Howdy, kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.

A couple weeks ago I did a three part study focusing on three candidates in the Shakespeare authorship question. Today, I’d like to write about a great thrill-ride of a book that features the authorship issue as one of its plot points. The book is Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell.

The title comes from a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do live after them; The Good is oft interred with their bones.” The book is pretty standard thriller fare, actually. It’s starts with a death of a Person-With-A-Secret. A friend of the PWAS (the hero of the novel) gets a clue about that secret, and before you can spell conpiracy…conspriacy…conspiracy, the hero is off on a wild hunt for more clues, eluding the machinations of a deranged killer in the process. The book doesn’t deviate from the formula any more or less than The Da Vinci Code (or any of the other Dan Brown novels) did, so what helps these sorts of books stand out is the content of the Secrets.

The secrets covered in Interred With Their Bones deal with the three big mysteries of Shakespeare: 1) Did someone other than Shakespeare write the plays? 2) Who was the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets? 3) What happened to Cardenio?

The History of Cardenio is one of Shakespeare’s lost plays (along with Love’s Labours Won), known to have been performed by the King’s Men in 1613. Most scholars speculate that the play was based around the character of Cardenio in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. There are no (that we know about) surviving manuscripts of the play, unfortunately, and finding a copy of the play could very well be the literary equivalent of archeologists digging up the city of Troy in the mid 1800s.

But the question that begs to be asked is, “Are these secrets worth killing someone over?“
A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required when reading Interred With Their Bones, but then, I suppose a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required when reading any novel. Like The Da Vinci Code, the heroine visits many real places and deals with real questions that have plagued Shakespearean scholars for more than a hundred years. The facts help lend a certain amount of credence to the rest of the book, and as long as you don’t look to carefully and just hang on for the ride, Interred With Their Bones will take you on a wild roller-coaster of a thriller and may just help you learn a little more about one of the best authors of the English Language at the same time.

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A short post from me today, folks. Hope you’re not too disappointed. I also hope all of you have pre-ordered a copy of the Mythoi: Birth graphic novel by now.
Have a fun (and safe) Independence day this weekend!

Until next time…
Still paddlin’ the old knew.
_-Akatzen-_

Sgt. Angle Reporting for Duty!

At ease, new recruits.

This past weekend, I shared a movie experience with a fellow officer. There were toys, and there was a story about an escape of sorts, but I don’t recall the title. How’s that for a laugh?

Before the movie, my fellow viewer and I had a deep discussion about “the previews,” aka “trailers” for upcoming films. He argued that he prefers to see movies fresh, with knowing as little about them as possible, while yours truly argued that some of the fun of seeing the current movie is the trailer for an upcoming movie, and that the point of the trailer is to get your ass in the seats in the near future. Here now is a brief history of trailers — their role in the past, the present, and the future.

Trailers were named as such because they used to be attached to the very end of the credits of the film playing in the theater. This was a practice dropped very quickly after the invention and integration of these promotional pieces, and “trailers” became “previews”, wherein short scenes from an upcoming production would be inter-cut with a narrator and a text description of the story of the film.

Yippity-do-dah, and we scoot to the 1960s, when the New Hollywood Era began kicking in — fast cutting, montage editing, and the always cheerful Stanley Kubrick pieced together trailers that were as much an art as his feature films.

Then came big blockbuster films and a need for the studios to blow their loads on any movie by replicating three-act-structure and, in some ways, blowing the whole film before we have a chance to purchase a ticket.

Beyond that, you should have learned by now that trailers are built by marketing companies and specialty editing folks who often use rushes, or dailies, in order to piece together something enticing to look at before a foot of film is pieced together by editors. Thus you’ll end up with a shot of Spider-Man’s web between the Twin Towers in the trailer, but then notice it absent from the final product (okay, bad example, but you get my point).

Or, you simply get spoiled by the trailer.

