Glenn Hauman: View From Above

This is seriously Smurfed up.

Proving that comics lead to juvenile deliquency, we have proof of the amazing things Smurfs will do to keep Smurfette in Smurfberries. And you thought Gargamel was in the wrong…

Four men dressed as Smurfs were arrested after attempting to steal a car and beating a man in Melbourne, Australia.

According to police reports, a 37-year-old man was walking out of a 7-Eleven just past midnight when he was approached by a man that looked like Papa Smurf, who asked for a cigarette. But the victim refused to light the cigarette before handing it over, and had to endure Papa Smurf’s wrath. He had also noticed that three other men, all similarly dressed as Smurfs, were attempting to simultaneously hotwire a car.

Australian police released the store’s surveillance video to find the four men responsible for the crimes. Three 19-year-olds and an 18-year-old came forward to admit to the crime and were promptly arrested.

via Australian Police Arrest Four Smurf Suspects for Crime Spree | TIME.com .

And it gets worse– Papa Smurf was arrested in New York .

Hat tip: Yog Sysop .

Originally published on ComicMix as Four Smurfs Arrested In Crime Spree

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We are incredibly fond of Go Get A Roomie! here at ComicMix. The comic won our May Mayhem NSFW Webcomics Tournament back in May, and their fans voted with their pocketbooks as well, raising hundreds of dollars for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to put them way over the top.

And now, they’re putting it all down on paper.

Since its first page, the comic has been there to corrupt the world with fond smiles and happy sighs. If it can continue to do so through a new printed form, it would make a dream come true. Not only will the first book of Go Get a Roomie include all of chapters 1-12, but countless other extras as well! Bonus chapter, illustrations and sketches, redrawn comic strips, drinking game, kitties, a sneak peek at a secret project, and much more!

via Go Get A Roomie! Book One by Hiveworks Comics — Kickstarter .

They’ve already blown past their initial goal of $20,000 in the first day, so it’s going to be funded, but they have lots and lots of stretch goals… at $30,000 they’ll throw in some extra charms and stickers free for everyone ordering at least a book. At $50,000 they’ll throw in a bonus book only chapter on top of the mini chapter already being put into the book, and at $75,000 they’ll get Little one plushies made and add them to anyone getting at least a book. Lord only knows what they’ll do if they hit $100,000– but I think they better start planning for it.

Watch the video– then go get your own Roomie!

Originally published on ComicMix as “Go Get A Roomie!” gets a Kickstarter

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Entertainment Weekly, of all places, presents one of the most thoughtful essays on superhero films and how– similar they’re all becoming, and even worse, how many other movies are aping them to great financial success and overall boredom.

Superhero Movies have evolved to the point where three of the genre’s standard-bearers can embody radically different filmmaking styles – this is a good thing, right? Well, maybe. But the problem is, when you dig underneath the three films’ respective stylistic excesses – and they are excesses; few genres in film history are more fundamentally decadent than the Superhero Film, with the ever-expanding budgets and the swooping digital-effects-crane-shots and the ruined cityscapes and the supervillains planning to conquer/pillage/destroy every city/world/galaxy in sight – there is a depressing sameness to lurking within each movie’s basic DNA.

via The Superhero Delusion: How Superhero Movies created the Sad Perfect Badass Messiah, and what that says about America | PopWatch | EW.com .

Originally published on ComicMix as Superhero Movies and their Sad Perfect Badass Messiahs

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While we fully believe that you should help Peter David recover from his stroke by buying his e-books here at ComicMix , we also believe we should give equal time to opposing views.

In that spirit, we point you to The OutHousers and Ten Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Help Peter David .

Originally published on ComicMix as Haters Gonna Hate

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Spider-Man definitely has some unique tricks and abilities— super strength, wall-crawling, and a mysterious Spider-Sense— but do any of them stand up to scientific realities? The guys at ASAPScience take a look at how some of Spider-Man’s main attributes could legitimately happen, while others… not so much.

And we’re not even going to discuss how his brain can be taken over by an octopus.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Originally published on ComicMix as Saturday Morning Cartoons: The Science Of Spider-Man

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As you probably already know, Peter David suffered a stroke last week. Even though the Davids have health insurance, they also have co-pays and things that the insurance company just won’t cover. And many people have been asking how they can help.

Right now, the most direct way is to buy his e-books. Crazy 8 Press , a writing cooperative that Peter belongs to (disclosure: so do I) has agreed to make their books available for sale through ComicMix. You can get The Camelot Papers , Pulling Up Stakes parts 1 & 2 , and his Hidden Earth Chronicles novels Darkness of the Light and Heights of the Depths right now. All proceeds go directly to Peter.

