This Variety article about how director Guillermo Del Toro’s dance card is filled through 2017 contains a buried gem for fans of Hellboy: Universal Pictures could consider a TV series to help build interest in a third installment of the movie franchise.
Sure, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army did so-so in the United States, but it’s performed well overseas. That’s not enough for the studio to jump at a sequel, though.
“I think they’ll decide when the last euro hits the piggybank,” del Toro tells the trade paper. “We laid the groundwork to have a magnificent third act. I’d like to return to an action franchise with 60-year-old actor Ron Perlman, because he’ll be scratching at that age when I get to it.”
Perlman is 58, which means del Toro is apparently is hoping to charge into Hellboy 3 sooner rather than later.
But what about that television series? That tidbit came from Donna Langley, Universal’s president of production:
Langley said the studio is interested and may work with del Toro to add a TV series and online segments to broaden the following before making the series finale.
It’s nothing concrete, obviously, but given IDT’s abandonment of the animated movies and the performances of the theatrical releases, it’s interesting that Universal sees potential in Hellboy beyond comics.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)
And another thing! Presumably in response to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, Spain has ratcheted up train security on par with American air travel. Bag searches, x-rays, multiple ticket and passport checks, long queues. Worse for backpackers is Spain's refusal to let other countries book voyages through the country. We were able to reserve international trips everywhere else but traveling in and out of Spain left us stranded on the border hoping for trains to our destination. Why, we feared for our Tomatina bus reservations on our way into Spain!
We made it, of course, and crashed on another backpacker's hotel room floor before heading out to that knee-deep unhygienic saucefest. Our Adventure Trio had a glorious time in the fight-- thousands of tomatoes and tourists couldn't separate us. One of our number emerged from the fray shirtless and another emerged wounded, possibly scarred for life. (They are both Alex. The roving shirt-ripping gangs didn't have a go at me until after the fight ended, at which point I was over the excitement and absolutely unwilling to sacrifice the extra shirt I'd worn specificially to sacrifice to the camiseta rapists. My friends nobly helped me escape with nothing more than a torn buttonhole.)
Back to my earlier point-- I've traveled on the very lines in London and Madrid that were bombed and have found myself humbled before the memorials there. But the security response in Spain is nearly as ridiculous as the US.
I have here a copy of Kasei Tanken (A Voyage to Mars) by Noboru Ohshiro, and it is totally sweet. Published in 1940, which was, er, not a good time for the Japanese publishing industry, or indeed the Japanese anything, Ohshiro's one-volume opus has survived as one of the classics of early manga. If you were wondering what manga looked like before Tezuka, Kasei Tanken will give you an idea (answer: a lot like early American comic strips). It was one of the first manga to tell a complete self-contained story, one of the first manga with science-fiction themes, and one of the best-drawn manga of its time.
Also, have I mentioned that it's totally sweet and kicks your ass?
Yet again up late and trying to write the end of this stupid chapter that will just not come together, for a book that no one will see for ages and if it even gets printed will probably come exactly when the entire economy and/or market for this sort of thing totally crashes, having taken two to three years of my life with nothing to show for it. This is only compounded by my loathing at the awful and predictable tastes of readers. Frankly, my store could stock copies of 100 books (like a mall kiosk...), and basically do the same business. This is almost even more true for indie comic readers, by which I mean graphic novel readers who freak out if you call a comic book a comic book, because they are fucking smarter than you, peon and would never condescend to read such lowbrow idiocy until a more hifalutin' term was coined for it and the Times started to review stuff like Persepolis. Although I should probably not complain as I plan to exploit this in the future. And Jonathan is kicking ass on ch. 3 right now. The man is a machine.
So the short of this is that I fucking hate most everyone and everything I guess. And I'm mad I've been scheduled for six days next week when I want to be working on my damn books. Or the latter is fueling the former. Fuck it, I'm tired.
I've fallen under the odd spell of 25 year-old Chinese-American writer Tao Lin. I'd love to say it's because I've read his books, but at the moment all I've seen is a few video clips showing readings, book launches, and eBay auctions. But they're enough to convince me that the New York poet and novelist is an interesting and original voice, a man whose tone -- slightly twee in an absurdist / emo comic book way, depressive yet funny, existentialist -- brings to mind the weirdness of Kafka, David Byrne and Toog. (I wonder if, like Toog, he's lefthanded? It strikes me as a "lefthanded" imagination.)
