Red alert! Red Alert! WE HAVE LOST PLUTO. Repeat, one of our planets is gone. PLANET DOWN! FIRE IN THE HOLE!. Call the JLA, mobilize the Avengers…was it Darkseid? GALACTUS? Maybe….THE DEATH STAR.

Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930.

The new definition of what is — and isn’t — a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.

Pluto is no stranger to controversy. In fact, it’s been dogged by disputes ever since its discovery. (Watch why some think planet size doesn’t matter — 3:39)

REED RICHARDS, DO SOMETHING!!!!

DEAD WEST by the doughty duo of Rick Spears and Rob G. (TEENAGERS FROM MARS) is the latest graphic novel to be headed to the big screen. According to Fangoria, Adam Green (HATCHET) is slated to direct.

Stephen L’Heureux is producing under his Solipsist Films banner (currently in preproduction on LOST SOULS director Janusz Kaminski’s WWII drama WHITE ROSE).

This time, Green will be shifting away from the swampy environs of HATCHET and splashing the red against an Old West backdrop. Based on the 2005 graphic novel of the same name by Rick Spears and Rob G., WEST concerns a bounty hunter who happens upon the cursed town of Lazarus, a plot of land that was once an Indian village but was laid to waste during westward expansion. This settlement soon lives up to its name when its former inhabitants rise from the dead to exact revenge on the “white man� who put ’em six feet under.

We’re big fans of Canadian artist Michael Cho here at Stately Beat Manor, and we just found out that over at his blog he’s posting pages of an upcoming project called GRASSHOPPER. We don’t know what it is or when it’s coming out, but it looks pretty amazing.

One of the things I brought to show at the con was a 7 page sample I wrote and drew up for an action-adventure comic book I’m working on called the Grasshopper! I’ve been wanting to write and draw a straight-ahead, full-throttle action and kung-fu story for a little while now, and I’ve finally gotten the opportunity to do so with this one. Below is the artwork for the first 2 pages. Of course, the REAL action begins on page 3…and doesn’t stop for another 45 pages! And if you like these pages, fear not, I’ll post more Grasshopper artwork soon.

Many more amazing pages in the link. In fact here’s a thumbnail to whet your appetite.

The dissappointing showing of SNAKES ON A PLANE continues to haunt Hollywood, and the Internet may not be our friend any more. Someone sent us this link to THR’s Martin Grovevery long and thorough analysis of why the film floundered, as opposed to, say THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT which also had a viral internet marketing campaign:

Why did the Internet work magic for “Witch” and leave “Snakes” writhing in the aisles? “Because there wasn’t a negative on ‘Blair Witch,’” he pointed out. “The tracking showed a huge negative (feeling about ‘Snakes’). It looked like a silly picture that people didn’t want to see. ‘Blair Witch’ never looked like a silly picture. ‘Blair Witch’ never had a high negative.”

Coming back to the damage done by making “Snakes” R-rated, he observed, “If you go out with a picture like this and you put an R rating on it and the biggest audience is teenage boys and you’re shutting them out in two-thirds of the country, you get what you deserve. It was a gross mistake. The director and Sam Jackson talked them into it. And they went heavy on the (very rough) dialogue and some scenes, which you could do without. I mean, you could approach the scene without showing the conclusion and that’s the way you get a PG-13. There’s no need for it. It’s over the top. It defies all the laws of marketing. You have to know who the audience for that (film) is.”

Now you may be wondering why The Beat is haunted by SNAKES ON A PLANE, a movie we never even planned on going to see. We’re a little bit fascinated by the cautionary tale of marketers who decided that giving a few vocal people on the internet what they wanted would be giving EVERYONE what they wanted. It was internet “buzz” that made New Line go back for reshoots which made the film more violent and more profane and moved it into R rated territory. It just proves — giving fans what they want doesn’t always make them happy.

