Yow! You’ll never believe it but that Kinsey girl on MySpace was really a Marvel viral video campaign! The final video launched last night and shows Kinsey (played by Megan Sherlock) finding out her brother has been replaced by a Skrull. The videos were written by Marvel’s own Jim McCann and Ben Morse, and directed by Sam Walker. Filmed over the course of a weekend, and uploaded over a month, the videos detailed Kinsey’s anxieties about going to the prom and other teen-aged pursuits before morphing into a tale of alien invasion.
Marvel was internally so pleased with the results that Kinsey has been written into the Marvel U. and will appear in Marvel’s first original webcomic, written by Ivan Brandon and with art by Nick Postic and edited by longtime webcomics mole John Barber. The webcomic launches today, we’re told, and will be ongoing.
Say what you will about Secret Invasion and “viral marketing”, Marvel’s marketing for this mini-series is at least bringing comics “events” up to speed with the new media atmosphere. We’re told Marvel teamed up with MySpace to get one Kinsey video featured on the video front page, garnering over 200,000 views. From reading the comments on Kinsey’s page a lot of people were following along just to sympathize with her prom plight and not just to find out about Skrulls. The jury is out on whether any of those 200K viewers will translate into comics readers, but you gotta give Marvel some points for fighting fire with fire.
But that leaves Marvel_b0y out in the cold. A Marvel insider, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of fanboy panties, said that “Marvel_b0y has been dealt with. He’s not Kinsey’s brother.”
Our guess? A viral campaign that didn’t go quite as well as planned. This one can be chalked up to as flinging stuff against the wall. Some of it sticks, some doesn’t.
Via YouTube Craig is profiled by the local paper . . . and we get a sneak peek at his adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN: THE DREAM HUNTERS. This is a preview scene from “Lurid Chief” Wayne Alan Harold’s upcoming DVD profile of Craig, titled SOUND INTO IMAGE: THE ART OF P. CRAIG RUSSELL.
Wow, there are more free things than EVER on the internet! What is the use of playing softball in the park or brunching with the girls when there is so much cool free shit?
First off, some that is NOT FREE, repeat NOT FREE, but it is pretty affordable: yesterday’s news BOMBSHELL: TEZUKA ON THE WEB! Japanese bookstore Papyless will make 448 stories from manga forefather Osamu Tezuka available, including ASTROBOY, BLACK JACK and NEW TREASURE ISLAND. Starting March 18th it will cost 105 yen, or about one dollar, to read a volume over 48 hours. You can buy it for keeps for 315 yen per volume. Hopefully with a little Googling and Paypaling we can finally read NEW TREASURE ISLAND which was to manga what D. W. Griffith was to filmmaking, technically speaking.
Speaking of PW AND videos, we have a new area for multi-media content, and one of the first is a video of last fall’s Think Future panel on “Harnessing the Power of Graphic Novels”.
PW’s Calvin Reid and Heidi MacDonald explored the issues around the category with some of comics’ influential players. Joining the discussion were John Cunningham, DC Comics, Dan Frank, Pantheon, Rich Johnson, Yen Press, Joe Quesada, Marvel and Bill Schanes, Diamond Comic Distributors.
MySpace is hosting a few videos from last months Y; The Last Party blowout at Meltdown in LA. This video features Joss Whedon, Mark Waid, Don Murphy, R. Eric Lieb, a monkey, and the live Q+A with co-creators Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra!
I’m Tom (aka Spinner), a Stage6 user and an employee of DivX, Inc., the company behind the service. I’m writing this message today to inform you that we plan to shut down Stage6 on February 28, 2008. Upload functionality has already been turned off, and you’ll be able to view and download videos until Thursday.
I know this news will come as a shock and disappointment to many Stage6 users, and I’d like to take a few moments to explain the reasons behind our decision.
Yes, it seems hosting videos is an expensive business for which there is no real profit model. Hello, YouTube!
Now why does this interest us? Well, you see DIVx produced and Stage6 hosted all the videos we did at the last two San Diegos, including great moments with Evelyn DuBocq, Tom Spurgeon, Gerard Butler, Scott McCloud, Rosario Dawson and the Turds. We’re attempting to download and archive the videos, although we don’t have much time — Thursday! YIKES! Hopefully we will find a new place to host them. I mean, it’s not like you don’t have enough San Diego videos floating around out there. We just like watching our state of coherence deteriorate over the five-day period, and the commensurate increase in the big dark circles under our eyes.
Even more excitingly, if you are in London you can see Alan Moore AND Melinda Gebbie at Gosh! this Saturday, 2/2:
Gosh! The London Comic Shop is proud to announce a signing by celebrated creators Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie to mark the long-awaited UK release of Lost Girls. The signing will take place in-store at Gosh! Comics, 39 Great Russell Street in Central London (opposite the British Museum) on the 2nd February 2008, from 2:00 to 5:00 in pm. Moore and Gebbie will be signing copies of the three-volume hardcover slipcase edition of the book, which will be available to purchase at the price of £49.95*
Perhaps one or two of you have not been pelted — nay, basted, stuffed and roasted with the Lasagna Cat meme over the last two days or so. For you unfortunate souls, here is what you need to know: some guy recreates a live action version of a Garfield strip and follows it up with a music video by Expose or Snap or Barenaked Ladies. In the one we’ve linked to, Jon discovers he’s been using the cat comb instead of the human comb! This necessitates a move into a video based on NiN’s “Head Like a Hole.” For many that may summarize the entire Garfield experience. In fact we couldn’t link to just one:
This one mixes Jon, Garfield, Odie and the soundtrack to Final Fantasy.
