PCS TV interviews gamers to find out what video game console they’re most excited about to usher in the Next Generation of electronic entertainment this fall.
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 Rosario talks to PCS TV about what it was like to work with Larry Clark, Kevin Smith, Spike Lee, Frank Miller and more. Written by David Atchinson and Rosario Dawson, art and cover by Tony Shasteen. On the case and out of her element, new recruit Sophia Ortiz scours Manhattan’s arcane underworld for clues, hoping to end a strange and horrific murder epidemic. Things take a bad turn when a routine mystic disturbance turns out to be something far more sinister. Are the two cases connected? Will Sophia live long enough to find out? Plus: an excerpt from the O.C.T. Officer Training Manual! Check out Part 1 of PopCultureShock’s interview with Rosario, covering the behind-the-scenes making of Occult Crimes Taskforce here.
 By Remy Minnick on August 28, 2006 at 12:32 pm Rob Liefeld talks to PCSTV about what working on Heroes Reborn then and Onslaught Reborn now means to him.
PUBLISHER: MARVEL Marvel’s greatest heroes sacrificed themselves to save the world from the deadliest threat they had ever faced—Onslaught! The lives of the Fantastic Four and the Avengers were saved only when Franklin Richards created a parallel universe, where we found those heroes, reborn! But this world has long since merged back into our own, and the evil Onslaught—forged from the most vile parts of Magneto’s and Professor X’s psyches—has been presumed long dead… but now he, himself, is reborn—and he’s bringing fragments of the other universe with him! Join comics superstars Jeph Loeb and Rob Liefeld in this no-holds-barred, all-out action extravaganza—celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the event that changed Marvel history—as Onslaught, the Marvel Universe, and the Heroes Reborn Universe collide in this massive crossover! A significant portion of the proceeds from ONSLAUGHT REBORN #1-5 will be donated to The Sam Loeb College Scholarship Fund.” 32 PGS./Rated T+ …$2.99
By Remy Minnick on August 24, 2006 at 12:51 pm Marc Guggenheim talks to PCS TV about finishing up Wolverine and starting on Blade. Published by MARVEL Blade Bites Back in His Own Ongoing Series The star of three blockbuster movies and a hit television series is finally getting what he deserves…his very own ongoing comic series. Blade #1 sees the return of the Blade to his own comic and he’s taking on all comers, whether it be supervillain or supernatural. Guest-starring Spider-Man, Blade #1 firmly plants the vampire hunter in the Marvel Universe as he has to help cure an undead Wall-Crawler who’s been turned into a vampire himself. And if that wasn’t enough, the Lord of the Undead, Dracula, makes an appearance. But what’s scarier than the most fearsome vampire in history? How about Blade having to face down an entire classroom of bloodsucking fourth graders? And all of this is just in the first issue! The Blade team of Howard Chaykin (New Avengers, American Flagg) and Marc Guggenheim (Wolverine, CSI: Miami) along with breakout cover artist sensation Marko Djurdjevic are set to bring you the most action-packed comic on the stands each month. Get onboard for a suspenseful, edge-of-your seat monster mash of a comic set right in the heart of the Marvel Universe. Be sure to pick up Blade #1 because this self-contained first issue is perfect for longtime fans, fans of the movie or TV show, and new readers alike. Reginald Huldin talks to PCSTV about the ramifications of Black Panther & Storm’s marriage. PUBLISHER: MARVEL “WORLD TOUR” Part 1 (of 6) // The Royal Couple — King T’Challa and Queen Ororo — embark on a diplomatic tour that will have them spanning the globe — and beyond! First stop: Latveria, for a meeting with the Dr. Victor Von Doom.  By Shola Akinnuso on August 10, 2006 at 10:19 am Rainbow Six Vegas Producer, Alexandre Parizeau, promotes what’s easily one of the Xbox 360’s most anticipated games this fall with a shiny new company interview and new gameplay footage. Watch the streaming footage here on PopCultureShock.com.
LeSean Thomas holds a special spot in comicdom. Considered by fans to be one of the comic-book industry’s rising stars, Thomas has managed to nimbly weave successful careers between the mediums of animation and creator-owned funny-books. LeSean Thomas kicks it with PCS TV at San Diego Comic-Con
Standing tall as the Supervising Character Designer on Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, it doesn’t hurt that his anime-inspired, hip-hop infused, revisions of the popular social comic strip helped catapult the show toward ratings paradise for The Cartoon Network. With a smile and New York swagger, LeSean will tell you that it’s been anything but easy. With a journey that began – at least for most fans – with spectacular art on titles that fizzled too early to catch, Thomas might argue that his rise really began with a full moon, a childhood of Street Fighter art, and tracing paper. Light tables were out of the budget. With little tolerance for laziness, and a great deal of love for the artistic process, LeSean sits with PopCultureShock.com to promote his latest labor, Nervous Breakdowns: The Art of LeSean Thomas Vol.1, Hip-Hop’s Little Brother, and why Roy Hargrove is great creation food.
For a newcomer to comics, Greg Pak has been getting a lot of buzz. It isn’t everyday that industry heavyweights like Joe Quesada and Brian Bendis hail a writer’s work before it even hits the shelves. Chalk up Greg Pak’s nameless celebrity as a tragedy of timing. Much of Pak’s work pre-dating the critically hailed, but largely-ignored, Warlock revamp for Marvel Comics has blown their editorial teams away. Unfortunately, the cosmic alignment of artist and scheduling never seemed in the cards – or so the legend goes. Greg Pak, however, has been making moves simultaneously in other mediums. Winning a stunning 35 awards for his independent sci-fi film, Robot Stories, Greg Pak is definitely going to tell his stories. Having finished a commercial homerun with X-Men Phoenix: Endsong, Pak’s low level buzz is now a resounding chorus. Planet Hulk, Greg Pak’s intergalactic yarn putting The Incredible Hulk in Russell Crowe’s Gladiator role, has wowed fans with an adventure that has rekindled interest in a title of roller-coaster sales despite being one of the company’s most recognizable properties. The success isn’t inflating Pak’s ego. We caught up with the award-winning writer/director at the San Diego Comic Con, cheerfully talking with fans. More than once, though, we caught him thumbing, nose-deep, through long boxes of four-color treasures. He is, after all, still a fanboy.
At San Diego Comic Con, Hollywood celebrities visit fans to promote their movie projects. One can tell if they understand the celebration of pop culture or if they are just going through the motions of another promotional leg. Rosario Dawson understands what it’s all about. Dawson toured not only her work as an actor in Clerks II, Sin City, an actor/producer in Decent but now as comic creator with her new Image comic, Occult Crimes Taskforce (O.C.T.), which she is co-creator and co-writes with David Atchison. The rumor was she knew her comics, so I tested Rosario, not just to see if she read comics but to what level? Her answers will impress and are indicative that she is in fact, a comic geek. Trust me, she’s earned it. She attributes that to growing up around comics. Her uncle, Gus Vasquez is an artist who has drawn every superhero from Green Lantern to Spider-Man and is a guiding supporter on this book. Her most creative role may not be seen on Broadway or on the big screen, but perhaps working on and in the pages of sequential art. Her likeness is used for the protagonist, Sophia Ortiz, a hard-working police officer following in the footsteps of her father. Ortiz’s career takes a whirl when she is recruited for an underground operation investigating the world of dark magic and the demonic. Millennium meets the mystical arts in a harsh realm fully imagined by the talented Tony Shasteen who draws Dawson as one bad mamma-jamma! In real life, however, Rosario is as genuine as her character, Becky in the movie Clerks II: charming, intelligent, thoughtful and seductively sassy. “Down-to-earth” doesn’t do her justice. “One of the guys,” pshhh, you don’t even know. And if you didn’t have a crush on her before, fanboys, keep reading. In Part One of my interview we talk about O.C.T. and her passion for comics and in Part Two, we talk about her career in film. Ernie Estrella: Is it true that you’re a comic geek? Rosario Dawson: I would love to say that I’m a comic geek; it would be great company to be in. I grew up around a lot of comic geeks. I’ve been called one more lately. Kevin Smith called me one so that works. EE: Give me three comic book titles that aren’t in the mainstream that you’d like to see more popular. RD: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is amazing but I don’t know if that’s popular or not–but I love that a lot! I talked to Jonathan Rhys Meyers when I worked with him (on Alexander) and told him, “You’d be so good as Johnny!” I think it’s really good humor. I just read this really crazy book, which I would like to be better but it’s not, Trucker Fags in Denial. I like Lenore and all that kind of stuff. Neil Gaiman’s really popular and Lucifer is really amazing. I’m trying to think of what’s not popular. Bite Club, I like Bite Club. I’m not sure if they’re popular or not but it’s what I buy so they’re popular with me. [Laughs] EE: Do you think elements of those darker comics you’re into get siphoned into O.C.T.? RD: Probably. I think it just says something weird about myself. They’re definitely tonally what I like. O.C.T. is not a PG-13 kind of thing. It’s not for kids particularly, though they can get into it. But I do like adult-themed comics. I do like intelligent kind of stuff. With O.C.T. we’re dealing with magic and creatures and people keep trying to think about it like Ghostbusters or Men in Black and that’s not where we’re going with it at all. I’m trying to do something much stronger. I think of more grungy, I think of skateboarders in New York looking at the world in a different way. The curiosity, imagination and inspiration that come with that–That’s what I get behind. It’s not something everybody gets because most of those kids are scruffy and people don’t get how amazing and intelligent they are and how playing with the Earth in that way is a really beautiful thing. It’s something a lot of people who push papers around could probably benefit from. O.C.T. is people being able to discover magic, not in the Disneyland, Mickey Mouse sort of way but magic in the sense of power, like Green Lantern, knowing your will, your strength and being able to manipulate that respectfully. EE: What’s it like to actually be inside a comic book, visually seeing you in the pages? RD: Yeah, it’s a little odd I’d have to say but fun also. We did this picture [pointing to a poster of the cover to issue #1 behind her] in David Atchison’s and my Uncle Gus’ apartment and Tony Shasteen, the illustrator took photographs where I’m holding a broomstick. And then all of a sudden it looks all badass like that, which is pretty cool. It’s nice because I get to do a lot of stuff unlike with film where it’s 16-hour days where I don’t have as much creative input as I do in the comic. I felt like the work I was doing visually for it was not just fodder for nothing. I’m doing it in a way of true storytelling. We’re going over the panels, the story, what kind of expressions I need to do, where is Sophia coming from emotionally and really adding that to this, which is a really cool thing to bring into comics. When you’re looking at an Alex Ross painting real people, you can see they’re real people because they have real emotions but a lot of times it’s so fantastical when you’re dealing with magic or whatever in a lot of comics to see they’re people with expressions that don’t really feel authentic, they don’t feel like they’re in the moment. That’s the fun part when I see me in there, it looks like storyboards of a movie but it’s cool because I know we specifically did that on purpose. We really tried to get emotion in there purposely and as an actor I feel really excited that I can do that. I hope it’s really coming across the way I want as an actor. I’m trying to contribute what I can because I’m not the illustrator I help with the editing and the dialogue as well but I’m not the writer. This what I can contribute so I hope that comes across. EE: You’re credited as a writer as well– RD: Yeah. EE: Are you doing the actual dialogue, the plot or a little bit of both? RD: A little bit of both. David and I get on the phone and we go over everything: where we’re going with the story, the characters we’re creating, how we’re pacing it. A lot of the times with the creation kind of conversation he goes and he writes. David does a lot of research and brings what he has. I’ll do some of the editing and boiling it down to get the dialogue really working. He’s definitely the truer geek than I am and puts in a lot of information, and that’s awesome–I feel like I’m reading a Quentin Tarantino script, he has great dialogue–but he brings tons and tons of stuff inside that’s just what the characters are thinking. I’m like, “You’re not necessarily going to get that necessarily, unless Tony can read your mind. I don’t know if they [the readers] are going to get that. So you need to make that snappier and not have thought bubbles all over the place. How do you make that work with just dialogue?” And I have that from experience from doing filmmaking for so long. There’s a lot of exposition in some comics, and they feel they need to do that but I know that from acting and talking to people that if there’s logic to it, you’ll follow, and you don’t need to say as much as you think you do. That’s what I am contributing writing-wise. EE: For women who don’t read comics, what would you say they’re missing out on? RD: Oh my god, so much. I talk to my brother and we deliberate over all of the lessons we learn from reading comics. It’s so incredible. The reason why Hollywood’s even jumping on the bandwagon for comics is because they’re real stories. People aren’t telling real stories anymore. Stories are how we learn anything. Stories are our bread; it’s what we had since the beginning. From poetry and oral history and music, it’s all stories and not just entertainment. I think people, especially chicks, think that with looking at comics, ‘Aw, it’s just a pictures thing, it’s a guy thing with muscle-bound guys and the girls are so outrageously perfect.’ That idealistic thing is not really what they’re interested in. And I go, “No. Have you ever thought about this or ever felt that?” You should pick up an Alan Moore book. You should pick up Lucifer because I know how religious your feeling with all of these different thoughts and it’s a different perspective. Look at X-Men. Have you ever felt different? And who would you be? Would you want to be Magneto and feel that everyone’s a peon around you or would you want to be Xavier and try to fit in? And I love that with O.C.T. for a lot of women trying to figure out who they are through experience and looking at their history–that’s what the Sofia character really has and will hopefully be a good draw for women to get into comics. That’s what I’m hoping for. I work with a girls club group in New York City in the lower East Side and I want to do a block party in New York and bring in artists to come down to teach the girls how to do comics and get them interested on how they can express themselves. Visually they can be artists, they can be writers but also how many people they can reach through comics. EE: Instead of David Chapelle’s Block Party, it will be Rosario’s Block Party. RD: [Laughs] Comics are a way to bring up great political humor. There are different types of comics out there. It’s not just all T and A. If you look at Maus or Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, that’s a great book for girls to get into and really see how you can really bring up really intense–especially female issues–in the world and do it in a way that’s never been experienced before. It’s like documentary films vs. just kid films vs. entertainment films vs. dramatic films vs. whatever, romantic comedies. There are all different types and comics has that as well. Maybe that’s what stops women from getting into it; they think it’s only one thing and that it’s a guy thing. I just did Clerks II and it’s really tracking well with men, they get it really easily but with women, they don’t really see it, but I’m like, “Are you fucking kidding me? As a chick, I love this movie.” If a guy were to bring me to it on a date I’d be his. I don’t know if that’s just my particular sense of humor or sense of whatever, but I think it’s because I was exposed to it really early because my uncle is a comic book artist so I have the benefit of not being prejudice against it and that’s what I hope to break–that prejudice. Stay tuned for part two of our Rosario Dawson interview (with video)! Video interview and gameplay footage of the PS3 sequel to this year’s Xbox 360 title. Sega’s John Coghlan tells us what we can expect to be different between the two versions.
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