We’re pretty much up to and beyond speed. 90% of our functions and files have been transferred, but we were understandably a little preoccupied, so posting this morning is a bit light. So far all the problems on our new machine have been from the files and system folders we imported from our OLD computer. Otherwise, it’s pretty darned sweet. Knock wood and all that.alltell ringtones for customerscellcom for ringtones phonesfor ringtones dangermda ringtones fornokia 6061 for ringtonessamsung a310 phones for ringtonesfor sch-u340 ringtons ringtonesv170 ringtones for tracfone motorola Map

Well, the baby has arrived, and we’re about to unpack it, so we may be going off-line for a little bit while we learn how to play Second Life. In the meantime, The Beat website had some weird, momentary outages today that resulted in a WordPress error message saying the database was unavailable. While our tech people look at it, if any of your WP gurus out there have any idea what might have caused this, shoot me an email.

We hear Journalista! is coming back any minute now. In fact a preview is up right now, which we know because it pinged us. Out of respect to Dirk, the father of comics linkblogging, we’re not going to link to the site, which is still in testing, but it looks pretty damned sharp, and as of tomorrow, when it goes live, linkblogging is going to be superflous. Dirk the Duke is back.

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Darned if this isn’t almost as good as Wood’s. [Click for larger version]

Anime News Network and many other places are reporting a new get-tough attitude from Bandai regarding fan-made translations of their movies, including things like the GHOST IN THE SHELL sequel SOLID STATE SOCIETY:

Several fansub sites have publicly announced plans to create and distribute illegal fansubs of Solid State Society following its release in Japan. However, Bandai Entertainment Inc. and Manga Entertainment have secured the exclusive right to distribute this title in the US. The creation of translated versions of Solid State Society is considered an unauthorized derivative and constitutes infringement of the intellectual property rights in the work as well as unfair competition. Furthermore, uploading and downloading of the programs without an official license or explicit consent by the content owner(s) constitutes infringement of copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights, and is an illegal act. Bandai must take steps to protect its investment in the property and will take all measures available to stop the illegal distribution of its titles, including instituting court proceedings. If it is forced to do so, Bandai is prepared to seek statutory damages and/or damages to cover its loss of sales.

“Fansubs, even those not sold for profit, are harmful to our properties and industry overall and we will be watching closely to make sure our rights regarding SSS are not infringed,� said Ken Iyadomi, President of Bandai Entertainment Inc. “We are prepared to take legal action against fansubbers and illegal download and other distribution sites if this notice is ignored,� he added.

This is the most hostile action yet against Fansubbers — there was a general don’t ask don’t tell policy in effect. Big big message board thread at the ANN link for more context.

E&P reports that Mort Walker’s National Cartoon Museum to be located in the Empire State Building, will get an influx of $1.8 million in funding from New York City:

The NCM, slated to open next year, was formerly the International Museum of Cartoon Art. It began in Connecticut in 1974, moved to Rye Brook, N.Y., and then was situated in Boca Raton, Fla., for six years before closing in 2002. The museum, which has a collection of about 200,000 cartoons, was founded by “Beetle Bailey” creator Mort Walker of King Features Syndicate.

Against all odds, the rights to a comic book have been acquired by a movie company and they might just make a movie out of it! It’s true!

Variety reports that Rogue Pictures has acquired LOST SQUAD, a WW II soldiers vs supernatural Nazi elements tale by Chris Kirby and Alan Robinson. The book was publishers by Devil’s Due and Josh Blaylock will get a producer credit. Producers Adrian Askarieh and Daniel Alter previously set up Devil’s Due’s Hack/Slash, and are developing the video game HITMAN for Vin Diesel to star in.

There’s been a lot of kvetching in various venues over THE 9/11 REPORT: A GRAPHIC ADAPTATION by Sid Jacobsen and Ernie Colon — it’s simplistic, it’s inappropriate, blah blah. This review at TomPaine.com sums up many of the objections even while sheepishly admitting that the book makes the story easy to follow:

Exhibit A: is there anything gained from drawing a bunch of phone operaters saying the phone system is swamped with a caption from the 9/11 report saying, the phone system was swamped?

