cyrus.mortazavi

No, I didn’t see that coming either.

I mean we knew the new Supreme was coming. But not this one.

You are not dreaming.
We are trying to communicate with you.
Local reality has been reinstalled.
Things have gone wrong.
The revision has corrupted.
Finding Ethan Crane is your supreme priority.
We are speaking to you from the ultimate bunker within the structure of multiversal time.
Do not trust Darius Dax.
We are all going to die.

Warren Ellis (TREES, Planetary) teams up with Tula Lotay (ELEPHANTMEN, The Witching Hour) to re-introduce the central Image Comics character in SUPREME: BLUE ROSE, coming this July from Image Comics.

“One day I woke up with an idea, that came out of nowhere, for how to extend this most strange and storied of ‘analogue’ properties into a new space. A new floor on top of Alan Moore and Rob Liefeld’s house,” said Ellis. “And, since I had some time on my hands that year, I emailed Image, and we got my friend Tula Lotay involved—and her work will be a revelation to people.”

Moon Knight, Project Superpowers, Supreme, he’s having a grand old time isn’t he?

Warren Ellis To Write Rob Liefeld’s Supreme

It’s a pretty badly kept secret but Mel Gibson has been offered (and may have even signed up for) one of the two lead roles in Dragon Blade, an upcoming Chinese action film. The story is set during the high times of the Roman Empire, and Gibson will be playing a Roman military leader lost in China who meets Jackie Chan’s character.

There was a press release to announce the film and Chan played coy with his co-stars identity, saying only:

All I can say is that he’s a foreigner — an A-list Hollywood star, a big name

Dragon Blade is being directed by Daniel Lee, who will apparently have a ‘record breaking’ budget. it will get a 3D IMAX release in China on their 2015 New Year. That’s a big slot – this film’s being set-up to be a huge blockbuster in just about every way.

I wonder when we’ll get to see it in the West?

Jackie Chan Making Historical Action Film With Mel Gibson (But Won’t Name Him)

We mentioned the earlier New 52 version of Wonder Woman that way planned by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, but in the new TwoMorrows magazine Modern Masters Volume 29: Cliff Chiang, we also get a look behind the scenes of the Vertigo Batman comic that never was. Or, The Bat-Man, closer based on the character’s first appearance.

We were supposed to do a First Wave: Batman series, but those plans changed when the First Wave books were abandoned. After Greendale, First Wave: Batman morphed into The Bat-Man for Vertigo. Vertigo had a reputation for reinterpreting classic DC characters, so we thought what if we did that with Batman, perhaps as part of the Vertigo 20th Anniversary? We got the go-ahead, and Brian wrote the first script and I started doing the visual development. My Batman: Black and White statue was intended to come out the same month as the book, to help promote it. If you look at that statue of Batman with his guns drawn, it would have made more sense if you saw the book. It would have featured this young and inexperienced Batman who still relied on his guns, fighting police corruption, gangsters, and Mexican drug cartels in a West Coast version Gotham City. L.A. Confidential meets Batman. Brian and I were really excited. After Jimmy Olsen, after Aquaman, we’d been talking about it for so long, it was finally going to happen! [laughs] Then one night Brian called me and asked, “What do you think of Wonder Woman?” He’d just been asked to write the book. Brian was very convincing, but in the end I stuck to my guns. We’d been working to get this Bat-Man book off the ground for so long, I couldn’t walk away from it. I would have loved to draw Wonder Woman, but not before this Bat-Man book.

MM: But it never happened, and instead you did Wonder Woman anyway?

CLIFF: [laughs] Well, three months later DC rescheduled The Bat-Man just as I was about to start drawing pages. They said they wanted to release it two years later, in 20131 In hindsight, I think they really wanted Brian and me together on Wonder Woman.

Here is that statue…

The Batman By Chiang And Azzarello That Vertigo Never Published

Lucasfilm

Star Wars: Episode VII has already begun filming according to Disney CEO Bob Iger, but details about the production have been well concealed. We know R2-D2 is in it, and Peter Mayhew is back to play Chewbacca. Carrie Fisher may be returning, and a few other bits have been revealed. Iger said Star Wars: Episode VII will be set 30 years after Return Of The Jedi and star three new young leads.

