The Penguin

As a comic book artist, I sometimes meet people with Great Comic Book Ideas. This can be irksome; they are mostly semi-avid comic book readers of the Marvel/DC stripe, and have never written or drawn a comic before (except, maybe, a short period in 8th-grade homeroom). Generally they want me to collaborate with them in developing the script, and then have me work for free on their Awesome Idea, while they sit back on a pile of money, surrounded by models. As irritating as these people are, every now and then you find a diamond in the rough - someone with the capacity to actually create, who has within them the brick-headed, nervous drive required to be a comic book storyteller. That's why I always listen politely to the Idea Guys, praising the noteworthy elements of their concept, and then offer what I call "blackjack" advice, harsh reality padded with gentle assurances: "If you develop your idea into a script, I can take a look at it and offer technical advice...

This is your captain speaking.We are about to take a 5-year journey of 2.4x10^13 miles through a near-vacuum with limited gravity, to the probable location of an alien world wending its way through a trinary star system. Please sit back, relax, and enjoy our trip to Proxima Centauri...oh, and don't eat too much or go crazy. Or get cancer. Thank you for your cooperation. (Source) Yikes, that sounds like a horrible plane trip. You've probably heard about the spectacular hurdles we humans would have to overcome in order to actually reach the nearest non-solar star, the most basic of which is that outer space is going to kill you even inside your flimsy metal spaceship, and you'd need a planet-sized food supply for the journey. I'll run them down real quick, just in case you've forgotten all the gleeful little buzzkills awaiting us: 1. Speed/time/distance 2. Fuel 3. Food 4. Communication 5. Social/psychological problems 6. Microgravity 7. Radiation 8. Spa...

The movie: Kill Your Darlings (2013) Directed by: John Krokidas Starring: Daniel Radcliffe (Allen Ginsberg); Dane DeHaan (Lucien Carr); Michael C. Hall (David Kammerer); Jack Huston (Jack Kerouac); Ben Foster (William Burroughs); David Cross (Lou Ginsberg). Kill Your Darlings follows a young Allen Ginsberg as he enters Columbia University and takes the first tentative steps in his poetry career. There he meets the irrepressible Lucien Carr, who introduces him to William Burroughs, and later Jack Kerouac. The four form a literary circle dedicated to "The New Vision" which focuses on, in Burrough's words, the "derangement of the senses." The gay Ginsberg immediately falls in love with the attractive and volatile Carr; but Carr already has an admirer, the intense, sinister professor-cum-janitor David Kammerer. Kammerer has pursued Carr from school to school, and appears to be merely a predator out to control Carr's life. But as Ginsberg becomes more e...