The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Back in gray?

Back in gray?

The first glimpse of the titular main character from Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was recently posted thanks to our friends over at IGN.com.

Keep in mind – this is the very first suit built our hero, as first seen in the comics. So don’t expect the shiny red and gold suit we see today. The film stars Robert Downy Jr. as the billionaire alter ego of Iron Man, Tony Stark, playing along side Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) Jim "War Machine" Rhodes (Terrence Howard) and the evil Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges).

Those of you may remember the director Jon Favreau for playing Foggy Nelson in 2003’s Daredevil, or for Dinner For Five, his movie-talk television series that appeared on IFC between 2001 and 2005.

Barbarella taken under James Bond’s wing

Barbarella taken under James Bond’s wing

The classic French science-fiction comic book character Barbarella will make her return to the big screen, according to Variety. Casino Royale writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have signed on to write the feature. Occassional comic book writer Jean-Marc Lofficier (Teen Titans) brokered the deal.

The creation of Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella turned heads in this country by being one of the first “legitimately” published comics to feature nudity and sexual themes. It was serialized in the United States in the avant-garde magazine Evergreen and collected in both hard cover and trade paperback graphic novels back in the 1960s.

In 1968, Barbarella was made into a movie directed by Roger Vadim and starring his wife, Jane Fonda. She was surrounded by a stellar cast, including John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg, David Hemmings, and Milo O’Shea as the original Duran Duran.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Hurling stones

I had a couple of other topics I was going to work on but then I read Mike Gold’s column this week and decided I had enough to say to on it and the subject of his column that I might as well do it in my own. Thanks, Mike, for supplying my column this week!

The question at hand was Don Imus’ racist remarks on his show, categorizing Rutgers University’s women’s basketball team (the majority of whom are black) as “nappy headed hos.” (For short, and because I don’t want to perpetuate the comment by repeating it endlessly, we’ll just reduce it to   “nhh”.)

Imus has since apologized at length, doing the mea culpa circuit that prominent white men do when they get caught putting their feet in their mouths. There have been the chorus of calls for Imus’ resignation or firing and Imus has said he was just trying to be funny and he’s really a nice guy and so on. As I write this, Imus has been suspended by CBS radio for two weeks and MSNBC has dropped the television show. After a ritual flogging on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show, Imus is now scheduled to meet with the women he actually insulted and their families. Nice to know we’re all keeping our priorities straight.

Caveat: I don’t listen to Imus. If I’m listening to radio in the morning it’s generally NPR and I don’t do that very often. So I’m getting a lot of this second hand or worse. I’ve never been into the whole “shock jock” thing so you can take what I have to say with that grain of salt. Also, I’ve had my own brush with hoof in mouth disease in a script where I referred to Asian people as Orientals. As has been driven home to me, Orientals are rugs; people are Asian. So I am not within sin. I’m throwing rocks anyway.

Let’s talk about Imus first. My first reaction on hearing all this was, “What an incredibly stupid thing to say.” Imus has been in the game long enough and he knows the field. He has no internal censor that suggested to him for a half second that referring to African-American women as “nhh” just might get him into trouble? Frankly, I always had the impression that Imus was sharper than that.

And then the cynical Chicagoan side of me kicked in. Maybe Imus’ attitude at the time was “Well, remarks like this sure gets people talking about ya, doesn’t it? Good, bad – does it matter so long as they don’t forget you?” Now people might listen in to hear how contrite you are, or if you’ll do it again, or because they think you should do it again. What’s a shock jock without a controversy? Or maybe he didn’t expect people to get upset – stuff like this has been his stock in trade, right? Isn’t it why people listen? Imus says what a lot of people think – isn’t that the justification? The current brouhaha is just a matter of degree.

I wonder – what would the reaction have been if it was the Rutgers men’s basketball team that lost in the Finals (they didn’t even get that far) and Imus had called them “nh (fill in the blank).” Actually, I’m betting nothing would have happened because Imus would have realized, before he said it, that it was going too far. But these are just female jocks. Who really cares, eh? Let’s call them whores because they lost a freaking basketball game. Maybe if Imus had just stuck with being misogynistic instead of racist, he would have been okay.

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Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007

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.

MATT RAUB: Who Are Two?

MATT RAUB: Who Are Two?

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.

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Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (Again)

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (Again)

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.

Stocking up on comics

Stocking up on comics

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.

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Mary Jane loves Mary Jane?

Mary Jane loves Mary Jane?

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.

Anime gone wild

Anime gone wild

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.

ELAYNE RIGGS: Polly wanna press release!

ELAYNE RIGGS: Polly wanna press release!

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.

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