Now THR confirms a rumor earlier reported by Badass Digest: Tatooine will be one of the locations in the new film, making this the sixth of seven Star Wars installments with scenes on Tatooine. THR says Disney and J.J. Abrams plan to “build out an extensive re-creation of Tatooine [...] in a Morocco-like environment”.

The original Tatooine was built in Tunisia and left standing, but there’s a bit of a kerfuffle with restoring those buildings for filming: people moved into them. Anakin Skywalker’s hometown of Mos Espa in Episode I now has squatters, and Luke Skywalker’s home in Episode IV is a being used as a hotel. No word on if Owen and Beru’s charred remains have been made into coffee tables.

The entire cast of The Expendables 3 apparently gathered at their local Sears and got these very adorable portraits done for the first character posters from the Patrick Hughes-directed threequel.

From Stallone to Statham to to Li to franchise newbies like Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson, they all carry big weapons and they all look super chipper for a bunch of people about to be sent into a potential life or death situation.

Expendables 3 comes out on August 15th.

Sixteen Expendables 3 Character Posters

When Arnold Schwarzenegger reprises the role of the T-800 in the upcoming Terminator: Genesis, he’ll be doing so as a man of 66 years. He won’t look quite like he did back in Terminator 3, let alone T2, and definitely not the original Terminator.

But this, as he explained to MTV, will make sense as part of the film’s narrative.

The way that the character is written, it’s a machine underneath. It’s this metal skeleton. But above that is human flesh. And the Terminator’s flesh ages, just like any other human being’s flesh. Maybe not as fast. But it definitely ages.

I had assumed some CG de-aging was to be required, possibly performance capture. I think it may still be necessary, as Schwarzenegger’s explanation of the plot features not only the aged T-800 but a younger version too.

Terminator deals a lot with time travel, so there will be a younger T-800 and then what that model does later on when it gets reprogrammed, and who gets ahold of him. So it will be all kinds of interesting twists in the movie, but I feel so good.

That does sound interesting. It may have been borne out of a desire to get Arnie back – there was a promise to keep – but it’s opened up a whole load of timey wimey possibilities.

I’m looking forward to this one a good deal. It’d be lovely for this to all come together and give us another Terminator film to treasure, and some post-Governor Schwarzenegger that’s strong enough to wipe away the bad taste.

Schwarzengger Explains Why His New Terminator Will Look So Much Older And Other Bits Of Business

According to this tweet by Rob Liefeld, there’s no mystery to Fox’s 2018 Marvel movie at all. He’s quite confident that it’s an adaptation of X-Force, one of his mutant works, and I would guess that he should know.

X-Force not a rumour, script complete, paid for by Fox. Excellent. RT @CBR: What Is Fox's Mystery Marvel Movie? http://t.co/CXMbLh41qL

— robertliefeld (@robertliefeld) March 25, 2014

If he wasn’t so sure, I don’t know if he’d be so confident. In any case, it was the odds on favourite, wasn’t it?

And… well, I wouldn’t say the prognosis looks good for the Deadpool picture.

Jeff Wadlow has written the script for X-Force and it’s anticipated that he’ll also direct. I’m guessing it’s only slated for 2018 to save on a Mutant pile-up over the next few years, and if the New Class crew do find their contracts running out after Apocalypse, it does make sense to line up something to come in their wake.

Rob Liefeld Says Fox’s Mystery Marvel Movie Is Definitely X-Force

by Matthew Sitman

Last week the Dish featured an interview with Peter Watson, author of The Age of Atheists, an intellectual history of European and American thought since Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation that “God is dead.” Emma Green accuses Watson of “intellectual snobbery” for believing that because “intellectual history trends toward non-belief, human history must, too.” Why she objects:

For one thing, it suggests that believers are inherently less thoughtful than non-believers. Watson tells stories of famous thinkers and artists who have struggled to reconcile themselves to a godless world. And these are helpful, in that they offer insight into how dynamic, creative people have tried to live. But that doesn’t mean the average believer’s search for meaning and understanding is any less rigorous or valuable—it just ends with a different conclusion: that God exists. Watson implies that full engagement with the project of being human in the modern world leads to atheism, and that’s just not true.

