* In case you missed the earlier link, I have an interview with Gary Panter over at Marvel.com. Seriously!

* Lost creator Damon Lindelof talks to EW about whether the Numbers (4 8 15 61 23 42) will ever be explained on the show. My single biggest problem with Lost is that they relegated their only explanation of the Numbers so far–they’re values from a mathematical formula called the Valenzetti Equation, which was developed by Dharma scientists as a predictor of the date the world will end; all the experiments conducted on the Island are supposedly designed to change those values and thus save the world–to a stupid alternate reality game that virtually none of my Lost-watching friends even know existed. If I recall correctly, Lindelof has said that the reason they didn’t reveal this on the show was that the characters wouldn’t care, which makes less than no sense. Anyway, Lindelof gives me some hope that they’re going to rectify this silliness when he tells EW that there will be more on the Numbers (which have been largely ignored since the Hatch that used them as a computer code blew up) on the show, and that they predate their inclusion in the Valenzetti Equation, but there will be no explanation of why they have their special significance. Jim Treacher, who linked to the piece, says that this is proof that the Numbers are “horseshit,” but I don’t think so–at a certain point things are magical because they’re magical, and you can’t go any deeper than that. Like 23 in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (at least until the explain what would happen to the Law of Fives if we had eight fingers instead of 10).

* The cast of Battlestar Galactica will be reading the Top 10 list on Letterman on March 19th. I have no idea how they pulled that off, but I’m programming my TiVo as we speak.

* The trailer for The Incredible Hulk is out. Everyone’s bitching about it for some reason, but everyone’s an asshole. Ed Norton Hulk vs. Tim Roth Abomination in the middle of Manhattan? That’s gold, Jerry. Gold! (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* A while back, I wondered how mainstream film critics would react to Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Funny Games given how hostile they’ve been to domestic torture porn horror. Based on the reactions compiled by Jason Adams, it looks like they’re going to shit all over it. On the other hand, bona fide horror critic Stacie Ponder was completely blown away by it. It was never going to be anything but an extraordinarily divisive movie, but I still expected the likes of J. Hoberman to at least pretend to be down with it.

Sean T. Collins interviews Gary Panter for Marvel.com.

There are any number of levels on which being able to truthfully write that sentence blows my mind.

* Finished The Wire!

* This is truly one of the strangest stories I’ve ever heard: A woman sat on her boyfriend’s toilet, ostensibly of her own volition, for two years. She’d been there so long her skin had grown around the seat and a hospital had to remove it. Shades of everything from Secretary to Se7en.

* AICN reports that Sylvester Stallone is considering a fifth Rambo movie, one that would abandon the usual war/action territory for another, unspecified genre. Like AICN’s Merrick, I think the fourth film in the series took things in a very interesting emotional direction, and the potential for a different kind of Rambo movie is definitely there.

* Hey, it appears that Steven “The Horror Blog” Wintle has a new comics blog called I Was Ben!

* Finally, Ezra Klein compares Geraldine Ferraro’s recent comments about Barack Obama to Marvel’s What If? series. (Via Andrew Sullivan, who seems to be growing fonder of talking about Hillary Clinton in genre-nerd terms by the day.)

* I’ve got about 50% of the final episode of The Wire to go, if you’ve been wondering.

* Neil Marshall, director of the excellent The Descent, the so-so Dog Soldiers, and the upcoming, cool-looking Doomsday, has announced his next project: a period Western horror film called Sacrilege which he describes as “Unforgiven by way of H.P. Lovecraft.” Sounds good to me! And speaking of Lovecraft…

* Krazy Old Comics Water Monster #1: Dave at Rue Morgue has the goods on an “America’s Choice” brand Cthulhu from Charlton Comics’ Baron Weirwulf’s Haunted Library. His name…Kulu! I know, clever, right?

* Krazy Old Comics Water Monster #2: Siskoid brings us this panel of some sonuvabitch shooting a rocket launcher at a perfectly good plesiosaur.

