Tagged: Marvel Comics

Americans spend half of their leisure time online

News
May 24, 2007

It’s not all that surprising, but still shocking when you see it spelled out: Americans now spend roughly half of their spare time online during a typical weekday, according to the Netpop I Play report from Media-Screen, and more than half of this time is spent on entertainment and communications activities.

Forty-eight percent of young broadband users say they learn about entertainment through their online community of social networking sites, blogs, review sites and video sharing sites. Only a quarter of them say they learn about entertainment options through television. And that’s why Paul McCartney debuted his latest music video on YouTube last night.

Meanwhile, TV networks devalue their own brands by running advertisements for shoddy products, as Mark Cuban points out — which, come to think of it, has an eerie parallel in DC and Marvel Comics’s recent moves of dumping unsold ad inventory to put in house ads or ads for comics stores.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Dick gets his due

News
May 22, 2007

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.

MARTHA THOMASES: Hey, Kids! Comics!

News
May 19, 2007

Once a week, I volunteer in the pediatric department of a local hospital. I teach knitting to kids and caregivers. I’d like to say I do this because I’m a spiritual person, more evolved than you – better, in fact – but that’s not true. I do it because it’s the best part of my week, and whatever problems I might have in my adult life disappear when I spend a few hours with these kids. It gives me a chance to talk about color and texture and sheep instead of war and money and politics.

Because I go to the hospital on Wednesdays, I stop on the way at the local comic book near the subway for my weekly fix. The subway ride is long enough to read at least one book, and sometimes I get uptown early enough to sit in a playground and read more, weather permitting.

For the past few months, when I’ve bought a Simpsons comic or the Jonny DC Legion series, I’ve given them away at the hospital. Again, this isn’t altruism, but efficiency. There are enough comics in my apartment without adding any extras.

I’d give them all away, but most comics are too serialized to give away at random, and it is not my wish to see these kids in the hospital every week. It would be better for them to get better and go home. And I’m not giving a kid Garth’s Wormwood, no matter what.

This may surprise you, but children are excited to get comics. They like them. Even in a room filled with computers and video games and flat screen televisions (and flowers and get well cards and relatives), kids put down what they’re doing and start leafing through the pages, looking at the colorful pictures.

For more than twenty years, those of us who love comics have insisted that the medium is one that can support great literature and complex ideas. We’re right. We’ve said “Comics aren’t just for kids,” and that’s true. Just as prose can be written for different audiences, graphic storytelling can reach many different audiences and tastes.

And yet, for some reason, a lot of people think that comics shouldn’t be for kids. I’m not just talking about the arts police, the ones who think every kind of entertainment needs a rating and a warning sticker. When I worked at a major comics publisher, my boss (who was a vice-president of marketing) once explained to me how the company would make plenty of money if no kid ever bought another comic, and our audience was exclusively males in the prized 18-to-25 demographic.

Even those who aren’t in it for the money often think that comics for kids aren’t necessary. In the early days of the direct market, when there were suddenly all kinds of comics for all kinds of niche tastes (“The Good Old Days”), I would often go to a local store with my toddler son. I’d buy a variety of comics, including a fair number of independents, but the emphasis for me has always been super-heroes. The clerk would sneer at me as he added up the prices on the colorful covers. “I don’t read this crap,” he would say. “I prefer the more challenging literature. Like Love and Rockets.”

No disrespect meant to Los Bros Hernandez, whose work I admire greatly, but I don’t find them to be the ultimate literary expression available to humanity (nor do they, I suspect). And why should I feel defensive about my purchases? It’s no surprise to me that this store is no longer in business. The stores that survive in the competitive Manhattan market are the ones that understand that all kinds of customers enjoy all kinds of comics.

Even these good comic book stores have relatively few comics for kids. American publishers aren’t publishing them. Manga is great, but there’s an awful lot of it, with lots of extended stories, and it’s hard for a newbie to jump in without a guide.

Comics may not be just for kids anymore, but do we have to shut them out?

Writer and creator of Marvel Comics’ Dakota North and contributor to their Epic Illustrated, Martha Thomases also has toiled for such publishers as DC Comics and NBM before becoming Media Queen of ComicMix.com.

Today’s comics movie casting news

News
May 16, 2007

In addition to the news about Lionsgate acquiring distribution rights to Frank Miller’s film version of The Spirit, we wanted to pass along a couple of casting notes:

Thomas Jane tells Ain’t It Cool News (in a very strange email) that he’s dropped out of the sequel to The Punisher, said to be darker and grittier than the original, if such a thing is possible.

And Slice of SciFi is reporting that Angel and Bones star David Boreanaz has auditioned for the title role in Marvel’s upcoming flick based on the Sub-Mariner comics. Can a Namor "comiquette" be far behind (pun intended)?

Could it be… magic?

News
May 11, 2007

Some of us are total suckers for magic. I mean, let’s be honest, all that super-science stuff that purports to explain how people have superpowers and everything — how different is that really than just saying "He flies? She shoots beams from her eyes? It’s magic!"

To some of us it’s all much of a muchness, but superhero comics universes are peculiar about that sort of thing, they seem to demand differing levels of disbelief-suspension depending on whether we’re talking about Batman or the Spectre, Spidey or Dr. Strange.

At both Marvel and DC, magic is a part of their fictional universes but, like religion, is usually distinguished from the mythmaking involving superscience. The DC Universe has had a number of recent stories dealing with a transformation of how magic works in that fictional milieu, and now Marvel’s about to undergo a similar shift in their interpretation of the fantastic.

For my money, even though I’m not paying for it, the best story currently dealing with DC’s attitude towards magic and superheroes is the Doctor Thirteen backup tale currently running in Tales of the Unexpected, wherein superscience and magic and nonsense and fourth-wall breaking all collide in a fun romp that proves DC is well schooled on how to puncture its own pomposity. Maybe it’s not Ambush Bug-level surreality, but you can’t go wrong with talking pirate gorillas, parodies of the 52 writers, and Infectious Lass.

Now Marvel’s gearing up for their own big magic event this summer, Mystic Arcana, leading off with, appropriately enough, a Magik one-shot written by one of my personal heroes, Louise Simonson. Firm believers in not being able to tell the players without a scorecard, Marvel’s also bringing out a companion guide called Mystic Arcana: The Book of Marvel Magic, 64 pages of bios and character sketches and probably not storytelling.

Meanwhile, Scott at Polite Dissent decries the use of the "humans only use 10% of their brains" misinformation employed so often in comic book fiction as a way of introducing magical (or even superhuman) abilities. Dang, there goes about 90% of the captioning for future origin stories!

Tim Roth in Incredible Hulk 2

News
May 10, 2007

Tim Roth, who played favorite characters in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Planet of the Apes, has been cast as The Abomination in the upcoming Incredible Hulk movie, according to Variety.

Roth will star opposite Edward Norton and Liv Tyler, as Bruce Banner and Betty Ross respectively. The movie is scheduled to be released next summer, on June 13.

Abomination is the alter ego of Emil Blonsky, a Russian spy who Hulks out. If you want to see Tim Roth before June, he stars in Youth Without Youth this fall, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Spider-Man 3: woulda, shoulda

News
May 9, 2007

Ouch ouch ouch. A brutal recap of the film. Examples:

A huge crane swings around, very specifically knocking some floors out of the building where Gwen Stacey has a modeling job. She ends up hanging from something way up high. Down on the ground, Captain Stacey meets up with Eddie Brock, who is photographing the whole thing.

EDDIE: Hey, isn’t that your daughter in deadly danger?

CAPTAIN: *yawn*

EDDIE: Shouldn’t you be doing something?

CAPTAIN: Nah, these days we more or less just wait for Spider-Man. This is the best job ever!

EDDIE: By the way, I’m dating Gwen for some reason, although I too don’t seem especially concerned. Let me take pictures.

Spider-Man arrives and saves the day, despite nearly being thwarted by some errant CGI.

This, along with a brief discussion of ECMLS, is worth a read.

Tom Artis’ Marvel Kids

News
May 6, 2007

Our friend Doug Rice passed this unpublished story along to me, and I wanted to share at least the splash panel with you ComicMixers out there. It lead off a 1993 project called “The Marvel Kids” – its intent is obvious from the art.

Doug wrote the job, and our late buddy Tom Artis was the penciller. Al Vey rounded it off with the inks. It’s a shame the project didn’t go anywhere, as the creative team had more wit and charm than a barrel of pie-throwing monkeys at a Cirque Du Soleil gig.

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Spider-Man 3’s spectacular overkill

News
May 6, 2007

It helps to remember, now that a third Spider-Man epic has arrived to herald the school’s-out season at the box office, that the title character had started out as the comic-book industry’s least likely recruit to the ranks of super-heroism.

The idea of a human being with the proportionate strength of a spider had been kicking around since the 1950s. Comic-book pioneers Joe Simon and Jack Kirby seem to have arrived there first, with an undeveloped concept known as the Silver Spider. The inspiration ran afoul of a publishers’ bias against spiders and other such crawly creatures, the bankable success of Batman notwithstanding. But Simon and Kirby steered the basic notion into print in 1959 with a change-of-species Archie Comics series called The Fly – capitalizing upon an unrelated but like-titled hit movie of 1958.

By the early 1960s, Kirby was slumming at a low-rent publishing company that was soon to become the influential Marvel Comics. Kirby and writer Stan Lee had recently found competitive leverage with a band-of-heroes comic called The Fantastic Four – grimmer and edgier than the fare offered by big-time DC Comics. DC’s Superman and Batman franchises anchored a line of costumed heroes who got along well enough to have formed a super-heroes’ club.

Lee and Kirby’s retort to DC Comics’ Justice League magazine had been a Fantastic Four whose members quarreled and exchanged threats and insults. After Kirby had raised the Silver Spider as a prospect, Lee and Steve Ditko envisioned Spider-Man as a teen-age nebbish, afflicted with superhuman abilities by a bite from a radioactive spider. Artists Kirby and Ditko combined qualities of strength and neurosis in the character design: Superman’s alter-ego, Clark Kent, wore eyeglasses and feigned social withdrawal as a disguise; Spider-Man’s alter-ego, Peter Parker, wore eyeglasses because he was a nearsighted dweeb.

The embryonic Marvel Comics, having little to lose and plenty to prove, launched Spider-Man in a failing magazine and hoped that somebody might notice. Sales figures spiked against expectations. Lee’s unsophisticated attempts at philosophical depth struck comic-book readers of the day as comparatively profound. Spider-Man’s début in his own title involved a violent misunderstanding with the members of the Fantastic Four.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies date from times more recent (2002-and-counting), but they recapture well that early stage of 45 years ago in which Peter B. Parker, alias Spider-Man, marks time between altercations by wondering whether he deserves to be saddled with such responsibility. Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (2004) is generally regarded as one of the more mature-minded comic-book films, reconciling sensationalism with provocative ideas.

Editor’s Note: SPOILERS after the jump…

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MARTHA THOMASES: 52-Skiddoo

News
May 5, 2007

This is the week that DC’s 52 came to a close. The company’s first attempt at a weekly comic since Action Comics Weekly more than 15 years ago, unless you count Mike Carlin’s interconnecting but freestanding Superman series. It was, by most accounts, a commercial and critical success. 52 re-defined what comics can do, as narrative and as pop culture events.

When I was a kid, a comic event was a much smaller achievement. I started reading comics when I was five (for those of you keeping track at home, that was 1958). My parents would go to the train station on Sunday mornings to pick up the just-delivered New York Times, and I’d get to buy a comic. One comic. Because it had to last all week, I wanted the one with the most story. Eventually, after lots of trial and error, I decided that DC was the best for me.

It’s not that I didn’t sample Marvel. I did. But the book I tried had a story that was continued next month. When I looked for the next issue thirty pulse-pounding days later, it wasn’t there. Newsstand distribution was like that. I was happier getting a DC book, with two – sometimes even three – complete stories in each issue.

(Kids today, they have it easy. They can buy multi-part stories in trade paperback collections. In my day, we had to walk to the convenience store, picking up deposit bottles so we could afford to buy comics that might not even make it to the racks. In the snow! With no shoes!)

This is not to say we didn’t enjoy events. I remember in 1961, when there was a “novel-length” (that meant it took up a whole issue) story, “The Death of Superman,” that made me cry when Krypto said goodbye. There were Wonder Woman stories where she used a Paradise Island computer to imagine what it would be like to have adventures with herself as a baby (Wonder Tot) and a teenager (Wonder Girl). Basically, just being allowed to get a comic was enough of an event.

In those days it was assumed that most kids would read comics for a couple of years in grade school, then discover the opposite sex and go one to other amusements. There was no reason to worry about continuity, because no one expected the readers to stick around long enough to notice.