"That Was A Hell Of A Thing!" - Galaxy Quest Comes to Comics

Everyone knows that nerds like Star Wars and Star Trek. But you can really tell when you're dealing with a geeky individual of true good humor and taste by how strongly they react when you mention Galaxy Quest, the unbelievably wonderful sci-fi comedy classic. I used to work in a video store where we'd watch this about twice a week on the store monitors. Galaxy Quest and Bring It On. That was a great job.

Galaxy Quest ended with the doors wide open for a sequel, but stupid Dreamworks never made one. Why?! The movie made money and Tim and Sigourney Weaver both said they'd do another one, but ours is not to question the will of movie execs, just to complain about their decisions. Luckily, like the throngs of Buffy fans, we GQ cultists may now be able to half-satisfy our fandom with a new comic book that picks up where the movie left off. You can read the full press release over at Comic Book Resources, but the bullet points are:

• The book will be a five-part series called "Galaxy Quest: Global Warming".
• It's from IDW Publishing, the folks who publish Angel and a lot of Niles/Templesmith stuff, as well as Gnerd favorites Locke and Key and Zombies vs Robots.
• It's written by Scott Lobdell,who's been writing X-Men books for Marvel since the early 90s, so we can assume he knows a thing or two about genre conventions and is ready to get to satirizing.
• The artist is Ilias Kyriazis, and you can peruse his Deviant Art page to get a flavor of his work. He's also got a comic of his own on Zuda called "Melody", though presumably he will now be devoting 100% of every waking hour to making sure he's capturing the dry sardonic humor of Alan Rickman's facial expressions.

Are we excited yet? Let's all enjoy a classic scene after the jump.

My Favorite Work by Anthony Minghella

Oscar Award winning director Anthony Minghella died today at 54. The short version is he died of complications from a recent operation that had seemed to be a success, details are at the Guardian UK.

Below, I've posted a link to my personal favorite of Minghella's film work. It's his contribution to the Beckett on Film project, a high-reaching, hypnotizing adaptation of Play. When this premiered on PBS, I taped it because knew Alan Rickman was in it, but I was completely drawn in by the film regardless of Rickman's (quite excellent) performance. I ended up carrying the taped version around with me and forcing my friends to watch it, and while I can't swear they all had the, let's say, emotional stamina to enjoy it, not one could say they watched it passively. What makes the adaption of Play so masterful is that Minghella transforms what might seem to be a bare-bones theater piece with little room for interpretation (read the stage setting of the playscript and try to imagine how you might put such a thing on film) into a piece where the camera itself becomes a character, and the cinematic language of close-ups, zooms, rack focuses and the rest become an expression of power. Let's also remember to co-credit the director with the amazing performances by Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliet Stevenson, and Alan Rickman.

Play remains my favorite short film of all time.

Part two after the jump (damn YouTube)...

Garth Ennis' Virgin Comics Project Revealed

Having parted ways with DC over the eyebrow-raising content in The Boys, writer Garth Ennis will be working with Virgin Comics on a new series that re-imagines a classic character that Ennis calls the British equivalent of "...Captain America, our Superman, our Batman; he's all of them rolled into one."

Who could it be? Click the jump and end the suspense!


That's right kids, Dan Dare! Originally a 1950s British comic book hero, Dare was a dashing space-pilot in the far-flung future of the 1990s. And if Monty Python's fixation with Biggles taught me anything, it's that Brits love their pilots. World II R.A.F glory and all that, wot. Dare was kept alive over the last five decades in U.K video games, comic books, and TV series, but until now has never really made it across the pond.

Variety describes the plot of the new Ennis series:

"New books will have Dare emerge from a self-imposed exile, the result of his disgust with politics and the post-nuclear warfare that has destroyed North America and much of Asia -- leaving the U.K. as the world's last remaining superpower."

Interestingly enough, the excellent Children of Men also had a post-nuclear holocaust scenario where the U.K was the only superpower left standing. Must suck to lose an Empire.

