* Really can’t say enough about Blaise Larmee’s new webcomic 2001. Beautiful.
* Well this is outstanding: Max Brooks has posted a vampire story set in the World War Z universe for free on the Daily Beast. Nerdout commencing! Can’t wait to read this thing; World War Z holds up miraculously well. (Via CRwM.)
* Stephen King apparently heard about the new adaptation of The Stand at the same time the rest of us did. In this day and age that seems like a failure of due diligence on the producers’ part, doesn’t it? So much nerd media rises and falls on its makers’ ability to convince the nerd audience that the property’s original creators (or current caretakers, on the part of superhero movies) are involved every step of the way. You’d think they could have given Uncle Steve a phonecall.
* Beavis and Butt-head are coming back. “Dammit, Pantera! Get your ass into the kitchen and grab me a beer.”
* Congratulations to pood‘s Kevin Mutch for his Xeric win.
* Fantagraphics hires Janice Headley for its already formidable marketing department.
* I sure like listening to Tom Brevoort talk about comics.
* Yep, that’s Adrian Tomine’s workspace, alright.
* It’s Brian Chippendale’s world; Dan Nadel just visited there.
* Very, very close, I daresay!
* A couple of Real Life Horror links via Matthew Yglesias: Timothy Snyder tackles the world-historical horrorshow of life in the lands contested between Hitler and Stalin, while Daniel Davies springboards off the Egyptian revolution to muse on the strategic value of arseholes:
And so that brings me to a useful piece of advice for any readers who are aspiring dictators, one that the Communists knew, Suharto knew, but that some modern day tyrants seem to have forgotten. There is always a level of civil unrest that outstrips the capability of even the most loyal and largest regular armed forces to deal with. In all likelihood, as a medium sized emerging market, you will have a capital city with a population of about five or six million, meaing potentially as many as three million adults on the streets in the worst case. Your total active-duty armed forces are unlikely to be a tenth of that. When it becomes a numbers game, there is only one thing that can save you.
And that is, a reactionary citizens’ militia, to combat the revolutionary citizens’ militia. Former socialist republics always used to be fond of buses full of coal miners from way out the back of beyond, but the Iranian basijs are the same sort of thing. Basically, what you need is a large population who are a few rungs up from the bottom of society, who aren’t interested in freedom and who hate young people. In other words, arseholes. Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity, have the one useful characteristic that is the only useful characteristic in the context of an Egyptian-style popular uprising – there are fucking millions of them.
(Sidenote: Matthew Yglesias has the worst comment section on the Internet, and I say that as someone who reads comic book websites.)
* I co-wrote the latest, Super Bowl ahem BIG GAME-themed episode of Marvel Super Heroes: What The — ?! I had nothing to do with the funniest bits, though. Fun fact: Alex Kropinak animates these things all by himself.
Tags: books, Carnival of souls, comics, horror, links, movies, real life, TV
Every time you say “Super Bowl,” A Marvel lawyer loses his wings.
Vampires? In the WWZ “universe” ?
I’m confused. And not necessarily in a good way.
Afraid vampires will ruin the verisimilitude of the zombie apocalypse?
Not entirely sure that that’s it. Maybe it’s because I’m not entirely enthralled with Mr. Brooks as a writer. And maybe because it violates the “one suspension of disbelief” that I give to “realistic” fiction, which WWZ certainly wanted to be.
It’s just for funsies, man. As you can see if you read it, it’s not written in that oral-history format…
I meant to click the adrian tomine link, and without realizing clicked the tom brevoort one, which resulted in a very breif “OMG TOMINE IS DOING MARVEL COMICS!!!!” Sigh.