My Favorite Quote of the Year

From Adam McGovern at ComicCritique.com:

"Wildstorm was roundly pilloried (here and elsewhere) for not renewing Marc Bernardin & Adam Freeman’s smart sci-fi spy thriller The Highwaymen, but luckily the criticism didn’t affect either the writing team’s attitude or Jim Lee’s judgment, since the boys are back for the smart sci-fi prequel comic to February’s film Push. Nobody in current comics is better at combining the wit and ensemble dynamics of heist films with the scary intensity of geopolitical conspiracy pulp than Bernardin & Freeman, and theirs is the *other* comeback of the year."

Because it's cool...

that's why.

Bob Schreck...

...got laid off today. In case you don't know who Bob Schreck is, he's one of the good guys.

One of the first feature stories I ever wrote for EW was about Frank Miller coming back to Batman for The Dark Knight Strikes Again. I interviewed a bunch of people about the project, one of them being then-Batman editorial overlord Bob Schreck. Great interview, lots of juiciness. A few months after the story had hit stands, I dropped Bob an email and asked him to lunch. He accepted. Maybe out of professional courtesy, maybe out of a back-of-his-mind bit of gamesmanship—I was still editing EW's comic coverage back them, so making nice with me might grease some wheels down the line—who knows? But he took the lunch and even allowed me to pitch a half-assed story idea, which we then talked about for 30 minutes. And then talked about again a few days later before he passed on it (and rightly so, as it was half-assed).

We stayed in touch over the years and when I finally gave up the comicss journalist ghost and started writing, he invited me in to talk about doing some Vertigo work. Pitched him a couple of things, developed them into proposals, talked through story arcs—they never went anywhere, but that's not the point. Most of them never do. But he took the time, time he probably didn't have.

I think, more than anything else, Bob Schreck enjoys the act of discovery: be it finding and nurturing new talent, or finding and nurturing new stories out of old talent. He genuinely likes the people, and getting the best work out of them.

The dude's a titan, and DC's loss will be someone else's massive gain.

Boobs, Push, and Adam Freeman

I swear, if every interview was as fun as this one, I'd do interviews up the ying-yang.

STILL RELEVANT: The Secret Service's Super Bowl

I originally wrote this post back in December of 2006. Everything in it still applies now that Barack Obama is, officially, President Obama. We're now playing for all the marbles.

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Or World Series, or U.S. Open. Take your pick. Whatever you wanna call it, that's what it's gonna be for the Secret Service if Barack Obama does, indeed, run for President.

Why? Because, for the first time, a black man has a legitimate (and, depending on who you talk to, likely) shot at winning the White House. (And Jesse Jackson's run, however well-intentioned it may have been, never really had a shot.) Even though it's been a scant 40-odd years since the Civil Rights movement, I'd like to think that we, as a society, are ready for that.

But there are still pockets of this country who won't stand for it, who aren't ready for a Negro in Chief. And those happen to be incredibly well-armed pockets.

So this is when we see, exactly, what the Secret Service is made of. Because those nuts are gonna come for Obama...whether the general public hears about it or not.

Put your game-face on, fellas. Show time.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop Makes $33 million

Jesus, America. Can you not just stay home and read a book? It seems like sometimes you fuckers will watch ANYTHING...

Damnit Damnit