The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Catching up with the Big Two

Catching up with the Big Two

Per my column yesterday, you know I’m not going to parrot press releases from Marvel and DC, but that doesn’t mean I can’t cull actual news from them where I discern it exists:

Marvel’s gearing up for their World War Hulk event, and as I’m married to someone who inked the Hulk for over two years I had to ask my Marvel press contact if he had any word on who’s slated to ink all the books.  So here’s your complete list of “top 2-3” creative teams (writer, penciller/inker or writer & artist) for all upcoming World War Hulk tie-ins:

WORLD WAR HULK PROLOGUE: WORLD BREAKER

Writer: Peter David

Artists: Al Rio/Scott Hanna, Lee Weeks (p/i), Sean Phillips/Tom Palmer

INCREDIBLE HULK #106

Writer: Greg Pak

Artists: Gary Frank/Jonathan Sibal

HULK: PLANET HULK HC

Writer: Greg Pak

Artists: Carlo Pagulayan/Jeffrey Huet; Aaron Lopresti/Danny Miki and Sandu Florea; Juan Santacruz/Faul Fernantz Fonts; Gary Frank/Jonathan Sibal; Takeshi Miyazawa (p/i)

That’s right, I’m all about loving the inkers!

Marvel’s also got another Spotlight book in stores on May 23, this one focusing on the Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer; perfect timing considering the movie coming out in mid-June.  John Rhett Thomas supplies the original written content with pre-existing images from the FF’s 40+ year history.  Hope that means some royalty checks for lots of terrific artists!

And Matt Fraction (check out his sweet reminiscence of Vonnegut) is writing a special 48-page Sensational Spider-Man Annual tying in with its “Back in Black” storyline.  Sal Larocca’s on pencilling chores, including “Romita-esque flashback sequences” — good luck with that, Sal!

Meanwhile, DC’s sent out its latest Direct Channel newsletter, which discusses sales incentives for retailers on the second Minx title Clubbing (writer Andi Watson has a nice write-up), brags about mainstream press for the debut Minx title The Plain Janes in PW and Variety, and lists books going back to press, returnable and resolicited books, release dates and so forth.  An invaluable resource for retailers, as always.

Back in gray?

Back in gray?

The first glimpse of the titular main character from Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was recently posted thanks to our friends over at IGN.com.

Keep in mind – this is the very first suit built our hero, as first seen in the comics. So don’t expect the shiny red and gold suit we see today. The film stars Robert Downy Jr. as the billionaire alter ego of Iron Man, Tony Stark, playing along side Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) Jim "War Machine" Rhodes (Terrence Howard) and the evil Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges).

Those of you may remember the director Jon Favreau for playing Foggy Nelson in 2003’s Daredevil, or for Dinner For Five, his movie-talk television series that appeared on IFC between 2001 and 2005.

Barbarella taken under James Bond’s wing

Barbarella taken under James Bond’s wing

The classic French science-fiction comic book character Barbarella will make her return to the big screen, according to Variety. Casino Royale writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have signed on to write the feature. Occassional comic book writer Jean-Marc Lofficier (Teen Titans) brokered the deal.

The creation of Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella turned heads in this country by being one of the first “legitimately” published comics to feature nudity and sexual themes. It was serialized in the United States in the avant-garde magazine Evergreen and collected in both hard cover and trade paperback graphic novels back in the 1960s.

In 1968, Barbarella was made into a movie directed by Roger Vadim and starring his wife, Jane Fonda. She was surrounded by a stellar cast, including John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg, David Hemmings, and Milo O’Shea as the original Duran Duran.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Hurling stones

I had a couple of other topics I was going to work on but then I read Mike Gold’s column this week and decided I had enough to say to on it and the subject of his column that I might as well do it in my own. Thanks, Mike, for supplying my column this week!

The question at hand was Don Imus’ racist remarks on his show, categorizing Rutgers University’s women’s basketball team (the majority of whom are black) as “nappy headed hos.” (For short, and because I don’t want to perpetuate the comment by repeating it endlessly, we’ll just reduce it to   “nhh”.)

Imus has since apologized at length, doing the mea culpa circuit that prominent white men do when they get caught putting their feet in their mouths. There have been the chorus of calls for Imus’ resignation or firing and Imus has said he was just trying to be funny and he’s really a nice guy and so on. As I write this, Imus has been suspended by CBS radio for two weeks and MSNBC has dropped the television show. After a ritual flogging on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show, Imus is now scheduled to meet with the women he actually insulted and their families. Nice to know we’re all keeping our priorities straight.

Caveat: I don’t listen to Imus. If I’m listening to radio in the morning it’s generally NPR and I don’t do that very often. So I’m getting a lot of this second hand or worse. I’ve never been into the whole “shock jock” thing so you can take what I have to say with that grain of salt. Also, I’ve had my own brush with hoof in mouth disease in a script where I referred to Asian people as Orientals. As has been driven home to me, Orientals are rugs; people are Asian. So I am not within sin. I’m throwing rocks anyway.

Let’s talk about Imus first. My first reaction on hearing all this was, “What an incredibly stupid thing to say.” Imus has been in the game long enough and he knows the field. He has no internal censor that suggested to him for a half second that referring to African-American women as “nhh” just might get him into trouble? Frankly, I always had the impression that Imus was sharper than that.

And then the cynical Chicagoan side of me kicked in. Maybe Imus’ attitude at the time was “Well, remarks like this sure gets people talking about ya, doesn’t it? Good, bad – does it matter so long as they don’t forget you?” Now people might listen in to hear how contrite you are, or if you’ll do it again, or because they think you should do it again. What’s a shock jock without a controversy? Or maybe he didn’t expect people to get upset – stuff like this has been his stock in trade, right? Isn’t it why people listen? Imus says what a lot of people think – isn’t that the justification? The current brouhaha is just a matter of degree.

