* My San Diego Comic-Con articles for CBR are still rolling out. First of all I want to make extra-sure that everyone sees that I interviewed Matt Furie, creator of the hilarious Boy’s Club, which my wife and I are now quoting in every other conversation. (“That would be a yes.”) Second, here’s my report from Entertainment Weekly’s Comics Visionaries panel, featuring Grant Morrison, Colleen Doran, Robert Kirkman, Mike Mignola, Matt Fraction, John Cassaday, and Jim Lee.

* Everyone’s saying they’re sick of hearing about the San Diego Comic-Con, but for pete’s sake, why? Is reading a blog post really that arduous an ordeal? You can turn the computer off, you know. Have Bloglines mark your RSS feeds as read, I dunno. There are in fact a lot of interesting things to say about San Diego and what went on there and what was announced there, and Tom Spurgeon’s con report covers most of them.

* I’m still doing a little catching up with news that broke right before San Diego. One such announcement is that MTV is remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Listen, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I met my wife because we were the only two people at a wedding reception who knew how to do “The Time Warp,” so I feel pretty strongly about this film. I played Brad twice and MC’d when Yale finally revived Devil’s Night showings of the movie. The two years me and the other people responsible for bringing it back it was in the top ten most well-attended campuswide events at the whole school I think, and it was also completely wild – they let people into the dining hall where we did it with booze and drugs, heck, they let us onto the stage with booze and drugs, everyone dressed up and/or stripped down, it was truly bacchanalian and awesome and in tune with the spirit of the movie. Moreover, after I discovered Bowie and glam, I’ve been listening to Richard O’Brien’s excellent soundtrack with fresh ears, and that music’s terrific. Finally, there’s really no way around it, Tim Curry Is God. So a big part of me is like “fuck MTV, they ruin life, and fuck remaking Rocky Horror no matter who you are.” At the same time, however, that movie was genuinely liberating for me and countless other nerds and freaks and outcasts, and maybe updating it for a new generation wouldn’t be so horrible if that message remains intact. Then again, with its increasingly horrifying reality shows, MTV has truly given hedonism a bad name–there’s nothing subversive about a bunch of drunk people making out in hot tubs, it’s actually maybe one of the squarest things you could possibly do at this point–and I don’t trust them to get this right, like, at all. If they must do it, however, I suggest they follow my wife’s casting ideas and have Zac Efron and Ashley Tisdale play Brad and Janet.

* Another pre-San Diego item: the trailer for Caprica. It looks pretty and emotional, and my hope is that starting a new series will help the Battlestar Galactica franchise refocus on ideas and emotions rather than continuity and mysteries.

* I like seeing big sites use their clout to do something other than talk about the newesthippestlatest releases, so I appreciate this interview with Frank Darabont by AICN’s Mr. Beaks, the topic of which is the simply the ending of The Mist. Because this is where we’re at as genre critics, potential political metaphors are discussed, but don’t let that stop you from reading it–there’s some stuff I had never thought of in there about how the ending was an obstacle for getting funding for the film.

*I’m kind of irritated by Rich Juzwiak’s ability to blog entertainingly about everything from R&B to America’s Next Top Model to Cannibal Holocaust. He’s done a few horror-related posts lately. First up, here’s a spoilery, animated-gif-heavy tribute to Neil Marshall’s wondrous post-apocalyptic hodgepodge Doomsday. And because I know you want it:

NOTE: This depiction of animal cruelty is okay because it’s obviously fake and stupid.

* Next, Rich did a round-up of some of the landmark films in the “POV horror” subgenre—Cannibal Holocaust, The Blair Witch Project, [REC], Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and The Butcher. By the way, fuck Cannibal Holocaust. Torturing animals to death in real life? No, no, no, no, no, sir, fuck YOU.

* Finally, as a horror-centric sequel to his awe-inspiring “I’m not here to make friends” reality TV montage, Rich gives you “Put down the camera.”

* Finally, Curt Purcell takes an in-depth look at artist Jose Gonzalez’s really lovely Vampirella art. Seriously!

From the STC inbox:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

BALLANTINE BOOKS TO PUBLISH BOOK INSPIRED BY THE WEBCOMIC GARFIELD MINUS GARFIELD

Collection to be published simultaneously with Garfield 30th anniversary book

NEW YORK, NY – July 30, 2008 – Paws, Inc. and Ballantine Books, a division of the Random House Publishing Group, announced last week at Comic-Con International that Ballantine will publish a book inspired by the popular webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield.

Garfield Minus Garfield (www.garfieldminusgarfield.net) made its online debut in February 2008 and quickly became an online sensation based on a simple premise: What would Jim Davis’ Garfield comic strip be like without its lasagna-loving fat cat? Without the presence of Garfield and other characters such as Odie the dog and Nermal the kitten, the strips “create a new, even lonelier atmosphere for Jon Arbuckle…Jon’s observations seem to teeter between existential crisis and deep despair.” (New York Times)

The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison. Dublin, Ireland-based Garfield Minus Garfield creator Dan Walsh will provide the foreword to the book.

Garfield creator Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. “I think it’s an inspired thing to do,” Davis said. “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.”

Garfield Minus Garfield site creator Dan Walsh says, “When I looked at Jon and laughed at his crazy antics I thought ‘He’s just like me.’ As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one saw myself in him: millions of visitors from all over the world visit Garfield Minus Garfield and tell me they think the same thing. Now, thanks to the awesome generosity and humor of Jim Davis, Garfield Minus Garfield is going to become a book and I’m absolutely honored to be part of it.”

Ballantine Books has been publishing Garfield books since 1980, and thirty-three Garfield titles have made the New York Times bestseller list. Thirty Years of Laughs and Lasagna: The Life and Times of a Fat, Furry Legend, will be published by Ballantine Books in October 2008. This hardcover anniversary collection will include a foreword from Dean Young, Blondie cartoonist, and exclusive content from Jim Davis.

ABOUT PAWS INC.

Paws, Incorporated was founded in 1981 by cartoonist Jim Davis as a creative house to support Garfield licensing. Today, the company, located in rural Indiana, handles not only the creative angle, but also the business concerns of the corpulent kitty worldwide. Paws boasts a staff of more than 50 artists, writers, and licensing professionals.

Paws, Inc. is a privately held company and the sole owner of the copyrights and trademarks for GARFIELD and GARFIELD Characters.

ABOUT BALLANTINE BOOKS:

Ballantine Books was established in l952 by the legendary paperback pioneers Ian and Betty Ballantine. Today, Ballantine is one of America’s largest publishers of hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback books — spanning a remarkably wide variety of subjects. Publishing talented writers from every category and genre, its hardcover program is particularly strong in commercial fiction. Its impressive list of bestselling authors includes Suzanne Brockmann, Julie Garwood, Tess Gerritsen, Kristin Hannah, Linda Howard, Jonathan Kellerman, Lorna Landvik, Judith McNaught, Anne Perry, and Jeff Shaara. Visit the Ballantine website at www.ballantinebooks.com.

ABOUT GARFIELDMINUSGARFIELD.NET

Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. Garfield Minus Garfield began in February 2008 and quickly gained a large following. It has been covered in such publications as Time magazine, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Garfield Minus Garfield is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

I am back from San Diego!

And here are my thoughts.

* I had a wonderful time at the San Diego Comic-Con this year and I’m happy to say so up front.

* It had been four years since I last attended, which, Jesus, that was as long as I spent in high school or college, huh? In that time I feel as though the show got bigger (duh), but also better organized, since they’ve now had several years of total pandemonium under their belts. The aisles are wider, the attendance was capped, the air conditioning was cooler yet not glacially so, there’s a FedEx in the building now, I was able to purchase at least one good veggie sandwich through an in-house vendor, and I didn’t have any significant trouble getting where I needed to go or attending the things I needed to attend. (Granted the only truly massive panel I tried to get in was Watchmen, but I got by with a little help from my friends on that one, and I knew I was gambling by not camping out anyway.) It seems to me that the Comic-Con people are, as they say, the best they are at what they do.

* I was a little overwhelmed at first in terms of my responsibilities–this was the first time I was properly working the show, for Jonah Weiland and the good folks at Comic Book Resources, and finding the balance between TCB and R&R took Wednesday evening through around Thursday lunchtime. Once I found that balance, though, it was a real blast.

* That being said, between going to panels, hunting down creators, conducting interviews, transcribing and writing pieces for CBR, saying hi to friends, shopping, getting Bowie sketches, wandering around, and occasionally bathing, something had to give, and that something turned out to be eating. I ate one and a half to two meals each day, and didn’t sit down in a chair in front of a table to do so until Saturday afternoon.

* I do want to give major props to Jonah and the rest of the CBR crew for being terrific workmates and bunkmates. Jonah in particular, besides simply paying for me to be there, gave me pretty free reign to roam around the floor and cover whatever I found worth covering, leading to a pretty eclectic mix of Collinsy articles. Any website that allows me to interview both Bryan Hitch and Matt Furie is okay by me.You can find a running list of my con reports here, and there’ll be more coming all week I’d wager, but for now, here’s what’s up there:

* Matt Furie/Boy’s Club 2

* Geoff Johns

* Watchmen and the other buzz books of the show

* Becky Cloonan, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Bá

* Brian Azzarello

* Ethan Van Sciver

* Bryan Hitch

* Comic-Con’s David Glanzer, Thursday evening

* Comic-Con’s David Glanzer, Saturday evening

* I also spoke with The Stand‘s Roberto Aguire-Sacasa for Marvel.com.

* I know I wrote a report on this, but it bears repeating: Watchmen dominated this show. The Owlship and swag bags at the Warner Bros. booth, the big panel and its excellent footage, the complete lack of any remaining copies of the book in the whole building by Friday afternoon, the giveaway t-shirts and limited-edition t-shirts, multiple Dave Gibbons panels, residual Dark Knight trailer vibes…that book was everywhere. Which was nice, actually, because of all the comics for people to get excited about, that would be in my top ten, and is without question the superhero book I’d hand to someone who’d never read one and wanted to try it.

* A while ago I noted that while goodthinkful critics everywhere hate Zack Snyder because 300 is supposed to be a parable of neocon adventurism and the Dawn of the Dead remake lacked the Romero original’s ever so subtle satire of consumerism, they’d probably have to work at it to find a reason to dislike Watchmen on political grounds given its roots in Thatcher-era British Leftism and Snyder’s stated intent, backed up by his work on 300, to stay as true to the comic as possible–not that they wouldn’t try, of course. During the Watchmen panel I realized what the line of attack will be–that the gory footage of Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian running amok in Vietnam is glorifying American war atrocities. I bet you I’m right.

* I really, really didn’t like when Jane Wiedlin and a platoon of stormtroopers presented at the Eisners. First of all, they caused a delay to the show and turned out not to be worth waiting for. Second, when they finally showed up, they entered aaaaaaaallllll the way in the back of the hall and we spent pretty much the entire Imperial March waiting for them to make it to the stage. Third–and I say this as someone who has the Rebel Alliance insignia tattooed on my arm and entered my wedding reception with my wife to that selfsame Imperial March–we were supposed to be celebrating the absolute best that comics has to offer. For that matter, Brad Meltzer and that horrible “Speedy and Halle Berry vs. rubble” issue of Justice League of America notwithstanding, a lot of the winners in their categories–Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Taiyo Matsumoto, Dave Stewart, Ed Brubaker, Fletcher Hanks, etc.–really were the best that comics has to offer. And this is how we honor them? It was like the Rob Lowe/Snow White number from the Oscars. Tom Kenny was funny and Barry Windsor-Smith wrecking shop via a written statement read by Gary Groth was too, though.

* I don’t want the show to move to Las Vegas. As you know I am an all-purpose nerd and have no problem with the Hollywood panels and presentations. I do kind of have a problem with the horrible, moneyed people who come with those panels and presentations. Watching people who view all of this as a paycheck descend into my beloved realm of nerds makes me feel like William S. Burroughs in that documentary about him where he comes across as a gruff old grandpa until there’s this one scene where he starts getting really angry and saying that gays should literally arm themselves, take over an island, force the straights out, and establish their own kingdom which they should defend with lethal force, like gay terrorists. I can only imagine that the sort of people who make me want to turn into a nerd terrorist will thrive in Las Vegas.

* I don’t know if I’ve ever sweated so much in my life. I’m including running the mile in high school gym class, the pit at Ozzfest ’98, and marathon, borderline-uncomfortably-long bouts of sexual intercourse during college. It’s lugging around about 90 pounds of electronic equipment and con guides and Bowie photo ref that does it. I apologize to anyone who had to look at or stand near me.

* Friend-wise, I wonder if that by virtue of being around comics for seven years I just know too many people to be able to see everyone I want to see. (It’s just that I’ve been around for a while, not that I’m so damn irresistable.) I had decent-length conversations with a lot of people and actually hung out with a handful–including both Tom Spurgeon and Chris Butcher, for really the first time ever in both cases, which was great–but there were at least as many people I saw for a split second or not at all, including some I fully intended to seek out and completely whiffed on doing so (Tom Neely, Rick Marshall, Batton Lash, the people at First Second–my bad!!!). Eating aside, I think maybe it was here that I made the most sacrifices in order to get my work done. (I would have chased more Bowie sketches too, actually.)

* Still, I was surprised how easy it was to bump into people I knew in a gathering at least twice as populous at any given moment as my hometown. I even met up with four different old classmates of mine I hadn’t seen in at least five or six or seven years.

* The con is in an awkward position with press passes. On the one hand they’re admirably egalitarian: Anyone with a printout of a website or a bylined article can get in, and SDCC’s spokesman told me that they consider websites and comics publications their mainstream press because we cover them 12 months a year instead of four days a year. But he also told me they issued 3,000 press passes this year, out of a total attendance of 125,000. This results in the passes being a devalued currency–they’re not even color-coded and they don’t get you in anyplace, except I think you can stand in the convention center lobby before the opening rather than standing around on the sidewalk. As a result, press are more likely than almost anyone to complain (to me and to anyone who’ll listen) about how hard it is to get into the events they’re there to cover. Part of this is the narcissism of the fourth estate but part of it is also a legitimate gripe. I have no idea how they solve this, though, short of doing a press day like E3 which would add a lot of expense for exhibitors and retailers without much direct benefit.

