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Titmouse's first feature film project promises strong bloody violence, drugs, nudity, and puckered anuses.

The post Titmouse Reveals Teaser for Adult Feature ‘Nerdland’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The voice cast for the film includes Paul Rudd, Patton Oswalt, Mike Judge, Brendon Small, and Jackson Publick.

Three fame-chasing, selfie-loving bears are coming to Cartoon Network.

A teaser trailer for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 2 was unveiled this weekend at a Comic-Con International panel.

The video embedded above features Patton Oswalt doing double duty as Agent Billy Koenig and Agent Sam Koenig while overseeing a “security orientation.”

Entertainmeny Weekly reports the upcoming season will introduce several new characters including Barbara Morse a.k.a. Mockingbird, Isabelle Hartley, Lance Hunter, and Daniel Whitehall a.k.a. Kraken.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Actor and author Patton Oswalt made a guest appearance on NBC’s Parks and Recreation. During taping, he delivered a sprawling speech outlining his ideas for a new Star Wars movie.

Although the speech mostly got cut, you can watch the complete recording in the video embedded above–a hilarious and awe-inspiring eight-minute fan fiction sermon delivered in a single cut.

Oswalt is the author of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You folks have been awfully good about my recent shoddy blogging, so I tip my hat in your general direction.  Jules of 7-Imp and I are putting the final touches on our book for Candlewick editing-wise and, as you might imagine, it eats up large swaths of time like an irate and hungry badger.  There is no situation in which a badger cannot be used as an example.  True fact.

In other news, there’s an author/illustrator out there that I happen to like very much.  His name is Aaron Zenz and over the years he has startled me time and again with the relative brilliance of his creativity.  If he wasn’t making multiple inspired pieces for the Re-Seussification Project then his kids were contributing to the stellar Boogie Woogie blog.  Well, Aaron and Co. are some of my favorite folks so when I saw the Friends of Zenz page asking to help ‘em out in the midst of some pretty upsetting surgery, you can bet I jumped on board.  If you’ve a minute, you can too.  They’re swell folks.

So I got to meet J.K. Rowling the other day.  Yup.  The woman who basically set me on the path of children’s librarianship in the first place via her books and I up and met her.  You see the good Dan Blank had tickets and one of those tickets happened to have my name on it.  So I got to see her speak with Ann Patchett about this adult novel of hers The Casual Vacancy (a title I’m certain she stole from the notes of Lemony Snicket) and then I stood in a long line and got my copy signed.  The conversation between us is as follows:

J.K. Rowling: Thanks for coming.

Betsy Bird:  Guh.

Many thanks to Dan for the opportunity.  He’s blogged about the experience here and just so you writer folks know, he’s doing another session of his author platform course starting Oct 31, with a free webinar. The course features Jane Friedman, Richard Nash, Colleen Lindsay, Kathleen Schmidt, Joanna Penn and Jeff Goins as guest speakers.  Info on the session is here and the webinar is here.

“COMIC LEGEND: There was a Winnie the Pooh comic strip where the characters acted a lot more aggressively than most Winnie the Pooh fans are used to.

STATUS: True”

Thus we find the strangest and maybe most engaging link of the day.  Apparently there was a Winnie-the-Pooh syndicated comic strip out there for a while that contained the Disneyfied Pooh and friends.  And apparently it was written by some seriously odd souls.  How else to explain some of these downright weird inclusions?  Comic Book Legends Revealed explains more (you’ll have to scroll down a little but they’re worth finding).  This one’s my favorite:

Wowzah.

And speaking of bears . . . how do you get kids interested in the political process?  Have ‘em vote for bears, of course!  The West Linn Public Library had an inspired idea.  They’re holding a bear election through election day on November 6 and, as they explained it to me:

“inviting kids (and adults) to vote for their favorite bear from children’s literature: Pooh, Paddington, Mama Berenstain, or Corduroy. We have also gotten staff involved by asking them to volunteer to be bear campaign managers. The response from staff and patrons has been tremendous! Our campaign managers have embraced their roles beyond my wildest dreams by designing posters, stickers, bookmarks, and games to support their bear.We are having so much fun that I thought I would share with other libraries. I have even created a campaign video for my candidate, Mama Bear—here is that link: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=vb.153513568034372&type=2“  Love it!  I suppose I’m a staunch Pooh supporter thanks to my job, but it’s tough.  Paddington comes in at a close second in my heart.

