Month: March 2014

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Thanks to Meow Mix®, today is that lucky day for cat fans across the country with the launch of the new interactive website, Meow Mix Catstarter SM.

The team is on the prowl to produce the next great cat-tastic invention and is asking cat owners for their vote/help. Now through April 11, cat aficionados across the country are given the power to vote for a project that will benefit their cat, as well as sign up to become the first generation to actually own it.

From a real PR email I received, in support of this.

Congratulations, Internet. You’ve finally gone too far.

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It was a series of conversations once Jason started breaking down the story, starting with the kinds of characters that he wanted. He wanted to build an eclectic group that would represent every corner of the Marvel Universe, and that would allow him to do unexpected pairings that would be fun to see. So we bounced names back and forth – I’m guessing 60 to 80 percent of that final list were guys that Jason suggested, and the other 20 to 40 percent were names that Axel and I threw off. Not in, “You must use the Ant-Man,” but, “How about Ant-Man, he’s cool, because he can do this, and that would factor in this way.” “What about Emma Frost?” “How about the Black Panther?”

Tom Brevoort, talking about how the core characters for Marvel’s next event book were chosen. Personally, I’m entirely convinced that it was “How about Ant-Man, he’s cool,” and not “How about Ant-Man, he’s in a movie in 2015 and we should really try to build up the character in the comics before we launch a spin-off to cash in.”
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I’ve said before that X-Men just doesn’t feel like Lee and Kirby have their hearts in it, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think the problem is that it was really their first attempt at building on what they’d already done. It’s a refinement rather than an innovation, pieced together from bits and pieces that worked in their other hits. The problem is that those other hits were themselves still being refined as an ongoing process, and they were way more interesting, which made X-Men redundant.

It had the hook of ostracized and isolated teens, but that was done way better in Spider-Man, the book that laid the foundation of the modern superhero. The team bickered while showing off their super-powers and had Angel and Cyclops competing for Marvel Girl’s affections, but that was nowhere near as good as the strained family relationship in Fantastic Four. They were outsiders in a world that didn’t understand if they were heroes or villains, but, you know, that’s the Hulk’s entire deal. X-Men was the first comic that tried to mash all that up — it’s the first real product of the Marvel Age — but it didn’t do anything better.

Chris Sims wrestles with why the first incarnation of the X-Men didn’t catch fire with the readers, especially in light of the runaway success of the second incarnation. I’m not sure I agree with a lot of what he says, in large part influenced by my Avengers re-read for Wait, What? and noticing many of the same problems in the Lee/Kirby issues of that series (For me, what likely doomed X-Men’s first run was the blandness of the Drake/Roth run that followed, as much as I have affection for it). But it’s good stuff, nonetheless.

One of these days, I’ll sort out my feelings about post-Claremont X-Men and how overbalanced it felt towards the high concept, and write that essay, I swear.

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From politics to the personal, from fashion to food, from the campus to the locker room, the desire to be cool has infected all aspects of our lives. At its most harmless, it is annoying. At its worst, it is deadly, on a massive scale. The Cool are the termites of life, infiltrating every nook and cranny and destroying it from within. The Cool report the news, write the scripts, teach our children, run our government—and each day they pass judgment on those who don’t worship at the altar of their coolness. The cool fawn over terrorists, mock the military, and denigrate employers. They are, in short, awful people.

From what we wear and what we eat, to what we smoke and who we poke, pop culture is crafted and manipulated by the cool and, to Greg Gutfeld, that’s Not Cool.

Fox News talking head Greg Gutfeld has written a book called, I shit you not, Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You. It’s like he saw the potential for self-parody and thought, “Fuck it, I can go so much further than that.”
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Imagine a present day in which old comic books and superheroes are of interest only to a coterie of geeky, aging fanatics. Where the names Tom Mix and Captain America are equally remote (just like 97% of everything Martin Goodman ever published). Those of us who are among the geeky fanatics might regard him as the man who made many artists’ visions possible – the non-artistic enabler of the forgotten art and mythology of comic books. If he’d ended up as a middle-class retiree in Florida, coming out to comic book conventions to swap stories with Jack Kirby, we might think of Martin Goodman as a quirky, square, accidental hero. A guy who built a family business that enabled Captain America to exist, that enabled the early shop work of Bill Everett and Carl Burgos to get an airing through a major newsstand publisher, and who had the good sense to allow Stan Lee to do what he did in the Sixties.