* Favorite celebrity sighting: I sat next to Garbage’s Shirley Manson in the Marriott lobby, which made 19-year-old Sean T. Collins the happiest boy on earth. She was gorgeous, pale, big-eyed, red-headed, stylish, and Scottish.

* Second favorite:

Guy on escalator: Nice bag!

Me, walking past with my giant Watchmen swag bag: Pardon?

Guy on escalator: Nice bag!

Me: Oh, thanks. [brief pause as I realize that guy on escalator is Patrick “Nite Owl” Wilson] Ohhh my gosh! [I then cover my mouth with my hand, because apparently I am a startled girl from the 1950s]

* Third favorite: Lou Ferrigno being denied access to the exhibit hall prior to opening because he didn’t have an exhibitor badge.

Here are some projects I heard about at the show that I’m looking forward to.

* Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver’s The Flash: Rebirth. Beyond the basic appreciation for that beautiful costume and wonderful power set that most superhero buffs have, I have no attachment to this character(s) or franchise whatsoever. But the same thing was true of Green Lantern before Johns and Van Sciver did Green Lantern: Rebirth and The Sinestro Corps War. I’m looking forward to liking this character, and my hope is that they can do something as expansive and fun for his mythos as this whole rainbow of Lantern Corps has been for GL.

* Darwyn Cooke’s graphic-novel adaptations of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake’s Parker novels. I feel like Cooke has spent his whole career waiting to get to do a project exactly the way he wants to do it, and it sounds like this is his chance. Throw in an amoral protagonist that will mitigate against Cooke’s more nostalgic side and this series of OGNs should be pretty tight.

* Darren Aronofsky’s RoboCop remake. Just think how much worse this project could have gone!

* Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen. I think Snyder has made two fantastic genre films so far, Watchmen is one of my favorite comics of all time, the cast all seem to be compensating for their earlier ignorance of the book by working overtime to pick it apart in terms of how it sees their characters, and the footage that was screened looked beautiful.

* Neil Gaiman on Batman. Every high-profile writer who works on this character earns a trial read of an issue or two from me since he’s the one character I feel an affinity for independent of who’s working on him. I seem to remember a Comics Journal interview in which Gaiman echoed Alan Moore’s retrospective dismissal of The Killing Joke as utterly irrelevant to the human experience, and since I don’t agree with either of them on that score I’m curious to see where this goes.

* Damon Lindelof’s Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk. Those two issues or three issues or whatever it was were fun, right? Are they gonna get Leinil Francis Yu off of whatever he’s doing to finish it? Will it be awkward to have this book come out while serial franchise-ruiner Jeph Loeb is doing whatever he’s doing to Ultimate Universe continuity in Ultimatum? Stay tuned!

* Mario Hernandez’s original graphic novel. The more full-time cartooning Hernandezes the better, I say.

* Mike Mignola, Fábio Moon, and Gabriel Bá’s B.P.R.D.: 1947. This is the first time since Guy Davis (and Richard Corben, now that I think of it) that artists were selected to work in the Hellboy-verse because they don’t look like Mignola, and I think that on the surface they’re the most aesthetically alien to the established sensibility of the franchise of all the artists who’ve been tapped to take on the various miniseries thus far, so it should be an interesting series to see.

* Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Perfect title for a sequel to the movie, which is named Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, by the way.

* A prequel to I Am Legend involving both Francis Lawrence and Will Smith. A better ending and better creature effects are surely in the works given how universal the cries were for same, right? Because such a movie would be really good.

*Seaguy 2 and Seaguy 3. Volume One was the best of Morrison’s creator-owned works of that period, I think. (Well, We3 was also pretty tremendous and not incidental to my decision to become a vegetarian to boot.)

Here is what I got at the show.

BOOKS

* Baobab #3, by Igort (Fantagraphics)

* Boy’s Club 2, by Matt Furie (Fantagraphics)

* Love and Rockets: New Stories #1, by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez (Fantagraphics)

* Mesmo Delivery, by Rafael Grampa (AdHouse)

* Pixu I, by Gabriel Bá, Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, and Fábio Moon (self-published)

* Scott Pilgrim Full-Colour Odds & Ends 2008, by Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni)

* Tales Designed to Thrizzle #4, by Michael Kupperman (Fantagraphics)

T-SHIRTS

* Parker (freebie!)

* Scott Pilgrim

* Sinestro Corps

* Watchmen (freebie)

And that giant Watchmen bag. I had hoped to pick up Against Pain by Ron Rege Jr. from Drawn & Quarterly and Tom Neely’s strip-collection mini, but again, whiff! Anyway, look for reviews of all those comics in the coming weeks.

* Thank you very much to Alvin Buenaventura at Buenaventura Press, Mike Baehr at Fantagraphics, Alex Segura, Pamela Mullin, and David Hyde at DC, and everyone I interviewed for your invaluable assistance. Thank you very very much to Dave Paggi at Wizard, Tom “The Comics Reporter” Spurgeon, Patrick Carone at Maxim, Chris Butcher at the Beguiling, Jason “Shaggy” Ervin, and especially Jonah Weiland, Seth Jones, and Lincoln Morrison at CBR for your hospitality and companionship. You guys made the con for me.

I did a lot of writing at San Diego over at Comic Book Resources, but I suppose the newsiest things are this piece on the sell-out of the buzz book of the show, Watchmen, and other popular books at the con, and a pair of interviews with Comic-Con International spokesperson David Glanzer about the state of the show, its potential move out of San Diego, crowd issues and so forth. I hope you like them.

I’m not sure what you can expect from me post-wise beyond the usual thrice-weekly reviews, but you know, keep your eyes peeled. I’ll be working for CBR at the show, so look around there, too.

* Curt Purcell liked The Dark Knight less than I did, it turns out, but I still think his is the most cogent explanation of why the ending felt out-of-balance, and what could have been done to fix it, that I’ve seen so far.

* Matthew Yglesias points out that there’s almost no conceivable reason this movie was rated PG-13 rather than R aside from the MPAA simply rolling over for a great big studio’s great big blockbuster. Seriously, children, even older children, have no business being at this movie. Not only would it scare them, I think it’ll be tough for them to appreciate the themes. And the length–there have been 2 1/2 hour movies that kids have loved in the past, sure, but those have tended to have Ewoks or Orcs in nearly every frame, not serious men in neckties debating ethics.

* While I enjoyed the film a good deal, if you take this quote from Heidi MacDonald and swap out Batman Begins for The Dark Knight…

we didn’t think BATMAN BEGINS was the Dostoyevsky-level masterpiece most fellows think it was.

…you’ll get how I feel about it. It was a good movie and it’s growing on me as we speak, but No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood it wasn’t, and as you see an increasing number of statements like “Take away the Batsuit and the clown make-up and you’ve got an all-time-great crime movie” you’d be well advised to compare it to actual all-time-great crime movies and keep this in mind. Heidi groks this, which I appreciate.

