“Did I forget to change your litter box again?”
The Phantom vol. 2 #30
Charlton Comics (February, 1969)
There are four stories in this comic, only two of which features the Ghost Who Walks, and none of which have credits. So let’s go right into the reviews.
Marv walking through the rain in the The Hard Goodbye cover by Frank Miller (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
No, I’m not talking about porn or a city set in Vegas. About porn. It’s Frank Miller’s baby, the one that shoved him into the mindset of doing mostly pseudo-noir stories and badly writing women. Unless you count constantly making Catwoman into a prostitute before becoming a cat burglar, and frankly I do. Seriously, I don’t see what used to make Frank Miller good in people’s eyes compared to what he does now.
Sin Citya new TV series started as a series of comics for Dark Horse, and later gained two movies. And now word is out that is being made. So if you liked the comics or the movies, here’s the TV show. I actually didn’t care for any of them. Maybe they’re good but they’re not my kind of story. i don’t even like the stuff Miller made that people say are good.
Star Trek Discovery, the new Star Trek series set to air exclusively as part of CBS’s “All Access” streaming service in the US and Netflix internationally (because CBS still insists on doing their own streaming while other networks let Netflix and Hulu do all the hard work for them), is rumored to be in so much trouble you have to wonder if the end result will even be a Star Trek series and if it will even be made. That last part may be an exaggeration but between creators who hate continuity, the CEO seems to hate Star Trek in the first place, and a lot of problems behind the scenes.
In this video from Midnight’s Edge, we get the latest on all the rumors, how Viacom messed up the licensing for Paramount, the part the fan film Axanar may have played in all this by violating the unspoken fan film rules (leading to harsher official rules), an upcoming parody series, and even Abrams desire to replace classic Star Trek continuity with his own (which kind of explains why he’s ignoring Lucas’s original concept for Star Wars 7 through 9) is tied to the the mess that Discovery appears to be.
“Geez, how many lightbulbs did you use?”
Transformers: Stormbringer #2
IDW Publishing (June, 2006)
WRITER: Simon Furman
ARTIST: Don Figueroa
COLORIST: Josh Burcham
LETTERER: Robbie Robbins
EDITORS: Chris Ryall & Dan Taylor
Mage: The Hero Defined, cover by Matt Wagner. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Mage series by Matt Wagner takes a long time to come out. I remember when A Hero Discovered was promoted in Comico comics I was getting in the 1980s. It wasn’t until 1997 that the second series, The Hero Defined, came out and with a different publisher because Comico was either gone or different. Now with Comico gone for good and in 2017, fans of the series (for the record I’ve never read it) will get to see the final chapter with The Hero Denied as Kevin Matchstick, reincarnation of King Arthur, goes on his final adventure. Like I said, I never read it but I know he has his fans out there and you might be interested.
Combine the Odd Couple and Dragon Ball and you…may not have a hit.
Dragon Ball Z #3
Viz Comics (1998)
originally published by Shueisha (1985), produced by Bird Studio
“An Unexpected Strength”
WRITER/ARTIST: Akira Toriyama
ENGLISH ADAPTATION: Gerald Jones
TRANSLATION: Lillian Olsen
TOUCH-UP ART/LETTERER: Wayne Truman
EDITOR: Trish Ledoux
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
Building A Better Trailer
Screenshot from movie trailer for North by Northwest (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A pair of articles on Screen Crush has me thinking about trailers. We just looked at one yesterday. Trailers are how movie studios prepare hype for a new movie and sometimes even TV show. They are an important part of marketing a new production. The problem is trailers can also ruin a movie not by being bad but by showing ALL the good parts. Showing only good parts makes sense but when you show all of them it kills the experience for the moviegoers, and while I understand where marketing is coming from, I don’t think they understand how things work nowadays.
The first article I saw was a comment by David Lynch about how he doesn’t like modern-day trailers and made sure his trailers for the new Twin Peaks series contained not only no spoilers but no information whatsoever. I’ll come back to this, but it’s David Lynch AND a continuation (or reboot, I haven’t followed it because I don’t care) of Twin Peaks. Both of them come with their own hype by themselves, never mind together. The article linked to a commentary elsewhere on Screen Crush by Britt Hayes about the lack of information in trailers for The Dark Tower, based on a book series by Stephen King, and why that’s a good thing. The same rule applies there however. The Dark Tower is a popular book series and Stephen King is Stephen King. You have the hype pretty much built-in. But what about productions who need that hype? While they have a point about trailers, you can’t just rule them out.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on May 31, 2017 in Movie Spotlight and tagged commentary, movie trailer, Trailers.
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