Notes from the Newsroom NewsOK.com Blogging Community

Captain America is back — and this time he’s brandishing a firearm.

The famous red-white-and-blue patriot was killed in “Captain America” No. 25 last March. In Wednesday’s issue, “Captain America” No. 34, Captain America’s former teen sidekick, Bucky, now carries the star-spangled shield.

Bucky, who spent decades under hypnosis as a Soviet agent, carries a firearm as well as the shield.

“It’s a little jarring for some people to see that,” said the book’s writer, Ed Brubaker, in an interview with the New York Daily News. “[But] people forget that Captain America carried a gun a lot in World War II. Every three covers there was a shot of Captain America with a machine gun or a flamethrower - or an atom bomb.”

Jim Lane, owner of Dragonfyre Comics, 1501 N Meridian, said he’d heard some customers complain about the new Captain America carrying a gun in preview images released by Marvel, but he thinks it works with the character.

“He doesn’t have the power that (original Captain America) Steve Rogers had, so he’s had to pick himself up an equalizer,” Lane said.

Brubaker told Vaneta Rogers at Newsarama.com that Bucky’s ongoing redemption dovetailed nicely with the death of Captain America, even if it wasn’t planned in advance.

“I had no clue until I wrote issue No. 26 or No. 27 that Bucky was actually going to end up taking the mantle,” Brubaker said. “It didn’t occur to me that it was the next evolution of where Bucky was going. I knew all along that we would also have a redemption of Bucky storyline. So once I realized how big this story was getting, I realized I needed someone back in the costume with the shield eventually. And Bucky fit so perfectly into that. It all came together.”

Lane said he thinks fans will accept the new character.

“They’ll see it as the evolution of the character,” Lane said. “It seems like a natural step.”

Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada will appear on the “Colbert Report” tonight to discuss the state of Marvel Comics, including the new Captain America.

“It’s an experiment,” Marvel Entertainment editor in chief Joe Quesada told the New York Daily News. “Every day, every story, I’m ready for backlash.”

“Captain America” No. 25 was the best-selling comic book of 2007 in comic-book shops, according to Diamond Comic Distributors.

Captain America was created in 1941 by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Steve Rogers was a scrawny teen who volunteered for a secret experiment. The results of the experiment turned him into a super-soldier, ready to fight the Axis powers of World War II. At the war’s conclusion, Captain America went missing — he was frozen in a block of ice, until being revived by the Avengers in 1963’s “Avengers” No. 4.

Lane praised the storyline of “Captain America” No. 34, which he called “relevant to today’s times,” even though Lane doesn’t agree with all the decisions made by Quesada. And, Lane says, he thinks just because there’s a new Captain America, it doesn’t mean fans will never see Steve Rogers again.

“In the back of my mind, I keep saying they’ll find a way to bring him back,” Lane said. “It may be five years down the road, but I think we’ll see Steve Rogers again.”

– Matthew Price
Acting Assistant Features Editor

The Oklahoma History Center, 2401 N Laird in Oklahoma City, will celebrate the holiday season with special events for families on Saturday, Dec. 6. Activities include crafts, games, songs and traditional holiday customs from various cultures and time periods. Children may have their photographs taken with Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus. Mrs. Claus will read cultural Christmas stories and serve cookies and hot cocoa.

Programs are free with paid admission.

Activity schedule:

– 10 a.m.: Caroling with Bishop McGuinness High School’s choir

– 11 a.m.: Photographs, cookies and hot cocoa with Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus

– noon: Holiday music featuring Putnam City High Schoo’s show choir

– 1 p.m.: Traditional period dances with Martha Ray

– 2 p.m.: Traditional holiday crafts with Martha Ray

– 3 p.m.: Photographs, cookies and hot cocoa with Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus

– 4 p.m.: Traditional games

Click for information or call 522-5248.

Brian Sargent
Staff Writer

NewsOK.com, The Oklahoman and local PBS channel OETA have joined forces to create a new Web site.

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’ new series on World War II, ‘The War’, airs starting Sept. 23 on OETA and, in an effort to join a national movement, a new Web site has been launched to gather and share Oklahomans’ WWII stories.

The site – http://oklahomawwii.org – offers archived stories and photos from The Oklahoman, as well as videos from OETA, a blog from OETA’S Dick Pryor, WWII resources and much more. We are proud to offer Oklahomans’ stories about WWII and videos submitted by Web site users telling personal stories about the war.

Oklahoma sent more than 268,000 of its own to fight in WWII, and with an estimated 1,500 people from this ‘greatest generation’ dying nationally every single day, it has never been more important to gather their stories.

Visit the Web site today to find out more about the project and to share your story. Families are encouraged to tell the stories of their loved ones, also. You can find the site through NewsOK.com by searching ‘world war two’. The related blog can be found at blog.newsok.com/worldwartwo.

And make sure to watch OETA this Sunday to see the first installment of Burns’ documentary.

Lindsay Hodges - NewsOK.com Web Editor - lhodges@newsok.com

One of filmmaking’s true masters, Ingmar Bergman, has passed away at the age of 89. The great Swede could be dark and foreboding or even mystifying for casual film viewers, but for those who got to sample his greatest works, it added another layer to their love of film. At least it did for me.

A brief rundown of five of my favorite Bergman works.

Smiles of a Summer Night: This romantic romp was one of his earliest films and seems quite uncharacteristic when compared to his later works, but its charms are legion and it even inspired the great Stephen Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music.” Still a joy to behold more than 50 years later.

The Seventh Seal: Probably his best-known work for its central setpiece and imagery as a knight returning home from the Crusades (Max von Sydow) challenges Death to a game of chess in hopes of sparing his own life.

Wild Strawberries: A  moving piece about an old professor off to receive an award and reflecting on his life during the train ride there.

Scenes From a Marriage: Originally made for Swedish television, this story about the life of a couple was trimmed into a feature. Both versions are great and a pseudo-sequel to it, Saraband, reuniting its stars came out in 2005.

Fanny and Alexander: Bergman said this film would be his last feature and talk about going out on a high note. A semiautobiographical tale of two children from a large theatrical family terrorized when their mother marries a sadistic minister, it’s haunting and entertaining and one of the most lush productions in terms of costumes, cinematography and sets ever placed on celluloid.

By Scott Schuldt, Staff Writer

An alarming letter from Cox Communications arrived in the mail yesterday, informing me that, as of Aug. 30, they will no longer carry HBO on the old-fashioned, regular cable but will relegate it to Digital Cable-only status.

They tried to make the offer sweet: three months of Digital Cable for merely $1 a month each, but no matter how kindly an ultimatum is made, I always instinctively resist it.

Of course, that wouldn’t include the cost for a converter box that I don’t want or the eventual raise after the three months. (Sorry, I don’t need multiple channels of HBO. One always has served me well.) I don’t want cable boxes that take over your TV and recording devices, usually leaving it where you can’t tape something and watch something else without an A/B switch (another expense). It defeats the purpose of cable ready TVs, VCRs and DVD recorders.

Know what’s even cheaper than a $1 a month for three months though? A cable bill that will be $13.95 cheaper forever. Sure, we had a story in The Oklahoman today about worries over the eventual switch to all-digital signals that will make old TVs obsolete without converters, but that’s not happening until 2009. I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. I imagine I won’t be alone because if anything will send rioters to the streets, it will be the sudden inability to watch television, especially for those on the lower end of the economic spectrum who can’t even afford regular cable now.

So, it’s a sad day for me. I anxiously awaited the new season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in September and, even more importantly, the final season of “The Wire” in early 2008. At least they waited until after “The Sopranos” finished to pull this stunt.

Scott Schuldt, Staff Writer

Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC is one of my newest heroines. Recently, when Paris Hilton was released from jail, her producers made that the “lead story” of the headlines she was supposed to read and instead, she ripped it up and skipped to the next item that was of actual importance. (By the way, why do I even know who Paris Hilton is? No one has yet come up with a reasonable explanation for that.)