Any critique of a comic’s effectiveness must weigh whether the art and the text balance each other, assist each other, or just become superfluous. Guess what happens most of the time here?

[snip]That’s what this is. And, like Classics Illustrated, the purpose isn’t the comic. The purpose is to basically fill you in on the plot details of a book you won’t read otherwise. And on that level, 9/11 Commission Chair Thomas Kean and I agree: A graphic adaptation works. I still haven’t read the original.

Jacobsen and Colon appeared on The Today Show yesterday morning — a pretty lofty place to sell books. The video is here, but as usual, our Mac can’t handle it.

Any way you slice it, the book is getting a LOT of attention.

And it appears to be paying off. As of yesterday, the book was at #7 on Amazon. Not on the graphic novel chart, but overall.

We could be looking at an actual bestseller here. And yeah, it may not be elegant, and it may have a lot of exclamation points, but this kind of straight-ahead storytelling has the potential to appeal to a LOT of people. Worth remembering.

Artist Stuart Immonen (NEXT WAVE) writes to say that he has relaunched his webcomic NEVER AS BAD AS YOU THINK, by him and wife Kathryn, at his own site. The strip was formerly located on Modern Tales, but they have decided to leave behind the subscription model, and now have an eight-month archive of strips at the site. At the Comics Journal board, Immonen wrote:

After an informal invitation to join Modern Tales after the relaunch, and having had nothing come of it, we decided that this would be a better option than our arrangement on WCN in terms of reaching a wider audience. We’ll see if it pans out.

For those interested, “Never As Bad As You Think” takes randomly generated words each Friday to direct the plot which results in a narrative structure similar to Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”.

The weekly strip can also be viewed as a Flickr set.

Immonen is quite possibly the best known “Big Two”-type artist to have his own webcomic.

Hey remember when we figured out how to post the solicitations? We figured out how to do it again and here’s the December books from Fantagraphics, including Sala, Herriman, Medley, Hernandez, etc etc etc.

THE GRAVE ROBBER’S DAUGHTER by Richard Sala
96-page B&W 6� x 8� paperback • $9.95; more in Canada
ISBN-10: 1-56097-773-6 • ISBN-13: 978-1-56097-773-5
The Grave Robber’s Daughter is another fast-paced, delirious ride from the author of the critically acclaimed The Chuckling Whatsit (“A masterpiece!â€? - Rue Morgue Magazine) and marks the return of Judy Drood, Girl Detective, last seen thwarting the murderous plans of a group of demented college professors in Sala’s 2005 epic mystery-thriller Mad Night. In this original graphic novel, when the carnival comes to town, parents in the town of Obidiah’s Glenn began to get sick, followed by the teachers, doctors and the sheriff’s department. The children of Obidiah’s Glenn become suddenly wild, roaming about at night with crazed looks in their eyes. Sixteen-year-old Paisley Curtain realizes she had to do something to stop what she saw happening — but there wasn’t anyone left in town who seemed to be able to help. So she sends a letter to someone she hoped might listen, someone who would know what to do — a friend of her late sister’s from college, a self-styled “girl detectiveâ€? with a questionable reputation named Judy Drood. Her only hope is that Judy will arrive in time to save her town - and to prevent her from ending up as yet another exhibit in the dark carnival’s Hall of Embalmed Abominations! The Grave Robber’s Daughter is filled with Sala’s unique blend of horror and whimsy that will please his many fans and new readers alike.
(more…)

Dragon*Con is definitely the most…unusual stop on the convention circuit. Held in Atlanta every Labor Day Weekend, it has the reputation as a show where fantasy reigns supreme and costumed con-goers parade down Main St. before engaging in con hijinks of every kind.