* There’s a poster out there for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and I got all excited about it when I first saw it, but then I realized that Indy looks bored on it and that it’s not really a great poster, it’s just great that there is a new Indiana Jones movie so as to necessitate the making of a poster, so I’m not gonna post a picture of it here. The end!

* I wasn’t aware that Scott Smith, the author of The Ruins, wrote the screenplay for its upcoming film adaptation. Those hopes just keep getting higher.

* Every comics blogger and their brother is linking to this sweet Wall Street Journal profile of cartoonist and fashion designer (!) Paul Pope. While it bobbles some of the facts of his career, as mainstream-media profiles of comics people are wont to do, it makes up for that by giving his trademark blend of style and substance a respectful hearing. (Nobody tell Dan Nadel!)

* Here’s a terrific interview with one of my favorite cartoonists in the world, Phoebe Gloeckner, about why she’s an artist. Watch it for the interview material, but keep your eyes peeled for a lot of seemingly digital art from Gloeckner that as far as I can tell has not been seen before, much of it appearing to come from her project about the mass unsolved murder of women in Juarez, Mexico. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Aeron at Monster Brains spots some cool, creepy Mat Brinkman art at the website for Providence, RI’s Stairwell Gallery.

* Michael Haneke talks to EW about his English-language version of Funny Games in delightfully brusque take-it-or-leave-it terms, while another EW reporter was reduced to tears by the movie. I myself am trying to figure out whether I have the wherewithal to go to a movie theater and subject myself to it as opposed to watching it in the comfort of my own home (or a hotel room in the Standard on Sunset while half-lit, as was the case for me

with the German version). (Via Jason Adams.)

* It’s an Eve Tushnet twofer! Here’s her review of Shock Treatment, the sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

* And in this post, she elaborates on the directors and subgenres she selected for her dream horror anthology film in response to the Horror Roundtable on the topic.

* From the quibble department: In Chris Butcher’s post lambasting, among other things, 52, it seems like he’s blaming editor Steve Wacker for the storylines that led to the imposition by editor-in-chief Dan DiDio of tie-in projects World War III and 52 Aftermath: Four Horsemen, even though Wacker was long gone from the book by then. I also think 52 in general was a rewardingly baroque reading experience where the personal obsessions of its writers made themselves manifest in a way that’s quite rare for superhero comics, and I enjoyed it a lot.

* Andrew Sullivan describes Hillary Clinton in horror-movie terms.

* Finally, here’s the new trailer for the ever-more-F-Zero/Mario Kart-esque Speed Racer. That’s entertainment! (Via Topless Robot.)

Much of my free time this past week, this weekend, and this upcoming week has been and will be taken up by a desperate (and no doubt futile, given my usual luck in this department) attempt to plow through the final two seasons of The Wire on DVD and TiVo in hopes that I can finish the show before the inevitable series-finale spoilers pop up unannounced in an Ain’t It Cool News RSS feed headline or an unrelated post on Matt Yglesias’s blog and ruin it for me. Now, this is not in fact the reason I haven’t blogged anything today–it’s just that nothing really tickled my fancy–but I really just wanted to use that post title.

* This week’s Horror Roundtable asks what our favorite horror locale is. Here’s a hint for my top two: an Andrew W.K. album and a Steven Segal movie.

* I totally wish they’d made toys out of a brainwashed Soviet assassin and a neo-Nazi killing machine when I was a kid!

(Via Topless Robot.)

* Finally, Skyscrapers of the Midwest author Josh Cotter is posting a whole lot of cool, random drawings on his blog this month. Look for the entries titled “March Hare.”

I’m kind of in love with this gallery of 20 stills from the upcoming adaptation of The Ruins. (If that link doesn’t work, try this one.)

Boy oh boy, did they cast this movie well. Everyone is cute but not in that plastic WB way–in a real, young-looking, vulnerable way, like your friends from college. My hopes get higher.

* I’m kind of interested in this Trinity project by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley: It’s DC’s next weekly comic, the first one starring the cream of DC’s superhero crop–Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman–and the first one whose main story is completely written and drawn by the same team, in this case two solid if not spectacular craftsmen responsible for enjoyable titles like Astro City and Ultimate Spider-Man. I’m curious to see how that kind of release schedule and pacing works with a set creative team and a small, fixed roster of extremely well known stars. Anyway, Doug Wolk interviewed Busiek about it.

* Over at Topless Robot, my buddy Jesse Thompson runs down his 10 favorite horror movie posters from the ’80s. What up, Ghoulies?

* Finally…

Feminism!

Zack Snyder has posted shots of most of the main superhero characters in his adaptation of Watchmen:

In the words of Kirsty from Hellraiser, me like. I guess we nerds are supposed to get all OG about it and be upset that they’re not in tights, but this approach makes sense to me: The comic book version of this story was geared toward comic book readers, so it featured traditional comic-book spandex costumes. The movie version is geared toward moviegoers, so it’s going with movie-style costumes. They look good. Full-sized images at the link. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Over at The House Next Door, the very good TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz, Alan Sepinwall, and Andrew Johnston debate which show by The Three Davids–Chase’s The Sopranos, Milch’s Deadwood, and Simon’s The Wire–is the best TV drama of all time in a podcast. One day, when I finish going through The Wire and then roll through Deadwood, I plan on listening to this with great interest, but until then I’m steering clear. In the meantime I will say 1) They missed a David; 2) So far (I’m a couple episodes into Season Four), as good as The Wire may be, between it and The Sopranos it’s not even close.

* A terrible week for the cast and the fans of Road House just gets worse: First Jeff Healey dies, and now we learn that Patrick Swayze has (terminal?) pancreatic cancer.

* Apparently Joss Whedon is going to have Buffy the Vampire Slayer have a lesbian fling in her current comic book. Feminism! (This gratuitous bit of browncoat-baiting is brought to you by Jason Adams.)

* The Blot artist Tom Neely keeps doing great work; the sad and upsetting comic strip he posted today knocked me to the floor.

* Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle unearths one of the most unnerving stories I’ve heard in a long while, one I’m surprised I hadn’t heard before: the Dyatlov Pass Accident. In 1959, nine Russian cross-country skiers made camp in the Ural Mountains to wait out a storm. The next morning they were all dead–apparently having literally torn their way out of their tents and ran into the -30 degree Celsius night in their underwear, two of them with massive internal trauma to the chest but no external injuries, one with a crushed head, one with a missing tongue, all bearing traces of radiation and all with their hair turned gray literally overnight. More weird details at the link. Given my reading of late, this rolled right down my alley.

UPDATE: A friend did some googling and discovered that virtually all references to this story stem from the past few weeks (there’s some sketchy stuff from 2006 on Wikipedia (where the article is up for deletion) and a Russian-language message board thread purporting to be from 2004 but that’s it), so take it all with a tub of salt.

* Finally, via Bruce Baugh I came across this alternate ending to Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend.

As they say at the link, it’s not perfect–the new coda feels like it needs a separate transitional scene to make sense given the tenor of the revised climax that forms the bulk of the alternate take–but it’s vastly superior to the out-of-nowhere Signs riff imposed on the film in the theaters. It ties directly into emotional themes present throughout the film, it makes more sense out of the viro-vampires’ behavior, and it comes a lot closer to the most provocative aspects of the book’s conclusion in terms of how the vampires think of themselves. There’s even a nice little visual callback to the Central Park Zoo lions that ties it all together.

It’s funny: As I’ve thought about the big apocalyptic monster movie trifecta of the past few months–The Mist, I Am Legend, Cloverfied–I came to terms with the fact that even though the character work in the middle movie is head and shoulders above the by-the-numbers material of the other two movies, I was still more likely to end up owning the other two flicks on DVD because their monsters were better. But if I Am Legend had this ending in the theater, I’d have walked away from it with more or less no reservations, and it’d have been a whole different ballgame.

* I don’t have any D&D related puns to deploy, but regardless, rest in peace, Gary Gygax. I didn’t play D&D as a kid, but I have very fond memories of jumping completely cold into a campaign some buddies of mine had going the summer after my freshman year in college and learning on the job, drinking Sam Adams and listening to the Braveheart soundtrack. My DM cooked up an amazing twist ending that had us all completely flabbergasted. For those memories, and for your role in paving the aesthetic road for synthesizing a variety of nerd traditions into a stew based solely on what happens to be awesome about them, god bless you, Gary Gygax. (Via Brian Hibbs.)

