The New York Times reports: "Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island."
We mourn his passing.
So we’re into week two of the Doctor’s new adventures with his shiny new companion in “The Shakespeare Code,” and much as I was last week, I’m still giddy with excitement. Last week we were introduced to Martha Jones, a med student from the present time. And in this week, the Doctor takes Jones on her first trip inside the T.A.R.D.I.S. to the late 1500s, where they meet one of the Doctor’s personal heroes, William Shakespeare.
While this episode got to play a lot with what I like to call the Shanghai Knights jokes. To explain, in the film Shanghai Knights the two main characters would run into famous names in history that only we the audience would know, and reference their lives through punn-ish dialogue, such as telling a adolescent Charlie Chaplin that he talks too much. Either way, the same thing stood for this episode, in which the Doctor is constantly using lines from Shakespeare’s unwritten plays. To which the playwright responds “I should use that!” Cute little dialogue, but lets move onto the nitty-gritty.
Going along with my last review, when I mentioned that the first episode resembled the season one’s episode “Rose,” this episode was very much like season one’s “The Unquiet Dead.” In that episode, a very green Rose tags along with the Doctor to the 1800s where they meet Charles Dickens and solve yet another perplexing mystery. That episode dealt with alien entities possessing corpses making them look like “zombies” to the anybody else but our Doctor, while this week’s episode dealt with ancient aliens who pose as “witches” and get Shakespeare to use his “new words” to open a portal to their home world. Very similar episodes indeed.
With that theory in place, there should be hints of this season’s overall arch. In episode three of season one, they started mentioning “Bad Wolf” and how it was a harbinger of things to come. Now, before the re-launched series, I was never a huge Doctor Who fan, but with the writing and pure concept of continuity that thick over an entire season, I was hooked. I’m only hoping that this episode can keep with that formula.
The Sci-Fi Channel is going dipping into the golden age of comic strips and resurrecting Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon for a new television series.
Eric Johnson has been named as the latest actor to portray Flash in this radical reimagining of the series. Johnson is best known to ComicMix fans as Smallville’s Whitney Fordman, quarterback and love interest for Lana Lang.
Dale Arden, Hans Zarkov and Ming the Merciless have yet to be cast with production of the 22 episodes set to begin in, where else, Vancouver on May 1.
The series will debut on the channel in August, date and time to be announced. Rick Rosenthal, who worked with Johnson on Smallville, and has also handled Sci Fi’s The Dresden Files, will direct the first two episodes. While the original strip featured the story of the planet Mongo threatening Earth and Flash journeying into space to save his planet, the television series will dramatically alter the premise. Mongo will now be another dimension with Flash giving up his original polo in favor of other pursuits and being located in the pacific northwest.
The last time a live action Flash was on the small screen was in 1954 in an eight episode series starring Steve Holland, who later provided the visual look for James Bama’s Doc Savage paintings.
Flash Gordon has been previously portrayed by Larry “Buster” Crabbe in the three Universal movie serials from the 1930s and later, by Sam J. Jones, in the tongue-in-cheek Dino DeLaurentiss travesty from 1980.
Via Lisa at Sequentially Speaking comes an article in American.com about the sure bet of investing in comics and other collectibles. Naturally, Kevin Hassett points the exceptions to the rule in order to prove his thesis, which helps nobody. The operative word here is "rare," people.
Plus, he supplements his databy looking things up in the Price Guide, which we all know deals more in theoretical than actual value, the latter being arbitrariily determined from day to day by whatever each buyer and seller actually feels like paying for and selling a book.
This knowledge would seem to make the answer to Hassells question, "Why don’t sophisticated money managers and operating companies invest in comic books?" fairly obvious.
Lots of entertainment websites are breathlessly exhaling the news that Kirsten Dunst has spoken out in favor of reasonable use of marijuana, still considered a taboo subject in her home country, and therefore a guaranteed attention-getter.
What should have billions and billions of science fans investigating the facts on THC, however, was Dunst’s quote, "My best friend Sasha’s dad was Carl Sagan, the astronomer. He was the biggest pot smoker in the world and he was a genius."
Dunst, like many, believes "America’s view on weed is ridiculous. I mean," she added, "are you kidding me? If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place. I’m not talking about being stoned all day, though. I think if it’s not used properly, it can hamper your creativity and close you up inside."
So many comeback lines, so little time.
By the way, this would seem the perfect place to mention that Jewish stoners abstaining during Passover because pot isn’t KP may now resume their intake, as the holiday ended at 8:17 Eastern time last evening.
FUNimation Entertainment has acquired several anime TV series and movies titles from Central Park Media (CPM) for broadcast on its digital FUNimation Channel. CPM titles picked up as part of the deal, most of which are appropriate for teens and up, include: Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie; the Record of Lodoss Wars series; Roujin Z, the Project A-ko series; Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer; and Grave of the Fireflies. FUNimation airs occasionally on Dish Network and other outlets.
When I was first offered the position as ComicMix‘s news editor, Mike Gold outlined his vision for how I was to treat press releases. Rather than parroting verbatim everything I read or was sent, I should first determine the release’s newsworthiness, then I should rewrite everything that I felt merited ComicMix‘s attention in my own words wherever possible.
I could not have been more delighted.
I think you readers probably sense how rare this is, particularly in today’s media-saturated and propaganda-laden world. To be fair, the notion of a supposedly free press on bended knee before the people and stories it covers has been spoken of in the U.S. since at least the Reagan era if not before, but the lapdog evolution seems to have accelerated exponentially under the current administration. So, now more than ever, it behooves journalists to try to shoot down that sorry legacy wherever possible.
But hey, this isn’t world-shaking events, it’s pop culture. What’s the big deal?
The big deal for me has to do with the constant conflation of providing actual news with filling the need for websites to have new content on a daily, even hourly basis for fear of losing eyeballs and facing a corresponding drop in ad revenue. And that’s a by-product of, and to be expected in, our hyper-capitalist society. But that’s presumably where the difference between quality and quantity comes to the fore.
At this point I feel I should step back and assure you that I believe press releases have their place, and I don’t blame other pop culture news sites — many of which are run by personal friends — for repeating them verbatim. That’s one reason I don’t feel the need to; so many others have already done that job. I don’t consider my standards to be necessarily higher, just different. This could be due to my ready admission that I’m an opinion writer rather than a trained journalist. (No, not all bloggers are automatically journalists, although there are any number of writers out there who are good at both.) So perhaps I approach press releases differently than someone with more journalistic experience.
For instance, when I read a press release from a big comics company whose entire point is that such-and-such a book has sold out its print run, the first question I ask myself is "What was the print run? How many actually sold?" After all, this information is readily available after the fact from a number of sources (ICV2 comes to mind), so it shouldn’t be any sort of secret. Yet of all the press releases I’ve read in the two months I’ve been at this ComicMix gig, only one has given an approximate number for the press run which sold out, and that was the item I ran because that was actual news.
Johnny Hart passed away the other day and in one of the obituaries I read, it stated Creators Syndicate intended to keep his strips, B.C. and Wizard of Id, still going. It seems Hart had been receiving help from family for some time now and much of his work exists as digital files for repurposing.
Upon reading it, my first thought was, ”Why?” The strips stopped being funny some 20-25 years ago and were coasting on momentum. B.C., which Hart wrote and drew, also was delving into his religious faith with increasing frequency over the years and was far from entertaining.
All of this brings up a host of issues regarding newspaper comic strips and their future. It used to be that the comic strips were a selling point, a way for papers to distinguish themselves. After all, the news, stocks and sports score were the same so why buy the New York Daily News if you also read the New York Post? The News knew comic strips were a key and filled page after page with the best strips possible. The Sunday edition was wrapped in the comics’ section – growing up, the Sundays were started with the latest Dick Tracy on the front and Dondi on the back and in between, there were more than a dozen other features.
The first generation or two of comic strip creators were a fertile, wonderful bunch that gave us enduring figures from Little Orphan Annie to B.C. As a result, as people aged, moved out of their parents’ home and started subscribing to a hometown paper, the comic strips remained a tool to entice and retain readers.
Whenever newspapers conduct reader surveys to figure out which features to drop in favor of new ones, the old standbys still score strongly because of that ingrained habit. Locally, the comics editor at the Connecticut Post admitted that “the blue-haired old ladies” threatened to cancel their subs if beloved strips vanished. And with circulation dwindling, papers have to hold on to every last reader.
The problem, though, has become that many strips have outlived their entertainment value and continue to run only out of habit. B.C. and Peanuts and Marmaduke and many others stopped being entertaining and fresh and interesting decades ago. When the creators have retired, or died, others have continued the features, recycling the same puns, gags and stale humor.
Some of the younger, hipper, creators recognize that such recycling is a kiss of death these days. Jim Davis gave Jon Arbuckle a girl friend in Garfield and Cathy Guisewite married off her pathetic Cathy a few years back, each mining new strip possibilities.
Slightly more sincere than a Don Imus apology (which one?), ComicMix PodCast #25 asks the question "Why didn’t you see Grindhouse?", covers the cool new comics and DVDs waiting to meet your credit card and runs back to the day when the CB was the ultimate "IM." DC 52 #52 goes 48, SpongeBob gets two different items, very varied variants, and… why weekly Wonder Woman?
All this and more in our silver anniversary edition of ComicMix PodCast, and you can hear it… right here:
Long-time comics writer Gary Friedrich has sued Marvel Comics, Sony Pictures and their Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, Relativity Media, Crystal Sky Pictures, Michael De Luca Productions, Hasbro Inc. and Take-Two Interactive for copyright infringement over his version of Ghost Rider.
Filed last week in Illinois, Friedrich claims 21 separate copyright and trademark violations based upon the “production and marketing” of the recent blockbuster motion picture. He claims the copyrights used by the defendants reverted from Marvel to him in 2001.
According to Reuters, Friedrich alleges copyright infringement and accuses Marvel of waste for failing “to properly utilize and capitalize” on his character. Marvel’s attempts to do so, Friedrich claims, have only damaged the value of his work by failing to properly promote and protect the characters and by accepting inadequate royalties from co-defendants. Friedrich also claims that toymaker Hasbro and videogame firm Take-Two have improperly created merchandise based on the characters.
Even though Marvel has published this version of Ghost Rider off-and-on since 1971, it’s predecessor company, Magazine Management, failed to register the work with the Copyright Office, according to Friedrich’s complaint. He states that, following federal law, he regained the copyrights to Ghost Rider in 2001.
As of this writing, neither Marvel nor Sony has responded to the suit. It is expected they will adopt the initial position that the complaint “bares no merit,” as if it did, the crack of the whip could severely undermine the profitability of both Marvel and DC Comics and their parent companies.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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