Me and the Missus, taken tonight on the log flume during Astroland’s likely final Labor Day weekend ever. The Wu-Tang Clan shirt was purchased at the local Hot Topic. Some kid at Coney Island came up to me and said “sick shirt!” I agree. Greatest Of All Time.

It’s probably too late, but Save Coney Island.

This week’s interview subject in my I Can Has Comix? column is one of my favorite cartoonists and the guy who really got me started on alternative comics in general, Jordan Crane. And just so you horror fans don’t say I never did anything for you in this column, he talks about why he doesn’t like The Walking Dead and how he keeps writing and drawing ghost stories because he has yet to read a good one.

Paging Bill Shatner and/or Frodo Baggins: A 200-yard spiderweb is attracting entomological attention in Texas’ Lake Tawakoni State Park. Theories differ as to whether this is an effort for multiple spiders to work together or get the hell away from each other. I know which one I’d do if I were there.

The trailer for The Mist, in glorious Firefox-busting streaming Quicktime. Via AICN.

Dig this, post-apocalyptic fiction fans: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a collection of eschatological short stories by everyone from Stephen King to Jonathan Lethem to Cory Doctorow to George R.R. Martin. (Via GalleyCat, via Justin Aclin.)

Jason Adams didn’t like Monster Squad all that much, at least in part because kids called each other “faggot” in it. I’ll admit that my main reaction is “that’s how kids talk, so maybe lighten up a bit.” This despite being absolutely ruthless in weeding out uses of the word “gay” as an epithet on the Wizard message boards where I am a moderator, for example. IIRC it was mainly the asshole bullies in the movie who used the word, if that matters.

We all have sort of real-world hot-button issues we’re more sensitive about when they come up in a horror context. Frex, Jason couldn’t bring himself to cheekily salute the curb-stomping from American History X, but was okay with tipping the proverbial bowler hat to Alex crushing a woman’s face with a ceramic penis in A Clockwork Orange. In my case I’m really not crazy about killing animals, with children in second place, and if I get the sense that the filmmaker is getting off on violence against women, I tune out.

Anyway, what do we think of this?

The film student in me still can’t quite get over this, but Kristin Thompson has started a blog spin-off of her new Lord of the Rings book The Frodo Franchise. I’d image the blog will mostly chronicle the continuing saga of the attempts to make a film or films out of The Hobbit.

Mike Mignola on Hellboy 2 and his new prose novel Baltimore.

My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way on his new comic The Umbrella Academy.

Director Tim Sullivan on the comic version of his Southern horror film 2,001 Maniacs.

Voice actor Phil LaMarr on Samurai Jack, Futurama, and the new Transformers cartoon.

A sneak peak at Robert Kirkman, Sean Phillips, and Arthur Suydam’s Marvel Zombies 2.

Hayden Panettiere on Heroes Seasons One and Two.

Pretty much the entire Heroes cast and writing staff on Heroes Season One, episode by episode.

Can YOU spot the error in this horror-themed LOLcat?

Via where else?

Jeff Lester saw Cemetery Man (aka Della’morte Dell’amore) and didn’t like it! (You know you’re in trouble when he says “It’s designed to be a horror film for the Smiths set”; simply put, no.) Here’s a bunch of reasons why he’s wrong.

In other news, I didn’t tell you that I saw Wolf Creek a few weeks back. It was good. Intense, at least in part because of all the baggage I took into it. The “torture porn” label is honestly the best thing to happen to a lot of these movies, because the dread you feel when you start to watching them is 50% due to that label alone. I forget who it was who pointed out that that’s the genius of the title The Texas Chain Saw Massacre–it does half the work for the filmmakers right there. But that of course is also a brilliant movie. This isn’t on that level I don’t think, but it’s rough. Parts of this reminded me of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, though the setting, protagonists, and antagonists are all very different. Haneke, I’ve learned through Jason Adams, is remaking that movie in English. I think he’s a little too late to catch the torture porn wave, which crested and crashed, but oh well.

Curt Purcell, whose Groovy Age of Horror blog has been bringing us the heavy heavy monster sound for quite some time now, has announced his attention to expand past his “60s/70s sleazesploitation horror” niche to include whatever genre of fiction is tickling his fancy at the moment. Good for Curt, I say! Though he’s certainly correct that his laser-like focus on horror’s groovy age put him on the map, my guess is he’ll find the freedom to follow his bloggy bliss on the newly rechristened Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror blog rewarding as all get-out (he already has, by the sound of it). Anyway, Curt and I have discussed this in the past; click here and here to see.

Jog on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey’s Soldier X, the Cable-starring “existentialist/absurdist superhero” series that’s the hidden gem of the late Bill Jemas era at Marvel. Cancelled just before the “we’ll collect any goddamn thing” era at Marvel began, its individual issues are among the few floppy-format comics I continue to treasure.

“Lovingkindness,” from the series And Jeopardize the Integrity of the Hull, Charlie White

I urge you to look at more of White’s deeply horror-inflected work, which I believe has made the blog rounds at some point in the past, at his website.

(Via Strange Ink)

My thoughts on the latest issues of The Immortal Iron Fist, Batman, Green Lantern Corps, Amazing Spider-Man, Green Arrow: Year One, Thunderbolts, and World War Hulk: Gamma Corps may be found at this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard.

Turns out that cool 31 Days of Spielberg blogathon is plagued with plagiarism (click here for examples). The author’s kind-of sort-of not-really mea culpa is here; Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door comments here.

Look, any time one of these cases pops up people talk about how it’s a thin line. It’s not. It’s a giant mile-wide crystal-clear line. It’s really, really easy to not plagiarize, and it’s really, really hard to do it, especially in the fashion illustrated by those examples, without knowing that you’re doing it.

The Missus and I watched House Party the other day. We felt inspired. This is the result.

Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition, featuring both seasons and the pilot, is now available for pre-order. It goes on sale October 30th.

(Via Whitney Matheson.)

Wizard’s got an interesting interview up with Zack Snyder, director of Dawn of the Dead, 300, and the upcoming Watchmen, a line-up of films that were he to die after completing movie #3 would make him the nerd-director equivalent of John Cazale (whose C.V. consisted solely of The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter). It focuses primarily on his relationship with Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, with whom he’s collaborating on promotional, conceptual, and storyboard art. Snyder reveals that he himself is actually drawing many of the film’s storyboards (the ones that aren’t straight lifts from the comic).

I think it was only this past week that I realized how cool it would be if they make a good movie out of this book.

This is what happens when comic book nerds go to Jamaica.

Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets digests make unbelievable beach reads, by the way. You may recall me panning Locas in The Comics Journal a while back; I was really proud of that review because it actually caused at least one drunk guy to grab me at dinner and yell at me, which to me is the hallmark of a good Journal review. But I’ve since come around on the “Locas” stories, thanks in large part to these wonderful digests Maggie the Mechanic and The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.. They’re much more complete, much more readable…just the way the stories were meant to be presented. It’s like a soap opera shot by Fellini.