We know it’s not true because the vast majority of the world believes in God or some sort higher power. Worldwide, religious belief and observance vary widely by region. It’s tough to get a fully accurate global picture of faith in God or a “higher power,” but the metric of religiosity serves as a helpful proxy. Only 16 percent of the world’s population was not affiliated with a particular faith as of 2010, although many of these people believe in God or a spiritual deity, according to the Pew Research Center.

Green goes on to cite a litany of statistics, broken down by region and country, showing just how many people still believe in God, even in Europe. I find this a puzzling and unpersuasive retort.

To begin with, the distinction between “intellectual history” and “human history” is a strange one – isn’t the former part of the latter, and might it not portend the shape of things to come? Even more, large numbers of people across the globe still having a “religious affiliation” doesn’t mean such social facts will be durable, or indicate how strong such affiliations are, or predict how the ongoing churn of the modern world will impact areas outside the United States and Europe. That 30 percent of the religiously unaffiliated in France believe in God, a number Green trots out, seems irrelevant to me; one can imagine a survey respondent shrugging and saying, “Sure, I believe in God,” with that belief being of no practical import to that person. The Pew study she cites specifically notes that such numbers only deal with the self-identification of those surveyed, and “does not attempt to measure the degree to which members of these groups actively practice their faiths or how religious they are.”

Most of all, in her own summary of his book, Green describes Watson as implying that “full engagement with the project of being human in the modern world leads to atheism.” That means he’s making an argument that an array of forces in contemporary life – from modern science to capitalism to the overturning of traditional ideas about sex and morality – mitigate against religious belief, or at least make it more tenuous and difficult. In other words, there are reasons, intellectual and cultural, that make Watson predict an atheistic future. I’m not convinced Watson is right, but responding with rather weak survey data does nothing to address these deeper issues. That’s why John Gray’s review of The Age of Atheists (along with Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God) is so on point, getting at the true intellectual and moral alternatives at stake. Here’s why he praises Watson and Eagleton as the rare exceptions who take Nietzsche as the “central reference point” in their books:

There can be little doubt that Nietzsche is the most important figure in modern atheism, but you would never know it from reading the current crop of unbelievers, who rarely cite his arguments or even mention him. Today’s atheists cultivate a broad ignorance of the history of the ideas they fervently preach, and there are many reasons why they might prefer that the 19th-century German thinker be consigned to the memory hole. With few exceptions, contemporary atheists are earnest and militant liberals. Awkwardly, Nietzsche pointed out that liberal values derive from Jewish and Christian monotheism, and rejected these values for that very reason. There is no basis – whether in logic or history – for the prevailing notion that atheism and liberalism go together. Illustrating this fact, Nietzsche can only be an embarrassment for atheists today. Worse, they can’t help dimly suspecting they embody precisely the kind of pious freethinker that Nietzsche despised and mocked: loud in their mawkish reverence for humanity, and stridently censorious of any criticism of liberal hopes.

I want more discussions prompted by this line of thought, more atheists who have absorbed the full import of what rejecting Christianity really might entail, especially the faith’s deep, if not uncomplicated, impact on the West’s moral and political heritage. To the extent Watson’s book, along with Eagleton’s, contribute to this happening, I rather enthusiastically welcome them.

by Patrick Appel

Rogin and Lake see it as a possibility:

Nobody knows if and how Russia will follow through on its threats to sacrifice the Iran talks to try rob Obama of the main diplomatic accomplishment of his second term as president. Russia could pull out of the so-called “P5+1” group—the world powers currently negotiating with Iran. Or Moscow could stop cooperating on international sanctions on Iran, easing pressure on Tehran and helping Russian businesses.

Roger Cohen casts doubt on the idea that Russia would cease working on the Iranian nuclear deal, noting that “Russia has its own interest in stopping nuclear proliferation, and even the Cold War did not preclude cooperation in some areas.” Larison isn’t so sure:

Moscow has been much less alarmed by Iran’s nuclear program than Western governments are. Russia may not want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but it seems much less worried that Iran is likely to acquire them. The other argument is that Russia doesn’t want to sabotage diplomacy with Iran because that would make U.S. military action more likely, but it’s not so obvious that it would greatly harm Russian interests if the U.S. and Iran couldn’t resolve the nuclear issue peacefully. Russia benefits in some ways from ongoing U.S.-Iranian hostility, and it is not harmed if the U.S. ends up waging yet another war in the Near East.

