* I interviewed Grant Morrison and Adam Egypt Mortimer about their upcoming film Sinatoro for Comic Book Resources. Because it’s so early in the game they are in large part limited to enthusiasm and hyperbole, but they’re pretty self-aware about that. I liked this bit:
We wanted to do something that took the language of movies and brings it into the 21st century. One of the things I was saying over the weekend was this idea that most of us have been playing video games and grew up watching MTV and music videos. The art that we’ve absorbed has changed. The way we look at things and the way we tell stories is a little bit different than how it used to be. I like the idea of introducing that back into the basic Hollywood narrative. Taking some of that, and all the building blocks we’re familiar with – the boy-meets-girl, the revenge story, the thriller, the murder mystery, the crime story – and combine all that together. It”s a little like what I did with Batman and Superman: take all the things we love about cinema and then put them together again in a slightly new way which still fulfills all the [original] functions. It still makes you laugh and cry and sing and dance.
* Clive Barker says Volume III of his Abarat young-adult fantasy series will come out in September 2011. Given that what would have been the ending in most YA fantasy series took place at the end of Volume 2, I suppose it’s no shock it’s taking this long to ramp up to the next installment.
* Since I am increasingly pessimistic about the economy in general and the long-term structural changes being made that will adversely effect the creation of art in particular, I’m always game for discussions Tom Spurgeon’s thoughts on the future of comics retail in a piece on five comics news stories to watch:
It’s take your pick of portents: the absence of a vital retailer selling new comics at Comic-Con the way Comic Relief used to underlines the notion that owner of the majority of comics’ best shops are getting older, there’s never a guarantee that these businesses change hands without causing major differences in what they’re able to do, and I’m not sure there are enough up and coming retailers to play the same role as the generation of retailers now in that 55 and over club. Price increases, continued horrific scheduling strategies, a ridiculous and inflexible start-up model, over-publishing and the slight discombobulation that is likely to arrive with an upswing in attention to digital comics strategies are making things more difficult for the system just at the time when everything should be done to make things easier. As second downswing in the economy will likely drive lot of folks to reconsider what they do, and comics seems less likely to escape a second generally fallow period coming so quickly on the heels of the first.
* I am enjoying Robin McConnell’s Inkstuds roundtable on “fusion comics,” aka the New Action plus some other mixed-genre/style stuff, with Frank Santoro, Brandon Graham, and Michael DeForge as we speak. Here are Frank’s notes for the interview. Obviously a lot of this material excites me as well, and I love all these artists bringing non-traditional influences to the table. It makes for exciting art, and exciting discussions between artists. As for criticism…Honestly? I do worry a bit, from a look around the blogosphere on any given day, that rise of fusion/New Action gives people the critical cover they’ve long secretly craved to talk only about genre, to the exclusion of non-genre work. (I oughta know!) Oh, I dunno, I’m a scold these days. Maybe it’s just that I’ve always proceeded from the notion that this stuff is legit to talk about, and so it doesn’t fire me up, like, eight years into talking about comics professionally and semiprofessionally. I’ve got my own issues, like.
* CRwM waxes eloquent on John McTiernan’s Predator and Die Hard, two films that undercut the Action Hero, examining the varying degrees to which they do so. Check the comments for TroyZ’s take on the matter as well.
* The Ten Video Games Roger Ebert Should Play. I’ve never been heavily invested in what Ebert thinks and this has not changed with his recent renaissance, but a) It’d be interesting if the collective Green Lantern power of the Internet wills him into liking video games after a prolonged period of philistinism, and b) this list doubles well as a Ten Video Games Sean T. Collins Should Play list.
* I’d forgotten how good the cover for Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur #29 was; Ruaraidh Bruce reminds us with a cover version at Covered.
* I love Rickey Purdin “What I Got at [Comic Convention X]” posts, because Rickey Purdin loves getting comics.
* I briefly want to draw your attention to a couple of other Internet ventures for which I am responsible: Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts, consisting of cool pictures of people wearing t-shirts;
* and Bowie Loves Beyonce, consisting of cool pictures of David Bowie and Beyonce.
* It’s been a while, for medical reasons, but I would like Serge Gainsbourg’s “Cannabis” (via Nate Patrin) to provide the soundtrack for all my future usages of the titular substance. I suspect it would be impossible not to feel like a cool dude with all the right moves under such circumstances.
* An LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip/Sleigh Bells tour? Oh, indeed.
Man, I just watched Predator last weekend for the first time in years, and I didn’t remember that scene either. Huh.
I was weirdly in love with the Predator novelization when I was a kid – I remember reading that and one of the Rambo books a whole bunch of times. The Predator one was a lot different than the movie, and I remember it kind of being told from the alien’s perspective too. It would dissect and analyze its victims’ bodies, instead of just whipping their nervous systems around over its head. I really need to see if I’ve still got that book packed away somewhere.
Great interview with Morrison and Mortimer. Looking forward to what they can turn out.
I saw the Hot Chip/LCD Sounsystem double-header at Sydney, Australia last week. Needless to say it was amazing. Chip’s Joe Goddard was on paternity leave and delivered his vocals via a recording they showed on a plasma screen. LCD’s set was spectacular and culminated with ‘Yeah (Crass Version)’ before segueing in to the ‘New York, I Love You’ encore, which Murphy called the ‘Lionel Ritchie part of the show.’