Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 |
Warren Ellis’ first novel, Crooked Little Vein, is coming out in August. The advanced praise is in, the ads have been created and I have my copy pre-ordered.
A couple of things about this ad:
1) It’s hard for me to remember a time when I was this excited for the release of a book. This is how Harry Potter people feel, why they gather at Barnes & Noble at midnight.
2) “The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep” — I wanted that nickname. Damn it.
3) When William Gibson says you’re scaring him you should be careful. You’re likely to try jumping off buildings and taking flight next.
4) Getting Joss Whedon to do a blurb on the back of your book — especially as breathless a blurb as this — is brilliant. Those Whedon fans are many and rabid. If a quarter of them get interested enough to pick up the book you’ve done well.
5) I’m really interested in the crossover of comics fans and fans of novels. When best selling thriller writer Brad Meltzer began writing the Justice League comic there was definite interest because of his novelist pedigree. But they also ran pieces of his next novel, The Book of Fate, in the back of one of the issues. When the book was released it became his first #1 New York Times best seller and he credited that, at least partially, to support from the comics community.
Neil Gaiman has certainly parlayed his comics career into a successful career as a novelist, though you could argue he was writing prose well before he was writing comics. Greg Rucka went from being a thriller novelist to the Eisner Award winning comics scribe who created Queen & Country and the gritty Gotham Central.
With the success of recent comics movies the studios are giving non-superhero works a go from Sin City and 300 to Brian K. Vaughan now writing the screenplay for a big screen adaptation of his Y: The Last Man.
It’s an interesting time to be a comics fan — and an even more interesting time to be a comics writer.
Posted in Books, Business, Writers | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 |
Will Eisner certainly went a long way toward creating the modern vocabulary of graphic storytelling - and The Spirit is a big part of that.
But it’s always been a little hard for me to get into The Spirit (no pun intended). As a character he’s sort of mercurial and ill-defined and some of the original stuff (or art, anyway) has aged so badly that it seems racist and primitive in a way that isn’t good or even interesting. As a cultural artifact the Spirit collection I have is interesting…but it isn’t my idea of good reading.
The concept might make a good movie though - and I’d trust Frank Miller to pull it off.
Posted in Books, Movies | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 |
Planetwide Games has introduced Marvel Heroes Comic Book Creator. Using your own digital images, you can create your own comic books.
Three hundred templates, customization including fonts and colors and effects and features, such as animation and audio.
You can save your finished work to .pdf or share it online.
There are action packs (Marvel Heroes being one) that let you theme your masterpiece. Theme’s such as Nacho Libre, a movie I haven’t seen yet, but based on the previews, I rated V for video.
Posted in Books, Games | 1 Comment »
Saturday, November 4th, 2006 |
Pop + Politics does an interview with Orlando Harding, an Arizona social worker who’s making waves with his character Pariah, who falls from Heaven to, of all places, Oakland, Calif.
Naked.
Needless, to say, the brotha ain’t to popular with the police. Or anyone else. He’s in a battle between heaven and hell while on Earth, very similar to the dilemma faced by Spawn.
Harding is publisher of Revolution Comics. He toiled away until a San Francisco Chronicle article put him on the map. He’s now working on edition number four and trying to get a movie deal — sending some books to Stephen Speilberg. “If I’m gonna get turned down, I may as well get turned down by the best,” Harding says.
Posted in Books | No Comments »
Friday, October 27th, 2006 |
The Hellboy animated movie Sword of Storms will be premiering on the Cartoon Network Saturday at 9:30 ET.
It’s supposed to be closer in tone to the Hellboy comic from Dark Horse than the movie from a few years ago. Fans of both should tune in.
Check out the movie’s online production diary here.
Audio interview with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola here.
Posted in Books, Movies | No Comments »