Walter Russell Mead makes related points:

[I]f Russia did manage to stop the talks dead, the result wouldn’t automatically be an Iranian bomb. The first result would be to put Obama into the horrible, no-win situation he has spent his whole presidency working hard to avoid: where his only two choices are military action against Iran and accepting an Iranian nuclear weapon. If (as the White House has continually insisted that he would) he goes for force, the United States gets involved in another Middle Eastern war, and Russia enjoys a huge financial windfall as oil prices skyrocket and a propaganda windfall as the United States (without a UN mandate, which Russia would take care to block) takes on yet another preventative war in a Middle Eastern country.

Or, alternatively, the United States endures its most humiliating and devastating foreign policy defeat in decades, leaving its prestige in tatters and its global alliance system fundamentally weakened as yet another of President Obama’s red lines, this one much brighter and deeper than the one in Syria, gets crossed—with impunity.

by Patrick Appel

Ryan O’Donnell explains the above chart, which shows the relationship between political districts’ ideology and their representatives’ votes:

Obviously we’d expect Democratic politicians to vote more conservative the more conservative their district gets, and more liberal the more liberal their district gets. And by-and-large, they do. But Republicans don’t really follow that trend, as you can see in red on the graph [above] … If you only take away one thing from this graph, it should be that the expected value for Republicans is nearly a perfect horizontal line. Translated into plain English, that means Republicans vote conservative almost no matter what. It doesn’t matter what type of districts they represent.

The lesson Matt Steinglass draws from this:

This doesn’t predict what might happen if Republicans gained control of the Senate, or of the presidency. It’s possible that with more power Republicans would feel freer to disagree with each other. With their backs to the wall, out-of-power Democrats might feel the need to present a more united front. But basically Democrats have less voting discipline than Republicans. …

In other words, if all else fails, the gridlock of the American government will probably end the next time the country elects a Republican president, since Republican legislators have the discipline to stonewall Democratic presidents while Democrats are more willing to compromise. That asymmetry is probably infuriating to Democrats, but unless their legislators adopt different voting behaviour, it’s not going to change.

According to George RR Martin, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter on the occasion of Game of Thrones season 4 gala premiere, there have been real and meaningful discussions about taking the series to the big screen.

One prospect, he says, is to make movies centred on the Dunk and Egg prequel stories. These novellas are set 90 years before the start of the Thrones novels and therefore don’t intersect directly with the narrative of the TV show, even while characters are related and locations can be the same.

Another is to finish off the TV show with a lavish, expensive two hour movie. This somehow sounds a lot less likely.

It all depends on how long the main series runs. Do we run for seven years? Do we run for eight? Do we run for 10? The books get bigger and bigger. It might need a feature to tie things up, something with a feature budget, like $100 million for two hours. Those dragons get real big, you know.

We’ll see about that.

Martin spoke to Vanity Fair a few days back about his hopes to keep the novels ahead of their TV incarnation:

The season that’s about to debut covers the second half of the third book. The third book was so long that it had to be split into two. But there are two more books beyond that, A Feast for Crowsand A Dance with Dragons.

A Dance with Dragons is itself a book that’s as big as A Storm of Swords. So there’s potentially three more seasons there, between Feast and Dance, if they split into two the way they did.

Now, Feast and Dance take place simultaneously. So you can’t do Feast and then Dance the way I did. You can combine them and do it chronologically. And it’s my hope that they’ll do it that way and then, long before they catch up with me, I’ll have published The Winds of Winter, which’ll give me another couple years. It might be tight on the last book, A Dream of Spring, as they juggernaut forward.

And what about the rapidly ageing cast? Just roll with it, I suppose. Pretend that puberty hasn’t redesigned the little ones and that the older ones haven’t each lost an inch in height while putting one on around the middle. I can play along with that, sure. But will audiences at large?

Game Of Thrones Movies Being “Actively Discussed”

I know plenty of people were hoping this project would get scrapped altogether (before and) after the death of Harold Ramis, but it’s been confirmed again today that that won’t happen. And now original Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman has dropped out of directing the threequel as well, though, as Deadline reports, he will help Sony find a new director.

Reitman gives Deadline a pretty in-depth interview about the evolution and slow progression of this project, but here are the newsiest bits. This is what Reitman had to say about the current script, which he worked on with Etan Cohen:

It’s a version of Ghostbusters that has the originals in a very minor role.

(The originals, of course, without Bill Murray or Ramis now.)

On his decision to step down from directing duties after Ramis’ death:

When I came back from Harold’s funeral, it was really moving and it made me think about a lot of things. I’d just finished directing Draft Day, which I’m really happy with and proud of. Working on a film that is smaller and more dramatic was so much fun and satisfying. I just finally met with Amy [Pascal] and Doug Belgrad when I got back. I said I’d been thinking about it for weeks, that I’d rather just produce this Ghostbusters. I told them I thought I could help but let’s find a really good director and make it with him. So that’s what we’ve agreed will happen. I didn’t want all kinds of speculation about what happened with me, that is the real story.

But he and the studio are moving full steam ahead on the long-gestating sequel, anyway, with a handful of directors in mind to take over, and a start date:

I’m not going to say how many Ghostbusters there will be in the new cast, but we are determined to retain the spirit of the original film, and I am pleased that all of this seems to have happened organically,” he said. “I’m hoping we can get started by the fall, set in New York, but given the logistics and the stuff that happens, the beginning of 2015 seems more likely.

Ghostbusters 3 To Begin Filming In Early 2015 Without Ivan Reitman At The Helm

This is going to make a lot of people very happy. One of Pixar’s finest is getting a new sequel.

That’s right. Cars 3 is on the way. The studio will also be tossing out Incredibles 2. Don’t know who’s going to care too much about that, except toy store owners.

Okay, maybe I’ve gotten my wires crossed.

In all honesty, I’m excited about any new Pixar film and I’m not going to dismiss a Cars 3 out of hand. It’s not like I don’t enjoy the first two, either. As much as The Incredibles? Okay, no. But enough.

Robert Iger gave word of both sequels during an investor’s conference call this afternoon. He didn’t say who would be directing either picture, but a lot of folk will be assuming Brad Bird will be back for the Incredibles sequel.

Or maybe it will be Teddy Newton…

UPDATE: Iger also said that Brad Bird is working on the film’s story now. I guess it is likely to be him directing, then…?

Anyway, official word of the creatives involved will be along soon, I hope. I’d also expect some release dates, at least temporary ones. [Disney]

Disney And Pixar Announce The Incredibles 2 And Cars 3‏ – UPDATED

They were looking for a young female star for this role, and they’ve definitely got that. The Wrap reports Rooney Mara has joined Joe Wright’s Peter Pan prequel Pan alongside Hugh Jackman and Garrett Hedlund.

This version of the story has Peter (still uncast) as a young orphan taken to Neverland to lead the native people there to a war against the pirates, led by Jackman’s Blackbeard. Hedlund’s Hook is shaping up to be a good guy, with Mara’s Tiger Lily as his love interest.

The most interesting part of the report may be this:

Wright is planning to create a world that very international and multi-racial, effectively challenging audiences’ preconceived notions of Neverland and reimagining the environment.

If this is true, we certainly aren’t seeing it yet with the casting of Jackman, Hedlund and Mara. And it seems to be utilized to get a jump on the backlash that is already brewing from the casting of a white actress for a character that’s Native American in its original context.

But we’ll see. Pan releases on July 17th, 2015.

Rooney Mara To Play Tiger Lily In Joe Wright’s Pan

Chris Evans’ future, if he has his way, will be behind the camera. He last year directed the movie 1:30 Train, which is in post production now, and it’s his plan to follow through on that career track.

Speaking to Collider, however, Evans made it clear that he’ll be seeing out his agreement with Marvel.

I have a six-movie contract with Marvel and I absolutely plan on fulfilling them. This is without a doubt the biggest blessing in my life. Marvel has literally changed the game for me, and they make great movies. I did direct last year and it was a really fantastic experience, I really enjoyed it. So I’m certainly looking to do that a bit more, so when it comes to exploring other acting jobs I may not be as proactive in trying to find those, I may kind of stick with my Marvel universe in terms of getting in front of the camera, and then getting behind the camera outside of it.