These days, companies like Ant Farm, The Cimarron Group, and Trailer Park, build trailers for all the big-shot studios. But each of these companies was created by a person or persons who put in their time at one major trailer company born out of the 1960s: Andrew J. Kuehn’s Kaleidescope Films (along with Dan Davis). Kuehn built his empire, and the future of trailer-making, on his self-produced trailer for the John Huston picture Night of the Iguana.

Kuehn helped re-invent movie advertising overall, and paved the way for the massive amounts of trailers, TV Promos, and Teasers we now see today.

For instance, check out this little bitty teaser trailer, in the truest sense of the concept, for David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s “facebook movie,” The Social Network.

Always be watching, always enjoy the little things between each movie you see. If you have a favorite trailer, post it below. We’ll revisit the best of the best in the weeks to come, including a look at: Viral marketing and teaser trailers, fan-made trailers, and trailer rehashes that seem to be all the rage these days.

Dismissed!

Sgt. Angle

Ok, here’s the deal. This play is kinda amazing and I am waiting patiently for the day when I can go see it. Hopefully with Alfred Molina in it. I know what your thinking, what is RED about?

It is the late 1950s and Mark Rothko, the famous Abstract Expressionist painter, is at a crossroads in his career. Intellectual, controlling and often bombastic, Rothko is at work on a surprising (and very well-paid) commission: a series of murals to hang at the Four Seasons restaurant in Midtown Manhattan’s Seagram’s Building. The play takes place in Rothko’s studio, where he works with the help of a smart, young assistant. The action follows the artist’s struggle for integrity and understanding in the face of fame, self-questioning and impending irrelevance. Will his paintings survive in a place that represents everything—greed, commercialism, bourgeois comfort—he detests?

Here’s what the people have to say that have seen it:

” So intense. An electrifying play! Molina turns in a robust portrait of the artist as a man of fierce intelligence and ferocious drive. Redmayne is admirably cool and subtle.” — Marilyn Stasio

“Finally a truly intelligent play on Broadway! Red is a compelling example of how a thinking theater can simultaneously entertain and educate. Molina and Redmayne are superb.” — John Simon

“A fresh, exciting portrait of a brilliant mind. The dauntless Mr. Molina gives his strongest Broadway performance to date. Possessiveness and perplexity glitter in his eyes like a fever. Mr. Redmayne’s Ken has a spine and a mind of his own, and you can feel both growing stronger throughout the play. Mr. Grandage is a canny craftsman of the theater, and he makes sure that the play’s intellectual arguments are sensually grounded.” — Ben Brantley

More to come about this new play as more details emerge.

–Admiral Eo

Flight has always been an intriguing prospect for humans. Stories are full of people who have captured the wind and ride the currents. Probably the most recognizable ancient story that involves wings and flight is the story of Daedalus and Icarus. Mary Poppins could fly with the aid of her umbrella. And children everywhere have often looked at birds and thought, “Why can’t I do that?” Sure, the airplane has enabled humans to take the skies in great number, but it isn’t the same, is it? Flying in an airplane is just like driving in a bus, so humans have come up with several ways of adding that feel. Hang-gliding is probably the closest you can get to feeling the sensation of flying like the birds, but it is technically not flight (it is gliding) which brings us to the question: what is flight? The OED refers to flight as, “The action or manner of flying or moving through the air with or as with wings: to fly.” This definition serves as an incredibly broad definition for flight. I think adding the stipulation that to be truly flight (like the birds) then one must have some form to propel themselves and control their movement through the atmosphere. It turns out that there are some pretty cool inventions out there that get closer to giving the average human the ability to fly around, but before we get ahead of ourselves, lets look at some of the biggest fliers in nature.

Birds have always intrigued people, and I have stood mystified looking at an eagle in a zoo for minutes just admiring the powerful wings that it would occasionally stretch. Today, the winner for the largest flying bird comes from the Andes mountains between Argentina and Chile in the form of the Andean condor. Here is a site that has more information on this and other birds. This massive beast can achieve up to an eleven foot wingspan and can weigh close to fifty pounds. The massive weight and wings consume a lot of caloric energy, so the animal has adapted to soar for incredible durations in its long quest for food. And though this condor is certainly a massive animal, prehistory has given us fossils of animals that harnessed flight that dwarf the Andean condor. The Pterosaur had a frighteningly huge wingspan of eighteen meters. That’s right eighteen METERS! That’s 58.5 feet! That’s probably the size of your house! There are fighter planes out there that don’t have that wingspan. Size doesn’t really seem to be a factor in the manipulation of air currents for flight; the trick seems to be how well can you capture the air and control it.

