animation
Comics A.M. | Ghostface Killah sued over Iron Man cartoon theme
Ghostface Killah
Legal | Composer Jack Urbont is suing rapper Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan and Sony Music Entertainment for illegally sampling the theme to the Iron Man animated series from the 1960s. The theme was used on two tracks from the 2000 album Supreme Clientele. Killah, who sometimes goes by the alias Tony Starks, had a song in the 2008 film and appeared in a deleted scene on the DVD. [Rolling Stone]
Digital | In Maps & Legends co-creator Michael Jasper shares a breakdown by percentage of where their sales are coming from, noting almost half of their sales are through Barnes & Noble’s Nookbook Store. [Michael Jasper, via The Beat]
Digital | The Globe and Mail looks at how electronic publishing is changing the way authors tell stories: “The Next Day is a graphic novel about people who have attempted suicide. Once it is posted online in September, you’ll be able to click your way through it according to your own preferences about how it should unfold.” [The Globe and Mail]
- July 12, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comic-Con International rolls out Sunday programming
Comic-Con International
Comic-Con International has unveiled the programming schedule for Sunday, July 24 — the final day of the convention — that’s heavy on presentations and workshops for kids and teens, with plenty still for older attendees.
There are spotlights on Jordi Bernet, Ashley Wood, Mark Tatulli and Joelle Jones, the annual tribute to Jack Kirby, a look back at 25 years of Watchmen, and a breakdown of what it takes to create a great cover. Want more? There’s a Q&A with Axe Cop creators Ethan and Malachai Nicholle, a showcase for the women of Marvel, a collaboration how-to, and the last of the panels devoted to DC’s September relaunch.
To help you with your Comic-Con planning, we’ve highlighted the comics-specific programming below. To see the full Friday schedule, complete with television, film and video game content, visit the convention website.
- July 10, 2011 @ 10:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comic-Con International announces Friday programming
Comic-Con International
Just like clockwork, Comic-Con International has released the schedule for the second day of the convention, one marked by tributes to Gene Colan and Frank Frazetta, spotlights on David Finch, Tony DeZuniga, Gary Alanguilan, Jeff Smith, Chester Brown, Dave Stewart, Ed Bennes and Dave Gibbons, the Aspen Comics, Oni Press and Radical Publishing panels, and a look at the state of the Hellboy Universe.
There’s also plenty of comics-to-screen action, with a viewing of the rejected Locke & Key television pilot (followed by a Q&A), The Walking Dead panel, presentations on The Amazing Spider-Man, The Adventures of Tintin, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Marvel Anime, and the premiere of the animated Batman: Year One.
Add to that a look at Marvel’s X-Men, DC panels devoted to the September relaunch, Superman and the Justice League, a discussion with Roman Dirge (conducted by Comic Book Resources’ Jonah Weiland), and — well, you’ll have to check out the rest for yourself. And it’s all topped off by the annual Eisner Awards ceremony.
To help you with your Comic-Con planning, we’ve highlighted the comics-specific programming below. To see the full Friday schedule, complete with television, film and video game content, visit the convention website.
- July 8, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Your video of the day | Rocketeer 20th anniversary fan film
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the film adaptation of Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer comics, and John Banana has created an animated tribute that’s pretty dang awesome. Check it out.
- June 24, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
‘There will be no escaping from the DC Universe’
The Warner Bros. mural (photo by Jonah Weiland)
Even as DC Comics continues the rollout of the sweeping relaunch of its DC Universe titles, Warner Bros. Consumer Products is laying out a three-year calendar that sees the company “investing significant resource” in its superhero properties.
“Over the next three years there will be no escaping from the DC Universe as we deliver on our commitment to produce new content,” Bruno Schwobthaler, senior vice president of sales and business development for Warner Bros. Consumer Products Europe/Middle East/Asia, tells Licensing.biz.
The licensing agenda begins, of course, with the Green Lantern movie, which opens next week, and continues with upcoming big-screen adaptations The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel. But it also includes the animated Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, the Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters video game, the Batman Live arena tour, and projects geared toward younger audiences.
“We’re taking a franchise approach to the brand and investing in original animation targeting children,” Schwobthaler says. “This will ensure that the brand has something to offer superhero fans of all ages, lives beyond a single movie release and claims its position alongside superheroes such as Batman and Superman.”
- June 8, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
What a bunch of poozers: A review of Green Lantern: Emerald Knights
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, the latest foray in Warner Brothers’ collection of straight-to-DVD animated movies, is a tired collection of military cliches interspersed with some impressive fight scenes. Words like honor, sacrifice and bravery get batted around like a well-used hacky sack at a Grateful Dead concert, but to little effect, other than to remind you that there’s a big screen, live-action movie starring Ryan Reynolds that will be coming out in theaters any day now.
- June 3, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Kirby Krackle goes green in ‘Ring Capacity’ video
Our friends in the Seattle nerd rock band Kirby Krackle have released a video for the song “Ring Capacity,” their ode to Green Lantern. The video features an animated battle between Hal Jordan and Sinestro, with a little help for GL from the band members.
The timing couldn’t be better, what with the Green Lantern film landing in theaters in a few weeks. There’s also a Facebook group for fans of the band hoping to get the song on the movie soundtrack.
- May 31, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | The Governator placed ‘on hold’; B&N gets $1B offer
The Governator
Publishing | As the fallout mounts from the revelation that former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child more than a decade ago with a member of his household staff, plans to revive the Terminator star’s acting career have been put on hold — a move that now extends to The Governator, the comics and animation project co-developed by Stan Lee. “In light of recent events,” representatives announced last night, “A Squared Entertainment, POW, Stan Lee Comics, and Archie Comics, have chosen to not go forward with The Governator project.” However, Entertainment Weekly notes the statement was revised two hours later, putting the project “on hold.”
Unveiled in late March, on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, no less, The Governator features a semi-fictional Schwarzenegger who, after leaving the governor’s office, decides to become a superhero — complete with a secret Arnold Cave under his Brentwood home that not even his family knows about. “We’re using all the personal elements of Arnold’s life,” Lee said at the time of the announcement. “We’re using his wife [Maria Shriver]. We’re using his kids. We’re using the fact that he used to be governor.” But even before the couple’s separation became public, producers had backed off depicting Shriver and their children. [TMZ, Entertainment Weekly]
- May 20, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Frank Cho to bring back Liberty Meadows
Good news for Liberty Meadows fans: Frank Cho is working on the long-awaited issue #38, after dropping plans (for now) to make it into an animated cartoon.
Liberty Meadows was originally a newspaper strip, but Cho’s art and sense of humor kept bumping up against editorial standards, and he ended syndication in 2001; “I got tired of the censorship and the low pay,” he told CBR in a 2006 interview, adding that his weakest strips were rush jobs done to fill in for strips that editors refused to run. Cho moved to a comic book format, first self-published, then through Image, but he put Liberty Meadows on hiatus in 2004, after issue #36. Issue #37 came out in 2009.
Cho let loose on his blog about his frustrations with Sony, which acquired the rights to create a downloadable Liberty Meadows cartoon for their Sony Digital division. Here’s his account of how that went:
I wrote the original pilot episode but it was rejected for being too “risque”. So other writers were brought in to tone it down and make it more kid friendly. Once I read the rewrite, I thought it completely missed the point of Liberty Meadows. So I rewrote the rewrite, and this went back and forth couple of times until we reached a compromised script. We turned that script into an traditional 2D animated pilot episode.
Enter Sony Television division. They saw the pilot episode and liked it. Liberty Meadows get bumped up to their television division and a TV series is planned. However there is one request, Sony Television people wanted Liberty Meadows to be more “risque” with adult humor like the “Family Guy”. This is the point where I rip my hair out in frustration.
Then the recession hit and all the executives involved with the project left the company. Fortunately, Cho’s contract had an inactivity clause (something the Tokyopop creators could have benefited from) so the rights have now reverted back to him.
His plan for now is to simply go back to drawing the strip, although he doesn’t rule out another movie or TV deal “if the right offer comes along.”
- May 17, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Your Wednesday Sequence 8 | Winsor McCay
Little Nemo in Slumberland, February 2nd 1908. By Winsor McCay.
Comics and animation have an interesting relationship. Both can be broadly designated “pictures that move”, both have the same typical end goal of visual storytelling, and both rely on frame after frame of closely considered progression to push themselves forward. Someone smart (I can’t remember who right now, apologies) once said that animation is comics at 24 frames a second, which is basically true, especially when the physical medium — film strips — that animation resides on is considered. A stretch of animation celluloid is a comic, maybe a weird, incredibly slow-moving one, but a comic nonetheless. A litany of great comics artists, from Alex Toth and Jack Kirby to Matt Groening and Ben Jones, have done serious time in animation. The skill set isn’t the exact same thing by any means, but there’s plenty that translates.
Probably the artist whose works blur the boundary between comics and animation most severely is Winsor McCay. An early virtuoso in both media, McCay came closest to a fusion of the two with the page above, which finds its animated parallel in this video. The strange, funhouse-mirror distortions of anatomy are the same on the screen and on the page; by 1908 McCay possessed such an intimate knowledge of the character-forms he’d been drawing for years on end that he could stretch them out and squash them down perfectly, elongating and impacting their lines and contours without ever betraying the fundamental shapes behind them. It’s interesting to note the difference between the printed and projected versions of this scene. On screen, the focus is on the continuous transmutation from form to form to form, the flowing and ebbing of lines that never disappear, the characters’ interaction with the fixed borders of the frame. On the page, it’s all about the remarkable difference between fixed forms, the way the lines change disappear and reappear in immensely different form between panels without changing what they depict in the slightest.
- April 27, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Matt Seneca
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights arrives in stores June 7
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights
Warner Home Video announced yesterday that the animated movie Green Lantern: Emerald Knights will arrive in stores June 7, 10 days before the release of the big Green Lantern feature film.
The movie has Hal Jordan telling a newly recruited Arisia six interlocking tales of various Green Lanterns, including Abin Sur, Kilowog, Laira and Mogo. The six stories are written by Geoff Johns, Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim, Dave Gibbons, Peter J. Tomasi, Eddie Berganza, Alan Burnett and Todd Casey.
It features the voice talent of Nathan Fillion (Firefly), Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men), musician Henry Rollins, wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper and Wade Williams (Prison Break). The film is executive produced by Bruce Timm and directed by Lauren Montgomery, Jay Oliva and Christopher Berkeley.
The press release also noted that the film will include a preview of the next DC Comics animated movie, Batman: Year One. You can find the entire release after the jump.
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights will have its world premiere tomorrow, April 1 at 6 p.m. at WonderCon in San Francisco. A panel discussion by filmmakers and voice cast will immediately follow the screening.
***** Continue Reading »
- March 31, 2011 @ 06:00 AM by JK Parkin
Animating Tatsumi
It’s not exactly a motion comic, but director Erik Khoo has somehow managed to make an animated version of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life. He does this by coloring the panels and introducing limited motion, and in this short YouTube video, he and his staff discuss how they used both live-action sequences to model the motion and computer techniques to transform static panels to moving pictures. Tatsumi seems like a strange candidate for animation, but Khoo says, “You look at his panels, [and] it’s almost like a very well done storyboard for a film.” This making-of film has a definite promotional aspect (everyone uses the full name of every product—that’s the tell), but it is interesting to see the creative and technical decisions that were made in translating the book into film.
- March 23, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Who owns Betty Boop? It isn’t Fleischer Studios, court finds
Betty Boop
A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the family of pioneering animator Max Fleischer doesn’t own the copyright or trademark to cartoon sex symbol turned comic strip and merchandising star Betty Boop, and can’t sue others for using the character’s image.
Courthouse News Service reports the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision that a half-dozen manufacturers of Betty Boop merchandise hadn’t infringed on Fleischer Studios’ copyright — because Fleischer Studios couldn’t demonstrate it has one.
Created in 1930 by Fleischer and animator Grim Natwick (probably among others), the cartoon flapper became the star of the studio’s Talkartoons series before being sold to Paramount Pictures in 1942. The Fleischer family contends that Paramount transferred its Betty Boop rights in 1955 to UM&M TV, which three years later sold them to the company that eventually became Republic Pictures. A decade later, Republic allegedly transferred the rights back to Fleischer Studios.
However, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ruled the Fleischer heirs failed to show proof of any of the transfers the plaintiffs alleged took place after Paramount purchased the rights in 1942. The appeals court agreed in a 2-1 decision, finding that Paramount retained the copyright in its 1955 agreement with UM&M TV, and actually sold Betty Boop to Harvey Films — the animation arm of Harvey Comics, now owned by Classic Media — some three years later. The panel also dismissed Fleischers’ trademark claims for lack of evidence.
In addition to her countless animated appearances, including cameos in commercials and the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Betty Boop has starred in two comic strips, one in the 1930s and another, with Felix the Cat, in the 1980s.
- February 24, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
‘It all comes out right in the end’: A review of the All-Star Superman movie
All-Star Superman
Warner Bros’ animated adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman is so reverent and faithful toward the source material that the film, to a certain extent, feels like a pale copy of its inspiration.
That’s not necessarily a damning criticism. Bruce Timm and company took the right approach in attempting to get as close a conversion from page to screen as possible (to do otherwise would have pleased no one). But the comic itself is so rich in detail and episodic in nature that even a trim, streamlined version like this that still manages to hit a number of the right high points feels a bit flabby in comparison. Saying “the book is better” is a rather easy cheat for a critic — the book is almost always better, but I suspect that fans of the comic won’t be able to watch this without running a compare/contrast checklist in their head and find the film coming up a wee bit short. The good news is that those coming fresh to the material probably won’t notice anything wrong at all.
- February 19, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Robb Pratt’s stellar animated Superman fan film
Animator and storyboard artist Robb Pratt created a one-minute “classic” Superman cartoon that’s been making the rounds, and it deserves every bit of praise it’s been getting. Click on the play button above to watch it, then stick around after the credits to hear Pratt talk about creating it. Good stuff.
(I believe I first saw it on ComicsAlliance)
- February 8, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin