* Hey, lookit this: In today’s Archive Spotlight at Top Shelf 2.0, you can relive the glory of me and Matt Wiegle’s action-adventure strip “Destructor Comes to Croc Town.” Watch one angry man in a suit of armor unmake a civilization!

* Discussion of Final Crisis #2 continues. Here’s Joe McCulloch wondering whether “good Grant Morrison superhero comic” and “good DC Comics event lynchpin thing” work at cross-purposes:

And then there’s that odd taste of self-awareness, even a little tiredness – Superman hoping the Martian Manhunter will be revived sometime in the future, Lex Luthor acting utterly bored at the death of some expendable superhero (in an Event comic! *yawn*). Like Didio implied, these characters have seen it all. Is it good for the health of DC comics, rather than the DC Universe? Hell, I don’t know. And while I’m aware that if things get so bad they board up the windows it’ll mean less chances for people like Grant Morrison to write comics, I still find it awfully tough to shift my focus onto what’s Good For the Industry when I’m trying to interface with a particular work – my problem, folks.

“Problem”?

* And in the comments at thishyere blog, Sean B. of the late, lamented Strange Ink addresses the nature of the threat presented by this series’ big bad guy, a Darkseid in human skin, as opposed to the traditional event-comic villainy:

It’s about the superfolk of DC coming to see that evil is not just the flaming spear flying into your Martian chest – beneath all their day-to-day conflicts with the various baddies of the physical world, the real battle has been fought and lost already. A crisis of faith – that what you do makes no difference at all when Secret Gods are pulling the strings. It’s almost Kirby by way of Lovecraft in a way?

That is dead-on and brilliant.

* Tom Spurgeon explains at length why the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne-era X-Men worked. Tom’s tolerance for superhero stories is pretty low, so watching him unpack why these superhero stories clicked on any number of levels is pretty compelling.

* Jim Treacher recommends some genre novels by erstwhile comics writers Duane Swierczynski and Charlie Huston.

* Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis #2 came out today; Douglas Wolk has annotations, while Grame McMillan wonders if it’s too smart a book for its own good, or DC’s good at least.

* It’s a good day for reading Tom Spurgeon, as he spotlights 12 unjustly overlooked comics from the past 12 years (including works from Gilbert Hernandez and Michael Kupperman, as well as Chuck Austen’s wonderful, balls-out R-rated Marvel comic U.S. War Machine) and reviews Matt Furie’s brilliantly funny Boys Club, serving up your quote of the day:

Like some of the best comics out there, one can imagine the reading of Boy’s Club to be an act in the same vein as the way of life promoted in its pages.

* I like that I found out about the November release of a 28-DVD, 2-CD, 10-pound, $400 Complete Sopranos box set at The Soup‘s blog.

*And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM reflects on the sexlessness of torture porn.

* Brian Heiler salutes the 10 Greatest Playsets of All Time. I’m the proud former owner of three–the Terrordome, Castle Grayskull, and the Hall of Justice. Notable omissions: the USS Flagg, the Defiant, the Fright Zone, Snake Mountain, Ewok Village…

* Cryptomundo’s Loren Coleman examines the strange case of the Giant Alaskan Ocean Platypus. I have to say that a six-foot seafaring platypus would basically be the greatest water monster ever.

* Now that I’ve finally seen all three series in their entirety, it was my great pleasure to finally dive into Matt Zoller Seitz, Andrew Sepinwall, and Andrew Johnston’s debate over which TV drama is the greatest of all time: David Milch’s Deadwood (Seitz), David Simon’s The Wire (Sepinwall), or David Chase’s The Sopranos (Johnston). I still think they left out a David (Lynch and Twin Peaks); also, having followed a Netflix-enabled viewing of The Wire with one of Deadwood, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Deadwood makes The Wire look like T.J. Hooker; but have you even doubted for a second that the debate (available in both podcast and text form) is a fascinating one?

* Since finishing Deadwood last night and thereafter immersing myself in whatever online commentary I could find (Seitz’s columns on the final season for the Newark Star-Ledger have tragically been disappeared), I’ve learned of the ignominious fate HBO relegated the show to and just gotten angrier and angrier with each passing hour. It’s to the point where I can check out this pretty bitchin’-lookin’ Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD set and merely be enraged that they have the gall to call it “the complete series.” Cocksuckers.

