comic movies
Comics A.M. | James Sturm on why he’s boycotting The Avengers
Artwork by James Sturm
Creators | Market Day creator James Sturm explains he’ll be boycotting The Avengers movie because he believes Jack Kirby, co-creator of many of Marvel’s longest-lasting characters, “got a raw deal”: “What makes this situation especially hard to stomach is that Marvel’s media empire was built on the backs of characters whose defining trait as superheroes is the willingness to fight for what is right. It takes a lot of corporate moxie to put Thor and Captain America on the big screen and have them battle for honor and justice when behind the scenes the parent company acts like a cold-blooded supervillain. As Stan Lee famously wrote, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’” Tom Spurgeon notes the position seems to mark a shift for Sturm, who wrote the Eisner-winning 2003 miniseries Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules for Marvel. [Slate, The Comics Reporter]
- February 8, 2012 @ 07:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
You, too, can smell like the Hulk with The Avengers-themed cologne
As the licensing machine revs up for the May 4 premiere of The Avengers, fragrance company JADS International — the company behind such brands as Sulu Pour Homme, Slave Leia Perfume and Shirtless Kirk Cologne — has rolled out scents inspired by Captain America, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury and even Loki. Sorry, Hawkeye, you’re out of luck.
The Avengers Cologne Set boasts “four unique fragrances”: PATRIOT, Mark VII, SMASH! and Worthy; you can probably piece together which name goes with which hero. Loki, meanwhile, gets Mischief Cologne (“Made to Rule”), and Fury has Initiative Cologne (“Activate the Initiative”).
Check out the details below, or on the JADS website.
- January 23, 2012 @ 01:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Chris Claremont talks about the future–for him and for comics
One of the key figures in modern comics is Chris Claremont. After the epic period of creativity that came out of the Golden and Silver Ages of comics, Claremont emerged as one of the preeminent storytellers in the Bronze Age. Claremont became a defining voice for modern superhero comics through his work on Uncanny X-Men and related titles, and although he didn’t create the concept, he’s the one who made it work–and made it flourish.
After doing a number of peripheral X-Men titles and other work in recent years, the writer stepped away from mutants–and comics at large. The final issues of X-Men Forever 2, New Mutants Forever and Chaos War: X-Men came out in early 2011 but were written by the New York-based writer in late 2010. For over a year now, Chris Claremont hasn’t written a single page of comics script.
Although he’s turned his focus to prose novels for the time being, Claremont remains in tune with developments in the comic industry that he worked in for so many years. In a far-ranging discussion with the London-born writer, we talked about the modern comics movie blockbuster, digital comics, the seduction of work-for-hire and news about his own creator-owned comics.
Chris Arrant: 2011 was a different kind of year for you and for fans of your work, Chris. What are you planning for 2012?
Chris Claremont: Well, I’ve got a prose novel making the rounds to potential publishers, and a short story in Simon & Schuster’s Under The Moons of Mars: New Adventures of Barsoom anthology. I’m working on another novel that’ll hopefully be in a position to start sharing with publishers soon as well. This year’s the first time I’ve been able to do things that are all totally mine and all totally different.
Chris Arrant: Are these sequels to your Willow novels or perhaps the First Flight novels you did a few years back?
Chris Claremont: No, the Willow books are George Lucas’; the fate of that is up to him. And these aren’t connected to First Flight either. They’re all in different genres with different emphasis. The novel making the rounds now is a young-adult adventure, and the novel on my desk right now that I’m stitching together for my agent is much more of a mystery/suspense.
Chris Arrant: Even if you’re working outside of comics currently, you’ll always be associated with the medium. Given that you have a little distance from the day-to-day of working in comics, what are your thoughts about the comics industry and medium as a whole?
Chris Claremont: This is the first time in 40 years that I haven’t written a line of comics work in a year. That is part of what’s enabled me to do a lot more prose. It’s a totally different experience, and I’m getting used to being on the outside looking in and on the inside looking out.
