Island Intelligence: Never Say Die

Comics

*Vaneta Rogers interviews various comics creators about the challenges of writing Aquaman. I especially like Smallville writer Mark Q Miller's quote: "What makes Aquaman Aquaman for me is the environmental activist angle and the nobility angle. He's very Shakespearean, in a way. A king with a cause. An Old World sensibility in the modern age. It's very cool." [Newsarama]

*Meanwhile, Aquaman gets his own Flashpoint mini-series with Emperor Aquaman. [The Source]

Movies

*The Goonies poster above was created by Justin Erickson for a special screening of the movie. [/Film]

*I'm looking forward to fully exploring /Film's set visit to Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Takeaways from the little I've read so far: Blackbeard should be awesome, but they're worried about Penelope Cruz's character. [Part One and Part Two, with more coming]

TV

*Remember that Treasure Island TV movie for Sky TV that stars Eddie Izzard as Long John Silver and Elijah Wood as Ben Gunn? It's actually a two-part mini-series for SyFy and it also has Donald Sutherland as Captain Flint, who doesn't actually appear in the novel, but sets everything in motion via backstory. The show is filming now and scheduled to air early next year. [Spinoff Online]

Misc.

*Lego's new Pirates of the Caribbean sets look amazing and include scenes from all four movies. [MTV]

*And oh look! There's the video game trailer!



[Topless Robot]

*It's not just Lego getting on board. Jakks has got all kinds of amazing playsets, figures, and other merchandise. [Toy News International; thanks, Ken!]

*But if it's Lego you like, wait'll you get a load of the lifesize Jack Sparrow from the presentation that launched all those wonderful toys. [Nerd Approved]

*Also: Lego Unsinkable Walker Bean. Not officially licensed, but even cooler for having been customized by a six-year-old. [First Second]

Elsewhere... Best Comics of 2010

Hm. I should've done this yesterday to follow up the movies posts, but bucking years of tradition (and contrary to my earlier prediction), I came up with a list of my ten favorite comics from 2010. I share that link with the other Robot 6eteers, so there are lots of great comics to be discovered there. And for even more comics recommendations, check out Comic Book Resources' Top 100 list. I got to do a few of the write-ups for those too.

It's kind of interesting, I guess, that not all the books I picked for Tom Spurgeon's year-end Five for Friday made it into my final list, but there are a couple of reasons for that. First is that Five for Friday's rules require fast thinking and I never do my best thinking quickly. But I also took to heart Spurgeon's criterion that we simply list five books that we liked without having to take into account their quality relative to everything else we read during the year.

Anyway, you can easily guess my Number One pick and I did a full review of it for Robot 6. I also managed to squeeze in another critical favorite before the end of the year, Charles Burns' X'ed Out. And to start 2011 off, I questioned how much of the Silver Age should really be a model for adventure comics today.

One final piece that I'm pretty happy with is the interview I did with Archaia's Editor-in-Chief Stephen Christy and the creators of Mouse Guard (David Petersen) and Return of the Dapper Men (Jim McCann and Janet Lee) about the sell-outs of Dapper Men and the Mouse Guard spin-off, Legends of the Guard. As I say in the interview's intro, I usually ignore press releases about sell-outs, but Archaia's a great company and at their C2E2 panel I was impressed with how honest and forthcoming they are about their business strategies. Enough so that I felt like this was an opportunity to learn more about what selling out really means - at least for them as a small publisher - and what they did as a company and creators to make that happen. They were even more open and helpful than I hoped and I learned a lot. Hopefully readers will find something enlightening and interesting in the interview too.