* Altcomix con conga! MoCCA is moving to April while Desert Island and PictureBox are launching the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest this December. I’m looking forward to both. For what it’s worth, I remain pretty stunned by the subcurrent of resentment toward MoCCA following this past summer’s sweat-soaked show. It seems like that peeled the lid off a lot of preexisting displeasure with the con and the umbrella organization.
* My other Robot 6 post today gave thumbs up to Monster Brains’ awesome video game and pinball art galleries.
* Good news: Jack Staff is being relaunched and rebranded as The Weird World of Jack Staff, an even more explicitly anthology-style series featuring Paul Grist’s veddy British superhero universe. Grist promises to get things under control schedule-wise, but I’ll see it when I believe it, if you will.
* Bad news: AdHouse has cancelled the publication of Vito Delsante and Rachel Friere’s FCHS due to low preorders. I like Vito and AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer both a lot personally and thing Friere’s art is gawjuss, and I hope this works out to everyone’s relative satisfaction.
* My pal Jason Adams caught a lot of interesting stuff in his daily linkblogging post today. To wit:
* This is apparently old, but it’s new to me: 13 writing tips from Chuck Palahniuk.
* The Let the Right One In remake Let Me In is being produced by the revivified Hammer Studios. Jason noted this because this PR seems to indicate the movie’s being filmed on a soundstage, but I just assume it means parts of the movie are being filmed there, not all of it.
* Finally, I’m bookmarking this piece on the difference between the original and theatrical cuts of Paranormal Activity for when I finally see the goddamn movie. (Which joins a list of as-yet-unseen-by-me films that includes The Hurt Locker, Gamer, A Serious Man, Zombieland…dammit, I’m seeing New Moon before I see any of those, aren’t I?)
* Speaking of Zombieland, this pretty awesome post by CRwM at And Now the Screaming Starts calls the movie a feature-length version of the “Merry Looter” scenes from flicks like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, which is a wonderful term to add to the lexicon; it then goes on to compare Zombieland‘s eschatology with Thundarr the Barbarian and Adam Rapp & George O’Connor’s First Second graphic novel Ball Peen Hammer. Lateral thinking at its finest!
* And speaking of Paranormal Activity, the triumphalist tone of this Bloody Disgusting article on the flick’s $7 million limited-release haul this past weekend really has me scratching my head. Mr. Disgusting’s argument is that We the Horror Hardcore are the people who made this possible. But isn’t it abundantly clear at this point that the film’s ever-widening release and ever-mounting receipts have nothing to do with the horror grassroots (beyond, of course, the benefit any movie can derive from rave reviews online) and everything to do with an extremely well-planned and well-executed release plan by the studio? If you honestly think that Paramount fully intended to bury this movie until the demands of rabid Bloody Disgusting readers “forced” them to make it their big Halloween horror movie of the year, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
* The Secret Origin of Gary Groth. Jesus, can you imagine being Gary Groth and going to “Robert E. Lee High”?
* Tom Spurgeon lists five truths about comics he holds to be self-evident, possibly in error. His points about loving serialized comics and disliking comics as a social scene definitely both inform his analysis of comics overall, in my experience, so it’s definitely worth reading his reasons why he finds this to be so.
* Rickey Purdin shows off the latest additions to his Watchmen and ninja sketchbooks. Not simultaneously, alas.
