The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Ed Catto: The Cutie & the Indefatigable Entrepreneur

I’ve listened to many podcasts during the long upstate winter and one of my favorites has been Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This. It’s billed as a storytelling podcast exploring the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century. I enjoy it because Longworth spins great yarns, with vivid insights, about Hollywood stars and their careers.

But I think there’s more to why it’s popular and why I enjoy it so much. I’m starting to realize that the inevitable ups and downs of yesteryear’s Hollywood Stars are analogous to the rollercoaster rides that categorize so many of today’s careers.

It’s astounding to hear about how a legendary star’s career might have floundered at one point, only to do a complete 360 as he or she gets cast in a successful blockbuster movie. Thundering successes and crushing failures become the tales told time and time again on You Must Remember This.

I believe that it’s optimism and hope that fuels our passions for Hollywood heroes and that keep us believing in ourselves too.

Longworth told the tragic tale of Carole Landis in one particularly memorable episode. I wasn’t familiar with Landis. In fact, the thing that drew me to that episode is the fact that Landis strongly resembled a friend of mine, Rosie McCooe, who’s also an actress.

The tale of Carole Landis is especially heartbreaking, and when you’re in the right frame of mind, I’d encourage you to listen to the episode here.

As I listened to the podcast, I was fascinated with Carole’s volunteer efforts during World War II. In fact, she played herself in a Four Jills in a Jeep, a movie that detailed her wartime experience.

Having learned about Carole Landis’ USO efforts, I was especially intrigued when my friend, Sean Dulaney, reached out to tell me about this latest project, Miss Vicky and Her Commando Cuties. In some alternate universe, Carole Landis would play the lead in the cinematic version of this upcoming graphic novel.

Sean’s an indefatigable, creative entrepreneur who’s always got something going on. I’m at the point now, and maybe you are too, where I admire the guys who have the internal motivation to keep getting up to bat and to take a swing as much as I admire the guys who hit the homers.

So, as you can see from the text below, I was eager to learn about this new project.

Ed Catto: Miss Vicky and Her Cutie Commandos looks like so much fun. What’s it all about?

Sean Dulaney: It’s the adventures of an all-female commando unit in World War II who operate using the cover of being USO-style entertainers to get them close to the front lines. They’ve been operating for a while when the story opens and we meet Lt. Thomas Hardy, our P.O.V. character. He’s a young guy who got a battlefield promotion, but what got the attention of higher-ups with the OSS is he grew up with four older sisters. His job is to serve as the girls’ liaison with Military Intelligence, his cover being that of their manager. He gets the orders from the higher ups, but Vicky is the one in charge. I’ve used the elevator pitch “Sgt. Fury in a skirt,” and that’s a good way to describe her and the series. Stan Lee’s old tagline of a “war comic for people who hate war comics.” Six women of different backgrounds, different talents, brought together to try and make the world safe for democracy.

EC: Is this something that just came up or have you been working on it a while?

SD: Miss Vicky and Her Cutie Commandos has been gestating for a while now. I think the initial pitch with Stephen Molnar (Danger Girl and Star Trek for IDW) on art was put together in 2006/2007. We had some nibbles and a tentative agreement in place with Praxis Comics at the New York Comic-Con in 2008, but I don’t think they were around too long after that. A few other Indies expressed interest, but the deals offered just didn’t feel right to us at the time. Shortly after that, Stephen got snapped up for some Marvel assignments and then IDW grabbed him and kept him busy. After letting it sit for a while, Tony Lee helped me find Ron Joseph and I shopped his version of the pitch a bit. Again, interest but not any great offers. When I decided to go ahead and just bite the bullet and self-publish, IDW was keeping Ron busy so I recruited Eliseu who I had been wanting to work with since the Digital Webbing days.

EC: Are the main characters based on real women?

SD: Yes and no. One of the lines I had written down was “Pin Up Commandos” and some of the initial character design directions I gave the artists for inspiration were 40s pin-ups and actresses. Vicky, the leader, I saw as a mix of Betty Grable and Bette Midler in “For The Boys.” June’s backstory was she was supposed to be the next Josephine Baker before the Nazis invaded Paris. Loraine has the smoky blonde Veronica Lake/Lisbeth Scott vibe mixed with the Varga Girls. Annie Sue is a cross between a teenaged Shirley Temple and the Gil Elvgren models. Betsy, the British member, has a touch of Caniff’s “Miss Lace” character he did for military papers and Roz… She may be the most modern influenced of the six. A mix of Lanie Kazan and Stockard Channing.

Since I’m shopped the pitch around, I’ve had people mention the story of Carole Landis and I can see some similarities with her group of entertainers.

EC: The art looks strong and engaging. But I’m not familiar with your artist.

SD: Yeah, Eliseu Gouveia is the artist for the project. I’ve known him from the Digital Webbing message boards going back to 2001 – 2002. In fact, the first “Dreah, Queen of Thieves” story from Digital Webbing Presents #12 was written for Eliseu, so we’ve been trying to work together for a while. I’ve amazed, and rather fortunate, that he hasn’t been snapped up by a major publisher here in the states. He’s done some stuff here and there like Genie for FC9 and Palmiotti and Gray’s Cloudburst for Image (I think Arcana has released the trade on that one), but being in Portugal I think he’s been off the radar of a lot of people but I can see that changing soon. He recently released his own Jungle Queen Sheva via ComiXology.

I also want to mention Jasen Smith who’ll be doing the colors on the book. He’s doing great work.

EC: As a big Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos fan, I can see some similarities. Did that series, often marketed as “The war comic for people how hate war comics” influence you?

SD: I think Kirby and Lee’s Sgt. Fury (and the later Gary Friedrich/John Severin run) ranks with a lot of other media as part of the prototype the book was built on. The Sgt. Fury book, The Dirty Dozen, Hogan’s Heroes… even Simon and Kirby’s Boy Commandos I think can be found in this book’s DNA. Even more obscure stuff like the 70s TV show The Goodtime Girls, Tales of the Gold Monkey from the 80s and the BBC’s ‘Allo ‘Allo are in there. Honestly, I came in late to Sgt. Fury, as I was more of a DC kid growing up and the War titles I would pick up were Our Fighting Forces with the Losers and Unknown Soldier.

Sgt. Fury and Hogan’s Heroes did something back in the 60s that now would be seen as trying to be politically correct in having members of different races and nationalities as part of the unit. Those books and shows are so ingrained in the 50+ years since they debuted; it’s hard to imagine them without Percy and Gabe or Newkirk and Kinchloe. In our case, we have Betsy and June, who each have great backstories that I hope we get to explore.

EC: More recently, I really enjoyed Jonathan Case’s The New Deal. Did that graphic novel influence you? And what other recent GN’s have influenced your efforts.

SD: Actually, I haven’t gotten to check it out. To be honest, my current reading list isn’t always that “current.” I try to keep up with books my friends are working on, but I don’t get out to the comic shops as regularly as I’d like, so I wind up playing a lot of catch up.

EC: The Kickstarter looks pretty cool too. How did you make the decision to launch it via Kickstarter and how is this one structured?

SD: As Kickstarter became more viable, it was always an option. The problem was trying to figure out the rewards. With Eliseu in Portugal, original art and rewards like that would have some serious shipping expense. We’ve not ruled out maybe some sketch cover commissions once we get into stretch goals, but they weren’t a default reward option like they’ve been on some campaigns. I looked into having some artist friends doing sketch covers, but schedules were a bear to coordinate.

In the end, we’re keeping it pretty straightforward. We have the first issue, physical and/or digital. We have a short story with guest artists doing pin-ups and the pin-ups are also collected as a portfolio option. I love the pin-up art painted on the nose of bombers, so we designed stickers of the girls in that style. We’ve got four variant cover options, Stephen and Ron signed off on the covers they did for their versions of the pitch to be variants and another Digital Webbing alum, Chad Hardin (DC’s Harley Quinn) will be doing a cover for the “Director’s Cut” edition.

We’ve also set up a special “Retailer Tier” for shop owners who might want to take a chance on putting Miss Vicky on their wall where they’ll get standard and sketch blank copies along with a retailer incentive cover edition. The stretch goal rewards…well, let’s hit the original goal first.

EC: This graphic novel looks like it might reach out to and appeal to classic Pin-Up fans. Is that your intent?

SD: Oh, definitely. I think Dave Stevens opened the door for that cross-pollination of comics and pin-up cultures and it’s only been in the last couple of years that the major publishers really embraced that market with things like DC’s Bombshells. I hope pin-up fans will take a chance on the title, enjoy what we’re doing and want us to do more.

EC: I’ve been fascinated with your work on the Dell superhero monsters. Can you tell me a little about those efforts?

SD: The initial response to the Miss Vicky campaign pretty much guarantees that my next Kickstarter will be Section: M.

The readers are going, “What the hell is Section: M?” It’s a super hero team book featuring the 1966 monster heroes published by Dell Comics during the post-Batman ‘66 super hero craze. Ron Joseph is the penciller on the book and the premise is the heroes went on a mission around 1968/1969 and wound up in suspended animation, only to wake up in the 21st Century. Because they’ve all been lost in time, they are kind of stuck together as they fight crime and try to adjust to the modern world.

EC: What else should I know about Miss Vicky and her Cutie Commandos?

SD: The campaign runs through May 30th, the day after Memorial Day, and folks can check it out here.

EC: Thanks for your time and good luck, Sean!

John Ostrander: Wait. What Was I Thinking?

On May 23, DC will release the sixth volume in their TPB reprint series of my Suicide Squad work. It’s sub-titled “The Phoenix Gambit” and, as is my wont, I’m going to share some thoughts about the stories therein. This might actually take a few weeks.

The volume covers issues 41 through 49 and, with one exception, was co-written with my late wife, Kim Yale. It was at this point that we shook up the Squad (and the book) to a large degree. When we last left the Squad in issue 40 (and the end of the previous TPB), the Squad had disbanded or dispersed. Amanda Waller was in jail as a result of her hand in executing the criminal gang calling itself the Loa; she just surrendered and, at the time, many people both within the book and without wondered why. Why didn’t she fight it? Why didn’t she scheme to get out of it?

In one of the stories in this issue, Amanda explains why to a friend – she felt she deserved to go to jail, that she had stepped over the line. This re-enforced the fact that, so far as I was concerned, Waller has always had a conscience of some kind, even when she crossed it. I think that’s the main difference between my Amanda and the film’s Amanda – mine is not a sociopath. Please note: this is not a criticism of the film; they wrote the character as they saw her, as they needed for their story. Mine is just a bit different. The first story starts with Waller in a prison cell in Belle Reve and the caption “One year later.”

This was slightly controversial at the time. There were fans who felt this now put the Squad out of sync with the rest of the DCU. Kim and I weren’t overly concerned about that; we figured over the run of the stories, they’d even up. It was important to Kim and I that the time elapse between the end of the last story and the start of this one. Not only did Waller need time out, some of the other characters need time to elapse as well.

Sarge Steel approaches Amanda in her cell. (Steel also works in the Intelligence biz and he and Waller have been at loggerheads since the Squad began.) He could use her help and advice with a problem and makes her the same deal she made others – do the job, succeed, survive, and get time off your sentence.

Amanda smiles at him; she’s been waiting for this or something like it. She has a counter-offer. She gets a presidential pardon; she gets to put a Squad together like before, they work without governmental ties or oversight, and they get a million dollars. Oh, and Batman has to help with the first mission.

This would be one of the big changes in the book; no more Belle Reve, no more supporting cast. Smaller Squad and, for the most part, no costumes. Every day clothes. They were free agents. More expendable than ever and the U.S. Government had less (or no) control over them (and especially Amanda).

These were significant changes. The book was over three years old and time, Kim and I thought, for a shake-up. While the new direction seemed to me at the time to be a good idea, in retrospect I’m not so sure. Fans can be a conservative bunch; they tend to want the same thing each time but different. That’s a hard trick to pull off. Don’t you need the characters in costume to really know who they are? It could be argued that Deadshot’s costume WAS the character. In losing the Belle Reve, we lost not only the Squad’s HQ but a genuine character in the series.

It could also be argued that having the characters running around in costume negated their being a covert action bunch. This seemed more “realistic” although realistic in this context is somewhat malleable. It also got Waller more out into the field as part of the operation rather than waiting at HQ and that seemed to me to be a better idea.

The Squad itself was a somewhat different group. Deadshot and Captain Boomerang were givens and Vixen and Bronze Tiger were regulars although we had messed with Tiger a bit, scuffed up his “good guy” image. They were joined by Count Vertigo and now Poison Ivy and the modern Thugee, Revan, who previously had been a Squad opponent, working with the terrorist group, the Jihad.

They were also joined by the Atom or, shall I say, an Atom. It appeared that Ray Palmer was killed in an explosion and a new Atom, named Adam Cray, had taken his place. Most the of the Squad members (and many readers) believed that Cray was actually Ray Palmer; they thought Palmer had, for some reason, faked his own death and was now assuming a disguise.

I always felt that the Atom would be an ideal member of an espionage team, especially the Squad. His ability to shrink could make him an ideal spy and so, when he became available to us, Kim and I jumped at the chance – albeit with our usual touch of twistiness.

The Phoenix Gambit also included the Russian equivalent to very early Superman crossed with Captain America, Stanoivolk (“Steel Wolf”). And Batman. Lots of Batman. In fact, the first chapter of The Phoenix Gambit could almost be thought of as a Batman story. He’d stick around for the other three issues as well. No great mystery there – Batman already had a history with the Squad and doing something of a crossover could be a nice way to boost sales, Especially at this stage of the Squad’s history.

Getting ready to write this column (and the next few) gave me a chance to go over the volume myself; I hadn’t read most of these in more than a decade. I think, as a whole, they’re among the strongest in the series. Kim and I were really hitting our stride and there are places where I can clearly see her hand and hear her voice. There’s a place where a drugged and deranged Count Vertigo gets all biblical while in battle. That was almost certainly scripted by Kim; her father was an Episcopal minister and she knew the well from which she drew.

The main artist at this point was Geoff Isherwood who had been one of our inkers for a long time. He gave the art a nice illustrative feel while, at the same time, keeping the down and dirty realism the book required. Luke McDonnell, our original artist, would return here and there but the bulk of the work is Geoff’s and he does a fine job.

Well, that does it for this week, my li’l Squadders. Join us next time when, among other things, we’ll talk about our Secret Origin of Captain Boomerang and how that came about. That’s next week – same Squad time, same Squad channel.

Or something.

 

Marc Alan Fishman: Epic Barriers to Entry

That thought of a 9-year old girl being intimidated by her local comic shop has not left my mind, kiddos.

I said what I could on the subject just a few weeks ago. Beyond the local comic shop being the culprit for the stagnation we as fans feel for the specific love of the pulp and paper side of comic bookery, there’s a plethora of other barriers to entry. Little mountains that stand in the way for people of all ages, shapes, sizes, and level of declared geekery that make the journey to our shores feel not unlike the one those halflings took from their little town, to that live volcano. And much like that epic, the damned eagles were there all along if anyone would have thought to ask for a quicker trip.

Epic Back Catalogs    

“I like Captain America!” the little tyke exclaims. He’s taken to his local comic shop, allowance in tow. Where, oh where does he begin? If he gets the current issue, he might be wondering why Steve Rogers is an agent of Hydra. Or why Sam Wilson isn’t Falcon. And just how many issues does he need to go back and buy to catch up? Of which volume? And what about trades vs. floppies? Or what if, by chance, the book falls in the middle of an epic crossover?

Touched on lightly in my aforementioned article, the advent of the epic crossover has been a thoroughly exhausting trend weaved into the modern comic book production schedule. It seems once to twice a year now, the big boys of comics (who are the specific targets I’m aiming at here) are hellbent to change the status quo. Grand schemes crawl and sprawl across special mini-series, and dump into the pages of dozens of titles – all in the effort to tell a larger story.

When it was done with years in-between, it was great! Crisis on Infinite Earths, Civil War, or The Infinity Gauntlet each stood as massive touchstones for years to come. Their larger-than-normal villains had massive plans, which required the multi-tentacled reach of an editorial Cthulu in order to come to the final catharsis. And in their wakes? New rules, new books, and time to let what transpired breathe.

Now?  Not so much. Every book becomes mandatory reading, and before you blink, new series are given birth, fail to catch on, and are chucked into the ethereal pit from whence they came. How could a muggle traipse into their local comic shop, cash and enthusiasm in hand, be told in order to jump on board they’ll need to drop serious coin, and spend the remainder of their afternoon reading Wikipedia to make sense of it all? This, of course, leads me to…

Epic Pricing

A standard comic, all-in-all, isn’t that expensive… until you compare it to similar media. A weeks’ worth of books for me (back when I bought books weekly) ran me $15-20 for a small haul. Left on the back of my toilet for easy-reading and metering out, I was done just in time for a whole new set the following week. For roughly the same amount of money I can have both the WWE Network and Netflix… which combined provide me thousands of hours of entertainment I don’t even need to read to enjoy. Apples to oranges you say? Correct, padawan. But tell that to an 8-year old.

Make no bones about it: kids do love comics. The static art being produced in any number of styles, slaved over by teams of passionate creators should be beloved, cherished, and sought after. For Rao’s sake, that is why I toil nightly to produce my own books! But I’d be lying if I didn’t feel like it can be a bit of a hard sell when the average comic can be absorbed in 15 minutes. The economics of it are depressing.

And, to my knowledge, publishers-at-large haven’t exactly solved how to compete. While Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and their next-of-kin pony up money for solid, respectable original content in addition to their bread-and-butter second-hand material… they have all found the panacea to their pricier counterpoints (cable TV, and the movie theater). Simply put, they found a price so low that people can barely argue about their subscription. For roughly ten bucks a month, their consumers have more content available then they can consume.

So, why haven’t the publishers figured this out?

Epic Conclusions on Infinite Earths

As it stands, there are no easy answers. Netflix and the like all started in different places – Netflix as a mail-order rent-a-DVD catalog, Hulu as pricey YouTube – but would up in the same business. DC, Marvel, and the other major publishers each offer a maddening number of ways to consume their comic content. Floppies or trades? Printed or Digital? Direct market, subscriptions, ComiXology, Comix Blitz, or any other number of other ways I don’t know? Because the original content is printed (but doesn’t necessarily need to be), it simply stands to ask the biggest question of all:

In the land of plenty, is the niche market of comic books too splintered to be as profitable as it needs to be… to sustain real growth? Are there simply too many choices out there for a truly casual fan to make a choice they can feel confident in, when it comes to their consumption? And is the looming specter of a digital device being so ubiquitous, how far off are we truly to even needing paper books? It’s why vinyl records made a comeback, and CDs are nearly non-existent. It’s why DVDs and Blu-Rays are slowly being discount-binned into-oblivion. And why we all have at very least… free Spotify or something similar on our smartphones.

In my estimation, the only way comics can truly save the day, is to match what their brethren in other industries have done. There needs to be a singular wave of content accessible, available, and bingeable… offered at a price so low it can’t be argued with. Weekly comics need to still create an eco-system in the direct market… but come packaged in such a way that it allows new readers to have their cake and eat it too. The ocean of content that exists in long boxes needs to be set free, where all publishers can coexist. The eagles are soaring over our heads. We need only ask for a ride into the mouth of the volcano.

REVIEW: How to Make Awesome Comics

How to Make Awesome Comics
By Neill Cameron
David Fickling Books/Scholastic, 64 pages, $8.99

Aimed at 7-10 year olds, this book attempts to explain how to create comics when it merely scratches the surface and suggests mash-ups are the only way to design characters. Neill Cameron should know better considering his background with YA graphic novels and his role as artist in residence at Oxford’s The Story Museum. This collection is culled from weekly installments that first saw print in England’s The Phoenix.

Narrated by Professor Panels and Art Monkey, they breezily and cheekily tour the most basic aspects of telling a story, creating heroes and villains, and putting them all together to form a visual narrative. Every chapter tells you how to do something awesomely but it’s too much in too few pages.

There are some basics early on that are age appropriate for the readers but once he tells you awesome ideas are to take one from column A and one from column B and your done does the budding comics creator a major disservice. This mix and match approach is carried on throughout the book which suggests to readers there is just this one way to tell a story or creator interesting characters.

Cameron should have dropped some of the silliness in favor of elements like making sure each panel leads the reader’s eye in the proper direction. How to place balloons, captions, and sound effects to aid in the reading.  There’s nothing on anatomy, perspective, or page design which might seem too sophisticated for the age range, but these are essentials for good comics literacy.

I would warn well-meaning parents away from giving this to their budding talents and instead find other sources (or courses) that would do a better job training them.

Martha Thomases: Naked Dessert

My jealousy nearly deprived me of Girls.

You see, Lena Dunham went to the same college I did, albeit several decades later. And here she was, a successful filmmaker with a series on HBO. That should have been me! She was being hailed as a feminist hero. I should have been the feminist hero. How dare she take successes that should have been mine, just because she actually did the work and put it out there!

Lucky for me, the backlash against her started almost immediately. She didn’t deserve her success, said critics, because her parents were famous and that gave her an unfair advantage. I felt quite comfortable ignoring the show. In fact, I felt cool, because only lame people follow crowds.

Real mature on my part.

My moment of truth came during the opening number of the 2012 Emmy Awards, which featured a peek into the ladies’ room. In a shot that is almost a throwaway, someone opens a stall and there, naked, sits Lena Dunham. Eating an entire cake. With her hands.

It was every nightmare I have ever had.

I admired her willingness to go there, to stand (well, sit) naked on national broadcast television. Like me, Dunham’s body is short, squat and generously padded. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to care.

If this were all there was to this story, there wouldn’t even be a story. I started to watch the series, and, at first, I didn’t understand why there was such a fuss. A series about four hipster twenty-something gifs in Brooklyn on a pay cable network that had just finished Sex and the City (about four stylish thirty-somethings in Manhattan) didn’t seem that daring to me. They were white and educated and had parents who were all capable of bailing them out of any problems they might have. They were pretty much the epitome of white privilege, and they seemed oblivious to it.

This turned out to be a feature, not a bug. A lot of the humor came from the obliviousness of the four main characters.

A lot of Very Serious People have written a lot of Very Serious Commentary about the generation dubbed Millennials. These kids want everything handed to them on a silver platter. They care more about their Instagram accounts than they do about real people. They don’t understand the meaning of hard work. They expect to be coddled. If you added a few insults about their hairstyles and choice of music, you’d have the exact same complaints that I’ve heard about every new generation for as long as I’ve been alive.

Young adults, just out of school, are assholes. It’s simply a law of nature. I, myself, was so insufferable when I got out of college that I still sometimes wake up in a cold sweat, remembering the stupid things I said in arguments with other people in public places. And it wasn’t that I was evil or anything. I just had strong opinions, but not enough experience with the world to test my opinions in reality. Learning how my values work in the real world has been one of the most interesting experiments of my adult life, and if I’m lucky, I will have time to do a lot more learning.

The four women who form the core of Girls are figuring out how their very different world views interact with their very different ambitions. There is the earnest Hannah (Dunham), the conventionally beautiful (and rather conventional) Marnie (Allison Williams), the cute but serious Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) and the utterly insufferable Jessa (Jemima Kirke), a character I found so repellent that it took me several years to consider whether I hated the actress or maybe was supposed to be that repulsed.

They have crap jobs with good prospects, boyfriends and one-nighters, failures and successes. They have men who are their friends, and men who are their rivals, but none of them have men who define their lives, either to the audience or themselves.

By the final season, which ended last Sunday night, we had a sense that each character had a life in front of her that would not be perfect, not by a long shot, but that would be much more complex than any happily-ever-after could possibly be.

I expect the same will hold true for Lena Dunham. She didn’t create a “perfect” television show, but she did create one that was interesting. She is not a “perfect” public figure, and she often said some incredibly stupid things. She will probably say more. I did. Unlike me, she’s in a position to use her privilege in a way that makes her mistakes more difficult to make in the future.

I don’t know if there will ever be a Girls reunion, although I would imagine that there are those already lobbying for one. I wouldn’t want to see one for a few decades. It would be fun to see them together, maybe at an independent living facility, catching up with each other’s lives and grandchildren, trading tips about how to best be female at this stage of their lives.

Tweeks April Loot Wear Unboxing

This week we unbox April’s Loot Wear — all 5 subscriptions (For Her, Socks, Wearables & Tees!. The theme was Primal and featured were items from Beauty & The Beast, Wolverine, Godzilla, The Legend of Zelda, Ren & Stimpy & more.

If you want your own Loot Wear – you can get it at lootcrate.com

Dennis O’Neil: Marvel’s Blame Game

The first time you ever ate a Yummy-Lump candy bar – second grade, wasn’t it? – you were sure you’d never tasted anything so good and you couldn’t wait to taste another. You didn’t have to wait long. Your aunt – the one who lived upstairs and always smelled like wet laundry – loved Yummy Lumps and when she learned that you, too, favored that sugary delight she took it upon herself to be certain that you were never without it. Nice aunty!

Day after day, year after year as soon as you passed through the front door your aunt hit you with the candy and, dutifully, you unwrapped and bit and chewed because aunty was nice and besides your mother seemed to be afraid of aunty and told you that you’d best not offend her sister and so you didn’t. The candy made you want to puke, but so what? You ate it and ate it and ate it…

All this has exactly what to do with the nominal subject of these comments, comic books?

A while back, in what has become a reliable supplier of comics news, and I refer to nothing less than the August New York Times, the paper ran a story headlined Don’t Blame These Heroes for Slumping Sales. The adjacent story told the world that, as the headline proclaimed, Marvel Comics was off its game in the money-making department. That’s disconcerting, but far from catastrophic, but the situation got worse when a Marvel executive blamed the faltering sales on the company’s diversity.

Time was, not so long ago, that Marvel’s primary product was superhero stories featuring costumed good-guy vigilantes who went around having double identities and kicking heinous ass. These stalwarts were, with few exceptions, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. (Okay, I’m not sure about the “Protestant” part. Matter of fact, these folk didn’t seem to have religions. Did this disqualify them from seeking elected office?)

Now, though superheroes come in diverse sizes, shapes, genders, ethnicities, orientations. (Of course, you know all this.) The Marvel exec apparently blamed limping sales on the diversity of revamps of familiar characters. The story mentions a female Thor, an Asian Hulk and a black Captain America.

But a respected comic shop owner in San Francisco, Brian Hibbs, disagreed. Mr. Hibbs blames Marvel’s woes on the plethora of series reboots with a Number 1 on the cover. (Number ones can be marketed as collectors’ items and so hobbyists may decide to buy extra copies; the flood of new series (more collectors’ items and the satisfaction of being there from the beginning) andt he promise of significant changes in storylines where, it turns out, there are none.

Questionable marketing tactics, unfulfilled promises and maybe just too much of the same stuff… In olden days these special issues were rare and maybe appeared when someone had a story idea that demanded special handling, and not one that existed just to sweeten profits.

There is, of course, no reason why a comic continuity can’t do both, but maybe it’s not a good idea to do them both every day.

Yummy-Lumps aren’t always yummy.

Box Office Democracy: The Fate of the Furious

Box Office Democracy: The Fate of the Furious

I don’t believe in objective reviews of media.  I think the personal subjectivity of the reviewer is impossible to remove and, honestly, that it would be boring if you could.  That said, I am not capable of being remotely objective when it comes to the Fast & Furious franchise.  I find the formula they have stumbled upon since Fast Five to be unbelievably charming and I can’t separate the movie from the joy they’ve brought in to my life and the friendships these movies have enriched.  If this bothers you, I can give you the low down on how I feel about this movie and you can be on your way: if you’ve liked any of the last three entries in the franchise you’ll like this one, and if you didn’t this will not change your mind.  If my F&F obsession does not bother you, come on and let me geek out a little bit.

If you’ve seen the trailer you know the hook for The Fate of the Furious: Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) has turned against his crew, his family, and is now working for the super hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron).  That’s sort of the whole film.  Cipher has a nefarious plan but it’s very nebulous.  She wants nuclear weapons and she wants to launch one, but I’m not sure what she wants to do after that.  It all feels hastily thrown together so we can get the shots of Dom in his evil black jumpsuit driving a more evil-looking black Challenger.  That’s all fine, the plot is only there to hold top the action sequences— but this feels less substantial than usual.  There’s also the idea that Cipher would blackmail someone who has pulled off some of the zaniest heists and car chases in history but only uses him as a glorified bag man that rubbed me the wrong way— but again it’s all about big action sequences and meaningful glances, so whatever.

There are two signature action pieces in The Fate of the Furious and they’re the most important thing to judge the movie by.  There’s a big second act set piece in New York where Cipher hacks a bunch of cars and controls them remotely as a big swarm to take out a motorcade.  This is a visually interesting bit but it might finally be the moment where a Fast & Furious movie got too far out there for me.  I know cars don’t work like that.  More importantly, it doesn’t feature any characters we care about so it’s literally just cars smashing in to each other with no purpose.  The sequence picks up a lot when it becomes about Dom and the rest of the crew, but by that point you’re kind of tired of action.  The movie’s climax is a race across a frozen bay to stop a submarine while being chased by cars firing missiles.  I know I said self-driving cars were straining my suspension of disbelief earlier in this very paragraph, but I loved every ridiculous second of this sequence.  It feels a little like they’re trying to top the tank sequence from Fast & Furious 6 by using a bigger more menacing piece of military hardware and it doesn’t live up to it, maybe nothing ever could, but it’s great in its own right.

Fast Five was a heist movie with all the wonderful twists and turns inherent in the genre, and in the two films since they’ve abandoned that to make straight-up action movies.  While they haven’t gone back to stealing giant safes, they have returned to meaningful third act twists and I’m so thankful for it.  There’s so many things we find out were slightly different than the first time we saw them, and it’s what these movies need to not just be an endless parade of flashy car tricks.  It needs characters, it needs stakes, and it needs to be just a little bit surprising.

Reading this back, I can see how much I’m grading The Fate of the Furious on a curve.  If this was any other movie with the flaws this one has I would probably be here tearing it apart and begging you not to see it.  I love this franchise, I love these characters, and I can’t set that aside.  There are so many little things to appreciate from an eight movie franchise that can’t be replicated.  It’s nice just to hang out with these characters and exist in their world for another couple hours.  It’s fun to pick up on the callbacks and see them pick up threads that were set down years and years ago.  I still find The Fate of the Furious as refreshing as a Corona on a hot LA afternoon— and as long as that’s true, I’ll carry water for these movies.

Mike Gold: There’s No Business Like…

For some odd reason, over the past several decades many a wannabe comics creator has consulted me for advice. That’s quite nice; it makes me feel like I might know something. Of course, that also means I’ve been around the block so many times I’m prone to tripping over my own tracks. That’s the yin and yang of life.

No matter who the victim wannabe is, be that person a writer wannabe, an artist wannabe, or in extremely rare and unusual cases an editor wannabe, there are several chunks of hot glowing wisdom that I try to impart. Now you, if you’re a wannabe or you’re simply comics-curious, get to experience some of these radiant pearls without having to suffer through what I alone like to think of as “my sense of humor.”

I shall start with the most important lesson of them all. It is absolutely true for everybody, although some might find it daunting. “For every truly great guitar player with a contract and an entourage, there are well over 1,000 guitar players who are even better who never make it out of the garage.”

Even though truer words were never spoken, you might be wondering what the hell that has to do with producing comic book stories. Well… everything. The business of comics is show business. Admittedly, comics creators get less money than our performing counterparts, and we get less cocaine and cars and hardly any nookie, but we are in show business nonetheless.

Assuming you haven’t just decided to switch your major and wiki “hedge funds,” I shall drop the definition into your lap. You want to get in to the comics business, editorially speaking. Well, so do a zillion other people – and that’s growing as the medium achieves greater public acceptance. Let’s say you want to be a writer. For every Neil Gaiman out there, we’ve got a thousand people who aren’t in the racket, would like to be, and are better writers than my friend Neil Gaiman (sorry, pal).

O.K., there probably is nobody faster than Neil and that’s important, but we’ll leave that aside. On a planet with 7.5 billion human beings on it right now and births outnumbering deaths by more than two-to-one, there’s got to be at least 1,000 writers who are better than just about anybody we’ve seen thus far.

In order to get in the front door, you may ask, do you have to be better than the best? Well, that would be great and we can always use another bright, shiny beacon, but no – you don’t have to be better than the best. But you damn well better be more than half as good as the best to get noticed.

Yeah, there are schools that purport to teach you how to write (or draw, but not edit), but there are no schools that will teach you how to think. Most are incapable of teaching you how to be creative, but if you excel at the basic techniques and take creative chances and polish your work as though it was the Hope Diamond and work hard and eat your veggies, you’ll have a damn good shot.

If I had a dollar for every time I looked through an artist’s portfolio and offered some words of alleged wisdom only to be told that the wannabe’s work was better than, say, the two or three worst artists available, I’d have enough cash on hand to get somebody from Lenexa Kansas to drive out some Zarda’s barbecue to me here in Connecticut. The fact is, we’ve already got those “lousy” artists. Why would we need more?

Besides, that lesser talent might have been saving our deadline ass for years and years. Sometimes you just need the damn job finished, and I’ll bet you any long-term D-lister you care to mention has paid his or her dues and deserves the respect and the work.

Or not. There are assholes out there. I said this was show business.

So what do you do? After you’ve studied the masters who have written brilliant books on the subject – start with every prose-and-pictures instructional written by Will Eisner and Scott McCloud – and you’ve started producing and polishing and redoing everything and make it better, take copies of a few pages to your friendly neighborhood comic book store at some time when conversation is available (as opposed to, say, Free Comic Book Day) and show it around. Listen to what the clerks and your fellow fans have to say. And by “listen” I mean “pay complete attention, don’t be defensive and don’t be a dick.”

Then you take your pages back and redo them with all the additional knowledge you’ve just acquired. Eventually – and it’ll take a while – you’ll get good enough that you can put it online or work with one of the smaller “independent” publishers or even self-publish. And then you listen some more. And redo it some more. Then you might have something worthy of showing a comics editor or a comics bureaucrat (there’s a difference) or a friendly writer or artist, and… you’ll get some more advice.