- January 2, 2012 @ 09:55 AM by Chris Arrant
The best of the best of the year lists
Daredevil #7
As the end of 2011 approaches, websites and publications are unveiling various year-end lists and gift guides — so many that keeping up is a challenge. Here’s just some of what’s been released in the past few days
• Matt Madden and Jessica Abel, editors for the Best American Comics series, have released their annual Notable Comics list. Every year they try to get their hands on every North American comic that’s published every year so they can narrow them down to about 100 or so comics for their guest editor to choose from for each edition. This year’s list includes comics by Matt Kindt, Brandon Graham, Megan Kelso, Kathryn and Stuart Immonen, Michael Deforge, Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, Mike Dawson, Joshua Cotter and many, many more.
• In a list of their favorite music, movies, books and more of 2011, The Tulane Hullabaloo spotlights Mark Waid, Marcos Martin and Paolo Rivera’s run on Daredevil: “The series contains a sense of pure, manic glee missing from many of today’s dark, gritty and realistic superheroes, with Daredevil grinning as he makes snow angels on the rooftops of his beloved city rather than brooding over his internal demons. It’s a joy to read every month and cannot be recommended more, even to non-comic book enthusiasts.”
• UK comics retailer Forbidden Planet has been posting best of the year lists from various comic folks on their blog, including Sean Azzopardi, Mary Talbot, Edward Ross and Robin Etherington.
• MTV Splash Page counts down the top five comic book movie deaths of 2011.
• Brian Truitt at USA Today offers a list of gift ideas for comic fans.
• Lauren Davis at ComicsAlliance offers a guide to various webcomics collections and merchandise she thinks would make fine gifts — “a fantastic way to convert friends and family to your favorite webcomic.”
- December 10, 2011 @ 10:29 AM by JK Parkin
NYCC | A round-up of Saturday news
Avengers Assemble
Saturday at the New York Comic Con brought news for the Avengers, Superman, Legendary Comics and … Disney’s Prep & Landing? Here’s a round-up of announcements from the show today.
• With a big, blockbuster Avengers movie scheduled for next May, Marvel announced a new ongoing series, Avengers Assemble, by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mark Bagley. The book will launch next March and will feature most of the Avengers featured in the movie — Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye and the Hulk. The first arc will feature the villainous group the Zodiac.
• Speaking of that big, blockbuster Avengers movie, fans were treated to new footage from it featuring Bruce Banner and the Black Widow. Tom Hiddleston spoke to CBR about his work on the film.
• Marvel also announced that writer Rick Remender and artist Gabriel Hardman will take over Secret Avengers with issue #21.1, adding new members and pitting them against a new Masters of Evil.
• At the Cup O’ Joe panel today, Marvel also announced a Disney/Marvel crossover — Prep & Landing: Mansion: Impossible. It features the elves from the Disney television special who prepare homes for the arrival of Santa Claus every Christmas eve — only this time they’re trying to break into Avengers Mansion to get it ready for Santa. Written by director Kevin Deters and drawn by story artist Joe Mateo, the story will run in the back of the Marvel Adventures books as well as Avengers #19 in November.
- October 15, 2011 @ 08:42 PM by JK Parkin
Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums: The Movie
France gets some cool comics movies. Last year there was The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec; now in a couple of weeks they’ll have Poulet Aux Prunes, an adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Chicken with Plums.
Oddly, Satrapi’s story of a relative of hers who decides to kill himself after his wife destroys his cherished tār looks like it’s played for laughs in the film. The trailer below shows some surreal fantasy sequences in which Nasser Ali Khan imagines various ways of committing suicide. It’s been a couple of years since I read the book (I reviewed it for Robot 6 at the time), but though I remember its using humor, it’s certainly not the comedy that the trailer makes it out to be. While the suicide plan sounds extreme and ridiculous at first, there’s a hidden reason for it that makes sense once it’s revealed. Discovering the answer to that heartbreaking mystery is one of the book’s most captivating and powerful elements and I dearly hope the film doesn’t sacrifice it for laughs. Satrapi both co-wrote and co-directed the film, so there’s reason to be optimistic.
