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MIKE GOLD apologizes to William Shatner… and Denny O’Neil

MIKE GOLD apologizes to William Shatner… and Denny O’Neil

I realize the whole concept of a public apology has become somewhat tainted, but I hope Mr. Shatner and Mr. O’Neil each accept mine in the spirit in which they are intended.

When the first episode of Star Trek was aired, I thought the show was rather lame. I had just turned 16 and I wasn’t all that much of a teevee viewer. That summer I took up an interest in a young woman who was a dedicated Trekker, long before the term was invented. Ergo, my interest in the show waxed. As we headed towards the awesome events of 1968 my interest in television in general waned as, sadly, so did my relationship with the aforementioned young lady.

As Star Trek’s popularity picked up in syndication, I managed to catch all the episodes, but with growing popularity grew derision towards its star. I found the jokes made about Mr. Shatner’s stylized performance to be hilarious, and I even did my own on radio. At the time I knew better: I remembered his fine performances in The Twilight Zone (perhaps the most famous episode of that praiseworthy series), on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (where he co-starred with both Leonard Nimoy and Werner Klemperer), and most significantly, in the lead on The Andersonville Trial, an astonishingly brilliant teevee movie directed by George C. Scott and co-starring Cameron Mitchell, Richard Basehart, Jack Cassidy, Martin Sheen, Buddy Ebsen, Albert Salmi. That’s one of the best casts ever assembled for a broadcast, and Shatner – its star – was more than up to the task.

Mr. Shatner proceeded to healthy runs on numerous series, but the jokes went on and on. My own attitude began to lighten up when I realized he had a strong sense of self-awareness about Captain Kirk. His own parody of the character in the movie Airplane: The Very Stupid Sequel (I think I’ve got the title right, but iMDB doesn’t list it as such) was brilliantly self-effacing. I figured somebody else wrote that part. But his performance as William Shatner at a Star Trek convention on Saturday Night Live – the famous “get a life” moment – well, even if somebody else wrote it, Shatner wasn’t playing a character. He was playing himself with a truth and honesty essential to successful comedy.

Damn. That was good.

Since then, Shatner showed his comedic prowess in a variety of television commercials, most notably those for Priceline.com. But the world moved and changed when David E. Kelley hired him to play the part of Denny Crane for a run on The Practice, knowing the show was to spin-off into Boston Legal, unless ABC changed its mind (ask our friends – off the record – at DC Comics about Lois and Clark).

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Edward Norton as Bruce Banner

Edward Norton as Bruce Banner

Step-sibling Cinematical (say that three times fast) is reporting that: "Bruce Banner and his massive green alter ego will be played by Oscar nominee Edward Norton! Best known for his superlative work in movies like Primal Fear, Rounders, American History X and Fight Club (oh, and Death to Smoochy), Norton steps into a role vacated by Bana — and I for one think it’s a really excellent choice on the part of [Louis] Leterrier and his Universal overlords."

Crime writer to tackle Hellblazer

Crime writer to tackle Hellblazer

The Scotsman is reporting that Ian Rankin, writer of the extremely popular Inspector Rebus crime fiction series, will be doing a six-issue run on DC’s Hellblazer.

Rankin approaches the venture with appropriate trepidation: "Let’s wait and see if I can do it; maybe it will turn out that I can’t. It is much more like a screenwriter’s skill than a novelist’s skill. You have to use very few words, and a lot of the writing is just instructions to the artist."

A good observation for other famous "mainstream" authors with comic book aspirations to bear in mind!

Sunday reading catch-up

Sunday reading catch-up

You know you’re a geek when you go away-from-keyboard to spend the day with your cousins at a nifty local mall and your first thought upon seeing a Lego keychain display is, "Ooh, Batman and Robin and the Joker, this would make a cute photo for ComicMix!"

And so it goes (apologies, etc. etc.).  Now for your weekly all-in-one post of our regular columns from this past week:

As for me, I’m going to catch up on Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s latest podcasts:

I’ll also be reading comics.  Have I mentioned today’s a good day to read comics?  Heck, what day isn’t?

Who’s on top again?

Who’s on top again?

With the Doctor Who episode, "Gridlock", airing last night in the UK, the show has retaken the lead from Star Trek with 727 produced episodes over a 44 year history, exceeding all of the Star Trek series combined. Well done, lads and ladies.

GLENN HAUMAN: Arguments should be good

CBRJoe Rice disgraces himself and Comic Book Resources with one of the worst cases of paralogia and argumentum ad hominem I’ve seen since the Peter David/Todd MacFarlane Great Debate. His argument can be reductiod to the following absurdum:

  1. I like Fantagraphics products.
  2. Harlan Ellison is suing Fantagraphics for reasons I don’t even pretend to address or understand.
  3. Therefore, Harlan Ellison is a "petty old sci-fi writer" and "a tired old hack" and he’s suing because "in truth, because his widdle feewings were hurt at how they descwibed him".

