Thirteen tracks that caught my ear this week:
Comics Greats Honor the Work of George Pérez
A roster of star comics artists including Alex Ross, Nicola Scott, Joëlle Jones, Jerry Ordway, and José Luis García-López have contributed to a double-page spread in honor of the great George Pérez, which will appear in all of DC Comics' June titles. Pérez, who has pancreatic cancer, announced his retirement from comics work late last year. Details:
DC will celebrate the 68th birthday of George Pérez, one of the titans of the comic industry, with a two-page spread featuring some of his most beloved characters in each of its June periodical releases. Working from a layout designed by Dan Jurgens, some of the industry’s biggest names including Jim Lee, Walter Simonson, Alex Ross, Dave Gibbons, Todd McFarlane, Daniel Sampere, Jerry Ordway, Nicola Scott and many more, collaborated on the colorful spread.“When I was asked to come up with a design and layout that would honor George Pérez and his many incredible contributions to DC Comics over the years, I was truly honored,” said Dan Jurgens. “I have admired George’s work since I first saw it and have had the good fortune to work with him in different capacities, on a number of projects. More importantly, I’ve been able to see the way George treats fans and readers, always smiling, gregarious and approachable. It was a joy to watch this cover come together and I’m sure everyone who contributed feels the same way.”The tribute features the following DC characters that Pérez is most known for, as well as the man himself, drawn by a number of the top artists in the industry and colored by Hi-Fi:
- The Monitor & Anti-Monitor - Jim Lee & Scott Williams
- Trigon - Todd McFarlane
- The Spectre - Alex Ross
- Darkseid - Walter Simonson
- Firestorm & The Justice League Satellite - Scott Kolins
- Ares & Hippolyta - Phil Jimenez
- Cheetah & The Amazons - Colleen Doran
- Lady H.I.V.E. & H.I.V.E. Agents - Scott Koblish
- Vigilante - Dave Gibbons
- Cheshire - Joëlle Jones
- Brother Blood - Darryl Banks
- Blackfire - Mike McKone
- Gizmo & Mammoth - Klaus Janson
- Shimmer - Bruno Redondo
- Psimon - Mikel Janín
- Neutron & Jinx - Dan Mora
- The Legion of Super-Heroes - Francis Manapul
- The Justice Society of America - Jerry Ordway
- Power Girl & Huntress - Kevin Maguire
- The Justice League of America (and the background) - Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund
- Superboy-Prime & Alexander Luthor - Ivan Reis
- Supergirl - Gary Frank
- Harbinger - Adam Hughes
- Pariah - Daniel Sampere
- Jericho & Kole - Nicola Scott
- The New Teen Titans, Deathstroke & George Pérez - José Luis García-López
Accompanying the spread on a separate page will be a key highlighting the characters and artists that participated.In addition to being included in all of DC’s June issues, the tribute will also be featured as a variant cover for Dark Crisis #7. Each issue of the event series will feature a cover highlighting a previous crisis event from DC’s history, starting with the genre defining Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez for issue #1. Artwork and additional details on each of the covers will be announced at a later date."George Pérez is one of my favorite comic storytellers of all time. To say he’s a ‘great artist’ is a massive understatement,” said Dark Crisis Writer Joshua Williamson. “His work on the original Crisis of Infinite Earths inspired so much of my love for DC Comics. When I saw DC editors pull together this incredible piece with so many amazing legendary artists celebrating George, I won't lie, it was emotional. And now it's an honor to have this tribute be a cover to Dark Crisis."A special version of the Dark Crisis #7 variant cover will be available for sale by The Hero Initiative to raise funds for one of Pérez’s favorite charities. Pérez is a founding member of Hero Initiative’s board of directors and has served as chair of its Disbursement Committee.
Out Now: "American TV Comic Books (1940s-1980s)"
A new tome from the always fantastic TwoMorrows Publishing. Order from them here.
Details:
American TV Comic Books (1940s-1980s) takes you from the small screen to the printed page, offering a fascinating and detailed year-by-year history of over 300 television shows and their 2000+ comic book adaptations across five decades.
Author Peter Bosch has spent years researching and documenting this amazing area of pop culture history, tracking down the well-known series (Star Trek, The Munsters) and the lesser-known shows (Captain Gallant, Pinky Lee) to present the finest look ever taken at this unique genre of comic books.