Okay, let’s do the Me Stuff all in one fell swoop today.  First off, I made a reading list for NYC’s New Victory Theater to accompany their upcoming shows.  Check it out here.  I never properly thanked Miss Kathleen at Mental Floss for including me in the 24 Library-Centric Sites We Love round-up, to say nothing of the compliments regarding my video with Travis Jonker. Thanks to Maureen Petry for the links!  I’m speaking at a Joan Aiken event tonight so enjoy this piece written by Lizza Aiken, Joan’s daughter, entitled Voices: The magical mysteries of children’s literature.  I was interviewed at the blog The Children’s Book Review as part of their ongoing librarian series.  And the Children’s Media Association blog gave me what could well be the most flattering spotlight I’ve received in my long internet life. Whew!

There was a Bibliography-Off between Judy Blume and one of my favorite comics Patton Oswalt not long ago.  As Jezebel described it, “The only thing that could really be better than this (for a Sunday, anyway) is if Calvin and Hobbes were real and they spoke at a TED Talk about the vividness of a small child’s imagination.” I just wish S.E. Hinton had heeded Patton’s call to give him a hand.  She’s on Twitter all the time, y’know.  Thanks to Marjorie Ingall for the link!

Maybe you can’t see Phil Nel speaking in my library tomorrow about Crockett Johnson.  If not, here’s the next best thing.

Comedian Patton Oswalt delivered an inspiring keynote at last week’s Just For Laughs Comedy Conference in Montreal. He presented it in the form of two open letters—one addressed to “all the comedians in the room”, the second to “all of the gatekeepers” of the comedy business. Read both of them on TheComicsComic.com.

In the past, I’ve pointed out that artists in different fields often deal with similar sets of issues, especially on the business side. Oswalt’s advice drives that point home; his perspective is applicable not just to comedians, but to almost anyone working in a creative field, including animation creators.

In his letter to comedians, Oswalt implores artists to stop waiting for executives to give them opportunities because the dynamics of today’s entertainment industry favor those who create their own opportunities. Some choice excerpts:

I was lucky enough to get hired onto King of Queens in 1998. I had nine years on that show. Money, great cast, even better writers, a lot of fun. I bought a house. Then I was lucky enough to get cast as a lead voice in a Pixar movie in 2007. Acclaim, money, I got to meet a lot of my heroes. Then I was lucky enough to get cast on The United States of Tara on Showtime. I got to watch Toni Collette work. I got to perform Diablo Cody’s writing. After which, I was lucky enough to get cast in Young Adult, which is where I got to make out with Charlize Theron. I will use that as an icebreaker if I ever meet Christina Ricci.

I’ve been lucky enough to be given specials on HBO, Comedy Central, and Showtime. As well as I’ve been lucky enough to release records on major labels, and I was lucky they approached me to do it. And that led to me being lucky enough to get Grammy nominations.

I know that sounds like a huge ego-stroking credit dump. But if you listened very carefully, you would have heard two words over and over again: “lucky” and “given.” Those are two very very dangerous words for a comedian. Those two words can put you to sleep, especially once you get a taste of both being “lucky” and being “given.” The days about luck and being given are about to end. They’re about to go away.

What I mean is: Not being lucky and not being given are no longer going to define your career as a comedian and as an artist.

In the middle of the TV shows and the albums and the specials, I took a big chunk of my money and invested it in a little tour called The Comedians of Comedy. I put it together with my friends, we did small clubs, stayed in shitty hotel rooms, packed ourselves in a tiny van and drove it around the country. The tour was filmed for a very low-budget documentary that I convinced Netflix to release. That became a low-budget show on Comedy Central that we all still own a part of, me and the comedians. That led to a low budget concert film that we put on DVD.

At the end of it, I was exhausted, I was in debt, and I wound up with a wider fanbase of the kind of people I always dreamed of having as fans. And I built that from the ground up, friends and people I respected and was a fan of.

I need to decide more career stuff for myself and make it happen for myself, and I need to stop waiting to luck out and be given. I need to unlearn those muscles.

