DC Comics Press Release

DC Comics is launching a new imprint called MINX, which will publish original graphic novels for teenage girls. MINX will be the first imprint from a major American comic book publisher devoted to reaching the teenage girl. It will launch in May 2007 with the publication of THE PLAIN JANES, a graphic novel written by young adult novelist Cecil Castellucci (THE QUEEN OF COOL and BOY PROOF) and illustrated by Jim Rugg (the creator and artist of STREET ANGEL). The MINX imprint will be overseen by Vertigo Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Karen Berger and Vertigo Group Editor Shelly Bond.

“The launch of MINX represents an opportunity for us to reach a very active reader who has only recently begun sampling graphic novels: the teenage girl,” said DC Comics President and Publisher Paul Levitz. “Until now, there has not been an American graphic novel imprint specifically for teenage girls. We want to reach out to this audience with creativity and offer them a line they can look to for titles designed for them.”

In an unprecedented level of commitment for an American comic book publisher, DC Comics will launch MINX with a major national, year-long marketing campaign. As part of this effort, DC Comics has hired Alloy Media + Marketing, the promotional experts behind such youth-targeted best-sellers as the GOSSIP GIRL series, SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS, and THE A LIST.

MINX is currently scheduled to publish seven books in 2007. MINX books will feature a diverse cast of characters, including a tenacious martial artist; a rebellious detective; an ex-surf punk; a big mouth blogger and a futuristic brainiac. From risk-takers to troublemakers, the MINX characters don’t just play by their own rules — they invent as they go along, resulting in up-to-the-minute, unexpected adventures.

“MINX books will appeal to the many young women who have been introduced to the visual impact of graphic novels through manga and books like PERSEPOLIS,” said Karen Berger. “The first book, THE PLAIN JANES, tells the story of a girl named Jane who leaves the city. She meets three other girls named Jane, and together, they form a secret art gang and take on suburbia to bring about change for the better. MINX stories are smart, fearless, and about the real world.”

• USA TODAY has a first look at the Fantasticar, which makes its debut in the upcoming FANTASTIC FOUR sequel FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER. [Link]
• Horror writer Clive Barker to develop and produce an original young-adult thriller flick centered on the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. [Link]
• Eddie Murphy will return as detective Axel Foley for BEVERLY HILLS COP IV. [Link]
• Sony is expected to greenlight STARSHIP TROOPERS 3, which would feature returning star Casper Van Dien as Colonel John Rico. [Link
• The new NBC supernatural series RAINES, starring Jeff Goldblum as a detective who sees ghosts, will premiere in March on Friday nights. [Link]
• Senior Vice-President/Editor-in-Chief Pat McCallum of Wizard Entertainment Group has been fired from the company. [Link]
• Meg Ryan is attached to star in THE BEST AWFUL, an HBO miniseries adaptation of the Carrie Fisher novel. [Link]

• The acclaimed Vertigo comic PREACHER is being turned into a one-hour series for HBO. [Link]
• SCARY MOVIE star Anna Faris has joined the cast of the sci-fi comedy FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT TIME TRAVEL. [Link]
• John Barrowman, star of the DOCTOR WHO spin-off series TORCHWOOD, will return as Capt. Jack Harkness in a multi-episode arc in the third season of DOCTOR WHO. [Link]
• Move over, Mickey Mouse. There are plans for a Bruce Lee — yeah, a Bruce Lee — theme park in the late martial artist’s ancestral home of Shunde, China.[Link]

EXISTENCE
Written, pencilled and inked
by Harold Ritchie Jr.
Edited by Tara Ritchie
Unhinged Studios

Let’s begin with a few words in praise of “stark.” No, not Tony (Iron Man) Stark or that Sebastian Stark guy played by James Woods in the new TV lawyer show SHARK. What we’re talking about here is “stark” as a classic concept: the kind of “stark” that means barren and desolate. The kind of “stark” that is harsh and blunt.

An empty farm house in the middle of nowhere in a John Steinbeck novel is stark. The Arizona desert at night is stark. The rocky surface of Mars is stark. “Stark” can be powerful and can also be beautiful. Harold Ritchie Jr.‘s new comic book EXISTENCE is also stark.

EXISTENCE is the story of a band of freedom fighters in a post-apocalyptic world. A dark, secret government rules and the old governments struggle to retain their power and restore order.

This is the kind of story where starkness is an asset. Ritchie’s minimalist artwork and short, brisk dialogue enhance his bleak story. His panels are tight and as claustrophobic as Paris Hilton‘s walk-in closet. This gives the story a moody atmosphere that conveys a world of paranoia and hopelessness. This is one of those comics that actually benefits from being rendered in black and white. It’s almost impossible to think of the world of EXISTENCE conveyed any other way.

The story moves along at a good pace, and — as in the first issue of most comic books — there isn’t time for a lot of character development. Each character gets a brief introduction, we learn why they are necessary to the plot, and then we move along to the next character.

We first meet Jack West, an amnesiac revolutionary who looks a lot like Silent Bob after a few months on a high-fiber diet. West is rescued by an agent of the Guardians of Order, and both Jack and his rescuer are pursued by the bad guys in a wild chase.