So what machines have humans come up with that allow us to experience the same locomotion as the avian creatures? A whole slew of things actually. The airplane is probably the leading vehicle for traveling in the sky followed closely by the helicopter. Both of these are worthy of comparison and contemplation, but the focus of this post is to look at the innovations that are being developed for personal flight. So, the first vehicle that has been under development for over a decade is Moller’s flying car. And though this is still kind of like an airplane, the car is able to go up to an altitude of thirty thousand feet and cruise at a speed of three hundred miles an hour. Not too bad. The problem (and it is quite a large problem) is the regulation of sky-ways and licensing that would be required to set up a workable network. Not to mention the insane amount of collateral damage that would occur if they were to fall out of the sky. But you can check out the specs and the site here.

And for fun, here’s a video of the skycar taking off:

Another method of flying that seemed ridiculous a decade or two ago but may be quite practical, is the jet-pack.

Anyone who has seen the Rocketeer has probably envisioned flying around on a jet-pack at some point in their lives. There are a few people that are developing cheap and practical jet-packs that could be the wave of the future. Here is a video that shows the machine in action.

So, will the future hold autonomous individual flying machines? I’m guessing yes. It really is the easiest way to get around and it has the potential to be far greener as well. Imagine how much concrete we could save by switching to these kinds of machines. The infrastructure of how we mobilize ourselves would change entirely. Next week, I’ll look at how homes will look and operate in the future.

Happy Thursday Folks,

This week DC comics finally got on board the digital comics train, and since most big name comic book publishers are now viva-ing the digital revolution, I thought that I would rate each publisher on how they are doing with bringing comics into this new medium. Let’s take a look shall we?

Marvel: The house of ideas has really been pushing the envelope since they went digital a few months back. Marvel was the first publisher to have it’s own dedicated comic book app, as well as having a presence on Comixology, iverse, and Panelfly. Marvel runs it’s app on the Comixology engine, which not only allows readers to go page to page, but panel to panel if they so wish.  The app is also very easy to navigate, with a wide variety of search options to help someone find what they are looking for. The quality of the books in the store is spectacular (especially on the high res display of an ipad). Marvel also allows readers to access the largest online catalog of any comic book publisher, giving readers a cornucopia of choices. most of their downloads are a pretty standard $1.99, but the publisher does offer a large number of free titles to get new readers hooked. The only hiccup that Marvel has had was their rather douchey release of the INVINCIBLE IRON MAN annual digitally on the same day that it came out in print (I went on a rant about this a few weeks ago).

GRADE: A– With a huge catalog, great app, and presence on several other digital purveyors, Marvel has really done a great job of not only embracing digital comics, but making easy for Marvel zombies to do the same.

DC: DC just began their digital comics push this past week, so they are a little late to the game. DC has quickly made up for lost time though, releasing a dedicated DC comics app, which also uses the Comixology engine. DC has also released their digital comics onto the Comixology store proper, as well as making titles available for download on the Sony PSP. While the available catalog is fairly small at the moment, Jim Rood (the man behind the DC digital push) assures fans that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Marvel did the same thing when it came onto the scene, so it makes sense. DC prices their comics at $1.99, $.99, and free, but the free comics available at this point are very limited.

GRADE: B+ DC was late to the party but seem to be doing their best to make up for lost time, still the tardiness and current lack of available issues dings their grade. The comics look good, and are reasonably priced, and with over 80 years of comics to choose from, DC could quickly have more digital comics on the market than anyone else if they wanted to. DC also gets kudos for getting comics onto the PSP, something their rival, Marvel has yet to do.

Image: This publisher was one of the first publishers to go digital, but their situation is a messy one. With each book being owned by different creators, royalties are a bit of a problem, so Image comics are strewn across a variety of different digital comic sellers, which the overall brand quality. As an example, Comixology (which, if you can’t tell has become the big papa of the digital comics world) has 29 Image series, including INVINCIBLE, CHEW, and THE WALKING DEAD, but iverse comics only has six Image titles, the most popular of which is PROOF. Image doesn’t have a dedicated app, but their comics are almost all $.99 per download across the board.

GRADE: C– The lack of a dedicated app really puts Image behind a lot of other publishers. With reading quality dependent on the program that readers may be accessing the books, it’s hard to rate readability. Image has done a good job of keeping their prices low, which does count for something, but they need to catch up to the other big boys.

Boom: These guys went balls-out a few weeks ago, releasing their whole catalog digitally, as well as introducing a dedicated app, using (can you guess?) the Comixology engine. Boom doesn’t have a large catalog, so “the whole catalog” sounds more impressive than it is, but no one else has come close to doing that. Boom also paired with Comixology and iverse to have comics on their sites. Comics will run anywhere from $1.99 to free.

GRADE: B– There just aren’t enough Boom comics yet. However, with titles like IREDEEMABLE, it won’t be long before this company pulls a huge digital market share.

Dark Horse: Going a different route than everyone else, Dark Horse allows readers to download their comics directly from the App store. The quality is fine, but the strictly panel to panel reading is a pain. DH recently began putting their books up for sale with the usual suspects as well, with prices again ranging from $1.99 to free.

GRADE: D+ If for no other reason than originality, but for goodness sake DH, get yourself an app!

IDW: These folks were right behind Marvel in releasing their own dedicated app, which actually runs on an engine other than Comixology (it looks like an iverse engine) . It turns out that this is a mistake, as the zoom feature isn’t nearly so intuitive as the panel to panel functionality that the Comixology app allows. IDW also has distribution deals with digital sellers, and has a fairly large collection of books for sale on line. The prices still run $1.99 and lower.

GRADE: B The lack of a Comixology engine has really hurt their app, but the company has been on the forefront of the digital push, and their extensive online catalog sets them apart from a lot of other publishers.

That’s it for me this week folks. Thanks for stopping in, and don’t forget to check in tomorrow for more supernatural awesomeness from Dr. Cellus.

Hey, kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.

In 1982, Richard Bachman (Stephen King’s pseudonym) published The Running Man (later very loosely adapted into the Schwarzenegger film of the same name). Set in a very dystopian 2025, the main character is forced to turn to the government’s Game Federation and enter in a deadly game show to get money to help his gravely ill daughter (one game is called Treadmill to Bucks, where contestants with heart and respiratory problems earn money for as long as they can last on a treadmill, though they often die in the process). The game he enters is called The Running Man, where contestants are set loose in society as “public enemies” and Hunters are sent after them. The contestants earn money for every day they stay alive, with bonuses earned for every law enforcement officer or Hunter they kill. By the end of the novel, the main character ends up bringing down the Game Federation by crashing an airplane into the Network building (resulting in his own death as well). At the time, the novel was a satire of game shows, though now it might seem closer to satirizing reality television.

In 1999, Koushun Takami wrote the Japanese novel Battle Royale (which later became adapted into manga and a movie). The the film deviated a bit from the novel, but the trailer above gives you a small idea of what the book is about. Set in a socialist alternate timeline, every year since 1947 fifty third-year high school students are enrolled in The Program, which the government uses to terrorize the population into submission, making organized insurgency impossible.
In The Program, each student is fitted with a collar and released on an island with survival packs containing maps, food and water, and a random weapon. The collars are a tracking device and also a micro-bomb designed to kill the wearer if it is detonated. The students are ordered to kill each other, and if any student attempts to escape or enter a “forbidden zone” their collar will be detonated. If 24 hours go by without any deaths, all the collars will be detonated.

