Funk Babblings

Someday I must go to the San Diego Comic-Con. Seems like there's always cool stuff happening there.

It seems that among the things happening there was a string of announcements from J. Michael Straczynski. Let's see, we have Ron Howard slated to direct a movie (Changeling) that JMS wrote. We get a 12-episode SF-comedy radio series for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, The Adventures of Apocalypse Al. We get a new JMS TV series called Borrowed Lives. His excellent Rising Stars comic book series will become a TV series. His Midnight Nation graphic novel may become a film, as may a one-off comic book called Dream Police (hadn't heard of that one). He'll also be doing a new comic book called Bullet Points.

Oh yeah, and some Babylon 5 projects. Sure, a B5 video game is coming, but the big news is Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, a direct-to-DVD collection of 20-minute stories, "stories that I wanted to tell during the B5 series but never had the chance to develop." Unlike the previous B5 spinoff attempts, it will focus on the prominent B5 characters -- at least those played by actors still living. (So no G'Kar or Dr. Franklin, but maybe Delenn and Ivanova!) And it will be released next year.

(Thanks to duriyah for sending the link!)

B5 fans may have heard that at one point J. Michael Straczynski worked on a treatment for a new Star Trek series. Now his cohort on that project has written about it and even posted the 14-page treatment as a PDF. This was to have been an alternate-universe Trek, retaining the elements they liked and ridding themselves of what they disliked.

From the article I also learned what I was apparently supposed to already know, that JJ Abrams (of Lost and Alias fame) will be doing a Star Trek prequel film. With him running things it should be good, but then again it'll be an odd-numbered Trek movie.....

This weekend we'll be heading to Columbus for Marcon. Every year at Marcon I end up buying a pile of books, usually stuff that's hard to find locally, and often rare or out of print stuff. Last year's take included my first real effort to get into graphic novels beyond Sandman.

( And also Elric... )

( My fictional influences )

Saturday I took nontacitare to the local comics shop. Between the two of us we bought six graphic novels, among them:
1 "Sandman" ("The Dream Hunters")
2 "Amazing Spider-Man"
1 Batman ("Arkham Asylum")
1 "Black Orchid"
1 "Promethea"
2 written by J. Michael Straczinski
2 written by Neil Gaiman
1 written by Alan Moore
2 drawn by Dave McKean

I was blown away by the second volume of Promethea (a series recommended by featherynscale). The first volume was an intelligent and off-kilter, yet in many ways typical, superhero origin story. But the second one includes a "hyper-reality" sequence with digitized actors, a magic lesson performed as a tantric sex scene, and finally a trip through the Tarot linking the major arcana with evolution and human history and mythology and kaballah and magic and science -- it's impossible to get it all in one reading.


After the comics shop we went to see an entertaining performance of the musical Pippin. That show includes some interesting theatrical elements, the most striking of them being the climactic stripping out of all theatrical elements, down to the bare bright lights shining down on a stage empty of everything but a few uncostumed actors. Another thing I noticed was a high proportion of red-headed actors in the cast -- about a third of them. I started wondering if that was part of an intentional red-themed color scheme going on.

Today I learned that all the Babylon 5 scripts written by JMS, along with related memos and memoirs and roads-not-taken, are being sold as a set of fifteen $40 books. (Well, the last one will only be available free to people who buy the other 14.) The first three are available now. www.Babylon5scripts.com has all the info, and TheJoeStore at CafePress has the goodies, along with the usual CafePress swag imprinted with B5 quotes.

You can even get on a mailing list to be alerted when each book becomes available. Volume 4 is coming next month.

I keep intending to write about all the books I've been reading, but it's inching closer to a year's worth of books, and sadly I don't think I could do any of them justice at this point. I may still try (wading through an 845-page book means the read-books-pile isn't growing so quickly), but it's still getting less likely.

But what I can talk about is comics.

( Read more... )

JMS has announced that the Babylon 5 film he's been working on for the past year, The Memory of Shadows, has fallen through. Apparently all the financial pieces couldn't be put together.

At least we'll get The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Serenity this year.