Instead, we know him as the first person to refuse Marvel comic book creators a share of the accumulating value of their creations. As he always had, he regarded the properties he’d bought as his own, and then he sold all the important ones for less than the value of Ant Man. From the lofty perch of 2014 parent company Disney, Martin Goodman was as clueless as Jack Kirby.

From here.
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What if front pages were selected by newspapers’ readers instead of their editors? At NewsWhip, we’re always interested in the news stories people are choosing to share – and how those stories differ from the normal news stories editors put on the front pages of big newspapers. So we ran a little experiment.

On Wednesday morning, we gathered the front pages of leading newspapers in several countries. Then we used Spike to check the most shared stories from each one.

A little work at our end, and we used those most shared stories to make new “people powered” front pages for each newspaper – giving the most shared story the most prominence, the second most shared the second most prominence, etc.

We replaced headlines and pictures, though did not get into replacing story text and bylines. The results are pretty neat – maybe even thought provoking.

For me, this story could be called “Why Editorial Oversight is a Good Thing.”
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Work Not In Progress: Fantastic Four

An unfinished first draft of this piece for the Hollywood Reporter, abandoned midway through because it wasn’t working. I started over from another angle, and it just felt better, somehow.

Now that it looks like we may finally have Fox’s new Fantastic Four, perhaps we can finally turn out attention to more important topics — like the question of just what is going to happen in the movie, due for release next summer.

As is by now traditional with super hero movie franchises, it’s almost inevitable that the first movie in the series will be the origin story of the team. Director Josh Trank has already denied reports that the movie will follow Marvel’s own revisionist Ultimate Fantastic Four in terms of origin story — but, of course, he’d also denied that Miles Teller was up for a role in the movie, and we’ve seen how that turns out.

Given the vintage of the original Fantastic Four origin story — in which the characters get their powers as the result of an attempt to beat the Russians into space, with Sue Storm pleading “Ben, we’ve got to take that chance… unless we want the Commies to beat us to it!” at one point — it’s impossible that the movie won’t be forced to deviate from the classic version of events in some way, whether it goes the Ultimate route (A teleportation accident), follows the earlier Fox movie’s “accident aboard a space station” take on events, or finds its own way to expose the characters to those all-important cosmic rays.

The earlier film also played with the origin by introducing Doctor Doom into events far earlier than he appeared in the comic book. That was a good move for a number of reasons, not least of which being that the original origin lacks any villain whatsoever, with the bad guy for the issue appearing later and having the ridiculous motivation of wanting to destroy New York because he was so ugly no-one would date him (Sadly, I’m not joking). Substituting Doom for the poor Mole Man felt as much like an act of mercy as it did a smart storytelling choice.

Using Doom makes sense, in that he’s undoubtedly the most famous — and most interesting — villain in the Fantastic Four mythos. Luckily for Fox, however, he’s far from the only interesting threat in there. The first hundred or so issues of Fantastic Four, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are some of the most restlessly inventive super hero comics ever made, creating all manner of characters that could easily be spun off into their own movies should Fox desire it.

Whereas Sony’s plan to build out the Spider-Man movie series into a multi-franchise property relies on that character’s villains, a Fantastic Four family could include the Silver Surfer, Galactus, the Inhumans, entire alien races like the Kree and the Skrulls, and arguably more characters whose rights situation may be slightly more complicated (The Black Panther, for example, appears to be under control of Marvel Studios although he first appeared in Fantastic Four. Similarly, quite who owns the movie rights to Adam Warlock, who first appeared in Fantastic Four under the name “HIM!” is unclear).