Included are hundreds of full-color covers and images, plus profiles of the artists who drew TV comics: Gene Colan, Alex Toth, Dan Spiegle, Russ Manning, John Buscema, Russ Heath, and many more giants of the comic book world. Whether you loved watching The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, and Zorro from the 1950s; The Andy Griffith Show, The Monkees, and The Mod Squad in the 1960s; Adam-12, Battlestar Galactica, and The Bionic Woman in the 1970s, or Alf, Fraggle Rock, and V” in the 1980s, there's something here for fans of TV and comics alike!
New Music Out Today April 22: Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder! Ornette! Mingus! More!
Our picks this week. Click the links to order from Amazon.
Watch the Apollo 16 Lunar Rover "Grand Prix," April 21, 1972
Back when people used to do cool stuff, like go to the friggin' moon!
Pop Culture Roundup: So Long, Robert Morse; No "Bone" for Netflix; Gaiman's Long Wait for "The Sandman"
ITEM! Robert Morse, famed from his role as Bertram Cooper on "Mad Man," in film and on Broadway for “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and Disney's“The Boatniks,” has died at age 90.
ITEM! Bummer. Netflix has canceled plans to adapt Jeff Smith's comics series "Bone." Of course, a lot of people also have canceled Netflix lately, so, what comes around...
ITEM! Speaking of Netflix: Fans have waited a long time for the forthcoming "Sandman" series, but Neil Gaiman has been waiting longer.
New Pop Culture Books: Batman! Buscema! The BBC and more!
Our picks this month. Click the links to order from Amazon.
THE ART OF THE BATMAN is the official behind-the-scenes illustrated tie-in book to the highly anticipated film The Batman by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, War for the Planet of the Apes), coming to theaters March 4, 2022. The Batman stars Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne/The Batman, Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, Paul Dano as Edward Nashton/ The Riddler, Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin, Jeffrey Wright as Lieutenant James Gordon, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, and John Turturro as Carmine Falcone.
In 1890, Le Prince was granted patents in four countries ahead of other inventors who were rushing to accomplish the same task. But just weeks before unveiling his invention to the world, he mysteriously disappeared and was never seen or heard from again. Three and a half years later, Thomas Edison, Le Prince’s rival, made the device public, claiming to have invented it himself. And the man who had dedicated his life to preserving memories was himself lost to history—until now.
The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures pulls back the curtain and reveals the riveting story of both Louis Le Prince’s life and work, dispelling the secrets that shroud each. This captivating, impeccably researched work presents the never before told history of the motion picture and sheds light on the unsolved mystery of Le Prince’s disappearance.
The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures pulls back the curtain and reveals the riveting story of both Louis Le Prince’s life and work, dispelling the secrets that shroud each. This captivating, impeccably researched work presents the never before told history of the motion picture and sheds light on the unsolved mystery of Le Prince’s disappearance.
Doctor Who; tennis from Wimbledon; the Beatles and the Stones; the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales: for one hundred years, the British Broadcasting Corporation has been the preeminent broadcaster in the UK and around the world, a constant source of information, comfort, and entertainment through both war and peace, feast and famine.
The BBC has broadcast to over two hundred countries and in more than forty languages. Its history is a broad cultural panorama of the twentieth century itself, often, although not always, delivered in a mellifluous Oxford accent. With special access to the BBC’s archives, historian David Hendy presents a dazzling portrait of a unique institution whose cultural influence is greater than any other media organization.
Mixing politics, espionage, the arts, social change, and everyday life, The BBC is a vivid social history of the organization that has provided both background commentary and screen-grabbing headlines—woven so deeply into the culture and politics of the past century that almost none of us has been left untouched by it.
Glamour Road: Color, Fashion, Style, and the Midcentury Automobile
This highly visual book explores the seldom-told story of how glamour, fashion, design, and styling became the main focus of automotive marketing from the postwar 1940s through the 1970s. With the expansion of the American suburbs after WWII, women suddenly needed cars of their own. By adopting the fashion industry’s yearly model changes, as well as hiring many designers and stylists from the fashion industry, the automobile industry made a direct appeal to the rising sophistication and influence of women. By perfecting the fashion-centric concept of planned obsolescence, it became the dominant economic engine of American postwar prosperity. The dramatic photography, elegant fashion, and use of color and materials in midcentury automotive marketing created a groundswell of demand for new cars. Much of the marketing imagery of the period hasn’t been published since it first came out, and this book features some of the best.