* The part of David Edelstein’s now-infamous-in-fandom pan of TDK that struck me the most was when he specifically lambasted its action choreography, which I thought was quite strong, by unfavorably comparing it to BB‘s, which i thought was horrendous no matter if that was what they were deliberately going for.

* Similarly, I still remember when Jim Henley called my review of Batman Begins picayune and wrongheaded–I used it as a tagline for the whole blog for a while–so it’s funny to watch the tables turn and see him be harder on The Dark Knight than I was on specific points where I really gave BB the business–the dialogue, the costume, and the Bat-voice, for example. Still, he mostly liked it and gives his usual smartly reasoned reasons for doing so.

* Which reminds me, SFF publisher Tor has launched a new web presence centered on pretty terrific thinkblog anchored by Jim (their superhero correspondent) and his fellow ADDTF fave Bruce Baugh (who’s working the RPG beat). Notable posts thus far include Jim’s common-sense note that mainstream audiences do, in fact, like superheroes, duh, and that the comparative obscurity of superhero comic books has more to do with the format than the genre. If you said this kind of thing back in 2003, which I did (warning: like all my posts from that era, this one goes to 11), Dirk Deppey, Chris Butcher, and Tim O’Neil would kick you out of the art club. (J/K, guys! LYLAB!)

* Back on Bruce B.’s home blog, he’s put up a twofold post I really appreciated regarding Zach Snyder. First, in light of recent, somewhat vapid interviews he’s given regarding Watchmen, Bruce suggests that the director is better at making movies than talking about them, and that that’s fine. Second, he has a brief but detailed and full-throated defense of Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake as far more thoughtful filmmaking than even many of its defenders give it credit for.

* Meanwhile, Matthew Perpetua says that Watchmen trailer’s use of a Smashing Pumpkins song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack and overall ’90s/early-’00s-ness in terms of its superhero imagery is a deliberate bait and switch on Snyder’s part, in the same way that the original comic used contemporary superheroisms in order to subvert them. How about that?

* Also on the Watchmen beat: At AICN, Matthew “Ozymandias” Goode speaks to Capone about his character and the film, revealing that he concocted a backstory for the character that involves Nazi Germany, which isn’t so hot, and that he looks a lot like David Bowie, which is.

* Grant Morrison discusses Final Crisis and Superman Beyond at length in an interview with Newsarama’s Matt Brady that will also hopefully continue to increase Geoff Johns’s hipness quotient, since as usual Morrison goes on and on about how good his stuff has been lately.

* I’m not sure if I ever blogged it, but Morrison also relaunched his website recently, putting a “blog” section behind a registration wall that’s really worth climbing. The most recent entry practically bursts with enthusiasm for The Dark Knight, which it compares to the book version of Watchmen in terms of the impact he thinks it will have on superheroes in its medium. He then gushes about the movie version of Watchmen, and indulges in yet another of his periodic, richly entertaining insults of Alan Moore, whom he derides as a grumpy old fundamentalist operating on counterculture-approved lines for wanting nothing to do with Hollywood in general and this movie in particular.

* Some SciFi Channel exec says Battlestar Galactica will return for its final episodes beginning January 2009, and that its prequel Caprica may go straight to series instead of being aired first as a backdoor-pilot TV movie. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Speaking during ABC’s fall season press tour, Lost mastermind Damon Lindelof compares the upcoming season of Lost to The Two Towers in that it serves as a bridge to the final act yet has to be satisfying in its own right. (Via The Tail Section.) Sadly, this is as close to Lindelof as I’m going to get for the time being, since I have other commitments during the San Diego Lost panel.

* Hubba hubba: Very talented comics artist Cliff Chiang is posting pinup-style portraits of great women from nerd entertainments. (Via J.K. Parkin.) My personal favorite is his Teela from He-Man (I know it’s technically called Masters of the Universe, but I never asked my brother if he wanted to play Masters of the Universe with me):

* Finally, Jesus!

(Now there’s a play-on-words you’re not gonna see a lot of!)

WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND.

The Dark Knight, I’m legitimately happy to say, is superior to Batman Begins in nearly every conceivable way, but the most important one is definitely the script. I’ll tell you, watching this thing makes it even easier than it was before to blame superhero-hack David S. Goyer for the gaping plot holes, leaden dialogue, and wild internal inconsistencies that had me ready to storm out of the theater watching this film’s predecessor. In fact, since the entire moral lynchpin of this film–whether or not Batman could or should kill the Joker, and what it means for him and for Gotham City if he won’t–is completely invalidated by Batman’s murder of Ra’s al Ghul (and that’s exactly what it was, folks) at the end of the first film, this makes ignoring Begins not just fun but practically necessary.

I feel like this movie got what Batman’s about much better than Batman Begins, too. The first film portrayed him as a neurotic, driven to distraction by crime, obsessed with fear, and repeating those two words over and over again like Rain Man. This movie drops those leitmotifs almost entirely, giving us a character it makes sense for the public to refer to as the Caped Crusader–a guy who, when a Chinese mob financier skips town, flies to Hong Kong, cuts off the electricity to his goddamn skyscraper, glides in on his Bat-cape, beats the snot out of his guards, grabs him, leaps out of a building on a hot-air balloon that a jet then snags to whisk them away, and brings the dude back to Gotham, dropping him unconscious on the steps of police HQ with a note to deliver him to Jim Gordon. Gone are the days when his primary on-screen crimefighting sequence involved running over police cars for some reason. Even Christian Bale’s growly Bat-voice seems to work better here, perhaps because his actions better match the superhuman conviction his monster voice implies. (And on a purely nerd level, they find an excuse to give him all-white eyes behind his mask, which pretty much made my evening.) Overall, I feel like I understand why he’s doing what he’s doing–that it’s more than an anti-littering campaign on steroids, it’s truly a drive to put a dent in crime in the city–and why people might choose to support him in this endeavor rather than run away screaming.

And the movie also gets the Joker. Now, I insist that Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson also got the Joker, mind you. All camp is not created equal, and too many people have this reactionary attitude to it (post-traumatic Adam West disorder) as though camp begins and ends with Schumacher rather than Sontag. But camp can be serious business in a world (even in a fandom, sadly) where rigidly patriarchal concepts of what constitutes seriousness hold sway, and Nicholson’s larger than life gay-vaudeville-pimp-comedian-dandy-performance-artist was compelling in his refusal to be normal. This is by no means mutually exclusive with being frightening, by the way. “And now…comes the part…where I relieve you, the little people…of the burden…of your failed…and useless lives,” says the Joker without blinking an eye just before gassing downtown Gotham City. He’s killing the squares. That’s subversive and that’s horrifying.

