Culture

It's the Hope Diamond of the comic book set. The one-of-a-kind 9.0 graded copy of ACTION #1 that once belonged to actor Nicolas Cage is going on the auction block -- and it is expected to set a record for a comic price. The comics loving actor purchased the copy -- the finest of ACTION #1 known to exist -- in 1997 for $150,000. It was then stolen from his house in 2000 and vanished from history until it was found in a California storage unit last year. According to ComicConnect's Vincent Zurzolo -- the go-to man for all comics collectible lore -- the stolen comic was actually tracked down and traced to a man who had purchased it from the owner of the contents of the unit. Will someone please make a movie about this investigation?

While we were tidying up, we chanced upon the old archives of Beat articles no longer on the Internet, including one linking to Edward Champion's Boilerplate for All Future Comics Articles. It's as true today as it was in 2006!

Hope you all had a great holiday weekend and plenty of turkey and stuffins. We spent the whole holiday mucking out our shelf porn -- organizing shelves, tossing pamphlets, setting aside some books for storage some for donation, a few for eBay. And some for Beat giveaways! Check back every day this week at 5 pm EST for some really swell classic GNs which we're giving away to lucky readers! A few other notes of business:

As you've doubtless heard by now, Marvel followed up the Fear Itself event mini-series with issues 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3.  Let's be kind and...

Via Crunchyroll, a translation of a 2chan chart which shows which kinds of otaku are the craziest and cause the most trouble. In case you're wondering about the "train" part that occupies the Michele Bachmann spot on the chart, it does not refer to various colloquial meanings of the word "train." It means fans who like...trains. You know, toot toots. Just what is it that makes them so crazy? Known as tetsudo otaku, train fans have long been looked on with suspicion by the Ahakibara crowd -- Irvine Welsh is universal, it seems -- but a band of younger, more energetic trainspotters has revitalized the subculture:

Former Marvel e-i-c Jim Shooter's blog has become the repository of some amazing stories -- some of them even true -- but here's one that could well become a holiday tradition: Thanksgiving in Newark. It's got everything a TV movie could need: a freelancer in need -- IRON MAN scripter David Michelinie -- an editor with a mission, two holiday orphans, and a quest to bring it all together:

Hope everyone has a fantastic Thanksgiving...and a lot to be thankful for. Including old comic book covers, courtesy of Cover Browser.

The long on-again, off-again life action Akira movie is decidedly on again at Warners, with Jaume Collet-Serra to direct the Steve Kloves script. Given that AKIRA is a worldwide classic of anime and Japanese film in general that hugely influenced both animation and the cyberpunk movement, it seems ripe for reinvention in that Hollywood way. And of course, also in that Hollywood way, despite the story being set in and infused with Japanese culture, because American moviegoers are all white and cannot be persuaded to pay money to watch Asian people on the screen, the film is being moved from New Tokyo to "New Manhattan " (essentially New New York) and replacing all the Asian characters with white people if casting rumors are true.

Matt Bors writes to alert us to a news Occupy Comics sketchbook -- Sarah Glidden on Occupy Miami. Glidden was in town for the Miami Book Fair, but found time to visit the OWS site. She explains more here, including the view from Europe where she's currently working:

Although Edna Mode famously cried "No capes!" people can't seem to get enough of them these days, with capelets and mini capes among the outerwear options for fall and beyond. But if you need capes on all your extremities, these Superman socks with attached capes will get you flying down the street. According to the seller, they are for schoolgirls, but they go up to Women's size 9, so a variety of ages and sizes can get in on the fetish fun. Usually, however, it is males who get socks for Christmas since there is little giftable that can be purchased for them. Maybe these are a comedy option for the BIg Bang Theory types in your household?

While Frank Miller's outburst against the OWS protesters might not have been the smartest PR move for him, he was right on the money about one thing: as a cartoonist, he was well qualified to comment. Graphic novels and comics have inspired a lot of the OWS protesters' iconography.

In the words of Charlie Brown.....ARRRRRRRGH.