* STC news: I have a piece teasing developments in The Stand: American Nightmares, the second arc of Marvel’s big Stephen King adaptation, at Marvel.com.

* I think my favorite reaction to Bowie Loves Beyoncé thus far is Kiel Phegley’s: “Sean, you are going to cause such a disparate group of people to masturbate with this blog.” Here’s hopin’.

(via Loving the Alien: Never before seen pictures of David Bowie)

* They might make a Battlestar Galactica movie that has nothing to do with the Battlestar Galactica series? That is maybe the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

* Speaking of Kiel, he spoke to Bill Sienkiewicz four years ago, and the results have never been seen…until now!

* Vice speaks with Sammy Harkham, Jaime Hernandez, Dan Clowes, Rick Altergott, Johnny Ryan, Matt Furie, and Matthew Thurber about Kramers Ergot 7. In the interview, Clowes reveals he recently had open-heart surgery. Did everyone know this? Sheesh. I’m glad he’s still alive.

* CRwM wonders what we talk about when we talk about Friday the 13th.

* Stacie Ponder presents a quick and dirty guide to POV horror.

* Andrew Sullivan discusses kinder, gentler torture.

* Ain’t nothin’ wrong with Jeffrey Brown drawing Wolverine.

* Finally, I’m putting it at the bottom here so you can avoid LOST SPOILERS if you need to: Todd Van Der Werff does his weekly Lost review thing. It’s interesting to hear his complaints about making Jack the focal character of the episode where the Oceanic Six Five return to the Island: He argues that since Jack has been dead-set in favor of this since the Season Three finale, it leeches some of the drama from the proceedings. But I think that centering the episode on someone who’s completely resigned to returning to the Island, to accepting his fate, is what helped give the episode an appealingly fatalistic air. I think it was a part of that weird, engrossing tonal dissonance I discussed; and though I still don’t swallow the idea that he’d ignore the disappearance of Aaron to get his bone on with Kate (I buy Kate using sex to forget, but Jack had nothing to forget yet!), I definitely recognized and appreciated the grim contentment of their breakfast conversation the next morning as the demeanor of people who’ve just accepted something awful. Focus this episode on someone else and you may have lost that very effective bit.

http://bowielovesbeyonce.tumblr.com

“Nick,” she said, and smiled. She clasped one of his hands in both of hers. “I wanted to thank you again. No one wants to die all alone, do they?”

He shook his head violently, and she understood that this was not in agreement with her statement but rather in vehement contradiction of its premise.

“Yes I am,” she contradicted. “But never mind. There’s a dress in that closet, Nick. A white one. You’ll know it because of…” A fit of coughing interrupted her. When she had it under control, she finished, “…because of the lace. It’s the one I wore on the train when we left for our honeymoon. It still fits…or did. I suppose it will be a little big on me now–I’ve lost some weight–but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always loved that dress. John and I went to Lanke Pontchartrain. It was the happiest two weeks of my life. John always made me happy. Will you remember the dress, Nick? It’s the one I want to be buried in. You wouldn’t be too embarrassed to…to dress me, would you?”

He swallowed hard and shook his head, looking at the coverlet. She must have sensed his mixture of sadness and discomfort, because she didn’t mention the dress again. She talked of other things instead–lightly, almost coquettishly. How she had won an elocution contest in high school, had gone on to the Arkansas state finals, and how her half-slip had fallen down and puddled around her shoes just as she reached the ringing climax of Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover.” About her sister, who had gone to Viet Nam as part of a Baptist mission group, and had come back with not one or two but three adopted children. About a camping trip she and John had taken three years ago, and how an ill-tempered moose in rut had forced them up a tree and kept them there all day.

“So we sat up there and spooned,” she said sleepily, “like a couple of high school kids in a balcony. My goodness, he was in a state when we got down. He was…we were…in love…very much in love…love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought…it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down…bring them low…and make them crawl…we were…so much in love…”

She drowsed off and slept until he wakened her into fresh delirium by moving a curtain or perhaps just by treading on a squeaky board.

“John!” she screamed now, her voice choked with phlegm. “Oh, John, I’ll never get the hang of this dad-ratted stick shift! John, you got to help me! You got to help me…”

Her words trailed off in a long, rattling exhalation he could not hear but sensed all the same. A thin trickle of dark blood issued from one nostril. She fell back on the pillow, and her head snapped back and forth once, twice, there times, as if she had made some kind of vital decision and the answer was negative.

Then she was still.

–Stephen King, The Stand

SPOILERS ON THE MARCH

* The one-two punch of 9/11 and The DaVinci Code really did a number on my longstanding love of arcane conspiracy-theory stuff, but apparently that was nothing a crazy old British lady using a Foucault’s Pendulum to find a hidden magic island in a secret chamber beneath a church decorated with a painting of Doubting Thomas couldn’t fix.

* Speaking of: must be the season of the infodump.

* Recreating the opening of the pilot episode reminded me how brilliant the opening of the pilot episode was. I remember going to a screening of that thing at the San Diego Comic Con simply because Dominic Monaghan was going to be there and The Missus had a crush on him–we had no idea what to expect, and frankly we weren’t expecting much. (“From the creator of Alias“–whoopedy-dee). Then bam, a handsome man in a suit wakes up in the jungle, with no clue where he was or how he got there (at least at first). That, of course, is exactly how the audience felt. Sucked in from the get-go.

* Why do they keep having characters ask Ben questions? Nine times out of ten, he’s lying, as the show itself pointed out tonight. It’s not just a problem for his fellow characters, it’s a problem for the viewers, since every thirty-second q&a with Ben is a total waste of time beyond the “it’s fun to watch Michael Emerson act” factor (which I admit is pretty high).

* There’s something about this episode I can’t quite put my finger on, something about the pacing. I want to say…the pacing felt like a series premiere, but the the material felt like a season finale? Like, it was slightly laconic, easing you into what was going on the way an introductory episode was, but everything that was happening had been built up to for a couple years now the way a finale would be? It was an odd viewing experience. I liked it.

* Interesting color scheme at times, too–unusual for Lost. I really liked that blue light on Jack’s face in the airport bar, for example.

* There was something profoundly fucked up about all of these people, except Desmond, risking the lives of everyone else on that plane in order to save them and their friends, or give their lives a sense of purpose, or whatever. (Hurley at least tried, but dude, the stewardesses are fucked regardless. And Jack, seems like you asked about the other people on the plane a wee bit too late, considering you were already in the air, dickhead.) There’s two ways of looking at this, I suppose: One is that the writers ignored this and want you to ignore it too, except in the very broad “Hurley is good because he cares, Ben is bad because he doesn’t, Jack is basically good but kind of a dick because he only sort of cares” strokes they painted it with. The other is that the writers know it and want you to know it too, that they want to convey that all these people are profoundly damaged and selfish.

* Well, how about this, the show coughs up some mysteries we’ll have to learn about in flashbacks, Season One style! How did Hurley find out about the flight, why was Sayid under arrest, what happened to Ben down by the docks (okay, that one’s not so big a mystery, but they’ll still need to fill in the gap), what happened to Aaron, etc. I dig it.

* I also dig Evangeline Lily’s tore-up-from-the-floor-up performance in this episode. I definitely believed that whatever happened to her and Aaron was rough. That big open-mouthed kiss was sexy, too, though I kind of think the unexplained disappearance of a child would be a mood-killer for me.

* It’s a little wonky to cook up all this pseudoscience with electromagnetism and equations on the one hand, then insist upon something as manifestly unscientific as “recreating the conditions of the original trip to the Island” just by assembling five of the flight’s original 128 passengers, plus a dead guy in another dead guy’s shoes.

* Seems like the “next week on Lost” blew a little too much information, no? Too much for my tastes anyway.

* Also seems like we’re getting some new cast members in the form of Sayid’s handler and “my condolences” guy.

* I don’t care how easy it was to see Frank Lapidus’s return coming, it still put a mile-wide grin on my face.

* Indeed, I found myself chuckling throughout the episode, in honor of a job well done.

…I generally believe that hate and vitriol should be reserved for people who deliberately try to do you harm, not people who try and sometimes fail to entertain you.

—Mark Waid

* STC news: Marvel is reviving its What The–?! title as a series of animated action-figure parodies, and I’m going to be helping to write it. But the main man in charge is the great animator and bon vivant Alex Kropinak, who I believe is the sole responsible party for the video below. The way he makes the “Bruce” non sequitur work for him is just killer.

* I’ve been known to blog about a variety of real-world horror-related topics, from cryptozoology to serial killers. Here are some updates from two of the least pleasant real-world horror subcategories.

* The state of the beast: I can’t decide which passage from this report about the chimpanzee who killed a friend of his owner before being shot to death by police is the more horrifying and heartbreaking–this one…

After a few minutes, the dispatcher asked if the chimp was still with Herold’s friend.

“He’s eating her,” Herold said.

…or this one…

At first, officers did not see the animal, Conklin said. The chimp returned and tried to get into one of the officer’s vehicles. The officer shot him several times at 2-foot range, and all of the shots landed in the animal’s upper torso, Larrabee said. One of its teeth was found near the car.

The wounded chimp fled, and police followed a blood trail to the rear of the house, where the animal had returned to its living quarters and died.

Via Bryan Alexander, who notes that the original link hosts an audio file of the 911 call from which its quotes are taken and which I can’t bear to listen to.

* Real-life torture porn: Army Spc. Brandon Neely offers first-hand testimony regarding prisoner abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan respond to this Charlie Savage New York Times piece on disturbing areas of continuity between Bush and Obama policies regarding the rights of detainees. Both argue against taking the most absolute pessimistic stance regarding the Obama administration’s actions thus far—I’ve learned first-hand that in some cases such pessimism stems from “nyah nyah told you so” agitation by the pro-torture right (in whose case it’s actually optimism), or by “nothing changes” cynics, or by go-along-to-get-along “centrist” D.C. CW mavens who perhaps believe that Obama’s acquiescence in these matters will lessen their own implication in their original Bush-era implementation—but they forcefully encourage vigilance rather than blind trust regarding such issues as rendition, indefinite detention, and state secrets.

* I think people who are upset at how goofy several of the recently released Watchmen clips look and sound are forgetting the fact that there’s a lot of goofy-looking and goofy-sounding shit in the original comic. That was sort of the point, in part. The question is whether Zack Snyder is onto that, or whether he’s bought into the SUPERHEROES IS SERIOUS BUSINESS mentality of the modern fanboy and is blissfully unaware of his own goofiness. U-DECIDE! Click the link for the footage, and keep in mind I’m the guy who defended The Spirit (but still hasn’t seen it–screw you, Loews).

* Speaking of Watchmen, there’s going to be a 3 hour 10 minute DVD director’s cut, which will include 44 minutes of scenes that didn’t make the theatrical cut, 15 minutes of the Tales of the Black Freighter cartoon, and 1 hour 12 minutes of slow motion.

* Tori Amos’s lamely titled upcoming album inspired my pal and ADDTF comment-thread regular Shaggy to create an obviously Photoshopped gag cover that duped Perez Hilton! I love the internet.

* Lord of the Rings cakes! Almost literally unbelievable. (Hat tip: The Missus.)

* Finally: Do you want to see more pictures of Kate Winslet? Sure, we all do!

Via the utterly indispensable Marilyn Loves Kate. If only someone would launch a Bowie Loves Beyoncé blog, I’d never turn my computer off. (Actually, you know what? Stay tuned.)

* It’s been a while!

* Fantagraphics is having a big clearance and closeout sale, and I insist that you purchase Dave Cooper’s outstanding, largely forgotten, and probably last-ever graphic novel Ripple for 1/3rd off cover price.

* All-time ADDTF hero Clive Barker is making the interview rounds big-time in support of today’s DVD release of the still-unseen-by-me Midnight Meat Train. Here’s a long one at Shock Till You Drop, another long one at Dread Central, and a slightly shorter but still interesting one at Fearnet.

