Heartless Dark: The Blog

First: read this. Possibly the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks and weeks.

Okay, let’s be honest, I consider myself a cinephile – a movie snob – a film geek. Though there are still films on the certified celluloid shut-in list that I need to see (one of these days I’ll get around to Deer Hunter and Ordinary People), I can hold my own in a classic/great film debate. I’ll fight to the death over the Casablanca vs. Citizen Kane debate (hint: it’s Casablanca – best movie ever). I’ll talk cinematic techniques of Hitchcock. I catch all the Oscar films most years – in the theatre, thank you very much.

But I do have a weakness…

And his name is Michael Bay.

Rarely has someone whose hair is trapped in 1989 ever brought so much child-like excitement to me (besides Mart McFly) than Michael Bay.

Yes, his filmography is a hit and miss of atrocious summer blockbusters. Starting out decent and descending into Abysmal. Bad Boys. The Rock. Armageddon. Pearl Harbor. Bad Boys II. The Island. Transformers. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (yes, I didn’t even refer to is as Transformers 2).

Are any of these movies really that good? Do they have any real substance or resonance? Well, no. Not really. But, boy, I tell you what – they get me (for the most part).

The ones I love:

Armageddon. Boy, do I love this movie. I didn’t expect much from it when I first plopped it in the vcr as an unsuspecting 15 year-old. From that moment to this day I still get chills during the final scene when Harry sacrifices himself for his daughter, Ben Affleck, and the world. With Liv sitting at the Nasa multi-screen, her hand on the blank TV as she cries into the table – whew. Boy, let’s not cry get womanly – but yeah, this movie hits every note for me.

The Island. Was I the only person with no tastewho liked this movie (and, apparently, judging by the box office receipts, watched it)? How can you go wrong? Sci-Fi: check. Cool story: check. Cool effects: check. Scarlett Johanson looking hotter than she will ever look again: check. Car chases and an overuse ofslow motion cinematogrpahy: check. How did this not work? Thought it was great. Love it. Didn’y cry as hardget womanly as Armageddeon, but with no Bruce Willis, who can blame you, Michael?

Like:

The Rock. As far as a movie goes – most likely his best (but, for me, there’s no accounting for taste). Cool performances. An introduction to Bay for the world.

Transformers. Not too bad for a movie about talking robots, let’s be honest. With the source, (other than the scene where the robots hide from Sam’s parents and the one robot pisses on the dog (or something)) not too bad.

Hate:

Sorry, Michael, my love, but Pearl Harbor sucked ass. Could you have raped any more WWII veterans in two hours and forty-five minutes without an entire prison attacking a VA hospital? Good lord, what a heap of poo.

Anyways, so, yes, taste aside – why do I love Michael Bay films so much? I have can watch him films over and over again (and no, I don’t own the Critereon edition of Armageddon). Is it the slow-motion shots that always make me feel like I’m in the action? The world-is-going-to-end plots? The incredible acting? The great soundtracks (can anyone not hear “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith and not cry get womanly?)?

Shoot, I dunno…

But I’ll keep coming back for more (and rewatching my copy of Armageddon).

–the creator

thecreator Rant

Okay, so here we stand at T-minus less than One. We launch our site tomorrow – so, in about 10 hours, Heartless Dark: The Prologue will go live and people will finally be able to see what we’ve been working on for three months now.

And, to be honest, I’m a little nervous. I don’t doubt the quality – the initial samplings we’ve shown people have been met with enthusiastic positivity. I’m nervous cause I’m trying to figure out if we balanced the Chicken/Egg dilemma of webcomics.

You create a comic (or a movie, or a book, or Japanese Porn) in order for people to see it (and hopefully like it). So, in our efforts to get people to see Heartless Dark, we’ve been creating facebook groups, myspace pages, blogs – we’ve been e-mailing hundreds of retailers across the nation – ad naseum. We want people to know about this and tell all their friends.

But how many people can you get really excited about something when they haven’t seen it in the first place? We have a trailer, yes, but comics aren’t like movies in that respect. It’s really hard to come from nowhere and build a fan base before you have the product released.

But (here’s the other part of the egg), if you launch with no fans – then no one will see it. So, how do you show a comic to people that know nothing about it – and, conversely, how do you get people to become fans of a comic they can’t see (yet)?

See the conundrum? So, we’ve tried to do our best – starting a small following, bugging people everywhere to check it out – and we hope that things’ll click. That the few who are anxious to see it (thanks mom!) will spread the word once they do – and that those whom we’ve contacted who’ve yet to get back to us, will, now that we’ve got things running (and, of course, they’ll love it).

So, loyal blog readers (of which there are none, really, but hopefully more soon) – what have you found/think works in this scenario?

To be continued… (I’ll write a follow up after a few weeks to let you know how it worked)

–the creator

admin Rant, This is How We Do It

Okay, so, let’s be honest – I love comics. I wouldn’t be spending all my spare time drawing page upon page of story for no money – with characters and a story that no one has even seen yet – if I didn’t love comics.

But they’re not easy to get into.

I was giving suggestions to The Suit when we got going – which comics were the best in the market today (Suit loves comics, but hadn’t been following a title regularly in a while). The first one I told him to pick up (and if you’re not reading it – bless yourself and go buy all the trades) was Peter David’s X-Factor.

I could spend the rest of this post reviewing and raving about it – but that’s for another time.

Okay, so issue 41 just came out. So, 40 issues is a bit to catch up on. Approx 6 trades at about $15-20 a piece. That’ll run you $90-120. Ouch.

But it doesn’t stop there. In order to understand why X-Factor started, you’ll need the Madrox trade and the House of M trade. To understand House of M, you need to read Avengers Disassembled. So that’s three more trades (at about $20 a piece).

But, there’s more. X-Factor crosses over into some other stories – and they have their own trades to understand the plot. Now we’re talking Civil War and Messiah Complex. Add another $50 between the two of them.

So, in order to jump into a story that is only 40 issues old (maybe 3 1/2 years), you need to spend $200-230 (ish).

And comic companies wonder why it’s so hard to get new readers into comics.

Hmmm… solution?

(shameless plug)

Heartless Dark.

Well, okay, that’s not a solution at all – but an alternative. A new, contained story, that we hope you’ll like.

admin Comic Review, Rant