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Tuesday – Documenting Stan, Clichéd News Coverage, Two Thousand iPhone Comics And Defending Crumb Badly

The in-the-works documentary on the life of Stan Lee apparently needs interns according to this Craigslist ad which describes the film as having interviews with everyone from Dick Ayers to Ringo Starr,

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The Guardian gets retro, covering the ComICA and Robert Crumb's Genesis with this headline "Pow! Comic-strip heroes fight against corruption" and the first paragraph "It is a comic book collection without a cape, dodgy mask or death ray in sight. There are, though, plenty of baddies." Thank you Guardian arts correspondent Mark Brown for taking us back in time a decade or two or three or four…

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Yesterday, Platinum sent out a press release that FOX 21 had optioned Gunplay from Platinum Studios – the winning comic in their 2007 talent competition, that saw print in 2008.

More intriguingly is that the press release chose not to mention the creators, Jorge Vega, Dominic Vivona or Neil Ruffino, despite the actual comic being called Jorge Vivona's Gunplay. It was more interested in talking about Glen Morgan, of X-Files, Final Destination and Final Destination 3 being attached to write the screenplay, tell us that Gunplay is the story of a ghost of a Buffalo Soldier who must kill once a day, and boast of Platinum's back catalogue of thousands of characters and that they are "the only rights holder to a library of comic book material of comparable scope and size independent of major entertainment studio affiliation. "

I wonder why. Thankfully most news sources chose to actually find out who created the comic before reporting the story.

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Now India get iPhone comics, with Tata DOCOMO selling two thousand titles for up to 20 rupees (40 cents) including Disney titles such as Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and Princess Diaries. With the Disney connection, this could be a very cheap way to get Marvel comics. If, you know, you can read Hindi.

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A suspected burglar trying to sell stolen Dungeons & Dragons's books to All American Cards and Comics last week was held and arrested as store owner Greg Bartholomew was the victim, Gib Franks, Dungeonmaster in the once-popular role-playing game. I don't know enoigh to make obvious jokes about points, dice, goblins whatever, can someone help me out here?

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Pro8news report that people like to read comics. Seriously, apparently this is a news item. I know.

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I hear reports that Joe Madueria is in Italy, persuading people that, yes, his Darksiders video game will be coming out on time.

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Oh and Kieron Gillen gives Den Of Geek the scoop on his new Avatar title, Heat, the wee fucker. Proof that being owned by Avatar doesn't give me any decent scoops…

The most important thing, is that it's a cop drama on Mercury. It's the idea that, especially after Obama got in, people seemed to be thinking about the future again, the idea that we're going to have a future. So a lot of the problems that we have today, are not problems in this particular world. Specifically, environmentalism becomes very important, as in Environmentalism is actually very close to what religion is now, but they still have this energy need. So what they've ended up doing is solar panels on Mercury. And Earth is kind of like a lived-in Utopia, but Mercury is a bit harsher, kind of the new Wild West. And the lead character is one of these cops, who goes to Mercury, and has to deal with crime there. Of course, The Heat. So the focus is both on Mercury, because it's very, very hot, and the police.

One of the inspirations for it was… Whiteout! Not the film but the actual comic. Whiteout is fantastic because it takes a police procedural and then applies it to an unusual environment. And the environment becomes a character. I basically wanted to do the idea of 'what would it be like to fight crime on Mercury?'. But Mercury's incredible, one side melts lead, the other side freezes oxygen. These are incredible differences, how would you police it? In fact, how would the power plant work? How would the people live? How would the energy get back to earth? Mercury is very small, and it rotates very slowly. A Mercury day is about 88 Earth days long. It actually only rotates at around 10km/hr, in other words it rotates less than running speed. On Mercury, you can out-run the dawn. And that's pretty much the opening scene, of somebody trying to out-run the dawn. And of course, you can out-run the dawn – just not for long. And that's my noir-esque start of it. And the environment characterises and changes everything.

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More people rush to say how horrible they find Robert Crumb's work, yet how important it is to be exhibited and studied. Anyone spot any university student or expert saying they actually like Crumb's work? Seriously, if any hack out there wants to run a piece where someone says they actually like to read Crumb, yes even his odder stuff, I'm right here.

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