- October 5, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Michael May
Nominees announced for Spike TV’s 2011 Scream Awards
Spike TV has unveiled the nominees for the sixth annual Scream Awards, which honor the best is science fiction, fantasy, horror and comic books. This year’s nominees were selected by an advisory board that includes Neil Gaiman, Wes Craven, Tim Burton, Damon Lindelof, George A. Romero, Robert Rodriguez and Rob Zombie.
The Scream Awards will be taped Oct. 15 in Los Angeles and broadcast Oct. 18 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Spike.
Here are the nominees in the three comics-specific categories:
Best comic book or graphic novel
• American Vampire, by Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque (Vertigo)
• Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory (Image Comics)
• Daytripper, by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba (Vertigo)
• Locke & Key, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriquez (IDW Publishing)
• The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard (Image Comics)
Best comic book writer
• Ed Brubaker (Captain America, Captain America: Reborn, The Marvels Project, Steve Rogers: Super Soldier)
• Joe Hill (Locke & Key, The Cape)
• Robert Kirkman (The Astounding Wolf-Man, Haunt, Invincible, The Walking Dead)
• Grant Morrison (Batman Incorporated, Joe the Barbarian)
• Mike Mignola (Baltimore, The Amazing Screw-On Head)
Best comic book artist
• Charlie Adlard (The Walking Dead)
• Mark Buckingham (Fables)
• Duncan Fegredo (Hellboy)
• John Romita Jr. (The Avengers, Kick-Ass)
• Bernie Wrightson (Doc Macabre)
Also worth noting are nods in other categories for comic-book adaptations Captain America: The First Avenger, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, RED, Thor, The Walking Dead and X-Men: First Class. A full list of nominees is available on the Scream Awards website, where fans are encouraged to vote often.
- September 7, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by Kevin Melrose
Anonymous turns V for Vendetta’s Guy Fawkes mask into a bestseller
Anonymous protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks (photo by Vincent Diamante)
Infamous for its protests against the Church of Scientology and website attacks on Sony, Visa and, most recently, Bay Area Rapid Transit, the loose-knit hacker group Anonymous is perhaps best known for a single image that’s become a symbol of its anarchic movement: The V for Vendetta-inspired Guy Fawkes mask worn by its members in public protests.
However, as The New York Times notes this morning, each of those masks purchased by the largely anti-government, anti-corporation activists puts money in the coffers of Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. The parent company of DC Comics, which published the Alan Moore-David Lloyd miniseries in the United States, and Warner Bros., which released the film adaptation in 2006, owns the rights to the image, and receives a licensing fee for each mask sold.
And there are a lot sold, thanks largely to the Anonymous movement. Rubie’s Costumes, the New York company that produces the masks, sells more than 100,000 a year; by comparison, it sells only about 5,000 of each of its other masks.
But it wasn’t until recently that Rubie’s knew why Guy Fawkes was a bestseller. “We just thought people liked the V for Vendetta movie,” Rubie’s executive Howard Beige tells the newspaper. “Then one morning I saw a picture of these protesters wearing the mask in an online news article. I quickly showed my sales manager.”
