* I’m going to the San Diego Comic Con this year after all, it turns out, courtesy of Jonah Weiland and the fine folks at Comic Book Resources. If you are a comics-related person whom I previously told I wasn’t going, I take it all back and I hope to see you/interview you there. Here’s the Thursday programming line-up for the show.
* Meanwhile, lots of nerdmedia news seems to have broken, or “broken,” in the past couple days. To wit:
* The Exterminators, Simon Oliver’s late, lamented Vertigo series, is being developed as a TV series by Showtime.
* The remake of Red Dawn will be written by Carl Ellsworth (who wrote Wes Craven’s Red Eye and a screenplay for Y: The Last Man, which I guess isn’t being written by Brian K. Vaughan anymore) and directed by Dan Bradley, a second-unit/stunt guy who’s worked on movies from the Spider-Man, Indiana Jones, Bourne, and Bond franchises.
* Jeepers Creepers III: Cathedral is in the works, with molesty writer/director Victor Salva again at the helm and original JC actress Gina Phillips all growns up and reprising her role. (Via Dread Central.)
* Jon Favreau has been signed for Iron Man 2, according to one-woman Marvel Studios rumor mill Nikki Finke. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* Quentin Tarantino’s script for his World War II flick Inglorious Bastards has leaked, I guess, and people like it. That particular link leads to Harry Knowles, who conveys his enthusiasm for the potential film with his typical degree of understated restraint.
* Speaking of action epics, Johnny Ryan is releasing an ultraviolent action-adventure graphic novel called Prison Pit in 2009.
* Our last bit of fresh news is that Darren Aronofsky is in talks to direct the Robocop remake, maybe, possibly. Like Red Dawn I’m not sure this is a film that needed to be remade–you’re simply going to lose something that made the great ultraviolent Reagan-era action films so great when translating them into this decade, unless your name is Sylvester Stallone–and moreover this is like the twelfth nerd-wet-dream project Aronofsky has been associated with (remember how he was going to make Batman: Year One and/or Ronin with Frank Miller?), but it’s out there as a possibility. (Via Topless Robot.)
* Meanwhile, some folks is talkin bout nerdmovies. For instance:
* The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias tackles the seminal Patrick Swayze vehicle Road House as part of his New Cult Canon series. I want to point out that the film’s love for its leading man’s body simply cannot be overstated. Dude was breathtaking.
* Rich Juzwiak of FourFour praises the hell, and SPOILS the shit, out of Carter Smith’s The Ruins. He even blows the new director’s-cut ending, sigh. But it’s still nice to see someone outside the usual horror circles talk about a very interesting and (as he points out) beautiful-looking, if not entirely effective, horror movie. Elsewhere, Jason Adams responds.
* Kramers Ergot editor Sammy Harkham has posted the entirety of a Fangoria-produced documentary on special effects wiz Tom Savini. Sammy gets a little snotty in describing Savini as “merely” a gore expert, and gets in some digs about his personality that I don’t think are justified by anything I’ve ever seen the guy do, but there you go, it’s a very important figure in alternative comics talking about a very important figure in horror cinema, what am I gonna do, not link to it?
* On the comics front, Big Sunny David Allison discusses the fool’s errand of searching for strict one-to-one allegory in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Saga at the expense of enjoying its weirdness, invention, and emotion as-is.
Enjoy San Diego. The couple of times I went, the sensory overload, lack of sleep, and excessive beverage intake reduced me to a delirious mess. I was like Warren Ellis, but thinner. And likable.
Hey, Sean. Hope to run into you at SDCC. I’d love to tell you to just look for the big banner with the name of my book on it, but I don’t think I’ll have a permanent presence anywhere.
Sensory overload awaits!