There's more than a little of the "Martian sends a postcard home" school (the phrase is originally Craig Raine's) about Lin's work, which uses Ivor Cutler-esque absurdities (many involving hamsters and other animals) to estrange banal and boring everyday realities. Another good reference point might be Miranda July. Or even David Shrigley. Insert pretentious references to ostranenie and the Russian formalists here, if you like. Or maybe just embed a video of Tao sifting through stuff he's offering on an eBay auction (now closed).
Lin's approach to self-promotion is as original as his authorial voice. The commercial worlds of Hollywood and of book promotion alienate him (Elijah Wood and The Da Vinci Code pain him particularly, and sustain terrible revenges -- at the hands of dolphins! -- in his first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee), but he's developed an alternative marketing strategy as original as his prose.
Not only does he sell his literary papers randomly on eBay (something trad writers do in deals with university research libraries just before they die), he's been selling shares in his second novel via an IPO of sorts -- a financing scheme as original, in the publishing world, as my Stars Forever project was in pop music. Like me, he managed to raise enough this way to avoid having to go down the salt mines -- $12,000, in fact, enough to buy three months of freedom to finish the book and pay rent on his East 29th Street apartment.
"Eeeee Eee Eeee concerns the travails of Andrew, a twentysomething pizza delivery guy with a penchant for intellectual contemplation and zero career ambition," reports Time Out New York. "Andrew spends a good deal of his time pining after a girl named Sara, but he also finds himself in a series of bizarre situations, discussing the meaning of life with President Bush and watching a poker game played by Salman Rushdie."
Here's a poem -- I'm tempted to call it "vexatious" and invoke Erik Satie -- called "When I Was Five I Went Fishing With My Family". It's funny, and then it isn't, and then it is again, and then it isn't, but by the end it is again.
And here's a poem Tao Lin just wrote with Ellen Kennedy. It's called Japanese Children with Digital Cameras in a Field, and Gary Glitter fans will be delighted to learn that it features child orgies. Something about it reminds me of the work that won Elfriede Jelinek the Nobel Prize, and enraged some traditionalists. Jelinek is more explicitly political, though.
I'd say Tao Lin is a dangerous writer, not just because there's something of the high school shooter about him, and not just because his writing gives you the strong impression that anything is possible to say, but because a brief exposure to his authorial voice makes you want to write like him, immediately. He's the kind of figure new schools are formed around, a head figure, a figure head. And while that's important for the future of literature, it tends to make a bunch of people runners-up at being Tao Lin, rather than winners at being themselves.
We are, many of us, living in a Day-Glo apocalypse, a time during which multinational business interests, in the guise of American culture, are rapidly devouring the world, draining it of its individualistic colors. We can see the effects in Great Britain, for instance, where news analysis is beginning to be replaced by Punch-and-Judy shows such as are put on Fox, CNN, and CNBC—in one corner Mr. Right Wing, Lefty in the other, the bell sounds, and they snarl at each other for a few minutes, spouting party-line clichés until it’s time for that all-important kitchen-cleanser commercial. In the Arab Emirates, the powers-that-be are transforming Dubai into a characterless glob of neon splendor every bit as boring as Disneyworld or Las Vegas, bigger and brighter than both put together (what an awesome decay awaits that city come the actual apocalypse, with sand sifting through the lobby of the Hotel Burj-el-Arab and lizards presiding over the ruins of the spaceport now under construction, testimony to the prescience of JG Ballard). In the Far East, in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, in every quarter of the globe where the GNP is large enough to support a sturdy consumerism (even in some places where it’s not), American styles, music, and advertising have made significant in-roads. One can make persuasive arguments that Nigeria produces the best contemporary gangsta rap and that the most authentic-sounding reggae is to be found in Malaysia. Nowhere is this pernicious influence (or blissful contagion, depending on your point of view) more evident than in the world’s various cinemas, which are churning out American-type pictures at an alarming rate. Whereas once Hollywood seduced quality foreign directors with bucketfuls of cash to come and direct a studio film, now those directors are queuing up for the opportunity and are making films every bit as bone-headed, as light on story and character, and as explosion-laced as those of their American counterparts, as if to say, “Hey! You want style over substance? Look what I can do!” For some it’s not selling out—they weren’t that good to begin with; for others, well, it’s sad, really. A case in point is Mathieu Kassowitz.
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I've fallen under the odd spell of 25 year-old Chinese-American writer 
Lin's approach to self-promotion is as original as his authorial voice. The commercial worlds of Hollywood and of book promotion alienate him (Elijah Wood and The Da Vinci Code pain him particularly, and sustain terrible revenges -- at the hands of dolphins! -- in his first novel, 
cynical