Best Week ever agrees.These appeared seemingly out-of-nowhere, all at the same time, and will undoubtedly be the best thing to happen to the Internet in a very, very long time.
Could it be that GARFIELD is in fact the tabula rasa of our time; the blank slate upon which the inner zeitgesit of every subsequent generation can be writ; the cave wall of the information era’s children?
Spotted at Neil Gaiman’s blog. God I miss Colbert and Stewart.
BTW, was that the most boring season of THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER or what? No one had any charisma but the coaches. George was the only one who acted like a professional. And this was definitely the most, er, “mentally challenged” cast yet. The two guys who wouldn’t train with Hughes? Look, I know Serra is the most loved coach ever, and Hughes is a dick/bully but come on - the chance to train with a great fighter? Why would you pass up a chance to maybe learn something?
OTOH, these two also sat around the house giggling like drunk schoolgirls. And then there was the “upper decker.” Poop pranks…bleah! Losers!
I never thought I’d say this but I missed Gabe Ruediger.
Time machine! Or at least someone with a VHS in 1992. Not Blog X begins an examination of Image Comics and links to the 1992 CNN report on the founding of Image Comics. Dig the hair and such titles as RETIEF on the stands.
Before becoming its own full-fledged company, Image began as an imprint of Malibu Comics. Youngblood, the comic that would become Image’s first release, was announced as a three-issue mini-series in October 1991. Before Youngblood was announced, Marvel’s lawyers apparently squashed Liefeld’s previous attempt to publish a title called The Executioners through Malibu. The Image name actually didn’t exist yet, and there’s no indication in the early announcement that anyone else would be joining him. In fact, looking at the Usenet discussions from this era, most people didn’t believe that he was even leaving X-Force in order to do this title.
The video mentions “EIGHT” image Creators — who was the eighth man??? (The Image Founder are considered to be seven: Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, and Whilce Portacio, whose book never quite came out.) Jesus, it’s like the missing replicant! Was it Dale Keown? Or someone…else.
Ray Quentin sends us a video of the now famed Nicholas Gurewitch/Great Ape skit at this year’s Ignatz Awards. Sadly, the lighting was so low in the auditorium that you can’t really see the monkey’s very funny actions, but some of the charm comes across.
So Geduld combined his creative talents with his abundance of free time. He took footage from the 1980s “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” cartoons, re-edited it and redubbed it to make the evil Skeletor and his cronies into a bumbling gang of losers. Geduld added incongruously peppy jazz by Django Reinhardt, called his farce “The Skeletor Show” and posted episodes on Google Inc.’s YouTube.
Geduld added his e-mail address to the credits, along with this line: “Please give me a job. I’m talented.”
Actually, that was a joke. Geduld didn’t think much could come of it.
But he was underestimating how much the Internet has broadened the ways people get discovered today, often for jobs in the entertainment industry that didn’t exist until a few years ago.
So why is Disney tolerating YouTube videos that turn Bambi, Simba and Winnie the Pooh into rap stars? YouTube users started posting the videos, set to “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” by the rapper Soulja Boy, about five months ago. The postings (called mash-ups), are made by editing together snippets of animated movies and TV shows. The finished products look like music videos in which the cartoon characters do the singing. As “Crank That” climbed the music charts over the summer — the song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 this month — the videos started gaining in popularity and users edited together versions using characters owned by other big media companies. A version using clips taken from Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants” has been viewed more than seven million times.
Richard McGuire’s RAW classic “Here” is adapted into a 1991 short film by RIT Dept. of Film & Video students Tim Masick and Bill Trainor for their senior thesis project.
Transmission-X the Canadian web comic consortium has announced even more improvements, now including a monthly video broadcast. (Above, THE ABOMINABLE by Karl Kerschl.)
In addition to its daily schedule of free comic strips, Toronto-based webcomics collective Transmission-X is set to launch a weekly video broadcast, entitled TX-TV, beginning Friday September 28 on YouTube and iTunes. TX-TV will present the creative professionals of the Transmission-X collective in candid situations as they struggle to conceive and assemble their comic strips while balancing industry commitments and a fiery studio group dynamic.
Each episode will run approximately 5 minutes in length and will spotlight Transmission-X strips, in-studio creative struggles, round-table discussions, comic con footage and more, and feature all the members of the Transmission-X collective and guest professionals from throughout the comic book industry.
TX-TV will be available to watch on the Transmission-X Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/transmissionxcomics) and for download from www.transmission-x.com in several formats and resolutions, including versions optimized for iPod and hi-res AppleTV (720P). Subscriptions will be available through YouTube.com and the Apple iTunes Music Store.
TX-TV is created and produced by Brenden Fletcher, formerly of the award-winning podcast “The Horcast”.
The ambitious bass player has decided to release all her current projects at once, proving she’s the ultimate ‘triple threat’. Fans who buy her second solo album, Out Of Our Minds, can also check out her short film and comic book, released under the rocker’s initial pseudonym MADM. Auf Der Mar tells Billboard.com, “I was basically building relationships because those comic book companies are crossing over into film and video games.
§ Brian K. Vaughan: ‘The Aaron Sorkin Of Comics’? Given the fate of STUDIO 60 this might not be considered the most complimentary comparison, but be that as it may, MTV has a profile on the writer up.
