* Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken seems skeptical about Gamer, the upcoming Gerard Butler action movie whose trailer you see below. I think this is because Rob is unaware that the film is directed by Neveldine and Taylor, the men behind the magisterially ridonkulous Crank and Crank: High Voltage. (The latter of which I still haven’t seen, by the way–any NYC-area readers looking for a movie date, my email’s to the left.) Rob is therefore forgiven for his lapse in judgment.

* Rob also catches that the initial Watchmen Director’s Cut DVD will not incorporate the animated Tales of the Black Freighter material, as was director Zach Snyder’s stated intention at every step of the way. Everyone seems to sniff a DVD double-dip attempt by the studio and I’m inclined to agree.

* I hope Brian Ralph isn’t kidding about working on Daybreak 4.

* The Onion AV Club interviews Michael Emerson, Lost‘s Benjamin Linus. He’s always a great interview subject. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Lots of real-world torture porn to consume: Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whom we captured and transferred to Egypt for torturing and who subsequently falsely confessed to WMD links between Iraq and al-Qaeda that were used to justify the Iraq War, has “committed suicide” in the Libyan prison he ended up disappearing into. Meanwhile, John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped greenlight torture and famously argued that no treaty or law could constrain the President of the United States of America from crushing testicles of a terrorist suspect’s child in order to extract information from his father, has been hired as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. And the Obama administration is threatening to cease intelligence sharing with Great Britain if they disclose information regarding the torture of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed.

* Eve Tushnet reviews the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, one of my very favorite films of all time.

* Tom Spurgeon speaks to Darwyn Cooke (and Ed Brubaker) about Cooke’s upcoming adaptation of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s Parker novels. A lot of it reads just like a journey through Cooke and Brubaker’s book and DVD collections, which is fun in and of itself.

* At first it seemed like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the torture of Abu Zubaydah, but it turns out that’s not true, at least as far as we know and as far as she and currently available records both say. You’ll no doubt be thrilled to the bottom of your heart to learn that torture is still enthusiastically supported by Dick Cheney, until four months ago the Vice President of the United States of America.

SPOILER WARNING

* I didn’t mention this, but it was refreshing to see Hurley’s not-so-brightness presented as a liability (in that hilarious “so you served in the Korean War?” exchange with Dr. Cheng) instead of as a method of audience identification for a change. Remember when Hurley was the common-sense character? The one who’d ask the questions the audience argued anyone would have the sense to ask in the castaways’ situation? That was back when the writers’ attitude vis a vis the character was “You guys in the audience are calling attention to some of the plot holes and dramatic lapses, so we’ll have Hurley try to address them.” Now that they’re doing all this time travel stuff, the attitude appears to have switched to “You guys in the audience aren’t quite bright enough to follow The Terminator, so we’ll have Hurley force people to spell it out over and over.” An audience identification character who used to be a compliment is now a veiled insult!

* Okay, I’m about to break my own rule and talk about some stuff Damon Lindelof recently said about what we can expect from the show in the home stretch. It’s nothing along the lines of what I was saying yesterday about not wanting to hear that, like, Matthew Fox is replacing Simon Cowell as a judge on American Idol–it’s nothing that’s going to spoil the season finale for you. But it does eliminate some options regarding a pair of long-standing mysteries that everyone expected to be tackled in the final season, so in that sense, BEHIND-THE-SCENES-TYPE SPOILER WARNING.

* After watching last night’s episode I realized just how much ground the show has to cover in its less-than-20 remaining hours. I listed some of the outstanding mysteries I hope to see addressed in this season’s finale, but there are plenty more that will hopefully pop up in the final season. One of the dangling plot threads I’ve been excited for them to get to is the story behind Libby, the ill-faited Tailie paramour of Hurley who was revealed to have been housed in the same insane asylum, and also gave Desmond the boat he ended up shipwrecking on the Island. My assumption ever since Matthew Abaddon described his gig for Charles Widmore as “I get people where they need to be” was that Libby had the same job. But it seems we may never find out, because at some kind of nerd-media panel last night, Damon Lindelof revealed that actress Cynthia Watros is apparently pointedly uninterested in reprising the role. Lindelof says this means they can’t address the question adequately, so they won’t do it all. I think that’s a bridge too far. For starters, she was okay with showing up for a 10-second cameo in last season’s finale to tell Michael it was time to die, but actually getting to act again is something up with which she will not put? Weird. Second of all, it seems easy enough to have the beans about her true motives spilled to Hurley by some relevant character, particularly if my Widmore theory pans out. I mean, I understand Lindelof’s point about telling-not-showing being kind of annoying, but leaving this hanging is much more annoying.

* Also frustrating are Lindelof’s conflicting statements regarding the Numbers and what, if anything, will be revealed about their provenance. On the one hand he says they’ll be revealing perhaps quite a bit more about them. On the other, he says that the origin of the Numbers as revealed in that dopey ARG from a few years back–they are the constants (!) in an equation devised by Dharma scientists to predict the end of the world, and that the Initiative’s goal on the Island was to conduct experiments that might help them alter the equation and thus save the world from its inevitable demise from war or ecological catastrophe–won’t come up on the show because too much of the audience isn’t hardcore enough to care. This is irritating as all get-out to hear, given that the entire first two seasons virtually centered on the Numbers; fans who are interested in hearing what’s up with them are not just the fans who cooked up elaborate theories based on the writings of real-world philosopher Jeremy Bentham. I guarantee you that if they close out the show without bringing this up, you’ll read sooooooooooo much bitching about it from fans not hardcore enough to have followed the ARG or gone to nerd-media panels featuring Damon Lindelof. In fact it’s the NON-hardcore fans who suffer from this decision the most! Now, I understand what Lindelof is saying about how there’s no real answer for “what the Numbers mean”–like most numerological phenomena, the Numbers themselves are arbitrary, and their meaning stems from their reoccurrence (be it coincidence or synchronicity). That is, it’s not like you’ll find out why it’s “42” instead of “43.” But it would be nice to trace them as far back as you can, and a misreading of the audience to expect them not to care.

* I disagree with Todd Van Der Werff’s contention that this episode was too plot-heavy to actually be good–one of the first times this season I’ve found myself at significant odds with his take–but as always his review/recap is worth your time and attention.

* Back to Libby/Watros for a second, I’m sure I’ve kvetched about this before, but I hate it when I find out that real-world actor issues forced changes in the plot of any movie or TV show. The most heartbreaking example of this, for me, involves a ’70s film classic that I’m not going to mention because I just found out a friend of mine hasn’t seen it and I don’t want to prematurely disappoint him about it, but in Lost‘s case I hate that Mr. Eko was written out of the show prematurely because Adewale Unspellablelastname didn’t want to live in Hawaii anymore. I don’t hold it against the actors or whoever was at fault, mind you–it just bothers me, as a fan, that stories rarely emerge in their platonic form.

* Anyway, it turns out that Watros is going to show up on Gossip Girl soon. Not since my hope that Bart Bass’s secret sex society was somehow linked to Charles Widmore has a Gossip Girl/Lost crossover flowered so fully in my mind. “Spotted in the Hatch: Golden Girl, grabbing supplies for a beach-blanket buffet with cute’n’cuddly Lotto Boy. Are these two really crazy…in love? Or will Michael go off half-cocked and shoot down their shot at love? Only time will tell–let’s just hope it takes less than 108 minutes. XOXO, Gossip Monster.”

* Comic Book Resources speaks to Grant Morrison at length about his upcoming miniseries Multiversity. As usual with Morrison interviews lately, it’s compelling reading both for the ideas he trots out and, in terms of ideas he says he had to abandon for reasons beyond his control, the implications regarding DC’s apparently, oh, let’s say “less than optimal internal cohesiveness” over the past few years.

* My pal Ben Morse proudly presents his debut comic as an editor for Marvel.com: War of Kings: Warriors #1, containing the origin of extravagantly Mohawked outer-space superguy Gladiator. Believe it or not, the origin of this Chris Claremont creation and the basics of his race were completely unexplored up until this point. I for one was particularly pleased to see an in-continuity explanation for his ridiculous haircut.

* Of all the responses to Tom Spurgeon’s recent essay on Diamond and the Direct Market, I like NeilAlien’s summary the best:

The Direct Market comics shop should be the jewel in the crown of multiple comics markets during a peak time of comics craft and mass-media attention; instead it eats its own arms off

Just about!

* Speaking of (in a way): PictureBox has announced a pledge drive to help support the upcoming release of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs 3 and Brian Chippendale’s If ‘n Oof. There’s really just no way to slice this story without drawing horrifying conclusions about the financial and aesthetic state of the North American comics market, I’m afraid. But do consider pledging: PictureBox is a great publisher, these sound like great books, and at any rate a pledge actually counts as a purchase of the books with some swag thrown in.

* I really like the look of the new facsimile edition of Adrian Tomine’s 32 Stories, not least because I’d never gotten to read this material before.

* Battlestar Galactica Season 4.5 arrives on DVD on July 28th, along with a Complete Series box set.

* Check out what some of my fellow horrorbloggers have been yapping about lately in the latest League of Tana Tea Drinkers roundup.

* Meet Victor Aleman Jr., recently arrested on drug and weapons charges with a Jeep full of cash and cocaine…and a cellphone sporting pictures of four severed heads lined up on a table. Florida police still have not identified or located the heads. (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

* “Crazy sickness” is spreading in Nicaragua. The unexplained “grisl siknis,” which usually strikes young women of the country’s indigenous Miskito ethnic group en masse, basically turns people into something out of Shivers or 28 Days Later. Scientists and doctors are unable to determine whether it’s physical or mental in nature–perhaps caused by ergotism like various mass-hysteria outbreaks of yore, or perhaps just a societal safety valve blown wide open. (Via Yucky Tuna.)

SPOILER WARNING

* Before I begin, a plea: We’re heading into season finale time, which means I’ll be speculating a bit about what will happen. If you know what’s going to happen–or at least have some educated guesses–based on in-real-life, behind-the-scenes stuff that you’ve read in interviews or the press, actors getting cast in other pilots or whatever, I ask that you please do not bring it up in the comment thread. I try as hard as I can to restrict myself to whatever ends up on the television, meaning the episode and the next-week teaser, and really really hate finding out about future developments because so-and-so is in some article from Variety or Jeff Jensen said something a little bird told him, so I’d like to keep the comment section free of that too.

* This episode of Lost got my heart racing like the show hasn’t done in a long time, perhaps not since last year’s season finale (Keamy and the freighter), or maybe even the previous year’s (“NOT PENNY’S BOAT”). I think it’s because it’s really starting to feel like we’re moving toward some major showdowns–Locke confronting Jacob, whatever “The Incident” is, Jack trying to set off the bomb, maybe some revelations about Richard and/or that Annie girl that Li’l Ben was friends with in portentous fashion a few seasons ago who we haven’t seen or heard from since–with the end in sight, and suddenly I realize that anyone’s probably fair game to go.

This has been a harder trick for the show to pull off now that it’s pared down the original cast so much. Boone and Shannon were relatively easy marks, Charlie started as a core character when the show was depending on Lord of the Rings fandom to boost ratings but by the time he was killed he was the definition of a supporting character, the Tailies (even Eko) didn’t get to stick around long enough for their deaths to be real hard work for the writers, Michael got the shit end from the start of his heel turn so sending him out like a punk wasn’t a huge risk, Walt’s aging gives fans agita every time he shows up so people don’t seem to mind that he’s gone, Vincent seems to have undergone Charlie’s basic trajectory from foreground to background, the redshirts are the redshirts (despite the occasional for-fun elevation of the likes of Arzt, Nikki & Paulo, and Frogurt), and I don’t hear too many people clamoring for the return of Claire, Rose, and Bernard from parts unknown. (I love me some Rose & Bernard, but I know I’m in the minority.) Heck, even most of the major Others like Tom and Mikhail are dunzo. Obviously the show has kept up the mortality rate by offing freighter characters (and newbies like Cesar), but while the freighter gang is fun, I don’t feel as attached to them as I am to Desmond, Penny, Ben, and Juliet, let alone the remaining original castaways.

So along comes this episode, and all of a sudden we’re getting tons and tons of foreshadowing that There Will Be Blood between Sawyer and Juliet, while Jack and Locke are involved in high-stakes Island brinksmanship with forces beyond their control and characters with demonstrably few scruples. And since this is the show’s penultimate season finale, when it sends the message that anything could happen to characters we’ve cared about for a long time, I believe it. Which makes for exciting television!

* My friend the great Ben Morse brought my attention to this pretty thoughtful review of last week’s episode at Primetime Pulse, which contains the following provocative paragraph:

A lot of people have brought up how these characters may not want to change the future, as landing safely to LA (strangely enough) is a worse fate than crashing on the island. Sure, that’s true. Kate was on her way to prison, Sawyer had nothing to live for, Locke was paralyzed and working at a dead-end job, Hurley was cursed, Rose had cancer, Jin and Sun were in an emotionally abusive relationship. Things weren’t that great. But, then again, think about all the people who have died: Boone, Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby, Eko, Charlie, Michael, and all those nameless red shirts. Is it acceptable for our heroes to say, “You know what? I didn’t really like the apartment I was living in before the crash. It was too small and in a bad neighborhood. I don’t want to go back there. To hell with all those good, innocent people who had to die”? I suppose Locke’s view of “I wouldn’t change the past because those events made me who I am today” is a bit more acceptable, but still.

I’ve already talked about this sort of thing in terms of the Oceanic Six’s disregard for the lives of the other people on the Ajira flight; iirc I was ready to book them for criminally negligent homicide over the death of the plane’s pilot. So my response when Ben pointed this out to me was this:

Nutshell reaction: Sadly, I think the morality of the main characters’ actions vis a vis the redshirts is something that the show can never address without making Jack into Tony Soprano, so we just have to ignore it, more or less.

Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when saving the lives of all the people who died during their Island experience and its aftermath was one of Jack’s first offered rationales for trying to go through with Daniel’s plan. I kept waiting for the show to send us a big signal that we’re meant to think that Jack is wrong to want to do this and Kate is right, but beyond the preexisting warped calculus of screentime-based emphasis, privileging Kate’s actually rather miserable romantic relationships with Sawyer and Jack over the lives of untold dozens, we really didn’t get one. In fact I think we’re supposed to be irked with Kate for winding up on the sub and potentially fucking things up between Sawyer and Juliet one last time. Yes, the show tried to make Kate seem less like the most selfish person on the planet by couching her objection to the H-bomb plan in “if you’re wrong you’ll kill everyone on the Island” terms, but that was clearly an afterthought. Now, I suppose you could say the same thing about Jack, i.e. his main rationale for wanting to change the future isn’t to save Boone, but so that he doesn’t spend those few years of his life constantly fucking up and feeling guilty about it. But so far the show seems to be leaning toward the (correct) point of view that the Main Characters’ thrilling adventures taking their stand down in Jungleland aren’t worth sacrificing the lives of everyone else on the plane. (Meanwhile I don’t think Faraday would be trying to set off the H-bomb if it was going to kill anyone except perhaps the people setting it off–seems to me like the idea is the energies of the bomb and the Island will cancel each other out relatively harmlessly–so that’s why I’m not giving much credence to Kate’s idea that Jack is risking the lives of the Dharma people or whoever else.)

This show is never going to be about morality the way The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica were about morality–it’s more about the emotional consequences of decisions you make or are prevented from making than the moral ones–but I’m happy to see this addressed even a little bit. It could just end up being a one-line nod in the general direction of the idea before ignoring it entirely, a la Ben saying “who cares” about whatever happens to the other Ajira passengers, but I’ll take what we can get.

* I got a good chuckle out of how Ben sheepishly tilted his head down and averted his eyes after Locke mentioned that he did, in fact, die.

* I’m kind of disappointed in the “next week on Lost” teaser for revealing that Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate all end up back on the Island somehow. I feel like the teasers have done a lot of that sort of thing this season–prematurely revealing the temporal/spacial proximity of characters who we didn’t know were in the same point in the spacetime continuum, showing that people who were in a bad spot got out of that bad spot, etc.

* Hopes for the season finale: seeing Jacob, seeing the DeGroots or Alvar Hanso or whoever really runs the Dharma Initiative, seeing Annie, a flashback to Statue Time or Black Rock Time, finding out what lies in the shadow of the statue and who the people who are dropping that catchphrase are, a happy ending for Sawyer and Juliet, explosions, The Incident, Richard info…

* I’m hugely impressed by how well done Poe Ghostal’s list of The 10 Most Famous Geek Arguments for Topless Robot is.

* “‘Fuck it!’ Yes! That’s your answer! That’s your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead!” When it comes to attempting to reform the Direct Market instead of storming out in a huff, Dirk Deppey is most definitely not a Lebowski Achiever.

* My pal Kiel Phegley talks at length to cartoonist and fellow Chicagoan Jeffrey Brown.

* David Lynch has two new, unorthodox projects brewing: providing visuals for Dark Night of the Soul, a musical compilation curated or produced or something by Dangermouse and Sparklehorse (via Pitchfork), and Interview Project, a yearlong series of interviews with ordinary Americans (well, as ordinary as Americans can be when David Lynch gets through with them) conducted during a road trip and posted at Lynch’s site (via The House Next Door.)

* The Onion AV Club talks to Scrubs creator and Josh Homme lookalike Bill Lawrence about the series, whose likely to be final episodes air tonight. Lawrence is impressively candid about the creative highs and lows of the show, though he and I differ about what those are. (Count me in as a fan of the increasingly far-out material of the late-middle seasons, which Lawrence thinks went too far.) This interview reminds me that I’ll be happy when everything goes into reruns so my TiVo can start taping the show again; we might have been able to shuffle things around on the very busy TV night of Wednesdays in order to keep taping the show, but by the time we realized we were missing it it was weeks too late. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Flipping the script, Scott Wilson talks to the Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias about his delightful New Cult Canon series. (Via The House Next Door.)

* I liked Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads but I’ve been skittish about the prospects of Tokyopop ever allowing him to finish his OEL manga series King City, so I’ve never bothered to track it down. Therefore I’m pleased to see Graham will be publishing the book (and republishing what’s already come out) in serialized form with Image Comics. (Via JK Parkin.)

* The Coming of Kodansha. (Link and awesome headline via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Starro the Conqueror goes Frazetta via JG Jones? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Topless Robot.)

* There’s something genuinely frightening about how present this cthulhoid brute’s eyes look in this piece by artist Bradford Rigney. This kind of illustration isn’t usually my cup of tea, but kudos to Rigney–you can download a sizable interview and image gallery in PDF form from 2D Artist magazine here. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Real-world torture porn update: As I’ve followed the revelations of the Bush Administration’s use of torture, I’ve been really struck by just how much the nature of the news media’s basic “he said/he said” template has allowed the torturers to frame the debate. That’s the way brutal methods understood around the world as torture since their inception are now referred to straightfacedly as “harsh interrogation techniques that some critics say amount to torture.” It’s also how the Abu Ghraib photos that most closely resemble the “frathouse antics” that torture proponents dismissed them as became the dominant frame for that scandal, to the point where when Rachel Maddow showed a picture of a man tortured to death during his CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib on her show last night, I was stunned to realize I’d forgotten that that even happened. That’s why releasing and publicizing the nauseating details of our torture program is so important. When you learn that someone was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, it’s harder to defend the completely imaginary “one and done” super-awesome terrorist-breaking conception of waterboarding concocted by the torturers and the Internet and think-tank tough-guys who fawn over them. When you learn that we were locking people in boxes with insects, it’s harder to depict the torture program as an orderly means of extracting information as opposed to the sordid province of sickos. For that reason, I fully support the release of as many incriminating photos as possible, and I hope they greatly discomfit the torturers, their defenders, and the people who, like me, spent years in blissful, even willful ignorance of the fact that it can happen here, and contemptuously dismissing those who tried to tell us otherwise.

Let me be the 20th person to encourage you to read Tom Spurgeon’s essay on why Diamond’s rejection of James Turner’s Warlord of IO is a terrible thing. I’m confused by a lot of the reactions I’ve seen to it. Tom can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe his point is this: Comics’ Direct Market as currently constituted is incapable of reliably selling comics, even comics of obvious quality and reliability, unless they’re the biggest superhero comics from the biggest publishers; and monopoly DM distributor Diamond’s current actions, while nominally in the service of improving the bottom line, are taking for granted a set of assumptions that are unrelated to the genuine financial well-being of either Diamond or the DM and that make it even more difficult to sell the aforementioned comics, perhaps irreversibly so.

Heidi MacDonald can correct me if I’m wrong too, but she seems to be taking that as the end of the discussion rather than the beginning, choosing to focus on touting other options instead of improving the existing one. It’s wonderful that there are other, better avenues for comics like Turner’s to reach an audience. It’s great that there’s manga and webcomics and iTunes and bookstores. But celebrating that and pursuing those avenues is by no means mutually exclusive with addressing the problems of the Direct Market, as opposed to writing them off.

Meanwhile, Brian Hibbs, though he eventually goes for the gusto and attacks Diamond’s deals with the Big Publishers for tying everyone’s hands, then focuses on (for example) publishers needing to do a better job advertising their wares to retailers and customers in the Previews catalog–but even doing a fan-freaking-tastic job in an inherently cockamamie and self-defeating system like Previews is like being the world’s tallest dwarf. Moreover, Diamond isn’t giving James Turner that option anymore even if he wanted to take it.

Tom’s said it before and it’s true: The great thing about comic shops, in theory, is that they’re shops that sell the comics. If you’re interested in one comic, it seems logical that you should be able to go to a comic shop and get it, and once you’re there, it seems logical that you should be able to look down the aisle from the comic you’re interested in and find other, different comics. Narrowing that selection to the Sure Things will, I think, be about as effective in saving the Direct Market as the chain record stores in the malls with their outrageous pricing for the Billboard Top 100 albums have been in saving the music industry. For years, all you could do about the shitty selection and pricing of record-store chains was bitch about them, but then along came Amazon and iTunes (let alone mp3 blogs, let alone Napster 1.0 and BitTorrent) to eat their lunch, and when the likes of Tower went out of business no one gave a shit, not even hardcore CD buyers like me, because no one felt any goodwill toward those stores regardless of their goodwill toward music. The graveyards of the world are filled with indispensable “in-store experiences.”

Pushing the price of the bestselling comics ever upward while preemptively choking off the market access of other kinds of comics at the source is a recipe for disaster. And it really would be a disaster, because no matter how crappy the local Android’s Dungeon is, the Direct Market comic shop in its ideal form and even in its less-than-ideal form is the kind of sales mechanism most media would murder dozens of innocent people to have access to. I’ve read enough on the topic from even artsy-fartsy stalwarts like Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds to know that even the DM’s red-headed stepchildren depend on the DM and would be devastated by a collapse. And it’s not necessarily at the top of my list, but the in-store experience at comic shops, good ones at least, really is something of value in and of itself. So yeah, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. But it’s a disaster that can be staved off, provided people, like Tom, repeatedly point out how disastrous it is, rather than whistling past the graveyard while being really glad for the latest 12 simultaneously bestselling Naruto volumes or the ridonkulous book deal Craig Thompson signed or the fact that Diesel Sweeties can support itself with merch. You can be really glad about all those things–I am!–and still want and work toward a better Direct Market.

The reason that disaster can be staved off is because Diamond’s move is not, in any way, the inevitable result of the market having spoken. The Direct Market’s inability to sell anything but Avengers titles in quantity is not a result of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand flipping everything else the bird. That notion is belied by the fact that there are viable alternative sales avenues that have been discovered by webcomics, manga, literary comics and the like. If no one wanted to buy them, they wouldn’t make money anywhere. Instead they can’t make money in, ironically, the one venue dedicated solely to their medium. That is a result of conscious decisions made by major players at various levels of the market–publishers, distributors, retailers, consumers, creators, and commentators all share in the blame. Now, however, the monopoly distributor of comics to the venue dedicated solely to selling comics is officially instituting that venue’s unofficial failure as policy. They shouldn’t, and we should tell them why, and we should also be able to tell them how not to without having to suggest that they wake up tomorrow as an entirely different sales mechanism. I’m not ready to give up on the DM as is.

* Rob Bricken, the Topless Robot, draws our attention to District 9, an upcoming science fiction film about an alien refugee/internment camp here on Earth, directed by Peter Jackson cohort Neil Blomkamp. This sucker is hanging right over the plate for any lazy film critic to knock their “I only pay attention to genre films insofar as I can read them as political allegories” grand salami right out of the park, but you know what? I’ll eat it.

* Heidi MacDonald draws our attention to three comics projects of note. First is The Iraq War Stories Anthology, an Act-i-vate-hosted collection of, well, Iraq War stories by the students in Nick Bertozzi’s Comic Book Storytelling Workshop at SVA. Nick is a blazing talent, he was my very first friend in comics, and this is an idea that seems almost necessary, so count me in. It launches on May 10th.

* Next is The Big Feminist But, an anthology of comics about contemporary feminism by the likes of Jeffrey Brown and Julia Wertz. I think feminism is in a weird place right now, where it’s almost always treated as something relatively lighthearted. Granted, my main exposure to movement feminism during my adult life has been through hipstery mags like Bust and Bitch, but that really does seem the dominant approach among my age group, and it’s weird to imagine, say, black civil-rights activism working primarily in that vein, isn’t it? So I’m a little skeptical, but also quite curious.

* Finally there’s The New Yorker‘s preview of Daniel Clowes’s upcoming graphic novel. It’s going to be told in the strip style of Ice Haven and The Death Ray. And holy crap is this panel hilarious if you’ve ever had any exposure to the work of Daniel Clowes:

* I really enjoy reading my friend and Marvel.com editor Ben Morse writing about superhero comics, and he’s done so at length recently, with a tribute to Brian K. Vaughan’s forgotten Cyclops miniseries and a two-part list of his favorite ’90s heroes.

* Meanwhile, my buddy and ToyFare editor TJ Dietsch serves up a seemingly sound theory about Geoff Johns’s upcoming Green Lantern-based event comic Blackest Night, using Johns’s affinity for old continuity minutiae and the DC collected editions department’s propensity for republishing newly relevant stories as a springboard.

* Pavlovian conditioning is starting to kick in with me every time I see a Flog! post that starts with the words “Now in stock.” This time around, I’m salivating over Anders Nilsen’s Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes.

* Jog reviews X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the live-action Death Note spinoff L: Change the WorLd (twice!). I really liked this bit about how oddly soulless big-time superhero movies can be despite cramming in so much of the comics’ refreshingly bizarre ephemera:

Granted, I can’t say Ryan Reynolds is terrible so much as he’s stuck in the hopeless position of playing a fan-favorite character that became a fan-favorite due to his handling by specific writers, yet shows up solely for the purposes of having another fan-favorite character in the movie regardless of how he’s actually presented, since hey – he’s a fan-favorite, right? So, here we’ve got a Wade Wilson that cracks jokes for ten or so minutes, and thereafter turns into the Super Skrull by way of Baraka from Mortal Kombat, complete with a showdown on a thin, high ledge, and you sort of wonder how the writers couldn’t quite manage the psychological muscle of Rob Liefeld-era New Mutants.

* More nostalgia porn for at least a few of my readers: Todd Klein serves up two more posts on the logos he designed for Amalgam.

* Lost fandom can be really slow (see item #3) and really self-parodic (see item #10b). I kinda like the theory in item #2, though. (UPDATE: Link fixed!)

* This story about Mahdi Army death squads killing gay Iraqis by sealing their anuses shut with glue and inducing diarrhea is so bizarre and gruesome that I have a hard time believing it regardless of the assurances it offers. But if it turns out to be true I wouldn’t be that surprised, since I think it’s pretty well established that the perversions of most crusaders for morality dwarf the alleged depravities of their targets. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

It has not been a good week for cameo players in History of the World Part I. Rest in peace, Dom DeLuise. Your Caesar is immortal.

* Now that was an episode! One thing I’d forgotten to mention about last week’s installment was that it was the first one I could think of to end on a series of cliffhangers in a long, long time. Because Gossip Girl moves at three times the speed of any other show, usually storylines more or less get wrapped up by the end of the hour, and then some tease-y thing is appended to the end to hook you for next week. But last time out, almost nothing was resolved. It was all gonna play out here. And it sure did!

* I can’t exactly remember the details anymore, but I seem to recall some elaborate scheme last season being screwed up by Vanessa’s ill-timed intervention. This time around it was down to Dan and Lily to blow up the spot. Which was frustrating insofar as it was repetitive, but also fitting: It took Dan’s self-righteousness and Lily’s status-fixated meddling and made them real liabilities for the characters.

* As far as the Lily end of that point goes, that was part of what made this such an effectively emotional episode. Kelly Rutherford doesn’t get a whole lot to do on this show other than be rich and MILFy, but I really liked the way she slowly revealed the various aspects of the investment-payback and get-Serena-arrested schemes to Rufus, as though with each new sentence she had to redouble her efforts to deny that what she was doing was completely fucked up.

* Lily’s go-along-to-get-along mentality also made her a more fulfilling antagonist for Serena’s scheme than what I thought was going to happen, which was Lily trying to get the police involved and Serena trying to dodge responsibility by taking Poppy and Gabriel down herself. Instead, the roles were reversed, and Lily was the sketchier of the two. Well done writers.

* Getting back to the emotional bit, Chuck and Blair’s exchange at the Russian Tea Room was interesting in that I really had no idea how it was going to go down. It was a good choice on Ed Westwick’s part to smile when he lied to her about it all being a big game to him, because for serious, does he ever really smile on this show? Seeing his teeth made it seem like this was a really unique moment, somehow. I’m not sure I buy his reasoning for letting Blair go, however. Doesn’t it seem like she’d be totally happy with him at this point, particularly if he was prepared to be honest and tell her he really has feelings for her, which is what he could have done at that very moment? The Missus and I were convinced he did it to spare Nate. I was really, really hoping that when Serena asked him “Chuck, why did you just do that?” his answer would be a gravelly whisper of “Bros before hoes.”

* So they played Georgina’s Jesus stuff strictly for laffs this time around, which is how I thought they were going to go the whole time. That’s fine I guess. A good excuse to paraphrase Pulp Fiction‘s made-up Ezekiel verse.

* Speaking of pop-culture references, there was much rejoicing in the Collins househould when Jenny distracted Lily by explaining the plot of Twilight. ‘Round these parts, you could keep me busy for a solid hour just trying to convince me that vampires in Twilight sparkle in the sunlight instead of burning up. “Wait, they sparkle? You’re making that up.”

* Another Vanessa-less episode! Woo! Actually, The Missus rightly said tonight “I’m glad Vanessa slept with Chuck. I don’t hate her anymore!” It’s true! She became more interesting through genital osmosis.

* Meanwhile you’ve got a lot of other interesting characters floating around who you could work into the mix on a more permanent basis. Well, mostly Eric Van Der Woodsen, whose not-a-main-cast-member status is inexplicable. But Georgina and Gabriel both have potential in a reformed-villain and/or anti-hero kind of way. Like Hawkeye in the early Avengers, or Venom.

* I’ll give the ’80s flashback/spinoff a try, sure. But god help us was that No Doubt covering “Stand and Deliver”? Fuck that noise. Gwen Stefani isn’t fit to do Marco Pirroni’s make-up.

* I really liked Kiel Phegley’s three suggestions for how to approach Free Comic Book Day as a chance to have fun with friends and family.

* This is a terrific bit from Tom Spurgeon’s post on Drawn & Quarterly’s new Doug Wright collection:

The great thing about cartooning is that sometimes the texture and feel of the way cartoonists approach the form can be as important as the content of the narratives. That’s why, to use a famous example, you can look at an end table drawn by Charles Schulz and feel his entire world through its line.

That’s a crackerjack insight no matter what, but what makes it even better is that before I read the post I just sat and gawked for a bit at the Wright panel Tom chose to illustrate his piece:

I think different kinds of comic geeks geek out in different ways: Lately I geek out by marveling at things like just how goddamn well-drawn that dude’s jeans are. I’ll tell you what, you draw jeans like that and your comics have instantly earned a lot of credit with me.

* Here’s a bizarrely eloquent post on Wolverine by national-security blogger Spencer Ackerman. I’m impressed by the way he unpacks the character as better understood through a series of small personality-based revelations throughout his publishing history than through a comic or movie that purports to be his “origin.” Also, it’s funny to look at Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X through a topical lens. Thank god we stuck with waterboarding and didn’t give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed an adamantium skeleton.

* I did not care for James Turner’s Nil, but I still think it’s an ugly and ominous development when the monopoly distributor of comics to the market system in which the vast majority of comics are purchased opts not to carry a book of obvious seriousness of intent and execution like Turner’s new project Warlord of IO from a publisher of long standing like SLG yet still makes room for Frog Thor busts.

* There’s nothing about Harry Knowles’s post on the Wolverine movie that isn’t totally hilarious at the expense of both Harry Knowles and the Wolverine movie.

* The Viggo Mortensen-starring adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has been pushed back from Oscar season 2008 to Oscar season 2009.

* They’re going to make a Hollywood movie out of Death Note. (Via Dread Central.)

* Artist Ryan Dunlavey reveals his part in one of my favorite things ToyFare magazine ever did: The Bearriors, an ’80s toy line and cartoon series starring anthropomorphized warrior bears…that the magazine invented from whole cloth as a hoax.

* Sea monster porn: a CGI reenactment of Predator X, the most powerful carnivore in the history of the world, in action. (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

* I thought this episode was simultaneously one of the more predictable and well-acted eps this season. On the predictable front, I was pretty sure from the jump that Widmore was Daniel’s dad, and it wasn’t tough to guess that Eloise was grooming Daniel to his death all along in order to set other events in motion. And “predictable” isn’t the right word for this, but the heavy-handed “I’m putting personality-warping pressure on you, my child, because that’s what parents do on this show” scene between Eloise and piano-playing Tiny Daniel was straight outta similar earlier encounters between young Charlie and his parents, young Jack and his dad, young Miles and his mom, young Ben and his dad, young Sun and her dad, young Sayid and his dad, and on and on and on.

* But on the acting front, Jeremy Davies is yet another one of the show’s richly enjoyable performance discoveries, and he’s given more to do here than ever before. I was particularly impressed by the painful way he displayed his post-experiment mental disabilities in the flashbacks. He also made for a convincing long-haired science weirdo in the “guy in Val Kilmer’s closet in Real Genius” mode. His death was well played as well, with a great “I shoulda known” vibe overlaid upon his grief.

* I was also impressed by Elizabeth Mitchell’s work here. Her fatalism ever since the return of the Oceanic, uh, Four has been a lovely note for the show to play, and having all her fears confirmed in this dramatic fashion enabled her to do a lot with it. I love how she can flip an internal switch to make her beatific (okay, and botoxed) face segue from serene to devastated by intensifying the look in her eyes and twitching the edges of that ducklike mouth just so.

* This is down to the writing as well, but I was really grateful for the degree to which Sawyer went out of his way to apologize to her and comfort her. Mitchell and Josh Holloway have real, loving-couple chemistry in addition to the in-story connection between their characters, and I hope the show’s writers realize what a mistake it would be to re-involve them with Jack or Kate again.

* Regarding the central development of the episode as expressed in its title, “The Variable,” I’m of two minds regarding the newly advanced notion that maybe we can change the past. (Well, more or less “newly advanced”–Daniel’s implication in sending Desmond on his mission to find Eloise was that Desmond, at least, is able to operate freely in time, independent from the “whatever happened, happened” constraint.) On the one hand, I think Lost‘s great achievement in dealing with time travel is coming up with such a thematically elegant counter to the time travel paradox.

Back when I first watched The Terminator, it occurred to me that if Skynet sent a terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor, there wouldn’t have been time for adult John Connor to send Kyle Reese back in time to stop the terminator: barring Kyle Reese’s involvement, the terminator would have had no problem killing Sarah, which would have wiped John Connor from the existence, which means he wouldn’t have been able to discover Skynet’s plot and send Kyle back in time hot on the terminator’s heels. Then I was like “Whoa, wait a minute–if that’s how it worked, Skynet would never have needed to send a terminator back in time in the first place, because John Connor would never be born and there’d never be a resistance to send a terminator back in time to prevent.” And this is all without even getting into the idea that John sent Kyle back in time to be his own dad, or that Skynet in essence did the same thing by sending the terminator back in time only to have his design and circuitry inspire the creation of Skynet in the first place. Basically, in order to even have a story to tell with time travel working as it does in the James Cameron Terminator movies, you sorta just have to arbitrarily declare a cut-off point after which you’re not going to worry about the ramifications–you’re just going to tell the story, even though its own events dictate that the story could never be told.

By contrast, Lost argues that whatever time travelers do in the past is fixed. Nothing can change as a result of what they do, because what they do is more accurately described as what they did–by the time they were sent back in time, their actions while time travelling were already 30 years in the past. There’s one timestream, and in it, whatever happened, happened. The elegance comes in how that euphonious bit of sci-fi exposition resonates as philosophy, as a theme for a show that has long concerned itself with questions of fate, destiny, and free will.

So in that light, I’m hesitant to believe that this diktat is going to go out the window, and (as the message board types are theorizing) season six will be some kind of “everything has changed!!!!” Heroes/”Days of Future Past” scenario–not just because the creators have said they wanted to establish firm ground rules for time travel to avoid confusion, but also because it’s such a narratively and thematically satisfying approach.

On the other hand, it’s easy to picture the show wanting to make some kind of point about how we’re free, how we can break out of the roles imposed upon us by cruel fate or sinister puppetmasters or the relentlessness of space-time and change the world for the better. Just because the show hasn’t come out and done that so far–just because it’s been pretty rigorous in refusing to give characters like Jack, Locke, and Desmond an out from their destinies, frequently to their detriment–doesn’t mean it won’t, particularly as the finale nears.

* Okay, enough of that. Now some short but sweet observations:

* Eloise seems a little old compared to Daniel to be his mom, no? I mean, she was at the very least in her late teens in 1954–how old is Daniel supposed to be? I’m sure that Gregg Nations has the dates written down, but it looks weird.

* If, as it seems, Li’l Miles and his mom and Li’l Charlotte and her mom flee in advance of the Incident, does this mean that all the children do so, and does that mean that we’ll finally see Li’l Ben’s doll-making girlfriend Annie again? And would that also mean that the Incident has something to do with the Island’s infertility problem and its inhabitants inability to successfully reproduce afterwards?

* Radzinksy’s a great annoying bad guy. It’s too bad we know he lives to hang out with Inman in the Hatch and then kill himself, because I would like to see someone ice him.

* It sure was nice to see the whole gang get back together even if they immediately broke apart. I’m not quite sure why Hurley wouldn’t have gone with Jack and Kate, though.

* I bought Miles needing to explain the fact that the characters are all currently living in their own present to Hurley, because Hurley’s the audience-indentification character and therefore the writers have to make him stupid. But Jack is a very smart guy, so having him not be able to grasp how their journeys through time work and needing Miles to explain it to him (i.e. to us) rang false.

* There’s probably something else that I’m forgetting. Ah well. Here’s Todd Van Der Werff’s review.

* Here’s a bunch of information on Grant Morrison’s upcoming seven-issue series Multiversity, ripped from the pages of Wizard in what strikes me as a little less than fair-use fashion. There will be a Fawcett issue doing Captain Marvel in an All Star Superman style, a Charlton issue using the original Charlton heroes in lieu of their Watchmen analogues, the whole thing will be one of those “stand-alone issues that introduce a whole new world but interlock to tell a non-linear story” Seven Soldiers deals that will be full of amazing ideas that no one at DC will ever use again, etc. (Via JK Parkin.)

* The film adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood will likely debut on the SciFi/Syfy Channel in the fall. That’s not good. (Via STYD.)

* Tom Devlin talks up Marc Bell’s upcoming 272-page art book Hot Potatoe. I’ll be honest, I’d be a lot more excited about this if there were more comics content and fewer pages 85% comprised of doodled curlicues, but I guess I understand where the money’s at for the guys who straddle the fine-art/comics border. I mean, shit, Shrimpy & Paul and Worn Tuff Elbow were tremendous.

* If I were in Richmond, I’d go to this: Ron Rege Jr. art show opening tomorrow.

* I’m not gonna spoil it by posting both images here, which you really need to do to get the impact, but check out Michaela Colette Zacchilli’s cover version of Jae Lee’s cover for Spider-Man 2099 #36 at Covered. It takes a pretty striking image to begin with and adds an oomph that you can practically feel–made me LOL, it did.

* Speaking of rides on the LOLlercoaster, thank you for this, Eric Reynolds:

* Dirk Deppey caught that Diamond will stop distributing the venerable Classics Illustrated line due to its failure to reach their new minimum order threshold. I think it’s this story more than any other so far that illustrates what Diamond’s policy means for the direct market: In an industry as completely dominated by one genre as is North American comics, imposing a barrier based on sales is effectively synonymous with imposing a barrier based on genre. It’s not just the artsy likes of Crickets that will suffer.

* Tucker Stone interviews Frank Santoro about Cold Heat, sort of. (Via Dirk.)

* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Rainbow of Lantern Corps is 100% pure awesomesauce, as is this pictorial guide to them.

* Quote of the day:

“Or more precisely, why is the belief that the torture of captured combatants is wrong compatible with anything other than some form of pacifism? I mean this an actual question, not as a passive-aggressive assertion.” ~Jim Manzi

One of the things that has kept me from saying much over the last week or so is my sheer amazement that there are people who seriously pose such questions and expect to be answered with something other than expressions of bafflement and moral horror. Something else that has kept me from writing much on this recently is the profoundly dispiriting realization (really, it is just a reminder) that it is torture and aggressive war that today’s mainstream right will go to the wall to defend, while any and every other view can be negotiated, debated, compromised or abandoned. I have started doubting whether people who are openly pro-torture or engaged in the sophistry of Manzi’s post are part of the same moral universe as I am, and I have wondered whether there is even a point in contesting such torture apologia as if they were reasonable arguments deserving of real consideration. Such fundamental assumptions at the core of our civilization should not have to be re-stated or justified anew, and the fact that they have to be is evidence of how deeply corrupted our political life has become, but if such basic norms are not reinforced it seems clear that they will be leeched away over time.

—Daniel Larison

* Oh reunited Goonies, how I loved you. How I daydreamed you would rescue me from bullies when I was in third grade. How I pined for Andy. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Marilyn Loves Kate: still killin’ it.

* Another illustration of the breakneck pace that makes Gossip Girl so satisfying a serialized-narrative experience despite having so much less going on than Lost, let alone your great HBO show of choice: Amount of screentime that passed between learning Gabriel was a double-agent last episode and having Chuck and Blair discover it in this episode? One segment. They didn’t even let a commercial break pass this ep before Blair snapped Gabriel and Poppy canoodling on her cellphone. When they keep things moving at that rate you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.

* Of course that also necessitates hitting certain beats over and over and over again, just because you need something to do. So by the end of the hour I was wondering if Nate and Blair would almost break up in every single episode.

* But back in the plus column, it means that predictable plotlines move along so quickly they don’t have time to get too annoying. It was easy to see that poor, well-meaning, ineffectual Rufus was gonna get rooked by Gabriel and further fuck up Dan’s chances at getting into Yale and his own ability to hang on to his art-gallery dreams, but I imagine all those cards will be on the table before the next episode is halfway over.

* I liked Georgina’s return, which surprised me! I thought they’d play it for too-easy laughs more than they did, but her conversion was treated semi-sincerely, and she actually articulated a rationale for her newfound faith that made sense given what her experiences were. Plus it makes her essentially a new character, and it should be funny to see where she ends up.

* The cast-wide team-up against an archnemesis teased in the promo for next week’s ep must mean we’re getting close to the end of the season, huh?

* What was in that six-pack Dan and Vanessa split that laid them both out like that, grain alcohol?

* Oh, there’s another case in point about the show’s speed: Vanessa coughed up the truth about her Chuckfucking right quick.

* Speaking of Chuck, Ed Westwick had some priceless reaction shots in this episode. I particularly liked when he orchestrated the big Gabriel-Serena-Poppy confrontation, then sat down on the bed to watch the show. But he hasn’t said “I’m Chuck Bass” in a long time, has he? I guess they don’t want to overdo it. He’s the best there is at what he does, but what he does isn’t very nice.

* “Serena getting changed” scenes could fit alongside “Blair wears lingerie” scenes quite nicely. I’m just sayin’. Now we just need to add “Nate and Chuck finally make out” scenes to the mix.

* Just a couple more thoughts about the passing of Bea Arthur: The Golden Girls‘ Dorothy Zbornak is one of the all-time great sitcom characters. Her staunch, iconoclastic personal and political progressivism undercut by her actual lived experience, she was easily embarrassed by her own mistakes and shortcomings but never less than passionately proud of the person she had become–and her potential to become something even more–despite them. Her ability to acknowledge her flaws but power past them made her the perfect foil for Rose’s naivete, Blanch’s narcissism, and Sofia’s provincialism, all of which she parried with her own trademark characteristic: bullshit-deflating sarcasm. As The Missus put it last night while we were discussing Dorothy, “They took the ‘straight-man’ character and made her funny.'” It was a brilliant maneuver brilliantly handled by Arthur, and I don’t think any sitcom has done it as deftly. There’s more value in a single Bea Arthur Golden Girls reaction shot than in entire episodes of How I Met Your Mother. She was the real deal.

* Mark Waid names names (Levitz, Ross, Jemas, Alessi, DiDio) in this uproariously candid interview with AICN. At this point Waid’s been off the reservation so long I’m not sure he remembers where it was, but even so, these kinds of comments still offer the frisson of on-the-record smacktalking in an sub-industry whose professional class rarely indulges in that sort of thing:

The biggest challenge [of working on 52] was actually, wisely, kept from us by Steve [Wacker, the series’ editor]. EIC Dan Didio, who first championed the concept, hated what we were doing. H-A-T-E-D 52. Would storm up and down the halls telling everyone how much he hated it. And Steve, God bless him, kept us out of the loop on that particular drama. [Subsequent editor Michael] Siglain, having less seniority, was less able to do so, and there’s one issue of 52 near the end that was written almost totally by Dan and Keith Giffen because none of the writers could plot it to Dan’s satisfaction. Which was and is his prerogative as EIC, but man, there’s little more demoralizing than taking the ball down to the one-yard line and then being benched by the guy who kept referring to COUNTDOWN as “52 done right.”

Place your bets on which issue that was. I’ve got a hunch myself.

* Related, in some ineffable way: Tom Spurgeon on how the direct market depends on the buying habits of a small group of big spenders whose spending might be getting less big.

* Also vaguely related, by way of contrast: Tom Spurgeon (again) on the 10 Best Long-Running Comics Series of All Time. A tough list to argue with, especially when you factor in his runners-up. Mostly, as always, it’s just a pleasure to read a long post in which Tom holds forth about a variety of different kinds of comics in short order.

* I feel like this is related too, somehow: Dan Nadel mulls over the life and career of Rocketeer creator and Bettie Page cultural archaeologist Dave Stevens. Dan’s read of Stevens’s aborted autobiography-cum-art book is that Stevens died disappointed that his output failed to live up to his ambitions; Dan then argues that those ambitions were inherently proscribed by Stevens’s own artistic and aesthetic self-limitations, primarily driven by nostalgia for an outmoded illustration tradition, and further, that those limitations were ignored and their ramifications actively celebrated by Stevens’s subcultural fellow travelers. It’s a depressing series of thoughts. But you know what? I still see it playing out today. Creators who act as though they know better continue to play squarely within the aesthetic and financial playing field of the direct market’s clients, despite any number of other options available at this point in the medium’s history. And new order cutoffs be damned, Previews will still be crammed full of work by writers and artists who you just wish would take their brains and think bigger thoughts with them.

* Also also related: Chris Butcher liveblogs the April Previews. Headscratching and hilarity ensues.

* The final vaguely related link: Curt Purcells reviews Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics from the perspective of someone who enjoys reading comics but finds himself so baffled by their current state that he can’t honestly refer to himself as a fan.

* Monster Brains previews Johnny Ryan’s upcoming non-stop-action comic Prison Pit.

* They’re remaking Videodrome. Oddly, I’m…kind of intrigued by the prospect of a thoroughly Hollywoodized versions of David Cronenberg’s orificetravaganza. The world could use a little more high-gloss perversion.

* Robert Rodriguez talks to AICN about the Predator sequel he’s allegedly producing, Predators. I’ll believe it when I see it, as I say. I hope it contains the words “get to the chopper” in some configuration if and when it gets made.

* Jason Adams celebrates the swine flu pandemic as only someone with an extensive knowledge of postapocalyptic movies and a great love of screencaps can.

* Finally, a very happy birthday to TheOneRing.net, an amazing 10 years old today. That’s an uncountably long time in Internet years. And gosh, I actually remember checking the site out back when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were first announced in 1999, from the computer lab on Old Campus where I had to go to use the Internet because our ramshackle off-campus house didn’t have it. TORn was a trailblazer for franchise-specific fansites, becoming a genuine industry powerhouse as far as all things Rings are concerned without ever devolving into attention-whoring or the meanspirited aspects of fandom in the process. I’m grateful for it and wish them 10 more years of success.

Art by Matt Wiegle, color by the illustrious Rickey Purdin. Original comic here. Thanks, Rickey!

Dorothy just wrecked shop over and over again. Man she was wonderful on this show. I’m really sad she’s gone.