Odds and Ends

The other day in talking about Marvel movies, I named a number of characters under option to various producers and thus unavailable to Marvel itself for potential movies. The Beat identified all the characters listed in a recent Marvel filing with the SEC, which included Luke Cage and Deathlok in addition to those I named, so that's perhaps two fewer to include in Marvel's slate of ten films. (Deathlok is optioned to Paramount, though, who will be distributing the new Marvel productions, so perhaps they can work some sort of deal.)

But before Marvel gets too excited about their future in the film biz, perhaps they should take a look at Ron Rosenbaum's latest column in The New York Observer, in which he attacks what he calls the "Cinema Stupido." He mainly rails against Kill Bill, but he gets a couple of licks in against Sin City and graphic novels in general. (Thanks, Dirk.)

I had no intention of making this entry a rundown of what's at The Beat, but Heidi McDonald's got the goods this week. You can check out the just-announced Harvey Award nominees from the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art here, and the latest grants from the Xeric Foundation for self-published comic books here. For a blast from the past, you can compare the Harvey nominations to the Eisner nominations that came out a couple of weeks ago (and which I should've noted at the time). Once upon a time the Eisners seemed more focused on the commercial mainstream than the Harveys did, but this year, although they don't have lots of overlap of nominees, neither appears more MOR than the other.

The Beat also points us to Tom Peyer's blog, which features pictures and more pictures of an important strategy session at the Pentagon.



Peyer has some fun stuff on the blog as a whole, particularly his illustrations of news events (and other things) in comic book covers. It's graphics heavy, though, so it may take a minute to load. I'm adding him to my list on the right.

Another blog I added recently is rocket to nowhere. I've divvied up the links by subject, but rocket to nowhere doesn't fit any I've got now. For the time being, I'll move it to the pretentious-sounding "Flights of Prose" (all pretension should fall on me, though--rocket to nowhere is not pretentious). Any suggestions for a category are welcome (and sh, you're also welcome to weigh in on the subject of in what box you'd like me to pigeonhole you).