* Finally (for now; I’m guessing I’ll have more to say about this show in the future), here is a lengthy, must-read encomium to the fight between Dan Dority and Captain Turner, the most brutal and best fight scene I’ve ever seen.

* Is it just me, or does this USA Today article on the Avengers movie bury the lede? It quotes Jon Favreau as “revealing” the character line-up every nerd on earth already knew (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk) but sorta glosses over the fact that, according to the article at least, he’s actively working on the Iron Man sequel he supposedly hadn’t even been contacted about. I don’t know if it’s just an assumption by the reporter or what, but it seems like news. Anyway, I’m making this the fourth item in this post because I care about it a lot less than I care about Deadwood, but what’s up with the rest of the nerdosphere? Did I miss something? (Via SciFi Wire, who also whiff.)

* Clive Barker continues to actively protest the treatment of the upcoming CB adaptation The Midnight Meat Train. This time he’s publicly laying the blame for the film’s supposed burial at the feet of new Lionsgate honcho Joe Drake, who he says is deliberately scuppering projects shepherded by his predecessor Peter Block, Meat Train included. If you’d like to politely contact Mr. Drake and ask him to reconsider his studio’s plans for the film, you may do so by emailing jdrake@lionsgate.com or calling (310) 449-9200 and asking for Joe Drake’s office.

* Dread Central’s Johnny Butane has a post on an interesting-sounding showcase of the reality-horror films [REC], Butcher, and Home Movie at the upcoming Fantasia Festival.

* Speaking of [REC], quick question, horror fans: Why can’t I find this movie on Netflix? Am I doing something wrong?

* Shit the bed, it’s a Quintesson action figure! These suckers duke it out with Golobulus and Cobra-La for the title of “weirdest addition to a major ’80s action-figure/cartoon franchise.”

* Finally, Nigel Tufnel’s green skeleton shirt…Chris Knight’s “I HEART Toxic Waste” tee…bouncer shirts from the Double Deuce…”STEPHEN KING RULES” from The Monster Squad…FoundItemClothing.com is one “BULL SHIT” t-shirt from The Jerk away from being the greatest t-shirt retailer ever.

That’s the video for the exuberantly sleazy “Pay for Me” by Whale. Even back when it first came out, when I was still in the throes of being very very very fucking serious about everything I listened to, I saw that hilarious first shot of them using a vinyl copy of Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy to scratch with and thought “GodDAMN that’s fucking VICIOUS.” That sort of blow against tedious authenticity brings a smile to my face I can only compare to the look on a supervillain’s face when something evil is about to go down.

And because I know you’re hankering for it now:

* Would you like to watch all four seasons of Lost online for free? Then go here and here, because ABC has recently signed a deal with Veoh to stream their series online

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror concludes his series on the modern zombie movie, taking us from the mid-’90s video game Resident Evil through the 28 Days Later-inspired zombie renaissance to the present day. If anything, I think he undersells the degree to which this decade has seen George A. Romero’s zombie films, particularly Dawn of the Dead, enshrined as the apotheosis of contemporary horror, the template against which other horror movies are now judged by critics.

* I was pretty convinced I blogged about this when I saw it but apparently I didn’t: Quentin Tarantino says that his long-discussed World War II action epic Inglorious Bastards (which I didn’t realize was a remake, of a movie by Enzo Castellari) will be split into two parts, Kill Bill style.

* Kristin Thompson notes that the London Times has largely retracted an article that made it sound like Christopher Tolkien was trying to singlehandedly take down production of the Hobbit films in some sort of grudge match.

* Lara Flynn Boyle rounds out her week of blogging about Twin Peaks. As with past entries you wonder if she correctly remembers who any of her female castmembers were, but aside from that it’s a fun glimpse into just how green she was at the time.

* In referring to The Happening as a fun and original B-movie, I think Adam Balz has found another way to accurately describe the deliberately off-kilter tone I was trying to describe with my “satire with violence instead of comedy” formulation. Anyway, please see the comment thread in my post for interesting back-and-forth between Jason Adams, Jon Hastings, Shaggy, Rickey Purdin, and hopefully myself if I get a few minutes.

