“Dogs and cats, living together!” – that’s what immediately popped into my mind yesterday when I read Tony Isabella praising DC on Facebook for how it was treating him in regard to Black Lightning.I’ve never seen the original contract between DC and Isabella in regard to Black Lightning so I have nothing to say of substance in regard to the property’s legal status, but as anyone who has followed Tony’s online writing over the years can tell you, Isabella’s statements about DC’s treatment of him and his landmark creation have not exactly been complimentary. That changed, however, yesterday, when Isabella called attention to an Amazon listing of the April 2016 release of Black Lightning, volume 1, the first of what could be a series of collections featuring DC’s first African-American superhero to star in an an eponymous book.
According to Isabella, the rapprochement is the result of outreach by Dan Didio and Geoff Johns, and Isabella is confident that DC will treat him fairly in regard to the payment of royalties. He also raised the possibility of doing more work for DC given sufficient reader demand; the prospect of Isabella working with, say, the creators of the revived Milestone line on a multi-generational crossover is particularly intriguing, given certain thematic resonances with Milestone’s nuanced reflections on creative identity.
To say that Isabella’s announcement is the most unexpected Facebook post of the year is an understatement — it’s one of the most dramatic turnarounds I’ve seen in decades of reading about comics-related disputes, and kudos to all involved for bringing about what I hope will be a truly lasting peace in our time.
I actually don’t remember the day I started this blog—it was June or July somethingth 2004- so I’ve arbitrarily decided today will henceforth be The Beat’s anniversary. Ten long years of late nights, sleeping five hours, web crashes, Vietnamese Instant Coffee, Amon Tobin, Luke Vibert, Vitalic, Tipsy, Mahler, Stravinsky and Amy Winehouse. Ten years of stopping whatever else I was doing at some point to say “I gotta do The Beat now.” Ten years of watching the graphic novel industry grow, 10 years of a new golden age of comics, the rise and fall of manga, the rise and rise of comic book movies and TV shows, firings, hirings, 10 days that shook the world. Ten years of the internet changing every week or minute. When I began there was no Tumblr, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Youtube, no smart phones. People were so starved for entertainment that they actually read websites run by one person in their pajamas.
This is the third and final home for The Beat. Originally it was party of the Pulse, which was part of comicon.com, a site now little spoken of, but in its day it was an exemplar of the kind of smart, current writing about comics that only the internet could provide. IN honor of its origins, I’ve changed the background color to the original Beat background, JUST FOR THIS ANNIVERSARY WEEK THOUGH, so please enjoy it, take snapshots, and so on. The Beat was a persona I developed at The Pulse, first for a weekly column, and eventually a blog. It was the early days of blogging and everyone thought it was the future of journalism. In reality, it wasn’t even the future of writing about what you had for lunch.
The Beat is actually more like 12 years old, if you go by the column that started it, but I forgot to celebrate two years ago, so here we are. I did dig up two pieces about San Diego from The Pulse days that kind of observed and classified a lot of how the rest of the decade would go. Part one here and part two, with my favorite headline of all times, “The Cromlech’s Secret.” What did a cromlech have to go with Comic-Con? I’m not sure any more, but back then you got to be really self indulgent.
In 2006 the Beat left Comicon for Publishers Weekly, where despite having the highest traffic it ever achieved, I couldn’t get a single person in the IT department to lift a finger to fix the many issues that had come up with the database. I wrote all about that here. (I didn’t write the postcript though, which was that after fighting tooth and nail with one particularly annoying web person at Reed who said she didn’t support WordPress sites, she ended up getting a new job where she converted a website to a ton of blogs using the very same template I used for The Beat. Why am I always right about these things?)
Both of the previous iterations of The Beat had been done in by web admins who just didn’t take or didn’t have the time to fix things when they went wrong. When I took the site back myself, I resolved to learn how to do basic maintenance myself (with the help of Media Temple’s always polite techs and my developer Ryan Dickey and his partner Ron Croudy.) And thus I’ve entered the door to a happy world where just this weekend I updated WordPress, made a sitewide backup, crashed my server entirely for about an hour, discovered the error log was getting out of control, and repaired a broken table in mySQL to stop the error messages. I’m lovin’ it.
