The LOST writers really don’t seem very romantic do they? For the second straight Valentine’s Day, the show features a decidedly unromantic episode. Last year it was Desmond and this year it’s Sayid who breaks a girl’s heart on February 14th.
More discussion of this week’s episode, “The Economist,” after the jump.
In the category “cartoonists who are also rockers,” Lauren Weinstein definitely can hold her own. She dropped us a note to let us know her band, Flming Fire, is hitting the stage after a bit of a hiatus.
I am excited to report that after a long hiatus on The Goddess of War’s Planet, exploring stars and time zones, I will be appearing from the caverns for one weekend only, to join my band, Flaming Fire for the purpose of PLAYING MUSIC TO HUMANS!
We will invade twice in the Tri-state area. SO HERE IS ADVANCED WARNING!
THE BAND HAS NEW PEOPLE AND NEW SONGS. EVERYONE IS ATTRACTIVE AND CHARISMATIC!
FRIDAY February 15th, at 8 PM: Union Pool, 484 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, with Beat Circus (from Boston), Unicornicopia, and Jared Whitham!!
SATURDAY February 16th at 8pm at Maxwells 1039 Washington Street, Hoboken, New Jersey NJ with American Watercolor Movement and Dragons of Zynth!
We love chronicling all the crossovers between our two favorite popular culture mediums involving giant muscled-up people hitting each other repeatedly: superhero comics and pro wresting.
Today, it’s an interview at Marvel.com with Friend of the Beat Shane Helms aka The Hurricane. There’s talk about comics and sports entertainment, including Helms’ all-too-real neck injury, which has kept him out of action for quite a while now.
Posted by Mark Coale
Danish authorities have arrested three people who were allegedly planning to assassinate one of the Mohammed cartoonists. A 40-year-old Dane of Moroccan origin and two Tunisians were arrested. The Dane ill be charged with a terrorism offense and the Tunisians deported.
The target of the plot, the intelligence service said, was the cartoonist for the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jullands-Posten, which first published the controversial drawings in September 2005. The paper identified the cartoonist as Kurt Westergaard.
“Not wanting to take any undue risks [the intelligence service] has decided to intervene at a very early stage in order to interrupt the planning and the actual assassination,” the statement by Jakob Scharf, the agency’s director general, said. “Thus, this morning’s operation must first and foremost be seen as a preventive measure where the aim has been to stop a crime from being committed.”
Westergaard and his wife have been under police protection for three months. In a statement, the 73-year-old Westergaard wrote:
Of course I fear for my life when the police intelligence service say that some people have concrete plans to kill me. But I have turned fear into anger and resentment.
While this is surely a “what a horrible world,” story, at least a potentially even more horrible story has been averted. For now.
Luigi Siviero of the Italian Fumetti di Carta blog writes to inform us an interesting piece of news:
Matteo Casali and Giuseppe Camuncoli are going to publish a short coloured comic with Corto Maltese in the italian magazine Specchio +, a monthly supplement to the newspaper La Stampa. The comic is a prequel of Quattro sassi nel fuoco (Four Stones in the Fire), the seventh chapter of The Skorpions of the Desert, published in Italy last year by Lizard.
The main character is Hugo Pratt creation Cush, who appeared in earlier Corto stories but apparently Corto himself will appear in a flashback.
While following Pratt in anything is a big challenge, Casali and Camuncoli are very talented fellows in their own right, so we’re excited to see them working on something like this.
You can read the original post in Italian here.
Casali and Camuncoli also recently finished a book called La neve se ne frega, an adaptation of a novel by well-known Italian rocker Luciano Ligabue. Cammo’s cover, colored by Gabriele Dell’Otto after Klimt is below.
You can read a bio of the duo (in Italian) here.
BONUS: whatever happened to those long-ago announced English editions of Corto Maltese to be published by Heavy Metal? Every once in a while we call up Howard Jurofsky at Heavy Metal and ask, but apparently it is still caught up in a rights issue.
Boo.
The long in development Marvel MMO (massive multiplayer online game) which was being made by Marvel and Cryptic Studios (Dity of Heroes) will never be. Shane Kim, head of Microsoft Games Studios, explains why:
“I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of what went wrong,” Kim told me. “I don’t know that that’s the right way to put it. For us we look at our priorities and all of the things we have to do. It’s a tough space. It’s a very competitive space. And it’s a space that’s changing quite a bit. …When we first entered into the development and agreement of the development of ‘Marvel Universe Online,’ we thought we would create another subscription-based MMO. And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success. And then you have to look [and say]: ‘Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?’ There’s a whole bunch of factors.”
[Thanks to Abel for the link.}
The Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards are a televised award show with stars and hosts and all that. this year they also have comics. Or books, anyway. The nominees in the Favorite Book category include to comics:
Favorite Book
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume One: The Long Way Home
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Harry Potter series
How to Eat Fried Worms
Kids will be able to cast their vote online at http://www.nick.com/kca beginning Monday, March 3 in a total of 18 categories. Surprise awards also will be announced during the show. Kids also will be able to vote via the Nick mobile website (wap.nick.com).
What can we say, kids love comics!
[Thank to Jeremy for the item.]
French colorist Stephane Peru, who worked on a variety of books for Marvel and DC has died at age 26, of a heart attack, Newsarama reported yesterday:
Jean Wacquet, editor-in-chief of French comics publisher Soleil, has informed Newsarama.com that artist/colorist Stéphane Peru, best known for his work as a colorist on Marvel’s Ultimate X-Men, Incredible Hercules, Annihilation: Conquest and Annihilation: Conquest – Quasar, Avengers: The Initiative, Civil War: X-Men, and DC’s Teen Titans: Year One, 52, The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive and All Flash, has passed away on Monday, February 11th. His work will also be seen in several upcoming projects such as the just-announced The Invincible Iron Man and Young X-Men. He was only 26.
Calling it a “tragedy,” Wacquet said that “Everybody here [at Soleil] is so sad. Our friend and partner Stéphane Peru passed away yesterday afternoon.”
Uno is the first beagle ever to win the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Snoopy and Underdog are cheering.
“He’s a people’s dog, a merry little hound,” Wilkerson said.
Photo © New York Times
What are the odds that in the ONE WEEK that the city is pelted with freezing temps and continued slushy snow, we would have planned–over five months ago–a trip to Florida?
Really now.
We’ll try to post a bit from the road, but don’t count on it.
MySpace continues to put up some surprisingly cool comics, including, now a new story by Gilbert Hernandez for Dark Horse Presents . It’s called “Manga.”
While it’s been known for a while that distributor Cold Cut had been sold to a Chicago-based concern, the identity of said concern was not public knowledge until now: it’s Rogue Wolf, hitherto known mostly as a publisher of comics on the web. According to the PR “Rogue Wolf Entertainment, Inc was founded in 2006 with the idea of creating comics for comic fans. They currently produce three web-comic titles. With this new addition to their corporate portfolio, their focus will be on helping their fellow creators and valued supporters succeed and hopefully improve the comics industry as a whole in the process.”
Here’s the rest of the press release:
As you read this, thousands of comics are being packed up and shipped from their old home in Salinas, CA to their new home in Chicago, IL. Cold Cut Distribution, the leading distributor of independent and small to mid-size press comics in the United States, has sold their company assets to Rogue Wolf Entertainment.
MEANWHILEFox is suing Warners over the labyrinthine rights to the Watchmen movie:
Fox claims that between 1986 and 1990, it acquired all movie rights to the 12-issue DC Comics series and screenplays by Charles McKeown and Sam Hamm. In 1991, Fox assigned some rights via a quitclaim to Largo International with the understanding that the studio held exclusive rights to distribute the first motion picture based on “Watchmen,” according to the lawsuit.
When Largo dismantled, the rights were transferred to producer Lawrence Gordon. Under a “turnaround agreement” between Fox and Gordon, the producer agreed to pay a buy-out price to Fox if he entered into any agreement with another studio or third party to develop or produce “Watchmen,” among other things.
The project apparently bounced around to Universal and Paramount before returning to Warners. Now, Fox claims that neither Gordon nor Warners has paid the buy-out price or advised the studio of any other conditions required under the agreement, including procedures necessary to acquire the rights to “Watchmen” from Fox.
If you canfollow all that you should get a job as an agent for sure. ICv2 has some good analysis”
Typically these sorts of rights disputes between studios are settled before any suits are filed and usually before a film goes into production (remember how rights disputes held up the production of decent Spider-Man movie for years), but perhaps Fox feels that it has Warners over a barrel with the fate of a potentially lucrative superhero film at stake.
Perhaps.
The Tolkien Trust, which represents the estate of JRR Tolkien has filed a lawsuit against New Line claiming they are owed $140 million :
Charging “unabashed and insatiable greed,” the plaintiffs said in the complaint that New Line, which produced and distributed the “Lord of the Rings” movies, had failed to pay anything despite a nearly 40-year-old contract that entitles the trusts and the publishers to 7.5 percent of the films’ gross revenues, less certain costs.
The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy has earned some $6 billion worldwide. This follows a similar suit (since settled) by Peter Jackson, and another one started last year by producer Saul Zaentz. While this kind of suit normally would be of only cursrty interest to movie goes, the Tolkien estate is also seeking punitive damages and attempting to block the next two Hobbit movies. So, you’d better pay up, New Line, or break the heart of millions of Hobbit lovers!