Well, that will make his Marvel movie all the more special, I suppose.

And for clarification, Evans’ cameo in Thor 2 was made outside of the six picture deal so we’re three in, so far – Cap 1, Cap 2, The Avengers – with Cap 3 in the planning stages and Avengers 2 shooting. What will the sixth movie be? Everybody is assuming Avengers 3.

Somebody oughta ask Sebastian Stan what kind of contract he’s on… there’s a pretty good precedent for replacing Captain America, and we may well already have met the new guy.

Chris Evans Says He’ll See Out His 6 Film Contract As Captain America, But Other Than That…‏

Progress on the Game of Thrones books is not moving at the same pace as progress on the Game of Thrones TV series. The show is being rushed along by a number of factors, I’d suppose, from the maturation of the cast to the need to feed HBO with regular content. Meanwhile, George RR Martin will be held back by the sheer volume of his volumes.

In order to make sure that they’re not getting too far out of sync, the showrunners paid a visit to Martin last year and got him to chart out the characters’ arcs to the very end of the story.

David Benioff told Vanity Fair:

Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him [Martin] and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be. If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character.

Just one more reason Benioff shouldn’t accept already-poured drinks from strangers.

This year’s run of Thrones, which kicks off at the start of April, will see us through to the end of the 3rd book. I daren’t project what sort of pace the rest will be adapted and screened, but I can’t imagine HBO would like to think they’ll need to sustain moment for more than another five years or so. Will Martin have sorted out the details by then?

My hunch is that they’ll either find an earlier natural end point or diverge the two storylines, and I think it’s far more likely to be the former. I don’t envy whoever it is that has to make these calls, however.

George RR Martin Has Had To Tell The Game Of Thrones Showrunners How The Story Ends Because They’re Out Of Step‏

Made by illustrator Chad Lakkis. He has dubbed it Ben Raunchy Burger. And while that is nasty, it’s certainly less objectionable than what the actual Ben does in the bathroom.

Here’s a preview of Benedict Cumberbatch‘s appearance on Sesame Street. He’s not really Sherlock, you know, he just plays him on television.

Click here to view the embedded video.

See how he’s genuinely laughing at the end there? Let me remind you: everybody should meet a Muppet. Magic happens.

Video: Benedict Cumberbatch And The Sign Of Four On Sesame Street

Ioffe profiles Russian activists. What to worry about:

The increasingly real threat of economic turmoil is already chipping away at Putin’s power with more effectiveness than any protest movement. There is bound to be a vacuum when the forces of economics prevail. But a movement that is pulled in myriad different directions, that cannot decide on an identity, and yet lacks variety in its leaders cannot fill the void. By crushing the opposition, Putin has all but ensured that, once again, Russia’s history will repeat itself, and only the wrong people will be there to step in—the ultra-nationalists, childlike faddists, and dangerous purists. And Putin’s own story may not end as happily as he imagined.

On this most recent trip to Moscow, I asked one government official what the culmination of Putin’s reign would look like. “We don’t have this tradition of, OK, you served two terms and you leave,” he said. “We have no other tradition but to hold out to the end and leave feet first.” He meant in a coffin.

The Economist breaks down the problems with the Russian economy:

In today’s Russia, oil and gas account for 75% of all exports, compared with 67% in 1980. Although Russia no longer buys grain from America, as it did in the 1980s, 45% of what Russians buy today is imported. Walk around a department store in central Moscow, and it is hard to find anything that is produced locally. The state remains the single largest employer, while its corporations—controlling natural resources, infrastructure, banking and media—dominate the economy.

As Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, two American economists, have argued, the highly inefficient industrial structure of the old Soviet economy, based on misallocation of both resources and people, remains intact. The oil rent reinforced and perpetuated it: it has bought political stability and the loyalty of the population, but has slowed down modernisation. Inevitably, the result is stagnation.

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and lo, the glory of the affliction v-neck tee shone round about them, and they were sore afraid

Stephen Platt was a comic artist who rose to prominence in the nineties, first drawing Moon Knight for Marvel and then Prophet for Rob Liefeld at Image/Extreme Studios and then his own book, Soul Saga. He was… rather popular, though not exactly prodigious in his output. He went to work in movies, and recently returned to create covers for Marvel and looked to be creating new work.

On Facebook, Stephen Platt gets asked this a lot,

Federico Bettini i need a Prophet sketch…buddaaa buddaaaaa buddaaaaaa..

So he finally replied,

OK, after 200 request for Prophet commissions/sketch let me make this clear.

Never. Gonna. Happen.

I’m done with that character and that studio. Forever. Period.

Very shortly afterwards, Rob Liefeld posted on his Facebook page,

Someday I will tell you the real reason why I hired Stephen Platt and the subsequent meltdown that occurred. But not today….

Also I have not spoken Mr. Deadline in 20 years. No Plans…

But ask him why he won’t allow Image to print the final chapter of Soul Saga. Guy is a loon…

Also, someone might want to enlighten him that I haven’t had a studio in like 20 years. “That studio”

I’m done with LIFE magazine, Tower Records and Delorean’s…….FOREVER!!!

Look to each his own, like what you like, I’m not here to say what anyone should like. The part where he won’t draw Prophet is weird and is his problem.

Also – he tried a career as a stand up comic…. Guess that didn’t work out.

Ex-Extreme Studios writer Thomas Reiter jumped in.

I remember Eric asking me to go in and find out just how far behind Platt was on an issue of an already late Prophet comic. I found him working very diligently…on a two page spread which was for the following issue and not the one which was needed. Like a week ago. He went into a whole 20 minute spiel about his art style, how art is a higher calling, and how he approaches his work like Moebius does.

I pointed out that Moebius was a long time professional who would have been working on the pages he needed to finish and how he wasted a slew of time telling me how he works without actually working as he did.

He never really talked to me much after that.

Rob replied,

Omigosh Thomas Reiter thank you for sharing that. He tried to convince me that I needed to print an entire issue as a “tapestry”…. I said that was not possible, he told me I didn’t understand what a tapestry was. ….the whole thing was absurd.

By the way, Promethea #32? Printed as a tapestry… and while it may not exist as a studio, Extreme was revived as an imprint from Image – which might be what Stephen is talking about. Odds are he was approached about contributing to Prophet…

Extreme manager, later Image publisher and creator of Beanworld, Larry Marder piped up,

My strongest memory was going into Rob’s office & the first Platt Prophet pages had come in. Various EXTREME people were marveling over the art. One spread was so layered & textured its details looked like a Jackson Pollack painting. Some of the pen work was 0000 rapid-o-graph that would never reproduce on the page after shrinking & coloring. What I remember saying was something like “Unless he adjusts his style this guy will never draw a monthly book.”

With Rob Liefeld replying,

Well, Larry Marder, that’s the least he could do considering I was paying him 40,000 dollars an issue. Yes, you read that correctly. I paid Sir Deadline Forty-Grand an issue for pencils and inks plus cover. He had to take an inker to cover the schedule so it went down slightly. Sigh. Poor baby.

Still, I did message Platt about Soul Saga. No response yet – or to any of Liefeld’s posts, He may just be taking the high road.

Fanboy Rampage: Rob Liefeld Vs Stephen Platt

Because everyone needed to have a take on Richard Sherman’s postgame interview and because Tom Brady doesn’t have a Super Bowl to prepare for, Dreamboat was able to weigh in on Monday with remarks about how the Patriot Way doesn’t tolerate gloating or any such glory boy behavior.

“I don’t know him at all. I’ve watched him play. He’s that kind of guy,” Brady said. “So, you know. I approach the game — and I have respect for my opponents. That’s the way our team always plays. We win with graciousness, and when we lose, we could do better. Some teams don’t always do that, or that’s not their program. The only way to counter that is to beat them. When you don’t win, it’s hard not to say — you just gotta shut your mouth and listen to it. Maybe when you get an opportunity down the road, maybe that’s a source of motivation. But they got a good team. They played well all year. They played well at home. And that’s why they advanced, too.”

Possibly sour grapes from Brady from the time Sherman mouthed off to him following a Seahawks win.

But Brady has a point – the Patriots never disrespect or show up opponents. Not them.