* Speaking of back and forth, I enjoyed a little comment-thread debate I had with my favorite music writer, Matthew Perpetua, about the new album from renowned sample-pirate Girl Talk–go here and here. I also recommend you listen to him offer a pretty even-handed assessment of GT’s ouevre generally and new album Feed the Animals specifically on NPR. I think I finally grok his objection to the aspects of GT’s work he doesn’t like: the result of its juxtapositions are sometimes merely additive (eg. cocky rap vocals plus cock-rock metal anthem equals cocky cock-rap) or non sequitur (eg. big hip-hop beat plus Dawson’s Creek theme song equals “haha that’s hilarious!”) rather than “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (eg. Young Jeezy’s “Soul Survivor” plus “Scentless Apprentice” plus “Passin’ Me By” plus “Juicy” plus “Tiny Dancer” equals a song about the horror of being trapped in a seemingly inescapable sociopolitical/mental environment and the euphoria of transcending it).

* In labeling The Incredible Hulk a failure with interesting visuals, Reverse Shot’s Matt Connolly serves up a couple of great lines about facial hair and your quote of the day:

As if in response to Lee’s intellectualized (which is not to say intelligent) infusion of convoluted psychological underpinnings into comic book mythology, director Louis Leterrier and screenwriter Zak Penn have streamlined their film’s focus to the body itself, specifically the male specimen: how it flexes, morphs, and bulges in frightening and entrancing ways.

This makes a lot of sense. After all, what else is Tim Roth’s Emil Blonsky looking for but gamma-Viagra, and what else is the purpose of the scene where Bruce refrains from bedding Betty due to his uncontrollable prowess than proof that his Jade Giant is bigger than Blonsky’s?

* The next best thing to being there: Tom Spurgeon reviews Heroes Con 2008, to which I was invited but regrettably could not make it.

* Evil on Two Legs looks at Camp Crystal Lake fashion. It’s, um, not hot.

* Check it out: Monster Brains’ Aeron Alfrey has a creature gallery of his own–1,000 beasts strong!

* Long ago, when reviewing Children of Men, I wondered if the film’s depiction of anti-immigrant hysteria amid economic privation of the sort that could be alleviated by immigrants made sense given what one would think would be the native people’s self-interest. This post from Matthew Yglesias points to a real-world analogue that shows it makes all too much sense, unfortunately.

SPOILERS FOR THE HAPPENING AHOY. Sorry, I tried, but I just couldn’t do without.

Before you read anything I write about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening you should stop and read everything Jon Hastings has to say on the subject. He does yeoman’s work as a Shyamalan apologist, trying to defend what were (to him and to me) obviously conscious choices made by Shyamalan in this movie against critics whose (to him and to me) increasingly comical and depressing conservatism led them to believe Shyamalan was trying to make a completely different movie and just screwed it up.* A movie that knows its place, basically. For god’s sake, do these people not understand there’s more than one way to skin a cat?

As you can gather I liked it. I’m not over the moon for it–in Shyamalan’s oeuvre I prefer The Village (haven’t seen The Lady in the Water but I sure am gonna now, and while Jon is quite right to point out that it’s doing something entirely different than Spielberg’s thematically and structurally** similar War of the Worlds, I find I prefer what War of the Worlds did. But the vituperative response to it is really completely unjustified. And while I know it’s a mug’s game to dismiss critics on an ad hominem basis, it’s tough for me to see the hostile reaction as anything but its own ad hominem rejection of Shyamalan for being too serious and too big for his britches, refusing to deliver the crowd-pleasers he’s apparently supposed to be delivering. That, and as I alluded to above, I’m literally sitting here shaking my head that people could watch (say) Mark Wahlberg’s performance in this movie, or John Leguizamo’s, and it doesn’t occur to them that they weren’t gunning for The Departed in terms of acting style. It’s like people complaining that Nicholson was over the top in The Shining.

I think the way to look at The Happening is as a satire with violence instead of comedy. (I’m a big fan of this kind of substitution, hence my theory that Eyes Wide Shut is a horror movie with sex instead of violence.) What you have here is a film in which the Earth basically decides to take a small corner of itself and murder all the people on it that it can. Then it stops, and then at the end of the film it picks another corner and starts again. Throughout, the horror imagery is of people calmly methodically killing themselves–in essence, reducing everyone’s personal stories and goals and ethics to a bloody punchline.

