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Fate gets real

Fate gets real

Steve Gerber reports his Doctor Fate series, already announced, solicited and then rescinded, will be appearing in a new double-length, double-feature book along the lines of DC’s recent Mystery In Space and Tales of the Unexpected titles. It should be coming out in September.

Personally, I think this is good news. It’s quite rare for me to get excited about still another plow-over of an old superhero, and Doctor Fate had some good runs over the decades. But Gerber and Fate seemed like a perfect match, and I look forward to his new series once again.

(Artwork copyright DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.)

 

The Bionic Woman and Chuck

The Bionic Woman and Chuck

With its only success this year the science fiction favorite, Heroes, NBC is betting that, come the fall, you’ll want more. The new season, announced today, includes a revival of The Bionic Woman, Journeyman (about a time-travelling journalist) and Chuck, a young computer whiz who becomes a Jack Bauer-style agent after espionage secrets are downloaded into his brain.

Other new series include Lipstick Jungle, based on the novel by Sex & the City’s Candace Bushnell, and The IT Crowd, about a "misunderstood" group of techies who apparently have nothing secret downloaded into their brains.

Gone are Crossing Jordan, produced by Heroes’ Tim Kring, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  *Sigh*  Where will we get our Miguel Ferrer fiix?

Alan Moore, Melinda Gebbie wed

Alan Moore, Melinda Gebbie wed

This photograph, shamelessly ripped off of Neil Gaiman‘s website, provides illustrative proof that yesterday afternoon (as the British reckon afternoon) noted comics couple Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie created the sequel to their mega-graphic novel Lost Girls: they, indeed, got married.

ComicMix congratulates Alan and Melinda and wishes them a long and happy life together.

For more pics, check out Neil‘s site, and, maybe, eventually, the Alan Moore Fan Site.

More Groo for you

More Groo for you

Ready that cheese dip, your favorite mendicant is about to return!  Groo writer Mark Evanier has just announced that on August 1st Dark Horse will release The Groo 25th Anniversary Special, to be followed in September by debut of the four-issue miniseries Groo: Hell on Earth.

Groo — it’s one of those books where, if you have to ask, don’t.

Only really, do.  According to the solicitation, the anniversary issue will feature our hero battling the menace of "The Plague," as well as presenting The Groo Alphabet, a primer of friends and foes (mostly foes), followed by a special illustrated text story on how this comic came to be and why it just won’t go away. Plus other silly features.

As if the features already listed weren’t silly enough.

(Artwork copyright Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones. All Rights Reserved.)

Pros name 50 most influential visual effects film

Pros name 50 most influential visual effects film

On Friday, the Visual Effects Society announced the results of a membership poll, naming the 50 most influential films of all time in terms of special effects.  According to VES Executive Director Eric Roth, hese films have had a significant, lasting impact on the practice and appreciation of visual effects as an integral, artistic element of cinematic expression and the storytelling process."

Comics fans will be arguing about the placement of Sin City (43) and Superman (44).  No other comic book-inspired films made the list.

The films will be the backdrop of the 2007 VES Festival of Visual Effects, which those of you in Los Angeles can enjoy at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills from June 7 through June 10.  There, a panel that includes Douglas Trumbull, Richard Edlund, Dennis Murren and maybe John Dykstra (he’s tentative as we write this) will discuss the list. 

After the jump, the whole list.

 

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MIKE GOLD: Who’s taking the bullet?

MIKE GOLD: Who’s taking the bullet?

Funny thing about Fred Wertham.

Dr. Fred, in case you don’t know, was the guy who, back in the late 40s and early 50s, was concerned about all the sexual imagery and violence he saw in comics and its harmful impact on our nation’s youth.  He, and those many folks of similar mind, waxed poetic about this crawling evil in the pages of such then-popular general interest magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest. He later wrote it all up in a best-seller called Seduction of the Innocent, which helped lead to the establishment of the Comics Code censorship board.

It also lead to the establishment of a noisy all-star rock’n’roll band that starred Bill Mumy, Miguel Ferrer, Steve Leialoha, and Max Allan Collins. They released an album called, appropriately, The Golden Age. It was loud, and it featured Weird Al Yankovic on one track. But this has absolutely nothing to do with my point.

My point is, if sexual imagery and violence in comics were to be considered bad, then Dr. Fred wasn’t incorrect in his analysis of the medium. He was merely premature.