That chase sequence is really the best part of the first issue — Ritchie’s art is best in the panels where the good guys are making their getaway. The lack of background detail complements the desolation facing the heroes of EXISTENCE.

We learn that Jack has been tortured for three years by TOC (the Omni Corpus) and that he was once the “strongest soldier” in his unit — which probably means he’ll be around for issue number 2 and beyond.

We meet other members of the cast, but again, we don’t really learn too much about anyone, but we do discover who the bad guys are and get a hint of what they’re trying to do.

But while the art and writing of EXISTENCE is stark, the plot is quite complex. I don’t want to give too much away here, but you’ll want to read this a couple of times to catch all the details. There’s enough happening here that it can be confusing if you’re not paying attention.

In the copy I received for review, there were a number of grammar and punctuation errors (which I hope were corrected before final publication). There were also a few problems with some of the character’s anatomy, which I’m sure will be tightened up in subsequent issues.

All in all, EXISTENCE is a work in progress and should be experienced that way. Be patient, it looks like Ritchie is going somewhere with this and if you like your comics stark, you might want to be along for the ride.

In the beginning, Godzilla got a raw deal. Originally the star of a 98-minute Japanese film named GOJIRA(his real name), he came to be known around the world in an 80-minute American re-cut called GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. The American film used just 60 minutes of the Japanese version, and filled the rest with low-budget scenes featuring character actor Raymond Burr (later known as TV’s Perry Mason and Ironside). Although Gojira was terrifically successful in Japan, it was Godzilla that became popular around the rest of the world — so popular that few fans outside Japan even knew about the existence of the original film. That success in the United States and elsewhere was not the success of a serious film, however. It was the kitschy popularity of the drive-in movie; people went to the theater to see a guy in a lizard suit destroy downtown Tokyo. Any deeper qualities the original film might have possessed were lost in translation, to put it mildly. This Emperor had no clothes, at least as far as movie critics were concerned.

Or did he? With the broader modern international acceptance of Japanese film, Toho Co. decided in 2004 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of GOJIRA by showing the world what it was missing. The original film was granted a fairly wide international art-house movie release for the first time ever. That critics were surprised at what they saw was something of an understatement. GOJIRA is an unexpectedly political film, commenting on both the anxieties of the Atomic Age of the 1950s and the historical tendencies that made Japan an aggressor in World War II and a victim of the only two atomic weapons ever used in combat. Anchored by legendary character actor Takashi Shimura (internationally known for his starring role that same year in THE SEVEN SAMURAI), the third of the film not seen in Godzilla successfully presented a series of relationships centered around love, loyalty, and sacrifice. With dark and moody atmospherics and some strong special effects, GOJIRA is hardly the critical joke that Godzilla made it out to be.

To understand why GOJIRA is a much deeper film than Godzilla ever was, it is useful to consider what Terry Morse, director and editor of the American film, decided to leave out. Gone is the scene in the Japanese Diet where two legislators debate whether or not the definite link between the appearance of the monster and recent South Pacific H-bomb tests should be revealed in the press. Also gone is much of the militaristic exultation on the part of the Japanese public for the efforts of the Navy to drive Gojira out of Tokyo Bay, and the disgust on the part of Takashi Shimura’s character (playing Japan’s most eminent naturalist and paleontologist) for how little anyone wants to study the creature and understand how it can survive exposure to vast amounts of radiation. Finally, the American film mutes several key exchanges that discuss the ethical role of science and scientists in the creation of weapons of mass destruction. It is heady stuff for a “simple” monster movie.

Now the rest us can see what we missed in those theaters in the GODZILLA-GOJIRA DELUXE COLLECTOR’S EDITION, a two-DVD set from Toho Co. and Sony/BMG Home Entertainment. Each film sits on its own disc, with GOJIRA remastered in high definition with subtitles and a commentary track by ‘Zillaphiles Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski. A number of short featurettes describing the genesis of the Gojira story and the creature suit round out the set.

The package is both hit and miss, with far more of the former than the latter. The real gems of the set are both of the films, showing in stark relief how a fairly serious piece of science fiction can be remade into cultural cotton candy. The short features and commentary provide rafts of useful information. For example, the commentators mention that any scratches present in the hi-def re-master of GOJIRA are there because of damage to the original negative — Toho Co. could not keep its cutting rooms clean and the negative suffered during the optical printing of the film’s effects. The commentary is something of handicap as well, though. The materials in the two-DVD set stress the seriousness of the original GOJIRA film at some length, and make some breezy comparisons to other great anti-nuclear films like Stanley Kubrick‘s DR. STRANGELOVE. Yet when all is said and done, the commentary track features two serious Godzilla fans, not two serious students of Japanese film, somewhat undermining the premise of the film’s supposed greatness. Film critic Roger Ebert also has a point when he says that the film does not contain the stop-motion artistry of Wallis O’Brien or Ray Harryhausen — it’s just a guy in a rubber suit.

Any deficiencies really don’t matter in the end, though. As the film that inspired more than two dozen sequels over the course of 50 years, GOJIRA still stands up. That it is also the darkest, most serious, and best of the films only adds to its luster. All hail Gojira, the real King of the Monsters — the Emperor who has some nice clothes after all!