In this day and age it’s pretty crazy for one person to try and run a news site all by her or himself. It’s still only a part time job for me, but one that takes up a lot of my waking time, and has given me more satisfaction and amusement and opportunities than any other job I’ve had. I’ve had some other great writers and columnists who have added immeasurably to The Beat Experience, and more to come, but it’s still mostly my site. Despite the absurdity of a one-woman shop, The Beat is still in the top 10 comics news sites, and to be honest that still boggles my mind. That there are more than ten comics news sites, that is.
It takes an insane amount of work to keep going, though. Luckily I like to stay busy.
The other day at HeroesCon I was on a panel with Tom Spurgeon (who started Comics Reporter a few months after The Beat started), Chris Sims and Tom Heintjes talking about “comics journalism” or whatever. I said that in todays climate, in a time of increased competition, I had to be less self-indulgent, which sort of surprised Tom, I think. But it’s true. I wish I could just post nonsense about Clive Owen and dear, dear Gerard Butler all day (two early fixations of the site, the Hiddleston/Cumberbatch of their day, a personal touch that no one would go for today) but there are a dozen tumblrs and TMZ/Buzzfeed rip-offs to do that. You know how at the end of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lo says “I wish that we’ll be in the desert together again”? Sometimes I wish I could just be in the cloud with Old Yeller dog food again.
Everything changes. I think it’s more important than ever to be a source for accurate information about the industry and exposure for new comics projects, because tehre’s more meaningless crap out there, too. People complain when I cover non comics stuff, but when I started the site I covered every comic book movie WAY more than I do now. (I was digging through the 2004 pictures archives and there were hardly any comics — just endless photos of weird comics related things and movie stuff.) It’s less fun, and yet more rewarding, doing the site now because more people depend on it. With great power comes great hosting bills.
Running this site hasn’t gotten any easier since I started. The main reason is that there is so much more news of comics and comics culture to cover! Sales are up, outlets are up, schools are up, awards are up, women are up, kids are up, webcomics are up, countries that were just mucking around when I started now have actual comics cultures. Conventions have gone from 200 to 2000*. We have transmedia and motion comics now, although those can usually be ignored. We have comics on the web evolving into a new artform, tablets giving readers a new experiences, and the cloud changing the idea of ownership entirely. And Disney bought Marvel and Amazon bought Comixology. And still every day, men and increasingly women are slaving over a table with ink stained fingers, hoping to pay the rent and touch a heart or two. They don’t want to be forgotten. That’s one of the reasons I’ve fought tooth and nail to keep most of the beat archives up all these years. Other websites are lost to the sands of time, but I’ll keep this site up as long as I can physically do it. No one wants to be forgotten.
When I started this, I believed that comics were not only a “legitimate artform” but an artform of the future. Given their growth in the last ten years, I think I was right about that, too. And the best is yet to come.
Even though I sometimes wish I was back in the desert with Old Yeller**, there’s no turning back. There’s a new icon here around Stately Beat Manor.
When there’s a job to be done, it gets done.
There are hundreds of people I need to thank for helping me over the years, and I would sit here for another decade trying to think of them all. So I’ll just thank the basics: Rick Veitch and Steve Conley at The Pulse for getting me into this web thing; Calvin Reid for his unstinting support; my parents, Suzu and Philip, for all they have done for me; and Ben McCool for making me laugh. And Todd Allen, Todd Alcott, Torsten Adair, Steve Morris, Mark Coale, Bruce Lidl, Maggie Siegel-Berele, Jessica Lee, Cindy arias, Shannon O’Leary, MK Reed, Kate Fitzsimons, Zainab Akhtar, Michel Fiffe, Marc-Oliver Frisch, Rich Johnson, Paul O’Brien, Padraig O Mealoid, Henry Barajas, Matt O’Keefe, Jeffrey Gustafson, Jason Enright, David Carter, Chris Rice, Jeff Trexler, Aaron Humphrey, Amy Chu, Laura Sneddon, Serhend Siricioglu, Brett Schenker, Brandon Schatz, Joshua Rivera, Nicholas Eskey, Kate Willaert and the rest for their great writing and insights. And all my awesome advertisers, who make this possible.
And always you, dear reader. As long as they have wifi in the desert, I’ll be here.
_____________
*exaggeration
** god that sounds horrible
Dear, dear Gerard Butler fans around the world are in mourning or denial after the wide distribution of holiday beach photos of the star sporting the kind of physique that screams “THIS! IS! CHEESECAKE! AND I’M EATING IT ALL!”