Continue along that path, even though there are 1,000 wannabes behind you. Do not get off that path. No, you do not suck (probably; hey, a few do). Persevere. You are on your own personal lifequest. A jihad, if you will. You only lose if you quit before getting to the finish line.

There’s more stuff I will probably get around to saying in the future, and many of my comrade columnists here at ComicMix with names like “O’Neil,” “Newell,” and “Ostrander” have given out some great advice. Marc Fishman, who occupies this space every Saturday, has been on this quest for a while and is nearing that bright light of success – and he’s been sharing every step of the way with our readers.

One more thing.

Don’t give up.

Ever.

 

REVIEW: Teen Titans: The Judas Contract

Condensing nearly eighty years of comics continuity, characters, and interpretations into other media allows for cherry-picking and revision to be done, so the resulting new work has the look and feel of the original while offering up something fresh, and hopefully, good.

One of the best-regarded storylines in DC’s history is “The Judas Contract” which was the culmination of a two year thread in New Teen Titans because no one saw the twists and turns in the storyline while it also dramatically shifted Dick Grayson’s status quo. It also provided readers with the origin of the Tiran’s great foe, Deathstroke. The ending was emotional and strong while the entire story holds up on rereading.

What is offered up in Teen Titans: The Judas Contract animated feature, out now from Warner Home Entertainment, is a pale comparison for a number of reasons. First, the lineup of characters is substantially different so the bonds of friendship are different. We open with a flashback to the original Titans (more or less) showing their ease with one another, their trust and teamwork. It nicely introduces Starfire and shows her immediate connection with Robin. Then we move five years into the Animated Universe continuity and we have the current Titans: Starfire (Kari Wahlgren), Robin (Stuart Allan), Beast Boy (Brandon Soo Hoo), Raven (Taissa Farmiga), Blue Beetle (Jake T. Austin), and Terra (an excellent Christina Ricci). There is little explanation of when Terra joined the team, but in the comics, she was around for quite some time before betraying the team.

In the comics, Deathstroke was hired by H.I.V.E. to destroy the Titans and manipulated Tara Markov, a sociopathic teen exiled from Markovia, to be his mole. He played the long game, getting her deep with the team’s trust, even initiating a romance with Changeling (Beast Boy), before having her deliver them to his grasp. She wound up sacrificing herself to save the team, a noble final act.

In the animated film, this is a much more condensed story, with lots of character threads that are under-deserved while the comics’ concurrent Brother Blood (Gregg Henry) story was given way too much play here. Ernie Altbacker, who did a great job on Justice League Dark, has a tough job in adapting the story for film and by using Brother Blood and his cult, serves up nonsensical action in lieu of the real emotional core. Terra’s introduction to the Tians is skipped over while flashbacks show a vastly different origin than the comics, a cliched one at that.

Terra’s romance with Beast Boy comes too late in the story and doesn’t have the same deep resonance it had in the comics, the same with Deathstroke’s uncomfortable sexual relationship with Terra. In the film, he is colder towards her, redeemed only by Miguel Ferrer’s strong (and sadly, final) performance as Slade Wilson. I still dislike how Deathstroke was appended to the League of Assassins in these films since it makes little sense and wish they’d move past that.

Blood’s device, designed to drain the Titans’ powers into him, transforming him into a god, is perhaps the weakest part of the story and an illogical one since Beetle’s alien tech or Raven’s supernatural force cannot easily be captured and transferred.

Where Altbacker excels, is with the evolving relationship between Starfire and Nightwing (Sean Maher) as they move in together at the same time she is jealous with his easy rapport with the team he no longer leads. The other character subplots – notably Beetle’s tense relationship with his father – could have been stronger. At least this film runs longer than most, clocking in at 85 minutes, allowing even this much characterization. His use of Damian is an excellent addition although he’s off the gird for a long stretch in the middle, as if Altbacker couldn’t figure out what to do with him.

Long-time fans will recognize Jericho in an early scene and we’re rewarded with a hint of things to come with a post-credits scene. Similarly, Wonder Girl is seen at the end, and should be showcased whenever the Titans turn up next.

Overall, if you take the film as the latest installment in the shared animated universe, it’s a strong entry. As an adaptation of this cherished comics tale, it falls woefully short. The film can be found in a variety of formats, of course, including a nifty gift set complete with Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD code, and a Blue Beetle figure.

The Blu-ray comes with a 28-minute chat between New Teen Titans co-creators Marv Wolfman and George Pérez which shows their easy camaraderie. Marv brought along some nifty artifacts enhancing the video.

Less interesting is the Villains United—Deathstroke (9:00), with Wolfman, Pérez, and Mike Carlin talking about Slade Wilson’s evolution and place in the pantheon of great antagonists.

There’s a fun Sneak Peek for the next offering, the stand-alone Batman and Harley Quinn with the return of Bruce Timm to the team. Rounding out the video are two thematically-related episodes from the DC Comics Vault: “Terra” and “Titan Rising”, both from Teen Titans.

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks