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Wallace and Gromit Go Sony

Wallace and Gromit Go Sony

Aardman Animation , of Wallace and Gromit fame, signed a three-picture deal with Sony Pictures, it was announced today.  The company, based in England, had been without a Hollywood partner since being dumped by Dreamworks in January. 

"We couldn’t be more excited about working with the entire Aardman team," said Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal.

Aardman co-founder David Sproxton said: "We are delighted to find a partner in Sony that shares our vision.  We are all very excited by the potential and have a number of projects we are keen to bring to fruition with this new relationship."

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit won an Oscar.  However, it lost money, as did Aardman’s following film, Flushed Away.  These losses were blamed for Dreamworks ending a five-picture deal after only two films.

Now YOU can slurp Spider-Man!

Now YOU can slurp Spider-Man!

Spider-Man fans (and people like me who collect lenticulars) can take part in the upcoming media frenzy over the release of Spider-Man 3 this month at more than 5,800 participating 7-Eleven stores in the United States and Canada.  Fans can buy Slurpee’s in a selection of three Spidey-related lenticular cups. 

In addition, there’s an online contest at hhttp://www.slurpee.com with prizes that include three trips to New York for the movie’s premiere April 30.  Other prizes include Spider-Man 3 video games and Spider-Man 2.1 DVDs.

Fans in Denmark, Hong Kong, southern China, Taiwan, the Phillippines and Sweden can buy the special Slurpees but are not eligible for the contest.

"This is one of the coolest cups we have ever designed, perfect for a perennially cool product like Slurpee," said Rita Bargerhuff, 7-Eleven Senior Marketing Director. "We worked very closely with Columbia Pictures to create lenticular illustrations that would make great collectibles for any Spider-Man or Slurpee fan. I expect the cups will sell quickly."

In a related event, the featured Slurpee flavor for April is Black Cherry Lemonade.

Mad about Bush?

Mad about Bush?

The MAD War on Bush will be released by DC Comics in June. The trade paperback reprints many of Mad Magazine’s recent features tweaking our president, all under an original and reverential introduction by Jimmy Kimmel.

This is a rush release. Perhaps our friends at DC know something about Bush’s future that they’re not sharing with sister-company CNN?

What you may have missed

What you may have missed

I’m back, and on a personal note I would like to thank everyone for their very kind wishes and condolences on the death of my father, more about which on Wednesday if I can manage to make Dad the focus of my next column. 

In the meantime, things here seem a bit — different, don’t they? So let’s get caught up first before we jump into the newer stuff.  Here’s your one-click guide to the regular columns and podcasts from the past two weeks.  First the columns:

Flip through our pages for the past couple weeks to check out contributions from Martha, Robert, Kai, Matt and others in our extended ComicMix family!  And I hope that you’re as eager as I am to catch up on all our podcasts as Mellifluous Mike Raub marches on:

There you go, lots of reading and listening — and all fodder for much commentary from you, we hope!  Feel free to let fly in our brand-new comments section below, coming shortly!

Downey’s looking pretty Stark these days

Downey’s looking pretty Stark these days

 

Robert Downy Jr as Tony Stark (right) and Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Pottson the set of the now-filming Iron Man movie. Set for release on May 2nd, 2008 and directed by Jon Favereau (who played Foggy Nelson in Daredevil), the movie also stars Terrence Howard and Jeff Bridges.

MIKE GOLD: You say you want an evolution…

MIKE GOLD: You say you want an evolution…

I like Martha Thomases’ idea of 365, as reported on ComicMix yesterday. A full-length comic book story each and every day for a year. Now that would be an event.

Sadly, most such comic book events aren’t worth the effort, let alone the price. The stories are overblown, their effects on their “universe” temporary – either in the sense that they will be countermanded or, at best, castrated in the next such event.

(Hmmm. There’s a phrase I’ve never written before. “At best, castrated.”)

By the time they’re over, most events turn out to be nothing more than marketing gimmicks, and an endless sea of marketing gimmicks doth not a universe make. As of this writing Captain America is dead but Bucky is alive – something he’d managed to avoid for over 40 years. As Denny O’Neil pointed out in his recent ComicMix column, death has no permanence in comics. As a plot point, it is hackneyed: it may have collectibility, but it has no credibility.

Wonder Woman has been redefined, resurrected, rebooted, and retold differently so many times since 1965 (arguably her first real reboot) that I’m surprised she doesn’t bump into Tony Soprano at her shrink’s office.

Of the two major universes, Marvel’s is the most consistent – but only by comparison to DC, whose universe had to be cobbled together retroactively by combining the efforts of five publishing houses over 70 years: DC, All-American, Quality, Fawcett and Charlton – and maybe Fox, depending how you, ahhh, look at Phantom Lady. But by and large, in the past couple decades Marvel’s change has been evolutionary and not stop-and-start-over. Spider-Man went step by step from being a four-eyed high school wallflower with a secret identity to becoming a publicly known married-to-an-actress superhero and, oh yeah, menace to his nation. Marvel never stopped and said “Oh, now everything you know is wrong; this is the way it is and the way it will be until we need to burrow into your pockets again.”

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Blades of Box Office Gold

Blades of Box Office Gold

Blades of Glory was the number one film for the April Fool’s weekend, with an estimated take of $33 million.  Disney’s Meet The Robinsons came in second, with $25.1 million.

300 came in next, with $11.2 million, followed by TMNT with $9.2 million.  If  Hollywood realizes that both films owe their existance to Frank Miller (whose graphic novel, Ronin, was the inspiration to Eastman and Laird back in the 1980s), no one admits it.