The fall from his 300 form is tragic, if human. Gawker uses the occasion to lobby for male stars being held to the same standards as the ladies where a photo with a few extra pounds can end a career.
For so many years Hollywood’s leading men, even of the leading and romantic varieties, have been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair after first seducing fans with their svelte physiques. Just look at Russell Crowe, Luke Wilson, and Vince Vaughn. This was acceptable behavior, to get all big and bloated and still play men who women fawn all over in the movies. It seems like Fatty Butler is putting this to rest.
“Fatty” Butler. Why did it have to come to this? Well, it seems in recent junkets, DDGB has been chafing
chafing a bit against the harsh regime of an action star who must spend half his movie roles with no shirts (cf.
LAW ABIDING CITIZEN),
telling one interviewer,“I wanna eat my potatoes and French fries and sponge cakes. When I play a role like this, I can’t have my carbs and it makes me crazy.”
But it isn’t just his jigglypuffs that is so, so disturbing about theses photos. What the FRAK is up with those swim trunks? PINK TRUNKS??? It’s a fact that pale colors like that make you look even chubbier, DDGB! And that pattern — did you lose your luggage and make an emergency stop at K-Mart? Even that would be no excuse for these hideous togs.
BUT, it is not all bad news for Gerry. Just yesterday misdemeanor charges that he assaulted a photog were dismissed. If convicted he could have been jailed for up to six months, which would have given him lots of time to get in shape but probably would not have otherwise benefitted his career.
FINALLY, last month Gerry was nominated for Scot of the Year, which sounds good, except that the other nominees include Susan Boyle–the way DDGB’s career is going, next thing you know they’ll be starring in a rom-com.
Hm, Let’s see, FMB is in Blighty for BICS*, so maybe it’s time to sneak a peak at some…old friends.
Whatever happened to dear, dear Gerard Butler, we hear you asking? Well, aside from being linked to all kinds of Hollywood hotties, and scuffling with seniors at the dog park, he’s also starring in about seventeen movies this year.
The latest is called Law Abiding Citizen, and if the above still is to be believed, it is a welcome return to, er, form, even if he does need to buy a belt. It’s also a change of pace, he told Geoff Boucher, as he’s playing a bad guy.
He’s a crazed vigilante bent on taking down the entire legal system.
Yeah baby! Tear it down! He’s also hosting Saturday Night Live in a few weeks. Odds of a joke involving Spartans: 3-1.
And what of Clive Owen? It seems he’s talking Sin City 2. It might be starting production next year! Not that old saw again!
“I’m hearing it might be next year,” Owen told MTV News. “I heard that from a very good source… recently.”
However, Owen wouldn’t reveal where he heard the news (”Maybe one of them,” he grinned, when asked if it was Miller or Rodriguez), and he didn’t let fans’ hopes get too carried away. According to the actor, he hasn’t read a script for the film yet.
More astonishingly, Clive was also recently spotted
at FMB’s favorite bar on earth, Nevada Smiths, talking to the New Yorker. And it happened to be the one day FMB wasn’t there!!!
It was four-fifteen on a Tuesday. Owen was drinking a rum-and-coke, and he wore a black suit and a white cotton shirt, open at the collar. On the screen, his neck seems a little thick—a fullback’s physique—but in person he resembles a lean, eager midfielder.
A midfielder? Like
Ashley Young?**
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! Both Clive and Gerard were recenty spotted in the same room talking to Bono and Jon Bon Jovi!!! What could they have talked about? Maybe something like this: “I miss Heidi’s posts.” “Aye, me too.”
FINALLY: These girls have all the proof you need that Clive and Gerard are just about the SAME PERSON.
It took all our will power not to show the side-by-side comparison of DDGB and CO snogging Angelina Jolie, but for that….you must click the link.
This concludes our broadcast day.
*If you understand the phrase “FMB in Blighty for BICS” you have been reading this blog too long.
**If you get this joke, you know too much about footie.
News flooded out everywhere yesterday that Frank Miller is working on a graphic novel SEQUEL to 300, the pop culture phenomenon that added the cry “THIS IS SPARTA!” to the ranks of movie catchphrases for lunkheads. Zack Snyder wants to direct and Legendary is on board.
While exciting news for fans of digitally enhanced abdominals, this story isn’t as much of a slam dunk as it sounds. First off, didn’t everyone, like, DIE in 300?
