The Eagle Awards winners have been posted. We’re told a 17-year-old girl has been put in charge of the awards for next year; which will surely lead to a more timely posting of the winners, if only on her LJ:

Favorite Newcomer Writer
MATT FRACTION

Favourite Newcomer Artist
DAVID AJA

Favourite Comics Writer
ALAN MOORE

Favourite Comics Writer/Artist
ALAN DAVIS

Favourite Comics Artist: Pencils
FRANK CHO

Favourite Comics Artist: Inks
D’ISRAELI (MATT BROOKER)

Favourite Artist: Fully-Painted Artwork
ALEX ROSS

Favourite Colourist
LAURA MARTIN

Favourite Letterer
DAVE GIBBONS

Favourite Editor
THARG (MATT SMITH)

Favourite Publisher
MARVEL

Favourite Colour Comicbook - American
HELLBOY: DARKNESS CALLS

Favourite Colour Comicbook - British
SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN

Favourite Black and White Comicbook - American
THE WALKING DEAD

Favourite Black and White Comicbook - British
HOW TO DATE A GIRL IN 10 DAYS

Favourite New Comicbook
THOR

Favourite Manga
DEATH NOTE

Favourite European Comics
REQUIEM, VAMPIRE KNIGHT

Favourite Comics Story published during 2007
CAPTAIN AMERICA 25-30: THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA

Favourite Comics Cover published during 2007
WORLD WAR HULK 1A (DAVID FINCH)

Favourite Original Graphic Novel
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN: BLACK DOSSIER

Favourite Reprint Compilation
ABSOLUTE SANDMAN VOLUME 2

Favourite Comics Hero
BATMAN

Favourite Comics Villain
JOKER

Favourite Magazine About Comics
WIZARD

Favourite Comics-Related Book
OUR GODS WEAR SPANDEX: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes (Chris Knowles)

Favourite Comics-Based Movie Or TV
300

Favourite Comics Related Website
MARVEL.COM

Favourite Web-Based Comic
THE ORDER OF THE STICK

Roll of Honour
MIKE MIGNOLA

Chris Ware has returned with another animated opening for THIS AMERICAN LIFE.

Borys Kit picks on Warner Bros:

As Marvel embarks on transferring its universe of comics characters to the big screen, it is determined to succeed where DC Comics and its corporate sibling Warner Bros. have stumbled. But then, Marvel always has been one step ahead of DC.

Turns out that Marvel is not only tying together its comics into one vast universe,ut is now doing the same with its movies. Something Warners has yet to emulate:

Warners has successfully revived Batman with the help of Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, but its Superman franchise, as if encountering Kryptonite, is struggling. Wonder Woman, under producer Joel Silver, can’t get her invisible jet off the ground. And the much-ballyhooed Justice League movie has lost steam: Bale had no intention of reprising Batman in that movie, and all the actors Warners had attached skewed young, making it almost a “Teen Titans” movie.

Here is the problem: Warners lets its filmmakers dictate what happens in its superhero movies. There’s not a hint of the existence of Gotham City in “Superman Returns,” for example, because Warners franchises have become filmmaker fiefdoms, where no one plays with each other. Worse, the filmmakers and executives take it upon themselves to make wholesale changes to DC’s mythology. Witness the fact that Superman has a kid!

Legendary Abstract Expressionist Robert Rauschenberg has died at age 82.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

We were lucky enough to see the Guggenheim retrospective of his work ten years ago, and to our eye, no artist so encompassed multi media with such authority, building sheer nonsense to pure beauty. In particular, we often think of his installation “Soundings”:

Soundings is a 36 foot long sculpture made up of three layers of Plexiglas. The front layer would be partially mirrorized and behind are two layers of Plexiglas with images of a wooden chair on them. Different lights behind the sheets of Plexiglas would vary in intensity based upon the amount of sound in the room and backlight the images so they would be visible through the mirror.

Viewers would stomp and shout as fleeting images of the chairs flashed and danced. It sounds like complete twaddle, we know, but as you became part of the art with your own motions and sounds, something even more amazing emerged. He was a fantasist, a visionary, and whatever this post modern world is, he’s a big part of the good in it.

