Posting that link to my Lord of the Rings Limited Edition DVD review yesterday reminded me that I frequently have work up on Wizard’s website.

Several of the trade paperback and graphic novel reviews I’ve written for the print magazine have made their way online:

Spider-Man Visionaries: Kurt Busiek Vol. 1

Absolute Dark Knight

More day-job stuff to come…

Over at my day job, I’ve reviewed the new Lord of the Rings Limited Edition double-disc sets (not to be confused with the Theatrical Widescreen, Theatrical Full Screen, or Extended Edition versions you may already own, having purchased them individually or in two- or three-packs). Check it out here.

In Horror Blog Steven’s latest Horror Roundtable, I sing the praises of David Jacobson’s excellent film Dahmer.

Does YouTube have a first-person horror mockumentary phenomenon on its hands? This post on the celebfotainment LiveJournal community Oh No They Didn’t indicates that it does, in the form of a series of video blogs by a homeschooled 16-year-old girl named Bree whose parents are slowly being revealed to be followers of…well, I’ll let you discover for yourself. As I’ve mentioned before (and hopefully demonstrated), it’s fascinating to watch the various media available on the Internet be put to use for horror storytelling.

Speaking of first-person horror mockumentaries, they’ve been much in the news lately. George Romero has revealed that the next film in his Dead series, Diary of the Dead, will be made in that style. Meanwhile, several pundits, notably Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly, have brought up you-are-there fright flick and proto-viral marketing phenomenon The Blair Witch Project in their attempts to explain the relative failure of Internet-beloved Snakes on a Plane at the box office. (SoaP was great, incidentally, box office or no.) Could Sam Jackson’s Folly (along with such “yeah, I said it” critical praise as the oft-linked Seven Best Horror Movies of the Past 7 Years at Cinematical) be the unlikely catalyst for putting Blair Witch back in the horror pantheon where it belongs?

Finally, this past weekend my coworkers and I got liquored up and watched Red Dawn, Invasion U.S.A., and Rambo: First Blood Part II in the latest of our periodic Manly Movie Mamajamas. I rememeber hearing when I was a kid that action movies were destroying the moral fabric of our nation with their mindless, gratuitous violence, and wondering what they were talking about because the only action movies I was really watching at the time involved George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. Now I know exactly what they mean. Awesome.

I’m really happy to say that there’s an interview with me about my “autobiographical horror” blog The Outbreak over at Dark But Shining. Sam Costello, one of my favorite horror bloggers since way back when he was the only one I knew of, conducted the interview, and it was really rewarding to participate in. Added bonus: It’s DBS’s 666th post.

I hope you enjoy it–go check it out!

There’s a new horror roundtable up at Steven’s Horror Blog. The topic is “favorite horror weapon,” and my answer probably won’t come as much of a surprise.

Meanwhile, Stacie Ponder at Final Girl has come up with the best idea for a series of posts EVER.

Kinda sorta.

Blogger Matt Maxwell recently wrote to inform me that in Max Brooks’s most recent zombie-survival mockumentary book, World War Z, there’s a mercenary character named “T. Sean Collins.” I certainly don’t mind interpreting this as a tip of the hat to my little autobiographical zombie fiction blog The Outbreak, and nor should you!

Meanwhile, Steven of the Horror Blog has posted his latest Horror Roundtable, this time asking what factors can get the roundtable’s participants to watch a horror movie they know is going to be bad. My answer won’t surprise long-time readers of this blog, that’s for sure…

Is this the return to Oz?

The grass is dead, the gold is brown, and the sky has claws

–Scissor Sisters, “Return to Oz”

I’ve been, as they say, otherwise engaged lately. Mostly I’ve been very busy with the day job, my duties at which have expanded of late in ways vaguely reminiscent of the kind of writing I’ve done around here. So that’s one thing I’ve been doing: Talking about comics again (mostly supercomics), here and sometimes here and infrequently here. I’ve been freelancing a lot too, and doing some free-time comics-related work as well.

But I’ve still been lurking amid the shadows, mind you: I’m a regular participant in the illustrious Steven’s Horror Roundtables over at the Horror Blog. If you haven’t been reading these, you’re missing out on a juicy cross-section of horror blogospherian opinion, notable as much for their variety as anything else. Go sink your teeth into ’em.

So what have I missed around here?

Well, there’s the sadly and horrifyingly familiar story of Robert Charles Browne, who is either an exceptionally vicious fabulist or a potential claimant to the title of America’s most prolific serial killer, though I would imagine Gary Ridgway will retain that dubious distinction for some time to come, and of course we will never know for sure.

In much less morbid territory, there are the two newly discovered Australian plesiosaur species, which for some reason have been compared to my beloved Loch Ness Monster in pretty much every news report I’ve seen about them. If paleontologists discovered a new species of Tyrannosaur, would they compare it to Godzilla? But still–water monsters!

Speaking of which, I’ve had the pleasure of watching a pair of totally awesome Discovery Channel documentaries on real, non-extinct sea monsters: Killer Squid, examining the pack-hunting Humboldts that plague the California coast (about which more here), and Killer Jellyfish (aka The Sting), chronicling the quest of a lone marine biologist to combat the fingernail-sized jellies whose lethal sting threatens the beaches of Australia (about which more here). Good God.

Then there’s the land of make-believe, where the news that most struck me coming out of the big San Diego Comic-Con is that Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s b-movie anthology Grind House will be a full-fledged double feature, rather than two short films; and that two animated Kill Bill prequel/sequels are planned. This bums me out a little–I was looking forward to watching the daughter of Vernita Green seek vengeance against Beatrix Kiddo in about 15 years–but I’ll take what I can get.

Finally, I read 1984 (for the umpteenth time) and The Handmaid’s Tale (for the first) back-to-back, so I’m all aflutter with dystopia. The main question in my head (a SPOILERY question, I suppose, though I’m not gonna say for which novel) is whether dystopian fiction in which the dystopia is revealed eventually to have fallen is more or less depressing. From a storytelling standpoint, does an omnipotent totalitarianism ennoble any struggle against it, however vain, through its very unassailability; does a totalitarianism destined for failure render the hopes and fears and torments of those who rebel against it fatuous, since the thing against which they struggled was finite, and therefore in some way pointless? I’d love to hear what you think.

Read this review, then imagine its diametric opposite!

And you’ll sometimes be able to read me do so here, and also here. Thought you might like to know!

It turns out that the remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece The Birds isn’t going to be a real remake, but instead will re-adapt Daphne DuMaurier’s original short story. Okay then.

Hey, look: Steven from Corpse Eaters and The House of Irony has a new horror blog! It’s called The Horror Blog!

Of all the 6/6/06 stories I’ve read today, the only one that actually feels evil is the news that today, of all days, Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez’s lawyers appealed for a new trial.

The third half-hour-long one-track EP from Underworld’s download-only RiverRun Project is now available at UnderworldLive.com. It has the delightful title of “I’m a Big Sister, and I’m a Girl, and I’m a Princess, and This Is My Horse.” Underworld is the best band on the planet. The end.

Roxy Music is recording a new album. They’re recording it with the original line-up. Including Paul Thompson. AND BRIAN ENO. The end, again.

Move over, Audrey 2: Check out this CNN.com video about giant hogweed, a truly massive plant (they can grow up to 15 feet tall) running rampant in King County, Washington, and filled with venom that can scar you for literally years. Who needs horror fiction?

Bryan Alexander of Infocult calls our attention to a lovely essay on horror by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, singing the praises of what he dubs “cycle” horror, horror in which the viewer or reader is made to understand that the horrific events she is witnessing have happened many times before and will continue to happen many times in the future. (Think The Shining or The Ring.) Palahniuk argues that these films are in some strange way comforting, in that they imply that the victims are sacrifices made in our stead to keep the evil forces that threaten to overwhelm us (i.e. death, the monster with a thousand faces) at bay. Bryan has some quibbles, centering on both the accuracy of some of Palahniuk’s examples and whether the near-total innocence of many of these films’ victims negates the sacrifice aspect, but as you might have guessed I like where Palahniuk is going with this: certainty and repetition are a big part of what makes the horror genre “work” for me. But regardless, it’s often exciting to see a philosophy of horror originating from an outsider. I interviewed Palahniuk way back in 2001, and was delighted to discover that his next book would be a horror novel; in fact Palahniuk’s last three fiction books (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted) have all been works of horror, and it’s compelling to see how he works with the tools of the genre given his lack of, for want of a better word, an apprenticeship among the hardcore.

Speaking of thoughts on horror from the non-hardcore, the stellar comics critic Jog of Jog the Blog reviews the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, pointing out how it’s really quite a beautiful film. (And he separates “Chain” and “Saw,” which always goes over well with me.)

And what better way to follow up a post on Texas Chain Saw than a post on eating meat? Slate’s William Saletan writes on how science may be on the verge of accomplishing what both soy and human morality have for the most part failed to do–make it unnecessary to eat the flesh of dead animals.

The moral dimension of Saletan’s argument is derived in part from the recent discovery that dolphins refer to one another by name. And I don’t mean “Flipper”–they have recognizable names in their own language of clicks and squeaks. I’d make an Onion joke, but this just makes me sad.

If your idea of a good superhero movie does not involve Tobey Maguire walking away from a gravestone in slow motion, then man, this is the superhero movie for you.

Please take a moment to remember. It’s more than many can do anymore.

Jon Hastings of The Forager Blog has a problem with the ramshackle plot of Art School Confidential, but his problem isn’t that there was too little plot, but too much. Ah, let him explain it to you. FWIW, I disagree about whether this point made the movie lousy–I laughed as hard at it as I’ve laughed at any movie in years–but since it seems to be a sticking point for many people who see the film and since Jon approaches it in such an interesting way, you should probably check it out.

In theory, at least, scientists believe they are capable of constructing a Harry Potter-style Cloak of Invisibility. Science is awesome.

The good people at Top Shelf have resized the panels of my comic “It Brought Me Some Peace of Mind” so that they you can see each panel in full without having to scroll down. So if that was bugging you before, it shouldn’t anymore. Enjoy!

The Transylvanian fortress commonly (though erroneously) cited as Castle Dracula is being returned to the heir of its rightful owners, who lost it to confiscating Communists in 1948. If the Commies had ditched the hammer and sickle in favor of a mallet and wooden stake, maybe they could have hung on to the thing, huh?

As enlightening and informative as the debate on torture-horror has been in the horror blogosphere and its surrounding environs–and I’m really happy to say that the ratio of light to heat that’s been generated by the discussion is staggeringly lopsided in the former’s favor–it’s also quite useful to hear the perspective of somebody who isn’t a genre junkie. So take a look at humor blogger Jim Treacher’s thoughts on Wolf Creek, a movie he finds both good and–surprisingly–not particularly graphic at all, except in an emotional sense. He makes it sound like nothing so much as the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a film I’m obviously quite fond of. Very, very interesting.