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I don’t know if I like this. I need to see the whole episode… the characters seem down-pat, for what they should be, and I like the art and animation, but I can’t tell if the old-school vibe is a put-on or homage…
Via Warren Ellis, you should read this. Warning: some comic, television, and Quantum of Solace/Bond spoilers.
Found on the Stranger Slog. It’s simply made of awesome.
It’s out! Issue 1 of Galaxy Hunters, Andi’s comic, and the new site (the design is a work in progress, don’t hit me…!) are live.
Rory Root, of Comic Relief, is currently in a coma. Please send some good thoughts and love his way.
“Everything is going according to plan.”
Oh yes, indeed. That looks fantastic!
Mike Wieringo passed away yesterday from a heart attack, at only 44 years old. Story here. Jesus…
GALAXY HUNTERS is live! Go see: http://www.galaxyhunters.net
Writer: Andi Szilagyi
Artist: Josh Crowe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVRQjCG8tn4
Go look now, before some fool goes and gets it pulled for copyvio reasons!
Work on the web comic continues behind the scenes, but if you go right now over to Galaxy Hunters, you can sign up right now for the announcement mailing list! Low volume, and probably no mail at all for the time being. But, once the art work is done and the writing ready, and the site goes live, we’ll be sending updates out. So, sign up!
Andi and her friend from way back in the day are putting together a new webcomic: GALAXY HUNTERS! It’s coming soon, and here’s a tiny bit of preview sketch art:
Go here, to see the site (not quite ready for prime time, yet, but soon!).
The Emerald City ComiCon is this weekend in Seattle at the Qwest Field Event Center. Andi and I will be there probably late in the day on Saturday to hang out, and again late on Sunday to try to score deals from vendors. If you see us, say hey.
On a related note, I predict that the forthcoming Marvel MMORPG being produced by Cryptic Studios, the producers of the hugely popular City of Heroes/City of Villains MMORPG, will be a bad thing for the legions of COH/V players. Why? Let’s assume that the Marvel game will be a success, and well made. Knowing Cryptic’s skill–the COH/V games frankly are amazingly fun and immersive MMOs that barely feel like MMOs (none of that horrific unclean feeling you get from playing World of Warcraft)–the Marvel game will be very good. If it’s a rousing success, which is quite likely, it won’t be long before production begins on a DC Universe MMORPG as well. Let’s say that the DCU game is at least half as good as the Marvel one. We’ll have three quality superhero MMORPGs.
As my friend Chad put it,
“I don’t think it’ll hurt CoH, I think it’ll outright kill it. My hope is Cryptic will take what they learned making the city of games and make the Marvel game even better. I don’t have high hopes for the DC one, even though I’m a big DC fan, due to Sony’s involvement. They have a great track record of screwing things up.”
Sony did bone up Star Wars Galaxies pretty good, but lots of people are playing that still. COH/V has (the last time I looked at the NCSoft public financial disclosures–they own COH/V) somewhere north of 250,000+ monthly subscribers. How many would defect for a great Marvel game and a so-so or better DCU game? A hell of a lot, that’s how many. I love playing City of Heroes (the villain side, not so much, but that’s just personal taste). But what will happen to the game I love if half the population bolts for greener, more desired pastures? Personally… the idea of the Marvel game in particular sounds nice. Would you rather play and spend your time in Metropolis, the Avengers/Spider-Man New York City, or a fictional urban city in Rhode Island populated by characters that only exist in the in-game environment of Cryptic’s game? No brainer.
Unsurprisingly, we’ve been watching Heroes on NBC since it’s pilot aired originally last year. Surprisingly, we weren’t completely sold on the show at first. Why? The pilot, relative to what the rest of the first season, was by far the worst episode. Not even weakest–television shows, if they maintain a strong, religious following, and keep growing, can overcome a weak pilot sometimes. Of course, to everyone else I’ve spoken to, they’ve generally loved the Heroes pilot. For us, it was a case of being cynical old school comic book readers. Every single thing touched on pretty much in the pilot episode we’d seen before, multiple times. Not just that, but we’d seen it done exceptionally. Well. So-so. Poorly. We’ve been reading comic books for our entire lives.
Then something occurred to us. Comic book readers, especially people that actually study them somewhat, and actually read comic book scripts, and follow it as a form of art and literature, and not just a diversion, or hobby, or casual reading, are an extreme minority. We really are. We are, in relative terms, comic book snobs. We’ve read our Watchmen, and our Dark Knight Returns, and our Sandman, and our old large-volume reprints of classics like the original Bob Kane Batman stories, and our Amazing Fantasy #15. We gleefully pointed at the deconstruction of the form when it happened in Planetary. We’re elitist snobs (although I do love my Ultimate Spider-Man, still). We’d seen all this “crap” before. But 99% percent of the America–no, the world’s population–never had.
It was all new to them.