- August 29, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Superheroes’ big-screen struggle for diversity; Z-Cult FM returns
Green Lantern
Movies | National Public Radio commentator John Ridley critiques Hollywood for being even less diverse than the Big Two when it comes to diversity in lead characters, and demolishes their blame-the-audience theory that white people won’t go to see a movie with a black lead by pointing to a study by Indiana University professor Andrew Weaver: “Weaver found that white audiences tended to be racially selective with regard to romantic movies, but not necessarily when it came to other genres. So, sorry, Hollywood. You can’t blame it on the ticket buyers.” [NPR]
Piracy | Comic-book torrent tracker Z-Cult FM, which was threatened with legal action by Marvel in 2007 and eventually shut down in 2009, has re-opened its virtual doors. [Facebook]
Creators | Becky Cloonan talks about the joys and the hardships of being a full-time comics creator: “Comics are hard work. Comics are relentless. Comics will break your heart. Comics are monetarily unsatisfying. Comics don’t offer much in terms of fortune and glory, but comics will give you complete freedom to tell the stories you want to tell, in ways unlike any other medium. Comics will pick you up after it knocks you down. Comics will dust you off and tell you it loves you. And you will look into its eyes and know it’s true, that you love comics back.” [Becky Cloonan: Comics or STFU]
- August 10, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Tearjerker alert: Jordan Crane’s The Last Lonely Saturday is now a short film
from The Last Lonely Saturday
The Last Lonely Saturday, by Uptight and The Clouds Above cartoonist Jordan Crane, is one of my favorite comics of all time. Why? You can find out if you read the entire beautifully bittersweet story online at Crane’s webcomics portal, What Things Do.
It’ll only take a minute or two. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
There now. Need a hankie? I figured. The story of an elderly man bringing flowers to his beloved, The Last Lonely Saturday is where I first discovered Crane’s impeccably cartoony character designs and near-wordless storytelling chops, as well as his knack for teasing both the darkness and the light out of issues of love and loss. And now the comic has been adapted into a live-action short film by director Seth Craven. The movie premieres as part of the HollyShorts Film Festival at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 in Los Angeles on August 12 at 5pm. Get ready to be heartbroken.
- August 8, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Man allegedly tries to steal cop car, blames The Dark Knight Rises
The filming of The Dark Knight Rises in Pittsburgh is expected to pump millions of dollars into the economy, giving a boost to hotels, restaurants, lumber yards and more. So, hey, why shouldn’t the criminal community get a little benefit?
WPXI reports that on Saturday evening, Pittsburgh police Det. Robert DiGiacomo was in an unmarked vehicle looking for the suspect in an assault. Suddenly a man matching the suspect’s description opened the car door, sat down and told the detective to get out. When the officer drew his gun and ordered 21-year-old Micah Calamosca to exit the car, the suspect reportedly responded that he was part of the cast of the Christopher Nolan film … and that stealing the vehicle was just part of the script.
As you may have guessed, DiGiacomo didn’t buy the explanation. Calamosca was subsequently arrested, and faces a charge of robbery of a motor vehicle. A police vehicle. I’d have at least gone for Batman’s Tumbler. Heck, he has three, so he may not have missed one.
- August 1, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
A closer look at the enemies of Captain America: Super Soldier
Baron von Strucker vs. Captain America in "Captain America: Super Soldier"
Ahead of the July 19 release of Captain America: Super Soldier, SEGA has debuted new art and background information for some of the villains players will encounter in the third-person action game.
Tying into the upcoming Captain America: The First Avenger feature film, Super Soldier allows gamers, playing as the Sentinel of Liberty, to engage in free-flowing combat and acrobatic platforming to infiltrate a mysterious castle and battle the Iron Cross, the forces of HYDRA and a host of enemies serving the Red Skull in an attempt to stop evil scientist Arnim Zola.
You can see screenshots, art and descriptions for Baron von Strucker, Madame Hydra and a sniper after the break.
- June 28, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Quote of the day | What superhero movies and superhero video games have in common
Honestly, most comic book movies feel like most tie-in-videogames do. Those things get made to service the trademark. They aren’t very good games. There’s nothing amazing going on in innovation or gameplay. They’re cool because you get to roleplay Batman kicking skulls in or the like. I’m sure they’re entertaining enough, but they’re not memorable above and beyond that.
–Strangeways writer (and Robot 6 veteran) Matt Maxwell, with a comparison that really clarified a lot of things for me about the pleasures and disappointments of superhero movies. Fatherhood has done to my movie-going time what I do to about 20 diapers a day and thrown it right in the garbage, but I’ve looked forward to and seen a lot of these flicks over the years, and on an alternate Earth I’d have seen two more already this summer in the form of Thor and X-Men: First Class, with another two, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger soon to join them. I’ve disliked many of them. I’ve liked some of them. I’ve liked a handful — the Marvel Studios suite of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2 — well enough to own them on DVD. But with the exception of the first Tim Burton Batman movie, I’ve never seen one that offers the never-seen-that-before sensation that superhero comics still regularly afford you, if you know where to look.
- June 13, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Quote of the day #2 | ‘The quintessential mutants of America were black’
My son is 10 and a romantic, as all 10-year-olds surely have the right to be. How then do I speak to him of this world’s masterminds who render you a supporting actor in your own story? How do I speak of the Sentinels whose eyes melt history, until the world forgets that in 1962, the quintessential mutants of America were black?
—from a New York Times op-ed piece on Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class by Atlantic contributor Ta-Nehisi Coates. In the piece, Coates praises the film as “the most thrilling movie of the summer…narratively lean, beautifully acted and, at all the right moments, visually stunning” — and at the same time finds the makeup of the film’s mutant heroes and anti-heroes an unintentionally revealing glimpse into the American psyche. “Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes.”
Coates elaborates on both points, and more besides, on his blog. “It is easily one of my top five comic book movies ever, and significantly better than any of the other X-movies to date,” he writes, even after comparing it unfavorably to the racially homogeneous but racially aware Mad Men and calling it “a period piece blind to its own period.” He also offers a quick take on the pros and cons of the film’s treatment of women, a point examined in depth by The Mary Sue’s Susana Polo.
Elsewhere on the “sociopolitical examinations of the latest X-movie” beat, ThinkProgress’ Matthew Yglesias agrees with a point of Polo’s and argues (twice) that Magneto’s out-and-proud Brotherhood of Mutants has a far more appealing message than Xavier’s accommodationist group; Ezra Klein disagrees, pointing out that Magneto’s agenda is a supremacist one, and wondering if the real dividing line between rival mutant camps would be one between those who could profit monetarily from their abilities (eg. Storm selling her rainmaking services to agribusiness conglomerates and drought-stricken nations) and those who couldn’t; and Adam Serwer connects the film with Avatar‘s enlightened-colonizer-goes-native storyline as “another example of the way the quest for racial innocence so permeates American culture that it’s almost unrecognizable.”
- June 9, 2011 @ 02:15 PM by Sean T. Collins
Is Green Lantern the psychedelic superhero movie we’ve been waiting for?
“I think audiences are ready [for more challenging superhero films]. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anyone in Hollywood who could drum up the $300 million it would take to make [a Final Crisis movie]. But entertainment has changed, again. We’ve been concerned with realism for a while, but we’re getting back into psychedelia and fantasy again. Look at James Cameron’s Avatar or Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which are two of the most successful films of the last two years. Both happened to catch a wave that few were ready for.”
–Grant Morrison in Wired, November 2010
My recent entrance into the world of fatherhood has done to my theatergoing what Bane did to Batman’s back, but that hasn’t kept me from eagerly anticipating new superhero movies, for good or for ill, nor has it stopped me from picking them apart with my friends. During one such recent discussion about Kenneth Branagh’s hit Thor adaptation, two of my friends said it feels a lot like Marvel Studios’ other movies — one of them meant it as a compliment, the other as a criticism, but both agreed that this similarity was the plan all along. Thor’s roots in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s cosmic take on the Norse myths may be a million miles away from Iron Man’s weapons-manufacturer-turned-roguish-hero science fiction, but both properties are being filtered through Marvel Studios’ version of Marvel Comics’ “as close to the real world as the presence of superheroes will allow us to get” tone — specifically, the military-industrial version thereof that was pioneered, I’d say, by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates a decade ago. Most of the other big superhero movies have been similarly earthbound, aesthetically speaking, from Christopher Nolan’s dark, Chicago-set Batman movies to the paramilitary jumpsuits of Bryan Singer’s X-Men. In those cases you could make a reasonable argument that toning things down made sense. In other cases, like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, making Spidey as much of an everyman as possible is part and parcel of the concept’s appeal.
- May 24, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Sean T. Collins