This year’s show will include magical feats by none other than Misty Lee, who will be enchanting attendees with her feats of legerdemain:

Misty Lee, a magician who trained at the Magic Castle and was recently named “The hottest thing since cups and balls� by blogging.LA.com, will cast a spell on opening ceremonies with her unique brand of ‘saucy sorcery’. “They called and said, ‘We need some spice’�, winked the magician, whose Atlanta performances kick off a national tour, “so I’m going to heat things up with magic.� In addition to bewitching the Opening Ceremonies, Lee will work her wonders during both the Awards Banquet and the Closing Program.

Other guests this year include Adam Hughes, Peter David, Marv Wolfman, Gerge Perez and many many many more, including tons of SF writers and TV stars. Even ADAM BALDWIN! Dragon*Con will be held at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta from September 1st – 4th, 2006. Registration ranges from $25-$85, and is available both at the door and through Ticketmaster.com. The Hyatt Regency Atlanta is located at 265 Peachtree Street Northeast.

A 75-year-old New York man who never threw anything out left an unexpected windfall for his grieving kin: a collection of vintage comics worth $2.5 million .

David Crippen started collecting comics when he was a kid and never let up, leaving behind some 11,000 comics in near mint condition for his son Tom to sift through. The younger Crippen suspected the trove might have some value, but was astonished to hear of its net worth.

Heritage Auctions has begun sellng the collection, and the first lot of 55o comics has sold for $717,000.

Perhaps the REAL hero of the story is Mrs. Crippen, who didn’t throw out her husbands comics.

Hoarding was just something that Davis Crippen did. Cynthia Crippen said she let her late husband amass his various collections as long as they didn’t spill into common spaces.

“The comics were always there but not in my sight,� said Mrs. Crippen, who works as a book indexer. “I ignored it. People would tell me I should sell them, but I knew it was important to him. I loved him; he was a wonderful man despite his eccentricities.�

The tale is not without skullduggery of a Wimbledon Green like-nature however:

While he was poring over his father’s comics, Tom Crippen noticed that, in such a methodical collection, vast numbers of copies were missing. The mystery began to unfold when the experts were called in. They told Mr. Crippen that, unbeknownst to the family, large numbers of his father’s comics had been in circulation since the early nineties. Many bore distinctive marks, including a D on the front cover that earned them the name “D collection.â€?

No one is sure how the comics went missing. However, some of the comics were traced to a New York dealer who said he’d bought them in the early nineties from a man who’d entered his store. The Crippen family discovered that the seller’s name was that of a contractor who’d been doing extensive renovations at the Crippen home at that time.

“A lot of the jewels were ripped off,� Tom Crippen said.

[Thanks to CS for the link!]

The proposed reclassification of our solar system, with Pluto, the dogged ninth planet about to be reduced to a “pluton”, captured the attention of the internerd in recent days. If ever old geezers needed proof tat the universe was indeed spinning madly out on control and intothe shape of something new and unfamilar, it was the idea that suddenly we had 12 planets, on of them named UB 313, instead of something sensible like, say, Vulcan. We do not want our solar system falling prey to some crazy ass scheme of fame-seeking science nerds. Indeed, the new model universe inspired cartoonist Tim Kreider to write an editorial for the New York Times boldly claiming”“I ♥ Pluto” :

I informed the assembled scientists that, first of all, no way was I or anyone else about to un-memorize anything we’d already been forced to learn in elementary school. More important, I felt sure that, as former children, we all instinctively respected the principle: no do-overs.

Planets, like Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life, and you can’t blithely oust them no matter how eccentric, skewed or unqualified they may prove to be. If they could kick out Pluto, I warned, they could do it to anything, or anyone.

I admit: it’s a highly emotional issue and maybe I got carried away in the heat of debate.

We’re with Tim on this one. KEEP PLUTO NUMBER 9!