* Chris Butcher, Tom Spurgeon, Brian Hibbs, and Tom Spurgeon again react to the news that monopoly direct-market comics distributor Diamond is permanently delisting about 1000 manga volumes from their Previews catalog as part of their recently announced cutbacks of low-selling items. The reason I don’t talk about business issues much anymore is because I am manifestly unqualified to do so, but I just can’t imagine how cutting off 1000 items from North America’s biggest comics publisher from a market entirely in thrall to such decisions is good for the long-term health of the industry. I think Tom raises an important point when he says that the way Diamond is sort of dropping these bombshells out there with little or no explanation of the thought process behind them, leaving it up to interested third parties to explain/excuse/defend these moves, is a strange way to go about making decisions that could effect the shape of the Direct Market forever.

* The cast of Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, which already included Sly, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, and Jason Statham, now includes Eric Roberts…and Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is already the greatest movie ever made. Better than Crank, even.

* Michael Kupperman blogs! Look for previews of future Tales Designed to Thrizzle, deleted scenes from Cheers featuring Tobin Bell as SAW, and more.

* Kiel Phegley interviews Sammy Harkham about Kramers Ergot 7. It’s the full transcript of the interview that he conducted for his piece naming KE7 Wizard’s Indie of the Year.

* Josiah Leighton got a review of the Pierre Bonnard show at the Met in his NYCC con report! No, he got an NYCC con report in his review of the Pierre Bonnard show at the Met!

* The Gold In Us is back, pointing out the internal continuity of Grant Morrison’s many DC comics. I’d wondered about those little JLAers myself.

* Dave Ortega talks to Dave Kiersh, a longtime ADDTF fave and faithful chronicler of the teenage wasteland, about his books Dirtbags, Mallchicks & Motorbikes, Never Land, and more, and I really just love a lot of what he says. Honestly, this sounds like I wrote it:

Well, I’m not so much a poetry reader in the traditional sense. I do however enjoy music, of course, which is closely related. My early comics were much shorter and with them, I was more concerned with conveying an emotion; story was not so important to me. Even with my longer stories, I have no aspiration for writing a sort of literary graphic novel. When I think of rock and roll songs I like, sometimes they tell a story. But more often what makes them memorable is that they possess a sort of compact nostalgic thrill. Just like an album has a theme that ties songs together, I wanted to create a book of short stories tied together with a common purpose. That’s what works for me now, rather than to write a long novel. It’s like asking a rock musician to write a song that is an hour long. In that way, it doesn’t make sense for me to make a 100 page novel. It has to be interesting for the reader and in doing so avoid repetition. My new book is five short stories not directly related to one another, but you could also view it as one story through the separate characters….For me, a picture story has to have this perfect balance balance between word and picture: that’s what keeps a child’s interest. I’m not exactly sure what keeps an adult’s interest but its similar to music; how I interpret music. Not like Classical music but like Rock and Roll… something that hits you immediately and hopefully sticks with you.

Yes yes yes yes yes.

* Curt Purcell reviews Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! Not only does he pull some of my favorite images from the book to illustrate the review, but he also articulates something I hadn’t been able to put my finger on, which is that the repetition in some of the images is almost evocative of mental illness.

* ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman’s review of the uncut-edition Friday the 13th DVD doubles as a brief and informative history lesson about the movie and its context in the slasher tradition.

* In another of his terrific posts on (mostly) ’90s superhero comics, Tim O’Neil explains DC and Marvel’s contrasting approaches to character retcons.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch reviews Ed Brubaker & Sean Philips’ Incognito. He feels that the series so far lacks a certain emotional heft that the pair’s previous hardboiled collaborations Sleeper and Criminal had. My feeling is that it’s just gonna take some time to get there since you’re dealing with bastards, but he’s not wrong for the moment.

* I think Beavis and Butt-Head is truly brilliant and just as funny now as it was when I was Beavis and Butt-Head’s age, so seeing a lengthy, thoughtful review of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America by Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Katherine Follett was a real treat. Set your TiVos.

* Chris Butcher and friends (I think?) review Naoki Urasawa’s Monster now that it’s all over and done with. Chris says the review’s spoilery and I’m not even close to having read the whole thing so I’m just bookmarking it for the future, but if you’ve gone through the whole thing, by all means check it out.

* Of all the things to rip off from Alex Ross, you go with the sourceless white glow???

* Odd blogospheric convergence of the day: Andrew Sullivan reads the, oh, let’s call them tea leaves regarding Michael Phelps, millennials, and marijuana through a viewing of the Friday the 13th remake.

* Helena Christensen and Ed Westwick—Gossip Girl‘s Chuck Bass—in a photo shoot inspired by The Graduate? Sure, I’ll eat it.

Delicious. (Hat tip: The Missus.)

* Nine Inch Nails touring—and recording?—with the original line-up of Jane’s Addiction as a farewell to the live incarnation of the NIN brand? Sure, I’ll eat it—and come back for seconds! In all seriousness, whatever became of the NIN/Jane’s style of dark, sexual, vaguely sinister, yet still both extremely thoughtful and hook-oriented school of alternative rock?

* Finally, Frank Santoro is a shy and retiring guy.

Ween – Push Th’ Little Daisies Music Video

Girls in floral-print sundresses and chokers…oh, the early ’90s, how I miss you.

Fans of my David Bowie sketchbook galleries would be well advised to check out my introductory post at the Savage Critics.

* Now it can be told: I’ve joined the Savage Critics! I’m part of a wave of new members that includes Tucker Stone, Dick Hyacinth, David Uzumeri, and Chris Eckert. Should be a pip. Thanks to Brian Hibbs for the opportunity!

* ShockTillYouDrop.com has been speaking to Clive Barker about Hellraiser remake helmer Pascal “Martyrs” Laugier, potential Pinhead redesigns, abandoned plans for a Midnight Meat Train film trilogy, a Hellraiser spanking the censors didn’t want you to see, and more.

* Josh Cotter: killin’ it.

SPOILERS SPOILERS

* Infodump! I thought it was pretty elegantly done for all that, though, because they couched it in compelling material. With Ellen, you had her panic and confusion and desperation upon waking up in the Cylon ship, rapidly replaced by an entirely new personality for that character–the real personality for that character, as it turns out. The frisson of this material, plus getting to see her duke it out intellectually with that candy-colored clown they call the sandman, Dean Stockwell, gave her and Cavil’s part of the infodump some real charge.

* It did feel a bit like Anders’s gunshot-driven revelations could have been better conveyed over a longer period of time, or visually rather than verbally. But I also understand what the show’s temporal and financial limitations are at this point, and once they waited this long their choices were few. As I’ve said a million times, I’m here for the human drama more than I’m here for some complex mythology–after all, when you start watching BSG, the complex mythology doesn’t even exist!–so all things considered I’m really glad they’ve spent this half-season dealing with things like the coup than with mysterious flashbacks to the earth-Cylons’ past or what have you. In a way, they tried to bridge that gap in the Anders segments, having his revelations come as a direct result of the wounds he incurred during the coup, and making the main conflict in his half of the episode be “Starbuck and the Cylons want to find out what the hell’s going on” vs. “Starbuck wants to help the man she loves.” Heh, that’s the main schism of Battlestar Galactica fandom in a nutshell!

* I think the best sign of the success of the infodumps here is that my two favorite BSG bloggers, Todd VanDerWerff and Jim Henley, each preferred a different one of the two approaches.

* VanDerWerff also accurately notes that we fans have wanted to know this information for so long that his episode had a lot of goodwill to coast on in order to reach its goal. Even though the mythology isn’t necessarily my thing, I can certainly confirm that–I was just so excited to hear the story come together in a way that made sense and had some emotional and thematic heft to it that they practically could have gotten away with having a character sit in front of the camera reading it from a book.

* Part of me is a little iffy about the idea that the Cylon nuclear holocaust wasn’t really all the humans’ fault in that they built the Cylons. I know you can trace it back thousands of years or whatever, but I’m with Tigh–the Five Cylons are to blame for the depredations of the Seven Known Models at least as much as humankind is, and I’m bummed about that. You lose some of that Frankenstein’s monster mojo if that’s the case.

* The rot in the bones of the Galactica is maybe the show’s most obvious metaphor to date, but this is the time in the series for obvious metaphors as far as I’m concerned.

SPOILER SECURITY DEVICE

* This has already come up this season, but it bears repeating: It’s a lot tougher for the show to do “shapeless dread” now that we’ve met all the Others, and gotten a good look at the Smoke Monster, and learned that the Dharma Initiative was ultimately a bit on the ineffectual side, and discovered that it’s all part of some great game between Ben Linus and a British tycoon, and so on and so forth, than it was back in Season One when you had no idea what the fuck was going on. So this episode was an all-out effort to, in the words of “The Battle of Evermore,” bring it back. Smoke monster attacks, crazy Rousseau, “the sickness” turning out not to be the time-travel aneurysms at all, brainwashed Frenchmen, Christian/Jacob, the freaking Temple at long last, “This place is death!“…the aim was to freak you out with mystery and terror. It worked pretty well. It still wasn’t as scary as the show used to be (remember the hieroglyphics on the countdown clock, or when the pilot got snatched out of the plane, or “we’re gonna have to take the boy,” or “help…me…”)?–but maybe we’ll get there this season if and when Jacob starts playing a bigger role.

* In the latest of his unceasingly excellent weekly Lost reviews, Todd VanDerWerff points out that the absence of flashbacks and flashforwards removes some of the intra-episode narrative coherence from how the show tells its story. Instead of having a subplot with a beginning, middle, and ending within the hour even as the larger Island plot rolls on, now it’s all plot, which (as I said of the premiere) gives the episodes a slightly overstuffed feel at times. But the pace is so breakneck, and the movement toward a destination seemingly so assured, that it’s still really satisfying, I think.

* Gory, wasn’t it? Bone shards, fly-ridden corpses, dismembered arms–it was the Geoff Johns episode of Lost. Good for them! Lost at its best is full of pulp thrills.

* This is probably an awful thing to say, but I never found Rebecca “Charlotte” Mader attractive until she went nuts and started dying. Those crazy-eyes! Hubba hubba.

* You know what? I think that’s an okay thing to say. The attractiveness of its leads is a big part of Lost’s appeal, and not just for dudes–it’s the one show I can think of where female fans seem to be randier for the male cast than male fans are for the female cast. But seriously: Evangeline Lily, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emilie De Ravin, Maggie Grace, Yunjin Kim, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Watros, Sonya Walger? Damn. See what I mean? Pulp thrills.

* I chuckled at how in-your-face that cliffhanger ending was.

* Cold Heat has a blog? And Frank Santoro and BJ are doing something in Mome? Hot cha!

* So, looks like They might have approached the Wachowski Brothers about directing a Superman reboot trilogy. I can’t imagine that Warner Bros. is in a “let’s put a franchise in the hands of the Wachwoskis” mood after Speed Racer and The Matrix Revolutions, so in general I echo Rob Bricken’s call for calm, but for now I’ll play along because there’s a possibility this could end up being really cool. Speed Racer would be a terrific direction for a more science-fiction/fighting with Brainiac, Bizarro, and Darkseid Superman movie to go in visually, while the aerial battle between Neo and Smith at the end of the third Matrix flick was already the best Superman fight scene ever filmed.

* David Cronenberg directing Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in a Robert Ludlum adaptation? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* The Descent 2 trailer was up but is no longer. Oh well.

* I liked Dash Shaw’s Best Comics of 2008 list.

* Speaking of Dash, he’s finished Body World, which gives me a decent excuse to read it from start to finish.

* Something about this sentence cracked me up: “Like so many bloggers, I was a big fan of Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s 2004 series Street Angel.” Like so many bloggers and so few readers, alas. But it was a great comic and the short live-action film version of it looks pretty great.

* Eve Tushnet waxes enthusiastic about the Brian Michael Bendis/Michael Gaydos Alias reunion.

* Bruce Campbell says no to Evil Dead IV. This comes several years after I said no to Evil Dead IV.

* Finally, like everyone else on the comics Internet, I bow before the almighty majesty of Alvin Buenaventura’s star-studded Angouleme Festival flickr set.

Seeing R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and Dan Clowes in the same picture makes my Bowie sketchbook ache. (Can you imagine how Crumb would react if I asked him for a drawing of Ziggy Stardust?)

* This sort of thing tickles me pink: Political bloggers Jonah Goldberg, Robert Farley, Spencer Ackerman, Robert Farley again, and Matthew Yglesias discuss recent developments in the world of Battlestar Galactica. There’s something really funny about people who normally write about the Middle East policy or the stimulus package addressing in-world politics like dudes in the Android’s Dungeon on New Comics Day arguing over whether or not Wolverine would really say that. The second Farley post in particular is gloriously nerdy in that regard. Also, this reminds me that I have a theory regarding the changes in behavior amongst the Cylons that I need to explore here on the blog at some point.

* For me, the appeal of a second Hobbit movie that fleshes out the stuff going on off-page during and after Bilbo Baggins’s journey There and Back Again centered largely on the image of the White Council–Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast, Galadriel, Celeborn, Elrond, and Cirdan, if I’m not mistaken–pulling a Magnificent Seven and kicking Sauron (then still known as the Necromancer) out of his Mirkwood stronghold, Dol Guldur, which is what Gandalf was busy doing for much of the time Bilbo and the Dwarves were mucking about with the Elves, the Lakemen, and Smaug iirc. With that in mind it’s a bummer to hear Christopher “Saruman” Lee say that his advanced age would probably prevent him from traveling to New Zealand to take part in the filming, should his character be required. I’m sure he’d like to portray Saruman’s last act of benevolence just as much as I’d like to see him do so. Still, maybe they could film him in London, as the interviewer suggests? (Via The One Ring.)

* Hey, it’s the teaser trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Yay, war crimes! (Via AICN.)

* Kiel Phegley talks to Ed Brubaker about that “Marvels Project” thing I mentioned the other day. Sounds like Bru and artist Steve Epting will more or less be doing exactly what they did with Captain America, only telling the full story of Cap and the Invaders back in the past. Sign me up.

* Becky Cloonan says that Tokyopop is more or less sitting on East Coast Rising Vol. 2. Travesty.

* Eric Reynolds laments Reed’s move to make Book Expo America a permanent NYC fixture, since that’s hella inconvenient and expensive for non-NYC-based (read: non-corporate) publishers.

* Back when I was at Wizard, one of my favorite tasks was helping to assemble a publication called PosterMania, which was nothing more or less than a collection of pullout poster versions of various covers and occasionally splash pages from various publishers. Comic Books! is essentially the exact same thing in tumblr form. Its taste and mine don’t line up perfectly, and it’s virtually all Big Two stuff, but frankly there are a lot of cool covers from those companies around, so this was quite a find for me. I’d imagine there are plenty of people reading this blog who would be perfectly happy if there only interaction with these properties were things like this Mark Chiarello Two-Face: Year One cover, for example. (Via Sean B.)

* Ladies and gentlemen, in honor of his uncredited cameo as General Zod in this week’s Pablo Raimondi-illustrated issue of Action Comics, a young Ian McShane. Break open the fuckin’ canned peaches indeed.

* Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman follow up on disturbing recent moves by the Obama administration regarding state secrets & extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention respectively.

* Finally, I support this idea of Heidi MacDonald’s:

* Fist bumping should replace handshakes as the official con greeting to slow spread of Con SARS.

* Austin English interviews Theo Ellsworth, author of Capacity, one of the very best comics of 2008. Dude draws 10-13 hours a day!

* Todd VanDerWerrf’s latest Battlestar Galactica review is must reading as always.

* Chris Butcher adds a little bit to his earlier thoughts on Diamond raising its order minimums, mainly regarding the notion that a cratering market forced Diamond’s hand on the move.

* Rickey Purdin presents a con report featuring pix of sketches, loot, panels, thank-yous, the usual fun con-report stuff.

* They’re fucking arresting people in the Michael Phelps “case.” This is Drug War madness at its absolute maddest. Arresting eight people because the greatest Olympic athlete of all time hit a bong! I guess he’s a huge threat to society, huh? At any rate, pleasure must be prosecuted at all costs. Fucking Anti-Life. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Finally, videogame characters that look like David Bowie. (Hat tip: Ryan “Agent M” Penagos.)