* The cast of Lost asks the creators of Lost their burning questions. I like this feature a lot because a) it shows that the actors have as little idea of what’s really going on as we do; b) the formatting makes it really easy to skip past questions you don’t wanna know the answers to; c) some of the answers are genuinely informative. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Bruce Baugh considers the critical consensus on Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend…and agrees with it!

* Eve Tushnet takes a cue from last week’s Horror Roundtable and picks five filmmakers for her dream horror anthology movie. Let’s just say she gets a little more adventurous than John Carpenter.

* Star Wars, Saul Bass-style. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* Finally, a press release about an art opening for the great Teratoid Heights cartoonist and Fort Thunder alum Mat Brinkman:

MAT BRINKMAN

SOLO EXHIBITION: RV AND TRAILER DRAWINGS

March 7 – April 6, 2008

OPENING RECEPTION with the artist: Friday, March 7, 6-9 pm

At certain times in history something unexpected, groundbreaking, and ahead of its time arises. From the eternal dark rivers of Providence, RI came Fort Thunder. Under its pure and unrestricted banner founders Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, together with the legions of unbridled creativity, fought against the quietness of modern mediocrity throughout the dark age of the 1990’s. Despite its demolition in 2002, the legacy of Fort Thunder continues to inspire a generation of artists who keep the true and hallowed flame of the underground in art alive.

LOYAL is proud to present this highly anticipated solo exhibition of new drawings by Mat Brinkman. Darkness will descend upon the opening night when the true defender of black metal, E from Watain, will bring holy damnation from the vinyl players. Pure hellish superiority!

Brinkman crushes predictability and creates a new order of storytelling. With his rough yet highly sophisticated lines, Brinkman’s stripped-down, ink-on-paper drawings use little and tell much. Demon-ghouls with razor claws and cloud-shaped entities bound through an unearthly labyrinthine darkness made up of cell-like squirming lines, revealing primordial undertones in our contemporary world.

In the year 2002, the four person outfit Forcefield (Fort Thunder residents Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg and Ara Peterson) was included in the Whitney Biennial. In 2006 a retrospective of Providence artists in the exhibition Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present was held at the RISD Museum. The exhibition included 1000’s of posters made for events at Fort Thunder and at places like Hilarious Attic and Dirt Palace.

Teratoid Heights, the first collection of Brinkman’s work was published in the summer of 2003 by Highwater Books. A classic of dark and heavy energy, Teratoid Heights is oblivious to the passing of time in its epic, monolithic spirit. New work by Brinkman will be featured in the forthcoming volume of LOYAL Magazine.

LOYAL

Torsgatan 53 & 59

113 37 Stockholm

Sweden

phone +46 (0)8 32 44 91

cell +46 (0)73 322 9289

info@galleriloyal.com

http://www.galleriloyal.com

If I were in Stockholm, I’d go to this, as the saying goes.

Part survival horror, part historical fiction, part training manual for arctic naval expeditions, part Jaws on Ice, Dan Simmons’s The Terror is a peculiar book. The story (though I didn’t know this until after I finished it) is a heavily fictionalized account of the voyage of two real ships from the British Navy, the Erebus and the Terror, to seek the Northwest Passage amid the frozen arctic seas above Canada during the mid-1840s. Bouncing from character to character to present a spectrum of viewpoints, primarily from officers and petty officers, its main narrative thrust is provided by a rigorous accounting of the logistics of such an expedition, and an equally meticulous cataloguing of the myriad paths it takes to disaster: subzero temperatures, treacherous ice, frightening storms and blizzards, food poisoning, scurvy, fire, starvation, murder, and most importantly, alpha predators. I don’t want to tip the book’s hand any more than that, but suffice it to say that the men come to believe–indeed have already come to believe, given the book’s initial in medias res set-up–that a “thing on the ice” is stalking them, with intentions more malevolent than mere predation and abilities more deadly than (literally) the average bear.

The book is very, very long, probably way longer than it needed to be; all those technical terms about ice conditions and parts of the ship and who answers to whom on board eat up page after page. Yet I don’t recall ever feeling bored, or coming to a point where I felt “that right there–that could have been cut.” I couldn’t imagine writing a book stuffed with that much technical detail, let alone making an entertaining genre effort out of it, but Simmons makes it feel so smooth that you hardly notice how stuffed to the gills it is with the fruits of his research, even if you don’t know a serac from a fo’c’sle. But maybe that’s the problem with it: It’s constructed in such a way that every detail seems equally vital, meaning that nothing ultimately is vital. I suppose the slow avalanche of detail is in its way evocative of the day-by-day grind the arctic conditions, natural and otherwise, take on the men and their ships, but compared to something like The Ruins or the Barker and King short stories of which that book is reminiscent, that palpable panicked breakdown momentum is missing; here it’s more a resigned despair. Which is valid, I suppose, but to me less compelling.

Certain elements do stand out against that blinding white background. For one thing, Simmons has a refreshing tendency to zig when you expect him to zag with his characters. A racist stuffed shirt turns out to have risked his career to help abused prisoners; a stereotypical evil homosexual is offset by the introduction of two lovers who are among both the noblest, smartest, and most psychologically complicated members of the crew; a cynical drunk turns out to be a stoic mensch; a squaresville naif delivers the most memorable and cutting rebuff to the book’s bad guys in the whole novel. While the book is never scary in the keep-you-up-at-night sense, the thought of wrestling with the notion that you are most likely going to freeze or starve or rot to death over slow months and years on the ice if you don’t get eaten first can certainly give you something to stew about as you drift off to sleep. And there are memorable horror visuals both operatic (the Carnivale) and insidiously subtle (what the sledge party sees off in the distance throughout their trek). Finally, like those characters, the whole book takes a wild trip off into left field for its final act, something hinted at only slightly by a pair of feints in that direction much earlier on (the first of which, now that I think of it, would have been much better left unrevealed until this final act). To me, this was the book’s best, most unique, and ballsiest section, beating out even the cat-and-mouse suspense of its long-running mutiny subplot. The only problem is that it rather completely undercuts the book’s menace, and that is a very big problem. After all, whether you’re referring to the thing on the ice or the fear of oblivion, you’re talking about the title character here.

This week’s Horror Roundtable is all about assembling directors for the ultimate horror anthology film. Frankly I wouldn’t care what kind of movies my crew made.

* Here’s the Iron Man trailer that ran during last night’s Lost episode. It’s pretty much as note-perfect for the character and concept as everything else we’ve seen from this movie so far. The likes of Mark Millar and J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada should be thoroughly chastened by this. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Speaking of Millar, while I’m sure the dialogue in his Kick-Ass #1 is just as wooden and devoid of insight into actual human behavior and popular culture as Ian Brill says, I think Ian’s really overreaching when he keeps heaping scorn on the notion that high school kids don’t read superhero comics. Um, I did. It’s certainly a hip notion to suggest that they don’t, but not one that is borne out by reality if pretty much any trip I’ve ever taken to any comic store ever is any indication.

* Finally:

In the confession, Underwood said he lured the girl, his upstairs neighbor, into his apartment in Purcell, hit her with a cutting board, smothered her with his hands, sexually assaulted the body and nearly cut her head off as part of a fantasy involving cannibalism.

“I wanted to know what it tasted like, and just the thought of eating someone was appealing to me,” Underwood said in the confession.

[…]

Underwood told FBI he hit the girl her over the head with a wooden cutting board while she was watching television and playing with his pet rat.

Agents asked Underwood what the girl said after he hit her.

“That’s something that’s haunted me forever since it happened,” he said. “She started yelling, I’m sorry,’ which I’m like, What is she sorry for? She didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me. I’m the one that should be sorry.”‘

—“Jury takes minutes to convict cannibal killer,” AP, CNN.com