The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Sci-Fi starts anime Mondays

Sci-Fi starts anime Mondays

According to Broadcasting & Cable magazine, the Sci Fi Channel will be launching a two-hour anime block on Monday nights starting on June 11 from 11:00 PM to 1:00 AM. Yep, that’s right up mear-daily against Adult Swim’s manga block.

The cable channel owned by NBC Universal will be turning to Starz Media’s Manga Entertainment. The schedule has yet to be set in stone, but they’ll be kicking off with Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society, and airing Noein, Tokko, and Macross Plus for at least the following two weeks.

Unless they change their minds.

Yahoo! Stan Lee gets much needed media exposure!

Oh, wait. It’s Steve Ditko who’s lacking media coverage.

Nevertheless, Stan gets coverage on 60 Minutes and Yahoo! It’s more Stan Lee goodness than you can shake a stick at. Apparently, there’s a movie or two that needs some extra promotion.

As for Ditko, we’ll have the inside scoop on the BBC-TV documentary about him real soon. Keep watching ComicMix.

MIKE GOLD: Who’s The Biggest Neurotic in Comics?

MIKE GOLD: Who’s The Biggest Neurotic in Comics?

After 45 years of Spider-Man and, I dunno, maybe 25 years since Batman became a certifiable nut-job, it is understandable that the question “who is the biggest neurotic in comics?” surfaces from time to time.

First, a caveat. I’m only referring to fictional characters. If we add in the real folks, well, there’s a limit to bandwidth – even here at ComicMix.com.

To me, there’s one clear winner. But this character is in good company, as some of the closest runners up were published by the same outfit. I’ll start there, in the hallowed halls of Harvey Comics.

These guys specialized in loons. Kiddie loons at that. Man, the whole bunch of them must have had really bizarre childhoods.

Third runner up: Richie Rich. If not for our winner, he would be poster boy for OCD. Okay, the kid’s wealthier than Joe Kennedy after a mob shipment, so he’s going to have some strange habits. But he, like his father, has dollar signs on everything. Everything. His house, his cars, his clothes – even his dog. The dog named “Dollar.” Good grief.

Second runner up: Hot Stuff. Okay, he’s a little devil. Get it? Fine. But, damn, he’s also a little prick. I mean it: the kid lives for the thrills of obnoxiousness. He even pissed off the sun. You know, that big yellow thing in the sky that gives Superman his powers? Here’s the proof, in one of my all-time favorite comic book covers:

First runner up and Mr. Congeniality: Baby Huey’s father. Now, clearly, Baby Huey has the worst case of microcephaly ever and as such deserves our sympathy. So does his mother, who laid the egg and hatched a baby that quickly became perhaps 20 times her size and about a thousand times her weight. And we can cut Huey’s dad some slack as his son was, like, nine feet tall (rather large for a duck), incredibly stupid, and wore diapers. That’s got to be a bit embarrassing at the Kiwanis Club. But this man was not cut out to raise any children. Always flustered, always angry and often threatening physical abuse, he simply could not cope. It is likely Huey should have been handled off to a Misericordia Home, but daddy should have been arrested.

But all of these characters pale in comparison to our winner.

(more…)

Spider-Man 3 cures world hunger!

Spider-Man 3 cures world hunger!

It’s even more ridiculous, folks.

Nikki Finke updates the running tally with the global numbers: Spider-Man 3 has produced the biggest worldwide opening ever with $375 million, upsetting the previous record of $254 mil by Star Wars Episode 3. The overseas estimates from 107 countries total $225 mil; pic was the biggest film debut ever in at least 26 countries including Russia, China, Italy, South Korea, Japan.

SM3 also shattered all the North American records (U.S. and Canada) for biggest opening day ever, biggest second day of release and biggest third day of release. Though SM3 fell -14% Saturday compared to Friday, that number without the midnight shows is actually +4%. This means that, comparatively, the threequel almost did in two days what the original Spidey did in three days back in 2002.

Spider-Man 3 box office eclipses national debt!

Spider-Man 3 box office eclipses national debt!

Well, given all those mixed reviews and all that bitchy word-of-mouth, Sony’s Spider-Man 3 managed to only rake in a mere $148,000,000 (estimated) in its premiere North American three day weekend. 

Which means by the time it’s done, and all the pay-per-view and cable revenue has been added, and all the various DVD incarnations have come out, and all that worldwide income is counted, and all the merchandising and licensing revenue is tallied, Spider-Man 3 will bring in something in the neighborhood of a billion plus.

That’s a very nice neighborhood.

Spidey-3 beats the poo out of last year’s record-breaking Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest which scored a mere $135.6 million. But Pirates 3 is coming out soon in the Big Battle of the 3-Quels… and Pirates has Keith Richards going for it!

Don’t get your fingers and toes too close to that one.

ROBERT GREENBERGER: On continuity

ROBERT GREENBERGER: On continuity

I like continuity. Always have, always will. It enriches serialized fiction as found in pulp magazines, comic books, movies and television.  In an ideal world, things would be consistent from the beginning of any new creation, but it rarely is.

Johnston McCulley altered his own reality after one Zorro novel because he decided more people saw the Douglas Fairbanks silent film than read his book and anyone coming to the second book should recognize elements.

Gene Roddenberry was building his worldview for Star Trek so details such as the name of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets evolved over the course of the first season. Unlike many of its peers, it actually had more episode to episode continuity than the majority of prime time in the 1960s.

