Besides the haunting off-center framing, the thing that struck me about photographer Cedric Delsaux’s series of real-world Star Wars photographs (enter here and click “series”) is how sinister and ominous all the villainous characters look when placed in everyday surroundings. Seeing them in the context of an environment that feels familiar and down-to-earth really makes them seem like a genuine threat, an occupying army ready to kill…

(Via Paul Pope.)

I’d buy D-War for a dollar…

Not to put too fine a point on it, but holy fucking shit.

Via Cinematical.

Going on record:

Monster movies will be the new torture porn.

Okay. On the one hand, I love giant-monster horror and mockumentary horror, so this is right down my alley. And the trailer does look good if you can get to it before Paramount (stupidly, shortsightedly, audience-alienatingly) yanks it from wherever it’s cropped up. On the other hand, I’m already irritated by the hype. The obvious comparison in terms of both the format of the film and the viral nature of its promotion is The Blair Witch Project, but in the case of that film, many if not most of the people hyping it had seen the film already. There’s something offputting about a gigantic corporation astroturfing a grassroots buzz campaign for a movie that doesn’t exist yet (while simultaneously shutting down individuals’ attempts to help them do so, by the way).

My biweekly interview column on the Wizard site returns, with The Salon‘s Nick Bertozzi. This is one of my favorite conversations about comics I’ve ever had (and as near as I can tell, beyond the fact that they’re both listed on the First Second webpage, it’s the first public confirmation that Nick and The Colbert Report writer Glenn Eichler are collaborating on a graphic novel). Hope you like it!

The sweetest-looking decrepit zombie I ever did see. That’s not me in this picture, by the way–I lifted this from the designers’ website so you could get a clear view–but I am wearing the T-shirt as we speak. Observe:

I bought this badboy at the MoCCA art festival two or three years ago from Squidfire. It was part of a series of horror-themed shirts they designed for a horror con. Supposedly they bombed at that con but cleaned up at MoCCA, where I snagged two other shirts featuring a nice bloody meat cleaver and a subtle chainsaw (seriously!). They’re there every year, and while their horror stuff is definitely most to my taste of their work, cutie-pie T-shirt fans will find much to enjoy at their site.

Bryan Lee O’Malley, writer-artist between the eminently enjoyable action-romance graphic-novel series Scott Pilgrim, covering Underworld’s “Born Slippy.NUXX,” the highlight of the Trainspotting soundtrack and one of my all time favorite songs by anyone ever. (It even incorporates a few snippets of “Jumbo,” another Underworld song that is another one of my all time favorite songs by anyone ever.)

For explanation and a link to more songs by O’Malley’s musical alter ego Kupek, go to RadioMaru.com, O’Malley’s website; it’s currently the top entry.

Land that I love.

If you’re into it, take note that Wizard’s going wall-to-wall with Transformers coverage. Interviews with Shia LaBoeuf, Megan Fox, John Tuturro, Jon Voight, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, and Michael Bay, toy image galleries, video game and comic previews, a review of the film–the whole shmear.

My current personal conundrum: On the one hand, giant monsters. (In this case robots = monsters, clearly.) On the other, Michael Bay.

George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, ladies and gentlemen.

Every once in a while a story comes along whose blend of the macabre and the technological is tailor-made for the great Bryan Alexander of Infocult. This is one of those stories.

They’re making me want something I don’t want. I feel like Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams trying to stay awake in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The peacock, a male several years old, wandered into a Staten Island Burger King parking lot and perched on a car hood Thursday morning. Charmed employees had been feeding him bread when the man appeared.

He seized the iridescent bird by the neck, hurled it to the ground and started kicking and stomping the creature, said worker Felicia Finnegan, 19.

“He was going crazy,” she said.

Asked what he was doing, she said, the attacker explained, “’I’m killing a vampire!”’

—“Man attacks unlucky peacock at Burger King; N.Y. resident insisted bird was a vampire; animal had to be euthanized,” AP, MSNBC.com

This story makes me want to cry and vomit.

For the research, Zukowska’s team first tried to stress mice in a way that would duplicate human life.

They made them stand in cold puddles — akin to riding a bus with wet feet in the winter. They also put the mice with aggressive mice that might act similarly to an angry human boss.

—“Shots could help you lose that pot belly; Injections in mice blocked chemical linked with weight gain, study finds,” Reuters, MSNBC.com

I can’t remember anything

Can’t tell if this is true or dream

Deep down inside I feel to scream

This terrible silence stops me

Now that the war is through with me

I’m waking up, I cannot see

That there is not much left of me

Nothing is real but pain now

Hold my breath as I wish for death

Oh please, God, wake me

Back in the womb it’s much

too real

In pumps life that I must feel

But can’t look forward to reveal

Look to the time when I’ll live

Fed through the tube that sticks in me

Just like a wartime novelty

Tied to machines that make me be

Cut this life off from me

Hold my breath as I wish for death

Oh please, God, wake me

Now the world is gone, I’m just one

Oh God, help me

Hold my breath as I wish for death

Oh please, God, help me

Darkness imprisoning me

All that I see

Absolute horror

I cannot live

I cannot die

Trapped in myself

Body my holding cell

Landmine has taken my sight

Taken my speech

Taken my hearing

Taken my arms

Taken my legs

Taken my soul

Left me with life in hell

–Metallica, “One,” 1988. Video directed by Bill Pope and Michael Salomon. Clips from Johnny Got His Gun, directed by Dalton Trumbo.

Something that stuck with me once I’d finished the issue…was the way in which the Marvel Universe these days is all about fear…right now, any sense of wonder or awe has been replaced by a sense of terror and threat: We have Atlantis launching sleeper cell terrorist attacks, we have the Inhumans declaring war on humanity and wanting to take over the world, we have mutantkind facing extinction and infighting, America becoming a police state because superheroes might accidentally blow up a school full of kids, and by the way, your best friend or anyone you know might be an alien invader undercover. There’s an incredible and depressing lack of openness to “the other” in Marvel’s books, these days; nothing is seen as new or different or unusual in a good sense, because everything that isn’t “us” is a threat (as opposed to even being a potential threat). …There used to be a time where it was awesome (in both senses of the world) that there was a race of superhumans living on the moon, instead of it being another band of people who want to kill us….Is it really post-9/11, post-Afghanistan invasion and post-Iraq civil war insularism informing what the Marvel writers are coming up with, or something else? And, either way, is there any way that optimism and, well, good fun could come back to these characters again?

–Graeme McMillan, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone: Graeme gets Silent, 6/27,” Savage Critic(s)

I don’t know that this is so much inherent in modern-day Marvel as it is part and parcel of the overall lack of optimistic science fiction, at least in terms of the sci-fi that reaches the mainstream. And Paul Pope recently told me he’s reading Ray Kurzweil these days, so maybe things are changing.

Purchased at Drea DeMatteo’s store Filth*Mart in NYC, under the auspices of research for an interview I did with her for the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly in 2003. Photo taken when I was full of beer and other things, May 7, 2005. I like a good trashy T-shirt.

Tool, 1994. Directed by Adam Jones.

I remember staying up late and seeing this video on Headbanger’s Ball in high school. It made me feel old and sad.

From a series by artist Jen Wang, of whose work lots more here. Link courtesy of The Missus.

It occurred to me yesterday that a solid 50% of all the ongoing superhero/genre titles I really enjoy had new issues this week: Immortal Iron Fist, Invincible, The Walking Dead, Criminal, Daredevil, Hellboy, Green Lantern…I had a heck of a time doing this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard for that very reason.