Actor Peter Graves died at his Los Angeles home on Sunday at the age of 83. Story and brief bio here.
Daily Archives: March 15, 2010
‘Alice’ Thrashes Damon’s ‘Green Zone’
Alice in Wonderland crushed Matt Damon this past weekend—bless her heart. The Johnny Depp-Tim Burton 3D extravaganza pulled in another $62.7 million, while Damon et al. had to settle for a measly $14.3 million.
Thousands Gather at Comic Con
Between eight and ten thousand sequential art, science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts gathered within Seattle’s Washington State Convention Center to celebrate the comic book and pop culture this past weekend. The fans came, some in costumes, seeking personal sketches and autographs from the gathered artists. Artists and writers came to meet their fans and to network with publishers in order to advance existing careers or establish new ones. In contrast to San Diego’s massive event, which draws over 10 times the number gathered in Seattle, the Emerald City Comic Con (EC3) caters far more to the sequential art form that inspired the convention. The San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) has become a multimedia extravaganza drawing stars and directors from Hollywood to preview what they hope will the next blockbuster or the next television ratings hit. At SDCC booths for production companies like Fox and Warners Bros, share floor space with television studios, toy companies, and, yes, even comic publishers. Moreover, a single event hall In San Diego, where fans will spend an entire day watching trailers and movie clip previews, can accommodate nearly all those gathered in Seattle. SDCC is a massive cultural event where panelists are escorted in and
James Bowman Denies Denying Artistic Standing to Tolkien and Lewis
James Bowman has kindly responded to my comments on his assertion that “fantasy is not Art.” ‘Kindly,’ on second thought, might be stretching things a bit, given that he begins by marginalizing those who disagree with him as nothing more than blog-dwelling trolls*: You can imagine the reaction in the blogosphere— which, as you may or may not know, has way more Lewis and Tolkien fans in it than the population at large. I wonder why that is, by the way? I’ll bet there are far more readers of Mr. Bowman’s latest blog entry in the blogosphere than in the population at large, but I digress. After establishing a suitably dismissive tone with those lines, Mr. Bowman begins his defense with the following: I wonder if it is too late to protest that I did not say what Mr Crandall says I said. What I did say was that fantasy — by which I meant the fantasy actually being produced in our culture today, the fantasy of Avatar or The Dark Knight or that which is, in one way or another, merely derivative from Tolkien or Lewis — represents a break with the Western mimetic tradition to which the fantasies
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