* Carla Speed McNeil and Grant Morrison agree: Let fiction be fictional. These are stories, not rulebooks. (Evan Dorkin apparently agrees too.)

* Ron Rege Jr’s “Math Comics” are now up on What Things Do. The more Rege comics made accessible to as many people as possible, the better.

* Jesus, is this what Paul Pope’s Battling Boy is gonna look like?

* Comics Comics’ Nicole Rudick takes a look at Russian comics.

* Douglas Wolk interviews Paul Cornell about Knight and Squire and Action Comics. Here are two back-to-back sentences from the piece: “We love Robo-Lois. Death appears at the end of the Gorilla Grodd issue.” SOLD

* Darren Aronofsky’s RoboCop remake is dunzo, sunk by the same MGM financial woes that have scuppered the Daniel Craig-model James Bond franchise and delayed box-office sure-thing The Hobbit to the point where directors are leaving and stars are publicly tweeting their doubts that it’ll get made.

* The trailer for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch had me at using “The Crablouse” by Lords of Acid for background music. “The Crablouse,” for crying out loud! Pure ’90s trailer music, and my favorite Lords song to boot. Wait, what’s that? Oh, right, the movie! Well, it looks like fun, like an amalgam of all the other moderately boundary-pushing nerd-friendly action movies of the past several years, and it’s also a Zack Snyder movie, and I’ve enjoyed many of the former and all of the latter. I also think this trailer helps better contextualize what Watchmen ended up being. Like, if the line-up is A) Dawn of the Dead, B) 300, and D) this trailer, and Watchmen is C), then you probably have a solid idea of what Watchmen is. (Via Sean Belcher.)

* I dream of a world in which TCJ.com can do something, anything without taking pot/kettle shots at the rest of the comics blogosphere in such a way as to call further attention to its own lameness. Still, an international comics blog aggregator is an interesting enough idea…but again, given the site’s track record for its domestic coverage, I’m skeptical. (Via Flog.)

* Here’s a pretty solid piece by Adam Sternbergh on the rise of nerd culture, or more specifically fanboy culture. It has a lot of the stuff that sprang to my mind in the time between reading the headline and clicking the link–the internet facilitating the rise of a mass geek culture from previously isolated pockets, the rage with which dissent from the nerd consensus is greeted, and so on. To that I’d add Matthew Perpetua’s critique, which is that contemporary nerd culture crudely seeks to establish its masculine bonafides at every possible occasion–the emphasis on the supposed rules of pseudoscience rather than the more fluid and feminine magical approach I talk about in that McNeil/Morrison link is a big part of that–and reacts to flattery of even the most empty and mercenary sort by preexisting cultural gatekeepers (in the immortal words of W.P. Mayhew) like an old bitch dog gettin’ its belly scratched. That said, I think Matthew exaggerates the extent to which “fanboys are the new bullies.” I’d be really surprised if the ratio of kids singled out for months-long campaigns of cruelty by their peers for being too smart and too attached to fantastic fiction vs. those thus singled out for not being nerdy enough were anything but absurdly lopsided. And stuff like G4 can suck as hard as the day is long, but it’ll never touch the insane cultural hegemony of the National Football League.

* “Sun” by Caribou is one of my favorite songs of the year so far, and now its video is one of my favorite videos of the year. (Via Ryan Catbird.)

CARIBOU – Sun from Caribou on Vimeo.

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