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.
– Patrick Osbourne has been tapped to direct the film adaptation of Paul Pope’s “Battling Boy” graphic novel series. Osbourne, who won an Academy Award last year for his animated short film Feast, is also attached to direct an animated adaptation of Noelle Stevenson’s “Nimona” web/print comic. It has not been announced whether or not the “Battling Boy” film will be animated or live action. Although it would make sense for it to be animated, there has been some precedent for animation directors making live-action features (such as Brad Bird directing Tomorrowland and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol). Whether there’s also precedent for one director doing two animated films at once is a much bigger guess. Either way, it’s nice to see Hollywood interested in creator-owned comic properties for a change.
– Ted Rall, cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is firing back at the newspaper for letting him go after the LAPD contested the veracity of a post Rall made on the paper’s site back in May. A frequent critic of the police department, Rall was let go after the LAPD produced an audio recording of the incident Rall details in that post (his beign arrested for jaywalking) that supposedly holds up their side of the story. You can hear part of that audio in the newsreport at that link, and it isn’t exactly a smoking gun. Also, some of the points against the LAPD could only really be verified by video recording or eyewitness accounts. YMMV.
– Nicolas Cage offers a small but upbeat comment about the failed Superman project he and director Tim Burton were attached to back in the 1990’s. Kinda channeling Jodorowsky on this one, which in and of itself would be something I’d be willing to pay cold hard cash to see.
– Jena Malone as Barbara Gordon in Batman v Superman? I guess we’ll find out soon enough, including whether she’s suiting up as Batgirl, rocking the keyboard as Oracle, or something else entirely.
– In case you’ve been holding off on picking up Hayao Miyazaki’s films on Blu-Ray, you now no longer have a reason to do so: Disney is putting out a complete box set of the master animator’s entire filmography in November. All eleven films plus “Yuki no Taiyo (Yuki’s Sun) — a 1972 television pilot based on a manga by Tetsuya Chiba that was directed, storyboarded and animated by Hayao Miyazaki…and three episodes (26, 27, and 41) of the 1972 anime series Akado Suzunosuk (Little Samurai), featuring storyboards by the filmmaker.” There will be additional material included in the set as well as a book about Miyazaki’s career. The film discs themselves, one would imagine, are the same ones already in circulation.
