Category: Entertainment

Posted on
by

Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars

Let me just say that the upcoming Farscape miniseries looks incredible. They ran a trailer they had just finished — not the one that’s just started airing, but one they’ll start showing later on — and it looks like it may be the most intense four hours of Farscape ever. They’re very cagey about the actual plot, but the clips show a level of danger, action, and drama at least equal to Farscape at its best.

The stated goal is to “bring this chapter of Farscape to a close” — to tie up the major dangling storylines and leave things open for other miniseries, feature films, comics, spinoffs, etc. Who will be around by the end is unclear, but it’s clearly going to be a heck of a ride.

They opened the floor for questions from the audience, and let me just say, hilarity ensued. I’d never seen any of this group at a convention before, but when anything funny comes up, David Kemper, Claudia Black, and Ben Browder just run with it. (Edit: quotes are now available.)
Continue reading →

Posted on
by

[MirrorMask Logo]Yesterday I mentioned the MirrorMask panel at Comic Con. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean were both there to talk about the movie and play a trailer-like clip they had put together the night before.

MirrorMask came about when Sony noticed that while Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal didn’t do very well in theaters, over the years they’ve become strong, steady sellers in the home video market. So they went to the Jim Henson company and asked if they could do a fantasy film in the same vein, on a budget. So Lisa Henson called up Neil Gaiman by way of asking for Dave McKean, and explained the situation: They only had a $4 million budget, but they wouldn’t have any studio interference. They went on to say they knew they couldn’t afford Neil to write the screenplay, but could he at least come up with a story, at which point he said (Edit: corrected quote) “If Dave’s directing it, I’m writing it.” Continue reading →

Posted on
by

We accidentally went to Comic Con on Thursday. The plan was just to pick up our badges that afternoon, but there was a panel on balancing action and character development with some really big-name authors – Robert Jordan, Peter David, Raymond Feist, etc. (The basic lessons: let combat grow out of the characters’ actions instead of tossing it in, and be aware that combat is confusing. Focus on individual characters as much as possible, rather than trying to present a long view. Quotes here.) So we stayed, I got massively dehydrated, and we spent the next hour slowly drinking water and recovering. We ended up running into a group from the UCI RPG club and just stayed around and talked for a while before we headed off to dinner.

Neither of us had ever been to Comic Con on a day other than Saturday, and my experience with conventions tends to be that Thursdays are very light. Not so! Continue reading →

Posted on
by

I’m beginning to think I should recommend convention-going as a good form of exercise. At this size convention, anyway. Not only do you get winded just traveling between panels (which comes standard at just about every con I’ve been to, since they all go overtime and the next one you want is always at the opposite end of the place), but there’s the opportunity for climbing multiple flights of stairs, the walk to and from your car is a great hike, and the food at the convention center is expensive enough to keep your caloric intake down. Also, the dealers’ room is sort of like an Olympic-sized crowd-weaving practice ground. Fun if you’re me, not so fun if you’re trying to follow me.

The other thing about cons that makes me want to exercise is seeing how the medians of the demographics play out. You have the younger contingent, who are mostly good-looking and relatively thin. You have the really old people, who are using hand-carved canes and usually there because they’re connected with actually producing something, and who are generally moving pretty well. Then you have two basic groups of middle-aged fans: the ones who are really skinny and nerdy-looking still, and the ones who put the “middle” in “middle-aged.” It’s wonderful motivation to lose weight when you see a forty-year-old Arwen on a Lark. (Please understand that I’m not trying for a cheap shot. I consider myself lucky that I’m able to lose weight when I want to, and I wish everybody were that fortunate. It’s just kind of heartbreaking in a weird empathetic way.)

So I’ve been on a real veggie kick the last couple of days, and I only just figured out what was up with that this afternoon at Subway. (Found out they’ll give you spinach on your sandwich if you ask nicely. Score!) And all things considered, it could be worse. I could be on a steak kick in the middle of India.

Posted on
by

Day 1. Hotel room contains two queen beds, each with the usual number and placement of pillows. Pillows are highly inadequate. We grab the pillows from the other bed and double-layer them. All is good. *sleep*

Day 2. The pillows from the unused bed are stacked on the side of the bed we slept in. We laugh, and move the pillows atop the other set. *sleep*

Day 3. The bed is made… with the pillows already double-stacked! (They’re learning!)

Posted on
by

Well, we made it to San Diego, and if you’re reading this, we managed to scrounge up an Internet connection. The drive down was fairly uneventful, and we arrived too late to do much sightseeing, but we still managed to find some interesting sights.

For example, when we walked into our hotel room, we found a pizza flyer shoved under the door, and the following stand-up card on our table:

[Long card all about how illegal garage pizzaa parlors are pushing fliers under doors and you should rely on the hotel to choose your pizza place]

OK, so they have deals with some places, but come on! Garage operations with “unsafe” pizza?! I suppose it’s possible, though.

For those Babylon 5 fans, here’s an excerpt from the dining guide:

[Ad for the Zocalo Grill]

And we encountered another relative of Boba and Jango Fett at dinner:

[Part of a receipt indicating Medit Fett]

While driving back to the hotel, we missed a turn and ended up driving through the seedier part of town (we passed no less than three nudie bars). We also spotted a restaurant calling itself “Extreme Pizza” (which might explain the card in our room) and a movie theater with an interesting cross-section of Hollywood:

  • Hellboy
  • Kill Bill
  • Passion of the Christ

Sadly, we didn’t have a chance to capture either on fil– uh, pixels.

Posted on
by

Support The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: 1-800-99-CBLDFYou might think nothing of going down to the store and picking up a comic book, but there are people out there who want to limit your choices to books aimed at 10-year-olds. (Admittedly, there aren’t enough books aimed at 10-year-olds right now, but that’s another rant). Imagine if all movies were G-rated. Because, after all, everyone knows, movies are just for kids, right?

There was a time when all comics had to be approved by the Comics Code Authority, because in the 1950s, comics were the trendy scapegoat for juvenile delinquency (much as video games are often blamed today). While writers and artists of the day managed to produce classics within those constraints, one can only imagine what the world missed out on that it wouldn’t see until publishers began to risk non-code books in the 1980s. The now-classic Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing, for instance, or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, could never have been produced under the limits of the Comics Code, even under its current incarnation. (Back to movies briefly: did you know that It’s a Wonderful Life broke the rules of the motion picture code? Mr. Potter may have failed to take over the Savings and Loan, but he was never punished for his misdeeds — a requirement under the film codes of the time!)

Even now, there are people who want to keep everything “safe” and innocuous — for everyone, adults as well as kids. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression in comics from this sort of attack. They’ve defended writers, artists, even retailers over the past 15 years.

So if you like books like Fables or Powers, or books like 100 Bullets or Y, The Last Man — check out the CBLDF. Read what they do, and why. Consider joining, or making a donation, or just buying a T-shirt. And if you’re going to San Diego for Comic-Con International this weekend, drop by their booth and see what’s going on.

ยปAll pages site-wide with this tag