The Four Color Media Monitor

In some news I'd almost missed, The Hollywood Reporter (via Collider) said a few weeks ago that overrated filmmaker/occasional comics writer Kevin Smith is going to launch his own line of indie comics at Dark Horse:

Kevin Smith is getting in the Dark Horse business with a line of creator own comics that he will write. The line will be called Kevin Smith’s Secret Stash Press, named for his New Jersey comic shop.

Smith will launch his line this fall with Masquerade, an eight-issue series about a budding vigilante. It will be followed by the ongoing anthology Quick Stops, set in his View Askewniverse movies that will include characters from films as Clerks, Mallrats and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.

“I’ve been a fan of Kevin’s films for years. The fact is, we have much in common. We’ve both worked in our own comic shops, worked in the film business, but most of all, have a passionate love for the comics medium,” Dark Horse president and founder Mike Richardson said in a statement. “It only makes sense for us to finally team up, and I am extremely proud to announce his exciting new line of comic books and graphic novels here at Dark Horse. Kevin has a brilliant, creative mind, and I can’t wait to see what he has in store for all of us.”

I find this laughable. To say Smith's got a passion for comics is but a huge exaggeration we could do without, recalling the time he wrote - and delayed his completion for a year and a half - of a Black Cat miniseries in the early 2000s with an awfully gratuitous retcon to Felicia Hardy's origins, establishing she was a rape victim. And years later, Smith was involved in a new take on the old Masters of the Universe cartoon broadcast on the one and only Netflix, which saw He-Man speared to death by Skeletor, so Teela could substitute for him. You'd probably think that was intended to apologize for his ill-advised direction with Black Cat, but I doubt it, if only because Smith never seemed to apologize for his earlier mistake. And he sure didn't promote the cartoon in a respectable way.

At least here, Smith is dealing with his own creations, but it'll be no shock if they come off as overrated and pretentious as several other film and comic projects of his in the past. And what next, will we learn this is all another stunt to create material that can almost instantly be adapted to film? That too would make things silly.

Labels: animation, golden calf of death, indie publishers, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, violence, women of marvel