I wonder – what would the reaction have been if it was the Rutgers men’s basketball team that lost in the Finals (they didn’t even get that far) and Imus had called them “nh (fill in the blank).” Actually, I’m betting nothing would have happened because Imus would have realized, before he said it, that it was going too far. But these are just female jocks. Who really cares, eh? Let’s call them whores because they lost a freaking basketball game. Maybe if Imus had just stuck with being misogynistic instead of racist, he would have been okay.

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Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007

The New York Times reports: "Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island."

We mourn his passing.

MATT RAUB: Who Are Two?

MATT RAUB: Who Are Two?

So we’re into week two of the Doctor’s new adventures with his shiny new companion in “The Shakespeare Code,” and much as I was last week, I’m still giddy with excitement. Last week we were introduced to Martha Jones, a med student from the present time. And in this week, the Doctor takes Jones on her first trip inside the T.A.R.D.I.S. to the late 1500s, where they meet one of the Doctor’s personal heroes, William Shakespeare.

While this episode got to play a lot with what I like to call the Shanghai Knights jokes. To explain, in the film Shanghai Knights the two main characters would run into famous names in history that only we the audience would know, and reference their lives through punn-ish dialogue, such as telling a adolescent Charlie Chaplin that he talks too much. Either way, the same thing stood for this episode, in which the Doctor is constantly using lines from Shakespeare’s unwritten plays. To which the playwright responds “I should use that!” Cute little dialogue, but lets move onto the nitty-gritty.

Going along with my last review, when I mentioned that the first episode resembled the season one’s episode “Rose,” this episode was very much like season one’s “The Unquiet Dead.” In that episode, a very green Rose tags along with the Doctor to the 1800s where they meet Charles Dickens and solve yet another perplexing mystery. That episode dealt with alien entities possessing corpses making them look like “zombies” to the anybody else but our Doctor, while this week’s episode dealt with ancient aliens who pose as “witches” and get Shakespeare to use his “new words” to open a portal to their home world. Very similar episodes indeed.

With that theory in place, there should be hints of this season’s overall arch. In episode three of season one, they started mentioning “Bad Wolf” and how it was a harbinger of things to come. Now, before the re-launched series, I was never a huge Doctor Who fan, but with the writing and pure concept of continuity that thick over an entire season, I was hooked. I’m only hoping that this episode can keep with that formula.

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Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (Again)

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (Again)

The Sci-Fi Channel is going dipping into the golden age of comic strips and resurrecting Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon for a new television series.

Eric Johnson has been named as the latest actor to portray Flash in this radical reimagining of the series.  Johnson is best known to ComicMix fans as Smallville’s Whitney Fordman, quarterback and love interest for Lana Lang.

Dale Arden, Hans Zarkov and Ming the Merciless have yet to be cast with production of the 22 episodes set to begin in, where else, Vancouver on May 1.

The series will debut on the channel in August, date and time to be announced.  Rick Rosenthal, who worked with Johnson on Smallville, and has also handled Sci Fi’s The Dresden Files, will direct the first two episodes.  While the original strip featured the story of the planet Mongo threatening Earth and Flash journeying into space to save his planet, the television series will dramatically alter the premise.  Mongo will now be another dimension with Flash giving up his original polo in favor of other pursuits and being located in the pacific northwest.

The last time a live action Flash was on the small screen was in 1954 in an eight episode series starring Steve Holland, who later provided the visual look for James Bama’s Doc Savage paintings.

Flash Gordon has been previously portrayed by Larry “Buster” Crabbe in the three Universal movie serials from the 1930s and later, by Sam J. Jones, in the tongue-in-cheek Dino DeLaurentiss travesty from 1980.

Stocking up on comics

Stocking up on comics

Via Lisa at Sequentially Speaking comes an article in American.com about the sure bet of investing in comics and other collectibles.  Naturally, Kevin Hassett points the exceptions to the rule in order to prove his thesis, which helps nobody.  The operative word here is "rare," people.

Plus, he supplements his databy looking things up in the Price Guide, which we all know deals more in theoretical than actual value, the latter being arbitrariily determined from day to day by whatever each buyer and seller actually feels like paying for and selling a book. 

This knowledge would seem to make the answer to Hassells question, "Why don’t sophisticated money managers and operating companies invest in comic books?" fairly obvious.

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Mary Jane loves Mary Jane?

Mary Jane loves Mary Jane?

Lots of entertainment websites are breathlessly exhaling the news that Kirsten Dunst has spoken out in favor of reasonable use of marijuana, still considered a taboo subject in her home country, and therefore a guaranteed attention-getter.

What should have billions and billions of science fans investigating the facts on THC, however, was Dunst’s quote, "My best friend Sasha’s dad was Carl Sagan, the astronomer. He was the biggest pot smoker in the world and he was a genius."

Dunst, like many, believes "America’s view on weed is ridiculous. I mean," she added, "are you kidding me? If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place. I’m not talking about being stoned all day, though. I think if it’s not used properly, it can hamper your creativity and close you up inside."

So many comeback lines, so little time.

By the way, this would seem the perfect place to mention that Jewish stoners abstaining during Passover because pot isn’t KP may now resume their intake, as the holiday ended at 8:17 Eastern time last evening.

Anime gone wild

Anime gone wild

FUNimation Entertainment has acquired several anime TV series and movies titles from Central Park Media (CPM) for broadcast on its digital FUNimation Channel. CPM titles picked up as part of the deal, most of which are appropriate for teens and up, include: Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie; the Record of Lodoss Wars series; Roujin Z, the Project A-ko series; Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer; and Grave of the Fireflies. FUNimation airs occasionally on Dish Network and other outlets.