* Gamechanger part deux: DC Comics unveils its own digital-comics plan. This includes an app for the iPad and iPhone, plus digital comics available through comiXology and PlayStation and eventually the DC website to boot. The 26-issue biweekly series Justice League: Generation Lost is going day-and-date immediately (y’know, if you’ve been wondering whether we’d see moves toward that sort of thing by the end of the year or anything). The company is also publicly announcing the existence of creator royalties for digital sales, though of course no figures. (Kudos to Matt Maxwell for being the first person I saw to notice all this.)
* My colleague Kiel Phegley talks to Co-Publisher Jim Lee and digital honcho John Rood about the move, and my colleague Kevin Melrose has the best reaction roundup I’ve seen.
* Today at Robot 6: Megan Kelso talks turkey about the New York Times Funny Pages.
* MK Reed interviews Tom Neely on the Henry Rollins/Glenn Danzig slashfiction minicomic Henry & Glenn Forever for the Beat. Hilarious and heartbreaking money quote:
In 3 weeks we sold more HG4Evers than I’ve sold of The Blot in 3 years. I’m really happy for this books success, but it has caused some conflicting emotions about success and art.
But Tom announces on his blog that the second printing will include 12 new strips, so that’s good news. I think.
* Lost “news” I’m posting today because I wasn’t sure, I figure some other people might not be either: Today I did some googling and learned that that epilogue featuring So-and-So and Such-and-Such will indeed be on the Lost Season Six DVD set, not just the Complete Series set.
One thing that significantly shaped the reception Fire Walk With Me received that rarely gets brought up is the timing of its release — even a lot of fans of Twin Peaks didn’t necessarily want any more Twin Peaks at that moment in time. It’s like if George Lucas had released a Star Wars film about Shmi Skywalker’s pregnancy in 2006.
That said, it’s pretty darn good, its use of suburban space and the notion of being trapped in behavior one can’t are both really affecting and Sheryl Lee’s performance is kind of fascinating.
The irony of Dick Tracy that gets hinted at in that article is that Reds is the one that’s the really entertaining cartoon movie with impossibly broad characters straight from the newspaper pages, a Hollywood outsider veteran in late-period prime playing a rival, the iconic not-traditional-beauty romantic lead of her era and even an artificial color palette.
Point of information: Benjamin Birdie tipped me off to the existence of the DC app.
My view of FIRE WALK WITH ME alternates from it being a compelling disaster to just compelling and scary. Haven’t seen it in a long, long time and my recollection of it back in the day was that it was a daunting WTF capstone or tombstone depending on how you looked at it. There’s still some supremely unsettling moments that don’t involve gore or overtly deviant behavior which Lynch is a master of, when he allows himself to be.
We did a complete Twin Peaks retrospective last year, and FWWM was pretty disturbing and disjointed, although still compelling. I think I wanted it to be total awesome becuase the TV series had ended so abruptly. But it wasn’t quite the apotheosis it was meant to be.
WOW BOB WOW
The Black Lodge entities in Twin Peaks are my gold standard for how to do supernatural evil. Every such thing should feel that awful and corrupt.
Hey, I hear there’s good money in writing spam front ends now.