Also via Simon Jones, ComicsSnob looks at an overview of 2007 manga sales in Japan:

Bullet Points:
# Japanese manga sales slip another 2.3% in 2007, but
# the medium is gaining currency as a tool of Soft Power diplomacy
# …and increased academic and scholarly attention.

There’s much more in the link, not all of it presented in a way our addled mind could comprehend, but this did stand out:

Aside: for the record, I think manga sales in Japan will continue to drop by ~5% a year until digital distribution becomes more than just a novelty, and is instead firmly established as the ‘third format’ — which will happen in Japan where the weekly/monthly ‘phone books’ are already largely considered to be disposable/recyclable media (and where everyone has a super-awesome cell phone that not only displays manga but also, in a pinch, can open an exploding Gate and be thrown at invading aliens) but not in the States where the nearest equivalent to the throw-away manga magazines are instead polybagged (don’t forget a cardboard backer) and sold at significant mark-up on e-bay — these are two completely different business models, folks, so unfortunately, no digital superheroes for you.

The Comics Journal message board comments on the fact that KRAMERS ERGOT #7, the new issue of Sammy Harkham’s epic and influential avant garde comics anthology will cost $125 for 96 pages. You can see the Amazon listing here. K. Parille explains.

The book is more expensive than earlier volumes because it is much larger. From an interview with Sammy Harkham:
“You’ve seen that Little Nemo book?” he asks, hands spreading reflexively to encompass the famous, full-page scope of Winsor McKay’s early-20th-century newspaper strip. “Issue number seven is going to be like that. Big—big—16 by 21! Every artist gets three pages. That’s it. But with that assignment, an artist is going to make work that wouldn’t exist otherwise. I’m so excited.”

Luke Przybylski weighs options:

A few things: Prices aren’t set arbitrarily. The size and overall printing quality, not to mention the quality of the art/comics themselves may very well be amazing enough to many of us that we’d drop $125. We’ll all have a better idea when we see the thing, but if it is that amazing, we should be congratulating Sammy and everyone else involved for making a great book, for pushing things in new directions. What’s the point if they keep doing the same thing every couple of years? KE is definitely in need of something or other at this point, and going bigger and badder will be really interesting to see.

Przybylski suggests setting aside $10 or $20 a week to save up for the book. We suggest setting hammer to piggy bank if necessary. Due to our own space problems at Stately Beat Manor, we may just leaf through a friend’s copy, at least until severe jealousy sets in.

Or you can order it from Amazon for $78.75 .

Technorati Tags: Kramers Ergot

The TCJ board floats the rumor that Fantagraphics is going exclusive with Diamond for the DM — if true. Norton would continue to be their bookstore distributor, of course. Barry Rodges emails Tony Shenton, FBI’s indie sales rep, and has this cryptic comment:

This does make sense from a business standpoint, but Shannon’s right in saying that it’ll probably alienate some retailers. Tony mentioned that since they are such a big client for him, retailers ordered a lot more minis, etc, from him because they were with him, so this might hurt a lot of us who already have a hard time getting into stores.

But, if this is indeed false, or I shouldn’t have posted this, I’d hate to get Tony in trouble with anyone, so whoever has the power can delete this thread if they want. I just hoped the Fanta big wigs would come out and comfirm or deny the story. As Tony pointed out, the 2 times they were in trouble (and probably more times than that) it was the retailers and fans that helped bail them out. So I guess I kinda feel like it’s okay to pose the question of whether or not this news is true…

So far no one from Fanta has disputed the rumor. Over at the NSFW Icarus blog, Simon Jones ponders the meaning of he potential move:

Fantagraphics is one of the few big comics publishers that have resisted exclusivity, perhaps in part because its wide-ranging catalog was better served by not signing solely with the once cape-centric Diamond. On that front, Diamond has improved; the success of non-superhero trades in bookstores pretty much made sure they had to improve. So if this rumor turns out to be accurate, there are some compelling reasons for the decision, not the least of which is the practicality of having centralized fulfillment. But there is also a strong emotional and psychological aspect to this, given the perception of Diamond as a Galactus-like monopoly which, fairly or not, is already on heavy display in the thread.

