Entertainment

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.

With Cowboys and Alien on the way to becoming areal live movie starring move stars like Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig and directed by Jon Favreau, Platinum Studios is on its way to being a real live content provider, and so ICM has signed up to rep them, Deadline reports.

 BookExpo America is kicking off today at the Javits Center with a day of panels and roundtables The exhibit floor opens tomorrow. Image Comics...

With Comic-Con's rise in the popular imaginaion over the last decade, we've heard many folks mutter over the years "I need to write a screenplay about Comic-con!" If you have been working on such a script, it is time to quietly set it aside and start working on that oil spill comedy you had been pondering. In keeping with the times, Comic-Con will be the subject of a geekumentary by Morgan Spurlock (Super-Size Me) following the fan's journey of seven con attendees. But Spurlock's not going it alone, because that would be too much for any man.

While your recovering from the emotional overload of last night's Lost finale, you can say goodbye just a little more with this interactive guide to all the characters and how they died from the National Post's Steven Murray, a.k.a. Chip Zdarsky.

Some pissing and moaning this week about the fact that Marvel/Deisney will be shooting the Captain America movie in the UK instead of the US. The reason? Oh, budget and so on.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, probably the single greatest event in the history of nerddom. STAR WARS might have been new and cool and funny and fresh, but EMPIRE was all that AND sad and tragic and shocking and filled with the kind of terror and awe that the greatest storytelling inspires. From the frozen beauty of an icy horizon studded with AT-ATs, to the steaming green swamp where Luke Skywalker begins his archetypal but unique hero's journey, to the crimson horror of the carbon freezing chamber, to the primal red and blue of the final battle between Luke and Vader, no SF blockbuster has ever captured the imagination so cleanly and completely. It was grown up in an unself-conscious way that nothing to do with Star Wars would ever be again. (Almost certainly because it was the last one that producer Gary Kurtz would in involved with; after EMPIRE it was George Lucas all the way.)