There’s a lot of chatter about an event that may or may not happen tomorrow.
(SPOILER: It won’t happen. See Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32.)
For what will become obvious reasons, it reminded me of this story from John Ostrander and David Lloyd from Wasteland #3, February 1988 from DC Comics.
As for me, I plan to spend Friday night going out and leaving strategically placed piles of clothes and shoes.
Artwork ©1988 DC Comics.
We’ve received all the covers for DC Comics August solicitations, and Flashpoint promises that worlds will live, worlds will die, and the DC Universe will never be the sa– oh, sorry, that was the tagline for Crisis On Infinite Earths, back when I worked at Flashpoint. I’m so confused…
My favorite item for the month is pictured above, the Sergio Aragones version of Batman from Batman: Black & White. But there are some absolute art gems here, including Darwyn Cooke’s JSA cover, and Frank Quitely’s redoing of Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson’s cover for [[[Green Lantern]]] #52.
As for the rest of the books, take a look… as usual, spoilers ahead:
I’ve checked with my cadre of DC contributors, staffers and fans current and past. While it’s impossible to decide on an exact number, the consensus is that in the past ten years the teevee series Smallville painstakingly built a cohesive and linear universe of DC characters while, at the same time, DC Comics reinvented itself in whole or in substance approximately 14 thousand times. Guess which was more entertaining.
And now Smallville’s gone. Pushed out of the way for still another Superman movie that, like the comic books, gets to ignore everything that has gone before it. That’s not entirely bad: Superman Returns was so awful I was thinking of getting rid of the memories by electroshock therapy.
Instead, I watched Smallville. At first I was there out of professional and fanboy curiosity. It was good but not great, and I stuck with it because my wife enjoyed the show. In time, Michael Rosenbaum’s performance as Lex Luthor grabbed me, and when they introduced John Glover as his eviler father, the tension between the two was riveting. When they brought Green Arrow in (using the Grell costume) and started really building their version of the DC universe, I got absorbed.
Then they brought in Erica Durance as Lois Lane. I enjoyed her performance and her character so much I felt like I was betraying my own childhood. More DC characters were introduced, heroes and villains alike. As they moved away from the Kryptonite-villain of the week and developed Zod, Darkseid, and the first interesting Toyman ever, Smallville moved towards the top of my TiVo must-record list. After ten seasons the show had more storylines going on than Soap – but by the time that final episode aired last night, they had resolved or at least tied-up just about everything. It was remarkable; the fact that so many of the actors from earlier seasons returned was even more remarkable.
At its best, Smallville has been about the human drama, and its science-fiction environment rarely mitigated this. It is in this spirit that the two-hour finale was produced. Some might find this to be overbearing; respectfully, I think those people have missed the point. If you take this element out of the story, all you have left is a comic book – in the most clichéd and repellant sense of the term.
The production team also avoided the trap of giving each character their moment to shine. Whereas most had sufficient screen time, this last episode was all about Clark Kent, as it was, by and large, from the very beginning of the series.
This is not to say that there isn’t a kick-ass story here. Two of them, in fact, with enough villains to fill the Justice League’s dance card. Darkseid, Granny Goodness, Lionel Luthor, and of course, his son Lex.
The finale was not flawless. For one thing, everybody showed a lack of respect for how gravity works, not to mention security on Air Force One. The big scene between Lex and Clark was pretty much lifted from The Dark Knight; thankfully, both the characters and the performers make it their own. Technically, this show was at least as proficient as teevee gets. If it were a theatrical movie, it would have been in 3-D, and that would have screwed the pooch.
Teevee is teevee. It’s not comics, and shows come and go all the time. Smallville’s decade was a remarkable achievement, and it set the high-water mark for superhero television.
At the end of the ten-year day, you will believe a man should fly.
This has not been a good week for comics on TV.
On Tuesday, Fox announced that it was canceling [[[Human Target]]] (starring Mark Valley, Chi McBride, and Jackie Earl Haley and based on the DC Comics character created by Len Wein, Carmine Infantino, and Dick Giordano) after two seasons, and also declined to pick up Locke & Key, the pilot from Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the minds behind Fringe and the Star Trek reboot) based on the IDW comic from Joe Hill.
Now word has come from Deadline Hollywood that NBC will not be picking up [[[Wonder Woman]]], the series that would have been produced by David E. Kelley and starred Adrianne Palacki as the amazing Amazon.
Between these developments, and Smallville ending its decade long run tonight, we are suddenly going from a lot of comics adaptations in broadcast prime time to none at all for the first time since 1996– and that was when Sabrina the Teenage Witch first aired.
Right now, all eyes are on whether Disney’s fabled corporate synergy will mean sister companies Marvel and ABC will go ahead with a new version of Hulk with Guillermo del Toro and David Eick, and/or AKA Jessica Jones with Melissa Rosenberg– or whether they’ll be shunted to ABC Family or some such solution.