§ Marv Wolfman writes of frequent collaborator Gene Colan who as reported this weekend, is quite ill:

Gene’s art has always been singular in comics. You see hundreds of Kirby imitators, lots of Buscema clones, those who try to mimic Jim Lee or name an artist, but nobody has ever tried to copy Gene’s work, because it’s truly unique in so many, many ways. You can always tell when Gene draws a page. His characters have personality, emotion, and somehow when you look at them, you feel they have a past as well. They are people who have lived. Who have weight and gravitas. His work on Tomb of Dracula among others is filled with human emotion. His characters appear to be photographic, but what makes Gene special is they aren’t. They are so real but at the same time they are a pure artist’s vision.

§ Tom Spurgeon ponders what we like to call “the satisfying chunk” theory:

Let’s talk comic books. On Thursday, I bought the above comics and paid almost $19 for the pleasure. The total was slightly shocking to me, because five comics still feels in the hand — my hand — like a $10 purchase. Truth is, five comic books hasn’t been a $10 purchase for a long time. I knew that, and I didn’t know that, if you know what I mean. In my defense, I rarely buy comics and when I do, it’s usually one or two as a courtesy to the store I just spent a half-hour casing or a couple hundred dollars’ worth around the holidays from Chuck Rozanski or Buddy Saunders. I like all of the comics I purchased Thursday, but for maybe the first time in my entire life of buying comics, I experienced a twinge of regret as the $20 left my hand. “I probably could have spent that twenty bucks more effectively,” I thought.

Much more in that link.

A new edition of Comic-Con Magazine is shipping and the cover includes another look at Samuel L. Jackson as the Octopus in the Spirit movie.

Top Cow’s franchise character is set to come back in a movie, via an alliance of Platinum, Top Cow and Arclight Films.

Pic will be produced by Arclight’s Gary Hamilton and Nigel Odell, Platinum Studios’ Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and Steve Squillante of Havenwood Media. Top Cow’s Marc Silvestri and Matt Hawkins will be exec producers with Platinum Studios’ Rich Marincic and Greenberg Group’s Randy Greenberg.

According to Variety, Witchblade has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. Previous incarnations include the TNT series starring Yancy Butler which ran for two seasons, and an anime version from Gonzo Digimation in 2006.

Platinum is definitely getting more in the Tinseltown mix, with Atlantis Rising and Cowboys and Aliens at Dreamworks and Unique set up at Disney. They also have Dylan Dog, based on the Italian comic, in the works.

While the Eagle award winners still haven’t been put online, more informal awards called the 2008 Golden Champagne Glass Awardshave been announced. They were presented at some kind of drunken bar fest during the Bristol con in the UK, and apparently we really did win one for Best Journalist (US). Organizer Tony Lee assures us that we really did win by a plurality of votes, so we can only say…thanks! It’s an honor just to be nominated, but winning is nice too.

Above you can see the award presentation by Tony and some other jolly fellows, and there seems to have been a lot of drinking involved, so you can see this is clearly the kind of award we deserve to win.

As mentioned here before, nominations for the 2008 Lulu Awards are open. Anyone can nominate. These are the categories:

The Women Cartoonists Hall of Fame nominees must have published work, whether self-published, company-published, or Web-published. An individual cannot win more than once.

Women of Distinction nominees must have worked in the comic industry in a non-creator role, such as editing, publishing, reporting, or retail.

The Lulu of the Year Award honors the creator(s), book or other project whose work best exemplifies Friends of Lulu’s mission.

The Kim Yale Award nominees must have published work, whether self-published, company-published, or Web-published. Nominees must be nominated for this category within three years of their first published work. An individual may not be nominated more than twice, and cannot win more than once. The award is named for comics writer Kim Yale, a founding Lulu member who passed away in 1997.

Come on peeps, let’s get the best people for the job recognized for their efforts. Suggest possible nominees in the comments.

For Hall of Fame, previous winners include:
Rumiko Takahashi, Lynda Barry, Wendy Pini, Marge Henderson Buell, Marie Severin, Dale Messick, Ramona Fradon, Trina Robbins and Hilda Terry.
Who is left to nominate? LOTS OF PEOPLE!
Moto Hagio
Kanako Inuki
Machiko Hasegawa
Rose O’Neill
Nell Brinkley
Tarpe Mills
Lilly Renée
Dori Seda
Aline Kominsky Crumb
..okay that’s just for a start.