Wild Hogs, Shooter, Premonition, The Last Mimzy, The Hills Have Eyes 2 and Reign Over Me rounded out the list.

Ellison, Groth sign historic peace accord

Ellison, Groth sign historic peace accord

In what is being widely heralded as the only diplomatic success during the Bush Administration, today a treaty was signed between Gary Groth, publisher of Fantagraphics, and Harlan Ellison, professional Harlan Ellison impersonater, at the Portland, OR headquarters of Dark Horse Comics.

"We were glad we could finally bring this conflict to an end," said Mike Richardson, Dark Horse’s publisher. "We found ourselves in the crossfire between the Fantagraphics army to the north and the Ellison guerillas to the south. And even though we were widely perceived as Ellison sympathizers due to our publishing Dream Corridor, we were able to convince Gary that since we had published Harlan’s work in the past, we wanted to throttle him as badly as anybody else. Gary understood that, and that led to our first breakthrough in talks."

Details of the treaty have not been made fully public, but we understand that as Ellison’s forces will be returning prisoners to Fantagraphics on the condition that they also take two of Ellison’s ex-wives and "some big creepy guy who’s been following me around ever since I stopped doing the Hour 25 radio show. Joe Stranucci, or Syzygy, or Sienkiewicz, or something… I never know how to pronounce it."

Dirk Deppey, Fantagraphics spokesperson, has announced now that conflicts have ended there will be a multi-volume set of The Complete Ellison Lawsuits coming out, with the first volume due next April and new volumes coming out every six weeks after. The entire series should be out by 2017.

MATT RAUB Reviews Doctor Who season 3 premiere

MATT RAUB Reviews Doctor Who season 3 premiere

The Doctor is back, and not only does he get a new companion but a new Sonic Screwdriver to boot! I just set my peepers on a back-to-back marathon of last year’s “The Runaway Bride” and the brand-spanking-new season 3 premiere, “Smith and Jones”, and I figured I’d drop in to throw down my two cents on the episode. Be forewarned, there are some spoilerific parts to this review, so if you decide you want to wait until Sci-Fi finally airs the show in 2023, then I’d turn away now.

From the first episode in season 1, I was a huge fan of Billie Piper as Rose Tyler, I thought she was gorgeous, and had incredible range. Though there were a good 12 episodes or so where she cried through the majority of the program, I still couldn’t dislike her. With that said, I was pretty hesitant to like this new companion, the intelligent and attractive medical student Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman. We first get a taste of Agyeman in last season’s “Army of Ghosts” as she was one of first victim of the Cybermen. We now find out she was the cousin of Martha Jones, and that’s a clever touch.

Looking back, this episode can very easily be put in stark comparison to season 1’s opener, “Rose.” Much like in that episode, the majority of this episode is exposition on our new companion’s life, an unexpected conflict, and the random entrance of the Doctor to save the day. Also, there is a scene very reminiscent of “Rose” where the Doctor grabs Martha’s hand and tells her to run…sound familiar? Of course, the doctor is still pining over the loss of Rose, but as established in “Runaway Bride,” it was time to find someone new.

The concept: the hospital where Martha Jones works gets transported to the moon. The Doctor, posing as the meandering patient John Smith, discovers that the transportation as by an intergalactic rhino-police (that’s intergalactic police that look like rhinos, not intergalactic police that only police the rhino population). The transportation was to single out a fugitive that they believe is hiding out in the hospital. The Doctor and Martha jump on the case to find the criminal and get the inhabitants back to Earth before they all lose oxygen.

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Spielberg, Lucas announce comics publishing company

Spielberg, Lucas announce comics publishing company

Through a spokesman, filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have announced their intention to join with Hugh Hefner, Jack Nicolson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicholas Cage, Matt Groening, Jon Voight, and Bill Clinton to form a comics publishing firm known as Studio Comics. Intended to be a Research and Development part of the successful SKG, the new company will gather comics artists and writers from around the world in an effort to create comics material that can be transformed into successful motion pictures.

Comics created for the new company will have small print runs of as few as twenty copies for the purpose of being shown to and commented on by studio executives. DiCaprio, whose father was a successful comics distributor, laughingly told reporters that Studio Comics would be responsible for what he termed "instant collector’s items" that will become a series of Holy Grails" to comics collectors.

Spielberg reportedly came up with the idea for creating comic books within a studio system after a dinner conversation with famed film historian Forrest Ackerman. The one-time editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland complained to the director of Close Encounters that the sales of once-ubiquitous comics were so low that it has become impossible to gauge the success or failure of a new feature by reader reaction. He suggested that filmmakers should go directly to comics creators and cut out of the loop existing publishers and the relative handful of readers from the process of acquiring material that could be transferred to film.

The surprising involvement of former President Clinton is the result of his long-standing desire to see both a comics and movie version of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s book The Enemy Within. After speaking with Groening about possible artists and writers for the project (and, according to DiCaprio, the shortcomings of Richard Nixon), an agreement was reached wherein Clinton would adapt the Kennedy book to comics form and Groening would do the illustrations.

Similarly, Jack Nicholson has expressed an interest in creating a comics and film biography of the late Mad publisher William M. Gaines. The multiple Academy-award-winning actor wants to direct the resulting movie and to portray psychologist Fredric Wertham, Gaines’s long-time adversary.

Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, who once produced a highly-praised filmed version of Macbeth directed by Roman Polansky, wants to introduce a series of general interest comics and movies aimed at a family audience.

Acknowledging that the majority of Studio’s "publishing" will involve photocopying pages that will be collated and shown to a small group of people, DiCaprio added that most of the comics will also be distributed to traditional newsstands, comic shops, and even movie theaters as promotional material for the films on which they are based.