Ledger’s Joker is a creature in that vein, but instead of being larger than life, he’s smaller than life. I know that seems counterintuitive given the for-the-ages performance he turned in–surely this will be the most-referenced portrayal of a Villain since Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter–but what the Joker is is a human being reduced to only cruelty and glee. Earlier in the day I watched a documentary about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who in the ’80s terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco by breaking into people’s houses at random and killing and raping with no pattern. Once Ramirez was caught, his affect throughout his trial was of someone having the time of his life–shouting “Hail Satan!” at the cameras, sneering at the victims’ families, growing his hair long and wearing sunglasses and flirting with his groupies, proclaiming that he is beyond good and evil, reacting to his sentencing to death by saying “Big deal. Death always came with the territory. I’ll see you at Disneyland!”

That, I think, is the Joker in this movie: A guy who loves hurting people the way you or I love our favorite meals or television shows, just loves it to pieces. The film’s plot and set pieces make it quite explicit that his goal is to see our worst suspicions about human nature confirmed, and reinforce it with how it introduces him to us: No big entrance, no “origin,” he’s just standing there on the corner waiting for his ride. Just by existing he stands as a reproach to the trifecta of Batman, Gordon, and Harvey Dent: They believe in the better angels of our nature, and the Joker is just havin’ a blast showing us that there’s no such thing.

He’s also got a great, great music cue, a neverending crescendo of discordant strings, which reminds me again how much better this movie was than the first one, which had no memorable music to speak of despite boasting two separate composers. In addition, The Dark Knight had better fight choreography that takes advantage of its environment and is easy to parse from beat to beat, making the consequences of each maneuver easy to grasp. It had a better car chase sequence, one with stakes and with genuine antagonists. It had better performances from all its recurring players, perhaps because they weren’t hamstrung by one of the dumbest scripts of all time, but in general they all (Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and especially Gary Oldman) seemed more comfortable in their skins and with their role in the story. It had a much better performance from the love interest, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who unlike Katie Holmes made the bold choice of imbuing Rachel Dawes with, get this, recognizable human emotions. It had genuine shocks–I was totally convinced that Gordon was dead, for example, and stunned that the news hadn’t leaked. It was visually much more sophisticated–the staging of Batman and the Joker’s final conversation, little touches like the Joker’s Harvey Dent campaign sticker, the bravura opening sequence, the snuff-film hostage tapes, and on and on. There was no dopey doomsday device. The one time it danced up to the ridiculous moral inconsistencies of the first film, Lucius Fox’s sudden objection to Batman’s methods when he discovers he’s spying on the entire city, it actually had Fox make his objection on specific grounds that made sense–too much power concentrated in the hands of one man–rather than asserting that a guy who spends his days helping a masked vigilante run around breaking people’s legs to get them to talk is suddenly in high dudgeon over warrantless wiretapping.

It wasn’t perfect, though. It felt long, it sagged when the Joker wasn’t involved, and even though the film did yeoman’s work in making us understand just why Batman and Gordon were so high on Harvey Dent’s transformative potential for the city, it still overestimated the degree to which we (or at least I) were invested in his saga, so that when it saved the big ending for a resolution of his plotline rather than the Joker’s, it felt miscalculated and anticlimactic. And perhaps ironically, leaving the Joker alive at film’s end was more of a fourth-wall-breaking reminder of Heath Ledger’s truly tragic death, though I don’t know if there was any way around that. I also wish there were some way for Batman to talk about his crusade without sounding ridiculously overblown and pretentious, but there may not be any way around that either.

Overall, though, I feel like here’s a movie that conveyed what the Joker and Batman mean to me: the most gleefully pessimistic take on human nature imaginable, and a rageful insistence that it need not be so. Good job!

Via Top Shelf 2.0 webmeister Leigh Walton I discovered this rave review of me and Matt Wiegle’s “Destructor in: Prison Break” from The Crooked Man at Rare Maiden:

It’s got everything you could ever want in an adventure comic: a forbidding prison island, robots, a cast of monsters, dragons, a huge fight, a heart-felt ending, a diagram… It’s that impossible-to-ever-actually-create strip that you always wanted to draw when you were a kid. But it works, and all in only 12 pages.

He’s got a lot more to say about the strip, including an appreciation of its lack of context that really makes me feel good about doing the strip that way, and an evocation of both Moebius and the Cocteau Twins, which I can always get behind. If you like, you can read the review, read the comic, and buy the collection.

* The Dark Knight came out and I’ll probably go see it this weekend, god help us all. If I blow another gasket I’m blaming all of you personally.

* With The Dark Knight came a Watchmen trailer. I liked it, other people really liked it, while I’ve heard some skeptics too. (It could do with a smidge less slo-mo, but that was the case for 300 as well.)

* Meanwhile the movie’s on the cover of Entertainment Weekly (it’s good to own the magazine, eh Warner Bros?) and they have an extensive look at the film’s road to production, featuring mildly disconcerting quotes from director Zack Snyder about how much ass he’s gonna kick, as well as a sizable interview with writer Alan Moore, featuring mildly disconcerting quotes lambasting films he’s never seen.

* Jim Treacher has a pretty extensive Watchmen-news roundup that I recommend browsing, though Jason Adams is the one asking the hard questions. So to speak.

* EW has also posted a preview image gallery of things that we’ll be seeing at San Diego Comic Con, including shots from Frank Miller’s The Spirit, a page from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3, and other nerdy things.

* George A. Romero is officially making a sequel to Diary of the Dead, which I still haven’t seen, starting this September. So I guess he liked it, then.

* Someone could have told me that credit-design god Saul Bass directed a movie about killer ants.

* Don’t forget my article on Dumb Doomsday Devices in Superhero Movies or me and Matt Wiegle’s new Destructor comic.

* Finally, The Beef comes through.

Check out me and Matt Wiegle’s action-adventure comic strip spectacular “Destructor in: Prison Break” over at Top Shelf 2.0.

Then read my piece on The 6 Dumbest Doomsday Devices from Superhero Movies over at Topless Robot.

* In a few days I will be interviewing Brian K. Vaughan, writer of Lost, Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, Runaways, Pride of Baghdad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Doctor Strange: The Oath, The Escapists, and so on, for a cover story in The Comics Journal. Is there anything you’d like me to ask him? Please post your questions in the comments to this post.

* Bad people ruining comics for the rest of us part one: Chris Butcher calls out the owner of the San Diego Hyatt for donating $125K to support an anti-gay ballot initiative. He suggests that you don’t patronize their facilities any more than you can help it during Comic Con.

* Bad people ruining comics for the rest of us part two: Tom Spurgeon examines the catastrophic (pending) failure of Platinum Studios, a “comics” “publisher” run by obvious grifters. He suggests that we as an industry and art form should be able to agree that this is a morally bad way to run a business.

* Good people making comics better for the rest of us: Christ Jesus look at Fantagraphics’ SDCC signing schedule.

* Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Katherine Follet takes a look at Alex Proyas’s The Crow, “the quintessential Goth Movie.”

* And now, a bunch of interesting (note: consult thesaurus for synonyms of “interesting”) reviews of older things…

* Inveterate person who doesn’t have much use for superheroes Tom Spurgeon takes a look at Joe Casey and Frazer Irving’s beautiful-looking, underappreciated miniseries Iron Man: The Inevitable.