The Kim Yale award is a bit harder to parse because tehre are SO many young women coming up and blowing the doors off. I haven’t even made up my mind, but a couple of examples:

Julia Wertz
Sarah Oleksyk
Laura Park

Lulu of the Year?
Hard not to start with Rutu Modan and Marjane Satrapi.

More ideas?

Over the weekend news spread quickly that Gentleman Gene Colan is suffering from liver failure. Gene’s wife Adrienne sentr out a letter, reproduced here:

My darling, sweet, handsome and brilliantly gifted husband’s liver is failing. The complications are very nasty. This week it’s fluid retention and encephalitis. He’s on powerful meds now to diminish the symptoms. He sleeps a lot and has very little energy. He wants you all to know how badly he wanted to attend the convention. He so seriously wanted to see you all and shoot the breeze.

Not sure how long we have left together, but our family whole and we’ll be taking this sad journey together and nearby.

Clifford Meth has begun organizing a benefit to help with the medical bills. . Neal Adams, Norm Breyfogle, Adam-Troy Castro, Peter David, Tom DeFalco, Pat DiNizio, Harlan Ellison, Mark Evanier, Neil Gaiman, Joe Kubert, Jim Lee, Stan Lee, Leah Moore, Tom Palmer, Mike Pascale, Dave Simmons, Marv Wolfman and Ash Wood have all signed up.

Colan remains one of the greatest Marvel artists of all times. His 70 issue stint on Tomb of Dracula with Marv Wolfman remains a highlight, but his work on Howard the Duck, Dr. Strange and Daredevil are also notable. Colan is one of the few artists whose work always elevated his material, not with dynamics but characterization. His people are always completely realized characters; while Colan would never be called a humor artist, his mastery of expressions definitely helped Howard the Duck, in particular, become a benchmark.

There’s an address to send cards in the top link. Please don’t be shy with your gratitude, admiration and generosity.

§ 12th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Winners have been revealed:

Masayuki Ishikawa won the 2-million-yen (about US$20,000) Manga Grand Prize for his Moyashimon medical comedy manga. The manga follows a college student who discovers that he can see and communicate with the germs all around him — germs that appear as super-deformed characters. This was the third year in a row that Moyashimon has been nominated. Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ohoku was also nominated for three years running, but has yet to receive the award. The second-place finisher this year was Umimachi Diary 1: Semishigure no Yamugoro.

Meanwhile, the Eagle awards were presented Saturday night in Bristol, and everyone is still too hungover to even list the winners. That’s right, not one single person has seen fit to send out a press release! And we’re not the only ones t notice!

SF Awards Watch:

Has anyone seen a bunch of Eagle Awards flitting around the place looking for somewhere to land?

Richard Bruton:

This Internet thingy isn’t that good really is it?

The Eagle Awards were given out last night yet nowhere on the Interwebby thing can I find the results. Someone must know!

Of course it doesn’t help that the awards are technically the 2007 Eagle Awards. Given to work from 2007. But presented in 2008. Time to re-date the damn things I think.

Forbidden Planet:

Mike Conroy has been in touch to say that the full official list of winners for the Eagle Awards, announced at the Bristol comics bash at the weekend, should be going up shortly (in fact, hopefully tomorrow). There’s been a bit of a re-organisation behind the scenes of the awards, with Mike not being able to dedicate as much time to it as before due to his own work and the fact that both the Eagles and the Bristol Expo seem to grow bigger each year, although he said that the exhibitors he spoke to seemed to think they still hadn’t lost the fannish roots.

Come on, people, surely everyone is sober now!

UPDATE: Tony Lee captures the spirit of Bristol:

The bottles of gin have been tidied away and the boxes of pizza are being folded into rubbish bin sized portions. Having been bought at around 2am on the Friday night, this pizza has been the sustenance for all our needs and has pretty much kept us alive since day one. The three day pizza is now looking bad, but not to Dan, who munches slowly while crying weakly to himself.

