed. Joe and Tina and Frank have been a part of my life for all those 30 years, and I wish them love and health and all the best in the future. But a new comics emporium has opened to take over from Vector (and with Vector’s blessing). It’s Manifest Comics And Cards, and I’ll be interviewing its young owner, Michael, in the future to find out how nuts (and brave) he is to open a shop at a time when so many are closing.
What fucking world do the Republicans live in? Who the fuck cares what Grover Norquist thinks? Attention John Boehmer!!!! Your job is to lead, not to follow the bug-fucked extremists and Tea Party wingnuts or to worry about losing your position as Speaker of the House! Get the deal done, for Christ’s sake! You can’t blame Obama this time! Like we said in the 60s, the whole world is watching!
How many of you had to Google labia majora and labia minora from my column last week? (Thanks to Mike Gold for this.)
Over at The League Of Woman Bloggers on Facebook, there is mucho discussion going on about the attack on girl geeks by boy geeks. Much geekiness is ensuing.
Okay, who here is a Homeland fan? Is Brody now a triple agent, again loyal to Nazir? What didn’t he tell Carrie, Saul, and Quinn in the debriefing? What did he make up? (I’m betting the being tied to a car battery part.) How long did it take before you realized that Virgil and Max were in Quinn’s apartment? (I thought they were in Roya’s.) Who is Dar Adal, the guy that Quinn met on the bus? (Yeah, yeah, I know he’s F. Murray Abraham…) Who is Quinn – FBI? Black-ops CIA? Mole? (I don’t think he is – too obvious.) Was the whole “terrorist attack on returning veterans” a MacGuffin, and the real attack is still coming? Is Estes as incompetent as he seems? Why did he send Quinn out to kill Brody? Why did Saul go to Philadelphia, knowing that Quinn would find out? And why does Jessica keep calling her husband by his last name?
