Entertainment

SPX is bearing down on us sooner than we could have expected -- September 11-12 -- and guests are being announced -- Kate Beaton,...

So when the tale was written, SCOTT PILGRIM Vs THE WORLD ended up #5 at the box office with a disappointing $10.5 mil. This...

A story in The Hollywood Reporter suggests that China is looking to get bigger in the international animation/comics field: Leading the charge is the city...

Two summers later, I am still quite taken with The Dark Knight. I have not encountered an American movie — much less an American movie, designed to be a gigantic blockbuster and based on a hugely popular comic book — that is structured as ingeniously and compellingly as this one. I’ve simply never seen anything like it, and after several viewings it still continues to flabbergast.

I’ve worked on a handful of these types of movies as a screenwriter, and let me tell you: they’re hard. They’re really hard. There are so many issues for the writer to address: the protagonist must be active, the villain’s plot must make sense, there must be a romantic interest, there must be due attention paid to the history of the character and the rules of the genre, they must be both fantastic and grounded at the same time. All these balls must be kept in the air and these concerns must mesh in a straightforward, compelling, swift, action-packed cinematic narrative, consistent in tone and true to its source material. I haven’t seen one — not one — that has managed to get everything in and do everything right. None of the Superman movies do it, none of the previous WB Batman movies do it, none of the Spider-Man movies do it, neither of the Fantastic Four movies do it, and, even after 22 tries, none of the Bond movies do it either. (The Iron Man movies come close — really close.) But The Dark Knight not only does a better job than any other movie based on its source material — and by that I mean "superhero comics" — it does it with a radically ambitious screenplay that challenges any number of conventions and brings a new, added weight to its subject.

Not comics really, but all nerd, chiptune punk band Anamanaguchi, who wrote the soundtrack to the Scott Pilgrim video game, is playing tonight in...

It's looking like SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD will come in at a disappointing #4 at this weekend's box office, according to Nikki Finke,...

Late last year, DC announced a new line of graphic novels called Earth One. The idea was a line of standalone graphic novels...

[With reality TV and reality contests everywhere, people have been wondering when someone would start a reality TV show about the comics industry. That hasn't happened yet -- maybe because sitting at a drawing board all day doesn't make for all that exciting a visual. However at least one comics creator is currently starring in a reality show: Jesse Blaze Snider, the 27-year-old son of Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider is on A&E's Growing Up Twisted, which airs tonight at 10/9c. Although Snider has had much previous TV exposure, he considers writing comics the career he wants to follow. We were interested in finding out how someone with experience in so many fields balances all these different outlets. Currently the author of BOOM!'s Toy Story: Tales from the Toy Chest , Snider chatted to The Beat about his writing, being a reality star and his very colorful family.]

Late last night Twitter flared with anger over a post entitled How to hire an artist by a designer of Flash-based computer games. Although we usually don't quote things so extensively, it seems that running enough of an excerpt to get the whole story is important here (plus is may be taken down). This is what the author, Christopher Gregorio, has to say about selecting an artist for a game project:

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Bruce Wayne, orphaned at eight, wants to overcome his fears and honor his father. This turns out to be rather more complicated than he suspects it will be. Batman Begins presents a radically new vision (for the movies, anyway — this stuff had been around the comics and the animated series for many years beforehand) of the Batman story, grounds it in a startling new sense of reality, presents not just a caped crusader and a wacky new villain but a whole wealth of good guys and bad guys, all following their stars in increasingly complex and interconnected ways, all of it bound together with the one fantastic conceit of a young billionaire who dresses up like a bat. It strongly reminds me of the Casino Royale re-boot, which brought the James Bond character to a new level of immediacy while retaining enough of the series’ fantastic hallmarks to still qualify as escapism. There is still enough silliness in Batman Begins to make it a recognizable "superhero movie" (grand, outsized villains with colorful personalities and an ambitious scheme to destroy an entire city, spectacular action sequences that teeter at the brink of believability, production design that borders upon science-fiction) but it’s presented with a sober, straightfaced earnestness that’s nothing less than shocking after the garish camp of Batman & Robin. The Dark Knight would successfully develop all of Begins‘s good ideas into an even more complex, startling vision of modern urban justice.

You could learn a lot from Mark Millar. Seriously. Not content to let his movie option deal announcement go live and get covered everywhere, he got a full three days of publicity out of it! And made such a big deal of it that Bleeding Cool literally wouldn't sleep until they scooped Deadline on the news -- which everyone we talked to seems to have known for days. So a big deal becomes a Bigger Deal. That is how you market it, Mark Millar, and we salute you.

While folks like Mark Millar, Mike Mignola, and Robert Kirkman have been deservedly marked by the success of their creations in Hollywood, one hard-working...