Award-winning horror author, Nancy Kilpatrick, has passed away after along battle with lung cancer. She lived in Montreal and was a frequent guest at Con*Cept. Read her bio on her website is here: https://nancykilpatrick.com/
Her facebook page is collecting tributes from her many friends and fellow authors: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.kilpatrick.31
Famed Japanese manga and anime creator Leiji Matsumoto, whose real name was Akira Matsumoto, has died aged 85, his studio has announced.
In a statement, Studio Leijisha said he died of acute heart failure on 13 February.
Matsumoto was known for his epic science fiction sagas, including Galaxy Express 999, Queen Emeraldas and Space Battleship Yamato.
His work often included anti-war themes and emotional storylines.
Matsumoto’s daughter, Makiko Matsumoto, who heads Studio Leijisha said in the statement that he “set out on a journey to the sea of stars. I think he lived a happy life, thinking about continuing to draw stories as a manga artist.”
Born in 1938 in the south-western city of Kurume, Fukuoka Prefecture, Matsumoto was only 15 when his debut work, Mitsubachi no Boken (Honey Bee’s Adventures), was published in a manga magazine.
After finishing high school, he moved to Tokyo to pursue his dream of becoming a professional artist.
He married Miyako Maki in 1961, a well-known manga creator and one of Japan’s earliest female artists in the genre. Together they collaborated on several projects, and he changed his name to Leiji Matsumoto.
His big break came a decade later after he published Otoko Oidon, a series about the life of a poor, young man preparing for university exams. It was hugely successful and won the Kodansha Publishing Award for Children’s Manga.
Several of his manga comics were made into anime television series, including the sci-fi epic Space Pirate Captain Harlock, which follows the adventures of an outcast turned space pirate.
The meeting of April 10th was dedicated to the memory of Sylvain St-Pierre, long-time member of MonSFFA.
Missed the meeting? Here are the links to all the posts in order, from the start:
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Remembering Sylvain |
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A re-run of a favourite presentation |
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The Break, Announcements |
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http://www.monsffa.ca/?p=17145
Another favourite:
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The BEM in your own backyard! |
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Wish you were here, video |
The Zoom session was recorded and will be uploaded to the members only section of our website.
During the Hugo Awards ceremony, it is traditional to honour those of our SF/F family who have passed away. Danny thoughtfully submitted Alice Novo’s name and picture, and got a screen grab from the ceremony.
Alice lived near me, and used to come over to help me cut apart all those badges for Con*Cept, and sort them alphabetically. At MonSFFA meetings I most miss her witty remarks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53401026
Grant Imahara, the former co-host of TV science shows Mythbusters and White Rabbit Project, has died suddenly at the age of 49.
He also made special effects models for films including the Star Wars prequels.
Before moving in front of the camera, Imahara worked for Lucasfilm’s THX and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) divisions for nine years, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
That involved making animatronic models for movies like The Matrix Reloaded, Galaxy Quest, XXX: State of the Union, Van Helsing, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Just two days before May 4, a day when “May the Fourth” puns run rampant, celebrities and “Star War” fans remember Mayhew as the man who inhabited the Wookie suit dating back to the ’70s.
Youtube: Peter Mayhew’s Best “Star Wars” Chewbacca Scenes | NBC News
It became easy, in recent years, to dismiss him as the wisecracking grandpa of the U.S. comic book, a past-his-prime gimmick who cameoed alongside Earth’s angstiest superheroes in the high-grossing Marvel blockbusters of the past decade.
But Stan Lee, who died Monday, was far more than that. It’s no stretch to say he helped redraw the world of U.S. fiction. And he certainly made sure everyone knew it.
From the ashes of pulp magazines and the radioactive raw material of postwar uncertainty about science and power, he summoned — not single-handedly, but certainly without parallel or peer — a textured, self-sustaining universe of imperfect heroes.
While Updike and Cheever were doing it in literature, while Kubrick and Lumet and Penn were doing it at the movies, the father of Marvel presented readers of comic books — which meant, at the time, mostly adolescent boys — a pantheon of deeply flawed protagonists who, despite their presence in so many tales to astonish, were in many ways just like you and me.
These outcasts and misfits rose to the alarm clock’s buzzing and slogged to work each morning to get the job done, not in a fanciful Metropolis or Gotham but on the actual streets of New York City and in the imperfect landscape beyond. For them, the struggle was the thing — no matter whether that was saving the world, paying the rent or trying to make ends meet as a freelance photographer or a blind lawyer or an itinerant stunt motorcyclist.
Unlike DC Comics’ iconic heroes, many of whom had been destined for greatness as the last sons of doomed planets, Amazon royalty or rightful kings of the sea, the likes of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Ghost Rider and the Incredible Hulk made for a catalogue of human frailties — schmoes who inadvertently, or negligently, wandered into the traffic of destiny.
Some moneyed, some working-class, all neurotic, they had powers thrust upon them by misfortune or questionable choices. Their abilities were just as often bane as boon. And sometimes it was hard to tell the heroes and the villains apart. Sort of like real life.
This was in no small measure due to Lee, who as Marvel’s editor-in-chief wrote many of the books himself during comics’ “Silver Age” years of the early 1960s. With seemingly boundless energy and a staggering variety of voices, he breathed personality, ambiguity and a common narrative into soon-to-be-beloved characters.
“One of the things we try to demonstrate in our yarns is that nobody is all good, or all bad,” Lee wrote in a column for Marvel’s March 1969 issues. “Even a shoddy super-villain can have a redeeming trait, just as any howlin’ hero might have his nutty hang-ups.”
It’s hard to overestimate how groundbreaking this philosophy was in a nation that, with a tone set by production-code Hollywood since the early 1930s, had spent three decades positioning largely unambiguous heroes at the centre of its rising mass culture. Add government efforts in the 1950s to demonize comics as the mind-decayers of youth, and to push publishers back toward blandness, and you’ll have some idea what Lee accomplished at the beginning of the 1960s.
Suddenly here was Tony Stark, a genius inventor with daddy issues (and, we would eventually learn, an alcoholic narcissist) who fixed his literally broken heart by turning himself into Iron Man. Here was Peter Parker, a meek high-school nerd who had no clue how to handle the creepy abilities and hormonal changes bestowed upon him by the bite of a radioactive spider on a class field trip. Talk about playing to your target audience.
Even Steve Rogers, whose Captain America was the most Superman-like of the bunch, had demons. He was the skinny kid rejected by his Second World War draft board who wanted so badly to fight that he volunteered to be a guinea pig for a “supersoldier serum” that would turn him into the ultimate fighting machine.
There was another, less-noticed corner where Lee was equally groundbreaking. As Marvel’s editor, in an age before computers were in every pocket, he worked tirelessly to develop a relationship with his audience.
He talked about stuff behind the scenes and curated a tallish tale of a wacky, collegial studio of writers and artists who might do just about anything in their pursuit of good stories.
Many felt Lee didn’t share enough credit with such comics pioneers as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, who worked alongside him in those early years as he developed the “Marvel Method” of story development. Fair enough. But part of Lee’s genius was his ability to be a master of collage.
Like a Bob Dylan or a Gene Roddenberry, Lee took cultural threads — elements already afoot in society — and constructed his own quilt.
While his source material was sometimes derivative, what he stitched was something new under the sun.
And within his emerging pantheon of white male angst, Lee was often an enthusiastic champion of progressive views about race, if not always gender. The now-fabled Black Panther first appeared in a Marvel comic book in 1966, becoming one of the earliest mainstream superheroes of African descent, though it took until 1973 for him to snag a marquee spot in a comic titled Jungle Action.
“None of us is all that different from each other. We all want essentially the same things outta life,” Lee wrote in the pages of Marvel Comics in February 1980. “So why don’t we all stop wasting time hating the ‘other’ guys. Just look in the mirror, mister — that other guy is you.”
I had a conversation with Stan Lee once.
In 2011, he was a guest at the Montreal Comic con. That was the year that attendance skyrocketed. I’d been going for the previous few years, so I went that time also.
There was a Q-and-A session that I attended; I’m not sure if that took place before or after the conversation. I remember that I didn’t get the chance to ask my question – were there any of his characters that he was surprised *didn’t* become a success? – because the ‘Fathers For Justice’ guy from a few years back (remember him? Dressed up as Spider-Man and climbed the bridge to get attention, and shut down traffic for a few hours?) was asking this very long and involved question which boiled down to “do you support my worthy cause, Stan, please say yes”, and afterward Stan was tired and they had to end the session a bit early.
But the conversation. At one point, Stan was moving from one part of the Palais des Congres to another, and although his assistants wanted to take him through the back corridors, he decided to walk across the main convention floor. Which were full of people who went absolutely wild because STAN LEE WAS WALKING AMONG THEM. People who were calling out “STAN, STAN, WE LOVE YOU STAN”.
I was rummaging through a longbox at some dealer’s spot when this took place, and by chance Stan moved towards me.
I was about 10 feet away from him.
I looked at him.
I raised my fist and said “All hail Stan!”
He grinned, and said “You’re damn right.”
And then he moved on.
I consider that a conversation.
Goodbye, Stan.
Excelsior.
Danny Sichel