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Over the weekend Frank Miller had a star studded 51st birthday party in Vegas with all the trimmings:
300 and Sin City creator Frank Miller celebrated his 51st birthday Saturday night at CatHouse inside the Luxor after being lured there under the guise of simply dinner with Sin City star Jamie King.
After dinner, Miller was surprised by a number of his Hollywood friends, including Sin City director Robert Rodriguez, actress Rose McGowan (currently engaged to Rodriguez, who directed her in Grindhouse), Sin City star Rosario Dawson, 300’s Gerard Butler, 24 actor Louis Lombardi, Spanglish knockout Paz Vega and CatHouse partner and chef Kerry Simon.
While Frank seems to be quite cmfy in the celebrity world, we did spot a familiar face on the photo page.
The “tweener” generation of comics readers and creators — of which I’m one — were lucky enough to come of age in an era of comics struggling to break out of a chrysalis. Nurtured on the canny, mythic cosmic melodrama of classic Lee-Kirby-Ditko Marvel, the next generation yearned to break out to the next level, to go from the child’s colorful fairy tale to the adolescent’s poetic angst. If early Marvel was the timeless struggle to be human despite the powers and guise of a monster, the next wave was struggling to be human despite the oppressive nature of human corruption. In a country made cynical by a failed war in a rotting jungle and a president who thought nothing of personally authorizing thugs to win an election it was time to question heroes.
In comics, a generation of writers emerged for whom the greatest threats weren’t space aliens or giant lizards — it was the evil at the core of a corporation, the greed of exploitation.
As a teenager in the 70s, my own comics reading grew up in the space of several short months. I was immediately hooked by the colorful dash and humor of Spider-Man, the clean adventure of the Fantastic Four. It was all fun and exciting. My trips to the spinner rack at a local department store were a search for new adventures, a world I knew nothing of, but was quickly learning about due to footnotes and letters pages.
I had only been reading Marvel comics for a few months when I found something called Howard the Duck. It was already up to issue 9, but back in those days every issue was a jumping on point. I was a little confused because Howard was dealing with the effects of an ill-advised presidential campaign and his relationship with a beautiful woman named Beverly was already in the middle stage of mingled attraction and bickering that actual human relationships were made of. After his disastrous campaign, Howard was forced to flee to Canada and fight a giant beaver. It was full of wacky humor, clever dialog and startling, original characters. I wasn’t very experienced in the ways of comics, but about five seconds in, I knew this was something I could relate to and make my own special comic.
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Writer Steve Gerber passed away on February 10th. He was 60 and had been hospitalized for the past few weeks due to pulmonary fibrosis. He was on the list for a lung transplant, but had developed an infection which greatly weakened his condition. Gerber had been blogging from his hospital bed about his illness.
Gerber was one of a handful of writers who significantly expanded the comics medium. He created or co-created Omega the Unknown and his best known creation, Howard the Duck and made Man-Thing the character that he is best known as. During his 70s marvel run he was also well known for a long-run on the Defenders, and wrote the first appearance of KISS in comics form.
Howard The Duck, introduced as a throwaway character in an issue of Man-Thing, was perhaps the first mainstream Marvel character to introduce the anti-establishment humor of the underground comics of the time. Howard, a sarcastic duck from Cleveland, battled such satirical foes as the Kidney Lady and Doctor Bong, romanced the beautiful human Beverly Switzer, and even ran for President.
Howard would later become one of the symbols of the failings of mainstream comics: Gerber unsuccessfully sued for ownership of the character, a benefit book, Destroyer Duck was created, and Gerber created a follow-up, Stewart the Rat, also for Eclipse.
Gerber went on to work on various projects in animation, TV and comics. His mini-series HARD TIMES for DC was one of his most recent writing highlights. At the time of his death he was working on a Dr. Fate mini-series for DC. His recent
Mark Evanier has more:
What I feel the need to tell you is just what a great guy he was. In the seventies, when New York comic professionals were banding together to find ways to elevate the stature of the field and the living standards of its practitioners, Steve was at the nexus of so many of those efforts. When Steve was involved in his lawsuit with Marvel, many fellow professionals rallied around him with loans and gifts of cash and some of us put together a benefit comic book, Destroyer Duck, to raise money. People did that because they knew, first of all, that Steve was fighting not just for his own financial reasons but for matters of principle relating to how the comic book industry treated its creators. That some of the more pernicious business practices soon went away had a lot to do with Steve taking the stand he did. Also, those who knew Steve knew that when you were in need, he would do anything to help. He was, in every sense of the word, a friend.