The death that struck me hardest is that of John Leguizamo’s grumpy, sort of unlikeable math teacher. Here’s a guy who despite the possibility of losing his own wife still finds the time to make his buddy’s wife, who he’s never liked, feel like a piece of shit; who also has the presence of mind to help keep a fellow survivor calm by getting her to work through a math puzzle in lieu of freaking out; then BOOM, he wanders out of a car wreck that killed his fellow passengers, plops himself down in the middle of the road, grabs a piece of glass and goes to work on his wrist. And when you think about it, what are the final two scenes–life goes on with Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, while life ends in Paris–but that same sick joke writ large?

So yeah, what I like about The Happening is that it’s the anti-Signs Not that I didn’t like Signs, because I do, it’s just that this movie is nihilistic where that one was optimistic perhaps to a fault. Is Shyamalan really this angry about climate change? Did the critics just break him down? Who knows, but I’ll eat it. As Wahlberg sing-songily deduces his way through the catastrophe, people keep dying and dying, and as he and his wife (and the poor little girl they’re supposed to be keeping safe) decide to make one last grand gesture of love, the dying stops, and ultimately it’s all sort of meaningless. Meanwhile a billboard outside a model-home McMansion poised to turn the middle of nowhere into an exurb proclaims, in the familiar and infuriating language of American advertising, “You Deserve This!” Indeed.

* Surely the Betty Buckley sequence illustrates that Shyamalan knows how to be really, really scary and could do so throughout the film if he felt like it. He didn’t!

** Very similar, in fact: initial urban outbreak, flight through the highways and byways, commandeered cars, the shattering of ad hoc groups, savagery among survivors, offerer of refuge becomes immediate threat and also happens to be nuts, last horrible moments, threat peters out, kinda happy ending. Shyamalan just adds an extra scene that shifts the balance, which is just one reason why, as Jon says, it’s incorrect to view him as a Spielberg manqué.

Because I fail at self-promotion I’ve neglected to mention that my comic book Murder is on sale at the Partyka table at Heroes Con right this very moment. If you’re there you might consider buying it. If you’re not, you still might consider buying it.

* Reviews of things I haven’t seen part one: Tom Spurgeon reviews Jason’s new collection of old material, Pocket Full of Rain.

* Reviews of things I haven’t seen part two: my pal TJ Dietsch reviews Jack Kirby’s OMAC.

* Reviews of things I haven’t seen part three: Jon Hastings keeps on talkin’ up M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. This time he’s asking potential audience members to go in with the assumption that Shyamalan, for want of a better phrase, meant to do that.

* Review of thing I have seen: Jim Treacher talks about The Incredible Hulk.

* Crisis at DC Comics: Dick Hyacinth offers a wide-ranging musing on the failure of Final Crisis to ignite the audience, while Douglas Wolk focuses on its implications for New Gods/Fourth World continuity.

* Lara Flynn Boyle is continuing to blog about Twin Peaks.

* Jason Adams spotlights his five favorite monsters from the films of the ’00s.

* Looks like Clive Barker is getting behind a fan campaign to persuade Lionsgate to give Midnight Meat Train a wider release. Here’s a brief statement from Clive to that effect (via STYD), and here’s a longer, more formal letter from Barker on behalf of an email drive. Hey, why not? Polite but firm pleas to expand the film’s release beyond the rumored 100-theater limited run may be directed to Lionsgate investor relations at keasterling@lionsgate.com, or Lionsgate as a whole at general-inquiries@lionsgate.com or (310) 449-9200.

* In the interest of accuracy, here’s the SciFi Channel’s response to earlier reports of an extended back-half ofBattlestar Galactica‘s final season. They’re only confirming that the finale “extends beyond the time allotted for the episode.”

* Carlos Pacheco will be joining (read: subbing in for) J.G. Jones on the art chores for Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis. Pacheco is actually a terrific superhero artist, better than Jones in some respects in fact, but this just doesn’t bode well for the management of the series, particularly given how its writer has been publicly saying he wrote the scripts long enough ago for other recent series to not yet have been a twinkle in their editors’ eyes.

* Lara Flynn Boyle is blogging about Twin Peaks. Man, what an awesome sentence that was to write. Sample quote:

A lot of kids went to college and they talk about their college years as so great. I never went to college; for me, college was Twin Peaks. I was able to have David Lynch direct me beautifully and slowly into a scene. That was my kegger.

(Via Whitney Matheson.)

