Donald Duck and Carl Barks

The Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex takes a look at vintage Donald Duck, Carl Barks who drew him, and Fantagraphics Comics who is eager to keep that legacy alive.

From the piece...

There are few storytellers in comics history that are more revered than Carl Barks, a titan figure who was one of the three inaugural members in the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame — the other two were Jack Kirby and Eisner himself, who once called Barks “the Hans Christian Andersen of comics.”

While Kirby filled the skies of multiple universes with superheroes, gods and aliens, Barks has a legacy that is more narrowly defined: The Oregon native was the creator of Duckburg, a place he populated with Scrooge McDuck, Gladstone Gander, the Beagle Boys and others both feathered and furry.

Fantagraphics recently announced a deal with Disney that will allow them to reprint the Barks run in a truly definitive collection. Our Geoff Boucher caught up with Fantagraphics’ Gary Groth to discuss the project’s heritage and ambition.

GB: It’s hard to talk about Carl Barks without mentioning emotion — there’s a startling depth of emotion in the characters themselves and then there’s the connection that fans and collectors feel toward his work. Can you talk a bit about that? It seems similar somehow to Charles Schulz.

GG: I think the connection — which I agree with — that you’re seeing between two cartoonists who couldn’t, in many ways, be farther apart from each other, is that they both succeeded in creating vivid characters who lived in a fully realized world, distinctly stylized but analogous to our own in all the important emotional ways so that it didn’t matter if there was a dog dreaming of being a World War I fighter pilot or a family of ducks going on an adventure looking for the source of square eggs. There is in fact an emotional truth at the center of Barks’ work; he even said that this was his primary goal, though I can’t dig up the quote at the moment, perhaps I’m thinking of when he told an interviewer that in his stories he was “telling it like it is” and “laying it on the line.” The comics critic Don Phelps once told me that it was Barks who made Donald Duck a citizen of the nation of comics characters, which I always remember as being a particularly eloquent way of saying that he invested Donald with such humanity.

Stephen King's "Bag of Bones" - the Mini-Series

The Magicians Coming to Fox

Lev Grossman's book is heading to the small screen.

From a story on Deadline Hollywood...

Fox has preemptively bought Magicians, a drama series adaptation of Lev Grossman’s popular fantasy novel, with a script commitment plus penalty. It will be written by X-Men: First Class and Thor co-writers Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz and produced by Michael London (Milk), Shawn Levy and Michael Adelstein. Based on Grossman’s book, which is described as Harry Potter for grown-ups, the one-hour drama follows a group of 20-somethings in New York who study magic and have access to a magical world.

6 Famous Authors Animated

Publishers Weekly finds them on shows like "The Simpsons" and "The Family Guy."

Andy Griffith...and Romeo and Juliet

Quixote, Colbert and the Reality of Fiction

Did Cervantes invent “truthiness”? A writer, for the New York Times, examines how the 17th-century master’s multilayered world mirrors the realities and absurdities of our modern age.

From the article...

As a literary theorist, I suppose I could take umbrage at the claim that my own discipline, while fun, doesn’t rise to the level of knowledge. But what I’d actually like to argue goes a little further. Not only can literary theory (along with art criticism, sociology, and yes, non-naturalistic philosophy) produce knowledge of an important and even fundamental nature, but fiction itself, so breezily dismissed in Professor Rosenberg’s assertions, has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.

We especially revere the genius of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, but I’d like to focus on the genius of another writer, a Spanish one, Miguel de Cervantes, who shaped our world as well, and did so in ways that may not be apparent even to those aware of his enormous literary influence. With the two parts of “Don Quixote,” published in 1605 and 1615 respectively, Cervantes created the world’s first bestseller, a novel that, in the words of the great critic Harold Bloom, “contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.”

As if that were not enough, in writing those volumes Cervantes did something even more profound: he crystallized in prose a confluence of changes in how people in early modern Europe understood themselves and the world around them. What he passed down to those who would write in his wake, then, was not merely a new genre but an implicit worldview that would infiltrate every aspect of social life: fiction.

A Visual History of Literary References in The Simpsons

The Atlantic revels in America's longest running sitcom.

From the piece...

With 23rd season of The Simpsons premiering on Sunday, America's longest-running sitcom is still going strong. Despite the perennial complaints of declining quality, the Simpson family maintains a huge audience and the ability to attract new viewers, averaging 7.2 million viewers per episode during the 21st season. An all-Simpsons television channel is rumored to be in the works.

But beyond the series' longevity, The Simpsons has had a profound impact on American society, both as the forerunner for an entire generation of irreverent, animated satire (see Family Guy most prominently and, to an arguable extent, South Park) and as a unique form of cultural criticism. The world that extends around 748 Evergreen Terrace looks very much like our own: politicians, movie stars, artists, and other cultural figures (or at least their caricatures) inevitably find themselves in Springfield U.S.A.

The Spectre Coming to Television

Perhaps!

From a piece on Comics Alliance...

It was just last month that we told you about Boston Brand aka Deadman's possible possession of The CW Network, but it seems yet another supernatural DC Comics character may be haunting your televisions in the not too distant future: The Spectre. The project is at Fox and is being written by Brandon Camp of John Doe. Gran Torino's Bill Gerber will produce with Warner Bros. According to Deadline, Camp became involved with The Spectre after being introduced to the concept by DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns.

The Corrections as an HBO Series?

Possibly!

From a story in Deadline Hollywood...

I hear HBO is nearing a pilot order for The Corrections, a drama series project from filmmaker Noah Baumbach based on Jonathan Franzen’s book of the same name. Top film producer Scott Rudin, who has been developing the project for a decade, originally as a feature, is executive producing with Baumbach and Franzen, and I hear Anthony Hopkins has expressed interest in playing the male lead and will be meeting with the producers.

The Plastic Man TV Show That Never Was

The pilot:

Books Featured on the Colbert Report

Happy reading!

Newspaper Headlines from the Simpsons