To the “gatekeepers”, he offers another message: Your job is to discover, patronize, support, nurture and broadcast material. It’s not to create. Leave that up to the artists or they’r

Things that I have difficulty understanding: The rules of soccer.  How to work an f-stop on a camera (or what it even means).  The French language.  The fact that actors Patton Oswalt and Tunde Adebimpe appear to be in a movie that is filming right now and is going by the title . . . The Seven Chinese Brothers.  That brings to mind the Margaret Mahy version, not to mention the controversial Claire Huchet Bishop one (though that story had only five brothers in it). Actually, Ms. Bishop used to work in my children’s room (though when folks ask we usually mention the fact that Marcia Brown worked here first).  The internet is curiously mum about this Patton/Adebimpe project so . . . we’ll just assume that it’s another picture book to screen adaptation.  It gives my existence just the right dose of insanity I crave on a daily basis.

• By the way, if you’re still a little fuzzy on who that Patton Oswalt fellow is, (A) He was the voice of Ratatouille and (B) I just stumbled on his commencement speech given when he returned to his high school and it is precisely what I needed to read right now.

• New Blog Alert:  Hardly counts if they’re famous, right?  Aw, heck.  Even famous editors need their plugs!  Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure to inform you that the great Arthur A. Levine, editor of the very Harry Potter books themselves and the man who helped to add the term Muggle to the American lexicon, is blogging.  Granted, he has only a single solitary post up at the moment, but I anticipate great things for young Mr. Levine.  Not that he doesn’t have a tough act to follow.  His right hand, Cheryl Klein, has been mastering the form for years (there’s a new The Year of Secret Assignments cover?!!!)

• Hey!  When I reviewed The Strange Case of Origami Yoda the other day I had no idea that it owed its birth to a BoingBoing piece.  BoingBoing apparently just got alerted to that fact too.  They seem grateful (though a BoingBoing review wouldn’t be out of place as well).

• I love it when a plan comes together.  Or, to be more precise, I love it when folks I like decide to make books together.  Folks that I like include author Laini Taylor and editor Alvina Ling.  I have liked Laini’s work ever since I read her fantastic The Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer (now known merely as Blackbringer).  I have liked Alvina’s work ever since I read The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin.  I have liked the two of them from
  7 Comments on Fusenews: King Friday the XIII gave the rehearsal dinner speech, last added: 6/24/2010
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  Lisa Yee said, on 6/23/2010 1:31:00 AM
  

  OMG, LOVE those stuffed animals!!!

  Constance said, on 6/23/2010 5:02:00 AM
  

  I started to work my way through the Top 100 Children’s Novels Poll too, and read the Watsons Go to Birmingham and two others. I will probably continue at some point but there were already so many books on my floor that needed attention! Still, it would make me and many others happy if you read Ballet Shoes…

  Diandra (Dee) Mae said, on 6/23/2010 5:16:00 AM
  

  Mrs. Mimi, teacher and authoress extraordinaire, is also working her way through your top 100 picture books, the Top 100 novels and the Top 50 multicultural books. She’s calling it her 2010 Reading Extravaganza. She’s pretty witty! (http://itsnotallflowersandsausages.blogspot.com/)

  I’m really curious how the heck Patton Oswalt could possibly fit in with the Seven Chinese Brothers.

  Cynthia von Buhler said, on 6/23/2010 9:06:00 AM
  

  You are one of the most interesting people I know too.

  These are adorable. I have made characters like this from cat fur and lint. I have plenty of cat fur (on couches, clothing and under beds) to work with.

  Cheers, Cynthia

  Heidi Rahlmann Plumb said, on 6/23/2010 3:13:00 PM
  

  I stumbled upon your blog a couple months back looking for Graphic Novel reviews so that I could find more to feed my nine year old son’s voracious appetite for them. What a find you are!! Thank you thank you thank you. The Fadeeva photos made me think of The Saga of Gray and Nameless which I thought you might enjoy.

  http://www.facebook.com/grayandnameless

  Arthur Levine said, on 6/23/2010 6:33:00 PM
  

  Thanks for the support Betsy!!!

  Maggi (Mama Librarian) said, on 6/24/2010 7:01:00 AM
  

  I have seven more to read on the top 100 novel list, though I haven’t read many of them since library school or before. Ballet Shoes is in my iPod.

  Thank you for pointing out The Philharmonic Gets Dressed. My son is obsessed with the instruments of the orchestra.

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