Tagged: Iron Man

The Stars Fall On San Diego

The Stars Fall On San Diego

 

The huge San Diego Comic-Con International has lined up an astonishing number of movie and teevee previews this year. The partial list includes Alien vs. Predator 2: No Peace on Earth; American Gangster; Babylon AD; Balls of Fury; Battlestar Galactica; Beowulf; The Bourne Ultimatum; Coraline; Fred Claus; Get Smart; The Golden Compass; Hellboy 2: The Golden Army; Heroes; I Am Legend; The Incredible Hulk; Indiana Jones 4; Invasion; Iron Man; Lost; National Treasure 2; Resident Evil: Extinction; Speed Racer; The Strangers; Stardust; Star Trek XI; Sunshine; Sweeney Todd; 30 Days of Night; Trick ‘r Treat; Wanted; Where the Wild Things Are and White Out.

Don’t be surprised if many of the actors and creative personnel are there to hawk their efforts. Good grief; I remember all the way back when the San Diego show was actually focused on comic books.

This year’s show will be held at the San Diego Convention Center July 26 through 29. If you don’t already have hotel reservations, make certain you take your passport or birth certificate.

 

DENNIS O’NEIL: Two-Fers, part two

DENNIS O’NEIL: Two-Fers, part two

All hail to thee, Pulpus. Praised be thy name.

What? You don’t know that you’re Pulpus, god of popular culture? Well, if I were you I’d get next to Shrinkus, god of psychotherapy, and do something about your identity crisis. Meanwhile – there are some questions I’d like to ask you.

I assume that part of your duties involve helping the content, as well as the venues, of popular narratives evolve. Now let’s say – we’re just blue-skying here – that there’s a cheaply published vehicle for a certain kind of heroic fiction. Call the vehicle… oh; I dunno – “funnybooks” and the central characters of the fiction… lemme think for a second – “superheroes.” Let’s further suppose that for a long time a lot of people who fancied themselves “respectable” thought that the words “funnybook” were a synonym for illiterate tripe.

Okay, carry our supposition a step further and say you’ve done your work well and both funnybooks and superheroes have become – here’s that word again – respectable. Say that the funny book-inspired kind of fantasy melodrama has become a mainstay of the world of motion pictures. So – as part of the form’s evolution, wouldn’t you want to eliminate the elements that gave “respectable” people an excuse to excoriate these funnybooks? Creative Writing 101 stuff like an overdependence on coincidences, not establishing elements crucial to the narrative, not showing and/or explaining how the good guy accomplishes what he accomplishes…

Being, as you are, the god of popular culture, you would be aware that the funnybooks were occasionally guilty of these sins against what is generally considered good fiction writing, for a number of reasons, including extreme deadline pressure; a lack of sophistication on the part of the funnybook creators, some of whom began in the business when they were quite young; the fact that funnybooks are an extremely compressed kind of storytelling; the further fact that funnybooks developed erratically, without anyone connected with them trying to really understand what they are and how they might best be employed, at least not until pretty recently; and, finally, the disrespect given them even by people whose living and lifestyle – sometimes a very handsome lifestyle, indeed – depended on them, which meant that nobody associated the word “quality” with them, not for a long time, and so nobody tried to define what quality in this context might be.

That was a painfully long sentence. But you’re a god, you can handle it.

Anyway, what I guess I’m asking is, even if certain narrative glitches have often been a part of the funnybook world, may even have contributed to funnybook charm, should they be carried forward and exported to other media doing funnybook-type material? Or would evolution demand that they be eliminated?

Beg pardon? You want to know if I’ve been to the movies recently? Matter of fact, I have. But what has that got to do with anything?

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot…All hail and praise be thy name.

RECOMMENDED READING: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig

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.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Two-Fers, part one

DENNIS O’NEIL: Two-Fers, part one

Mr. Robert Joy, of DC Comics, informs me that Green Arrow and Black Canary are getting married this summer. Allow me to assume a Victorian mien and sniff, “About time.”

How long have they been “going together” anyway? I guess that depends on whether we’re talking about the first Black Canary, Dinah Lance, or her daughter, Dinah Laurel. I confess: I’m no longer sure who was involved with whom, or when, which may mean that senility is knocking at my door, or that the continuity has become a tad confusing.

