The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Stargate expands, Illuminati escapes, Barbie’s electronic!

Stargate expands, Illuminati escapes, Barbie’s electronic!

A new week and a new ComicMix Broadcast where we lay out miles of four color fun waiting for you at the comic stores this week, plus some DVD treats that range from Blue Beetle to Uncle Scrooge to our pal, Dr. Johnny Fever. From there, it’s a sharp left to Hannibal Lechter’s song debut (you won’t believe it!), plastic Barbie girls get electric, and a lot of truly major Stargate stuff. And now you, too, can sing along to the Marquis de Sade!

Press the button. It’s good for you!

Doctor Who 3 hits Sci-Fi this summer

Doctor Who 3 hits Sci-Fi this summer

The third season of the new Doctor Who series will hit the U.S. cable channels in July, starting with the 2006 Christmas Special, "The Runaway Bride".

The new series will run on the Sci-Fi Channel, home to the previous two seasons of shows. Ultimately, it will be syndicated and appear alongside its "adult" spin-off show Torchwood on BBC America.

The week following "The Runaway Bride" U.S. fans will meet the Doctor’s new companion Martha Jones in the season’s opening episode "Smith and Jones."

 

Babylon 5 novels bite the dust

Babylon 5 novels bite the dust

So much for new Babylon 5 novels and graphic novels. Matthew Sprange of Mongoose Publishing notes on their discussion forums: “ We have agreed to drop the entire novels project – it really wasn’t going to go anywhere. In their place, we have a new B5-related project waiting in the wings. More news on this soon!”

A number of novels were in the works at the time the plug was pulled, including a rumored one by Claudia Christian, who played Commander Susan Ivanova on the show. No reason were given as to why the license for the novels was dropped.

Mongoose will continue to produce Babylon 5 role-playing games.

Cup o’ Joe at Tribeca

Cup o’ Joe at Tribeca

Concurrent with the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival (at which Spider-Man 3 will have its U.S. premiere) will be a series of panels called Tribeca Talks, and right up there with all the other luminaries scheduled to talk is Marvel EIC Joe Quesada, appearing on a panel called "Heroes for Hire."  Presumably the panel will not just be a plug for Marvel’s title of the same name.

According to the program notes, "a genre of entertainment originally devised with children in mind, superhero movies have found real success among bigger babies — adults, to be specific. We unleash the power of some superhero creators to explore why the vulnerable, conflicted, reluctant, and more…well…human superhero is a sure-fire way to a colossal opening weekend. Featuring a sneak peek at original illustrations from the highly anticipated Amazing Spiderman: One More Day comic book storyline!’  That’s the one written by Joe Straczynski with art by Quesada himself.  Only hey, Tribeca folks, isn’t it "Spider-Man" with a hyphen and all…?

FCBD up north, eh?

FCBD up north, eh?

Chris Butcher has announced that Scott McCloud and family are taking a little detour from their Making Comics 50-state sojourn and heading up to Toronto for Free Comic Book Day, where Scott is scheduled to give a talk at the University of Toronto’s OISE Theatre sponsored by the U of T newspaper The Varsity and The Beguiling bookstore.  All appropriate info can be found on Chris’ blog.

The McClouds are currently somewhere in the vicinity of Neil Gaiman’s house, as reported by both Neil and Ivy (Scott’s wife).

DENNIS O’NEIL: Who knows what evil lurks…? Part 3

DENNIS O’NEIL: Who knows what evil lurks…? Part 3

I had it easier than many comics writers. I began in the business as an assistant to Stan Lee in 1965, when Marvel was just completing its metamorphosis from obscure Timely Comics to publishing phenomenon, and Stan’s vision of what a comic book company could be was pretty much complete. Implicit in the writing part of the job was the requirement that I imitate Stan’s style – after all, Stan’s style was Marvel. That made the job simple: imitate Mr. Lee successfully and I was doing it right.

