* I’m pretty proud of the latest What The–?! video I co-wrote for Marvel. It’s a Twilight parody. I can’t speak for the rest of the gang, but as for me, I kid because I love.

Also, just to anticipate what I imagine will be a common complaint: Yes, we’ve seen the photoshop of Blade lurking behind the Twilight kids, but it’s not like the idea of Blade killing the annoying vampire character wouldn’t have occurred to us regardless. I mean, we write for Marvel. At any rate, the presence of Morbius, Man-Wolf, Dracula, Werewolf By Night, and Kitty Pryde is all us, baby. (PS: The Blade figure with his awesome Captain Britain & MI-13 haircut is a custom by our animator extraordinaire, Alex Kropinak–yet another Wizard alum, along with me and my co-writer Ben Morse.)

* It’s no Cage Match, but in this case that’s a good thing: Comics Comics’ Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, and Frank Santoro conduct a Round Table review of Al Columbia’s masterful Pim & Francie. I was particularly struck by Dan’s observation that the way the individual characters and scenes disappear into artifacts of the drawing process–erasures, tears, ink spills, burns, wrinkles, water damage–in effect “animates the page,” creating an illusion of motion and the passage of time that traditional drawing couldn’t match. Great stuff; read the whole thing and keep checking back for more.

* Speaking of Santoro, Chris Mautner found Cold Heat #7/8’s deviation from the series standard more satisfying than I did.

* I’ve seen this YouTube montage of The Wire‘s 100 Greatest Quotes here, there and everywhere, but I didn’t watch it until it showed up at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog. I’m really glad I did, because my whole “Deadwood > The Wire” thing has clearly led me to forget just how strong the writing on The Wire could be. That frequently used “If [metaphor], then [some subordinate action related to that metaphor]” structure is really elegant.

Meanwhile, in the comment thread at TNC’s post, I once again go through my arguments in favor of The Sopranos and Deadwood over The Wire, if you haven’t seen them already. Coates attracts a high class of commenters, so there are probably some other worthwhile things to read in there if you’re interested in those shows. Just watch out for True Blood spoilers!

* Curt Purcell is unimpressed with the latest round of Blackest Night tie-ins, the first ones created with the more or less openly stated goal of goosing sales for their respective series.

* There’s pretty much nothing I don’t love about this discussion of how to get the people of the far future to take radioactive waste site warnings more seriously than we take the curses of the pyramids.

* And there’s absolutely nothing I don’t love about CRwM’s test of whether splitting up when pursued by a slasher is a good idea or not. To paraphrase President Clinton, it depends on what the definition of “splitting up” is.

* Matthew Perpetua has re-uploaded his Best of The Best Show on WFMU mix. Matthew also effectively gave me the hard sell on pledging to WFMU last night, so I have him to thank for the Michael Kupperman t-shirt on its way to me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.