Dave’s Long Box has an amusing and persuasive essay on the problems posed by the Batmobile

Technically, the Batmobile is not street legal. No license plates, no vehicle tabs, unsanctioned rocket afterburners, no proof of insurance, high-performance fuel… the list goes on. I can’t see Batman waiting in line to get an emissions test for his car or even getting a driver’s license. The guy breaks the law every time he slips behind the steering wheel.

[…]

If you’re a creature of the night, would you drive around in a really distinctive car with loud pipes or would you keep it on the down-low? You’re supposed to be a Living Shadow, dude. You are the night, etc.

I hate to say this, but what would make the most sense for Batman is to have a series of black Ford mini-vans stashed in monthly parking lots all around Gotham. He could change in the back or stitch up his wounds without drawing any attention to himself.

That does makes eminent sense, to be sure.

I guess the problem is that a black Ford mini van just isn’t badass.

Via Reuters: Marvel spins Spider-Man into Broadway musical.

But the basic story isn’t the wildest part–the fact that Bono and The Edge are involved is:

Julie Taymor, who won Tonys for direction and costume design for the Broadway production of “The Lion King,” will direct, with U2’s Bono and The Edge creating new music and lyrics for the project.

Technorati Tags: Bono, U2, The Edge, Spider-Man

Almost two weeks ago I noted the passing of Batman artist Marshall Rogers–today I surfed over and saw Dave’s (of Dave’s Long Box) write-up on Rogers in the form or a review/discussion of Detective #479 (there are some scanned panels included as well). If this is a topic of interest, I would recommend reading the piece (indeed, I heartily recommend Dave’s site to any fan of comics who has a slightly off-kilter sense of humor).

I once owned that issue as well, but am fairly certain it was part of a stack of comics that I had in the late 70s that got tossed at some point (this was before I was an actual “collector”).

Via Reuters: “Ghost Rider” creator sues over copyright.

Usually, creators of characters back in the 60s and 70s had no claims on the comic characters they created. However, in reading the story, this may actually be a case wherein the creator at least has a case:

Friedrich created the character of Johnny Blaze and his alter ego Ghost Rider in 1968. Three years later, he agreed to publish the character in comic books through Stan Lee’s Magazine Management, which eventually became Marvel Entertainment.

Under the agreement, Magazine Management became holder of the copyright for the first issue, which explains the origin story of Ghost Rider. Lee’s company also held the copyrights to subsequent Ghost Rider works.

However, Magazine Management allegedly never registered the work with the Copyright Office and, pursuant to federal law, Friedrich regained the copyrights to Ghost Rider in 2024.

Of course, one wonders why Friedrich waited until now to sue.

Batman Artist Rogers Is Dead:

Marshall Rogers, the artist who was best known for his work on DC Comics’ Batman and Marvel Comics’ Silver Surfer, died on March 25 at the age of 57, Newsarama reported. The cause of death has not been disclosed to the media, according to a DC spokesman.

Rogers’ Batman was fantastic, I must say.

But more to the point, 57 is far too young to die.

Via Reuters: New York artists sue NBC over “Heroes” concept

New York-based artists Clifton Mallery and his wife Amnau Karam Eele charged in a suit filed on Thursday in Manhattan that “Heroes” creators based their plot line — about an artist who can paint the future — on a short story, a painting series and a short film the couple exhibited in 2024 and 2024.

I wonder how far one has to go in a case like this to prove infringement. Certainly duplication of powers alone in one character to the next isn’t enough or various comics companies would have sued one another into oblivion by now. Still, there are some striking parallels beyond the specific power in question. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Via the SciFi Wire:  Writers Hired For JLA Film

Entertainment Weekly has an interesting piece on the show and on the future of superpowered tv and movies: The Powers That Be.

While I fully take the point made in the EW piece and briefly in the slide-show at the previously-mentioned Slate piece (see previous post), the authors may be giving JMS’ Rising Stars too much credit in terms of basic story inspiration as Rising Stars’ basic premise sounds a lot like that of Wild Cards: an extraterrestrial object causes mass mutation and the creation of super-powered individuals.

Slate has an interesting piece on Comics that reinvent the superhero genre–more specifically it looks, through the lens of Heroes at comics that have looked beyond the normal “men in tights” approach to the super-powered world and have focused, instead, on character issue.

I was intrigued to see that Concrete was still around, as I remember his earliest days (and still have his early books around here somewhere).

One side note that I think intersects with the story, as well as with Heroes itself would be the Wild Cards books from the 1980s which deal with the implications of the sudden acquisition of powers on a large scale in a way that deviated from standard comic book formulae. Of course, they were short stories and later novels, so don’t quite fit with the Slate story. Indeed, I think that the series was recently revived.