The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Torchwood season 2 announced

Torchwood season 2 announced

Torchwood co-executive producer Julie Gardner disclosed the show’s second season will begin airing on the BBC at the beginning of next year.

In its article about the new Doctor Who season in the British publication The Stage, Ms. Gardner stated last season the show didn’t have as much post-production time  as they would have liked. This year, the season debut will be pushed back a bit – after the as yet unannounced Doctor Who special that airs on or around Christmas. This would likely push the debut of the next season of Doctor Who back a few weeks.

The current  Doctor Who season will be featuring several guest appearances from Torchwood‘s Captain Jack. The first season of Torchwood will be making its American debut on BBC America this September.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Perverse Pleasures

We all know what a “guilty pleasure” is – some movie, book, song, whatever that we are ashamed to say we actually like – nay, sometimes love. While we may be embarrassed by our affection we should, at the very least, be able to claim, “Well, anyway, I like it.” Even if nobody else does. I have my list of those and I suspect you do as well.

This is not the same as the strange, little known things that you love that are, in fact, pretty good. I have my list of those things also and it might be useful to talk about these odd delights at some other time.

Neither of the above are the same as what I call my “perverse pleasures.” I’m not talking about sexual kinks and peccadilloes. I’m talking about music, books, movies and so on that I know, in fact, are awful and that I don’t like but feel a weird compulsion to own them anyway.

On to confession.

The first item is Pat Boone’s 1997 CD In a Metal Mood; No More Mr. Nice Guy wherein the King of White Bread Music decides to do his covers of Heavy Metal songs. We’re talking songs such as Stairway to Heaven, Smoke on the Water, Love Hurts, Enter Sandman and plenty of others. Oh, my ears! He doesn’t do them as Heavy Metal, of course; his arrangements turns them into Big Band tunes. When Mr. Boone sings, he’s usually off the rhythm, flat, or just speaks the lyrics. I have yet to get through a complete cut.

This is completed with a cover shot of the aging Mr. Boone in leather pants, leather vest, and no shirt, fixing the buyer with a steely stare that defies said buyer not to purchase the CD. I, of course, succumbed.

To top it all off, I was doing a guest shot on my friend Bill Nutt’s radio show, The Nutt House, on WNTI. I decided to play a cut of the CD on his show. Hey, they’re not my ratings. My better half, the lovely and talented Mary Mitchell, was listening in. I should explain that Mary is a heavy metal fan. Most people wouldn’t suspect it to look at her but she’s pretty knowledgeable and has her criterion: a good heavy metal band should look and sound like trolls. Pat Boone comes nowhere near that ideal.

Mary asked me what was on my mind to play that track. I explained that none of us at the radio station actually listened to it; we turned off the monitors about thirty seconds into the song so we didn’t have to listen to it. I think that’s where I lost Mary as a regular listener to my radio hijinks. She did listen to the track all the way through.

This is one of my definitions of love – despite having trick-bagged her into listening to something that I couldn’t, she still cares about me.

If Mary hasn’t found the CD, I probably still have it around somewhere.

Wandering over to the DVD section, I find my copy of Barb Wire. I knew the Dark Horse comic on which the movie was based and stumbled on the movie starring Pamela Lee Anderson while channel surfing late one night. I, like millions of Americans, ignored it in its theatrical release but I thought it was worth pausing long enough to see if Pam popped out of whatever she was wearing. It was late night and my standards of viewing are pretty low after midnight.

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Going APE with Attitude

Going APE with Attitude

The indie comics’ Left Coast division will have its chance to shine again this weekend, as the Alternative Press Expo (a.k.a. APE, run by the good folks from the San Diego Comic-Con) gets underway at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco ("…my favorite city, where the women are strong and the men are pretty!" and yes, I bought the t-shirt) on April 21 and 22. 

Cartoonists with Attitude will be there in full force!  All nine CWA members will attend.  This is a great chance to meet some of the best political cartoonists working today. This might be your last chance to meet Ted Rall before he gets hauled away to Gitmo.

No word on whether they’ll all be camping out on SF local Keith Knight’s floor.

Handel-ing the Pulitzer

Handel-ing the Pulitzer

The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded and, along with everyone else in comics-land, ComicMix would like to congratulate Walt Handelsman on his award for Editorial Cartooning.  Handelsman plies his trade for Newsday, one of the better NYC-area newspapers and the one I used to read back when I was a subway commuter.

The other finalists in this area also nominated as finalists in this category were Nick Anderson of The Houston Chronicle for his pungent cartoons on an array of issues, and for his bold use of animation, and Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press for his compelling cartoons that rely on rich detail and deft caricature to make their point and for using animation to widen his impact."

Supergirl Chic

Supergirl Chic

Our friends at The Comics Journal’s ¡Journalista! website carry a wonderful story about DC’s latest Supegirl make-over. This puppy’s gonna sell a whole lot of action figures, and if DC Direct wants to see a serious blip up in their sales, they could consider those life-size dolls with the valves.

But I’ll bet the real reason you click through is to see this graphic at a much larger size and far greater resolution.

Marvel movie madness

Marvel movie madness

 

Marvel Entertainment has announced a new sweepstakes, the winner of which will win a walk-on role in an upcoming Marvel Studios movie.  Usually these things are only reserved for folks like Stan Lee and Joe Quesada, so it’s nice to see regular ol’ folks given the chance at unpaid, uncredited extra work.