Peter’s e-books are also available for sale via Amazon and Barnes & Noble . Royalties from those sales will take longer to get to Peter, and be slightly smaller. But one thing that you can do there that you can’t do here is give his books as gifts. Just go on the webpage for the book and click the “Buy As Gift” button and go through the process using the gift-ees e-mail address.

We’ll be keeping you posted on additional efforts to help Peter as hear of them.

Related articles

• Here is how YOU can Help Peter (peterdavid.net)
• Peter David has stroke (comicmix.com)

Originally published on ComicMix as Help Peter David by buying his e-books now!

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Sick of vampire books? Movies? TV shows?

Yeah. So are we.

Sick of the entire unlife of vampires?

Yeah. So is Vince Hammond.

In the thrilling conclusion to this twisted new take on the vampire tale, Vince’s investigation into the murder of Tracy and the assault on Amber leads him down paths that he could not possibly have expected, including not only a confrontation with the woman who turned him into a vampire, but also a secret that could upend the entirety of the Order of the Chevaliers.

And don’t forget to get Pulling Up Stakes, Part 1 !

Originally published on ComicMix as Pulling Up Stakes Part 2 EPUB

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Mary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes has won the Costa Book Awards biography of the year. They won the £5,000 biography prize for a book that interweaves the true and tragic story of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia with Mary’s own troubled relationship with her father, the eminent Joycean scholar James S. Atherton.

The Talbots have known of the win for several weeks. “It has been really hard keeping quiet about it,” said Mary. “We were astonished. Just being shortlisted was amazing and hearing we’d won the category was stunning. We’re delighted of course, both personally – it’s the first story I’ve had published – but also for the medium, I can’t believe a graphic novel has won.”

It is not the first graphic work to win a major literary prize – Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992 and Chris Ware won the Guardian first book prize in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth – but the Costa award is still a significant moment for the graphic medium.

“It is a good thing for graphic novels as a whole,” said Bryan Talbot whose prodigious output includes The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alice in Sunderland as well as strips for Judge Dredd and Batman. “Graphic novels are becoming increasingly accepted as a legitimate art form.”

The last graphic novel spike came about 25 years ago with the popularity of books such as The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and Maus. The problem then, said Talbot, was that there were not enough books to feed this. “By the time you’d read a dozen or so of the best titles, there wasn’t enough left to keep this nascent interest going. Since then, there has been an increasing number of graphic novels published and now we have this whole canon of quality work.

“We are living in the golden age of graphic novels. There are more and better comics being drawn today than ever in the history of the medium and there’s such a range of styles of artwork, of genre and of subject matter.”

Judges called Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes “a beautifully crafted” work “which crosses the boundaries between literature and the graphic genre with extraordinary effect”.

via Costa awards 2012: graphic biography wins category prize | Books | The Guardian .

Congratulations to Mary and Bryan!

Originally published on ComicMix as “Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes” wins Costa Book Awards biography of 2012

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UPDATE: Peter’s site is back. Feel free to add well-wishes there.

Peter David , writer of over one thousand comics for everyone over the past four decades, has suffered a stroke . He writes on his site:

I have had a stroke. We were on vacation in Florida when I lost control of the right side of my body. I cannot see properly and I cannot move my right arm or leg. We are currently getting the extent of the damage sorted out and will report as further details become clarified.

His main website, PeterDavid.net , is getting hammered, but we’ll be updating as we have more information. He’s still planning on hitting all his deadlines, though.

Peter, of course, is well known for his comics work, holding the current record for most months consistently published. comic book resume includes an award-winning twelve-year run on The Incredible Hulk, and he has also worked on such varied and popular titles as X-Factor, Supergirl, Young Justice, Soulsearchers and Company, Aquaman, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2099, Star Trek, Wolverine, The Phantom, Sachs & Violens, The Dark Tower, and many others. He has also written comic book related novels, such as The Incredible Hulk: What Savage Beast, and co-edited The Ultimate Hulk short story collection. Furthermore, his opinion column, “But I Digress…,” has been running in the industry trade newspaper The Comic Buyers’s Guide for nearly a decade, and in that time has been the paper’s consistently most popular feature and was also collected into a trade paperback edition.

His latest prose fiction, Pulling Up Stakes , is available from Crazy 8 Press. Part one is available as an e-book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble now, with part two arriving shortly. His latest comic, Richard Castle’s A Calm Before Storm, is a spinoff from the TV series Castle, starring Nathan Fillion.

Originally published on ComicMix as Peter David has stroke

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Happy birthday to Stan the Man! (If you don’t know who he is, we can’t imagine why you’re even reading this website.)

Excelsior from all of us true believers! May you keep making cameos in Marvel films for decades to come…

…in fact, we have most of them here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

Originally published on ComicMix as Happy 90th birthday, Stan Lee!

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