We’re waiting for out new Intel iMac to be delivered today.

Much excitement at SBM, needless to say.

The nominees for the 2006 Quills Awards are up, and the nominees in the graphic novel category are:
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel/Houghton Mifflin Company
Maximum Fantastic Four: A Visual Exegesis of Fantastic Four #1
Stan Lee/Marvel Enterprises, Incorporated
Mom’s Cancer
Brian Fies/Harry N. Abrams , Incorporated

Naruto
Masashi Kishimoto/Viz Media
Hellsing
Kohta Hirano / Dark Horse Comics

Hm, developing.
THe Quills website has now been corrected and HELLSING is listed as the fifth GN nominee.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes was also nominated in the Humor category.

Voting for the winners is open to the publis and can be done here. The winners will bepresented in a star-studded televised ceremony in October.

Tower Records has filed a Chapter 11 for the 2nd time in 2 year, Publishers Weekly reports:

The beleaguered music and video chain, which launched an online bookstore as recently as last March, went into bankruptcy in 2004 for just over a month. This time around, Tower is hoping for a buyer; it’s been on the block since February.

According to the filing, Tower’s assets and debts exceed $100 million. Both Ingram and Baker & Taylor were among the company’s top 40 unsecured creditors, although no publishers appear on the list. Ingram Entertainment is owed $760,000, while its Book Company is down $160,900. Baker & Taylor Book, which had been supplying fulfillment for www.towerrecords.com/books, is owed $437,400; Baker & Taylor Video is owed $198,000.

ICv2 has its annual interveiw with Paul Levitz up in four parts, including his thougths on weekly comics, manga and more, with a few bonus comments from vp Stephanie Fierman. A few callouts:
On the changing audience:

It smells to me like the number of human beings who are regularly reading graphic novel formats in this country is now larger, or about to be larger than the number of human beings regularly reading the periodical formats. I think that’s a very interesting transition, because that has never been true before.

On the weekly format:

I think the weekly is kind of in the same list in my head. I’ve looked for 20 years at the consumer who comes into the comic shop every week and said, ‘There ought to be some combination of content and format that can take advantage of that weekly pace and make it work.’

Action Comics Weekly was a notable failure. The creative format we used in Superman books for a bunch of years under Mike Carlin where the stories flowed week to week to week was a more successful version of it, a subtler one because it wasn’t labeled as a weekly, but it still was an attempt to do that. It’s very difficult to work creatively and never expanded much beyond that to a wider range.

On future manga acquisitions:

The common characteristics are that we’re focused in on is the range of manga that is fiction, that is compatible with what we see as one of the mainstream audiences for manga at this point, either the girls’ titles or the men’s action/adventure or science fiction/ fantasy stuff. We’ve looked at some titles that were nonfiction, we’ve looked at titles that were at a wider creative range. We haven’t yet felt that we’ve had enough strength to do that in the market.

We probably have a more limited range of what would be at the far edge of R-rated to X-rated content than some publishers. We don’t want to do material that is beyond the range we’d publish ourselves in our own lines. That affects the range that we look at as well. The Japanese culture is comfortable with any number of things in manga that American audiences are not necessarily comfortable with. We’re probably not going to be the company that is going to push the limits to the extreme there.

On “manga storyteling”:

The pacing that you identify is certainly a piece of it. The level to which emotional acting is used in the characters is part of the power. How motion takes place. Underneath all of that, beyond my Iliad illustration, when I sit and talk to manga editors in Japan, they begin talking about a very different point of view in what makes a good story — different human characteristics they think drive story than I learned in an English lit class 30 years ago.

I think all of this will synthesize in some fashion. We will have people wanting to tell different types of stories and wanting to tell them in different ways. Some of the projects that we have in development for next year are, in part, steps along that path. I don’t think it’s anywhere near where that synthesis will end up, but it is creative work that probably wouldn’t have happened that way if it hadn’t been for the influence of manga in this country. The writer and the artist are setting out to tell a different story.