Well, I am sure of one bit of Black Canariana, and that’s that the hot mama, Dinah Lance, the original Canary, was an alien – even more alien than Superman or the Martian Manhunter. At least The Man of Steel and the green detective from the red planet were of this universe. Not so, Dinah: In one of Julius Schwartz’s annual teamings of the forties superheroes, whose club was called the Justice Society, and the new superheroes, whose club was The Justice League, we saw Dinah’s husband, Larry Lance, die. So grief-stricken was the Canary that she followed the Leaguers into another dimension to insure that she would be free of anything that could remind her of her late spouse. I mean, think about it: another dimension! That makes Superman’s migration from (I guess) another galaxy seem pretty paltry. And the Manhunter’s trip from Mars? Another planet, not only in the same solar system, but one of Earth’s nearest neighbors? Pah! Hardly worth mentioning.

Those annual teamings of the superdoers of different eras is what’s really interesting (and, incidentally, the point of this blather, if it has one.) The reason is this: the stories ran over two issues. If you were born before, oh, say, 1966, you might be asking, so what? Because if you’re that 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. The reason, someone back then told me, was that publishers couldn’t be sure that just because a certain newsstand had this month’s issue of Detective Comics, there was no assurance that it would carry next month’s. Comic book distribution was a hit-or-miss affair in which those involved paid attention to the number of comics entrusted to a given retailer, but none at all to individual titles. Funny animals, superheroes, wacky teenagers – made no difference. It was all just product.

How, then, was Mr. Schwartz able to perpetrate his annual continued stories? I once asked him this and his answer was that he just did it, and no one ever complained. Stan’s answer would be different. I remember that he said somewhere – in his autobiography? – that doing continued stories saved him the trouble of having to think of so many plots – and there, my friends, speaks a true professional!

I don’t think we’ve exhausted this subject so – you guessed it! – you can consider what you’ve just read as Part One, to be continued…

RECOMMENDED READING: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens.

Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like

DENNIS O’NEIL: Dick gets his due

DENNIS O’NEIL: Dick gets his due

 

Back in the halcyon Sixties, when respectability was but a distant glimmer on science fiction’s horizon (and comics were still mired in disrepute), the editor of an SF magazine asked me to review a novel by Philip K. Dick. It wasn’t my first encounter with Mr. Dick; back in St. Louis, before I’d migrated east and gotten into the funny book racket, I’d read a roommate’s copy of Man in the High Castle and found it interesting. I told the editor, sure, be happy to. The book was Galactic Pot Healer. I didn’t like it and wrote the review accordingly.

That doesn’t quite end the story. The review never got into print. It may have been a lousy review – hey, nobody’s perfect – or the fact that the editor was friendly with Mr. Dick may have influenced his decision. No big deal either way,

Cut to a decade or so later: I am in Southern California on a mission for Marvel Comics and I have run out of things to read, and for some reason, there are no places to buy books nearby, and our expense allowances for this particular jaunt do not include car rental. Oh, woe! What is a print junkie to do? Then my fellow Marvel editor and friend Mark Gruenwald comes to the rescue with a copy of Valis, by a writer I knew I didn’t like, the same guy who’d perpetrated Galactic Pot Healer. But a writer I didn’t like is better than no writer at all – remember, I’m a print junkie – and besides Mark, whose acumen I respect, recommends him. I take Mark’s copy of Valis to my room…

And have that rare and wonderful experience of finding what I hadn’t known I was looking for. Dick was writing a kind of fiction unlike any I’d ever encountered – a fiction that dealt with the malleability of reality, the impossibilities of accurate perception, the questions of personal identity and its place in a large context.

I enrolled in the Philip K. Dick Society and delved into the author’s 44 title backlist.

A year ago, someone who shares my DNA found that tattered copy of Galactic Pot Healer on a bookshelf somewhere and I reread it. I can see why I panned it 40 years ago. The writing is only okay, the plot not terribly engaging. But mostly, the book doesn’t deliver what I think I wanted from science fiction in those days, which was closer to space opera than the introspective, sui generis stuff Dick was doing. But in my new capacity as an Ancient, whose tastes have changed somewhat, I could and did enjoy it. It will never be on my Top 10 list, but I don’t regret having experienced it.

I now know that Dick wrote what was labeled “science fiction” only because nobody, maybe including Dick himself, knew what else to call it. Writing in a genre meant that folks who fancied themselves capital L-Literary would not notice the work, and may not have been able to judge its worth if they had. Back then, the rule of thumb was If it’s good it can’t be science fiction. So Dick’s brilliantly original novels were largely ignored during his lifetime.

