Tagged: Superman

2006 Eagle Awards Announced

2006 Eagle Awards Announced

Since you couldn’t watch a new episode of Doctor Who this past Saturday, maybe you were at the Eagle Awards, as part of the Bristol International Comic Expo.

Established in 1976 by Mike Conroy, the Eagles are the comics industry’s longest established awards. Acknowledged as the pre-eminent international prizes, they have been featured on the covers of leading US and UK titles across the last three decades with such diverse titles as X-Men, Swamp Thing, Preacher, 2000 AD and MAD among those proud to display the Eagle Award emblem.

Winners are after the jump.

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Pros name 50 most influential visual effects film

Pros name 50 most influential visual effects film

On Friday, the Visual Effects Society announced the results of a membership poll, naming the 50 most influential films of all time in terms of special effects.  According to VES Executive Director Eric Roth, hese films have had a significant, lasting impact on the practice and appreciation of visual effects as an integral, artistic element of cinematic expression and the storytelling process."

Comics fans will be arguing about the placement of Sin City (43) and Superman (44).  No other comic book-inspired films made the list.

The films will be the backdrop of the 2007 VES Festival of Visual Effects, which those of you in Los Angeles can enjoy at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills from June 7 through June 10.  There, a panel that includes Douglas Trumbull, Richard Edlund, Dennis Murren and maybe John Dykstra (he’s tentative as we write this) will discuss the list. 

After the jump, the whole list.

 

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MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies

I’ve gone into some detail elsewhere about how my Forgotten Horrors series of movie encyclopedias (1979 and onward) dovetails with my collaborative comic-book efforts with Timothy Truman and John K. Snyder III. More about all that as things develop at ComicMix. This new batch of Forgotten Horrors commentaries will have more to do with the overall relationship between movies and the comics and, off-and-on, with the self-contained appeal of motion pictures. I have yet to meet the comics enthusiast who lacks an appreciation of film.

Although it is especially plain nowadays that comics exert a significant bearing upon the moviemaking business – with fresh evidence in marquee-value outcroppings for the Spider-Man and TMNT franchises and 300 – the greater historical perspective finds the relationship to be quite the other way around.

It helps to remember a couple of things: Both movies and comics, pretty much as we know them today, began developing late in the 19th century. And an outmoded term for comics is movies; its popular usage as such dates from comparatively recent times. The notion of movies-on-paper took a decisive shape during the 1910s, when a newspaper illustrator named Ed Wheelan began spoofing the moving pictures (also known among the shirtsleeves audience as “moom pitchers” and “fillums”), with cinema-like visual grammar, in a loose-knit series for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American.

Christened Midget Movies in 1918, Wheelan’s series evolved from quick-sketch parodies of cinematic topics to sustained narratives, running for days at a stretch and combining melodramatic plot-and-character developments with cartoonish exaggerations. Wheelan’s move to the Adams Syndicate in 1921 prompted a change of title, to Minute Movies. (Don Markstein’s Web-based Toonopedia points out that the term is “mine-yute,” as in tiny, rather than “minnit,” as in a measure of time. No doubt an intended sense of connection with the Hearst trademark Midget Movies.) Chester Gould showed up in 1924 with a Wheelan takeoff called Fillum Fables – seven years before Gould’s more distinctive breakthrough with Dick Tracy.

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Superman Returns wins most Saturn Awards

Superman Returns wins most Saturn Awards

Variety reports that Superman Returns was top movie winner at the Saturn Awards.  These awards are presented by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.

Superman Returns won as best fantasy film, best director (Bryan Singer), best actor (Brandon Routh), best script (Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty) and best score (John Ottman). 

Children of Men was the best science fiction film, The Descent was the best horror film, and Cars was the best animated film.

Heroes was awarded the prize as best network television show, and Battlestar Galactica won for best cable or syndicated series.  Masi Oka and Hayden Panettiere took best supporting actor and actress awards.

Full list after the jump…

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MIKE GOLD: Who’s The Biggest Neurotic in Comics?

MIKE GOLD: Who’s The Biggest Neurotic in Comics?

After 45 years of Spider-Man and, I dunno, maybe 25 years since Batman became a certifiable nut-job, it is understandable that the question “who is the biggest neurotic in comics?” surfaces from time to time.

First, a caveat. I’m only referring to fictional characters. If we add in the real folks, well, there’s a limit to bandwidth – even here at ComicMix.com.

To me, there’s one clear winner. But this character is in good company, as some of the closest runners up were published by the same outfit. I’ll start there, in the hallowed halls of Harvey Comics.

These guys specialized in loons. Kiddie loons at that. Man, the whole bunch of them must have had really bizarre childhoods.

Third runner up: Richie Rich. If not for our winner, he would be poster boy for OCD. Okay, the kid’s wealthier than Joe Kennedy after a mob shipment, so he’s going to have some strange habits. But he, like his father, has dollar signs on everything. Everything. His house, his cars, his clothes – even his dog. The dog named “Dollar.” Good grief.

Second runner up: Hot Stuff. Okay, he’s a little devil. Get it? Fine. But, damn, he’s also a little prick. I mean it: the kid lives for the thrills of obnoxiousness. He even pissed off the sun. You know, that big yellow thing in the sky that gives Superman his powers? Here’s the proof, in one of my all-time favorite comic book covers:

First runner up and Mr. Congeniality: Baby Huey’s father. Now, clearly, Baby Huey has the worst case of microcephaly ever and as such deserves our sympathy. So does his mother, who laid the egg and hatched a baby that quickly became perhaps 20 times her size and about a thousand times her weight. And we can cut Huey’s dad some slack as his son was, like, nine feet tall (rather large for a duck), incredibly stupid, and wore diapers. That’s got to be a bit embarrassing at the Kiwanis Club. But this man was not cut out to raise any children. Always flustered, always angry and often threatening physical abuse, he simply could not cope. It is likely Huey should have been handled off to a Misericordia Home, but daddy should have been arrested.

But all of these characters pale in comparison to our winner.

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ROBERT GREENBERGER: On continuity

ROBERT GREENBERGER: On continuity

I like continuity. Always have, always will. It enriches serialized fiction as found in pulp magazines, comic books, movies and television.  In an ideal world, things would be consistent from the beginning of any new creation, but it rarely is.

Johnston McCulley altered his own reality after one Zorro novel because he decided more people saw the Douglas Fairbanks silent film than read his book and anyone coming to the second book should recognize elements.

Gene Roddenberry was building his worldview for Star Trek so details such as the name of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets evolved over the course of the first season. Unlike many of its peers, it actually had more episode to episode continuity than the majority of prime time in the 1960s.

In comic books, after 60+ years of publishing, even I recognize that it’s impossible for a singular continuity to exist for long-running characters from Captain America to Superman. What editors need to strive for, today, is consistency so the reader isn’t left scratching his head week after week.

During my tenure at Marvel, I pointed out to the editorial team that three different titles released the same week gave Henry Peter Gyrich three different jobs. That serves no one well and meant no one was paying attention at a company that prided itself on its shared universe.

More recently, DC Comics released, a week apart, a Nightwing Annual and an Outsiders Annual. Both were solid stories that wrapped up some long-standing threads and filled in gaps left by the time between Infinite Crisis’s conclusion and the “One Year Later” re-set. Read separately, they were fine, but read against the largest context of the DC Universe they massively contradicted one another.

At the conclusion of Infinite Crisis, Nightwing was completely zapped and left for dead. In his own annual, we’re told he was in a coma for three weeks and then so badly banged up he needed additional time to recover and retrain his body.  Finally, when he was deemed ready, he left Gotham City with Batman and Robin for what we know to be six months of bonding. And from there, he returned in time to meet the new Batwoman in the pages of 52.

A week later, though, we get the Outsiders Annual where Nightwing is running around with his teammates to break Black Lightning out of Iron Heights prison and once that’s done, he goes with the team for an underground mission that lasts the better part of a year.

OK, so what is the reader to accept as the actual sequence of events? He cannot be in two places at once, yet these annuals ask us to believe exactly that.

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May sweeps at ComicMix

May sweeps at ComicMix

We’d like to welcome Michael A. Price to the Mix — see his Forgotten Horrors #1 below.  It’s always nice to have another contributor take the heat off an overworked news editor!  Between him and Martha (who’s occasional column now has a name, Brilliant Disguise) and Robert and Matt and Glenn, I’m starting to lose count…) Here’s our round-up of regular weekly columns:

Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s podcasts keep getting Bigger and Broader:

And don’t forget our very special premiere videocast, in which EIC Mike Gold hints at greater things to come…

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

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

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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Free Comics Day hits The Big ComicMix Broadcast

Free Comics Day hits The Big ComicMix Broadcast

Primed for Free Comic Book Day? Pumped up or punked out At Spider-Man 3? We cover it all on the Big ComicMix Weekend Broadcast, including news on Casper”s return, the next Superman Movie, More Star Trek in comics, and a quick drive by from Flo & Eddie! Plus we conclude our Comic Book Masters Series with a visit from an Oscar winning cartoonist who helped bring back The Golden Age Of Comics!

Press The Button – or no free comics for you!

MARTHA THOMASES: 52-Skiddoo

MARTHA THOMASES: 52-Skiddoo

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.

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