I was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike last weekend, and stopped in the (going west) rest stop outside of Breezewood. There's a nice exhibit on PA Turnpike tchockes which includes this Turnpike Man cup and inaction figure, which I believe has artwork by the late Paul Ryan, a longtime Fantastic Four and Phantom artist. Can anyone confirm that?







Anyone want to sell me a cup? I just bought the inaction figure on ebay, where 8 of them are being sold as cake toppers.

I saw the movie in a sneak preview last week. It's pretty darn bloody and earns its R rating. However I liked it a lot, and Dafne Keen, the actress who played the young girl, did a fantastic job. Any movie with Shane in its DNA is ok in my book.

In 'Logan,' one enemy is time [in print as Before sunset: In 'Logan,' the years take their toll]

By Kristen Page-Kirby

Express March 3 2017, p. 24
https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/03/03/in-logan-one-enemy-is-time/

'Logan': Hugh Jackman, as the Wolverine, goes out fighting [in print as The 'X-Men' grown up, and brooding].

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post March 3 2017  , p. Weekend 27
https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/logan-hugh-jackman-as-the-wolverine-goes-out-fighting/2017/03/02/af7a6380-fb72-11e6-9845-576c69081518_story.html

Aw, heck, here's the NYT too -

In 'Logan,' a Comic-Book Stalwart Turns Noirish Western

By MANOHLA DARGIS

A version of this review appears in print on March 3, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Noirish Western With Comic-Book Claws.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/movies/logan-review-hugh-jackman-wolverine-x-men.html

James Mangold Narrates a Scene From 'Logan'

Anatomy of a Scene

By MEKADO MURPHY MARCH 2, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/movies/james-mangold-interview-logan.html

Captain America: The Winter Soldier continues to be seen around DC, and the DCist has the story today.

Actually, they pulled the story from NBC - 'Captain America' Closes Some D.C. Streets
By Megan McGrath
May 14, 2013 

The bi-monthly Capicons con at Tyson's Corner saw a few new faces today. I picked up a couple of pieces of original art as a result (and blew my budget, but if you go to the show with friends, you can borrow money from them).



Baltimore County's John K Snyder III did this Shadow sketch with the money going to Hero Initiative charity. Keep an eye out on IDW's variant covers for the Shadow as John is doing one in 2013.

 

Front Royal's Ben Hatke's Zita the Spacegirl original art for page 98. Zita's aimed at kids, but I like it a lot.

 

Ben Hatke's Zita the Spacegirl original art for chapter breaks. He tossed this one in after I bought the previous.

Washington's Tom King was signing his book A Once Crowded Sky, a novel about what happens when all the superheroes vanish, but the supervillains don't. I reviewed it for the City Paper and had the strange experience of seeing my words as a pull quote on his banner.  I liked the book enough to buy another copy for a comics-collecting buddy's Christmas present. King told me that some additional comic book news from him should come out this week - remind me to follow up if I don't post something here.

Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology - A Secret Identities Book - had a booksigning at Busboys and Poets, Washington, DC, with editors Jeff Yang and Keith Chow, filmmaker Michael Kang and cartoonist Jamie Noguchi. The talk went for about an hour and a half and culminated in a 'design a supervillain' crowdsourcing event. The Stain is the audience-designed character drawn by Noguchi. The talk was enjoyable. I read a few stories in the book while waiting and enjoyed the ones by Kang and Noguchi; Bernard Chang's was disappointing because it concludes online somewhere. More pictures are online here.





Julian Lytle who does the Ants webcomic shared my table, and multitasked by working on his strip:

I was looking at this article tonight:

Remender Prepares "Venom" for "Circle of Four", by Dave Richards, December 6th, 2011

and took a closer look at the image promoting it:

Every one of these characters is derivative of a pre-existing and still existing character, and to top it off, these are less pleasant versions. Marvel is now like 1955 DC which had a Superman, Supergirl, Batman, Batdog, Batwoman, Batgirl, Superhorse (Comet), Supercat (Streaky), etc, etc, except they might be murderers or psychopaths.

