Spider-Man Parkour

The title says it all.

New Steve Rude Documentary

Steve Rude has been one of my favorite comic book artists since the mid-1980s, when I first discovered his most famous creation: Nexus.  I almost met him once twenty years ago at the San Diego Comic-Con. I saw him standing at his table just a few feet away, but was too afraid to walk over and introduce myself.  He's in  his 50s now, married with two children.  Disillusioned, he recently left comic books behind to concentrate instead on fine art. A new documentary about him apparently focusses on his ongoing struggles with depression and money. Here's a five minute trailer.  I found it compelling and sympathetic.  But it's also a little hard to see a personal hero so vulnerable.

Superman Tops Batman Again (We're Saved)

Did you see the news a month ago about how a copy of Detective Comics #27, a comic book published in 1939 that contained the first ever appearance of the super-hero Batman, had just sold at auction for $1.075 million, just more than the record $1 million previously paid for a copy of Action Comics #1, with the first appearance of Superman? I was amazed at the time by the amount of mainstream press coverage that sale received, along with all the hand wringing about how those respective selling prices demonstrated that popular culture had evolved in recent decades away from wholesome idealism of the 1950s toward the dark, the gritty and the violent.


Well, yesterday a copy of Action Comics #1 sold for $1.5 million. You can read about it HERE.  American culture, it seems, has been redeemed. And just 35 days later.  I wonder whether this sale will garner the same amount of press coverage?

Searching For The Aging Creator of "Spider-Man"

Did you know that the co-creator of Spider-Man is an artist named Steve Ditko? You've probably never heard of him, however, in part because he's lived his life as a sort of J.D. Salinger-esque recluse. He's still alive, though, age 82, hiding in plain sight in New York City.  But he never gives interviews (ever), and the few photos of him known to exist date back over 40 years.


Ditko created Spider-Man for Marvel Comics along with Stan Lee in 1962.  But just as the character was becoming widely popular in the mid-1960s, he abruptly walked away after drawing fewer than 40 issues.  Ditko continued to draw comic books for decades thereafter, but he never did Spider-Man again. And today he's known as much for his famous reclusiveness and his devotion to Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism as anything else.  


Three years ago a BBC talk show host named Jonathan Ross, who's a big fan of American comic books, made a 1 hour documentary about his search for the elusive Steve Ditko, while tracing the course of his career over the decades.  I won't spoil it for you by revealing whether he ever succeeds in finding Mr. Ditko and getting him on camera.  But if you want to find out, you can start with part 1 below. (It's 10 minutes long.)  Or, if you really don't care enough to watch the full 1 hour program, I've also embedded below the last part of the documentary, which is only 7 minutes long, wherein the results of Jonathan Ross' search are finally revealed.

When Good Comics Make Bad TV: Daredevil

One of my all-time favorite comic books was Daredevil.  You might be familiar with the character, too, though maybe only from the 2003 movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck.  But that wasn't the first attempt to bring Daredevil to the screen. Writing this morning about the 1979 Captain America TV movies reminded me of a 1989 TV movie titled The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, in which the Hulk and Daredevil teamed up to defeat the Kingpin in low budget, live action glory.



While it was in part a sequel to the popular Incredible Hulk TV series that had aired from 1978-1982, and while this TV movie still featured Bill Bixby and Lou Ferigno, it was really designed to be a pilot for a proposed live action Daredevil TV series. But the version of Daredevil brought to the screen in this movie was jarringly bland, so much so that a 45 second NBC promo for the show never even mentioned (let alone showed) Daredevil, even though he was the film's main character.  The problems started with Daredevil's costume. As you can see from the photo above, his costume in this movie was a plain dark blue, not red as in the comic book, and it also lacked his trademark horns and "DD" logo on his chest.  And why did this Daredevil apparently feel the need to don a black eye mask to supplement his costume, like he had trouble sleeping or was a Las Vegas magician?

I could go on at length about all the other problems that made this so disappointing at the time, but won't bother.  The scene where Bill Bixby transforms into the Hulk in a courtroom, after having been badgered in the witness box by an aggressive lawyer, was particularly corny.  If you remember that those transformations were the "money shots" in the old Incredible Hulk TV show, that'll give you a good idea how badly this TV movie stumbled.

But what NBC wouldn't show you in that 1989 promo, I will now.  Embedded below is a 10 minute clip from this movie's climax. Daredevil appears in action at length from about the 4:40 mark on.

