meltblog

Heroes returns tonight.  Allocate space on your Tivo.  Pray for a Peter Petrelli haircut.

Are you on the List?

Luncbox Funnies went live this past week. It’s a new web home for a collection of great all-ages online comics, including Dean Trippe’s Butterfly, Mike Maihack’s Cow & Buffalo and Trade Loeffler’s Zip & L’il Bit. These are fun comics where “all-ages” doesn’t mean “kids,” but actually “ALL ages.” Get to readin’.

Hey, did you know that the book of the year for 2006 was a mini-comic and dropped while you were drunk and angry at your family (aka The Holidaze?)

Jim Mahfood’s extremely limited edition mini-comic ASK FOR JANICE is an astute illustrated history of one of the five most important albums of all time; PAUL’S BOUTIQUE by the Beastie Boys.  Food uses his unique style and inimitable voice to bring the reader inside the final salad days of the record industy as Hip Hop began its march towards market dominance.  Amazingly, this slim volume compresses a rollicking ride from the ludicrious money battles with Def Jam post LICENSED TO ILL to the never-ending party life that erupted in Silver Lake/Atwater/Echo Park in the den of the Dust Brothers, parties that stewed the beats that would become all-time legends.
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Whew! This thing is a fucking mess. One participant actually nomiates How I Met Your Mother in the number one slot, and yet another participant nominates Scrubs in the number 2 spot. And only one nod for Friday Night Lights out of eight participants? It’s amateur hour over at Creative Screenwriting Magazine, folks.

To prepare you for the upcoming February sweeps, the writers and staff of Creative Screenwriting Magazine and CS Weekly turn our attentions to the small screen and give you a cheat sheet for what you should be watching.

This year we’ve seen the final demise of a slew of Lost rip-offs, the premiere and death of a new slew of Lost rip-offs, and an ungodly procession of ill-conceived game shows. Fortunately, there are some diamonds in the roughly 48,976 indistinguishable procedural series, and we here in the Creative Screenwriting are once again bringing you our picks for the best TV 2006 had to offer. We will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical…

Peter Clines, writer, CS and CSW
1) Heroes
Created by Tim Kring
Move over Lost, my girlfriend and I have new must-see-TV that we compare notes and theories on with all our friends. A “realistic” view of people developing superpowers, Heroes shows us the denial, fear, and sheer joy that could result from these gifts, sprinkled amidst a time travel story that shows The End in episode two and lets viewers wonder how they’ll get there.
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Maureen Ryan, the Chicago Tribune’s TV afficianado, posted a piece today about Aaron Sorkin’s appearance for the Television Critics Association. Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was an Internet whipping boy throughout 2006. A bloggers delight. The NBC drama has been taking much deserved heat from the press, and Maureen has a recap of Sorkin’s (sprawling?) defense.

The end result of Sorkin’s hourlong aria to the critics clustered around the giant oval desk in the “Studio 60” writers’ room? I just don’t know what the man wants.

He said he doesn’t mind critiques or negative press. “It’s the cost of doing business,” he said more than once. “Not everything is for everybody.”

But it’s hard to square those remarks with several of Sorkin’s statements on Tuesday. First, his contention that the press isn’t writing about the content of his show, and is only focused on its disappointing ratings, doesn’t ring true.

Writer Ben Schwartz wrote articles for both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times last week. Both articles are related to comics, and both articles are essential reading if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Ben is a friend and an excellent writer to be representing the industry on these subjects.

Los Angeles Times — on Drew Friedman

New York Times — on comic strips being collected, and the collectors that make it possible.

Columnist Steven Grant has an interesting piece on Jim Steranko’s recent involvment in a situation where art he had donated to a university collection may or may not have been sold/stolen after the head of the collection passed away.  Grant, as always, has some excellent commentary.

I’ve been waiting for this for a while. Two of my faves, Brian Wood and Matthew Woodson collaborating on an OGN for Top Shelf. Like any good Brian Wood yarn, we have here a young (angsty) man with headphones and a bandage about the face. And here’s the equally “Woodian” premise…

“Following up on the time-honored adage “you can’t go home again”, Dogs Day End details the personal journey of 30-year-old Andrew Maguire, pulled back to the small upstate hometown by his mother as she enters the final stages of cancer. Once back, he revisits the demons of his youth: his estranged father, resentful ex-buddies, and his jilted high school sweetheart. As the twin pressures of the past and the present threaten to bury him, Andrew makes an all-or-nothing decision to come to terms with it all.”

Sign me up…