J. Caleb Mozzocco has an excellent write-up of saturday’s Jeff Smith/Scott McCloud event at the opening of the Smith art show:

There may not be a better illustration of the unique place Jeff Smith occupies in the history of comics—spanning the end of the black-and-white self-publishing boom and the beginnings of the current graphic novel boom—than the audience that showed up to see he and Scott McCloud speak this Saturday at Ohio State University.

The talk was held in the Mershon Auditorium, and drew a crowd of a few hundred. These ranged from grade school-aged boys and girls to grandparent-aged adults; there were college-aged boys and girls; there were bald men, balding men, men with long hair, men with ball caps and men with cab-driver hats; there were kids who looked like their parents dragged them there, parents who looked like their kids dragged them there, and, most remarkably, families in which both the grown-ups and the kids wore Bone t shirts and seemed equally excited about flipping through the books they purchased on their way in.

DATELINE covered the Michael George case on Friday and a complete transcript and video excerpt are up.

Lenora Ward: She knew our names. Immediately when we would walk in, she would light up with a smile. Many times, she would actually come around the counter to greet us.

But not on this early evening, just after 6 p.m. Tom and Lenora had thumbed through the bins and found their comic, but no one was there to take their money, not Barb or her husband Michael, the co-owner. Some teenagers in the shop weren’t being waited on either.

In addition to the expected lurid graphics, there are also some old photos of the store as it looked in the 90s.

Were the 90s really so long ago that that car looks like an LeSabre or something?

Photos from his recent opening at the Clementine Gallery. In the foreground to awesome new art book from PictureBox.

§ Carol Kino profiles Lynda Barry in the New York Times:

BY celebrity standards the cartoonist Lynda Barry leads a reclusive existence. When she first developed a cult following in the 1980s, she cut a highly public figure, with frequent appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” and the like. But after the market for her work began shrinking in the late 1990s, she gradually withdrew, refusing to talk on the phone with reporters or her editors. Today she draws her 30-year-old weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” on a dairy farm just outside Footville, Wis., where she lives with her husband, Kevin Kawula, a prairie restoration expert. Since moving there six years ago, the couple have been relatively self-reliant, growing much of their own food and chopping their own wood for fuel.

Check out the multi-media slideshow, narrated by Barry.

§ PLUS : Alice C. Chen interviews Gene Yang in SFGate

Since “ABC’s” rise, the 34-year-old has lived at a frenzied pace. In late April, he released a short story, “The Motherless One,” the only graphic tale in “Up All Night,” an anthology of teenage literature. He travels to destinations such as New York and France, speaking at comic book conventions and teen book clubs. Yang also works full-time as a computer science teacher and director of information services at Bishop O’Dowd, a Catholic high school in Oakland. (He keeps his job because he enjoys education and says it would be too isolating to just cartoon.) He’s married to Theresa, a former teacher, and they’re parents of a 1-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. Every night after the children go to bed, Yang heads to his home office to sketch thumbnails and write for hours.

§ Cameron Stewart’s new Illustration Blog>.

§ Everyone else linked to Cracked’s The 6 Creepiest Comic Book Characters of All Time. Who are we to say “Neigh!”

§ If you read one fashion writer’s take on the Met’s Superhero show it should be this one, by Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan:

Still, there is nothing ponderous about this exhibition. How could it be stuffy and dull when a glowing green mural of the Hulk glares across the room at a three-dimensional Spider-Man climbing up a vertigo-inducing cityscape? Bolton has chosen examples from the fashion industry that are among the most dramatic interpretations of superhero style. There are ensembles from Balenciaga, in which designer Nicolas Ghesquiere’s models look like human Transformers, with metal leggings, dresses held together by brass-colored rings, and shoes seemingly constructed out of industrial chains and rivets. Dolce & Gabbana’s silver bustiers and molded skirts sparkle next to the Iron Man suit — each of them addressing a tug of war between invincibility and vulnerability.

[Link via Mark Coale.]

§ Alex Ross, fashion model?

§ Weirdness of the day: the very bizarre ups and downs of Yaoi House.

Wow. I can’t believe the hating being laid on Speed Racer.