* This video for the Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money” constructed from edited footage of Destro (in the role of the Notorious B.I.G.) and the Baroness (Li’l Kim) from G.I. Joe is very very funny, but it also has the effect of all great Biggie tracks, which is to flabbergast me that Puffy was ever responsible for something this good. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Jon Hastings expands his defense of The Happening and the work of M. Night Shyamalan generally, and I continue not to read it until I’ve actually seen the film.

* Curt Purcell continues his critique of Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” by poking holes in the way Freud addresses primitive/superstitious beliefs.

* Finally, no one defies Golobulus and lives. No one!

Two of the better responses I’ve read to the mid-season finale or whatever the hell they want us to call it of Battlestar Galactica this past Friday are Todd VanDerWeff’s and Alan Sepinwall’s (the latter via Whitney Matheson). The title of Sepinwall’s review is really sheer genius, by the way.

As I think I’ve said around here before, while I’m not of the opinion that the show j***ed the s***k this season (or at any time in the past), I haven’t been thrilled with the way its emphasis has shifted from examining the human conscience through the prism of war and atrocity to an ourobouros-like fixation on its own mythology. (It’s kinda cute how, in keeping with the final episode’s title “Revelations,” Comix Experience honco Brian Hibbs is recounting his realization of this fact like it’s a genuine revelation; be warned that he doesn’t bleep out the Dreaded Phrase like I just did.) So in keeping with that, I was at first disappointed with the way that the ep had to rush through, gloss over, or ignore entirely the major character beats that one would think should accompany the astonishing events that transpired. Some great reaction shots from Michael Hogan and Katee Sackhoff and a mourning montage from Edward James Olmos doesn’t really cut it, given the enormity of what they’re all learning and doing.

But then it occurred to me that perhaps I’m simply being less charitable toward the show than I used to be. Back in the day I used to praise the show for the liberties it took with conventional episodic drama pacing, how it would change the emotional status quo for individual characters at a breakneck rate and have confidence in the audience to follow along and construct the through-line on our own. The example that comes to mind, and I know it’s not the best one, is the rapidity of Lee and Dualla’s relationship from first flirtation to full-on thing goin’ on, but hopefully you get the drift. I think getting grumpy with the show becoming a show about itself–coupled, not incidentally, with my first-ever viewings of Deadwood, a show that is about nothing but the characters’ reactions to adversity and tragedy–has made me look askance at this particular episode in ways it might not deserve.

At any rate, the penultimate, celebratory montage and the final, grim tracking shot were quite magnificent, among the strongest visuals in the show’s history and on a par with the best visual moments from rival genre exemplar Lost (a show that pays a lot more attention to the memorable image than BSG, historically). I rewatched them with my wife, who doesn’t watch the show at all, and with minimal set-up from me even she was able to appreciate their impact. If push had come to shove during the strike, it’d have made a wonderful series finale too.

But in taking us to Earth in all its burned-out glory, the final minutes of the episode enable us to make sense of the preceding demi-season in ways that were impossible to do before. I said last week that I was no longer sure what the show was “about,” but that was because I was seeing the sudden monomania about Finding Earth through the prism of the belief that we wouldn’t actually reach it until we only had a couple-three episodes left in the entire series. If that were the case, I figured we were in for an ever more regressive examination of continuity minutiae, the onset of which felt completely arbitrary. But by taking us to Earth now–a move probably necessitated, as an astute friend of mine pointed out, by the possibility that the show wouldn’t make it through the strike, and Ron Moore’s desire to see his promise to the fans fulfilled come what may–that makes this half-season “about” the desperation of these characters to find their new home, and the crazy, erratic, illogical, life-upending moves they’re willing to make to get there. It makes sense as a whole. And of course it will be exciting as hell to see what happens now that these two formerly warring societies, still pursued by the more extreme Cylon faction, have had all their dreams turn to shit.

* The big news of the day is that Stan Winston has died. Winston contributed make-up and special effects to some of the most iconic films of the past thirty-odd years of fantastic fiction, including The Terminator and Terminator 2, Predator, Aliens, The Monster Squad, The Thing, Jurassic Park, Iron Man and more. He was the most influential visualizer of horror this side of Jack Pierce and Ray Harryhausen. He’ll be deeply missed.

* Look, it’s the David Bowie sketchbook in action!