I’ll have a longer memorial to Gerber in a bit. Right now I am in serious mourning – it’s no exaggeration to say that no writer has had a greater influence on my life and I would not be the same person without the work of Steve Gerber. My condolences to his friends and family.
Gerber’s wikipedia page lists the characters he created or co-created.
• A. Bizarro
• All-Night Party
• Angar the Screamer
• Princess Ariel
• Baphomet (comics)
• Cybernary
• Death-Stalker
• Destiny
• Destroyer Duck
• Doctor Bong
• Doctor Fate (Kent V. Nelson) (Replacement version)
• Exiles (Malibu Comics)
• Foolkiller
• Hard Time
• Headmen
• Howard the Duck
• Amber Hunt
• Hydro-Base
• Hydro-Men
• Ikthalon
• Jennifer Kale
• Kamuu
• KISS (Marvel Universe versions)
• Korrek
• Korvac
• Lord Pumpkin
• Mandrill
• Montesi
• N’Kantu, the Living Mummy
• Nekra
• Nevada
• Nikki
• Aleta Ogord
• Omega the Unknown
• Ookla the Mok
• Phantom Blonde
• Poison
• Red Guardian (later known as Starlight)
• Ruby Thursday
• Richard Rory
• Shanna the She-Devil
• Silver Samurai
• Sludge
• Starhawk
• Stewart the Rat
• Therea
• Thog
• Thundarr the Barbarian
• Void Indigo
• Wundarr the Aquarian
UPDATE: Tom has a much better obit than anything I’ll ever write here.
Three out of three people we surveyed today agree that Dunkin’ Donuts coffee now tastes like complete swill.
This weekend DC held one of its occasional RRP (Retailer Roundtable Program) meetings, an invite-only forum for retailers to see what’s coming up from DC in the year ahead. The last one was held in 2005 , so this is definitely the first one of the post-52/Dan Didio era. And it couldn’t come at a more interesting time, as the future of DC’s heavily event based publishing program is the subject of much chatter, both public and private. Newsarama has some news points coming out of the meeting, including official announcement of the next weekly series, Trinity, (left) which will feature 12-page front stories focused on the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley, with back up features written by Busiek and Fabian Nicieza:
The series will follow Countdown, but, as with Countdown and 52 which came before it, will be unrelated to the previous weekly series. That said, Trinity will be “apart,” that is, occurring in the DC Universe, but not tied to other events happening in the DCU.
Didio gives notes on the bigger picture:
DD: One of the things that we’re really focusing on this year at DC is how we’re driving the different storylines through 2008. There will be a storyline that features Superman prominently in the Superman titles through 2008, there will be a storyline that features Batman prominently throughout his titles in 2008, and Wonder Woman will have her own strong storyline in her series. Final Crisis will be contained to the primary series and a couple of spin-off series and a couple of one shots, but doesn’t crossover throughout the rest of the line. And Trinity will be its own story amid all of that, because it explores not just the history of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, but their impact on the DCU in the past years and for the future.
Johanna and her commenters have some fun with this quote, but we’ll circle back to this in a bit.
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Is at PANEL AND PIXEL:
Shared Risk, Shared Responsibility and Shared Rewards. If you are entering the comic book field on the creative end, you have to realize that what you are doing is participating in the day-to-day business of roughly 3,000 other businesses — that’s how many comic book stores there are. With a handful of exceptions, these guys are all incredibly reliable: that’s why they’re still in business after four years, eight years, ten years, twenty years. A big part of any success story is just showing up for work in the morning and then giving it your level best from the moment the door opens to the moment the door closes.
Put as plainly and as simply as possible: if we had even half the work ethic on the creator side that we see on the retailer side, this business would be functioning at a much higher level of success.
When you solicit a book in PREVIEWS, you are asking 3,100 retailers to Share the Risk with you that there’s an audience out there for what you do. You’re asking them to bet $5 or $10 or $15 on what you do, usually based on a cover reproduction the size of a postage stamp and two lines of copy.
The Comics Reporter interviews Valerie D”Orazio and she clears the air on a number of topics. The interview also makes you realize how seldom anyone who has worked in the mainstream comics industry in the “modern” era ever talks about it in an analytical way:
D’ORAZIO: When you are an assistant editor — at least from where I sat — your contrary opinion is not encouraged. And, if you’re female, that contrary opinion is not just discouraged — it’s seen as downright gauche. At any rate, you can be replaced pretty easily. You stay because you hope and dream you will be promoted. You see how cut-throat things are and you vow to swim with the sharks and get-ahead. Always there is this fear that if somehow you “screw up” and lose the job, you will never find another one in this small small industry — and that you are only competent to edit comic books. And that, in your sort-sighted view, no job could possibly be as cool as working in comic books. All this fosters a very conservative viewpoint, at least as far as work is concerned.
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