The Opera web browser has always focused on speed as a selling point, but sometimes I think they’ve got Flash fans in their marketing department. I mean, not only are they promoting today’s release of Opera 10.50 as “The Fastest Browser On Earth,” but the announcement at Choose Opera starts off with “Catching lightning in a bottle.”
Then there was the red and yellow blur they used to promote a beta a couple of years ago…
I’m mostly linkblogging via Twitter these days, and you can follow along at @SpeedForceOrg. Some highlights from the last few weeks include:
Blue Lantern Flash Custom Figure at The Green Lantern Corps Forum.
Death Race on Reality Prime by Dave Myers and Kurt Christenson.
Blackest Night: The Rogues by xanychaos at Comic Bloc.
Uncanny Comic Book Scans just finished a week of Flash posts featuring single pages from throughout Wally West’s run on the book.
Broken Frontier unearths the dead Rogues.
Bleeding Cool spots an error in Blackest Night: The Flash #2 – Barry Allen’s narration boxes feature the wrong Lantern Corps symbol!
LiveScience: Humans Could Run 40 mph, in Theory (via Devin “The Flash” Johnson).
Perspective: schmevil reminds us all that Your fandom is not Fandom. (Via Comics Worth Reading).
Myth Adventures, Phil Foglio’s comic-book adaptation of Robert Asprin’s comedic fantasy novel, Another fine Myth, is now available online as a free webcomic. They’ve just started serializing it a page a day, three days a week.
For more frequent updates, follow me on Twitter at @SpeedForceOrg.
I was recently looking through old scans and ran into an image of Team Turmoil. Readers from the 1990s will recognize them as a group of generic villains who would show up anytime Mark Waid needed the Flash to have a short battle as part of a larger story about something else.
The funny thing is that their costumes reminded me of another team — a much more developed team with actual characters: Dynamo 5. Read the rest of this entry »
At the Source, Dan Didio talks about Who’s Who and Legacies with a little more solid information than last month’s teases.
Who’s Who will start in May and take 18 issues (initial reports said 12, then 15), covering thousands of characters, and the DC Universe should be a little more settled (“no longer in flux”) after Blackest Night.
It turns out that the “new History of the DC Universe” hinted at last month is not a separate project, but rather the the concept behind Legacies. Instead of a literal history, they’re telling “a detailed and weaving story of two families whose lives have been impacted by five generations of super-heroes.”
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that a lot of the indie comics I read don’t have fixed schedules. In a few cases, it goes beyond that, and the comics are, as near as I can tell, totally stalled — in some cases for years. Maddeningly, there are a few that are stalled just one issue from the conclusion!
Planetary #27 was one of these, but the epilogue issue finally came out last month. I was beginning to wonder whether Ignition City #5 was headed the same way, once it got to three months after the fourth issue, but the last issue finally came out in October.
Currently, I’m waiting for…
(Image) This five-issue miniseries from Jay Faerber and Jon Sommariva about a super-hero whose secret identity doesn’t know he’s a super-hero (sort of like that TV show with Christian Slater last year) started off solidly, then quickly went off the rails scheduling-wise. I didn’t even realize how late it had gotten until I looked for it a few days ago and found a reference to the original solicitation: It was supposed to wrap in September 2008! The longest gap was between #3 and #4 (which came out this past July).
Status: The artist is currently working on the issue…along with a bunch of other projects.
(Dabel Bros.) This 8-issue miniseries adapting the Wheel of Time prequel launched in August 2005, produced by Dabel Bros. and published by Red Eagle Entertainment. After a couple of issues it got to be very sporadic as the studio and publisher started to feud, and it ceased publication entirely after #5 came out in early 2006.
Two years later (summer 2008), Dabel Bros. announced that they would start adapting the main Wheel of Time series, but at the time had no plans to complete New Spring. Finally, in April 2009, they announced that they’d be finishing the miniseries. #6 came out in May, along with a prologue to the new series, then I waited…#7 came out in August… Now there’s just one issue left, but there’s been no sign of New Spring #8 anywhere. For that matter, Eye of the World seems to have stalled after just one issue. Meanwhile, Bleeding Cool has been reporting financial problems — like not paying artists — and Dabel Bros. website has gone offline.
Status: It doesn’t look promising, but then the series has already come back from the dead once. I believe Tor (Robert Jordan’s publisher) has the rights to publish the collected edition. Maybe if Dabel Bros. can’t finish it in miniseries form, Tor can step in, finance the last chapter, and just sell it as a hardcover? I’d certainly buy it.
(BuyMeToys.com) Simple premise: Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz have grown up and left behind the worlds they think were simply childhood fantasies, and are now roommates in (IIRC) Chicago (Their other roommates include Wendy from Peter Pan and an obvious analog of Susan from the Narnia books). Of course, their pasts were real, and now they’re being called upon to return to those worlds and help them. The four-issue miniseries was coming out about once a year, but it’s been at least two years since issue #3.
Status: They released a preview of #4 at Chicago Comic-Con this year, and the website says it’ll be out “early 2010.”
Today, as quietly announced six months ago, Yahoo is shutting down Geocities.
Geocities was one of the icons of the Internet in the 1990s. It was emo before LiveJournal, boasted legendarily awful layouts before MySpace (be sure to check XKCD today), and spurred user revolts over terms-of-service changes before Facebook. As one of the major free web providers, it attracted everything from teenage poetry to fan sites to do-it-yourself social networking.
Over the last decade, people have mostly moved on. A lot of old sites have been shut down or abandoned. Spammers and phishers set up shop, using the free service to hawk pills or bootleg software, or host malware, in the hours it took for Yahoo to catch them and shut them down. No doubt it’s become more trouble to maintain than it’s worth.
To be honest, I won’t miss most of it. But there are fan websites that have never moved. Book annotations, timelines, analysis, fanfic — a huge chunk of fandom history will simply vanish today. (As of noon Pacific time, all my links still work.) Some of it will survive in public archives by the OTW and Internet Archive, or in personal archives. I contacted a few site owners, or tried to, but most of my emails bounced.
One advantage for fanzines: ink on paper doesn’t require anyone to keep a central service going.
It’s funny: the things we expect to disappear from the web often don’t, but the things we expect to be permanent often do drop out of existence. GeoCities appeared 14 years ago. Will today’s blogs, Facebook pages, forums, and wikis still be around 14 years from now?
The FlashForward premiere was amazing. I’d been hoping it would be good, but it not only lived up to my expectations, it surpassed them! More thoughts at K-Squared Ramblings.
If you missed it, ABC is running it again Friday night. It should also be up on Hulu soon.
Comic Cavalcade was an anthology series that ran from 1942 until 1954, publishing super-heroes and other adventures for the first six years. Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Green Lantern were the headliners. Earlier this year, DC reprinted the first three issues as The Comic Cavalcade Archives, Vol. 1
I read a few of the stories this afternoon, and these panels from the Green Lantern story in issue 1, “The Adventures of Luckless Lenore,” made me laugh out loud.
Green Lantern’s sidekick, Doiby, has been trying to romance Lenore, whose “bad luck” seems to be engineered. At this point he’s been captured. I didn’t even notice the name of the bar the first time through, it was the menu that caught me off-guard. Read the rest of this entry »
And some non-Flash linkblogging to round out the week!
There’s a million pieces of Marvel/Disney fan art by now, but these posts collect some good ones:
This next one is Flash-related, but seems to fit well with the Disney mash-ups: it’s a sketch Livesay shared of Donald Duck and the Flash, by Don Rosa.
Die Kal-El Die! chronicles building Lex Luthor’s power suit for this year’s Comic-Con International.
The Ventura County Star profiles artist Sergio Aragonés (Mad Magazine, Groo the Wanderer, etc.) (via Robot6).
WildStorm has posted a preview of Planetary #27, the long-awaited epilogue to the Warren Ellis/John Cassaday series that will finally arrive next month! The Hallelujah Chorus ran through my head when I saw this. And it gets better: They’ve got wallpaper and icons.
The Weekly Crisis recommends comics to read after Fables and Y: The Last Man.
Finally, I’ve got another project called LOL_Spam. In a nutshell: a couple of times a day I post a funny spam subject line, usually with snarky commentary. If that sounds amusing, please check it out!
Oh, yeah, one more thing: I’ve added a bit to this morning’s Classic Flash round-up.
So, the Internet is abuzz with Disney’s purchase of Marvel Comics.
There seems to be a lot of freaking out along the lines of “OMG Disney will turn Marvel into kid stuff!” There’s also a lot of people having fun with mash-ups, as seen on #disneymarvel.
A little perspective, though:
DC Comics has been owned by Warner Bros. (or rather its parent company, currently Time Warner) since the 1970s. From what I’ve heard, DC is more limited by merchandising at this point than by its corporate parent. Don’t change Superman into someone you can’t put on a kids’ beach towel.
Admittedly, Warner Bros. is less of a top-down hierarchy. When describing the fight to find Babylon 5 a new home when PTEN collapsed, JMS described Warner Bros. as “a
series of competing and structurally independent fiefdoms.” (WB wouldn’t take Babylon 5 because it was a PTEN show.
Of course, this brings to mind images of Bugs Bunny-as-Superman vs. Mickey Mouse-as-Wolverine. Say, didn’t Duck Dodgers actually get a Green Lantern ring in one comic?
Disney isn’t just Disney. It’s also ESPN, ABC, Miramax, and Touchstone. It’s not just Mickey Mouse and Hannah Montana, it’s also Kill Bill, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. And while Disney has been known for strict corporate control, they managed not to break Pixar.
It may be that my lack of concern for Marvel’s comic books has to do with the fact that I’m not much of a Marvel reader. But I have seen a lot of their movies, and I do see a major potential pitfall there.
The big advantage Marvel has had over DC in terms of movie development is that until recently, they could shop around to different studios. So they could have X-Men in development at Fox, Spider-Man at Sony, and Hulk at Universal, while DC was stuck with Warner Bros. — a company that exudes caution in every move and seemed to want to make only one movie at a time.
Now Marvel’s tied to a single studio, just like DC, except for projects already in development like the current Spider-Man series and the X-Men spinoffs.
My main concern on reading the news was actually what might happen with BOOM! Studios’ Pixar and Muppet comics. Why would Disney want to keep hiring out to a third party when they own a comics company? BOOM! made a big splash last year with their Jim Henson and Disney deals, particularly Farscape, The Muppet Show and The Incredibles…and then Henson took the rest of their properties to Archaia, and now Disney’s buying Marvel.
The short term answer, according to this list at CBR, is that “Existing licensing and distribution deals should remain where they are.” So BOOM! gets to keep producing The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and so forth. When that contract is up, who knows? Maybe it’ll come down to whether Disney likes what they’ve been doing. Or maybe it’ll come down to whether someone in management wants to save a few bucks by staying inside the company.
Presumably the same would be true of the characters at Universal Studios theme parks: they’d stay in place until the contract runs out.
Update: Further analysis and discussion at Comics Worth Reading, The Beat, Robot 6, Comics Should Be Good, and The Weekly Crisis. And it looks like Bleeding Cool is melting down (bleeding out?) under the strain of the discussion.
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