Monthly Archives: July 2008

Flash Companion Podcasts

Flash Companion author Keith Dallas has appeared on several podcasts in the last few months.

May 1: TwoMorrows Tune-In #8

May 14: Views from the Longbox Episode #39: The Keith Dallas Conversation Part 1

May 28: Views from the Longbox Episode #40: The Keith Dallas Conversation Part 2

July 9: Alter Ego Comic Cast #107 with Keith Dallas and Jim Beard

Also, it turns out that while TwoMorrows will have copies to sell next week at Comic-Con International in San Diego, it probably won’t hit stores until July 30.

Flash + Speed Racer = ???

A few months ago, artist Cliff Chiang (Green Arrow/Black Canary) posted some old sketches he did of an anime-inspired Justice League. He describes them as “basically a mix of DC, old school anime and kaiju.”

This version of the Flash is clearly based on Speed Racer (especially with the car and the “Go Go Go!” caption), with the visor reminiscent of Racer X.

(via scans_daily)

Linkage: Velocity and MK vs. DC

Various news bits today:

Newsarama interviews Joe Casey on his upcoming Velocity series starring the speedster from Cyberforce

Justice League: The New Frontier has been nominated for an Emmy award (via Blog@Newsarama)

Mike Schramm of Joystiq got to play a demo of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe at E3 last weekend. (via Blog@Newsarama)

For their part, [senior designer Brian] Lebaron did say that Midway is trying to push the line as much as possible, both with DC and with the ESRB (the game is set to be rated T): he showed us a Scorpion fatality against the Flash where Bart Allen (at least we saw him as Bart Allen — when we asked Lebaron which Flash he was, Midway said they weren’t choosing a certain one) fell to the ground, his costume and skin charred and burned.

San Diego Con Coverage (2008)

I’ll be attending Comic-Con International in San Diego next week. For the last few years I’ve been posting reports during the con at my other blog, K-Squared Ramblings, and I’ll continue that this year in the Comic-Con 2008 category. I will be posting stuff here as well, especially anything Flash-related — like these Flash hall costumes from last year, or the 50 Years of the Flash panel two years ago.

This will be my 19th year at the con, which I’ve attended every summer since 1990. Scary numbers, there.

If you’re interested, here’s a list of my past convention reports and photos, including San Diego from 2003-2007, Wizard World Los Angeles from 2007-2008, and WonderCon 2008.

“Blood Will Run” Back In Print

Blood Will RunReaders trying to track down Geoff Johns’ run on The Flash frequently run into a problem: most of the trades are out of print, and the high demand drives up the prices on the secondhand market. Fortunately, it looks like DC is doing something about it. Earlier this year, DC re-issued Flash: Blood Will Run, collecting Johns’ first storyline as regular writer (his previous story, Wonderland — finally collected in paperback last fall — was essentially a try-out). The new edition added something else that had been hard to find: the one-shot graphic novel, Flash: Iron Heights. Now, according to this week’s DC Comics Direct Channel (a newsletter sent out to retailers), that new edition is getting a second printing.

Also in the newsletter: the upcoming hardcover of The Wild Wests, featuring the first arc of the Wally West relaunch and Mark Waid’s brief return to the book, is being delayed a week until August 6.

Flash Movie Standing Still

/Film got a little more info out of The Dark Knight producer Charles Rovan:

“We had hoped to be able to get a new draft going before the writers’ strike and we weren’t able to,” Rovan admitted. “And since the writers’ strike, we just haven’t been able to find the right creative compatibility between what we’re looking for and a writer and you know, we’re a little bit dragging our feet, we’re just waiting to see what’s going to happen with this actor’s strike, you know.”

(via FusedFilm)

On the plus side, there’s that Warner Bros/DC film summit that’s been making the rounds of comics blogs lately. Perhaps once the labor issues are resolved, we’ll see some more movement?

And yes, “looking at how best to exploit the DC Comics characters and properties” is an appropriate description, if a bit blunt. Warner Bros. is a movie studio. Neil Gaiman sums up the typical Hollywood take on source material in his short story, “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” (in Smoke and Mirrors):

She managed a pitying look, of the kind that only people who know that books are, at best, properties on which films can be loosely based, can bestow on the rest of us.