His reputation has gradually brightened over the years because, among other reasons, his work has inspired a lot of movies, from Blade Runner, completed shortly after his death in 1982, to Next, which I saw last weekend. Now, The Establishment, in the person of the guys who run the Library of America, have further anointed Mr. Dick by bringing out an edition of four of his novels to be offered alongside productions from Twain, Hawthorne, Melville…you know, the gents whose yarns get assigned in Lit. classes. The Dick collection is edited by the increasingly ubiquitous Jonathan Lethem, which, as far as I’m concerned, is icing on the cake.

The novels in the collection are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which became the basis for the aforementioned Blade Runner), The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Ubik. Any one would do for this week’s Recommended Reading.

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.

DENNIS O’NEIL: The kryptonite reality

DENNIS O’NEIL: The kryptonite reality

Once again, life has imitated comics. Maybe comics should sue.

This latest instance was reported in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago and has to do with kryptonite, the stuff from Superman’s planet or origin which can lay the Man of Steel low, or even all the way down. As far as I know, kryptonite was introduced in the early 40s by the writers of the Superman radio show. Since I was only a year or two or three old at the time, I’ll forgive them for not getting in touch with me and telling me why, exactly, they introduced it. But a guess might be: to facilitate conflict, which is widely considered to be a necessary ingredient in drama, and especially melodrama.

These guys – I assume they were guys – and their comic book counterparts were facing a fairly unique problem: how to get their hero in trouble and thus create conflict/drama, and do it not only once, but several times each month, or even more often.

Oh, sure, there had been superhuman characters in world literature and myth before Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, but they were in self-contained stories, and not many of those, and the problem was pretty limited. But with Superman… well, here was a fellow who was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound – and that was when he was in his infancy. (For the record: Superman is only a year older than me. That is, he appeared only about a year before I did, though I gestated for the customary nine months and Supes took a leisurely four years to progress from the imaginations of Joe and Jerry to the public prints. He was a slow developer, but once he got started…) And he literally become more powerful with every passing year. And he had to have a lot of adventures.

So, okay, how do you get this guy in trouble, often, and thus create suspense and interest? The question has been answered in many ways, many times over the years. Kryptonite was one of the earliest of these answers. According to the mythos, it is a fragment of – I guess mineral – from Krypton, where Supes was born. Something in the gestalt of our planet makes kryptonite dangerous to natives of Krypton. (All of which you almost certainly know, but we do try to be thorough here.)

We thought it was fictional. Some of us, of the professional writing ilk, further thought that it was neither more nor less than an answer to a plot problem and at least one of that ilk thought it was overused and temporarily retired it. But now, a Chris Stanley, of London’s Museum of Natural History, analyzed a substance some of his colleagues discovered and, according to the Times, “found that the new mineral’s chemistry matched the description of kryptonite’s composition in last year’s film Superman Returns.”

It is not known whether or not anyone collapsed near the stuff.

At this point, you can either shrug and get on with your life, or pause, and engage in some pretty wild speculation about the nature of reality.

Be warned: We probably aren’t finished with this topic.

RECOMMENDED READING: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like

Iron Man gets real

Iron Man gets real

If the fighter jet scenes in next year’s Iron Man movie look very realistic, that’s because they were filmed at Edwards Air Force Base with about a dozen Marines, 150 Airmen, and real Air Force aircraft – and some of the newest stuff at that!

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Lt. Col. Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard) share what the American Forces Press Service described as a "heated scene" in front of 20 Air Force "pilots" — all active-duty airmen and Marines who auditioned to be extras — between a  F-22 Raptor and a bulb-nosed Global Hawk.

Director Jon Favreau said brought realism to Iron Man.  "This is the best back lot you could ever have," he said. "Every angle you shoot is authentic: desert, dry lake beds, hangars."

"This is a movie about superheroes, and my son might watch it," Sergeant Danny Vaughn told the American Forces Press Service. He’s hoping 7-year-old Danny III will get to see his dad acting as 2nd Lt. Eric Huppert, one of Rhodie’s pilots in the hangar, or as an Army special operations Soldier walking across the camera during the previous day’s shoot.

Iron Man is scheduled for release in May, 2008.

