* Today I used my newfound Robot powers thusly:

* In this Robot 6 post I pointed to some recent statements by Marvel’s Joe Quesada and Tom Brevoort on how they determine what can and cannot be done with characters by writers and editors outside their core series.

* in this post I directed everyone to Curt Purcell’s astonishingly sleazy Flickr gallery of paperback and fumetti covers. This thing’s a marvel.

* And in this post I linked to Joe the Barbarian artist Sean Murphy’s bitchin’ deviantart gallery.

* Meanwhile, over at Marvel.com, I’ve got Strange Tales Spotlight interviews up with Tony Millionaire and Max Cannon. Catch me after hours at a con someday and I’ll tell you about the parts of Tony M.’s interview that ended up on the cutting room floor.

* In the course of reviewing the book and the movie of The Surrogates, Joe McCulloch ponders “The New Action” vs. “The New Mainstream.” I think there are many clear points of distinction, but the largest is that “New Mainstream” books seem to me to have been created with the express goal of reaching a particular, and theoretically large, audience. The “new action” comics? I doubt it.

* Ceri B. flags some freaky shit from World of Warcraft. Faceless Old Ones and the extradimensional insects that worship them–all this week on Town Talk!

* Real-World Horror #1: Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Rumsey Taylor reviews Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple. If you’ve ever seen video or heard audio from Jonestown’s final 24 hours, I’m guessing you yet to shake off the almost magisterial horror of what happened.

* Real-World Horror #2: This New York Post story on Wallace Souza, the Brazilian true-crime TV host who hired hitmen to commit murders he would then cover on his show and is now on the run, contains so much cinematic bizarrity in its five short sentences I hardly know where to begin. It ends with the phrase “if he has fled into the rain forest, he may never be found.” Good Lord.

* Real-World Horror #3: How do I know that the Zazi terror plot has authorities in New York genuinely frightened? The security level in Penn Station is as high as I’ve seen it since 2003. Packs of police in full armor stand around holding machine guns, armed NYPD officers patrol Long Island Rail Road trains all the way out into Suffolk County, and military K-9 units sweep through the lobby of my office building on top of the station. Well, at least I get to see some cute doggies.

* God bless my friend Jesse Thompson for helping to put together this montage of great movie laughing scenes. That bit from The Money Pit where Tom Hanks reacts to the bathtub falling through the floor is my single favorite scene in any comedy ever.

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