Gareth S. Young - - 1000 Trillion Suns

...Kirby! Jack "King" Kirby is one of the single most important people in comic book history. Unfortunately, many people still haven't heard of him. I hope to rectify that here. Marvel Masterminds What do The Fantastic Four, Uncanny X-Men, Hulk, Thor and Iron Man have in common? You are correct if you said they are all Marvel comics. If you said they were all created by Stan Lee, you're only half right. The legend goes... Stan Lee would come up with ideas, basic outlines and tell them to Jack Kirby. Kirby would then go away and draw a comic book based on that idea. Once he was finished, he'd give the comic back to Lee who'd fill in the dialogue and speech as he saw fit. Often Lee would have no idea what he'd get back from Kirby and has been quoted as saying it was like doing a crossword puzzle, trying to figure out what story the pictures were telling him. Later, the idea of credit became the subject of bad blood between Kirby and Marvel...

...Groot! Cashing in In 1996, barely twenty years ago, Marvel was in big financial trouble. In an attempt to cash in on their large inventory of characters, they made several licensing deals with different movie studios. Universal snatched up the Hulk, Fox grabbed the X-Men and Fantastic Four, and Sony bid highest for the Spider-man rights. Several lackluster movies were made over the next few years and many of the rights reverted back to Marvel. Hulk, Punisher, Daredevil and Blade foremost amongst the returning heroes. Marvel comes back to life By 2008, Marvel were on a stronger footing and ready to attempt a launch of their own movie studio. Since the licensing of Marvel's big guns (Spider-man and the X-Men) was still owned by other companies, Marvel decided to use Iron Man to launch the studio. Not only was Iron Man a huge success, but Marvel enjoyed a long string of successes after it, including a little known property set in space called Guardians of the...

Next year, Captain America celebrates his 75th birthday. No doubt the comics will celebrate this in fine style, and it's just been announced that ABC, the television wing of Disney, will be showing a 1 hour  75th Anniversary Special . Later in the year there is, of course, a third Captain America movie -  CIVIL WAR  - to be devoured by the fans. And all of this is great. I'm a fan of comics, movies and Cap, so I'm on board for all of it. What is interesting though is how OLD all of this comic book stuff is. DC's Holy Trinity There's a lot of excitement for DC's upcoming Batman versus Superman movie and the first "on screen" appearance of the Big 3  - Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman - together in one movie. Warner acquired Time Inc. in 1989 and with it, DC comics. About ten minutes later, a Batman movie was announced. That it's taken more than 25 years to get the Big 3 together is baffling to me. Supes, Bats and WW are three of the...

It's going to be one of the biggest box office years on record, but the news with the movie studios is more of a mixed bag than you might expect. Here are how the top 5 studios fared... The Big Two Right now the big two movie studios are Universal and Disney. 2015 has been dominated by blockbusters from both studios but Universal has taken the lion's share. TRIVIA BLAST: Universal's $2.2 billion dollars leads Disney's $1.5 billion, but there's the little matter of a Star Wars movie in December which will probably bring the House of Mouse out on top. #1 - Universal Universal have had colossal hits: Jurassic World , Furious 7 and Minions making the bulk of their record breaking box office. All three of these movies are in the worldwide box office top ten, with Jurassic World recently moving into third place. Other good performers for Universal - Straight outta Compton, Trainwreck, 50 Shades of Grey (ugh), and Pitch Perfect 2 - probably le...

part 3 of the Born Again story arc by Miller/Mazzucchelli One of the most thankless tasks, in any profession, is following someone regarded as the best. In comic books, following Frank Miller in the 80's would be like following Einstein at a comedy club after he's finished his set with the punchline: E=mc². Or something. You get my drift. Either way, Miller moved from Marvel's Daredevil to write the career defining Batman series "The Dark Knight Returns" for DC. He also left after writing probably the most well known and loved Daredevil story ever: Born Again. Ann Nocenti, editor of Uncanny X-Men, got the call to take over from Miller. Often forgotten, sandwiched between superstars like Miller, Kevin Smith (yes, Kevin Smith the movie director) and Brian Michael Bendis, I believe Nocenti wrote some of the best Daredevil stories ever. She moved away from Miller's noirish crime stories to tackle more societal issues, managing to broaden the scope of the chara...

Greetings, Earthlings... So, this week I watched a handful of movies and thought I'd share some thoughts with you. If you follow me on  TWITTER , you probably already know that I enjoy all kinds of stuff (and things) with movies being up there amongst my favorites. If you don't follow me on Twitter...why not?? You're missing the brilliant comedic styling of @Spartagus: *instals calories* *updates mood* Thank for installing Spartan 3.0 *sigh of relief* & Watching #Noah ...and Noah has just been punched in the head by a rock monster...so...there's that. The first tweet is me being...well, me. And the second tweet refers to the movie I watched last night...and I'll get to that in next week's post. For now though, let's start with  Guardians of the Galaxy ... So, you take Marvel's box of toys and Disney's marketing machine and what you end up with is a colossal $95M opening weekend for a movie with a talking Raccoon ...

Every summer, the movie studios release what they call "tentpole" movies. Normally, these are big-budget, effects-driven franchise movies, designed to prop up the studios and make them their profits for the year. I call them programmed franchises because they're not acquired with one movie in mind. The philosophy from the start is to produce at least a trilogy. So much money is invested in these movies that failure can cripple a studio. Trivia Blast!! - New Line Cinema had to merge with its parent company Warner Bros after the (relative) failure of  The Golden Compass:   Budget: $180M  Box Office: $70M ( The Golden Compass  was intended to follow the trilogy of His Dark Materials books by Phillip Pullman) Jaws   Stephen Spielberg is sometimes credited with creating the first summer "Blockbuster" movie with  Jaws .  Jaws  was the first movie to be distributed with a "wide release," meaning that it opene...