(Special thanks to John Tebbel for the legwork.)

DENNIS O’NEIL: On triskadekaphobia

DENNIS O’NEIL: On triskadekaphobia

Do my hands tremble as I type these words? Are there creaks and groans coming from the room behind me? Is the air chill and sticky?

What could be happening?

Ah, I think I have it! Triskadekaphobia – that must be it! And what is triskadekaphobia? My computer’s dictionary defines it tersely and simply: An irrational or obsessive fear of… (that number between 12 and 14.) (Parentheses and paraphrasing mine.)

This is the that number of these whatever-they-ares that I’ve written and that, my friends, is scary. That it is also irrational goes without saying, at least to the non-believers among you.

My irrational fear of… that number is not exactly new. If you look at any of the comics I’ve written in the last dozen (nor baker’s dozen!) years or so, you won’t find the dialogue balloons and captions on any single page totaling that number unless the editor added or subtracted or conflated something, in which case it’s on his or her head. And if I’m doing a script and reach the end of page 12, I either quit or make myself charge on until I get to page 14, even if I run out of steam half way through that page.

(more…)

Iron Man’s all shiny!

Iron Man’s all shiny!

Thanks, Entertainment Weekly!  This is the shiznit!

Okay, I know lots of people out there liked the old square tincan one, but this — this is sleek and brassy and colorful and… well, it just looks like I’d picture Iron Man’s armor looking.

Kudos to FX guy Stan Winston, who designed them to fit on a real-life and, we’re figuring, increasingly sweaty Robert Downey, Jr.

Also?  IESB has some video from the set of the Iron Man movie.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Tribute to a true master

DENNIS O’NEIL: Tribute to a true master

Kurt Vonnegut is gone.

I’d like to say that I was a bit ahead of the crowd in discovering that, while he was a science fiction writer, he was also much more, but by the publication of Cat’s Cradle in 1963 a lot of people had found this wise, sad, funny man – particularly disaffected young people.

He was often likened to Mark Twain and the comparison’s apt. But while I unstintingly admire Mr. Twain (maybe such admiration is in every Missouri-born writer’s DNA), I think Vonnegut’s quality average may be a bit higher. True, he did not write as much as his predecessor – Twain was astonishingly prolific – but he always seemed to be at or near his best. I can’t remember reading any Vonnegut piece that I thought was second-rate.

He was pessimistic without being sour, famous without egotism, and he had compassion completely devoid of sentimentality. Like Mark Twain, he could voice unpopular opinions without offending those who disagreed with him.

(more…)

Comics soon in a theater near you

Comics soon in a theater near you

  • News
  • April 30, 2007

As a contrast to all the Spider-Man stories this week, Alan Kistler sends us a quick update on other movies in the pipeline:

"This is an interesting week in terms of comic book movies and the like.

Iron Man director Jon Favreau has confirmed that Jeff Bridges will be shaving his head to play the role of Obadiah Stane, who in the comics was a wealthy, sociopathic industrialist who took Tony Stark’s company and manipulated the recovering alcoholic into drinking again.

Rumors are flying that Sarah Michelle Gellar is up for the role of Harley Quinn in the upcoming Batman sequel The Dark Knight, but this has yet to be confirmed by anyone.

And "Moriarty" at Ain’tItCoolNews has posted up a review of an advanced screening of The Transformers. The review is full of spoilers concerning plot, so if you want the gist without having the story ruined for you, here are the highlights:

  • The plot will involve the Allspark cube, analogous to the "Autobot Matrix of leadership" from the original cartoon series.
  • The characters in the film are said to be very accurate to how they were portrayed in the Generation One cartoon series.
  • Optimus Prime is said to have amazing action scenes and is showcased as an incredible warrior.
  • To the satisfaction of older fans, Megatron and Starscream do indeed argue quite a bit.
  • The supporting cast of John Turturro, John Voight and Josh Duhmel are said to give a solid performance.
  • The special effects are supposed to be very good, though it is said that a couple of the robots look odd when speaking with robot lips.
  • There is a criticism that certain characters are not shown enough or given enough to do, as screentime must be focused on explaining the origin and nature of the Transformers.
  • There are supposed to be several references to the old cartoon for fans to enjoy, including lines by Optimus that were lifted from the original series.

Sounds like a great report to me. Here’s hoping the movie lives up to the hype."

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks