* Rob Bricken, the Topless Robot, draws our attention to District 9, an upcoming science fiction film about an alien refugee/internment camp here on Earth, directed by Peter Jackson cohort Neil Blomkamp. This sucker is hanging right over the plate for any lazy film critic to knock their “I only pay attention to genre films insofar as I can read them as political allegories” grand salami right out of the park, but you know what? I’ll eat it.
* Heidi MacDonald draws our attention to three comics projects of note. First is The Iraq War Stories Anthology, an Act-i-vate-hosted collection of, well, Iraq War stories by the students in Nick Bertozzi’s Comic Book Storytelling Workshop at SVA. Nick is a blazing talent, he was my very first friend in comics, and this is an idea that seems almost necessary, so count me in. It launches on May 10th.
* Next is The Big Feminist But, an anthology of comics about contemporary feminism by the likes of Jeffrey Brown and Julia Wertz. I think feminism is in a weird place right now, where it’s almost always treated as something relatively lighthearted. Granted, my main exposure to movement feminism during my adult life has been through hipstery mags like Bust and Bitch, but that really does seem the dominant approach among my age group, and it’s weird to imagine, say, black civil-rights activism working primarily in that vein, isn’t it? So I’m a little skeptical, but also quite curious.
* Finally there’s The New Yorker‘s preview of Daniel Clowes’s upcoming graphic novel. It’s going to be told in the strip style of Ice Haven and The Death Ray. And holy crap is this panel hilarious if you’ve ever had any exposure to the work of Daniel Clowes:
* I really enjoy reading my friend and Marvel.com editor Ben Morse writing about superhero comics, and he’s done so at length recently, with a tribute to Brian K. Vaughan’s forgotten Cyclops miniseries and a two-part list of his favorite ’90s heroes.
* Meanwhile, my buddy and ToyFare editor TJ Dietsch serves up a seemingly sound theory about Geoff Johns’s upcoming Green Lantern-based event comic Blackest Night, using Johns’s affinity for old continuity minutiae and the DC collected editions department’s propensity for republishing newly relevant stories as a springboard.
* Pavlovian conditioning is starting to kick in with me every time I see a Flog! post that starts with the words “Now in stock.” This time around, I’m salivating over Anders Nilsen’s Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes.
* Jog reviews X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the live-action Death Note spinoff L: Change the WorLd (twice!). I really liked this bit about how oddly soulless big-time superhero movies can be despite cramming in so much of the comics’ refreshingly bizarre ephemera:
Granted, I can’t say Ryan Reynolds is terrible so much as he’s stuck in the hopeless position of playing a fan-favorite character that became a fan-favorite due to his handling by specific writers, yet shows up solely for the purposes of having another fan-favorite character in the movie regardless of how he’s actually presented, since hey – he’s a fan-favorite, right? So, here we’ve got a Wade Wilson that cracks jokes for ten or so minutes, and thereafter turns into the Super Skrull by way of Baraka from Mortal Kombat, complete with a showdown on a thin, high ledge, and you sort of wonder how the writers couldn’t quite manage the psychological muscle of Rob Liefeld-era New Mutants.
* More nostalgia porn for at least a few of my readers: Todd Klein serves up two more posts on the logos he designed for Amalgam.
* Lost fandom can be really slow (see item #3) and really self-parodic (see item #10b). I kinda like the theory in item #2, though. (UPDATE: Link fixed!)
* This story about Mahdi Army death squads killing gay Iraqis by sealing their anuses shut with glue and inducing diarrhea is so bizarre and gruesome that I have a hard time believing it regardless of the assurances it offers. But if it turns out to be true I wouldn’t be that surprised, since I think it’s pretty well established that the perversions of most crusaders for morality dwarf the alleged depravities of their targets. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
I don’t think your Lost link is working.