In 2008, Suzanne Collins released the young-adult science fiction novel The Hunger Games. She says she got the idea when she was watching television one night and the line between a reality show and war coverage began to blur. Readers of The Running Man and Battle Royale will certainly be familiar with the content, though I’m hoping teenagers are reading neither.

The Hunger Games fills that role quite nicely. In this first book of the now fully released trilogy, the reader follows sixteen-year old Katniss Everdeen in a post-apocalyptic America ruled by a powerful government from The Capitol. The country is divided into twelve districts, each district providing goods and services for The Capitol, which lives in eternal distraction and entertainment. As part of that distraction, every year one boy and one girl from each district are chosen to participate in the Hunger Games, a Battle Royale–like competition where the children are released on an island to kill each other, with the winner receiving food and money for the rest of their lives. The Capitol, of course, has more nefarious reasons for the competition, and through the series, those reasons come to light as a Resistance forms.

The book was very well received on its release. The New York Times wrote that the novel was “brilliantly plotted and perfectly paced,” and that “the considerable strength of the novel comes in Collins’s convincingly detailed world-building and her memorably complex and fascinating heroine”. One critique however was, “Collins sometimes fails to exploit the rich allegorical potential here in favor of crisp plotting, but it’s hard to fault a novel for being too engrossing.“
Stephen King, in his Entertainment Weekly review puts it more succinctly. “Reading The Hunger Games is as addictive (and as violently simple) as playing one of those shoot-it-if-it-moves videogames in the lobby of the local eightplex; you know it’s not real, but you keep plugging in quarters anyway”, though, “balancing off the efficiency are displays of authorial laziness that kids will accept more readily than adults”.

It’s easy to see what King means. I was thoroughly engrossed in the novel, rather than setting it aside at bedtime, I found myself staying up to incredibly late hours to complete it. There are moments, however, that I found frustrating until I remembered that the target audience for the novel are readers half my age. It’s still a good read, in spite of that, and I give it a strong recommendation for parents who want to give their kids something to read now they’ve finished Harry Potter but you don’t want them getting into to utter banality and utter vapid personality found in the heroine of the Twilight books.
Adults will enjoy the novel as well, though admittedly not as much. You’ll recognize flavors from Brave New World and 1984, as well as key ingredients from Battle Royale and The Running Man. I still recommend the series to you, but if you’re looking for more hearty fare (to keep with the food metaphors), pick up these other novels and give ‘em a read.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Sgt. Angle reporting for duty!

Looking at the fantastic cover for the Mythoi Book One: Birth book that is due out later this year, written by James Ninnes (buy it here!), I noticed a beautiful creature that deserves to have a film made about it.

Then, just the other day, I was off-duty from a grueling set of rounds, and I therefore had more than a brief moment of time to peruse the cable channels for something fantastic to stimulate my visual senses. Thus I came across the SyFy channel (no relation to syphilis), and the wondrous plethora of low-budget “monster” movies that are upcoming and/or already screening, and I thought, how is it that these movies can get made, and I can’t get promoted above Sgt. in my ranks?

Folks, the movie and television industries are truly magnificent creatures in their own rights, because you can work for years to earn that million-dollar paycheck for a silly idea that is high-concept (Get Him to the Greek), or make just a few thousand dollars for another high-concept story that is sold to a cable channel (Attack of the Sabretooth). But really, which is more fun: drunk Russell Brand or a sabretooth f**king tiger?!

But there’s more than meets the eye happening at SyFy over the next year or two. Below is a look at some of their original movies, the B-grade and the (possible) A-grade, as well as a glimpse of their series development, and an interesting-only-after-you-think-about-its’-long-term-potential idea.

WYVERN: “When global warming unearths an ancient dragon, a small Alaskan town will be destroyed, unless Hell freezes over in time.” (That is the actual tagline from the website.)

MEGA PIRANHA: “When a science experiment goes horribly wrong, gigantic fish gain appetites for human flesh.” And air-cycling, it seems:

DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATER: “Two giant creatures terrorize tourists on the Big Island.” (The doctor’s breasts — real or fake?)

