Entertainment

All the news we missed in the last week from Captain America's new zipper to Matt Kindt's movie news to the first look at brain eating walking dead zombies to the Black Spidey to who will take over the Hobbit movies.

I know this is "not comics" but William Gibson and Douglas Coupland both tweeted it, and I am weak-minded.

Via a press release, and speaking of Frank Miller, Heritage Auctions set a record by selling a page of Miller art from Daredevil #188 for $101,575. According to Todd Hignite, who is Consignment Director for Original Comic and Illustration Art for Heritage, it's a record for original art from the 80s, and "one of the handful of highest prices that Heritage has ever seen paid for a piece of comic art, period. It’s in very rarefied company.”

Hank Azaria was surreptitiously filmed in his role as Gargamel in the upcoming Smurfs movie, and as you can see, it is a chilling portrayal of ultimate evil that will scar our nightmares. Actually, it is quite terrifying.

Yesterday was the final moving day at the old Publishers Weekly office. One last day to shovel everything into a box. Every move comes with a purge purge purge mandate, and since we're moving to a smaller office, the need to travel light was particularly urgent.

A preview Heroes Con preview; a smashing comic book wedding; is a comic book really worth $3.99? Not when you have to get rid of hundreds of them; and my final thoughts on BEA.

Dash Shaw and Frank Santoro have been working on this teaser for THE RUINED CAST, a new Shaw animation project which includes the Shavian staple of a family in crisis near a body of water, and looks very mind trippy. The final product will be a full length animated feature to be directed by Shaw and produced by Howard Gertler and John Cameron Mitchell. Warning: NSFW if your W does not like male frontal.

You know, we've been expecting that this thing will be awesome, and this just confirms it, but seeing it all laid out like that makes us wonder if the movie going audience -- which has recently shown itself to be pretty reactionary and unadventurous -- will really except a teenaged romance comedy with lots of fighting. Either the girls will love the romance and the guys will love the fighting...or the girls will hate the fighting and the guys will hate the romance like they usually do. More to the point, can Hollywood successfully MARKET a movie that has crossover appeal?

Like Batman, Batman Returns presents three protagonists, almost the same protagonists as 1989‘s Batman — a deformed freak of a gangster (this time the Penguin instead of The Joker), a blonde who’s crazy about bats (Catwoman subbing for Vicki Vale), and Batman himself. In addition to its three protagonists, it offers an antagonist from outside the traditional Batman world — a ringer, if you will, in the form of businessman Max Shreck.

It would be great to report that Batman Returns takes all of these worthwhile, interesting characters and weaves them into a single, unified story, but it does not. Instead, it presents two separate stories, each compelling in its own right, and kind of sutures them together like the irregular chunks of vinyl of Catwoman’s bodysuit. As this is an unusually complicated narrative with three separate, competing plot strands which actually take place in utterly different genres, let’s separate out each character’s storyline and examine them one at a time.

And on a somewhat lighter note...Fox has released stills from this summer's doggie comics movie, which stars Owen WIlson as the voice of Marmaduke, along with Lee Pace, Fergie, Goegre Lopez and William H. Macy, among others. The film is based on the comic strip featuring the large Great Dane by Brad Anderson, which began in...1954. The film is a combination of live action and CGI. Can Fred Bassett be far behind?

A little perspective via Writer's Digest publisher Jane Friedman: Stat from BEA: 7% of books published generate 87% of book sales. And 93%...

As mentioned previously, we were at BookExpo America all day Wednesday, and will be there all day Thursday. The show is much smaller than in recent years -- the children's book section which once took up the entire bottom part of the Javits is now just a corner of the main floor. The Diamond alley of comics publishers seems smaller this year, as well, although Dark Horse, Image, Dynamite, IDW and Marvel are all set up, along with a few others. By contrast, Fantagraphics was set up in the Norton Booth right at the front of the hall and was practically the first thing you saw as you walked in. They are giving away galleys of Moto Hagio's HERE COMES THE SON and Joyce Farmer's SPECIAL EXITS, which we have and have flipped through, but haven't had time to read yet. Something to look forward to in life, thank God! Fanta assoc. publisher Eric Reynolds explained that he felt that this year it was more effective to pay for more galleys to give away than to have an author appearance, and given the alacrity with which people roaming the floor scoop up those galleys, it might be a good idea.