Dark Horse, ' Doctor Who' and 'Heroes' in Everyday Hero headlines

Everyday Hero, your roundup of handpicked headlines from the fanboy universe...

The Oregon success story of Dark Horse comics is historic -- in fact, it's so historic that it will now be protected and indexed in a massive archive project at Portland State University. Two copies of every Dark Horse publication will be kept there, one in general circulation and the other in a special collection preserve.

Heidi MacDonald has the story on her blog, the Beat: "The library’s Dark Horse collection will include everything they’ve produced, from books in 24 different languages to Aliens stickers and Hellboy lunch-boxes. The Beat spoke with Portland State University Librarian Helen Spalding, who explained that even a Buffy marquee statue can be useful to academics. 'The key rings, action figures, mugs and tee-shirts are all rich research material for examining marketing, gender roles, and many other topics,' she said. The idea for the collection was sparked a few years back when Spalding saw DHC Publisher and PSU alumnus Mike Richardson speak at a university luncheon. 'They’re an important Portland institution, and the University is really engaged with the community and the alumni,' Spalding said, 'so it just made a lot of sense that we work together on this important collection to our mutual benefit.'" [Publisher's Weekly] ... If you want to learn more about the fascinating contours of the Dark Horse story, check out a major piece I wrote earlier this year during a visit with Richardson (pictured above) and his team in Portland.

Now on with the rest of today's handpicked headlines...

"Heroes" needs a heroic effort: Jeff Jensen isn't ready to give up on the floundering NBC series "Heroes," which hit a series low of 8.2 million viewers on Oct. 6 (waaay down from its peak audience of 16 million) and has lost so much of its urgency. Jensen writes that "NBC's No. 2 drama won't ever reclaim its status as a ratings powerhouse, but it can regain its creative glory — provided producers start fixing things now. In order to speed things along, we present our five-point plan to save Heroes...from itself." Those five points: 1. Retire Some Capes 2. Make The Heroes Smarter 3. Get Back to the Heroes’ Roots 4. Get a New Bag of Tricks and 5. Find a Big Vision – And Set an End Date. Sounds easy enough! [Entertainment Weekly]

To Serve Man: Wait, there was a show called "Twilight Zone" and it wasn't about a Tiger Beat vampire in Washington state? Yes, kids, a long time ago a fellow by the name of Rod Serling hosted an unsettling and cerebral show about creepy creatures, twist endings and the slippery nature of reality. Sci Fi will air a two-day, end-of-the-year marathon of the grand old show and they want your vote on your 10 favorite episodes. Remember, as with any popularity contest, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Tucker Stone has an essay on the fuzzy logic that applies these days when it comes to labeling comics books for violence and sexualized content. He writes: "The mature readers/explicit content tag may have once been there as a warning to the parent or the queasy, it may have been there to keep the non-comics-shop-haunting evangelicals at bay, but that was then. Now? It's a neon sign, a greasy guy in a trenchcoat, and it's beckoning the reader down the street, and around the corner — and he's saying 'You want some gore? I got you some gore. I got it right here.' For whatever it's worth — that cat ain't lying."  [Comixology]

Who's "Who"?: Grant Morrison would love to write a "Doctor Who" movie but, sadly, nobody has asked. "That would be fantastic to do,” he said. “I’ve got quite a good story for Doctor Who. I think it would have to be quite definitive, especially because the recent series have had a few really strong definitive stories, such as ‘Human Nature,’ and ‘Silence in the Library.’ A couple of those I thought just nailed the character so completely, and that’s what you have to aspire to: a definitive, iconic, almost ultimate Doctor Who story.” [Splash Page blog, MTV]

The Great Sulu-Kirk War of 2008 continues. Here's a press release that came in today about a George Takei interview with "Entertainment Tonight" that will air this evening: "Takei talks to ET exclusively about his "Star Trek" co-star William Shatner's now-infamous YouTube rant about not being invited to his wedding, 'It's absolutely baffling to us because we did invite Bill and we didn't hear from him! But it wasn't surprising because it's true to his history. He's never responded to an invitation. Every time there was something happy to celebrate amongst us, he never showed up.' Shatner says in the YouTube video that Takei has a 'psychosis,' to which Takei responds, 'I think his stability is quite questionable. Bill likes to be the star of the show. He likes the attention focused on him. It's a big, shiny, demanding ego. It's all typical of Bill.  His ranting and raving is just silliness.'" [Entertainment Tonight]

And, finally: Check out our very own Denise Martin's guide to "Twilight" Halloween costumes...

-- Geoff Boucher

2008 photo of Mike Richardson of Dark Horse shot by Robert Durell/Los Angeles Times; Zachary Quinto of "Heroes" photograph by Chris Haston and courtesy of NBC. TARDIS image courtesy of the BBC.

Welcome to Milwaukie, Ore., Hellboy's hometown

Mike Richardson's Dark Horse Comics empire has put the sleepy town of 21,000 on the map.

MILWAUKIE, ORE. — IT'S A three-block stroll from the leafy banks of the Willamette to Main Street here, but on most lazy afternoons, it's so quiet you can hear the river's lulling drone the whole way. As one local said the other day as he walked toward the malt shop on Main: "It's like this town got to about 1959 and said, 'This seems good, we'll stay here.' "

Unless there's a remake of "Stand by Me" in the works, it's hard to imagine this town grabbing the attention of distant Hollywood and its Bluetooth brigades of executives and agents. But it has managed to do that very thing because mild-mannered Milwaukie has a secret identity. The "Dogwood City of the West," it turns out, is also "Dark Horse, U.S.A."

Dark Horse is a pop-culture content company that has grown so steadily over the last 20 years that it currently occupies six separate storefronts along Main Street, and with 150 employees, it's now one of the top five employers in the town of 21,000. Dark Horse made its mark as an upstart, indie publisher of comic books, but now its ventures go well beyond that, which is why its founder, Mike Richardson, hops a flight to Los Angeles every week to tend to Hollywood pursuits.

"Hellboy 2: The Golden Army," which opened as the No. 1 movie in America last weekend, is the latest Dark Horse property on the screen, joining the florid parade that includes "300," "The Mask," "Sin City," "Time Cop" and "Alien vs. Predator." In May, Universal Pictures and Dark Horse announced a three-year production and distribution deal. That's not especially shocking in this era -- Marvel Studios, born from a comic-book company, delivered its first film that month, the massive hit "Iron Man," followed by "The Incredible Hulk" -- but for Dark Horse, the Universal deal is a validation of its long, quirky odyssey. "This," Richardson said, "is a major moment in our history."

That history reflects the personality of both Richardson and the place where he grew up. Richardson is a big man in this small town (literally: He's 6-foot-9), and the small town is very much in him. In the 1980s, when New York City was still considered the only place to publish big-time comics, Dark Horse shook up its industry by luring star writers and artists with unprecedented deals that gave them ownership of their work and a share of profits. The nimble little company with a fondness for edgy work became the Miramax Films of comics. Eventually, Hollywood types noticed and came dangling option money.

"I told them, 'That's great, but I want to produce it,' " Richardson said. "I got laughed at and I got cussed out and I got called an idiot. They were shocked. One guy told me that if I didn't take his deal I'd never get a chance to work in Hollywood. I said, 'OK, great, I'll stay in Oregon and do comics. That's what I like to do anyway. You go back to your world. I'll stay here in mine.' "

Richardson knows his world and seems to be in tune with his times. Marvel and DC have household-name heroes that yield bigger films, but almost every one of them is based on characters created before 1970. Marvel has long billed itself as the "House of Ideas," but since the Reagan years that title might rightly belong to the Oregon upstarts.

The company is making a big push on MySpace now looking for readers as well as new talent. Dark Horse is "the place I wanted to be and the place where you can find the most sophisticated stuff, but it also has a sense of comics history," says Gerard Way, lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance and writer of "The Umbrella Academy" comics for Dark Horse.