We came back next week, and the week after, and are now sixteen episodes into Heroes. Each week is fantastic. Each week shows growth for nearly all the characters involved, and their stories. Even better? Heroes, in many ways, is the antithesis of LOST. LOST goes out of it’s way to give you questions, but only the most (if at all) roundabout answers. LOST is like crack cocaine: a great high, but you feel rotten and dependent immediately. It’s Las Vegas; all flash and the illusion of substance like a mirage. I’ve heard that LOST is allegedly now “halfway done” and has a finite five year plan, so maybe that will be changing. But it is what it is. Heroes, on the other hand, is like the American heartland, or the ideal of it: all meat, all solid, whole-wheat, and pure story. Even better? Like I said, it’s all new to most people, but many of the themes to seasoned comic book readers will seem familiar since… oh, the 1960s or 1970s. That said, Heroes is one of the most amazing live-action interpretations of comic book superheroes (albeit without spandex) I’ve yet seen. In that, the show is on par with the Tobey McGuire Spider-Man films.
To my knowledge, very little has happened or come about yet in Heroes Season One that hasn’t either served the larger plot, a given character’s story, or been a set-up for one or the other. Watching Heroes is actually a lot like watching one of my favorite films, Ghostbusters. Go back and look at that film, and it’s best aspect, the brilliant script. Nothing happens in that movie, no action, no line of dialogue, no joke, that isn’t a setup for a plot point or something else. Everything builds into something else until the crescendo of the closing credits. That’s what the entire season of Heroes feels like (so far). The last episode, where we see one character suddenly flaunting a heaping host of abilities (at one point more than one at a time!) was just fantastic, and felt like the ending of act four of a five act story. The season so far, also rather interestingly, has more of the feel of a mini-series, than a regular week-by-week show, which has 18-20 stand alone episodes per season and then one larger series mythology aspect in the remaining episodes. All of Heroes is the mythology; every episode is a chapter of the larger story.
That’s what makes that show so fantastic: it’s all meat, with none of the vapor that other shows use to pad and fill out their allocation of episodes per season.
From SDCC courtesy of NEWSARAMA
An otherwise uneventful Comics-Con panel led by Todd McFarlane Saturday (overview of Todd McFarlane Productions’ current and upcoming comics, slides of new toy products, Q&A) took an interesting turn when writer (and fellow Image contributor) Robert Kirkman took over the audience Q&A.
From the crowd, he identified himself as a fan who was wondering if McFarlane had any ideas for new comics. McFarlane (who evidently had never met Kirkman and did not recognize him) mainly danced around the question, equating it to if you create a character like Mickey Mouse, that would be enough for him and he wouldn’t worry about creating Donald Duck or Goofy. After this, one of McFarlane’s fellow TMP panelists identified Kirkman, telling McFarlane he wrote “that Walking Dead comic you like.”
Kirkman continued by saying he didn’t buy toys, and just liked McFarlane’s comics, and didn’t want to put him on the spot, but since comics were what got him famous and he has time to work with the toys, why can’t he put out a new comic?
McFarlane explained to him that it’s difficult for him to maintain the proper pace drawing and doing his other duties. Kirkman - still not satisfied - bluntly asked him “Do you want to do a book with me?” McFarlane eventually relented, and told Kirkman to talk with editor Brian Holguin about ideas and, adding, “You convince him, he convinces me - you and me. And I’ll give you some free toys.” He then joked, “And thanks for making money for Image,” to which Kirkman sarcastically replied “Someone has to.”
This ended the panel, and the two were seen shaking hands, with Kirkman saying that he’ll “come back next year if he has to.”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pTFMtravl-M
EDIT: apparently MIGHT be a fake. But what the hell, it can’t be? That looks pretty damn real.
2005: Batman Begins
2006: Superman Returns
2007: Wonder Woman I
2008: Batman Begins II. Uh… Joker!
2008: Superman Returns II. Darkseid beats the crap out of Earth.
2009: Wonder Woman II. Uh… Cheetah? Her rogues gallery kind of sucks.
2011: Superman III/Batman III/Wonder Woman III, one film. Hello… $400 million box office gross? The trinity vs. Apokalips to save Earth. End with Supes and Darkseid beating the snot out of each other in Metropolis, knocking buildings over.
2013: …JLA. Something bigger than the three of them comes in, that they can’t contain. Queue Martian Manhunter, Flash, Green Lantern…
2016: JLA II
2019: JLA III
The End. Christian Bale would 45 and Brandon Routh would be 40 by the end, though… ah. Again, easy. JLA III = Kingdom Come. Game, set, and Match.
See? It’s so easy. The whole structure of the core DC storylines is like tailor made for box office bonanza.
If you all haven’t seen V For Vendetta’s adaptation yet, and it’s still playing locally, GO SEE IT. Fantastic film, Andi and I saw it last night.
It hurt not seeing Alan Moore’s name on it. It’s my understanding that he had his name removed at his request.
Anyone know what book he’s doing next, after Loeb & Joe Mad take over?
Word up, yo. I’ll be there Saturday at least a decent chunk ‘o the afternoon. Maybe Sunday to try to score good deals. I think I wanna hit the Busiek panel.
Who’s going? Jaz, you and Ian? Everyone sound off like ya got a pair.
Subject: [BAD SIGNAL](no subject)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:30:06 EST
From: WarrenE
To: badsignal
Drama over with. Fucking artists.
Subject: [BAD SIGNAL]Whoops!
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:34:37 EST
From: WarrenE
To: badsignal
Whoops! That went to the wrong email address. And now
you know exactly how foul-tempered I am most of the time.
And how much I need more coffee.
You really need to go here if you never have, and if you dig comics.
