...indy rocker Bif Naked...
...sexy pro poker player Evelyn Ng
Calvin.......oooooooh, he's so tough
FROM John Byrne's web site (byrnerobotics.com) on April 11:
"I have to say this is upsetting. Not only because it leaves a guy like Paul Kupperberg out of a job, but the fact that the magazine publisher falls into the same stereotype that most people have about wrestling fans. That their fans, which is largely made up by children, don't like to read. It is a magazine for crying out loud! They would have to read the articles, why not a fun comic strip putting their favorite wrestlers in fantastic situations? Is this thing just going to be 80 pages of pictures and no captions? It also amazes me they wouldn't have waited for the first few issues of their new childrens magazine to actually be published and read by their fans, before making such a decision.
••
Discussing this with Paul, I noted that there is more to it than simple economics or "kids don't read" mentality. Some things simply do not cross over into other forms. Sports are high on that list. Billions of dollars spent every year, in this country alone, on sports of all kinds, yet if we take all the thousands upon thousands of comics published in the last 75 years or so, how many of them were sports oriented? And of the few that were, how many were successful.
Same with movies. So many millions of miles of film, yet so few sports movies. Novels are the same. Such books/movies/TV shows etc do exist, but they are by far the exception, and really successful examples are an exception to the exception.
It falls into the same category as comics based on videogames, I think. More millions spent by consumers, yet how many of those consumers want to read about the characters, instead of being the characters?"
FROM the current issue of WWE Magazine on sale in Aussie newsstands ("The 500th Anniversary Issue") comes this little tidbit (above). How did I miss Krozor? Sounds godawful, like all those Chaos! comics put out at around that time (remember The Rock, The Undertaker, Chyna, etc? Ugh!).
I BOUGHT Jam-Packed Action back in 2004 and have only just got around to reading it...there's probably a good reason for that.
All the images are taken from the original animated episodes and unimaginatively laid out on the page. Despite the lack of creativity on display, the Mucha Lucha! story's kinda interesting: Richochet enters a tag team tournament to win a reproduction mask of his hero El Rey. Along the way, he goes to the gym and has his head shrunk to help him win his matches (don't ask). It's the pick of the four tales in this book, but that's faint praise.