That’s Jason adding his contribution up top, and me (the person who isn’t Art Spiegelman or Dash Shaw) watching him do so down below. Via Mike Baehr at Fantagraphics and his MoCCA report.

* David Lynch talks to The Atlantic about where he gets his ideas, advancing the theory that they exist fully formed prior to his conceptualizing them and he merely catches them like a fisherman catches fish. If there is an artist who displays a bigger contrast between demeanor and creative output than Lynch, I have yet to encounter him. (Via Matthew Yglesias.)

* Jon Hastings apparently loved The Happening. So many people hated it that I’d be here all day rattling off links even just to people whose work I already like, but the first one I came across is BC of Horror Movie a Day. I hope to see it this weekend.

* Also from the “reviews of films I haven’t seen” files, here’s an absolutely enthralling roundtable discussion of…Krull? Oddly enough for someone who was as big a He-Man fan as I was, I never got into the sword-and-sorcery flicks of the early ’80s. This is probably because I was also a huge scaredy-cat. I do remember some well-meaning family member renting Beastmaster for me, and I started bawling uncontrollably when it looked like some sorcerer person was going to make some pregnant lady’s belly pop and they had to stop the movie.

* Here’s a review of a movie I actually have seen: My own review of The Incredible Hulk.

* Want to hear My Bloody Valentine’s first gig in over 15 years? (Via Pitchfork, who have pictures if you’ve been swoonily daydreaming about how Kevin Shields and/or Bilinda Butcher look these days.)

* Finally, your quote of the day comes from an episode of the BBC music special Sounding Out from (I’m assuming) 1972:

Every time you go to a gig, you have a cursory look at the audience, but you know what it’s gonna be like. They’re always, to a man, gonna be between 16 and 20, the young, white, affluent kids of the particular town you’re in. They’re all gonna have long hair. They’re all gonna have slightly tattier clothes than they need to wear.

–Bill Bruford, drummer, Yes. Plus ça change…

I feel like I’ve taken an inordinate amount of guff for looking forward to The Incredible Hulk. For starters I’ve been mercilessly taunted by the “Ed Norton is a prima donna artsy-fartsy asshole who should just shut up and make movies” brigade. Then there’s the “nobody cares about this movie, Iron Man has all the buzz, it’s the hippest happenin’est superhero movie around baby” fanboy-EW-wannabe contingent. And lately I’ve even got into it with a small army of people who prescribe to the absurd notion that Jennifer Connelly is more attractive than Liv Tyler. (The hell you say!) And oh yeah, some people just think it’s a mediocre movie.

Well ha ha ha ha ha, you’re all wrong! The Incredible Hulk was basically exactly what I was looking for in a Hulk movie. Three rock-solid action sequences that made tremendous use of their physical settings (the chase through the Brazilian urban sprawl was particularly stunning), with the consequences for the combatants easily parseable amid the CGI rubble. Terrifically vulnerable leads in Edward Norton and Liv Tyler–the former imbuing Bruce Banner’s every move with a sort of hangdog desperation that his life as a human being with anything to offer anyone is over, the latter using her breathy voice and just-wept eyes and lips to convey the awkwardness of running into someone you used to love as well as you’re gonna see in a movie. Moments of memorable, borderline-poetic action spectacle that more than make up for seeing the seams of the SFX–the savagery of the Hulk vs. Abomination fight is as strong as anything from the second and third Spider-Man films, which had some excellent, beautiful fights despite their other flaws.

Then there were little surprises–the sneak-attack emergence of the Mr. Blue character as a bit of a mad scientist, which really snuck up as organically as possible in a big Hollywood blockbuster. Moments of glamor and wit, like Tyler’s sultry tossing and turning, Norton’s weird breathing exercises, and the very funny “we can’t have sex or I’ll Hulk out mid-coitus” moment. And the biggest twist of all: The fact that this was more or less an Abomination origin movie, showing us Emil Blonsky’s journey from black-ops badass at the top of his game to a first-time loser obsessed with his defeat, at which point, enter superhero pseudoscience. That’s your superhero-movie origin structure in a nutshell, and here it’s used on background to cook up the antagonist. Clever!

I’m quite glad I saw it in a theater full of cheering, clapping people, in midtown New York City, at 5 o’clock on a Monday. It was a hoot, as good in its way as Iron Man, with those characters’ cleverness replaced by these characters’ awkwardness. It works.

…I’m thinking that it must be the Thin White Sketchbook, Part 3!

Last weekend was the MoCCA Art Festival 2008, and me and my David Bowie sketchbook (previously seen here and here) were back in action. As always, I couldn’t be more pleased with the results.

Molly Crabapple: Eyes to the skies and halfway between classy and goofy, as is the wont of Molly’s dandies.

CF: CF seemed excited to draw Bowie, until he flipped through my sketchbook, which he said was intimidating. He handed this back, saying “He was a great Nazi sympathizer.” That’s something of a misrepresentation, as a matter of fact–and something of a disconcerting addition to the sketchbook–but one does not look gift sketches in the mouth, I suppose.

Michel Gondry: Yes, that Michel Gondry. The fact that I have a sketch of David Bowie by the man who directed the video for “Everlong” is pretty goddamn wonderful if you ask me. Gondry insisted I buy his comic book in exchange for the sketch, which seems fair.

Jason: The most underappreciated cartoonist around, given his talent, Jason commanded huge sketch/autograph lines at the show. He actually apologized for “getting the clothes wrong” on this, but Bowie as an anthropomorphized doggie version of The Little Prince? No apology necessary.

Tom Kaczynski: A mash-up of Bowie’s two most stylish eras. My favorite sketch of the show. Look at that luscious red!

Bill Plympton: Yes, that Bill Plympton. When I saw this animation legend’s name on the guest list for the show, I got pretty excited. It paid off.

Andy Runton: Runton draws his trademark character Owly as any other character you like. He went for one of Bowie’s well-dressed crooner phases for me. Compare and contrast with the CF, if you will.

Dash Shaw: I get kind of a silent-movie expressionist vibe from this one, don’t you?

Kazimir Strzepek: This shot of Bowie, based on his soldier-boy look from the film Just a Gigolo, looks like it could have come right from one of Kaz’s post-apocalyptic fantasies.

Matthew Thurber: Thurber made a pretty wild Bowie minicomic called What Kind of Magic Spell to Use, an alternate-reality take on the recording of the Labyrinth soundtrack with producer Steve Albini (!). Needless to say he was a must-get on my list.

Don’t forget to check out the sketches I got at MoCCA 2007 and SPX 2007, or see the whole shebang as a Flickr set. Drink to the men (and women) who draw sketches for you and I! Drink, drink, drain your glass, raise your glass high!

* Shock Till You Drop reports that Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train will receive a limited 100-theater release. So much for The Strangers saving R-rated horror, eh wot?

* SPOILERY Descent/Descent 2 tidbits ahoy: The entire cast of the original Descent will be returning in The Descent 2 via flashback. (Via Bloody Disgusting.) So yes, the new film will pick up where the American cut of the first film left off. Since I find being haunted by guilt and failure for the rest of your life to be a more disturbing source of fear than remaining stuck in a cave full of creatures trying to eat you, I’ve always prefered the U.S. version to the U.K. version, so this news makes me pretty happy.

* At least one of those rumored Battlestar Galactica TV movies looks like a going concern for this year, while the show’s Sopranos-style “final season part deux” may pick up an additional 2 hours to go from 10 to 12, according to the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan. I’d have been marginally more excited about this news before the current half-season, but hey, I hear tonight’s episode is a real mind-blower. We’ll see. (Via Jason Adams.)

* I enjoyed Keith Uhlich’s essay on the new four-film Rambo DVD box set a great deal, because I think in comparing John Rambo varyingly to Frankenstein’s monster, Tintin, and the Hercules of Greek myth he gets at the heart of the character: Rambo is war. He’s offensive, heroic, and disturbing, easy to harness to propagandaiacal aims yet always too strange, complex, and dangerous to stay harnessed. (Via The House Next Door.)

* The Groovy Age of Horror’s Curt Purcell continues his examination of supernatural horror with a second critique of Freud’s “The Uncanny,” this one focusing on Freud’s (mis?)interpretation of his key source, E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sand-Man.”

* Your quote of the day comes from Jim Henley, discussing recent witch hunts in Kenya:

A working definition of “witch” has long been “a widow with some property.”

* Finally, just a friendly reminder that you can buy my comic book Murder for the low low price of three American dollars at the Partyka shop.