They were a generation all their own, the army of children who ran home from school to watch Dark Shadows, TV’s very first supernatural soap. A breed apart, they set aside the worship of mundane pop stars to follow vampires, witches, and werewolves. From 1966 to 1971, they were daytime Monster Kids…and today they have stories to tell.
The director Michael Cimino (1939–2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven’s Gate, the most notorious bomb of all time. Originally budgeted at $11 million, Cimino’s sprawling western went off the rails in Montana. The picture grew longer and longer, and the budget ballooned to over $40 million. When it was finally released, Heaven’s Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era.
Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven’s Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. Elton’s Cimino is a richly detailed biography that offers a revisionist history of a lightning rod filmmaker. Based on extensive interviews with Cimino’s peers and collaborators and enemies and friends, most of whom have never spoken before, it unravels the enigmas and falsehoods, many perpetrated by the director himself, which surround his life, and sheds new light on his extraordinary career. This is a story of the making of art, the business of Hollywood, and the costs of ambition, both financial and personal.
An utterly charming book by beloved Parisian artist Pierre Le-Tan, filled with dazzling illustrations and intriguing tales about often eccentric art collectors. Le-Tan, known for designing New Yorker magazine covers and collaborations with fashion houses, summons up memories of inveterate collectors in this lavishly illustrated volume. He evokes fascinating, sometimes troubled figures through insightful and curious portraits. With seventy of his distinctive pen and ink drawings―in vibrant color with meticulous cross-hatching―A Few Collectors opens a window onto the vast or minuscule world created by collectors out of a mix of extravagance and obstinacy. It recounts encounters in Paris, the Côte d’Azur, North Africa, London and New York, where Le-Tan’s subjects have amassed a range of treasures. Some involve famed figures like former Louvre Museum director Pierre Rosenberg. Others are insolvent aristocrats, princes of film and fashion, expatriate dandies, and flat-out obsessive eccentrics. Le-Tan devotes perhaps his finest chapter to himself.
John Buscema’s innovative drawing on Marvel’s Silver Surfer is presented in IDW’s Artisan Edition format. Collecting three complete issues (issues #5, #6, and #8) from the acclaimed original run written by Stan Lee. As a special bonus—this book will have four foldouts featuring eight oversized covers.
An essential component of The House of Ideas, John Buscema’s talented hand graced the pages of Marvel’s most iconic characters for over four decades, working on The Avengers, Thor, The Fantastic Four, and The Amazing Spider-Man just to name a few.
As with all Artisan Edition books, nearly every page in this volume has been scanned from the original art, enabling the reader to clearly see all the little nuances that make original art unique and fascinating—blue pencil notations, margin notes, whiteout, and so much more. This will be a must-have for all fans and students of classic comic art!
DC’s Dark Knight first emerged from the shadows in the pages of Detective Comics in 1939, when young Bruce Waye vowed to avenge his parents’ murder and fight for justice in crime-ridden, corrupt Gotham City.
Packed with information on the Dark Knight, including how he was created and evolved over the decades, this in-world celebration of DC’s most popular Super Hero explores his motives and drives, his incredible array of weapons and vehicles, his “family” of allies, and his formidable rogues gallery, including The Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, The Riddler, Penguin, Bane, Scarecrow, Killer Croc, and many more.
This definitive volume brings Batman’s thrilling story right up to date with full details of his exploits in recent DC storylines such as Rebirth, Dark Nights: Metal and Dark Nights: Death Metal. Featuring a detailed timeline of key events in the life of Bruce Wayne aka Batman, Batman: The Ultimate Guide is packed with spectacular full-color artwork from the original comics and is a dream purchase for the Dark Knight’s legion of fans all over the world.
In 1976, champion player Roger Sharpe stepped up to a pinball machine in a Manhattan courtroom. The New York City Council had convened to consider lifting the city’s ban on pinball―a game that had been outlawed since 1942 for its supposed connections to gambling and organized crime. Sharpe was there to prove that, unlike a slot machine, pinball wasn’t a game of chance designed to fleece its players―it was a game of skill that required a measure of patience, coordination, and control. To prove his point, he proclaimed that he would launch his ball into the center lane at the far end of the playfield―much like Babe Ruth famously pointing to the fences. Sharpe pulled back the plunger and released, and the fate of this industry and art form hung in the balance.