In this picture is Red Hulk - one of five current Hulks, I think (if you count Hulk's son Skaar) - two male and two female. Given that I thought it was the GREEN gamma radiation that gave the Hulk, She-Hulk, Leader, Abomination etc their powers, I have no idea what Red means.

Venom, was derived from Spider-Man, albeit around two looong decades ago. Spider-Man got a symbiotic black suit that had the same powers he had, and could look like any type of clothes he wanted. It turned evil of course. Venom's the one with the guns, because you know, a suit that can mimic Spider-Man's powers isn't enough. Recently every other person on Manhattan supposedly had Spider-Man's powers. Uh-huh -- they're that special. And another Spider-Man clone is about to be running around as the second Scarlet Spider.

X-23 is the third Wolverine derivative, although her own comic just got cancelled.

And Ghost Rider is a woman now? Who knows, but there's two predecessors there as well, and Johnny Blaze the first one of them is still floating around the Marvel universe. Perhaps like the new female Red Skull (the first one's daughter), someone finds something sexy about a faceless skull-headed woman? If so, I don't want to think about that any more.

DC's not any better either. Harking back to the 1950s, in Grant Morrison's Batman Inc. each country has a Batman, there's no longer just a Green Lantern Corps, but also a Red, Black, Indigo, Orange and Pink set, a multitude of Firestorms, and who knows how many relatives that Superman "the last son of Krypton" has floating around now... Unmentioned so far are Marvel's multiple versions of the Avengers (four teams I think) and the X-Men (also four maybe?).

I'm hearing The Who's New Song as a comic book soundtrack much too often these days.


This post from yesterday touches on another aspect of derivative superhero stories. I track these articles for my Comics Research Bibliography.

Using the Web to adjust the color on TV
Minorities find a warm reception through online channels
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Sunday, November 15, 2009

My buddy Robert Montgomery and I have been buying comics in DC since 1989 when we started working together and fell back into the hobby hard. Here's his thoughts on Final Crisis (which I have not read):

OK. I bought all 7 issues of Final Crisis and all I get at the end is a big HUH? Typical Morrison surrealism. Judy's right when he says DC should have gotten Geoff Johns to write it. What I think happened is: the Multiverse was re-established thanks to Superman; also, the New Gods are back. Is Darkseid? Dunno. Is the Martian Manhunter? I'd bet he is. Looks like we now will get a series of stories explaining how things have changed. Eh. It looks as if Morrison brought in a bit of stuff from the cross-overs. I know he brought in characters from the Superman cross-over (which must have been terribly confusing to those readers who didn't pick up that story and who were wondering where the vampire came from). All-in-all -- what a mess.

To help further humanities research, I note that on the comix-scholars list there was... (the following is quoting Dr. Reinhard) discussion a couple weeks ago about the influence of American superheroes in different countries -- and to investigate how much anime/manga characters are seen as superheroes -- I created this survey in my spare time: http://www.survey-xact.dk/LinkCollector?key=WG5EYZ7P96C5

The goal of the survey is for people from around the world to tell us what they think a superhero is and what superheroes mean to them.

I would love your help in both filling out the questionnaire as well as distributing it far and wide to get as many different people from a range of different countries to take it. Please feel free to post the link anywhere you like, and refer any questions to me at my professional email address of carrie@ruc.dk

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, PhD
Virtual Worlds Research
http://worlds.ruc.dk/
Roskilde University
Department of Communication, Business, and Information Technologies
Building 43.3
Kommunikationsvej 1
DK-4000 Roskilde

See "Study: Comic Book Superheroines 'Improbably Busty'," CAP News January 28 2009.* The same site is reporting on a new, grittier Dark Archie movie.

*this is satire, but Sequential Tart used to run a great column entitled 'Bizarre Breasts' by colorist Laura Dupuy.