Culture

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.

This weekend I suffered the technocrat's greatest nightmare and dunked my iPhone. It's currently sitting in a bag of rice and soon I will find out if my life is over or not. In the meantime, for someone who is attached at the metacarpal to her iPhone, this past weekend was very interesting. For instance, I had to find my way to someplace I'd never been. Instead of relying on GPS when I got out of the subway, before leaving the house I had to look it up on a map and print it out. And then pull out a paper and look at the map when I arrived. It was like a Geico caveman commercial.

Well, now this is nice! The New Yorker is releasing a "Cartoons of the Year" special issue tomorrow, edited by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon guru for the magazine. The issue features more than 250 cartoons by Charles Barsotti, Glen Baxter, Harry Bliss, David Borchart, Pat Byrnes, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Frank Cotham, Michael Crawford, Leo Cullum, Joe Dator, Drew Dernavich, Matthew Diffee, Liza Donnelly, J. C. Duffy, Bob Eckstein, Emily Flake, Felipe Galindo, Mort Gerberg, Alex Gregory, Sam Gross, William Haefeli, William Hamilton, Trevor Hoey, Carolita Johnson, John Kane, Zachary Kanin, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Farley Katz, Edward Koren, Robert Leighton, Lee Lorenz, Robert Mankoff, Michael Maslin, Ariel Molvig, P. S. Mueller, Paul Noth, John O’Brien, Jason Patterson, Danny Shanahan, Michael Shaw, David Sipress, Barbara Smaller, Karen Sneider, Mick Stevens, Julia Suits, Ward Sutton, Tom Toro, P. C. Vey, Kim Warp, Christopher Weyant, Gahan Wilson, and Jack Ziegler.

Like the Batibat, the Kapre is a relatively gentle giant who lives in trees and smokes a big tobacco pipe.

This is one of my all-time favorite comics stories. I've often alluded to it in conversation as "It's like, you know, that story where Gyro Gearloose builds a house for a picnic?" Very few people get the reference. In fact I am the only one. But It's a couple of things: a fine example of Carl Barks at his 1957 form -- sure fluid art with the joke extended visually to its fullest extent, and a tight plot based on human folly -- all executed with a seeming effortlessness. It's also a fine example of the Gyro story -- a well-intentioned dullard whose high intelligence is unencumbered by any sign of wisdom (he'd outsourced that to Helper, his little lightbulb-headed robot.) Gyro Gearloose and Helper call into the category of foolish leader and the sidekick who saves him -- Wallace and Gromit, or Green Hornet and Kato in the recent film. "Picnic" takes that basic dynamic and adds in another universal human truth: how the solution is often worse then the problem; and how losing sight of the goal can take you in the exact opposite direction. 

Comics and related cartoons continue to cause problems in the Middle East. Tunisia, the country widely credited with setting off the "Arab Spring" in a relatively peaceful fashion earlier this year, is in an uproar after Marjane Satrapi's animated film was shown last month and immediately set off a huge controversy for a scene which shows God -- which, as you may have realized by now, is forbidden by some branches of Islam. Nessma, the station which ran the film, is being sued for showing it -- and the trial erupted in angry confrontations yesterday:

While comics pundits continue to debate (well, really beat down) Frank Miller over his ornery comments about the Occupy Wall Street movement, Occupy Comics continues to ramp up, with the addition of contributions from Darick Robertson, Dan Goldman, and musician Amanda Palmer , just three new high profile contributors with, we're told, more to come. The project has a Kickstarter page , and is already $1000 away from their goal of funding comics coverage of the protest movement. Susan Cagle, Charlie Adlard, Molly Crabapple, Joseph Michael Lisner, Steve Niles, Tim Seeley, Ben Templesmith, and others are already on board.