Tag: MirrorMask

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Yesterday our copy of Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Chosen Collection—all seven seasons—arrived. (It’s supposedly a limited edition, but I don’t see anything to that effect on our box.) Since we’d been listening to the soundtrack of “Once More With Feeling” on the drive home last night, we immediately put on the episode.

I’ve been slowly working my way through the Comic Cavalcade Archives. I’m determined to read the whole thing, but I have to take it in small doses. Partly the target audience is much younger than me, partly the storytelling (and art) I’m used to is much different, and of course partly it’s a very different time. It was the middle of World War II, and half the stories involved fighting Nazi spies or, in some cases, wreaking havoc in Germany itself. (The Ghost Patrol should have been able to take Hitler out on their own, but they seemed more interested in sabotage and practical jokes.) The original setup for Wonder Woman was that she left Paradise Island to help America defeat the Axis!

The Golden-Age Flash hunt continues. I’m now up to three issues of All-Flash with an issue of Flash Comics on its way. So far I’ve discovered that the Turtle didn’t have a costume the first time he appeared. He was just a guy in a green suit who used slowness against a guy who was used to moving fast. Next up: the original Thorn. I’ve bid on a lot of eBay auctions, expecting to win only a fraction of them. Everywhere else I look online, people are selling collector-grade books at much higher prices. I just want to read the original stories, write down who appears, and scan the occasional panel that I’m going to clean up anyway.

Amazon has finally put a discount on the Golden Age Flash Archives vol.2, so I’ve pre-ordered it. While there I looked around on my wish list and noticed that the Mirrormask DVD page (which still shows the wrong date) is recommending, “Buy this DVD with Serenity (Widescreen Edition) DVD ~ Joss Whedon today!” That seems like an appropriate pairing!

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Neil Gaiman writes that Amazon lists 2025 as the release date for the MirrorMask DVD.

Twenty years seems a long way away, but Sony are probably just scheduling it that far off because during the Great iPod Content Uprising Years of 2013-2024 people aren’t going to have much time for things like actually watching films, what with gathering together in places where the iPodPeople can’t get them and shooting them in the brain and all that stuff, and it’s only after the Man-Droid-iPod Peace Treaties of 2024 that anyone gets back to the serious business bringing out DVDs of long-forgotten movies.

“Alternately,” he adds, “I suppose it could be an Amazon.com typo and MirrorMask could be coming out on the last day of this year. That would be nice.”

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It’s refreshing when a movie you’ve anticipated for years actually lives up to your expectations. It’s unprecedented when it happens twice in one weekend. MirrorMask and Serenity were both amazing.

The MirrorMask theater listing looks like a tour schedule, with the film opening in a few more cities each week. Unfortunately, at least some theaters that have it now won’t have it by next weekend, so we’re going to have to catch it again one night this week. Then we’ll seek Serenity again on the weekend. Somewhere in there we’ll find time for the other movies we wanted to see.

We’ve got a more thorough review of Serenity planned…

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Neil Gaiman weighs in on the flap over adult-oriented comics in a Denver Library:

It’s been twenty years, and newspaper headlines still oscillate between “Wham! Bam ! Pow! Comics Have Grown Up!” and “OH MY GAAAD THIS COMIC NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN HAS CONTENT NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN IN IT!” articles. Bizarre.

(Ironically, the people complaining don’t seem to care much about the content—they just wanted to get the Spanish-language books off the shelves.)

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[MirrorMask Logo]Yesterday I mentioned the MirrorMask panel at Comic Con. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean were both there to talk about the movie and play a trailer-like clip they had put together the night before.

MirrorMask came about when Sony noticed that while Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal didn’t do very well in theaters, over the years they’ve become strong, steady sellers in the home video market. So they went to the Jim Henson company and asked if they could do a fantasy film in the same vein, on a budget. So Lisa Henson called up Neil Gaiman by way of asking for Dave McKean, and explained the situation: They only had a $4 million budget, but they wouldn’t have any studio interference. They went on to say they knew they couldn’t afford Neil to write the screenplay, but could he at least come up with a story, at which point he said (Edit: corrected quote) “If Dave’s directing it, I’m writing it.” Continue reading →

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We accidentally went to Comic Con on Thursday. The plan was just to pick up our badges that afternoon, but there was a panel on balancing action and character development with some really big-name authors – Robert Jordan, Peter David, Raymond Feist, etc. (The basic lessons: let combat grow out of the characters’ actions instead of tossing it in, and be aware that combat is confusing. Focus on individual characters as much as possible, rather than trying to present a long view. Quotes here.) So we stayed, I got massively dehydrated, and we spent the next hour slowly drinking water and recovering. We ended up running into a group from the UCI RPG club and just stayed around and talked for a while before we headed off to dinner.

Neither of us had ever been to Comic Con on a day other than Saturday, and my experience with conventions tends to be that Thursdays are very light. Not so! Continue reading →