BBC Trailer for New Doctor Who Season

The BBC has released a trailer for the new season of the long-running Doctor Who series.   The seventh season of the “revamped” Doctor Who promises to be very interesting especially since Neil Gaiman, who won a Hugo Award for his first Doctor Who script, penned another episode that will be included in Season 7.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=a1pzCjPN9xs

 

Is any footage from the Gaiman episode in the new trailer? The answer appears to be yes since there is a shot of the Cybermen, who have not appeared in any Doctor Who episodes since 2011, but which are the focus of Gaiman’s second Doctor Who script.  The new season will premiere debut on March 30th.

Gaiman to Write New "Sandman" Series

Comic-Con News: Neil Gaiman appeared at the Vertigo panel via a 4-minute film clip in which he described a new Sandman miniseries that he is writing, and which Vertigo plans to release in 2013, the 25th anniversary of the publication of Gaiman’s first Sandman comic book. The miniseries will be a prequel and it will explain how what happened to Morpheus before we met him in the first issue of Sandman. "This was one of the few stories that I felt, that after I finished Sandman, I felt that I had failed because I had not told this story," Gaiman explained in the video.

The as-yet-untitled Sandman miniseries will be published day and date digtially and will be drawn by J.H. Williams. Gaiman was enthused at the prospect of working with Williams telling the Comic-Con crowd, "I am incredibly excited that it is going to be drawn by J.H. Williams. I’ve been a fan of his since Promethea. I love his Batwoman stuff, but on this you are going to see a side of J.H. that you have never seen before."

In other Gaiman-related news, according to The Guardian, the author has signed a contract with Harper Collins for five children’s books. The first, which is due out in January is Chu’s Day, the story of a little panda with a big sneeze that will be illustrated by Adam Rex. Gaiman’s contract includes a sequel to Chu’s Day along with Fortunately the Milk, a middle grades novel that Skottie Young (Oz) will illustrate, a sequel to Gaiman’s 2008 saga Odd and the Frost Giants, and an as-yet untitled project.

Gaiman - McFarlane Skirmishing Continues

Legal wrangling over the damages in the eight year old lawsuit between Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane in federal court in Wisconsin continues, with a key hearing scheduled for June 14th. There still is no accounting of the revenues generated from the characters Medieval Spawn, Cagliostro, and Angela, which Judge Shabaz ruled back in 2003 would determine the amount of money owed Gaiman for their use. And Gaiman is also demanding revenues from “derivative characters” Dark Ages Spawn, Tiffany, and Domina, which he alleges are based on the characters he created.

The current round in the case began in March of 2009, when Image Comics filed a notice asking the judge to examine the original judgment in the case in the light of subsequent Supreme Court and Court of Appeals rulings. It argued that such an examination was appropriate since the judgment was not final because damages had not been determined.

The Image filing was the first significant action on the case since the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the appeal back in 2004. That appeals court verdict affirmed the rulings at the district court level.

Image asked that it not be prohibited from selling inventory of books featuring the Gaiman characters without giving him credit, that Gaiman be ordered to pay Image its attorney’s fees, and that the court review its finding that the use of Gaiman’s likeness and biographical information without permission was not permissible.

On March 12th of this year, Judge Barbara Crabb (Judge Shabaz retired in the intervening years) denied the motion to re-open the judgment; that the judgment had been final. She left open the possibility that Image could sue to have the injunction requiring it to credit Gaiman on books containing the characters he created modified.

Crabb also noted the long time period during which damages had still not been calculated. “It is long past time to close this case definitively,” she said. “The parties have had more than enough time to undertake an accounting of the damages due plaintiff. Their failure to complete this relatively simple task makes it evident that the matter is not one to which they have given much consideration. A short deadline may serve to focus their attention.”

Crabb ordered that an the accounting of the damages be completed by July 7th of this year and that monthly reports be filed by Gaiman describing progress on the project.

A few weeks later, on March 30th, Gaiman’s counsel filed the first report. The two parties had been unable to resolve an accounting issue, which was whether or not to include revenues from the characters Gaiman argued were based on the ones he created. The bankruptcy court handling the matter ordered the accountant calculating the damages to decide the issue; he refused in August of 2007, stating that it was outside his experience.

McFarlane and Gaiman then unsuccessfully negotiated to resolve the issue.

The accountant charged with determining damages said in late March that after he got the documents he still needed, it would take three full-time people working for a minimum of four months, at a cost of $350,000 to determine damages.

Around the same time, Gaiman served discovery on the defendants, asking for the documents needed, and filed a motion with the court asking it to rule on the question of whether Dark Ages Spawn, Tiffany, and Domina were based on Medieval Spawn, and Angela.

On May 24th, Judge Crabb issued an opinion and order on the motion. She noted that the characters appeared similar (including the uniforms of Tiffany, Domina, and Angela, which consisted of “thong bikinis, garters, wide weapon belts, elbow-length gloves and poorly adjusted armor bras” but that she would hold an evidentiary hearing on June 14th at which all concerned could argue the question.

So the long road to a resolution of this case continues. Once Crabb rules on the motion regarding the three “derivative characters,” documents will still have to be produced and the accounting work done to determine damages. Without a settlement, it seems that this will go on for at least months to come.

Hugo Award Nominations for Best Graphic Novels

The nominations for the Hugo Awards have been announced, including the list of titles nominated for the Best Graphic Story Award:

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?
Written by Neil Gaiman; Pencilled by Andy Kubert; Inked by Scott Williams (DC Comics)

Captain Britain And MI13. Volume 3: Vampire State
Written by Paul Cornell; Pencilled by Leonard Kirk with Mike Collins, Adrian Alphona and Ardian Syaf (Marvel Comics)

Fables Vol 12: The Dark Ages
Written by Bill Willingham; Pencilled by Mark Buckingham; Art by Peter Gross & Andrew Pepoy, Michael Allred, David Hahn; Colour by Lee Loughridge & Laura Allred; Letters by Todd Klein (Vertigo Comics)

Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm
Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; Art by Phil Foglio; Colours by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)

Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse
Written and Illustrated by Howard Tayler

Girl Genius won last year’s award in this category. Like Girl Genius, Schlock Mercenary is a Webcomic (with trade paperback editions).

Joseph to the the First Doctor Who?

David Tennant hasn't yet abandoned his starring role in the BBC SF series Doctor Who, but rumors have already begun circulating that Paterson Joseph--who guest-starred in the first season--may be the leading candidate to replace Tennant as the 11th Doctor. Joseph would be the first black actor to assay the iconic role. Joseph's agent reportedy denied the Doctor Who rumor when approached about it last week.

When SCI FI Wire contacted Joseph directly, his initial response was a text message that said, "I am on a list of God knows how many others, but flattered to be considered." That was followed by an e-mail a day later, saying, "The news on Who was news to me as of last Wednesday, when my agent said they'd had lots of journos asking if the rumors were true. That's all I know, and I'm very pleased to even be thought of in this way. It's a blast!" The rumor, which should be taken with a grain of salt, was first reported by British journalist Richard Johnston last week in his online column "Lying in the Gutters." Joseph played Roderick in the Doctor Who two-part episode "Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways."

Joseph's recent TV appearances include the U.K. series Peep Show, Green Wing and Hyperdrive, but he is probably best known to genre fans for his scene-stealing performance as the Marquis de Carabas in writer Neil Gaiman's short-lived 1996 BBC series Neverwhere. Perhaps more germane to this particular story is the actor's work in last year's Jekyll miniseries, which was created by Steven Moffat, who will be taking over as the new Doctor Who show runner in the upcoming fifth season in 2010. Did that role give Joseph the inside track? Only time will tell. While many Doctor Who purists are already resisting the notion of a black actor taking on the role, the biggest obstacle could actually be Joseph's role as Greg Preston in the BBC's upcoming revival of the 1970s post-apocalyptic drama Survivors. According to the show's producer Adrian Hodges (Primeval), "He's a lovely actor, and he has immense likability on screen.

To me, he has hero written and integrity written all over him, and he's a great actor. We're very pleased with him, and we won't kill him off anytime soon, I promise you that!" The fourth season of Doctor Who will be released in the United States on Nov. 18. The series is currently on hiatus in the United Kingdom but will continue with a series of one-off specials, after which a new production team will take over with season five in 2010. --Joe Nazzaro

Neil Gaiman's 'The Graveyard Book'

This week Harper Collins published Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book ($17.99), a 320-page young adult fantasy novel with illustrations by Dave McKean. The hero of the saga is a normal boy named Nobody Owens, who is known to his friends as "Bod." Bod would be even more normal if he weren’t an orphan, who is being brought up in a graveyard by ghosts—and he dares not leave the graveyard for fear that he will be attacked by a man named "Jack" who has already killed Bod’s parents.

Gaiman’s fertile imagination is on full display in this richly textured novel, which includes a mysterious graveyard gateway that leads to a desert in which there is an abandoned city populated only by ghouls, and then there is the ancient Indigo Man who lives under the hill, and the unforgettably strange and scary menace of the Sleer.

Gaiman’s previous YA novel Coraline has been made into a stop-motion animated feature film and adapted as a graphic novel by P. Craig Russell as well (see “Coraline Set for Feb. 6th Debut”).