* Bruce Baugh takes a look at Rian Johnson’s po-faced high-school noir Brick. I watched both this film and Donnie Darko for the first time right around the same time and started to reimagine high school as a sort of heavily medicated flat-affect genre-revisionism wonderland.

* Matt Maxwell, like me, found much to admire in Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend–at least until the ending with its forced Shyamalanisms and Hollywood inversion of the titular concept.

* At The House Next Door, Will Lasky discusses M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, comparing the director’s oeuvre to Rod Serling’s and declaring that since his films rely on their protagonists’ dramatic self-discovery, they really do require The Twist–not as a matter of pyrotechnics but of dramaturgy.

* Looks like they might remake, and by remake I mean cut the balls of off and otherwise ruin, The Monster Squad.

* There’s a trailer for Frank Miller’s The Spirit out there, if you can still find it, and believe me, it’s nuts. Somehow I don’t see the fan/critical community that rejected Speed Racer and is increasingly divided about 300 appreciating this thing at all, but time will tell. Since I really don’t care about the Spirit as a character or franchise, the chance to see my favorite cartoonist take movie-making tools and go as absolutely bananas with them as Lynn Varley did with Photoshop while coloring The Dark Knight Strikes Again tickles me pink.

* In the comments downblog, Jon “The Forager” Hastings discusses the strange case of Guillermo Del Toro, throwing his career into relief by comparison to similar disreputable-genre visual-stylist nerd icons Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.

* Yours truly weighs in on the controversy over The New Yorker‘s Obamas-as-radicals cover at Tom Spurgeon’s blog (scroll down).

* Over at Loren Coleman’s joint, paleonotologist Darren Naish debunks the trunks, throwing cold water on that awesome “dinosaur with a trunk” image I posted yesterday. Oh well.

* Finally, congratulations to my Partyka chums Shawn Cheng, Sara Edward-Corbett, and John Mejias for making it into the Lynda Barry/Jessica Abel/Matt Madden-edited Best American Comics 2008!

[Editor’s note: This is one of a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on March 30, 2007.]

TV Q&A: ‘BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’–MARK VERHEIDEN

The writer of the stunning Season Three finale takes us behind the shocks–and tells us what’s in store for Season Four

By Sean T. Collins

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t yet watched the “BSG” Season Three finale, stop reading here, for the love of gods!

Have you lost sleep or sanity (or countless work-hours gathered around the water cooler) trying to process all the series-rocking revelations in last Sunday’s “Battlestar Galactica” season finale? Blame Mark Verheiden. As the writer responsible for the episode, titled “Crossroads: Part Two,” he set Gaius Baltar free, revealed four more secret Cylons, brought Starbuck back to life–and showed us Earth.

Wizard went to action stations with the veteran TV and comics scribe and “Battlestar” co-executive producer to look back on Season Three, look forward to Season Four and learn whether Cylons–and Starbuck–can really be trusted…

WIZARD: How did you land the writing chores for the season finale? Is that a real plum gig, or a real hard gig?

VERHEIDEN: Well, [executive producers] Ron Moore and David Eick make the decision of who writes which episodes. Some of it is rotation-based: “Who’s up?” Obviously, when you’re on the last episode, you get to be here longer. So there is that aspect, but I was flattered to be asked to do it and I had a great time doing it. I can’t really tell you exactly why [they asked me], but it’s nice to be trusted with it. By the way, I think that any of the writers could’ve handled it. It’s a great staff here. But it was great that I had a chance to do it.

You had a lot of balls to juggle in that final episode: Baltar’s trial, Laura’s cancer, Adama’s relationship with both Laura and Apollo, Starbuck’s return, the shot of Earth, the opera house dream sequences, the appearance of the Cylon fleet, the revelation of four out of the final five Cylons.…How do you even go about weaving all those threads together?

VERHEIDEN: When you’re here through the entire process, you’ve been following the strain of these stories all along. We all have ideas where we’re going with each one of those stories anyway. It just becomes an issue of sitting down and trying to order them up and figuring out a way to bring some of them to fruition or a close, and which ones do we want to continue into the next season. That’s really a process that comes out of working with Ron and David and in the writers’ room with the rest of the writers; we call that breaking the story. For every episode we do the same thing: We sit down and we look at the balls that are in the air, the stories that we want to tell, and then we break it down on note cards and put it up on a board and say, “This is how we think it should go.”

The interesting thing with “Crossroads” parts one and two is that ultimately, in the editing process, material from what was in part two ended up in part one and stuff in part one ended up in part two. It’s a little bit of a mix-and-match process. Even at that stage, we’re rethinking and configuring what we want to put in the show. Again, with so many balls in the air, I think that even after the fact–when you’re editing, obviously–you’re thinking, “Well, where do we want to present these? Where do we want to cut a story off and pick up the next story?” There are decisions like that, and it’s really just part of the process of figuring out the story. That’s how you do it. You do have a lot of things in the air, and that frankly makes it more fun.

Really? I was wondering if you went into it sighing, wondering how you’re going to pull it off.

VERHEIDEN: We do that with every episode. [Laughs] But it’s not so much a sigh of defeat, but more like, “Wow. A lot of challenges here.” It’s really great, though. One of the wonderful things about this show is the fact that there are so many places that we can turn. We have such a large cast, and each of them has their own idiosyncratic issues that they have to deal with. We have the Cylons. We have science-fiction conceits. We have interpersonal conceits. There are just a lot of ways stories can go. So rather than that being challenging–well, it’s challenging, but it’s also a wonderful opportunity because you’ve just got so many choices that you can make. You’re not locked into any one thing that you sort of need to do or tell. That’s great.

One of the big reveals for this episode was the identity of four new Cylons: Colonel Tigh, Chief Tyrol, Anders and Tory. Around my office, at least, we had a lot of people who couldn’t possibly wrap their heads around people like Tigh and the Chief being Cylons. I know that Ron Moore has said in interviews that they are, but I want to get as many people on the record as possible. So, are these four Cylons? Pinky swear?

VERHEIDEN: [Laughs] They are Cylons. No, this will not be a “Dallas” dream episode where you wake up and go, “We’re not Cylons!” Without getting into any kind of spoiler territory, we will be exploring what that means as we go into Season Four, but they are Cylons. So, harbor no hopes that it’s some kind of dream or nightmare. When we do something like this, first of all, it’s not without considerable thought and planning, and second of all, we don’t do it so that we can pull the rug out from under the audience and say, “We were kidding.” Not with this one anyway.

I’ve seen fans of the show comment that because of the leadership role these characters played in the New Caprican insurgency, it essentially makes that conflict a Cylon civil war, even if these characters weren’t consciously aware of that. Is that one of the long-term planning points that you’re referring to?

VERHEIDEN: Well, I think that what happened on New Caprica will certainly be an issue that we have to think about as we go along. Basically, they are Cylons and we’re going to approach that. I really don’t want to give anything up about what we’re doing next season… [Pause] …that… [Another pause] well, what can I say? I’m trying to think what would be interesting here. [Yet another pause] Well, I think that I’ve said it. We will be exploring what it means to have these guys being Cylons for sure. Oh yeah, I was going to say… [Super-long pause] Well, no. I will end there. [Laughs]

Clearly, they’re a breed apart. For example, we’ve seen a younger Tigh in flashback sequences, so it seems unlikely that there are thousands of regular, aged Colonel Tighs walking around on some base ship somewhere. Are those different rules for these guys something that will be coming up in Season Four?

VERHEIDEN: All stuff that we’ll be exploring. We do know who they are. So in terms of, like, if we’re just winging it and backpedaling as we go? No. We know who they are, and that is going to be a big part of what we get at in Season Four.

Switching gears for a moment, I loved Apollo’s courtroom speech in Gaius Baltar’s trial. It showed that he’s such a noble, likable character even when he’s doing something that you don’t agree with, and it also tied in all these events from the past where characters from the Galactica have committed horrible crimes of treason and been forgiven. How did that speech, and its references to those plot points from all three seasons and the miniseries, come about?

VERHEIDEN: That was a culmination of something that Ron Moore really wanted to do. The entire idea of the trial of Baltar was to explore the concept of guilt or innocence within the fleet, and also to suggest that this is a fleet that only had an ad hoc justice system. We’ve never really seen the justice system in the fleet, and I think internally we always assume that the captains of each ship always dealt with whatever issues came up on a summary basis. So we were interested in just trying to explore how you create justice in this world.

The second question, which is the one that Lee attacks in his speech, is “What is justice?” What does that mean in this particular world, where we’ve basically been reduced to 38,000 people and vengeance and attempts to get retribution for things in the past might not be as valid as they would, say, in a different circumstance. It was also fascinating, I think, that Baltar was the elected president of the 12 colonies and found himself in an untenable position. Lee’s speech was an attempt to address the practical realities of the situation that they found themselves in, and pull us out a little bit from us screaming for blood. That’s where the impulse for that came from. And again, one of the great things about working on a show that has such a rich background as “Battlestar” is that you’re able to pull from a lot of events that happened in past shows to demonstrate how the fleet’s justice system or sense of justice has been tested or not tested, or how forgiveness has been the rule of the day.

Internally, we thought one of the more interesting moments pointing out that [President] Laura [Roslin] had pardoned everyone, so we’re not quite sure why that pardon didn’t manifest itself all the way to Baltar. How come he got excluded from that when we forgave everyone else who may have actually done more heinous crimes than him? Of course, the horrible thing is that Baltar, in fact, is at least complicit in the genocide of the whole civilization, if you go back that far, but that’s kind of one that we can’t really prove. I’m sure that he would have a very facile argument as to why he wasn’t to blame. “It wasn’t me!”

As the proud owner of a homemade “Free Gaius” T-shirt, I was happy with the verdict.

VERHEIDEN: [Laughs] He’s free. Sort of.

Oh yeah–he’s been whisked away by the Cult of Gaius, or whoever these people are. Is that storyline going to dovetail with the religious aspects of the show, or is it a separate beast?

VERHEIDEN: It doesn’t really give anything way to say that we’ve always explored the role of religion in civilization and in the fleet. It’s certainly an issue that will come up, whether Baltar’s story goes that way or not; that remains to be seen. But absolutely, the role of religion is an issue that we will continue to explore. Certainly, in the fleet and in what we’ve said already, religion has played into it, as well as faith and the “polytheist versus monotheist” situation. Those things have all played a role in how we ended up where we are.

Speaking of which, at least in terms of prophecies and visions and things of that nature, Starbuck is back and has apparently discovered Earth.

VERHEIDEN: That’s what she says.

Should we trust her, Mark?

VERHEIDEN: Well, you know– [Laughs] I trust her. You don’t trust her? She said it with great enthusiasm! You’ll just have to see. I say that not meaning it in one way or the other; it doesn’t mean to trust her or not to trust her. It means that obviously, when she comes back with a piece of information that relevant, it will become an issue as we go forward.

Even just the choice of that final shot, pulling back through the Milky Way and zooming back in and showing Earth, seems to be sending a message that the goal line is in sight.

VERHEIDEN: I don’t know if the goal is in sight, but certainly the goal of the fleet is to find Earth. That [shot] was a really wonderful sort of wish of the fleet, to be there. That’s how you can take that. You’ve seen Earth. What Earth is and what it might be is stuff that’s still up in the air, but the goal of the fleet is still to find Earth. Obviously, we’re going to be exploring that. When Kara comes back and says something like that, it’s not a thread that will be dropped. Let me just put it that way.

And speaking of Earth–I think–this episode used the Bob Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower.” How difficult was it to thread that song in? That’s a huge earthquake in terms of fans’ interaction with the world of the show.

VERHEIDEN: Right. Well, Ron has said that you shouldn’t take that as meaning anything specific to, say, Bob Dylan in the ’60s when he wrote the song, except in the sense that for all we know this song and these lyrics have existed on many planes. Maybe Bob Dylan is the one who picked it up here, in our place. It gets kind of mystic here, but I don’t think that you should draw too much from that, except that there are connections and there are very many interesting eddies and byways in the universe of “Battlestar” that remain to be explored.

On a more pragmatic level, “All Along the Watchtower” was there because Ron Moore has always wanted to use that song and use it in some way where we were, again, thrilled with how it worked into this final episode, and also with the version that [“Battlestar” composer Bear McCreary] did. I thought it was suitably evocative and eerie and really worked well. In fact, I thought that the music in that episode was just fantastic all the way through.

It really conveyed the sense of borderline chaos that was gripping the fleet throughout the entire show. It lent the episode an air of weirdness.

VERHEIDEN: It really did hammer that home. I especially loved the music when Tigh, Tory, Anders and Tyrol got together, which just seemed to raise to this crescendo of, “What in the world is going on?” which is exactly what they were thinking and what we hoped the audience was thinking when we got to that point. Again, as they said, a light switch clicked, and the music was really helping to push that moment.

When Tigh walks into that scene, I believe his exact word was, “Whoa.” It was a funny moment. Even Gaius, despite having been in a very tortured and tormented place the entire season, was calling Gaeta “butterfingers” at the trial and got back to his smarmy self when the trial was over. Was it a conscious choice on your part to inject those humorous elements into what was such a momentous episode?

VERHEIDEN: Well, the Baltar character, by definition, has sort of an ironic disconnect with himself at times. I wish I could take credit for everything, but the “butterfingers,” I believe, was something that [Baltar actor] James Callis came up with. It was perfect. I mean, it was just so perfect. A lot of that is how he plays it. We think that James is a fantastic actor and brings so much to the part, and he brings this sort of naïve malevolence, or, well, I don’t even know how to put it. It’s this odd, almost disconnected from his own understanding of what he’s done, sort of defense. It’s a moral relativism, which gives so much more to each scene that he’s in.

But conscious choice? Yeah. Obviously, we scripted it, and he brings an attitude to the show that is very unique to him. It’s always fun to go to him because he brings something unusual. I don’t think that funny is necessarily the right word, but sort of ironic. Well, in the case of “butterfingers,” it was just funny.

Tigh also shined in this episode. His arc in the third season was more of a downward spiral than an arc, but this moment that one would think would shatter him became his finest hour. I found it moving.

VERHEIDEN: I’m glad. I’m glad that came across. Michael Hogan is a fantastic actor, and the Tigh character has been through a very, very difficult season on the show. There is something reassuring [about] hearing him say that he wants to reassert his humanity despite what’s happened. We’ll see where that goes, but I think that of all of the [newly revealed Cylons], he’s certainly the one who, discovering that that’s true about himself, has the most to catch up to, given what’s happened to him in the past. If he’s a Cylon, then it’s interesting what’s he gone through. Well, he is a Cylon, and so it is interesting what he’s gone through.

Given that only these four came together, can we take from that that the fifth Cylon is elsewhere?

VERHEIDEN: I think you can take that the question is still in the air.

It seems as though there’s a different explanation for Starbuck’s reappearance than the old Cylon-recycling trick, right?

VERHEIDEN: Well, again, we’re getting into where we’re going in Season Four, and we’re awfully early to be giving up things.

You can take the Fifth. There’s a lot of that going around these days.

VERHEIDEN: Yeah, I think I will take the Fifth on that. I feel more comfortable with that. [Laughs] It’s a question that’s hanging out there, and it’s a question that will be explored. In terms of who it might be and is there a fifth one–those are all things that I’d just as soon not get into because there are surprises to come.

Do you have a favorite character whom you love to get your hands on when you’re writing an episode?

VERHEIDEN: They’re all great–which is the standard answer, but they really are all great. One of the fun things about the show is that their voices are all so different. Adama’s voice–I mean, I really love writing for Adama. It’s really fun to write for Laura Roslin. I think that Tigh brings a pathos to his character that’s very interesting to try to find. His voice is one that has a tragedy to it that’s maybe even stronger than the others. But I’ll tell you, they’re all so rich, and the show has managed to invest them with such rich backstories and textures, that they’re all great to write. If I was going to pick one where when you get to them you go, “Wow, we can really go to town here,” then Tigh is someone who fascinates me, but also Adama and Laura. Both of those bring very strong personas. I say those, but I’m certainly not excluding anyone else. Starbuck is always fun and crazy. She’s such a live wire that to try and capture that is always a blast.

Is there anyone who’s been difficult to get a grasp of?

VERHEIDEN: I don’t know if it’s been difficult. I will say that when we started doing the stories on the Cylon base ship, that was a learning process internally here–just trying to get a handle on how to play those scenes, to figure out their interpersonal dynamic. It’s obviously a little different than with the humans, since there are multiples with each of them. I would say that in the two years that I’ve been here, working that out and trying to understand how that world worked was a challenge. That would be the one.

Even besides the basic nature of the Cylons–they’re not human and are fundamentally a different species, in at least some ways–there was also a different storytelling rhythm during scenes on their ships, even in the way cuts are made from shot to shot and from scene to scene.

VERHEIDEN: Yeah. We made a conscious choice to sort of present the base ship in a different way than we presented the Galactica, our side of the universe. Those were conscious choices. That also [involved] just trying to understand how these creatures, or these robots, or machines, or half-human half-machine entities, communicate with one another–an interesting and different, and yet understandable to us, way of communicating. All of those things just took time to figure out what we wanted to do there, so as challenges go, that was one of the bigger ones, trying to understand those people. By definition they are alien to us, and it’s necessarily harder to empathize with them, to understand what they’re saying and where they’re coming from.

Until the episode that focused on Boomer and Caprica Six back on Caprica, where you saw things from their point of view and learned that they truly are multidimensional characters, I was pretty sure that they were all evil all the time and everything else was just a false front. Convincing viewers that these are more than just Terminators must be a challenge.

VERHEIDEN: Right. In a way, to say that the Cylons are like the Terminator or soulless, empty machines diminishes their capacity for anything. I was going to say evil, but I don’t know that you apply evil to that. Certainly the genocide of the human race was an inherently evil act; however, that was prompted and didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t just sociopathic, it came out of things that had happened prior. So it’s sort of an “understand your enemy” point of view. I don’t want to speak for Ron and David Eick, but we never wanted to end by saying, “We’re up against this soulless mechanical army.” We wanted to say that they had their points of view, too. That’s why we actually went over to the Cylon side for a while.

In many ways, the most interesting relationships on the show are in these pairings of a Cylon and a human, whether it’s Six and Baltar or Athena and Helo or Boomer and the Chief–although it turns out that that’s not a Cylon-human pairing after all.

VERHEIDEN: Well, Chief and Cally…

That’s true–you’ve created more of those relationships with these new revelations.

VERHEIDEN: Yes, and we also created a situation where people have a secret. And strictly from a dramatic standpoint, that’s always interesting to explore. We’ve got four guys with a pretty big secret now.

How does it feel to work on a show that is this good?

VERHEIDEN: It’s fantastic. You can take one step back and watch a show and go, “Wow.” I mean, I’m a fan of the show, too. So when I can take a step back and look at the first five episodes that we did this year–and look at most of the episodes, actually–I can go, “It’s really a wonderful thing to be on a show that you can be so proud of.” I’ll tell you from a writing standpoint, too, the great thing is being able to explore concepts and conceits and political dynamics and nonpolitical dynamics and character interactions that you just wouldn’t get to do if you were doing–not to put down cop shows, but you just couldn’t go there. By being a science-fiction show and by having created the political dynamics we have, we can go and explore relationships and philosophies and things that you would get in big trouble if you tried to do in sort of real-world terms. But since it’s one step removed in our “Galactica” universe, we can explore them with an abandon. That’s been almost a liberating experience, as a writer, to do. It’s been just great.

Does it burn you at all that you guys haven’t been recognized by the Emmys? I know it’s baffling to a lot of fans. Is that something that’s even on your radar screen?

VERHEIDEN: Do we read the nominations when they come out? Sure. [Laughs] I speak for myself, but you can’t live your life worried about whether or not you’re going to win a prize. You have to go ahead and do the best show you can, and if we get recognized, great, and if we don’t, we still know it’s a great show. I mean, we did win a Peabody, which is one heck of a recognition. I don’t feel like we’re under-recognized in terms of people who have found the show and can appreciate what we’re doing. In terms of Emmys, it would be wonderful, but does my world turn around it? No.

I guess this is a fatuous question considering your job, but how much attention do you pay to “The Sci Fi Channel is picking the show up for 13 more episodes, and now it’s 22, and now there’s a special two-hour movie-type episode in the middle?”

VERHEIDEN: I pay intimate attention to that. [Laughs] Those things I do pay a great deal of attention to, because that impacts what we’re doing here.

It obviously makes a big difference in how you write the show.

VERHEIDEN: Yeah, and it’s great to have 22 [Season Four episodes] for sure, I’ll say that.

I just don’t know how I’m going to wait until 2008 for them.

VERHEIDEN: Well, there is the two-parter that will be on before that.

Of course! Do you know when that’s airing?

VERHEIDEN: I have not heard. Maybe someone else knows it, [but] I’ve only heard the generic term of “fall.” So hopefully you’ll have that.