I saw it this weekend, and loved it. Loved every minute of it. It was creative, imaginative, innovative. It was made with care and love. The characters all had story arcs. The story was laid out one scene at a time and made sense. Sure, the whole movie was a cartoon where normal rules of space and time did not apply — in one cityscape you could see a Dubai-like skyscraper topped by what looked like Mr. Peanut, for chrissake — but what do you expect from a movie where a chimpanzee is accepted as a normal family member? It’s got pancakes, Shaft, Segways, Black vikings, ninjas, girls piloting pink helicopters, cars covered in snake skin, races in ice caves where doom befell once before, and Christopher Hitchens as the villain. That’s a good time to me.

The Wachowskis, who both directed and wrote the kid-friendly film, have created a world with its own thrilling, topsy turvy logic. The visual style is like nothing ever seen before, a mash-up of Tron, Blade Runner and Gran Turismo but taken to a new degree of kinetic flair. Backgrounds explode into plastic and chrome speedlines, cars leap and bounce. Deserts are searing orange clouds, fireworks are purple neon. Cars don’t just race, they race through tunnels, not just tunnels, but tunnels animated with racing zebras. Why? Who cares. The internal dynamics require it. The whole movie is shot in bullet time. Yes, it was exhausting — the intensity is too much for a two-hour plus movie. And yeah, if you have motion sickness or are prone to seizures, it will probably kill you.

When it isn’t racing around the track, the story is mostly told through big, big close-ups of the actors. Most everyone complains that the acting is flat, but I think that’s beside the point. The only way to make a successful CGI movie is to keep the actors in the foreground, and keep them likable. If you don’t like Susan Sarandon when she’s making peanut butter sandwiches for an all-night family chassis-welding party, you have no heart.

SPEED RACER captures the rhythms of manga — the sentimentality and emotional overdrive. The characters are always telling each other how they feel in no uncertain terms. It isn’t subtle, but it supplies all the narrative drive the day-glo racing needs.

But the level of opprobrium being laid on this movie is hard to fathom. Over at Nikki Finke, its paltry $20 mil this weekend is rightly seen as a blow to Warners, but the comments are a Newsarama-level beat down. And I just don’t get it. In a world where CGI explosions and digital farting animals are just casually dismissed as the expected mediocrity, here’s a movie that tries to be different and ups the ante significantly. And gets slammed for it. Sure the story is predictable…but so was IRON MAN’s. Anne Thompson rounds up more of the scorn, but is a bit more sympathetic overall.

I think SPEED RACER will have a long life on DVD, and will in time, like Robert Altman’s Popeye before it, become accepted as something that succeeds on its own terms. In the meantime, I fear the Wachowskis will be left in the Hollywood wilderness. My guess is that they really were trying to make a kid-friendly blockbuster; instead they’ve made something crazy and idiosyncratic that will go down as a big $100 million+ stinker.

Perhaps there is one good side to the perceived failure of SPEED RACER: if more little kids saw it, there would be a high chance of an epidemic of epilepsy. Maybe it’s just my ADD talking, but this movie was like a shot of Adderall…it made me feel peaceful and happy.

Stolen from the way-back machine of Venus In Furs’ Flickr account.

Technorati Tags: Matt Fraction

It’s no secret that The Wachowski’s SPEED RACER is primed to be the summer’s first big FLOP. Nikki Finke explains:

The real problems plaguing this pic occurred not in the marketing but in the production. Oh heck, they started as far back as handing control of the project to the writer-director Wachowski siblings (since they’re no longer brothers). The Industry scuttlebutt is that Warner Bros Pictures Group prez Jeff Robinov, a one-time agent, gave way too much power to his former clients. Of course, the success of their Matrix franchise justified a certain degree of autonomy. But Robinov and for that matter his boss Alan Horn should have written into the contract that Speed Racer had to clock in at 90 to 100 minutes long — the average for kiddie pics these days — and not the absurd 2 hours, 15 minutes length it is now.

