* Here’s a by-definition SPOILERY promo for Battlestar Galactica Season 4.5, as I suppose they’ll be calling the show’s final stretch of weekly episodes. (There’s still the prequel pilot/potential series Caprica and at least one TV movie to account for, of course.) One thing that looks promising is increased screen time for Richard Hatch’s Tom Zarek, one of my favorite characters.

* Tom Spurgeon explains what he doesn’t like about Final Crisis. I agree with his points about how the series is conveying hopelessness, and disagree with but appreciate his observation regarding Morrison’s interpretation of the Anti-Life Equation. (Actually, in the sense that Tom’s interpretation of Kirby’s original idea allows for an even more hopeless universe than Morrison’s, it’s probably something I’ll cotton to myself eventually. You know how much I love hopelessness!) But Tom’s main beef, in a nutshell, is that he doesn’t care about the DC Universe or the vast majority of its characters anymore. As this has long been his position regarding the big corporate superhero farms, it’s not exactly a surprise. It reminds me a little of my friend who today told me she thought Let the Right One In was overlong and overrated and generally terrible, but maybe someone who doesn’t hate vampire movies the way she hates vampire movies would like it. No kidding!

* However, one aspect of Tom’s critique for which my response goes beyond “agree to disagree” is whether bad comics set in a particular character’s or mythos’s continuity hurt comics like this. I’m honestly not a whole lot more invested in the idea of “The DC/Marvel Universe” than Tom is, but I do still hold some affinity for a lot of the ideas contained in both, and I’ve never understood why I have to pay any attention at all to bad comics about them. I haven’t said to myself “But wait, that contradicts Countdown #3!” or “man, this would be good if I hadn’t known what happened in that lousy Countdown #3!” a single time while reading Final Crisis, because long ago I realized that no matter what Dan DiDio or Joe Quesada say, it’s entirely up to me what I choose to treat as canon when reading big superhero books. In that light, some crappy comic that steps on a good comic’s thematic or narrative toes no more ruins my enjoyment of the good comic than the fact that there are stinky comedies set in New York City ruins my enjoyment of Ghostbusters or Annie Hall.

* Speaking of disagreeing, I enjoyed Neil Marshall’s Doomsday a bunch, but the movie just won a reader-participation contest at Topless Robot for Stupidest Fantasy World–not, I have to admit, without reason. The phrase “Sir Knight of Eatingpeopleshire” is deployed.

* Four things Becky Cloonan draws well are hair, tentacles, pretty girls, and skeletal toothy mouths. Put them all together and you’ve got a recipe for delight.

* The Dark Knight is doing the For Your Consideration bit in the trades, and I thought this ad was really lovely because of how normal it looks. This image is like if a friend of yours had snapped a picture some dude on the street, only the dude is the Joker. The Dark Knight is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, and to me the idea that it’s a Godfather-level masterpiece is utterly cockamamie, but there’s not a whole lot involving the Joker it got wrong. In this case, the idea that he’s just some clown off the street (heh, no pun intended) is quite creepy.

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