Yesterday, Ms. Brzezinski did it again, pointing out how the endless reporting about Lindsay Lohan’s latest troubles really works as enabling the behavior. Of course, she’s one of the few voices on MSNBC saying such things, the rest of the day would be spent talking up Lohan over issues such as Iraq, Alberto Gonzales’ possible perjury or a House panel voting to cite Bush Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former counsel Harriet Miers with contempt.

It’s true. The insane substitution of pop culture over actual news is nuts. News is supposed to inform, not entertain. (CNN further blurred that line with their crazy YouTube debate this week, asking Democratic candidates for president to come up with fun videos of their own. This is about choosing the next leader of the free world, why does it need to be fun?)

What’s even worse is that this celebrity culture has made a mockery of drug and alcohol rehabilitation, as it has become just another PR tool instead of needed help for those caught in the web of addiction. The list is astounding: Are you a U.S. representative caught sending steamy e-mails to pages? Blame booze. Are you a major movie star with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism in your blood? It’s that old demon rum. Are you a television actor with a homophobic streak that causes you to lash out a gay co-worker with epithets? Quick — get to rehab, stat. At this point, it seems as if rehab can cure everything EXCEPT drug or alcohol addiction.

When we live in a world where the death of an E-list celebrity such as Anna Nicole Smith gets more coverage than the deaths of former presidents or the first leader of post-Soviet Russia, we have entered a sad world indeed. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someday someone with deep pockets will set out to start a cable news network that actually covers news instead of trivia.

Scott Schuldt, Staff Writer

Outside of the Bush Administration that is, which doesn’t want anyone to know about anything that they do. I’ve never read any of the “Harry Potter” books, but I have enjoyed all of the movies so far (though I have yet to see the newest), but I do know the twists of the fifth and sixth installments, though I’ve been fortunate so far to avoid hearing about the true ending.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the identity of this year’s winner of the Main Event of the World Series of Poker. For some reason, ESPN doesn’t get around to broadcasting its coverage of those events until months after the winner claims the top prize, which he or she did last week. So far, I’d been lucky to avoid learning the winner’s name, but it got spoiled in an unexpected way as I was innocently reading the quote page of the latest edition of Newsweek and there in the quotes, where I wasn’t even thinking about it, was one from the winner. So, now I know who’s going to walk away with the $8.5 million prize.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always made a simple request to friends who were about to become new parents: Do everything in your power to keep knowledge of the movie “Psycho” away from your children until they are old enough to see it for the first time. I can only imagine what it must have been like to see Alfred Hitchcock’s classic back when it originally was released in 1960 without knowing that shower scene was coming. What a shock it must have been for the viewer to follow along the story which seemed to be ostensibly about Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane only to have her exit the film early and in such a shocking way.

“Psycho” was ruined for me by, of all things, an old episode of “Saturday Night Live” hosted by Anthony Perkins which I saw before the movie and had the skit about the Norman Bates School of Motel Management. I remember how grateful I was back in 1992 when I saw “The Crying Game” before all the hype about the “twist” took over so that its surprise truly was a surprise for me.

The worst cases are when people reveal things without any warning. I remember reading a review of “Fight Club” where the critic David Thomson gave away its twist without any warning in just a matter of fact way before I even saw the film. Fortunately, “Fight Club” was still great with that ruined and it added a new layer to the viewing experience. I also knew about the twist in “The Sixth Sense” before I saw that, but I think I would have figured that one out anyway. “Fight Club” I don’t think I would have.

Since our world has become so saturated by pop culture (We live in a universe where CNN considers the arrival of the Beckhams in L.A. as “breaking news”), secrets will be harder and harder to keep, so artists need to work hard to make sure that their works are strong enough to stand up even if we know what’s coming.

— Scott Schuldt, Staff Writer