* Wolf Man and Rocketeer director Joe Johnston will apparently be handling the obnoxiously titled First Avenger: Captain America for Marvel Studios. I am filled with lack of feelings about this, although I will say that I remember his Jumanji being pretty effective in a “My First Movie About Uncontrollable Hordes of Hungry Things Trying to Eat People” sort of way.

* This strikes me as being pretty weak tea to actually be worth reporting, but for now at least, Danny Boyle himself may direct the sequel to 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. I have a bad feeling that this will set up a reductive and unhelpful “skip the second movie” sentiment somewhere down the line, but still, it’d be neat.

* I’m not going to read Jog’s review of The ACME Novelty Library #19 until I read the book itself, but for now I want to note that I like the Jog-suggested idea of being “that guy in the comics blogosphere who really loves animals.”

* Tim O’Shea interviews Frank Santoro of the mighty mighty Comics Comics and the anxiously awaited completion of Cold Heat. Tim also reveals that there’s a Cold Heat blog/webcomic on the horizon. Memo to my friend Josiah: help me out with this bit?

Comics, how they are composed, is like an architecture, right? Well, I’ve become obsessed with the structure of comics of how one reads comics and how comics spreads are composed. I’ve also come under the spell of Pythagorean Theory and how it applies to image making and Architecture. That all might sound really pretentious but it’s really the most un-pretentious approach to creating images ever. Basically, it’s all the perspective tricks that we all learned in 6th grade art class but way more complex than three point perspective. Pythagorean Theory and The Golden Section are the building blocks of Renaissance perspective. In oil painting all of these compositional techniques have been used for centuries. There are “harmonic points” on a canvas that can be used like one would use harmony in music. These points can be measured. In comics, these ideas are often used WITHIN the borders of each panel but the overall design of the page is often muddy and bottlenecked and this undercuts the power of the image inside the panel borders. The whole structure of the spread should be “in key” with the images. And, for the page or the whole two page spread (all comics are read as two page spreads when they are in a book) to “sing”, to really be clear, the structure has to be “open”, and have a symmetry that is dynamic as opposed to static. Again, it’s like Fractals. I’m writing a book on it for Picturebox. People go nuts, in a good way, when I show them how simple it is to do. It’s like comics are just figuring out certain approaches that Painting and Architecture have understood for centuries. It’s fun stuff, and I wished someone would have hepped me to it years ago. But, honestly, people just look right past it. Who needs to learn perspective when a digital camera and a illustrator program will do it all for you?

HALP!

* Monster mash: Stacie Ponder reviews The Mist and CRwM reviews The Cave.

* Why does Zack Snyder hate gigantic telepathic exploding squids?

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