When Good Comic Books Make Bad TV

I've written here several times before about various bad cartoon adaptations of great comic books.  But there have also been several equally risible live action TV adaptations as well.  


Perhaps because both The Incredible Hulk (1978-1982) and Wonder Woman  (1976-1979) TV shows were so successful in their time, an attempt was made in 1979 to bring Captain America to the screen as well.  The result was two made-for-TV movies, which were really just pilots for a proposed ongoing series. (The Incredible Hulk had also begun with two TV movies in 1977, and Wonder Woman had started with a TV movie in 1975.  So the same was clearly hoped for with these.)


But they didn't work.  Much of the character's background was changed. Instead of being a sickly WWII soldier named Steve Rogers who volunteered to receive an experimental 'super solder serum' during the War to become Captain America, in this version the hero is the son of that man.  And, reflective of the era perhaps, before he became a super hero he was an artist, not a soldier.  He has developed super powers himself only after an accidental injection of a "super steroid."  And as you can see from the photo above, his costume in this TV show is more motorcyle daredevil than super hero.  (And where's his shield when he needs it?  He could have used it to hide his 'shame,' at least until the full side effects of the steroids kicked in.) Embedded below is a 1 minute trailer for the second TV movie, perhaps inaccurately titled Captain America II: Death Too Soon.  


Notably, the villain is played by the legendary Christopher Lee.  Yes, "the" Christopher Lee who so famously played Count Dracula in many successful Hammer horror films of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the villain Scaramanga in the 1974 James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun. In recent years, he's also played Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the villainous Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels.

First Bill Watterson Interview Since 1989

Who is Bill Watterson?  He created the newspaper comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which ran from 1985 to 1995. You remember that, right? It was about a little boy named Calvin, his toy tiger Hobbes, and their adventures together in his imagination.  I loved it from the first time I saw it, which was surprising even to me since I didn't really like newspaper comic strips otherwise, and never have.   Very unusually for such a wildly popular comic strip, Watterson never let the characters be merchandised (in stark contrast to Peanuts or Garfield, for example). So there never were any Calvin and Hobbes toys, or cartoons, or coffee mugs, or calendars.  Only reprinted collections of the strip itself.  (That's the first ever one above, which I still have.) And then in 1995, Watterson abruptly quit doing even the strip itself, and Calvin and Hobbes disappeared forever.  


You may not recognize the name Bill Watterson for those reasons alone.  But there's more. Following the death of J.D. Salinger, Watterson may now have assumed the mantle of most fiercely reclusive artist/celebrity in America.  He hasn't given an interview since 1989.  Yet he just responded to a few questions via e-mail from the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper (he lives in the area, apparently), which you can read HERE. 


Watterson doesn't give away too much in his short, prosaic responses.  But when asked about why he quit the strip abruptly after only 10 years he explained, "This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.  It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now 'grieving' for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them."

That Can't Be What I Think It Is On My Boxers

I wrote previously HERE about one of my all-time favorite comic books, titled "Concrete."  That's him at left.  First published in the mid-1980s, it's popularity peaked in the early 1990s, almost 20 years ago now. No new issues have been published in several years, though, and it's pretty obscure these days.  So you can imagine the surprise of its creator, Paul Chadwick, when, as he detailed on his blog HERE, he was recently shopping in an Old Navy store and ran across boxer shorts for sale (made in Indonesia) emblazoned with a print of Concrete himself. As you can see in the photo of those boxers on his blog, Concrete appears to be jauntily holding a boom box on his shoulder, which makes this unauthorized 'underpants' swipe even funnier because it's so at odds with the subdued (almost pensive) tone of the series.  

J.D. Salinger And The Unseen Captain America Movie

J.D. Salinger has died.  He was 91. While his lengthy obituary is front page news in The New York Times, I suppose it's both complimentary and belittling that it might be fairly summarized in five words. "Catcher in the Rye.  Recluse."  You can read it HERE.  I didn't realize until I did the math just now that he was only 32 years old when Catcher in the Rye was first published in 1951. And then he lived another 60 years, seemingly perpetually uncomfortable in its long shadow.


On a very tangential note, few people probably know that his son Matthew, who is now 50 years old himself, actually starred in a 1990 movie adaptation of the comic book super hero Captain America. Despite being promoted in advance as an upcoming summer blockbuster, the movie was never released theatrically in the United States (nor on DVD), allegedly because it was deemed irredeemably bad in test screenings. But I happened to catch it a few years ago on television when I lived in Hong Kong.  And you know what, it wasn't all that terrible.  I have embedded below the original trailer for the film.  If you watch it, you'll also get a feel for how cheesy  most super hero films were prior to the Batman, Spider-Man and X-Men films of the last decade.

The Human Target: 1992 Version

A new TV show called Human Target, about a professional bodyguard who impersonates his clients in order to 'smoke out' their would-be assassins, premiered last night on Fox.  If you've watched any of the NFL playoff games on the Fox network over the last couple of weekends, I'm sure you knew that already (even if you didn't watch the show), because they relentlessly promoted it during commercial breaks. 


But did you know that the show was actually based on a comic book?  That's right. The Human Target was originally created in 1972 by Len Wein and Carmine Infantino, and ran as a back-up feature in some Superman comic books. In fact, almost 20 years ago a prior TV adaptation ran on CBS starring Rick Springfield.  Yes, the Rick Springfield of "Jesse's Girl" and General Hospital fame. It was pulled off the air by CBS after only 7 episodes because of poor ratings. I've embedded below the 1 minute opening credits from this 1992 version, as well as a teaser for the current series that premiered last night.

"Spider-Man 4" Delay: Legal, Not Creative, Issues

Have you heard the news that production on the Spider-Man 4 movie sequel, which is scheduled to be released in May 2011, was suddenly halted last week? When this news first broke, I read that production had been stopped because the studio did not like script. In particular, that they did not like Sam Raimi's preferred choice of villain, The Vulture. (That's him at left.)

But The National Enquirer is now reporting HERE that the real reason for the delay is that Disney (which just bought Marvel comics last year) is now going to Federal court to clarify their ownership rights to many of Marvel Comics' most famous characters, including Spider-Man, who were originally co-created in the early 1960s by legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby. (I previously wrote HERE about meeting him (along with, bizarrely, David Carradine) in 1988, and posted a photo of all of us together.)

Mr. Kirby died in 1994 at the age of 76, but his heirs began trying last September to invalidate Marvel's copyrights on the super-hero characters he had helped create 50 years ago now. And Disney filed a lawsuit against them in Federal court yesterday, apparently.

San Diego Comic-Con 2010 4-Day Passes Sold Out

4-day passes for the 2010 Comic-con International San Diego, which won't be held for another eight months (in late July 2010), have now already sold out.

The total attendance at the four day event is now capped at 125,000 each year. Last month, only three comic books sold even 100,000 copies, with the #1 seller being a mere 137,000 copies. The only two that I still buy on a semi-regular basis sold 9,000 and 14,000 copies last month, respectively.

Those figures give a fairly stark numerical insight into how little "comic book" there really is in the San Diego Comic-Con each year now.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sold for $60 Million

The kid's cable television channel "Nickleodeon" (owned by Viacom) has struck a deal today to buy all the rights to the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" for $60 million from the co-owners The Mirage Group and 4 Kids Entertainment. According to the "Los Angeles Times" today, Nickeloden has made this deal because they want to attract more boys to its channel. A new cartoon series is apparently planned, as is a feature film.

If you remember the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" at all, you probably think of their huge popularity in the early 1990s in the wake of their successful cartoon series, which inevitably spawned a seemingly ubiquitous line of action figures and other merchandise. There was a year or two there around 1990 where if you happened to be in a shopping mall or an airport, you couldn't go 10 minutes without seeing a young boy wearing a "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" t-shirt, or with one of the dolls dangling listlessly from one hand.

It all started much more humbly, however, as a black and white comic book first published by "Mirage Studios" in 1984. Mirage Studios was actually just two guys, the creators: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. They wrote, drew and published the early issues entirely themselves, using money borrowed from family. (They called themselves "Mirage Studios" because there was no "studio" really, just them.) They had only 3,000 copies of the first issue printed, and sold it at a comic book convention being held at a Sheraton hotel in their home state of New Hampshire. The comic book was initially a somewhat crudely drawn parody of the two most popular comic books at that time: "X-Men" (thus the "Teenage" and "Mutant" in the title) and "Daredevil." (The image above is from those early days.)

But it was the Saturday morning cartoon, which started in 1988, that really popularized them. What followed was a textbook case of the power of cartoon marketing to kids. (A vintage commercial for the dolls, featuring clips from the cartoon, is embedded below. See how the artwork and the entire concept itself has been softened from the original black & white image above?) The "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" became an unlikely household word there for a time. Eastman and Laird made millions. Imagine what the property would have sold for in those days? A lot more than $60 million, I would have thought.

