* First up, some Sean T. Collins In The News updates. I have a piece on Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Mike Perkins’s Marvel Comics adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand in the new issue of Maxim, the one with Anna Kournikova on the cover. The stuff I’ve done for this magazine is by far the stuff that my family members and the friends and co-workers thereof are most likely to notice.
* Over at Marvel.com, for whom I’m the official Stand correspondent, I have a short piece on the character of Randall Flagg and his appearances throughout the King-verse.
* Meanwhile, there’s a shout-out for my comics anthology Murder in the latest issue of ToyFare, to which I remain a regular contributor. They liked it, and before you say “well, that’s because you work for them,” remember they could just as easily reacted with complete disgust and slowly phased me out of my freelance work over there. Why not follow their suggestion, then, and buy a copy for yourself?
* I’m told a couple more of my one-liners showed up in the crawl at the bottom of the video pieces over at the Onion News Network. So if you enjoyed gags about the military deploying killer robots in “Operation What Could Possibly Go Wrong” or the discovery that Taco Bell Express is just a regular-speed Taco Bell with fewer seats and menu items, you know who to thank.
* Feast your eyes on this awe-inspiring gallery of Charles Burns art, from a show at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in NYC that will run from September 5th to October 12th. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)
* Frank Santoro reviews Joan Reidy and Ron Rege Jr.’s classic teen-sex comic Boys. That the new Rege odds’n’sodds collection from Drawn & Quarterly, Against Pain, may give these strips the audience they deserve is really a joy to me.
* Chris Pitzer, founder of the high-quality comics and art-book publisher AdHouse, recalls his life in comics, one store at a time. It’s a unique and revealing rubric for this kind of trip down memory lane.
* Like Matthias Wievel, I too have found it strange that the superheroes in Secret Invasion all seem pretty okay with killing every Skrull they can get their hands on. I know the idea is that it’s a war, and that’s fine, it actually makes more sense that they’d act this way than how these things are normally depicted, but you’d think that maybe they’d have taken some casualties on their own side before launching straight for the jugular simply given the traditional superhero discomfort with lethal sanction. What’s weird is that I don’t guess that this was ever even a point of discussion among the creative team. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* Courtesy of Rob Bricken at Topless Robot comes one of the strangest, most delightful things I’ve come across in quite a while: ELA. A wondrous mix of live action and crude digital animation, it seems to be an all-in-one homage to She-Ra, He-Man, Heavy Metal, Space Invaders, Tron, The Neverending Story, Monty Python, classic arcade games, the Italian and American B-movie fantasies of the ’70s and ’80s…but not in the same way that Doomsday riffs on that era’s action, horror, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi films. There’s something more, I don’t know, poetic in nature about what this little film does with its constituent parts, where the emphasis isn’t on eliciting “hey, that was awesome!” recognition with various bits of action but on conjuring a similar sense of wonder, glamour, spectacle, danger, excitement, occasionally eroticism, and all-pervasive weirdness to that which these rough-around-the-edges entertainments provided due to their own magpie nature and make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to genre. It’s undeniably trippy and “arty,” but it doesn’t deny the simple pleasure of imaginary landscapes or epic sountrack-synth-rock or a woman with a lovely tush. And the ending is bracingly unpleasant. In comics terms it’d be part Powr Mastrs, part Scott Pilgrim, part Goddess of War. Take a look: