Wednesday, June 9, 2010

It's Finger Time Again!

Once again, avoiding obvious jokes about giving the Finger, we have this to proclaim...

SAN DIEGO – Comic-Con International is proud to announce that Otto Binder and Gary Friedrich have been selected to receive the 2010 Bill Finger Award for Achievement in Comic Book Writing. The choices made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer-historian Mark Evanier were unanimous.

"This is an award about excellence and about contributions to the field which have not received the recognition they deserve," Evanier explains. "Bill Finger sure merited more acclaim than he got and in his name, we try to honor others who have been similarly overlooked. Many people know of and love the work of Otto Binder and Gary Friedrich. Not nearly enough know the names of the men who created that work."

Gary Friedrich was a member of the legendary Marvel Bullpen of the sixties, joining the company in 1967 after a brief stint working for Charlton Comics on strips that included Blue Beetle and The Sentinels. For Marvel, he began with westerns and quickly segued to super-hero features including The X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, and Marvel's version of Captain Marvel. He distinguished himself with a long, memorable run writing Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, and in 1972 introduced a new, memorable character with the name of Ghost Rider, which has had a successful run in publishing and which in 2007 resulted in a major motion picture bringing the fiery hero to the screen.

Otto Binder sold the first of hundreds of science-fiction stories in 1930 at the age of 19. Within a few years, he was a major contributor to pulp magazines, and when comic books came along, he was an early entrant in that field and one of its most prolific writers. He was the primary scripter for the original Captain Marvel, authoring nearly a thousand stories — approximately half — of those featuring that hero and allied characters. It was largely due to Binder's work for Fawcett Comics that Captain Marvel became the bestselling superhero of his era. Binder also found time over the years to write for Timely Comics, Quality, MLJ, Western Publishing and EC. In 1948 he began working for DC Comics and soon was writing Superman. In the course of writing that character he introduced such important, lasting elements of the mythos as Supergirl, Brainiac, Krypto the Super Dog, and The Legion of Super-Heroes. Binder passed away in 1974.

The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914-1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics. The Bill Finger Award was instituted in 2005 at the instigation of comic book legend Jerry Robinson, who worked with Finger on the original Golden Age Batman.

In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book artist-historian Jim Amash, writer Tony Isabella, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

The 2010 awards are underwritten by Comic-Con International. DC Comics is the major sponsor; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.

The Finger Award is presented under the auspices of Comic-Con International: San Diego and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con on the evening of July 23 at the San Diego Hilton Bayfront.

• Posted at 11:07 PM · LINK

Buffet Blogging

Just because I can, I'm blogging from the buffet at the Luxor in Las Vegas. Lunch here is $15.95 and thanks to my Gastric Bypass Surgery, I was able to eat about four bucks worth. This is the same rate of return you get on your money with Keno.

• Posted at 2:23 PM · LINK

License to Kill

We're still coming to you from the Africa Hot city of Las Vegas, Nevada where the temps are so high that everything in the Liberace Museum melted and sequin-studden lava is now oozing onto The Strip. As I mentioned, I'm here at the Licensing International Expo, which is where folks come if they (a) have a character or property to promote or (b) might be able to make some money from the exploitation of others' characters or properties. It's the kind of place where you often hear the word "monetize" used, as in: "I have these characters who are kinda like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer only they're mosquitoes and we're trying to monetize them."

Many of the characters being touted as The Hottest Property Out There are unknown to me...and since I'm somewhat involved in this world professionally, you can imagine how unknown they are at the moment to the average person. But in this kind of exploitation, the appearance of popularity is often self-correcting. There are booths pushing new cartoon characters, brand names, celebrities...everything. Some of the celebs are deceased, some are here. I saw Tony Curtis and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, for instance...and Buzz Aldrin, who was on my flight to Vegas, has a booth in connection with some promotion called "Buzz Aldrin, Rocket Hero" that makes him look less like The Second Man on the Moon than the senior citizen version of Buck Rogers.

Of course, there are tons of characters you have heard of. Time-Warner is pushing the heck out of Yogi Bear, Scooby Doo, Green Lantern and all the others...and they must have a movie or something in the works of Top Cat because they have a Top Cat banner that probably cost about half the budget of the original series. And you have your Disney and your Dreamworks and your Sony and your Smurfs and I'm sorry I didn't get a photo of this great walkaround costume they had of the cartoon version of Mr. Bean. You'll have to settle for Miffy above.

I'll tell you more when I don't have to go pack for the flight home...including a report on Zumanity, the "sensual side of Cirque du Soleil," where the acrobats do much less spectacular feats but without nets or shirts. I also have to steel my courage to make the daring three-yard dash from the air-conditioned hotel to the air-conditioned taxi. That'll be more impressive than anything they tried last night at Zumanity even if I won't work topless.

• Posted at 9:57 AM · LINK

The Doctor is Out!

It's the end of an era. Dr. Demento will still be heard via a streaming Internet show but after forty-some-odd years, he's leaving conventional radio. This article has all the details...and I don't think it gives nearly enough credit to what the good doctor has done for many, many careers. I also don't think it properly summarizes the reasons that his program lost listeners the last decade or so. I think some of it was a period when he was a bit too generous (I thought) in playing the works of new wanna-be recording artists. The show morphed from being a celebration of established successes in the world of comedy and novelty records to being a showcase for aspiring Weird Als. There should be a place for such works but I don't think that's what folks wanted when they tuned in to Dr. D. They wanted Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer and Spike Jones, as well as records that were unintentionally funny.

The other problem (again, I thought) was that certain CD releases and Internet MP3 swapping have made that material fairly easy to acquire, slap on your computer and play whenever you feel like it. The irony, of course, is that the reason such recordings are now so readily available is that one man kept them alive and popular. Dr. Demento isn't going away. It's kind of like radio has gone away from him...

• Posted at 2:38 AM · LINK

June 8, 2010 • Current • June 10, 2010