Spinoffs of bloody actioners can prove challenging, especially when the main characters kick the bucket the first time out. Warners would surely like to cash in on “I Am Legend” again, but would have to find a way to deal with the fact that star Will Smith’s character died at the end. Producers tried to figure out how to revisit “Gladiator,” but they too were hampered by the fact that the star character, played by Russell Crowe, expired in the original. A second “Wanted” could also prove tricky for Universal given the violent deaths of so many characters.
A sequel to “Sex and the City,” by contrast, is theoretically easier to conjure on a creative level, although Warners and New Line could run into talent problems similar to the ones that delayed the original bigscreen adaptation.
Second,
Cinematical looks at
the sources of this rumor, and finds them wanting.
But honestly, I can’t believe the trades even ran this story. I mean no disrespect to Collider, as they ran it in the right context, but Variety is implying that this is on the verge of being filmed. Any 300 spin-off is entirely theoretical at this point, as it depends on a book that Frank Miller is only believed to be writing. No one even knows if he’s jotted an outline down, let alone what it will be about. I watched Collider’s interview with the aforementioned producers — and with all due respect, when asked point blank if they had been in contact with Miller, they didn’t answer. That doesn’t confirm a solid project. I’m going to go out on a limb here, and suggest Miller hasn’t given it a second thought since the movie came out.
So this Frank Miller GN, though much wished for, may just be standing behind HOLY TERROR BATMAN in the queue of Miller projects. Which is a long one.
Finally, and most importantly, would any kind of 300 sequel be the same with dear, dear Gerard Butler and his amazing six-pack? Of course not. And yet DDGB himself does not know if he’ll ever be in fighting shape again. Sad but true. And James McAvoy just isn’t fit to wear DDGB’s codpiece, now or ever. Must we find a new burly Scotsman to bring ancient Sparta to grunting, sweaty life? The search is on!
Technorati Tags: 300
Well, it’s not enough that comic book movies have saved the box office, now they are saving the DVD business, which fell 3.2% last year to a mere $15.9 billion. How? Well, using Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, of course. According to the NY Times, Warner is trying a bold new tactic in conjunction with the release of the WATCHMEN movie next year: a concurrent release of the animated TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER as a direct-to-dvd movie.
The second film, tentatively called “Tales of the Black Freighter,” follows a side “Watchmen” storyline about a shipwreck and will arrive in stores five days after the main movie rolls out in theaters. The DVD will also include a documentary-style film called “Under the Hood” that will delve into the characters’ backstories.
Warner, the No. 1 distributor of DVDs, bills the effort as a way to renew retail excitement for little silver discs now that the once-booming market has matured.
The move is an investment in creating excitement for WATCHMEN, which is already a risky business as an R-rated, mature-themed superhero movie.
The immediate goal is for the parallel release to help start a potential new movie franchise. As television advertising becomes less effective because of declining TV viewership, movie studios need to reach a mass audience somehow, and having what amounts to ads sitting on store shelves is seen as a crucial antidote.
The effort is also a way for Warner to get more DVD bang for not many more bucks. The “Watchmen” film, Mr. Synder said, will probably generate at least three DVDs: “Tales of the Black Freighter,” followed about four months later by release of “Watchmen” itself, and then an “ultimate” edition in which the two are edited together into one megamovie.
You don’t say. Warner also plans to create a dozen 22- to 26-minute Webisodes of “The Watchmen Motion Comic” to help make the story more palatable to non-Watchmen initiates. This series, which will eventually be collected into DVD, will be “a panel-by-panel slide show of the graphic novel narrated by an actor.” So that’s at least FOUR dvds that we will have to buy then. Let’s hope Warner does a better job of marketing this movie than they did SPEED RACER!
Setting aside how positively thrilled Alan Moore must be over all this, we’re thrilled because dear, dear Gerard Butler is going to take time out from his busy schedule of being linked to Hollywood starlets to provide the main voice for Black Freighter! Win-win!
Good for Tony! I hope that everything works out between him and DC Comics.
Today in TONY ISABELLA’S BLOGGY THING…Cats and dogs, living together: http://tonyisabella.blogspot.com/2015/07/black-lightning-2015.html
(Yes, I am shamelessly stealing Jeff’s very funny line from Ghostbusters.)
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