When Great Comic Books Make Terrible TV Shows

You've probably never heard of a comic book from the 1980s called "Jon Sable: Freelance," even though it's still published intermittently today. It was created, written, and drawn by Mike Grell from its first issue in 1983. (That's the cover at left.) The title character, Jon Sable, was a sort of mercenary/private eye for hire. A one man "A-Team" with a dash of Sam Spade. Among other adventures, he saved President Reagan from assassination, tried to rescue POWs in Vietnam (before either Chuck Norris or Rambo), and caught a thief who tried to steal the original Maltese Falcon movie prop. Like James Bond, he also made time for an endless string of love affairs, all of which were rendered in some detail (much to my delight as a young teenage boy).

Fifty six issues were published by First Comics in its initial run from 1983-1988. Curiously, the comic book was cancelled just as ABC launched a prime time TV show adaptation of it that was titled simply, "Sable." But boy was the TV show terrible. The show's minimalist production values gave it the "cheap" look of a soap opera. Only 7 episodes were ever aired before it was pulled. It pretty much tells you all you need to know about the show that its producers added a new character: a heavy-set computer expert nicknamed "Cheesecake," as Jon Sable's sidekick.

The 1 minute intro to the show is embedded below. My "favorite" part of it is when Sable leaps over the building's ledge to absolutely no dramatic effect. That's exactly what I felt like doing, too, after I suffered through the first episode back in 1987. If you watch this intro, you may be amazed to learn that this was actually the second version of the show that was shot. An entire pilot episode was filmed with Gene Simmons (yes, the Gene Simmons of KISS fame) playing Jon Sable that was never aired. It makes you wonder how impossibly risible that version must have been if this second version was deemed a big enough improvement to be added to ABC's prime time line-up.

Frank Miller On "Daredevil"

If you only know of the super hero "Daredevil" from the Ben Affleck movie a few years ago (or not at all), then the video embedded below is probably not for you. But Daredevil was one of my all-time favorite Marvel characters. As a teenager I faithfully bought his monthly comic book for most of the 1980s. Despite having been a big fan of the character, I thought that the theatrical version of the 2003 film, which had been heavily edited, was jarringly choppy and borderline unwatchable, even though it starred Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, and Michael Clark Duncan. Colin Farrell stole the film, flawed as it was, however, with a standout performance as the villain Bullseye.

Daredevil - The Director's Cut [Blu-ray]is a half hour longer (having restored the footage previously cut), and was a surprisingly vast improvement on the mediocre theatrical release. But here's where the video embedded below comes in. The film's script was actually a condensation of a seminal storyline from the comic book, when it was written and drawn by a young Frank Miller at the start of the 1980s. The story he told in the comic, which involved Daredevil's romance with the super-assassin Elektra and her eventual violent death at the hands of the villain Bullseye, catapulted "Daredevil" from an also-ran comic book to a premier title. It also made Frank Miller a star in the world of comic books in his early 20s.

He built on that success in 1986 with the release of the four issue "graphic novel" Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which catapulted the character Batman back into the broader popular culture. It also led directly to the 1989 Tim Burton film (and the ensuing "Batmania" which swept the nation that summer), and made Frank Miller the most famous comic book creator in the "real world" since Stan Lee. The subsequent success of the movie versions of his "Sin City" and "300" comic books in recent years only further cemented this status.

Anyway, in the 11 minute video embedded below, Frank Miller discusses in detail his run on the "Daredevil" comic book in the 1980s and his conceptualization of the character that underpinned that run. It's more nuanced than you might think. If you ever read Daredevil: Born Again, another string of "Daredevil" issues also written by Frank Miller in 1986, you may find this particularly insightful. But even if you haven't, if you watch this video and Frank Miller's discussion in it of the impact of the character's Catholic heritage, the mythological background of the Elektra character, and the metaphorical underpinnings of her brutal murder, and then flip your eyes back up to that movie poster above with Ben Affleck unconvincingly posed in a red leather bondage outfit, you'll immediately understand why that movie failed.

Canary in the Coal Mine

I have been traveling for the last several days, during which I passed through four different US airports in three states, including two of the nation's busiest (LAX and DFW). Whenever I passed a newsstand I checked to see if they sold any comic books. I walked into several in each airport. And not one sold any comic books at all. Not one.