Thus opens Jon Chad’s comprehensive graphic novel to the history of the captivating, capricious―and at times infuriating!―game of pinball. Tracing pinball’s roots back to the Court of King Louis XIV, through the immigrant experience of early 20th century America, the post-War boom and bust, right up to the present day, Chad charmingly ushers readers through the myriad facets of this most American of pursuits―capturing not just the history but also the artistry, cultural significance, and even the physics of the game.
In one of the most well-known and well-loved fantasy epics of the 20th century, Elric is the brooding, albino emperor of the dying Kingdom of Melnibone. After defeating his nefarious cousin and gaining control over the epic sword, Stormbringer, Elric, prince of ruins, must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in a fight against Armageddon.
Stormbringer is the second in Michael Moorcock’s incredible series, which has transformed the fantasy genre for generations. Perfect for fans new and old, this book is brought to life once more with stunning illustrations from the most lauded artists in fantasy.
New Peanuts Prints from Mondo Help Celebrate Record Store Day
Record Store Day is April 24 and Mondo is celebrating with the release of two vinyl-centric prints created from Charles Schultz's comic strips. You can order them Thursday, April 21, at 11 a.m. CT. More info.
Here's a look:
New Comics Collected Editions for April 20: Sandman! She-Hulk!
Our picks for the week. Click the links to order from Amazon.
Collecting issues #21-37, The Sandman Special #1, and stories from Vertigo: Winter’s Edge #1-3.
The complete original adventures of She-Hulk in one mighty Omnibus! When criminal defense attorney Jennifer Walters is shot by a mob hitman, her cousin saves her life with a blood transfusion—but that cousin is Bruce Banner and his gamma-irradiated blood turns her into the Savage She-Hulk! Suddenly, she’s a mean, green lawyering machine, and criminals the world over had better watch out. Conflict rages not just between She-Hulk and the many super-powered enemies in store, but between Jennifer Walters and She-Hulk! Our heroine’s two halves are in a battle for control as She-Hulk fights transforming back into Jen Walters, while Jen risks losing herself in the She-Hulk’s power. And each has their own separate romantic interest — it ain’t easy being green.
COLLECTING: Savage She-Hulk (1980) 1-25, Marvel Two-in-One (1974) 88
New on Video: "The Girl Can't Help It "(The Criterion Collection) - Jayne Mansfield in a Rock'n'Roll Classic
Order now from Amazon.
Details:
In 1956, Frank Tashlin brought the talent for zany visual gags and absurdist pop-culture satire that he’d honed as a master of animation to the task of capturing, in glorious DeLuxe Color, a brand-new craze: rock and roll.
This blissfully bonkers jukebox musical tells the story of a mobster’s bombshell girlfriend—the one and only Jayne Mansfield, in a show-stopping first major film role—and the washed-up talent agent (Tom Ewell) who seeks to revive his career by turning her into a musical sensation.
The only question is: Can she actually sing?
A CinemaScope feast of eye-popping midcentury design, The Girl Can’t Help It bops along to a parade of performances by rock-and-roll trailblazers—including Little Richard, Fats Domino, Julie London, Eddie Cochran, the Platters, and Gene Vincent—who light up the screen with the uniquely American sound that was about to conquer the world.
BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring film scholar Toby Miller
- New video essay by film critic David Cairns
- Interview with filmmaker John Waters
- New conversation between WFMU DJs Dave “the Spazz” Abramson and Gaylord Fields about the music in the film
- New interview with Eve Golden, biographer of actor Jayne Mansfield
- On-set footage
- Interviews with Mansfield (1957) and musician Little Richard (1984)
- Episode of Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This about Mansfield
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Rachel Syme and excerpts from director Frank Tashlin’s 1952 book How to Create Cartoons with a new introduction by Ethan de Seife, author of Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin
Pop Culture Roundup: Billie Eilish meets Lisa Simpson! Mama Cass meets John Denver! Doctor Who meets the past!
ITEM! Lisa Simpson is set to meet Billie Eilish.
ITEM! Mama Cass talks to John Denver about voter registration.
ITEM! A number of past "Doctor Who" companions will be back to close out Jodie Whittaker's run on the show.
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