Those of us who enjoy the ancient and nearly-dead form of the newspaper comic strip know that the first successful regularly published strip was Bud Fisher’s Mutt & Jeff. It was enormously popular, running from 1907 through 1982, and reprints remain available each day online through various newspapers and through the gocomics.com service. Yes, it’s dated and the best stuff – the original strips that were actually done by Fisher – are quite good, if you are in for that sort of thing. I most certainly am.
Mutt & Jeff went on to Broadway, to silent pictures, to animation, and to a strong and ongoing presence in comic books starting in 1919 with a series of reprints from Cupples and Leon. When the contemporary comic book started in the mid-30s, Mutt & Jeff were right there from day one, in the first issue of the first regularly published comic book, Famous Funnies. The duo and their entourage continued in comic books published by Dell, DC and Harvey until 1965; the overwhelming majority coming from DC Comics in All-American Comics and in their eponymous title, which ran for 103 issues.
So it was with amusement and some surprise that I greeted today’s reprint (above) on gocomics.com. You see, I’m also a Smothers Brothers fan. The still-performing team is enormously talented, politically erudite, and very, very funny. What amused me is that today’s Mutt & Jeff gag was lifted, lock, stock but no music, from a classic Smothers Brothers routine. It’s so classic that I have even played it on my Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind show on getthepointradio.com.
The routine was the very first track of the Smothers Brothers’ very first album, released way back in 1962. It was written by Tommy’s friend, the brilliant Pat Paulsen. Later that decade, Pat became a featured performer on the SmoBro hit variety show, and he ran for president (in the sense that Pogo and Alfred E. Neuman ran for president) in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1988 and 1992. The song was called “Chocolate” and was part of their stand-up act for over fifty years.
Well, it you’re going to steal, you should steal from the best.
The press release came out late yesterday:
Gregory Noveck has been named to the newly created position of Senior Vice President, Production, Syfy Films, charged with launching projects for the new film company which the two companies announced in December. Noveck will report jointly to Mark Stern, President of Original Content, Syfy and Co-Head of Content for Universal Cable Productions, and Co-Chairman, Universal Pictures, Donna Langley. Noveck will work closely with the Universal and Syfy creative teams to find projects to develop by leveraging Syfy’s experience in developing genre content.
Noveck most recently served as Senior Vice President, Creative Affairs and Executive Producer for DC Comics where he established a new Film and TV division to help deliver quality content by mining the extensive DC Comics library. Feature projects included Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Watchmen, Red (for Summit Entertainment), and the upcoming Green Lantern, with television projects ranging from Smallville and Human Target to over ten animated DTV features. Prior to that he was Senior Vice President of Silver Pictures Television, developing and producing series and pilots for producer Joel Silver. Noveck previously served as Senior Vice President, Creative Affairs and Producer at Platinum Studios, where he established and grew the Creative Affairs department for Film and Television, overseeing all aspects of production and development. Projects included Cowboys & Aliens (Universal/DreamWorks) and Jeremiah (Showtime).
Syfy Ventures and Universal Pictures joined forces in December 2010 to create Syfy Films, a new film company that will develop and produce Syfy branded theatrical motion pictures to be distributed by Universal. The new entity will leverage Syfy’s genre expertise to produce human and relatable theatrical releases from the worlds of science fiction, fantasy, supernatural and horror. Beginning in 2012, Syfy Films will distribute one to two films a year through Universal Pictures. Mark Stern and Donna Langley jointly oversee the operation.
Very interesting. Diane Nelson is consolidating her position.
As for Gregory, he’s certainly shown the ability to do a lot with limited budgets, which will serve him well at his new job, as Syfy, and Universal’s new owner Comcast, have a reputation for keeping a tight control on purse strings. We wish him the best of luck.
We’ve received all the covers for DC Comics July solicitations, including the long awaited Games, the New Teen Titans graphic novel from Marv Wolfman and George Pérez. And when I say long awaited, I mean two decades long– which kinda ties in with all the DC Retroactive titles coming out, including our favorite, Green Lantern reuniting the team of ComicMix contributors Dennis O’Neil and Mike Grell.
Take a look.
Another April Fool’s Day has come and gone, leaving in its wake a trail of confusion as comics news sites posted fake news article after fake news article in an attempt to hoax their audiences into believing things that couldn’t possibly be true.
Naturally, ComicMix condemns all such shenanigans as juvenile and unworthy.
All the same, now that we’ve had a day or two to process, there have been six recent happenings in the comics world that stood out as so weird, so unlikely, that we were completely floored when they turned out to be true. But don’t take our word for it, take a look below.
Stan Lee and Arnold Schwarzenegger are teaming up for The Governator, a comic and TV show detailing the adventures of the ex-Governor of California, ex-King of Aquilonia as he teams up with a precocious pre-teen hacker to fight crime. This is a thing that’s going to happen. Not a joke. We couldn’t believe it either. You’d think after Peter Paul and the Clintons Stan would stay clear of politicians.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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