Welcome back to The Rundown, our daily breakdown on comic news stories we missed from the previous day. Have a link to share? Email our team at rundown@multiversitycomics.com.
– Former Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont’s deposition in his lawsuit against AMC has been unsealed and, as you can imagine, he bars exactly no holds in it. Which is understandable, considering his suit claims AMC cut him out of millions of dollars guaranteed in his original contract by either disputing the amount of his input into the show’s second season and/or deliberately licensing the show to itself at lowball fees and thereby reducing his contractual stipulated percentage well below what even just a bad licensing deal would have earned him. So it’s safe to say Darabont’s opinion of the network executives would be contentious at best. [Photo by KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features (1240149t)]
So while it might be difficult to feel sympathy for him only making some of the many millions he should have, the fact he was brought in to do a creative job, achieved tremendous success, and was then micromanaged & terminated by non-creative higher-ups with their own contradictory agendas should sound pretty familiar to anyone working in or following comics. And Darabont isn’t a ‘fake geek cred’ Tinseltown player by any means; I’d put him up there with Guillermo Del Toro as someone who’s proven their sensitivity and understanding in translating genre from another medium into their own. Plus, the dude has one of the original flying police car models from Blade Runner. He shows it off in the Nexus Generation documentary (at the 5:40 mark) and you can tell from the gleam in his eye as he holds it for the camera that he loves and treasures it like we all do for our own little slices of geek nirvana.
– New York is footing the bill for a $1 billion (with a B) expansion of the Jacob Javits Center in 2016, home to the New York Comic Con and I’m sure some other gatherings during the year. This will add about 1.2 million (with an M) square feet of space to the structure, 344,000 of which is slated to be exhibition space. Given how little unused space there seems to be around the structure, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that extra exhibition space ended up being a 344,000-square foot Artist Alley barge tethered off one of the piers. Certainly couldn’t have been any more humid than last year’s Special Edition show.
– According to Robot 6 and Comics Alliance, the Angouleme International Comics Festival organizers have now announced that since everyone is making such a big deal about the fact that none of the 30 creators nominated for the Grand Prix prize this year were women, and were somehow not satisfied or placated after they added Marjane Setrapi and Posey Simmonds over their beliefs that positive discrimination was an evil unto itself, that academy members can just pick whoever they want if that will make them feel better about themselves. Well, full disclosure: they did announce they were not going to put forth any nominees and leave the selection completely in the hands of the academy members, but the snark is just some additional cultural translation on my part.
– In other geek TV news, NBC has ordered a pilot for the potential workplace sitcom Powerless. As one might guess, the Ben Queen-written series will focus on the workplace lives of ordinary humans living in the DC universe. With that workplace being an insurance agency, maybe Queen and EP Michael Patrick Jann are going for the Dwayne McDuffie/”Damage Control”-kinda vibe with this? We can certainly hope so…
– And finally, a little something to warm even the coldest Sith hearts: Kylo & Darth!
