* Just to reiterate, Tom Spurgeon interviewed me about the year in alt/art comics. It was a hoot.
* Wow: a judge has granted 20th Century Fox’s copyright ownership claim over the Watchmen film. He appears to be encouraging Fox and Warner Bros., which made the movie, to work something out rather than giving the thumbs up to Fox’s stated goal of preventing the film’s release, though. And somewhere in Northampton, Alan Moore raises a chalice to Glycon in thanks.
* Shaggy reports that Gossip Girl Season One will be on sale at Target on Sunday for the low low price of $17. Mark your calendars.
* Speaking of bargains, Fantagraphics is having a 25% off/free shipping sale on orders of $50 or more at its website through the end of the year. Go blow some Christmas cash.
* A part of me is glad that They’re having trouble funding the next Narnia movie. A bit of this is due to me falling on the Tolkien side of the Tolkien/Lewis debate that dates back to Tolkien and Lewis themselves, but it’s also because everything I’ve seen about the Narnia movies so far looks like a desperate, transparent Tolkienization of the source material. (Via AICN.)
* Bloody Disgusting says they have some plot details about the Ron Moore-scripted prequel to The Thing, but it looks to me like they got their wires crossed and are reporting the plot of the original as the plot of this prequel. Seriously, what they’ve posted doesn’t make any sense. But hey, Ronald D. Moore and The Thing. That’s not too shabby.
* And Bloody D redeems itself with its annual Top 10 Best and Worst Horror Movie Posters lists. I certainly don’t agree with all their choices–I think Doomsday‘s logo approach stuck out in a sea of murky blue, for example–but they’re dead on when they call for one-sheets and posters to show more effort than just running a still through Photoshop.
* This is interesting to me: political blogger Matthew Yglesias, who is a bit of a comics nerd but not a huge one, disliked The Spirit but not in a venom-spewing, “fuck that douchebag” kind of way–he thought the plot was cockamamie, basically. Not a word about the crazy dialogue or the hambone acting or the tone vis a vis Eisner’s originals. I am really, really curious about this movie.
* AdHouse presents its 2009 release slate.
* I move in a couple of circles online: One consists of people who are apt to like Marnie Stern, the other consists of people who are apt to like Brian Chippendale’s Maggots. David Allison falls in the overlap of that particular Venn diagram, as demonstrated by the aforelinked post comparing the two.
* Frank Santoro reports that those expecting a screaming match or fisticuffs to erupt upon the Kramers Ergot 7 Tour’s Brooklyn stop-mandated meeting between Santoro and David Heatley have been let down. Alas, those of us expecting a heated discussion, followed by understanding, followed by the tender blossoming of friendship as two stalwart altcomix souljaz hugged it out once and for all are also let down.
* Seeing ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman post about making it all the way to the 27th and final volume of Iron Wok Jan, a series he was blogging about perhaps even before I started this blog, made me feel incredibly old all of a sudden.
* Jon Hastings presents his best stuff of 2008 list. He took a cartooning class taught by Matthew Thurber???
* Finally, your quote of the day:
COVINA, Calif. – Six bodies were found Thursday in the ashes of a home where a gunman in a Santa Claus costume opened fire during a Christmas Eve party before setting the house ablaze, police said.
—“Police: At least 6 dead in Christmas Eve shooting,” Christina Hoag, AP. Obviously I wanted to make some sort of joke here but the story is really awful and horrifying. Perhaps this, from later in the story, should be the real quote of the day, then:
She said she saw a teenage boy flee the house, screaming, “They shot my family.”
I’m sorry to be such a downer all the time with this stuff.
I have no interest in the formal debates over the Lewis/Tolkein approach to fantasy as I love both those series with different parts of my 6th graders heart, but damn…those Narnia movies were disgracefully bad. I hope they never make another.
I, for one, am thoroughly satisfied that the BBC series of adaptations survived longer than the new Disney ones. I felt like they were trying to do vis
I didn’t like the Narnia movies. I think from watching the Space Jam-level hilarious supporting material for the first one the director was either deliberately misremembering the books or hadn’t read them closely. The result in both films still feels cobbled together instead of organic. I think the play for Tolkien-lite audiences was fairly apparent in the transformation of battle scenes that were a half-page long in the books into extended sequences of mayhem. Now, I don’t give a shit about “remaining faithful to the material” in general, and I think the Tolkien movies themselves — about as boys adventure a version as I can imagine — shows that what geek culture really means 99 percent of the time is “please don’t make put us in a position to be mocked or laughed at.” I think this more a matter of there not being an appetite for roughly that kind of movie — general audiences were slightly tired of it by the time the fourth ending of Return of the King went by on screen — and that from things like the herky-jerky pacing and the mostly lame voice work audiences weren’t given something good enough and different enough to break them free from the exhaustion.
That said, my memory is that both movies tested well, and I suspect what you’re seeing here is the moviemakers simply spending too damn much (that last one didn’t look like $200 million on screen even by the loose standards of today) coming back to bite them, and also the hubris of moving the second movie to summer where the recent mini-trend had favored Christmas time (the Harry Potters seems to have done better there, too. Has any pastoral fantasy film other than the one Harry Potter ever done well in summer? When I think of summer, I think of Willow and Princess Bride, both box office duds).
It’s easier to get a church group field trip going between September and May, too.
Yes I did. I had a blast. I’m planning on putting some of my cartoons up on my blog as soon as I set up my new printer/scanner.
Carnival of souls
* My favorite mafia story, because it’s the story that does the best job of stripping away the Godfather romanticism and revealing mobsters for the shitty little monsters that they are, is the one about how when one of John…