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.
– Alan Moore may not care for movies being made from his comics, but leave it to the comic scribe to magic some of that discomfort into a blessing for an old friend. Moore used his royalties from LXG (aka the “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” film) to write a £10,000 check for Graham Cousins so that Cousins could qualify as having enough money in his bank account to bring his wife to the UK from her native Mozambique. And just to be clear: that’s not money to simply pay for airfare, travel expenses, or accommodations. The UK has a law on the books requiring citizens to have at least £18,600 ($28,309) in yearly income to allow non-EU spouses to live with them in the country. If they can’t reach that threshold (like the semi-retired Cousins, who works part-time), they can be exempt if they have at least £62,500 ($95,129) in savings for six months or more. Which is completely, totally, and utterly insane.
So if you ever paid money to see LXG and regretted it ever since, or if you’re James Robinson, you can take some measure of consolation that your sacrifice of wallet or soul has, in some small way, helped bring a husband and wife together despite the best intentions of xenophobic public officials.
– Amazon has released its Top 20 GNs of 2015, despite there being almost 50 days left in the year. Yeah, I get the fact this list needed to be out now so as to fuel all the holiday shopping fodder, but still. I’m not sure of the selection criteria, but there does appear to be some kind of curation behind it, rather than a simple ‘Bestselling titles’ criteria. Go and see if your favorite title took the top spot!
– While Mark Hamill’s The Killing Joke film adaptation might get an R rating, it looks like Jared Leto’s Suicide Squad film will be strictly PG-13 (until the eventually unrated Blu-Ray release, obviously). Producer Chuck Roven talks about the rating, how Leto’s method acting went over on set, and more at the link.
– Snowpiercer is looking to chug its way from the frozen silver screen to the warmer climes of television, as screenwriter Josh Friedman has been tapped to write the pilot script. I never got around to watching Friedman’s The Sarah Conner Chronicles but I’ve heard good things about it, and his blog is a hoot & a half.
– Will Eisner spent a lot of years making comics. I mean, a LOT of years. We’re talking decades, here. The man started young and remained active up until his passing in 2005 at the age of 87. But being one of the pillars of the American comics industry since its inception, you would think that there wouldn’t be any work from the man that hadn’t already been seen by this point. You would be wrong. A discovery of Eisner comics drawings dating from before his earliest known work has been found, and the fellas over at Locust Moon are Kickstarting a collection of it.