In comic books, after 60+ years of publishing, even I recognize that it’s impossible for a singular continuity to exist for long-running characters from Captain America to Superman. What editors need to strive for, today, is consistency so the reader isn’t left scratching his head week after week.

During my tenure at Marvel, I pointed out to the editorial team that three different titles released the same week gave Henry Peter Gyrich three different jobs. That serves no one well and meant no one was paying attention at a company that prided itself on its shared universe.

More recently, DC Comics released, a week apart, a Nightwing Annual and an Outsiders Annual. Both were solid stories that wrapped up some long-standing threads and filled in gaps left by the time between Infinite Crisis’s conclusion and the “One Year Later” re-set. Read separately, they were fine, but read against the largest context of the DC Universe they massively contradicted one another.

At the conclusion of Infinite Crisis, Nightwing was completely zapped and left for dead. In his own annual, we’re told he was in a coma for three weeks and then so badly banged up he needed additional time to recover and retrain his body.  Finally, when he was deemed ready, he left Gotham City with Batman and Robin for what we know to be six months of bonding. And from there, he returned in time to meet the new Batwoman in the pages of 52.

A week later, though, we get the Outsiders Annual where Nightwing is running around with his teammates to break Black Lightning out of Iron Heights prison and once that’s done, he goes with the team for an underground mission that lasts the better part of a year.

OK, so what is the reader to accept as the actual sequence of events? He cannot be in two places at once, yet these annuals ask us to believe exactly that.

(more…)

Tom Artis’ Marvel Kids

Our friend Doug Rice passed this unpublished story along to me, and I wanted to share at least the splash panel with you ComicMixers out there. It lead off a 1993 project called “The Marvel Kids” – its intent is obvious from the art.

Doug wrote the job, and our late buddy Tom Artis was the penciller. Al Vey rounded it off with the inks. It’s a shame the project didn’t go anywhere, as the creative team had more wit and charm than a barrel of pie-throwing monkeys at a Cirque Du Soleil gig.

(Artwork copyright Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

May sweeps at ComicMix

May sweeps at ComicMix

We’d like to welcome Michael A. Price to the Mix — see his Forgotten Horrors #1 below.  It’s always nice to have another contributor take the heat off an overworked news editor!  Between him and Martha (who’s occasional column now has a name, Brilliant Disguise) and Robert and Matt and Glenn, I’m starting to lose count…) Here’s our round-up of regular weekly columns:

Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s podcasts keep getting Bigger and Broader:

And don’t forget our very special premiere videocast, in which EIC Mike Gold hints at greater things to come…

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Spider-Man 3’s spectacular overkill

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Spider-Man 3’s spectacular overkill

It helps to remember, now that a third Spider-Man epic has arrived to herald the school’s-out season at the box office, that the title character had started out as the comic-book industry’s least likely recruit to the ranks of super-heroism.

The idea of a human being with the proportionate strength of a spider had been kicking around since the 1950s. Comic-book pioneers Joe Simon and Jack Kirby seem to have arrived there first, with an undeveloped concept known as the Silver Spider. The inspiration ran afoul of a publishers’ bias against spiders and other such crawly creatures, the bankable success of Batman notwithstanding. But Simon and Kirby steered the basic notion into print in 1959 with a change-of-species Archie Comics series called The Fly – capitalizing upon an unrelated but like-titled hit movie of 1958.

By the early 1960s, Kirby was slumming at a low-rent publishing company that was soon to become the influential Marvel Comics. Kirby and writer Stan Lee had recently found competitive leverage with a band-of-heroes comic called The Fantastic Four – grimmer and edgier than the fare offered by big-time DC Comics. DC’s Superman and Batman franchises anchored a line of costumed heroes who got along well enough to have formed a super-heroes’ club.

Lee and Kirby’s retort to DC Comics’ Justice League magazine had been a Fantastic Four whose members quarreled and exchanged threats and insults. After Kirby had raised the Silver Spider as a prospect, Lee and Steve Ditko envisioned Spider-Man as a teen-age nebbish, afflicted with superhuman abilities by a bite from a radioactive spider. Artists Kirby and Ditko combined qualities of strength and neurosis in the character design: Superman’s alter-ego, Clark Kent, wore eyeglasses and feigned social withdrawal as a disguise; Spider-Man’s alter-ego, Peter Parker, wore eyeglasses because he was a nearsighted dweeb.

The embryonic Marvel Comics, having little to lose and plenty to prove, launched Spider-Man in a failing magazine and hoped that somebody might notice. Sales figures spiked against expectations. Lee’s unsophisticated attempts at philosophical depth struck comic-book readers of the day as comparatively profound. Spider-Man’s début in his own title involved a violent misunderstanding with the members of the Fantastic Four.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies date from times more recent (2002-and-counting), but they recapture well that early stage of 45 years ago in which Peter B. Parker, alias Spider-Man, marks time between altercations by wondering whether he deserves to be saddled with such responsibility. Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (2004) is generally regarded as one of the more mature-minded comic-book films, reconciling sensationalism with provocative ideas.

Editor’s Note: SPOILERS after the jump…

(more…)

Best headline ever

Best headline ever

My favorite story headline was run by the New York Daily News after a bus and subway strike that had crippled the city was resolved over the weekend in time for the start of the work week. The headline: Sick Transit’s Glorious Monday.

But now, the AP has matched it with a story about tightrope performers converging on South Korea to compete for a $15,000 prize by crossing the longest high wire ever, over a half a mile long, suspended over the river in Seoul.

The headline: Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo.

Hat tip to Tom Galloway.

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks