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Viacom sues YouTube for $1 bil

Viacom sues YouTube for $1 bil

Looking for that video of Stephen Colbert accepting the mantle of Captain America last night (apparently Marvel has just discovered the shield missing), or decrying the death of Steve Rogers in his Word segment from last Thursday?  Don’t bother going to YouTube for ’em.  Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom announced today that it has sued YouTube and its parent company Google, seeking more than $1 billion in copyright infringement damages.

The lawsuit was not exactly unexpected — last month Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips after several months of talks between the companies broke down.

Considering the fight is about who can make more money "out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works," so far it looks like, whoever wins, the fans might still be the losers.

Back to the Futurama

Back to the Futurama

Cartoonist Matt Groening confirmed the rumor the upcoming release of four brand new direct-to-DVD 90 minute movies based upon his popular Futurama teevee series. The entire original cast will be returning, including Katey Sagal, Billy West, John Di Maggio and Maurice LaMarche, and the original animators and animation house have also returned for the effort.

The videos will be released starting later this year and will each be sliced into standard-length teevee episodes for broadcast on Comedy Central, to be aired in 2008. There is a possibility that the show’s original broadcast outlet, the Fox Network, might air these shows as well.

Guest-stars abound in these D2DVDs, with Sarah Silverman and Al Gore already signed for speaking roles. Each DVD will also include the usual bulk of bells and whistles.

Sopranos’ Frankie Valli sings to ComicMix!

Sopranos’ Frankie Valli sings to ComicMix!

We’ve got the low-down on The Boys, Batman gets a swell new squeeze, comics and DVD new releases get revealed, Tom DeFalco gets previewed (?), and Timeline gets out in 1963, and we interview the Sopranos‘ most famous singing dead guy thus far,  Mister Frankie Valli!

All this and, as we always say, even more… at ComicMix Podcast #13.

It’s all yours, if you just click here:

2007 Shuster Award Nominees Announced

2007 Shuster Award Nominees Announced

Named after Canada’s most famous cartoonist, the Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards nominees have been released. Mr. Shuster, of course, was the co-creator of Superman – the original visual look and feel of fabled Metropolis was based upon Toronto.

The winners will be announced at a Satuday, June 9th ceremony at the Holiday Inn, 370 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, during the weekend of the Paradise Toronto Comicon.

According to their press release, the 2007 Shuster Award nominees are:

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Dennis O’Neil: The Fanatic Conclave, part two

Dennis O’Neil: The Fanatic Conclave, part two

About 370 million years ago, give or take, swimmy little critters biologists now call lobefish developed appendages that were helpful in getting around the bottoms of the ponds and lakes where they lived. Their descendants eventually flopped onto land and those appendages evolved into things that are useful for tap-dancing, kicking field goals and, attached to the likes of Jessica Alba, drawing admiring glances.

Comic books began as a low-common-denominator, novelty entertainment and became an industry and, arguably, an art form. Lobefish spawned, among other phenomona, karate and Ms. Alba’s thighs and comic books spawned, among other phenomona, comic book conventions. These were, at first, quite modest affairs, as described in last week’s installment of this feature, but, like the lobey appendages, have evolved into quite something else. They’re, some of them, held in gigantic auditoriums – the San Diego Convention Center and New York’s Javits Center, to name two – and attended by tens of thousands of participants. And people far more knowledgeable regarding showbiz than I am say that anyone wanting to launch a fantasy or science fiction-themed movie or television show is well-advised, if not required, to do so at one of these mega-soirees.

They have become an integral part of the huge modern monster media and I wonder if they’re not more influential as that than as places for hobbyists to gather and share enthusiasms. Further – I wonder if some folks forget that the “comi” in comicon refers to these visual narratives still being published in glorified pamphlet form.

A lot more entertainment seekers will see the forthcoming Fantastic Four movie (starring our friend Jessica, by the way) than will read any years’ worth of Marvel’s Fantastic Four comic books. And how many of the millions of ticket buyers who made Ghost Rider the box office champ for two weeks running, despite iffy reviews, even realized that the character had been born as a Marvel superhero?

I think it’s clear that the term comic book is in the process of redefinition, though what it will mean in 10 years I don’t know. It certainly won’t be merely a noun referring to the aforementioned pamphleted narratives. Nor will it any longer be a modifier meaning low, dumb, semi-literate, borderline immoral, as it has been until recently, and might still be in some venues. Probably it’ll describe a genre, or combination of multi-media genres. Or, could be, it’ll be entirely forgotten. After all, we don’t call legs lobes, do we?

And now, in the spirit of Jon Stewart, who on The Daily Show has his moment of Zen, we have our Recommended Reading: Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, by Peter Coogan. Full disclosure: I wrote the book’s introduction. But I won’t profit if you buy it. I recommend it because it is, quite simply, the best treatment of the subject I’ve encountered.

More on Sinful Comics

More on Sinful Comics

Not to pile on poor little pornographers, but I think, if this image is any indication, that Sinful Comics is going to be hearing from Marvel’s lawyers too. And Sony’s. And probably the lawyers for Jessica Alba and Ioan Gruffudd.

And the hell of it is, the artist is pretty talented and could probably find work in the regular comics industry.

Pirates get pirated

Pirates get pirated

World Entertainment News Network reports that Disney is considering legal action against an organization called Sinful Comics after they produced a "raunchy" strip featuring Pirates Of The Caribbean actors. British newspaper The Sun reports Sinful have created a comic strip, which sees movie beauty Keira Knightley being seduced by co-stars Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom.

No, we don’t have a link to the Sinful Comics website. You think we want to take Disney on?

Yet?

 

Plex moves to Mars, version 0.1

Plex moves to Mars, version 0.1

One of the more disturbing things about Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! was how many little things it got right– from the use of digital actors (later to be used in former studio-mate Frank Miller’s films) to some of the overarching political threads. Chief among those in Flagg! was how the powers that be, after taking as much money out of the US system as they could, relocated their corporate headquarters to Mars and acted as absentee landlords.

Fast forward to today, where Halliburton announced they’re moving their corporate headquarters to Dubai. Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s old company) has millions of no-bid contracts from the US government, including a lot of jobs critical to the war effort in Iraq, and they’re not going to pay any taxes on their profits. Oh, and if they’re not a US company, that means they can get around sanctions on US corporations doing business with Iran. And a foreign company will be doing a lot of things for the US military, which could be a major security risk. What fun.

ComicMix flicks hits!

ComicMix flicks hits!

With 300’s $70 million opening weekend, everyone’s eyes lit up. No one expected this number, with the best estimates at least $20 million lower. Now everyone is scrambling to read the tea leaves and try to understand what just happened.

A few thoughts from our corner of the universe. First, this will make 2007 the best year ever for comic book movies. There are six feature films scheduled for release this calendar year and I will guarantee you that combined, they will add up to huge box office receipts.

As a result, this will fuel future comic book-into-movie activity. It also makes Frank Miller a suddenly bankable name. Forget his work on Robocop 2 and look at Sin City and now 300. Once he begins directing The Spirit later this year, expect that to get onto a release schedule ASAP.

Projecting ahead, there are five more comic book movies have firm release dates for 2008 with at least two others penciled in (see schedule, below).

I’ve said all along that the comic book adaptations will continue until there are enough flops to sour Hollywood on the genre. This year opened with Ghost Rider opening to surprisingly huge numbers and then had legs. With 300, the reverse seems to be happening. I suspect production heads will fast track properties in the various studio pipelines and we’ll see one or two more movies added to 2008 and 2009 could possibly get jam-packed even though all that’s for certain that far out is the next Bryan Singer Superman release and Captain America.

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Arnold Drake passes away

Arnold Drake passes away

Mark Evanier posted the sad news that Arnold Drake passed away this morning.

Drake was a prolific writer for comics, prose and film, refusing to be typecast.  In the early 1950s he wrote It Rhymes with Lust which can be argued as America’s first graphic novel (readers can judge for themselves when Dark Horse reissues this later in 2007).

While best known today for creating Deadman, Drake also wrote a wide variety of titles, mostly for DC Comics featuring the Doom Patrol, Space Ranger and Tommy Tomorrow.  Given his versatility, he also handled Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and the delightful Stanley and his Monster.

For film, he may be best remembered for The Flesh Eaters.

Drake was outspoken about the changes he saw happening to comics in the 1960s, as Stan Lee and his Marvel cohorts rewrote the rules.  As a result, he was in the forefront at demanding improved working conditions and tried to wake DC’s editors up that there was finally some serious competition for readers.

The efforts led to his removal from DC assignments although he would return to write now and then into the 1980s.

His last effort, a proposed Doom Patrol graphic novel, was in the works at the time of his death.