* The New York Comic Con panel schedule is up, mostly. (“Most” movie and TV panel information TK, annoyingly.) If you’re interested in seeing Sean T. Collins in his first comic convention panel ever, you’re welcome to come to the Twisted ToyFare Theatre panel on Saturday 2/7 at 5:30pm in room 1A17.
* U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess will decide whether WB can release Watchmen on Inauguration Day, January 20th. Yes we can.
* Missed it: Quentin Tarantino’s World War II action flick Inglorious Basterds comes out on August 21st of this very year.
* Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell are going to be bad guys in Iron Man 2. Sounds good. Still no Mandarin, I guess.
* I get a kick out of how into year-end best-of list-making Dick Hyacinth gets. I’d guess I’ll have my own list ready in a couple weeks.
* Graeme McMillan on Dark Reign:
In a weird way, I can’t help but feel as if Dark Reign is really, really shittily timed. Dark Avengers, the core book for the branding, gets released the day after Obama gets sworn in as President of the United States, and it’s that cognitive dissonance that sticks in my mind. Marvel, for all their faults, are normally more in tune with the cultural zeitgeist than Dark Reign; it feels oddly… wrong, and somewhat DC-ish, to see them plunge into a depressing world of misuse of power at a time when we’re about to bring in a President who made the country believe in Hope and Change again. Maybe they know something we don’t… or maybe this is a sign that they’ve lost their touch.
This really is a problem. It’s not even a political issue, really–it’s that the guy has like an 80% approval rating, meaning that people in this country would have a hard time swallowing the idea that he’d put a mass murderer in charge of the American security apparatus. Seriously, Marvel Barack Obama just named the Green Goblin head of the equivalent of the CIA; Real World Barack Obama just named Leon Panetta. It’s really rather tone-deaf. This kind of thing doesn’t cut it, either.
* Kyle Baker makes the point I’ve tried to make, which is that there’s plenty of the stuff you’ll find in Frank Miller’s Spirit in Will Eisner’s Spirit, along with a lot of other things. Still haven’t seen the damn movie, though. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)
* Battle-damaged He-Man T-shirts? That’s pretty rad.
* Finally, who doesn’t?