Yes, Joe, comics should be good– and so should your arguments. I didn’t think there could be a Rice who could make worse arguments than Condoleezza…

Happy birthday, McDonald’s

Happy birthday, McDonald’s

Fifty-two (there’s that number again) years ago today, the first McDonald’s franchise opened up in Des Plaines, IL, just north of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

It’s still there, but now it’s a museum – complete with 1955 cars in the parking lot.

On behalf of what you’ve done for the bodies of millions of comic book fans across America, we’d just like to say: Thanks heaps.

(Comic Book Guy artwork © Fox. All Rights Reserved.)

MATT RAUB on Painkiller Jane

MATT RAUB on Painkiller Jane

Hey gang, Matt Raub back again for another TV review for the newest comic and Hollywood hybrid show, Painkiller Jane. The show is based off of Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Quesada’s comic from the 90s about a government agent who can’t die. The episode stars Kristanna Loken, the robot hottie from Terminator 3 and another remarkably popular comic book movie, Bloodrayne.

Going into the show, I knew nothing about the comic book. All I knew is that Palmiotti knows how to draw very attractive female characters, which I sometimes reason enough to read a book, just not this time. So the episode was a fresh start for me, being an origin story of sorts.

The episode starts with one of my least favorite plot sequences, where we start the episode halfway through the plot, and then we jump back two days or so. I consider this the “J.J. Abrams” episode format, because there was a point in the last season of Alias where every episode would do that. I long for the days when we started at point A and ended at point C, without going all Sam Beckett on us and confusing the story.

After getting over that little issue of mine, I found the episode to be a little too dumbed-down for the same audience that has been taking in episode after episode of Battlestar Galactica. There were little flashbacks to things that happened six minutes ago in the episode, which I found to be unnecessary. An argument for this could be that the director of the pilot was going with a Tony Scott feel for the episode, using quick cuts and flashbacks. Either way, it felt as if they were treating an audience who lives in the land of intelligent television like they have never seen an hour long science fiction show.

Going into the story, D.E.A. officer Jane Vasko stumbles across a secret government operation that hunts “Neuros,” which are people with neurological powers, and that means a whole ton of freaks of the week. On Jane’s very first mission, she gets pushed out of a window 44 floors up. She’s pronounced dead and after a very trippy flashback sequence of everything that happened thus far in the episode, she wakes up without a scratch on her. From this point on, Jane is able to heal any of her wounds that she comes across almost instantly. You may be asking yourself the same questions I was during this episode, such as: Did she know she could heal her whole life? Why did it take falling off a building to work? Or has anybody noticed the fact that this show is a lot like Torchwood? Great questions, but I unfortunately don’t have any of the answers.

So while we have the sultry Loken as our invulnerable star, and a fresh and funky visual style that should capture the MTV audience, I don’t think this show has much of a lifespan.  It is too simplified for a Sci-Fi audience and people today need more than a name and a comic book tie to continue to watch a show. Anybody else remember Blade: The Series?

But to satisfy my fans, I still need to rate this pilot. Due to the fact that the show could have been a lot worse, I give it a 6/10, but I don’t know how much more of the show I can handle.

Let’s get Squashy!

Let’s get Squashy!

In case you thought Zippy was kinda normal, King Features will be launching a new strip, My Cage, on May 6th.

My Cage is a twist on "MySpace," except that it has a bit of a manga-style influence. Drawn by Melissa DeJesus and written by Ed Power, My Cage is about Norman, a young 20-something platypus who wanted to be a world famous writer. Like all too many writer wannabees, he is stuck in a crappy middle-management job. However, he does have a  girlfriend, a pet amoeba named Squashy, and the usual compliment of oddball co-workers.

Some 30 newspaper have picked up the feature, including the Houston Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Chicago Sun-Times, St. Paul Pioneer Press and Madison (WI) Capital Times. No doubt you’ll be able to check it out at the Post-Intelligencer‘s website, one of the best places for the online reading of newspaper comic strips: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/

Galactus Voiced and Fantastic Four 2 Tested

Galactus Voiced and Fantastic Four 2 Tested

Now that Tim Story has confirmed that we will see the towering Eater of Worlds, Galactus, in this summer’s Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer, it is now on good authority that the voice will be lent by Laurence "don’t call me Morpheus" Fishburne. It seems after narrating the very popular TMNT Fishburne is going back to his less serious roots. Let’s hope this can only end with a revival of his Cowboy Curtis character from Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

On more depressing note, Fox held a test screening for Story’s FF2 in Seattle and the crowd was less than impressed. One quote from an audience member is that the film was "sooo bad that they felt dirty and wanted to write letters of complaint." This is pretty discouraging to hear after the excitement that followed the trailer for the film earlier this year. With a response like this and a release date of June 15, it seems that Tim Story and his crew may need to hit the cutting room quickl