It’s our Official Toy Fair 2009 debriefing with some of the finest action figures we’ve seen yet including Strangers in Paradise, Dick Tracy and even The Wolfman. And by the way, someone out there forgot to buy their comics in January and the numbers showed it. Even the President couldn’t stimulate this,
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Reuters is reporting that Warren Beatty is suing the Tribune Company over the film and television rights to Dick Tracy, a character he played in the 1990 film which earned more than $160 million worldwide, but is today most remembered for Madonna’s song "Vogue".
Under the original agreement between Beatty and Tribune, the rights would revert to Tribune if "a certain period of time" lapsed without Beatty having produced another Dick Tracy movie, TV series or TV special, according to court papers.The suit said Tribune sent Beatty a letter on November 17, 2006, that gave him two years to begin production on Dick Tracy programing. Beatty began work on a Dick Tracy TV special on November 8 this year and gave Tribune written notice. Tribune responded by asserting that it still had the right to terminate Beatty’s Tracy rights and effect a reversion, and did so.
The lawsuit seeks a declaration that Beatty’s work on the Dick Tracy TV special precludes Tribune from taking back the rights to the property.
Sadly, I doubt Kyle Baker will want to do the comic book adaptation this time…
Max Allan Collins revisits the world he crafted for Road to Perdition by signing to write and direct movies based on the prose novel sequels, Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise.
Collins will be working with Illinois-based JBM Production Company (Leprechaun) and EMO Films (April Showers).
The prolific crime author wrote Road to Perdition as a graphic novel for DC Comics’ Paradox Press imprint and it was subsequently adapted into a big budget film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. The film, directed by Sam Mendes, won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Cinematography with a nomination for Newman.
The initial story tells of Michael Sullivan, a hitman for he mob, who suddenly becomes the hunted when his son witnesses a murder committed by the son of Sullivan’s boss.
Road to Purgatory will follow the character of Michael Sullivan, Jr., the son of Tom Hanks’ character in the original film, who returns from World War II with a new determination to avenge his murdered father. His quest ultimately leads him to Frank Nitti, whom he is urged to kill on the orders of Al Capone. The second sequel will follow Sullivan’s continued plight.
The original graphic novel, illustrated by Richard Piers Rayner, remains in print as does Road to Perdition: On the Road, collecting the three-part miniseries, illustrated by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Steve Leiber, that covers events concurrent with Perdition.
The novels Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise were released in 2004 and 2005.
In an extensive interview in the current issue of Write Now!, Collins discussed the origins of the entire project. “Very shortly after I lost the Dick Tracy strip, I was scrambling for gigs, including comics work. I had a meeting with Andy Helfer – sitting in a hotel lobby, I believe – where he told me that he was planning to do a series of noir graphic novels, and wanted me to do one. At that time, I was the only comics writer who also had a straight mystery writing career going (not so now), so I was a fairly obvious choice.
“Andy wanted me to do something along the lines of Nathan Heller, but not Heller, something new but in that vein and with that vibe. I’d been toying with a Prohibition era variation on Lone Wolf and Cub, spliced with the historical story of John and Connor Looney, father-and-son gangsters in Rock Island, Illinois, and informed by my heavy interest in the time at John Woo’s Hong Kong crime melodramas, one of which was another Lone Wolf take, Heroes Shed No Tears. I didn’t have anything on paper, but I pitched it, anyway.
“My original title was Gun and Son, which Andy hated. He despised all my punny, jokey titles (Ms. Tree, mystery, get it?). What can I say, I grew up on Chester Gould. What’s good enough for Charles Dickens is good enough for me.
“The only problem came late in the game. We originally were going to do three volumes of Road. I’d done the first two 100-page books (it was designed to be published in three smaller volumes, though it never was) when Andy called and said the publishing program was being scrapped. I had to finish what had been conceived as a 900-page epic in another 100 pages.
“That was tough. It plays well, but I was not able to do everything I planned to do, which is why I did Road to Perdition 2: On the Road.”
Collins went on to write the prose novelization of the film for Pocket Books, but discovered the producers disliked his embellishments. “I was forced to publish a book that was half the length of what I submitted, and I hope one day to have the real novel published. (I was hired to write the novelization of the screenplay based on my own graphic novel, and then forbidden to write new dialogue or background for the characters I’d created.).”
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.
On this day in 1949, Dick Tracy married his sweetie of 18 years, Tess Trueheart. Here’s to the lovebirds.
For over 75 years, this copy has put away more bad guys than Batman, the CSI Guys and Joe Friday combined. He’s gone from comic strips to radio, movie serials, TV, comics and even a big screen flirtation with Madonna. Now there is a group working hard to give Dick Tracy the credit he deserves – and you can help! On other fronts, today’s Big ComicMix Broadcast tells you how NBC makes sure you don’t miss a new show, DC gives you some big hoops to jump through to get variant covers and Canada gets a really cool cartoon channel!
No need to whip out that widescreen surround-sound wristwatch home theater system – just PRESS THE BUTTON!
They don’t draw comic book covers like this any more. And, well, that might be a good thing.
These days, we’re in a phase where covers are particularly boring. When it comes to the great American staple, the heroic fantasy comic, most are over art directed and too posh for their own good. Few actually have anything to do with the story inside; they are simply generic poster shots. When I stare at the big Wall-O-Comics at most shops, my eyes quickly glaze over. They generate little enthusiasm and manage to completely ignore the sense of wonder that makes comics magic. At best, I walk away from the Wall thinking “gee, that Captain America cover sure would make a swell statue.”
Yes, I still use the word “swell.” I’m trying to bring it back.
Look at a few of the really great covers. If you’re at all interested in the genre, how can you pass ‘em up? They are exciting, intriguing and most of all, they appeal to the sense of wonder.
Yeah, they’re all ancient. But don’t try to tell me they’re childish. Putting on a mask and fighting crime and/or evil as the result of some event that wouldn’t even cut it in Greek tragedy is childish. We’re simply negotiating the price.
However, some covers were simply wonderfully absurd. They are so far over the top you’ve just got to check them out. In fact, there are so many of them that there’s an entire website devoted to the topic, run by cartoonist Scott Shaw!. It’s called Oddball Comics and you’ve got to check it out. He’s got about a trillion such covers there. But I don’t know if he’s got my all-time favorite comic book cover.
(If) you’re…young; you don’t remember a time when continued stories were rare. But until Stan Lee made them standard procedure at Marvel in the 1960s, they were next to unheard-of.
Those words seem familiar to you? Certainly not, unless you read this department’s blather three weeks ago, when I began a discussion of continued stories in comics, where they – the words – appeared in a slightly different form. And in reprinting them, in a column which is – let’s face it – a continuation of a previous one, I’ve tried to deal with a paramount problem writers face when doing continued narratives: clueing in readers who either don’t remember the earlier stuff or are new to the series.
There is a difference between continuing characters and continuing stories. Continuing characters have been with us a very long time. Even if you ignore the many tales of the various gods and goddesses, those rascals, you can find a continuing character as early as 428 BC, give or take a few years, when Sophocles followed up his smash hit Oedipus Rex with a sequel featuring the same poor bastard, Oedipus at Colonus. Then, over the centuries, there have been various adventures of King Arthur’s knights and other heroes. But these were not continued stories, not exactly. An adventure or episode ended and the characters went into Limbo and reappeared to solve new problems and encounter new hassles. That kind of storytelling continued through the invention of high speed printing, which made books relatively cheap and accessible at about the same time that a lot of people were learning to read.
Which brings us to the pulp magazines, a publishing form that began about 1910 and was one with the dinosaurs by the middle 50s. A lot of these cheaply produced entertainments featured continuing heroes. (We’ve discussed perhaps the greatest of them, The Shadow, in this department earlier, and I won’t be surprised if he gets mentioned here again.) Meanwhile, over in another medium, movies were also featuring continuing heroes, ranging from that loveable scamp Andy Hardy to a legion of bad guy quellers, including noble cowpokes and suave detectives. And…in yet another medium, that newfangled radio was presenting weekly dramas about cowboys and detectives and police officers and even federal agents, like the movies only more often. And…here might be an appropriate place to mention comic strips, which began doing stories, as opposed to daily jokes, in 1929 with Burne Hogarth’s comic’s adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan, and since the introduction of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy in 1931, were sometimes stretching plots over many weeks.
Those were continued stories featuring, of course, continuing characters. But there were others…Oh my goodness, look! We’re almost at the limit of our allotted word count and we have so much more to discuss. I suppose I could go on for a couple of paragraphs more, but that wouldn’t begin to exhaust the topic, so I guess we’ll just have to – yes! – continue this next week.
RECOMMENDED READING: The Creators, by Daniel J. Boorstin
Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.
Artwork copyright Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved.
Once upon a time, mystery writer Max Allan Collins (Road To Perdition, CSI, Dick Tracy) teamed up with his pal Terry Beatty to create one of the longest-running independently-owned hardboiled crime comics, Ms. Tree. It enjoyed a long and healthy life, outlasting several of its publishers.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I edited the last lengthy run of the character over at DC Comics, where we produced ten novelette-length stories.
Now the indomitable private eye is making her return – not as a comic book, but as a prose novel written by Max Allan Collins and published this December by Hard Case Crime, who handles writers such as Pete Hamill, Stephen King and Ed McBain. I’m happy to report co-creator Terry Beatty is not being left out of the action: as you can see from the above illustration, Terry has contributed the cover painting to Deadly Beloved, "the first ever Ms. Tree Novel." This puts Terry alongside such masters as Robert McGinnis, Arthur Suydam and Bill Nelson.
All I can say is, well, hell, it’s about time.
Artwork copyright Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty. All Rights Reserved.
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Much as the crime melodrama had helped to define the course of cinema – especially so, from the start of the talking-picture era during the late 1920s – so Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy proved a huge influence upon the comic-strip industry, beginning in 1931. It was something of a foregone conclusion that the paths of Tracy and the movies should intersect, and none too soon.
It took some time for both the talking screen and Dick Tracy to find their truer momentum. Bryan Foy’s Lights of New York (1928), as the first all-talking picture, marked a huge, awkward leap from the part-talking extravagances of 1927’s The Jazz Singer. And Lights of New York proved impressive enough (despite its clunky staging and the artists’ discomfort with the primitive soundtrack-recording technology) to snag a million-dollar box-office take and demonstrate a popular demand for underworld yarns with plenty of snarling dialogue and violent sound effects. Gould launched Tracy with a passionate contempt for the criminal element but made do with fairly commonplace miscreants until his weird-menace muse began asserting itself decisively during 1932-1933.
Chet Gould’s fascination with such subject matter, as seen from a crime-busting vantage as opposed to the viewpoint of outlawry, appears to have influenced Hollywood as early as 1935 – when William Keighley’s “G” Men and Sam Wood’s Let ’Em Have It arrived as trailblazing heroic procedurals. These watershed titles posed a stark contrast against such antiheroic sensations as Roland West’s Alibi and The Bat Whispers (1929-1930), William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), and Mervin LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931). It bears wondering whether Edward Small, producer of Let ’Em Have It, may have taken a cue from Tracy, for the film pits an FBI contingent against a disfigured human monster (played by King Kong’s Bruce Cabot) whose scarred face and vile disposition seem of a piece with the grotesques whom Gould would array against Dick Tracy.
I’ve been on a renewed Tracy kick since the arrival last year of IDW Publishing’s The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, a debut volume covering 1931-1933 (the second volume, going up to 1935, was released earlier this month). The interest extends to a re-watching of the Tracy movies that began in 1937 with Republic Pictures’ Dick Tracy serial. Cable-teevee’s Turner Classic Movies has staged recent revivals of the (considerably later) Tracy feature-films from RKO-Radio Pictures, and various off-brand DVD labels have issued dollar-a-disc samplers of the (still later) live-action Tracy teleseries. An audio-streaming Website has come through with two Tracy-spinoff record albums from the post-WWII years; one, The Case of the Midnight Marauder, involves a ferocious encounter with Gould’s most memorable bad guy, Flattop. (The less said, the better, about UPA Studios’ animated Tracy series of 1961. And likewise for Warren Beatty’s 1990 Dick Tracy, which commits the sin of “cartooning the cartoon,” its live-action basis notwithstanding.)
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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