Now we’d gladly sit through 2 hours (we think) of a SPEED RACER acid trip, which looks like nothing so much as playing an auto racing game. But most people wouldn’t. Movie Marketing Madness has more on how Warners dropped the ball

And right there I think you have a sense of how this movie is differing from most of the other tentpole releases this summer: It’s the only one that seems to be sublimating character for visuals. Iron Man, The Dark Knight, heck even The Incredible Hulk have all taken pains to make sure it’s the character every bit as much as the special effects that are drawing people in. I can’t help but think it’s this sterility in approach that’s contributing to the lack of buzz around the movie and its poor tracking. People are engaging with the characters that they’re seeing as more fully fleshed out rather than something that just looks wicked cool.

Be that as it may we have every intention of going to see SPEED RACER. First off, it looks weird, even if it is dreadful. Second, the SPEED RACER cartoon was our first great love. We HAD to be home in time for Speed. We threw horrible tantrums when we missed it, and wore our vinyl-lined Speed-esque kiddie driving gloves until our mom had to just about cut them off our hands and they smelled like egg salad inside. So yeah there’s some nostalgia at play. But we just like Speed Racer.

BONUS: the new Speed Racer cartoon debuted on Nick recently, and it was written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray.

Your humble Helper Monkey had to stay up past his bedtime to watch tonight’s spooky episode, so let’s get right to it.

Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend, if you’re in Columbus, Ohio or anywhere nearabout, the only place to be is the Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond exhibit opening at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Of course it contains mucho awesome Jeff Smith art, but there is more:

The exhibition also includes a selection of original comics whose artists Smith cites as direct influences, among them examples from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Will Eisner’s The Spirit, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, and E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre. The exhibition is organized by Lucy Shelton Caswell, professor and curator of Ohio State’s Cartoon Research Library, and David Filipi, the Wexner Center’s curator of film and video. The catalogue features an introduction by Caswell, essays by Filipi, Sandman creator Neil Gaiman, and cartoonist and scholar Scott McCloud, and an extensive and wide-ranging interview/conversation with Jeff Smith, Caswell, and Filip.

A related show, titled Jeff Smith: Before Bone, is on view nearby in Ohio State’s Cartoon Research Library from May 1 until September 5. (The library entrance is just north of the Wexner Center’s main entrance, along the sidewalk under the “grid.”) That exhibition is open 9 AM to 5 PM Monday through Friday, and on Saturday, May 10, from 1 to 5 PM. Admission is free.

There are a host of related events, as well, starting this Saturday at 2:

• Jeff Smith and Scott McCloud in Conversation Book signing follows Sat, May 10, 2008 | 2:00PM Mershon Auditorium

• Lucy Shelton Caswell and Dave Filipi on Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond
Wed, May 14, 2008 | 12:30PM Wexner Center Galleries

In this informal gallery talk, the curators of Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond talk about the project’s development and selected pieces in the exhibition. Lucy Shelton Caswell is professor and curator of Ohio State’s Cartoon Research Library. Dave Filipi is the Wexner Center’s curator of film and video.

• Terry Moore
Artist’s Talk Book signing follows Thu, May 15, 2008 | 7:00PM Film/Video Theater

• Paul Pope
Artist’s Talk Book signing follows Tue, May 20, 2008 | 7:00PM Film/Video Theater

Bonus: See photos of the show set-up at the Bone blog.

ALSO: Smith talks about the exhibit with Vaneta Rogers.

Technorati Tags: Jeff Smith

Meanwhile, up in Seattle, it’s the Emerald City Comicon, marking the second big comics event in the Pacific Northwest in three weeks. The guest list is an eclectic brew, from Kurt Busiek and Tony Bedard to Bryan Lee O’Malley and Derek Kirk Kim. There are a few media guests,m but even these seem to be part of the gang, like Wil Wheaton and Fat Momma.

ECCC seems to be a thoroughly modern and grown up take on the regional con. It mixes in some of the hallmarks of the Wizard-Era, like variant covers (below) but they are covers for books by Mike Allred and Jay Faerber, so you don’t mind so much. Since it’s located in Indie Central, home to Fantagraphics and a bunch of alterna-toon legends. that side of comics is well represented. And everyone lives in peace and harmony, from what we’ve heard.

Anyway, read an interview with showrunner Jim Demonakos, or eyeball Fantagraphics new offerings at the show. Or attend the party above, tomorrow, or the one below, tonight. Have a good time for us.