The writing seems to be on the wall for the comic book industry, which is all the more painful given that super hero characters like Spider-Man and Batman are probably more popular worldwide today than ever before (albeit in other media).

What Disney's Purchase Of Marvel Says About The Future Of Comic Books

The Walt Disney Co. announced Monday that it has agreed to purchase comic book and film company Marvel Entertainment for about $4 billion. The deal is valued at $50 per Marvel share, which represents a more than a 29% premium to Friday's closing share price.

The myriad of press accounts about, and analyst reports on, this proposed deal published over the last two days unintentionally provide compelling insight into the future (or lack thereof) of comic book publishing. Almost without exception they have noted, with caution, that Marvel already has a myriad of long-term deals in place with movie, merchandising and theme park partners (including Paramount for movie distribution, Universal for theme parks, and Hasbro for toys), that will take years to run their course before Disney will be able to realize the full benefits of this acquisition. They've also all noted that Marvel owns the rights to over 5,000 popular super-hero characters, including Spider-Man, the X-Men and Iron Man.

I've not read a single account that mentions anything at all about comic book publishing, in any way.

Comic Books' Anemic Sales These Days

You may be surprised to learn how few copies of super-hero comic books are sold each month.

The news has been peppered for over a year with stories of periodic newspaper closures, media consolidations and famous magazines like "Newsweek" going exclusively online. But with this summer's "Transformers" movie about to break $400 million in ticket sales in the United States alone this summer, and "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" having grossed $350 million worldwide to date, you'd be forgiven for thinking that comic books must be bucking this insidious trend of decreasing circulation figures.

Not so, unfortunately. Sales figures for June 2009 were just released by Diamond Comics Distributors, and the "Transformers" movie adaptation sold a mere 10,400 copies. "Amazing Spider-Man" sold only 61,000 copies. "Wolverine" sold 66,000 and the X-Men's flagship comic book, "Uncanny X-Men" sold 76,000 copies. The top selling comic book in June was "Batman and Robin," which sold 168,500 copies, one of only two comics to break 100,000 in sales.

By comparison, as recently as the mid-1990s, the top selling comic books, including X-Men and Spider-Man, would regularly sell over 1 million copies each month.

People Magazine Article Today About Comic-Con

"People" magazine has published an article today about the San Diego Comic-Con held last weekend.

It says a lot about the cost of the popular success Comic-Con has enjoyed in recent years, however, that the article is titled, "Comic-Con Round Up: Where Megan Fox, Daughtry and Anna Paquin Partied!" And that it never once mentions comic books.

That's Chris Daughtry and Megan Fox "partying" together at left, by the way. No doubt also sharing their equally genuine love of comic books. (Where are you trying to stick that replica light saber in your left hand, Megan?)

"The Funk" At Comic-Con

The biggest comic book convention in the world starts today in California, "Comic-Con International: San Diego." This is the convention's 40th year now. It has become a well-known event in recent years, even among the general public, and an important centerpiece of the City of San Diego's annual civic calendar. Tickets for the four-day convention now sell out months in advance and are highly prized, as are nearby hotel rooms.

What is less well known about it, however, is "The Funk."

What is The Funk? Well, "The Funk" is a smell. An odor, really, and an overpowering one at that. It's a terrible rolling fog of concentrated body odor. Like the bottom of a high school gym locker. But unlike most teenagers who eat fairly well balanced meals at home under parental supervision, this odor also betrays a fearsome collective ill health: bad diets of fast food, perpetual under-hydration and more than a hint of "spice" derived from chronic halitosis.

The Funk comes from packing thousands and thousands of comic books fans and D&D players, whose collective hygene is suspect at the best of times, into one large room for an entire day. As the day goes on, and as the convention fills up with its over 30,000 daily attendees, the big hall becomes hotter and hotter, to the point where even the industrial air conditioning can no longer fully compensate. Fans, many of them heavy-set, begin to sweat ever more profusely into their hawaiian shirts and trench coats and Bobba Fett costumes, as the temperature rises and as all the walking around the Con carrying bags of new purchases takes its toll.

Then in the early afternoon, maybe you step outside to get some lunch or a drink or whatever. When you return an hour or so later and push open the doors to the convention hall: pow, that's when The Funk hits you square in the face. Maybe you actually recoil, a little staggered. But then in an instant you steel yourself and thrust back into the hall for more "fun."

That's Comic-Con.