kingdomofevan

September 21, 2012 11:25 am That Captain Canuck piece is actually promo art for a new animated feature that Kalman Andrasofsky and Cap's creator, Richard Comely, are working on. I met Comely at Fan Expo a few months ago and he seemed really excited about it. The trailer's here: http://captaincanuck.com/

September 3, 2012 12:45 am I was in Australia a few months ago and picked up an issue of Killeroo while I was there. Damn fine comics, that is.

August 31, 2012 10:32 am Damn, that Psylocke ...

August 6, 2012 11:18 pm @CaseyJustice That's fascinating. I wonder if that's why the X-Men movies essentially gave Quicksilver's powers to Callisto (or at least the character they called Callisto). A thought occurs: If Marvel wanted to make a movie out of the new Carol Danvers Captain Marvel, could they do it? DC seems to have given up on calling Billy Batson Captain Marvel, so trademark likely won't be an issue, but if Marvel wanted her powers to be of Kree origin and the Kree are tied up in Fantastic Four movie limbo, they'd need to revamp her whole origin.

August 6, 2012 8:22 pm I've wondered that myself. A friend and I had a debate about whether it would ever be possible to make an Alpha Flight movie, and speculated that no one could do it without Fox because they're X-Men spinoff characters, and thus tied in with the X-Men movies. Giving away the X-Men franchise was a big strategic mistake for Marvel in that regard, because they've lost access to a huge chunk of their character roster -- including, arguably, Namor, who is a mutant. On the other hand, Namor predates the Fantastic Four -- Jack and Stan didn't create the character, they just made him better -- but if the deal for the Fantastic Four movies included Namor with the expectation that future sequels might include him, I guess he's off-limits. If Marvel's going to start negotiating their characters back, Galactus/Silver Surfer is a good place to start. If the plan is to make a lasting Avengers franchise, and they've already used up Loki and soon Thanos, they need villains on an escalating scale of threat. That pretty much leaves only Galactus and the Celestials. (Maybe Mephisto too, but I suspect the rights to Mephisto are tied up with the Ghost Rider movies.)

August 1, 2012 7:22 pm I can definitely relate with your geographic fixation, Ryan, and the desire to reach beyond it and just enjoy the books. I'm Canadian, and we tend to obsess about fiction that's set here, and how well or poorly it represents reality. I'm still interested in those things, but not out of an obsession to make it all "fit" any more. Setting is important to any kind of literature, and analyzing the setting teaches you a lot about the author's intent, cultural perspective and the universe he or she has created. Sometimes they use real places that they know (like Marvel does, generally), other times by creating idealized fictional places that match the personality of their characters (like DC does, generally). Either way, it teaches you stuff about where they're coming from, literally and figuratively. Being a map nerd, you might be interested in this map I made of Canada in the Marvel Universe, examining what Marvel's gotten right or wrong about Canadian geography: https://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=201268484770934972012.0004ac000c159243f250e

July 21, 2012 12:28 am I had to think hard and remind myself what the League of Shadows wanted in the first movie, because I hadn't seen it in a while. They believed Gotham was decadent and corrupt, but there never seemed anything explicitly anti-capitalist in their motives -- after all, they were training Bruce Wayne, a billionaire, to act as their agent. The first movie also stated that they had used economics as a means to destroy Gotham in the past and were largely responsible for its poverty and decay in the present. It seems really implausible that Bane and Talia are using economic inequality as a call to revolution when their own organization caused said inequality in the first place -- maybe it would make sense if they were just cynically manipulating people and destroying Gotham was their only end goal, but we're given every indication that they believe what they're preaching. That's one of the things that felt really unpleasant about this movie: The use of Occupy Wall Street imagery and phrases when what Nolan really wants to talk about is terrorism. Regardless of what people feel about Occupiers, creating a story that thematically lumps them in with al-Qaeda just seems really misguided and cynical on Nolan's part. If Bane had nothing to do with the League, and this movie stood on its own plot- and theme-wise from the first movie, I'd like it a lot more. As it is, I'm just confused about what it's trying to say.

May 28, 2012 2:31 am As someone who works for a newspaper and writes headlines for a living, I share your contempt for the Zap! Pow! headline. I hate, hate, hate those headlines, and even though I've never written one myself, I see them everywhere. There are several interrelated reasons for this. Copy editors tend toward clichés because a) clichés are easy to write, b) clichés, like puns, are space-efficient, conveying multiple layers of meaning with as few words as possible, and c) clichés are deemed to be accessible to a general audience. The point of a headline is to distill the meaning of a story and inject it straight into the reader's hindbrain, piquing their interest so they want to read the whole story. You need a phrase that's clever, has universal appeal and conveys the subject matter of the story instantly. Not every clever headline can be the same, of course, or you risk devolving into cliché -- I, for instance, am on a lifelong quest to abolish the "From Russia with [noun]" construction from all headlines about Russia. Those may have been cool in 1963, but they're long since past their prime. (Part of me wishes the Cold War had never ended so we could still use "In Soviet Russia, [noun] [verb] you" headlines. At least that would give us more than one outdated cliché to choose from.) The problem arises when you write headlines about a subject you don't know much about, and useful metaphors aren't readily available. Most copy editors don't read comics, and can't think of comic-related metaphors to spice up the headline. Even if copy editors are knowledgeable about comics, they can't presume that their audience is too. Not everyone is going to get your bitchin' "Crisis on infinite [plural noun]" headline, no matter how bitchin' you may think it is. It's the same reason you can't write a headline based on a song that's less than 15 years old or more than 50 years old. If it's too recent, older readers won't get the reference, and if it's too old, twentysomethings and kids won't get it. Have you ever noticed that almost every newspaper headline based on a song title is derived from classic rock? It's not because all newspaper copy editors are over 50 and grew up on that music (although many are); it's because everyone is exposed to those songs, at the mall, in the dentist's office, on their drive home from work. It's part of the idiom of everyday North American thought and speech in a way that comics aren't, and might never be. That's why headline writers (even the ones who read comics) struggle to find popularly accessible metaphors and turns of phrase when talking about comics -- and, inevitably, most are willing to settle on references to the Batman TV sound effects. "Zap! Pow! Comics aren't for kids anymore." Over time we can expand the vocabulary of comics clichés, but it's going to take time.

May 18, 2012 9:43 pm You're referring to his remarks on the Neil Gaiman/Todd McFarlane lawsuit, I take it?

May 18, 2012 8:07 pm Jeff Lemire has gone on record saying he'd love to write a Punisher story, and a Wednesday Comics-style anthology would be a cool opportunity to let him do that. Marvel's weird and wonderful side characters aren't getting as much respect since the Cancelpocalypse, and a Wednesday Comics project would be a great way to reverse the trend a little -- kind of like they did with Strange Tales, but on a more epic scale. I'm thinking back to that James Stokoe Silver Surfer story in Strange Tales II and imagining how much more awesome it would have been if he had had newsprint-sized pages to work with.