The visual-effects magicians of Industrial Light and Magic explain exactly how they created New York City for the climactic scene of The Avengers.
Since the 1940s, Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, has held down a day job as a reporter for the Daily Planet, a venerable Metropolis broadsheet whose very existence (as the Onion pointed out in July) may now be the most unbelievable aspect of the Superman mythos. But not anymore: In this week's issue of Superman, Kent has delivers an impassioned, Sorkinesque newsroom-floor speech about the debasement of modern journalism and then resigns from the paper.
Memo to movie-studio types planning to conduct some on-the-DL market research down at the Android's Dungeon: A brand-new, crisply creased Batman T-shirt is not an effective disguise.
Monday, at the comics-news site Bleeding Cool, editor Rich Johnston summarized an encounter between some comic-shop staffers and a group of suspiciously chatty, suspiciously comics-illiterate customers who may have been Warner Bros. employees trying to take the pulse of nerd world vis-à-vis the forthcoming Justice League movie. "They entered posing as fans," Johnston wrote,
" … but it was obvious to staff by the time they finished their first question that they were not. And about half way through they abandoned all pretence and were asking questions like “what superhero films have had good Facebook pages?”, “Do you think comic fans would accept a superhero film without [Christopher] Nolan’s involvement, would him serving as a producer suffice?” “What do fans think of Aquaman? He’s lame isn’t he?”, “What is regarded as the strongest lineup of the Justice League and would work as a film?” boiling right down to “What should DC do film wise?”
They asked for comics that best represented how the fans perceived the Justice League. One of them was wearing a box fresh Batman T-shirt — it still had the wrapping crease marks. They knew nothing about comics but corrected a member of staff on the year the Justice League film was due, 2014, not 2013. They mocked the Ant Man movie and looked a bit worried when they were assured by staff it was probably going to be all right.
And they looked glum when they were told DC should “just do what Marvel have done”.
Ouch.
On the last page of Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates No. 15, on sale yesterday, Captain America gets a phone call informing him that he's just been elected president of the United States. The story is by writer Sam Humphries, newish to Marvel and new to superhero comics in general. (He was previously best-known as the writer of Our Love Is Real, a sci-fi comic set in a future where people have sex with animals, plants, and occasionally minerals. You should read it, it's great. "Not just about people fucking plants!" — Grantland.)
The President America story is less, um, groundbreaking than Our Love Is Real, and — as ripped-from-the-headlines election-year stories go — almost quaintly nonpartisan. Some context: A few years ago, right-wing bloggers jumped on another Captain America story that could be read (especially on a day when the fish were not exactly jumpin', right-wing-blogger-news-wise) as depicting the actual, nonfictional tea party in a light that seemed less than flattering; Fox News's Mike Huckabee got similarly Worst Issue Ever–ish last spring when DC Comics' Superman — sick of "having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy" — decided to stand before the U.N. and renounce his American citizenship. (Huckabee, reported Politico, "said he wouldn't purchase the comic book, and that American kids should be taught that their country is great.") And then there was the time Rush Limbaugh transformed into one of comic-shopdom's most durable clichés: Fat Guy Who Is for Some Reason Really Upset About Bane.
Dumb as they are, flaps like these are always bittersweet moments for comics fans; the fact that people still bother to feign outrage about things that happen in actual, printed comic books proves that actual, printed comic books — with a little help from a couple of hundred-million-dollar blockbuster movies, OK — are still culturally important enough to argue about. "We've wanted these characters to be taken seriously for a long time," Humphries says, "and now they are, and we have to deal with that."
Last week, Matt Groening quietly put an end to Life in Hell, the weekly comic strip he'd written and drawn for 32 years.
Today, Groening's best known for creating The Simpsons, which in addition to being TV's longest-running scripted prime time series — 23 seasons and a movie, with no end in sight unless and until Fox gets tired of ponying up the equivalent of a small island nation's GNP 22 times a year to retain the services of Hank Azaria and/or his jar-preserved head — is inarguably his greatest contribution to popular culture, not to mention Rupert Murdoch's. But The Simpsons didn't really become The Simpsons until it passed from Groening's hands. As an institution, it belongs as much to the storied lineup of writers, producers, actors, and animators who've kept it alive and (countless Worst Episodes Ever notwithstanding) reasonably funny for more than two decades as it does to Groening.
Over the weekend, from the dais at a comic book convention in London, DC Comics co-publisher Dan DiDio revealed that as part of an ongoing reboot of its entire line, DC plans to change the sexual orientation of a preexisting character. Then, yesterday, the other biggest comic book company on earth, Marvel Comics, announced — on The View, no less! — that their first openly gay superhero, Northstar, would marry his boyfriend in an upcoming issue, because bigfooting the competition in the news cycle makes striking a blow for human rights that much sweeter.
