Turns out that cool 31 Days of Spielberg blogathon is plagued with plagiarism (click here for examples). The author’s kind-of sort-of not-really mea culpa is here; Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door comments here.

Look, any time one of these cases pops up people talk about how it’s a thin line. It’s not. It’s a giant mile-wide crystal-clear line. It’s really, really easy to not plagiarize, and it’s really, really hard to do it, especially in the fashion illustrated by those examples, without knowing that you’re doing it.

The Missus and I watched House Party the other day. We felt inspired. This is the result.

Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition, featuring both seasons and the pilot, is now available for pre-order. It goes on sale October 30th.

(Via Whitney Matheson.)

Wizard’s got an interesting interview up with Zack Snyder, director of Dawn of the Dead, 300, and the upcoming Watchmen, a line-up of films that were he to die after completing movie #3 would make him the nerd-director equivalent of John Cazale (whose C.V. consisted solely of The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter). It focuses primarily on his relationship with Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, with whom he’s collaborating on promotional, conceptual, and storyboard art. Snyder reveals that he himself is actually drawing many of the film’s storyboards (the ones that aren’t straight lifts from the comic).

I think it was only this past week that I realized how cool it would be if they make a good movie out of this book.

This is what happens when comic book nerds go to Jamaica.

Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets digests make unbelievable beach reads, by the way. You may recall me panning Locas in The Comics Journal a while back; I was really proud of that review because it actually caused at least one drunk guy to grab me at dinner and yell at me, which to me is the hallmark of a good Journal review. But I’ve since come around on the “Locas” stories, thanks in large part to these wonderful digests Maggie the Mechanic and The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.. They’re much more complete, much more readable…just the way the stories were meant to be presented. It’s like a soap opera shot by Fellini.

At the Horror Roundtable this week we’re recommending good foreign horror movies. Here’s a completely NSFW tip as to what mine was.

Beginning with [Indiana Jones and the Temple of] Doom, [Steven Spielberg] begins a process of apologizing for disturbing his audience – outside the film at first, but internalizing these dual impulses *within* the films as he continues.

—Jeffrey Allen Rydell in the comment thread for Damian Arlyn’s analysis of Temple of Doom, part of his “31 Days of Spielberg” blogathon.

(I’m back, back in the New York groove.)

This week in the hotseat at my regular Wizard interview column: Jeffrey Brown of Incredible Change-Bots and sundry autobiographical graphic novels fame. Sex is discussed.

If by “fishing” you mean “to Jamaica.”

Back in a week or so.

Pay a visit with me, won’t you, to the House of Ideas as I review Criminal, Daredevil, Nova, Powers, World War Hulk: Front Line, and X-Factor in this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard.

(Additionally and for the record, I loved B.P.R.D. and Batman, and New Avengers and Green Lantern and The Incredible Hulk were fun too.)

Gary Frank is one of my favorite superhero artists. He gives his characters a realistic but heightened physicality and an intensity in their eyes that connotes both potential violence and, well, sex appeal (for both sexes). We’ve got a ginchy gallery of Gary Frank sketches for his upcoming run on the Superman title Action Comics over at Wizard–take a look.

On his blog, Paul Pope has posted a quote from Frank “Dune” Herbert’s son Brian about how upset his father was over the (ahem) similarities between his work and George Lucas’s later, much more successful Star Wars. It got me thinking in a way that’s sort of in direct opposition to the way I’ve been thinking about a lot of art lately.

This is something I’ve gone into on the blog before: Basically, a sometimes-writer and a frequent consumer of fiction, I’m a very big fan of what I think of as “the art of enthusiasm”—the magpie approach of constructing your own little mythos or whatever based on elements of other stories that you really really enjoy. That’s why I like that the He-Man/Masters of the Universe toys and cartoons were an incoherent mish-mash of sci-fi, fantasy, pulp and superhero conventions; they just took everything awesome and jammed it together. That’s also why I like Kill Bill, or Scott Pilgrim, or The Immortal Iron Fist*, or Star Wars itself, and so on. And it’s not just fiction. The same principle probably applies to Bowie throughout his career, latching on to whatever music had him psyched at the time and then moving on when he felt like it, as well as really really sample-heavy late-80s/early-90s hip-hop. So on the one hand I’d say that a big part of the appeal of Star Wars is that Lucas took all the stuff he loved—Flash Gordon, Carlos Castaneda, Dune, the Fourth World, drag racing, Joseph Campbell, World War II dogfighting movies, 2001—and jammed it together. Of course the downside is when you appropriate from a specific-enough source that it’s recognizable, even if it’s in a different context or surrounded by enough other elements that it’s just part of a patchwork. It’s a fine line aesthetically and morally as well as legally. I think it’s likely that both sides are right—it’s a perfectly valid artistic approach, and it’s perfectly valid to be upset if it’s your work being appropriated.

My yapping aside, click the link to see a badass Paul Pope drawing of a Tusken Raider sandperson.

In a new interview with Ain’t It Cool News’ Quint, Clive Barker says a lot of things to inspire confidence in the upcoming Midnight Meat Train adaptation–I mean, referencing Weegee is a good sign, I would say. But at the same time he says he has no idea if the Hellraiser remake is going forward. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if that’s bad news or good. Ah well, go read.

Check out this unbelievably awesome original art spread of the B.P.R.D. by Guy Davis and Dave Stewart over at Wizard. It’s an illustration for a character guide we did for this thrilling Hellboy spinoff series, which in my opinion has surpassed its source.

Premature T-shirt blogging! Check this beauty out! (You can sorta see it behind the guitar and the beard.)

As made by the great Buenaventura Press. I eyed this covetously at MoCCA this summer, but couldn’t bring myself to spend $60 on a T-shirt knowing what I tend to do to the things. My loss is avant-rock’s gain!

(Via Pitchfork’s Virgin Festival photogallery.)

If you care about horror in comics, you really ought to read this Tom Spurgeon interview with Tom Neely, author of the new graphic novel The Blot. The Blot contains some of the most unnerving and original horror imagery I’ve seen in comics all year, including my favorite spread of the year thus far.

In the comment thread in the Midnight Meat Train image post below, Bruce Baugh points out the striking and obviously thoughtful composition of the image, leading me to note what a pleasant surprise it is any time I come across an image from a horror film (let alone a promotional image for a horror film) that has any kind of panache. I’ve thought of this the last several times I went to the mall and saw this poster for the werewolf flick Skinwalkers hanging up:

The leading-less font, the white background, the off-center placement of the title, the image composition–gorgeous. I hold out no hopes for the film itself, of course, but man, this was money well spent. Comparisons to the almost confrontationally dull and generic Dark Is Rising The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising poster are most instructive.

Scott Pilgrim artist Bryan Lee O’Malley just posted this gorgeous David Bowie sketch he drew for me at MoCCA. I’ve got a lot more where this came from, actually; watch this space.

I’ve fixed some long-dead links and added several interviews you may not have read before, with everyone from Chuck Palahniuk to Drea DeMatteo to Underworld to Bettie Page. And don’t forget my trip to Loch Ness!

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks if we ever drifted away from the genre, and what brought us back if so. The responses are fascinating. It may be my favorite Horror Roundtable so far.