What he thought he found in the children’s comics (a redundancy) of the 50s can be easily discovered on the walls of any comic book shop today. Now, the industry’s defense might very well be “but these books are not for children,” and they’d be right. At today’s cover prices, with all the intertwined continuity and story arcs that command a commitment to multiple purchased, children can’t afford them. Heck, damn few adults can afford them, but adults should have the option of buying any sort of reading material they want.

But you would think that in these times of rising religious fundamentalism and “family values,” at least somebody would be bitching about all the blood and guts and astonishingly huge-breasted crime fighters, both female and male. I know my friends at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund might disagree, but they fight for the comics retailers and creators who get nailed. I’m glad to see they don’t have to extend their meager resources any further than they have to.

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Spider-Man 3 still on top

Spider-Man 3 still on top

Spider-Man 3 still rules the box office charts, pulling in $60 million dollars in its second weekend, far outdistancing all comers.

Whereas it suffered a 60% drop from its opening weekend, Media By Numbers president Paul Dergarabedian noted "To me this is an appropriate second-weekend drop. Any studio would be happy to have a movie opening with $60 million, let alone a second weekend with $60 million."

These figures are only represent ticket sales in North America. The domestic total is just below a quarter-billion dollars; total worldwide projections run close to twice that number.

According to the charts, all other movies this weekend sucked big time at the box office: 28 Weeks Later ($10 million), Georgia Rule ($5.879 million), Disturbia ($4.802 million), Delta Farce ($3.5 million), The Invisible ($2.2 02 million), Hot Fuzz ($1.655 million), Next ($1.604 million) and Meet the Robinsons ($1.6 million).

 

A mother of a week

A mother of a week

Friday the 13th done fall on a Sunday this month, so we’re off to celebrate Mom’s Day with family members.  But first, here’s our round-up of regular weekly columns, now including our weekend regulars:

Don’t forget to check out the debut column from Ric Meyers, DVD Xtra #1: The Thai’s have it, and of course our regular weekly podcasts, courtesy of Mellifluous Mike Raub:

Happy Mother’s Day, everybody!

Tonight: Drinky The Crow!

Tonight: Drinky The Crow!

Tony Millionaire has made it to television.

The creator of Sock Monkey, Billy Hazelnuts and Uncle Gabby previously known as Scott Richardson has leased his Drinky Crow character to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, which, evidently, is in need of more jokes about vomit and poop. Drinky the alcoholic crow appears in Maakies, Millionaire’s weekly strip syndicated to "what-to-do-this-weekend" papers all over the country.

The pilot goes up tonight and is available on the Adult Swim website. After that, Cartoon Network is going to think it over.

(Artwork copyright Tony Millionaire. All Rights Reserved.)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies

I’ve gone into some detail elsewhere about how my Forgotten Horrors series of movie encyclopedias (1979 and onward) dovetails with my collaborative comic-book efforts with Timothy Truman and John K. Snyder III. More about all that as things develop at ComicMix. This new batch of Forgotten Horrors commentaries will have more to do with the overall relationship between movies and the comics and, off-and-on, with the self-contained appeal of motion pictures. I have yet to meet the comics enthusiast who lacks an appreciation of film.

Although it is especially plain nowadays that comics exert a significant bearing upon the moviemaking business – with fresh evidence in marquee-value outcroppings for the Spider-Man and TMNT franchises and 300 – the greater historical perspective finds the relationship to be quite the other way around.

It helps to remember a couple of things: Both movies and comics, pretty much as we know them today, began developing late in the 19th century. And an outmoded term for comics is movies; its popular usage as such dates from comparatively recent times. The notion of movies-on-paper took a decisive shape during the 1910s, when a newspaper illustrator named Ed Wheelan began spoofing the moving pictures (also known among the shirtsleeves audience as “moom pitchers” and “fillums”), with cinema-like visual grammar, in a loose-knit series for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American.

Christened Midget Movies in 1918, Wheelan’s series evolved from quick-sketch parodies of cinematic topics to sustained narratives, running for days at a stretch and combining melodramatic plot-and-character developments with cartoonish exaggerations. Wheelan’s move to the Adams Syndicate in 1921 prompted a change of title, to Minute Movies. (Don Markstein’s Web-based Toonopedia points out that the term is “mine-yute,” as in tiny, rather than “minnit,” as in a measure of time. No doubt an intended sense of connection with the Hearst trademark Midget Movies.) Chester Gould showed up in 1924 with a Wheelan takeoff called Fillum Fables – seven years before Gould’s more distinctive breakthrough with Dick Tracy.

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