Of course, I bridled a bit at having to imitate anyone. After all, I was in my 20s and had been doing comics for about two days, and therefore, according to my lights, I was deeply wise and fully knowledgeable about…oh, name it, and don’t forget to include comics. As Bob Dylan sang, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Now, in my sexagenarian salad days, I’m grateful for my Marvel initiation because everyone begins by imitating someone, and I didn’t have to seek a model or wait for the churning of the universe to provide one – I learned the trade by having to imitate the comic book scripter who was at that time, arguably, the best.

Here are a few words from a man who is well on his way to becoming my favorite mainstream writer: “Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master… Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.” Those observations are from a Harper’s Magazine piece by Jonathan Lethem titled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which you can read on Harper’s website. They bring us, at last and via the long way around, to the subject of this installment of the arc (or miniseries, or series-within-a-series or whatever the hell it is) that began with what we called “Who Knows What Evil… Part 1.” Those of you who were kind enough to read the earlier installments may remember that I suggested that the creators of Batman may have been…well, call it “intensely aware” of The Shadow and other popular culture creations.

Let’s assume that they were. Did that make them wicked, weaselly thieves? No, no, and again, no. Remember: everyone begins by imitating someone. As Anthony Tollin said in a phone conversation, those early comics guys (who were barely out of adolescence and in the process of inventing a medium) had no one to emulate except authors from other forms and the newspaper strip fraternity. Since they were generally not from society’s loftier precincts, with ready access to elitist amusements, their entertainment was comic strips, movies, the pulps, and maybe radio, and it was natural – inevitable? – that they’d seek inspiration in those media. Where else?

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A Wonder-ful overview

A Wonder-ful overview

Over at Monitor Duty, Alan Kistler has completed his exhaustive — and we do mean exhaustive — overview of the comics history of Wonder WomanPart 3 covers the period from 1993, when Bill Loebs and Mike Deodato took over from George Perez’ run, on up to the present day.

If you want to take things chronologically, here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of Alan’s profile.

Both fans and pros new to the character could do far worse than to review Alan’s work here.  At times quite opinionated, it nonetheless distills decades of comics history into three extremely informative posts.  Well done, Alan!

International Pixel-Stained Techno-Peasant Day

International Pixel-Stained Techno-Peasant Day

It all started when Dr. Howard V. Hendrix, current VP of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, delivered a rant about people giving away their works for free on the Internets,

I’m… opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free.  A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) — given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the "net time" they seemed to want at this point in the organization’s development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch. 

As you would expect, this met with a certain amount of derision, head-shaking, and laughter.

First there was John Scalzi, who’s already stirring things up in SFWA with a write-in candidacy that could very well win, pointing out how well giving stuff away has worked for him. And Cory Doctorow. And Charlie Stross. And so on and so on. And adding that "It’s appalling that a standing Vice President of SFWA is calling a rather large chunk of his constituency backstabbing scum."

Then Jo Walton got into the act, declaring today to be International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, "the day when pixel-stained technopeasants everywhere are stretching and smiling and putting down their technotools to celebrate their existence by releasing their works into the wild, or at least the web." Numerous authors have contributed, and Jo has been keeping a pretty complete list, along with a quick LiveJournal community that sprang up to document the phenomenon.

Of course, the webcomics folks have been doing this sort of thing for a long time now.

I’d like to do my part as well, but  most of my work has been work-for-hire so the selection’s a bit limited. Nevertheless, here’s a story previously published in Urban Nightmares by Baen Books… a story that, irony of ironies, helped get me into SFWA in the first place.

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Stuck Barcelona Baby

Stuck Barcelona Baby

We’ve been vicariously living in Spain for the last few days via Heidi MacDonald, who’s taking in Ficomic (officially the Saló del Còmic de Barcelona), but something she hadn’t had the chance to mention yet was that the Spanish edition of fellow NY-er Howard Cruse’s work Stuck Rubber Baby has won their Best Foregn Comic award!  Howard, himself, was also kind enough to tell us about the event.

At right is a picture of the cool- and heavy-looking award atop a copy of SRB.  Congratulations, Howard!

A little bit more of Harry

A little bit more of Harry

Here you go, something to brighten your morning:

That would be your basic second (international) trailer for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.