Yesterday, Cold Cut Distribution announced that they were instituting an across the board discount for retailers, as opposed to a tiered system base on how the size of the order. MacGuffin explains why it’s important:

Business wise, this seems to be incredibly smart move from the outside looking in. First, it likely has almost no effect on the biggest accounts because the majority of those were on rolling terms wherein they received 50% as a base discount and worked from there. The A, B and C level discounts corresponded almost across the board to the same titles that are now 50%, 45%, 40% discounts respectively. Therefore, unless I’m misunderstanding their new terms, the only thing that Cold Cut is really doing is leveling the playing field in an attempt to get more orders from smaller stores that were reluctant to start with a base discount of 40-45% and work down from there.

Iowa blogger/journo Joe Lawler recently informed us of the all-butter statue of Brandon Routh as Superman that was one of the highlights of this year’s Iowa State Fair but was surprised at its crude detailing. But now it seems that a finalized version of the dairy delight has been fashioned and unveiled for all the world to marvel at, and Joe has once again captured it:

Truly, tis wondrous! It’s as if the cape were about to unfurl right onto a croissant!

In today’s depressing news, Turner Broadcasting is tinkering with its old toons again, after a complaint about an appearance of smoking in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. As far as we can tell — and we really hope we’re right — the ban applies only in the UK:

“We are going through the entire catalog,” Yinka Akindele, spokeswoman for Turner in Europe said on Monday.

“This is a voluntary step we’ve taken in light of the changing times,” she said, adding that the painstaking review had been prompted by the Ofcom complaint.

[snip]”The licensee has … proposed editing any scenes or references in the series where smoking appeared to be condoned, acceptable, glamorized or where it might encourage imitation,” Ofcom said, adding that “Texas Tom” was one such example.

Akindele said cartoons would only be modified “where smoking could be deemed to be cool or glamorized,” and that scenes where a villain was featured with a cigarette or cigar would not necessarily be cut.

As usual, Mark Evanier has some words of wisdom:

Let me type that again and boldface two words: This, they say, is in response to one complaint about scenes in two cartoons.

But of course, that can’t be true. You don’t start chopping up your old cartoons in response to one complaint about two scenes. You do it because someone high in the company says to someone else high in the company, “You know, one of these days, we may have a problem with this.” For some reason, when they make these decisions, they like to make it sound like they had no choice in the matter; that they gave in to public pressure, even when that pressure was close to non-existent. It’s an excuse to take an action that is probably more economic than idealistic…and to make it sound like an act of social responsibility.

Slate Magazine is excerpting Sid Jacobsen and Ernie Colón’s The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. Meanwhile, USATODAY.com profiles the creators:

Last week, its writer, Sid Jacobson, and illustrator, Ernie Colo´n, both veterans of the comic book industry, visited what had been the World Trade Center, now a massive construction site ringed by hundreds of tourists.

Jacobson, who lives in Los Angeles, hadn’t been there since the attack nearly five years ago.

“It’s painful,” he says, and he remembers eating at Windows on the World, the restaurant that was on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower. He had resisted going back to Ground Zero but agreed to be photographed there, although “it’s difficult. It’s not a place you say ‘cheese.’ “

Colo´n, a New Yorker, last visited the site a few months after 9/11: “I had to leave after a minute. I couldn’t stand it.” This time, he just stared at what he called “the anthill of activity” by construction crews. “But it’s still just an empty shell. And there’s no memorial yet. That’s disturbing.”

Their backgrounds in comics — Jacobson, 76, created Richie Rich and was executive editor of Marvel and Harvey Comics, and Colo´n, 75, drew Casper and Wonder Woman —may seem like odd preparation for dealing with real-life tragedy, terrorism and national security.

MEANAWHILE, meanwhile, Wonkette has a more sardonic take, on the book, including this mash-up: