* Eve Tushnet reviews the bloody blue bejesus out of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen here and here. (That second link is weird, but it should show you four separate posts on the movie.)

* Speaking of Watchmen, Curt Purcell continues to insist, Linda Richmon-like, that the “logical conclusions” of the superhero genre are neither logical nor conclusions. Discuss. Actually, I agree with Curt that “logical conclusion” is overstating the case a bit, since as he points out with a clever comparison of Dr. Manhattan to the Squadron Supreme’s Hyperion, there are any number of ways “what would superheroes really do?” can be taken. But I think he brushes it all off a bit too completely. Most the the superhero stories we’re discussing are self-contained; they can’t take place in the corporate shared universes that exist, like DC or Marvel’s, because they upset the delicate balancing act required by those universes. For example, Marvel prides itself on being a more “realistic” universe than DC’s, so you can’t have a President Nighthawk and you can’t have Reed Richards phase out fossil fuels by having us fill our tanks with Kirby Krackle instead. DC has a set hierarchy in terms of which superheroes are the biggest deals, so you can’t have a godlike supervillain like Black Adam just walk up to Batman and pull his head off, nor can you have Golden Age Flash be more popular than Wally West even though, as Tom Spurgeon once put it, that would sort of be like Babe Ruth coming out of retirement but people are still more interested in Derek Jeter. What the superhero stories that purport to take the genre to their “logical conclusions” do is take certain ideas inherent to the genre much, much further than the shared-universe structure could ever allow them to do without falling apart at the seams. In that sense they really would be “concluding” stories for those universes as we know them–which is why many of them are literally apocalyptic or Ragnarokian in nature even when removed from those universes. So there’s definitely something more to such stories than simply being “a tour-de-force that takes superheroes remarkably far in a relatively unusual direction”–in many cases, certainly in the better cases, they really would break the average superhero comic if they were attempted in that context. But of course that’s because of the various business considerations and weird historical quirks that led to the creation of the Marvel Universe and the ad hoc assembly of the DC Universe, and thence what was considered by superhero creators and fans to be “normal,” not anything inherent to the genre per se.

* Here are seven clips from Caprica, the upcoming Battlestar Galacitca prequel-pilot-movie. I’m not watchin’ ’em but I hope they’re good.

* Wow, terrible news about shoddy subtitle translations on the DVD version of Let the Right One In. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Finally, here are some pictures of Patti Smith, who is attractive in them.

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