Sweepstakes entries are here. If you don’t win the Grand Prize, there are also three First Prizes (that never sounded right to me, shouldn’t First Prizes be the top ones rather than Grand Prizes?) where you could win a collected edition of Marvel comics and 15 Second Prizes for a 12 issue sub to one of their books.

The sweepstakes began on Tuesday and runs through August 10, so it’s not like you have to rush. Only one entry per person.

U.N.C.L.E. boxed at last

U.N.C.L.E. boxed at last

 

Last year, DVD provider Anchor Bay announced it was releasing the classic action series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Star Robert Vaughn recorded four hours of supplimentary materlal. And then, they got a nasty letter from Warner Bros. saying "no way, José."

The two companies reached for their lawyers and had a showdown. And now, Warner Bros. won. It seems that in addition to having the teevee rerun syndication rights (their Turner division got it when they bought bits and pieces of MGM), they got the home video rights as well. All that material Vaughn recorded? Gone with the wind.

But in a few weeks Vaughn will be teaming up with his old partner David McCallum to record brand-new DVD extras. Oddly enough, American Vaughn has been working in Britain filming his AMC/BBC series Hustle, while British-born McCallum has been in the States filming NCIS.

The first box set is expected to be out by Christmas… unless one of the lawyers gets a clever idea.

 

Robotech Returns – Old and New

Robotech Returns – Old and New

Cynopsis reports that Harmony Gold has re-launched the famous Robotech brand.  It has already signed three new licensing and merchandising deals for the original Robotech animated series  with FUNimation Entertainment for the US and Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.  EXIM Licensing Group took the series for the Latin American territory while Empire International Merchandising Corporation has it for Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.

Additionally, four new distribution deals for the Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles film based on the series have been signed with more pending. They include theatrical, TV, and DVD rights to FUNimation Entertainment for the U.S. and Canada, EXIM Licensing Group for Latin America (all media rights), and Revelation Films for the UK and Ireland.  Madman Entertainment picked up the DVD rights only for Australia and New Zealand.

ELAYNE RIGGS: Part of the solution

ELAYNE RIGGS: Part of the solution

As I write this, the nation is still reeling from the deadliest shooting massacre in its history – if you don’t count wartime battles, and they never seem to. Once again, a disturbed young man decided that the best response to his problems lay in premeditated violence against total strangers. Once again, trusted and trained authorities appeared slow to act in protecting human life. Once again, we found ourselves yearning for a hero to make it all go away.

Comic book heroism is a double-edged sword, probably a fitting metaphor, given superhero comics’ fascination with weaponry. On the one hand you have a reflection of whatever the current national mood of the era happens to be. I was watching a history-of-Superman program on the Biography channel earlier this evening, wherein Mark Waid talked about how the character shifted from a rabble-rousing champion of the people at his inception to the "ultimate blue Boy Scout" symbol of authority after World War II. Superman, like other successful icons, was able to change with the times, allowing succeeding generations to project their desires onto him. And for some time, ever-escalating fictional violence as the appropriate (and often only) answer to frustrations has fueled the entertainment desires of Americans.

Comic books are, of course, incidental to this trend, which has encompassed virtually all forms of mass media, even more so as the news divisions — once sacrosanct and considered acceptable loss leaders to responsible corporations which made their money on other programming — morphed into 24/7 cable infotainment, hungry for the next fix of spectacularly gruesome visuals. Their mouths say "tut tut" to the carnage, but their wallets say "More please, sir!" And yet, critics of ultraviolent entertainment (and boy is that a Sisyphusean undertaking!) are always very quick to point fingers at "the comic book mentality" and wave around the latest issue of Punch ‘Em Up Man. Because, you know, it makes a good visual.

On the other hand, comics at their best can inspire and educate and lift us all up to our highest aspirational fantasies. To me, this attitude of being "part of the solution" rather than "part of the problem" has always been the essence of superhero fantasy — not beating up on badguys, but using one’s hidden reserves of power to triumph over adversity and bring hope to others, showing them by your deeds the way they too can become heroes.

Nowhere was this more keenly illustrated than after 11 September 2001, when the comics industry came out with a slew of amazing and poignant comics stories examining and trying to make sense the tragedy, in order to help raise money for victims’ families.

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UPDATE: Jamie Bishop

UPDATE: Jamie Bishop

Often inspired by his artistic superheroes Dave McKean, Frank Miller, Diane Fenster, and the ever-groovy René Magritte, Jamie enjoyed creating digital art. Recent work includes book covers for his father Michael Bishop’s Brighten to Incandescence and A Reverie for Mister Ray as well as Mike Jasper’s now ironically-named short story collection Gunning for the Buddha.

Despite a penchant for art, Jamie received both his B.A. and M.A. in German at the University of Georgia. Between 1993 and 2000 he lived for four years in Germany where he spent most of his time, in his words, "learning the language, teaching English, drinking large quantities of wheat beer, and wooing a certain Fräulein," Dr. Stefanie Hoder, who would later become his wife.

Jamie’s art portfolio, along with a dated version of his biography, can be found at http://www.memory39.com/, which is also the name of the piece of art above. The Los Angeles Times has an article about Jamie here.