With Garth Ennis at the helm, you might expect this re-envisioned Dan Dare series to amp up the hewn-limb and disturbing sex content. However, a Gnerd source tells us this is a particularly important project for Ennis, and one he's wanted to do for a long time. Perhaps we'll see a take on the series that might surprise thoes who think they have Ennis' writing style Simon Pegged. As a fan of both Ennis and several Virgin Comics titles (Walk-In was one of the best books around during it's sadly short run), I'll be looking forward to meeting Mr. Dare for the first time.

Via Variety and Cinematical.

Reel Geek: Webcomics In Hollywood

Every Tuesday, Geekanerd Correspondent Bishop rocks it movie geek style...As geeks and/or nerds, I can pretty safely assume that you enjoy four things: comics, the internet, movies, and animation (if you dislike any of these things then you probably misspelled a word on Google and somehow ended up here). Well, today we’re going to talk about all four of those things coming together in a writhing orgy of tangled limbs and sweaty buttocks.

Oh my! Upcoming WebComic to Animation info and video, after the jump!


As many of you may know, Scott Kurtz, author of Player vs Player, the popular gaming comic, has launched an online animation series based on PVP. The series is set for 12 episodes, pumped out once a month, for a fee of $24.95 for the year. So far the reaction has been a mixed bag, but the internet is full of critics who would nitpick the way a popular website was giving away free money, so I’d rather not sit around debating how a character’s voice didn’t sound like what a 13 year old in Iowa felt it should.

PVP: The Series is being brought to us by Blind Ferret Entertainment, which is the studio that produced Tim Buckley’s “Ctrl+Alt+Del” series last year (see the trailer here). Blind Ferret is the creation of “Least I Could Do” writer Ryan Sohmer et al. Now I know I’m supposed to be discussing movies here, but bear with me.

Blind Ferret recently announced plans to create a full-length feature animated film starring the cast of “Looking for Group,” another comic that Sohmer writes. Sohmer posted a short that he and the BF team had put together for everyone to see, so take a quick peek at the video below.

Now, I don’t know about you, but the very fact that webcomic creators are pushing into the frontier of animation and film is pretty exciting to me. What we’re seeing is another expansion by webcomics into a venue traditionally only seen in syndicated comics. Garfield, Heathcliff, Peanuts and others were all syndicated newspaper strips that branched out into merchandising, which included animated features and television series. Webcomics have really only proven themselves to be financially profitable in the past few years, with powerhouses like PVP and Penny Arcade and collectives like Dumbrella and Dayfree Press. Now it looks like webcomics are taking up the challenge to produce animated series and movies without the backing of a large syndicate, and personally I’m glad to see them doing it. Sure things are going to be a little rough at first and there are going to be a lot of false starts and misfires, but that’s just part of the game.

Blind Ferret said that CAD: The Series was indeed financially profitable, and PVP still seems to be attracting subscribers, so we may start seeing more and more webcomics pushing into the animation field. Better still, we’re going to be seeing them get there on their own terms (or at least much closer than they would working under a syndicate and a network). Now I know some people out there are going to scoff and roll their eyes because webcomics are “trying too hard” or “going commercial.” Well those people have herpes. All we’re seeing is artists branching into another field of expression, one that allows them to create new material and give a new voice to their work. It may also push web-based animation ala Homestar Runner more into the spotlight and encourage more young artists into animation. This means not only more series like Homestar, but more series like “Venture Brothers” hitting the channels as networks see that these web-based series can garner an audience and make more compromises with creators about content and themes that carry over to air. Sohmers’ “Least I Could Do” has already been optioned and is in development for a TV series.

I’m looking forward to seeing web-based animated series grow and garner larger audiences. The scripts will probably be a little unsteady early on (writing for the screen has a different pacing than with a 4-6 panel comic strip), and the animation will be a little uneven, but go watch an early episode of the Simpsons and tell me you KNEW that it was going to be the success that it was.