This week’s Horror Roundtable goes meta, asking the participants to name their favorite Horror Roundtable moment. Mine’s got nards.

I mean, don’t they?

It’s that whole beefy, bourbon-drinking uncle vibe.

Find out what I thought of this week’s issues of Captain America, The Flash: Fastest Man Alive, The Incredible Hulk, Ex Machina, Heroes for Hire, Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Justice League of America, and Repo at this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard.

At the 2007 MoCCA Art Festival, the best alternative comics convention going. If you’re in New York City, swing by and say hello to me at the Wizard table. And horror fans, be advised that Bill “Stray Toasters” Sienkiewicz and Charles “Black Hole” Burns will be there too!

Via Jason Adams. Damn you for scooping me on a Dark Is Rising image, Adams. Damn you to Hell!

(I’m actually not so wild about this one, to be honest. Who are those other kids? Am I forgetting something?)

The inaugural installment of the biweekly alternative comics interview column I’ll be doing for WizardUniverse.com, I Can Has Comix?, is up. This week’s guests: Los Bros Hernandez (aka Gilbert and Jaime), creators of Love and Rockets. Enjoy!

Here’s a new pic from Frank Darabont’s upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Mist,” which accompanies an interview with King on his upcoming film and TV projects at USA Today.

Can. Not. WAIT.

(Via Bloody Disgusting.)

This comment at this post about this post led me to this site and this thread where this post brought me to these images:

They’re fan-made alternate covers for the upcoming Twin Peaks complete definitive gold box edition whatever DVD boxed set, the cover of which is, shall we say, aesthetically challenged. And there’s a lot more where those came from.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. November 6th. Rated NC-17. (Via Cinematical.)

According to health and law enforcement officials, there are several warning signs of the onset of Wayne Ray Thomas, including intense anxiety, shortness of breath, sweating, and a sudden loss of power to the victim’s house.

Physical symptoms of a full-scale attack include involuntary constriction of the airway and sharp, stabbing pains in the left arm, right arm, throat, and back. In the advanced stages, afflicted persons suffer external bleeding, loss of motor function, organ failure, and intracranial hemorrhaging.

So far, those stricken by Wayne Ray Thomas have exhibited a 100 percent mortality rate.

—“Florida Man Beats Out Heart Disease as Nation’s No. 1 Killer,” The Onion

Panels like this are why I read Brian Ralph’s first-person zombie-apocalypse indie comic Daybreak, and why you should too. Buy it here.

A somewhat, shall we say, ambivalent relationship with food in general and meat in particular is expressed in this rather wonderful clip for “Sick Sick Sick” by Queens of the Stone Age, one of the best songs the band has yet produced.

Conspicuous consumption indeed.

Simply reading or hearing the words “transcend the genre” is enough to make me turn away in disgust, so goddess bless Jon Hastings: He’s devised a wonderful five-part taxonomy of “transcending the genre”, in an attempt to figure out the what critics who use this phrase to describe horror or other déclassé genres actually mean. It’s tempting to believe that TTG automatically equates to “I don’t like horror movies but I like this horror movie so therefore it is not a horror movie” (Jon’s TTG classification #1)–all the more so because that usually is what it equates to–but Jon elucidates some definitions that are actually useful and non-condescending. For example, a genre film that appeals to a wider audience than genre die-hards can be said, accurately and without pejorative connotations, to transcend the genre. Again, I don’t tend to find that that’s what mainstream critics who break out TTG are getting at, but still, Jon’s post was a tremendous eye-opener for me.

I also want to use this opportunity to point out Dave Intermittent’s shots across the bow of the “‘safe’ critical consensus” about the lo-fi, politically aware horror films of the ’70s. Dave asserts that budgetary concerns are not an inherent strength (or flaw) and that the impact of those movies upon their release was not predominantly (if at all) political in nature. Given recent developments in this area, they’re points worth considering.

A complete, definitive Twin Peaks DVD set called “The Gold Box Edition”–including Season One, Season Two, and the pilot–is supposedly headed for shelves this October 30th. Rumor-riffic details can be found at TVShowsOnDVD.com (still no word on extras).

So excited.

This week’s Horror Roundtable question: Name your favorite horror sequel. It’s a toss-up!

A propos of nothing, I want to point out this post by James Smith responding to my post on the artificiality of Alan Moore’s writing; I’ve had the thing bookmarked for ages. James takes things in a number of directions, from pointing out that comparing Watchmen to a group-written enterprise like The Sopranos is an apples/oranges deal to suggesting that Moore’s imposition of patterns on patternless life is what people do all the livelong day.

It’s nerd-guru blogging weekend, apparently: On his blog, Battlestar Galactica re-inventor Ron Moore waxes rhapsodic about the Sopranos finale, calling it “perfect” and saying “I wish I’d thought of it first.” Not that I was worried before, but this gives me a lot of faith in BSG‘s final season, that’s for sure. (Via Jim Treacher)

On his blog, the director of Hostel: Part II says this weekend will the last chance you have to see a new movie of his for the forseeable future; after that, his financially (and creatively -ed.) disappointing Hostel sequel will probably be out of theaters, and it will be a long time before Cell, Trailer Trash, or anything else he’s been talking about will see the light of day. He blames much of the failure of the film on leaked bootlegs of a rough cut that surfaced before the release date, both for siphoning away the audience and leading to reviews of that rough cut by sundry online critics. (The possibility of inherent faults within the film itself is not acknowledged; “People love the movie,” he says.) He also warns that with the failure of this movie, the future of R-rated horror as a viable genre with studios and theater chains is in doubt. Frankly, after actually seeing Hostel: Part II, it’s tough to get all that worked up over that prospect. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

I grabbed this spiffy Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely New X-Men-derived number from Mutant-America.com, purveyors of a variety of great comics-logo shirts that aren’t available through more, er, official channels. (The licensed “Magneto was right” T-shirt has a gigantic grimacing Jim Lee Magnus set on a black background with a goofy badass font. No thanx.)

According to a recent AOL interview with Korn lead singer Jonathan Davis, he’s working on an opera entitled Oblivion with none other than Clive Barker. I’ve been wondering what was up with this project: Barker mentioned a potential collaboration with Davis to me waaay back in the spring of 2001, but that was pretty much the last I heard of it; I don’t recall it being mentioned in any of the upcoming-project laundry lists that official Barker site Revelations puts together on a regular basis. I’ll admit that this project is a lot less interesting to me now than it was six years ago considering Korn’s output since then, but take it from this metal fan: Korn’s first few records contain enough interesting ideas to make a Davis/Barker collab worth looking into. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)