In an interview at shocktillyoudrop.com in February of this year, EVP of Programming Thomas Vitale explained that monster and creature movies are a specified genre of film that, for decades, have been around on Saturday nights to thrill, scare, and cause uncomfortable laughter in audiences across the US and beyond. Because of filmmakers like Roger Corman (I’ll shine a spotlight on that genius in a few short weeks), who always want to take a chance on a different story if there’s any way to turn a profit, the SyFy channel has been able to re-brand itself to be the mainstay for the return of Saturday Night Movies to bring its’ status above and beyond the typical science fiction flare (AKA Star Trek, Stargate, and gold-star show Battlestar Galactica).

Another upcoming project on SyFy’s plate is to take classic fairy tales and give them a “contemporary twist”. For example, the descendant of Little Red Riding Hood discovers that her family secretly hunts werewolves; Hansel returns to the woods after many years to seek revenge. These movies already began in February with Beauty and the Beast (see the trailer below).

You’ve got to give SyFy credit for twisting itself in some interesting ways — movies made as international co-productions for $2 million, gaining an audience of 2 million each premier, and re-inventing classic stories despite low-budgets). The channel is taking free risks with familiar material to reign in an audience beyond their typical viewers, and is doing so in such a way to target a very niche market with each new film experience. The network’s Ghost Hunters series was just picked up for another season, “Eureka” maintains credibility as a family-friendly science fiction based show about a small town where everyone’s a genius, and you can always catch a “Twilight Zone” rerun if you’re a night owl.

Finally, the good folks at the SyFy network are teaming IGN to bring cheesy monster-movie filmmaking to you, the viewer. Over the next 15 months, viewers will vote on every aspect of production — from the concept to the wardrobe, to the dialogue and arbitrary character deaths. Enjoy being a stay-at-home producer.

SyFy, despite your bizarre rendering of your own channel name, I salute you, and look forward to watching Malibu Shark Attack soon.…

Dismissed!

Sgt. Angle

Happy Father’s Day folks!

I’m sorry to interrupt your usually scheduled Writer’s Block column, but since this month Semantink is officially one year old, I thought I would do a state of the union column. So, let’s take a look at what’s going on here at Semantink!

MYTHOI: I have a few pieces of news regarding our flagship title. First, if you were not aware, our first TPB, Birth, is now available for pre-order. This is collecting the entire MYTHOI Birth series, as well as an entirely original MYTHOI story featuring Heath and Catherine, the Werewolves that you met in MYTHOI #1.

While I am mentioning Birth, I would be remiss if I did not point out that MYTHOI writer James Ninness is letting his inner philanthropist out, and donating all money that he receives for the Birth TPB to charity! You can get all the details over at James’ Blog.

Finally, MYTHOI #2 will be out soon! Keep your eyes peeled, this issue is going to blow you away. Jed Soriano really knocked this one out of the park. If you are behind, don’t worry, you still have some time before issue #2 comes out to catch up, so go read the Birth series (they are free online), and then get your digital copy of issue #1!

THE UNDERGROUNDS: Our weekly web comic continues to get great readership, so thanks to all of you who make a point to check this out every week. If you haven’t gotten a chance to find out what happens when you mix monsters and coffee, or if you have just fallen behind in your reading, you an always check out our UNDERGROUNDS archive.

So what’s next? Well, we have three (!) new properties that will be coming out in the later half of this year, and they are going to blow you away. One is a comedy, one is a western, and one is a fantasy book with a good amount of steampunk, because who doesn’t love steampunk? More details as they become available.

Also, if you are in the San Diego area and want to rap comics, the fine folks of Semantink host a monthly meet up group in Mission Valley. Stop in, get some java, and rap comics. We are having one today! You can check out details here.

We will also be representing at San Diego Comic Con next month, and at Ape in October. If you are in the area give us a shout out!

So that’s it for today folks. Have a happy Father’s Day, and stay tuned for more big Semantink news in the next few months!