WGA the Dog

Comic Book Resources has an informative piece up about the writer’s strike called WGA the Dog.

DC Responds to Piracy Concerns

Over two years ago Glenn Hauman met with DC and Warner Bros. where he told them that the torrent community had already bootlegged 75% of DC’s entire comic library and presented a plan to start putting stuff online to curb the trend iTunes style. This week DC finally started doing something about it, by suing torrent sites, but has made no movement in putting its products online itself. You would think that they could learn from the music industry, especially being that Time Warner owns a record label.

Bender's Big Store on Sale

Bender’s Big Score, the first of four new Futurama DVDs, comes out on Tuesday. Amazon has it available for 40% off. An article in this month’s Wired says that it includes a full episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad:

It consists of a shot of the titular amphibian, who fixes viewers with his trance-inducting gaze. (Diehards who watch the motionless toad for half an hour will discover hilarious fake commercial breaks and a few other surprises.)

Fox has greenlit four DVDs which will eventually be cut up into 16 half-hour episodes for television.

Christmas Playlist 2007

I’ve been very carefully building a Christmas playlist for the past few years. I only add one song a year, and I only listen to the songs on the list between Thanksgiving and the Epiphany. There are now seven songs on the list.

1. The Fairytale of New York by The Pogues
2. Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley
3. I Won’t Be Home for Christmas by Blink-182
4. New: Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade
5. Baby It’s Cold Outside by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Jordan
6. Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! by Dean Martin
7. Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy by David Bowie & Bing Crosby

The Battle of Marathon

I’ll just quote this in its entirety:

So there I was reading the annotations to Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman: The Black Dossier when I find this:

Panel 2. The Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.E.) was a major victory for the Smurfs over the forces of Gargamel, and prevented him from conquering Oz and Wonderland.

I MUST buy this thing soon or go insane.

Word.

24: The Unaired Pilot

As great as the YouTube era is, it means I come across a lot of stuff that I can’t just read casually. The Onion and Boing Boing both have video content now that I never remember to check out. Anyway, from a few weeks ago, 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot.

Wired Profile of Randall Munroe

Wired has a little profile of Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, one of my favorite comic strips: Real Geek Heart Beats in Xkcd’s Stick Figures.

Not the Daily Show

Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer, by a Daily Show writer.

Dæmon Effects in Golden Compas

While I’m sure that The Golden Compass and its eventual sequels will warm over the more interesting (and exceptionally controversial) themes of the books, it looks like they might actually do a good job with the feel of Pullman’s world. A nice touch: director Chris Weitz says most characters’ dæmons will be computer-generated, but dæmons that have been severed will be played by real animals. If the computed-generated dæmons are done well, it’ll provide a neat effect where the severed ones look mundane while the active ones look more magical.

Marvel Digial Comics, First Impressions

As reported yesterday, Marvel Comics has launched a new service that offers its comic books online. The service has a selection of 250 free samples (for a “limited time”), with a catalog of 2,500 for $59.88 annually or $9.99 monthly. I have a lot to say on the matter of digital comics, but for now I’ll write about the service itself.

First, it’s all done in Flash. Flash is widely compatible with most computers (but not the iPhone), so you shouldn’t have much trouble with it, but it can be quite slow on some machines. (Also the site’s new, so it’s getting more traffic than its servers can handle right now, but that’ll cool down in a day or two.) In an interview with Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada and Vice President of Online Operations and Marketing John Dokes, Douglas Wolk asks about why they’re keeping it all on the site instead of offering downloads. Quesada’s response is that fans won’t want to have to store all the data, which is a dodge. A PDF download would let me take it on my iPhone, but it’d also let me print the comics out, email them to friends, or post them online. There’s an obvious business reason why Marvel wouldn’t want to have their stuff out there, but if their new online push is an effort to combat bootlegging that’s already going on, putting out an inferior product won’t help too much. Apple succeeded with iTunes because, though it had DRM, the restrictions were reasonable enough that they didn’t get in most people’s way. The Flash presentation is fine, but Quesada could just say that he doesn’t want people downloading them and trading them around because he wants his artists to get paid. Note also in the interview that he says he’s going to share revenue with the creators, which is a direct reference to the current Hollywood writer’s strike.

Marvel’s service is a subscription plan. You’re not buying anything when you sign up, so when you stop paying for your subscription, you lose access to the comics. For most people this probably won’t be a big deal. They’ll read the comics once and move on. But consider that for your $60 you could have bought softcover collections of those same comics that you get to own forever.

The presentation of the site itslef is very nicely done. The default view places two pages onscreen at once, which is great for looking at the art, but it makes reading text difficult. Switching to viewing one page at a time gives you a nicer close-up view, but you miss out on experiencing the whole page as one image. Finally, they have a “smart panels” view which zooms in on each panel individually, something their earlier “dot comics” system did also, and it works quite well. None of it matches up to actually holding a book in your hand, but overall it’s a nice experience.

The system also popped up a little box that recommended that I type in my zip code to find a local comic shop near me, which is very smart of Marvel. They need to drive people from the online service to their monthly comics, so making it easy to find a comic book store is important.

Marvel claims to have 2,500 books online now (though only 10% are available for free), with “hundreds” more going up each week. Of the free selection, here are some highlights worth checking out:

• Spider-Man’s first appearance, in Amazing Fantasy 15
• A selection of the first Stan Lee/Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man issues
• Tons of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original Avengers, including, in number four, the reintroduction of Captain America to the Marvel Universe
• The early Fantastic Four, also by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, which is great, great stuff
• All four issues of Grant Morrison and Jae Lee’s Fantastic Four: 1234 mini-series, which probably isn’t as memorable as some of the classic stuff here, but I’ve never read it so this’ll serve as a reminder to me to check it out
• The book that most consider to be the start of the Modern Age, Giant Size X-Men, from 1975
• Incredible Hulk, including the first appearance of Wolverine in 180-181
• A few issues from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men, which is my favorite X-Men run
• Runaways 1-25 (!) by Brian K. Vaughan and Jo Chen, and later Joss Whedon
• All of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s first volume of The Ultimates
• Lots of Uncanny X-Men, which is good because so many later X-Men stories depend on you knowing earlier important stories, like Days of Future Past in 141 and 142

I’m sure I missed some other key stories that they’ve posted, but that’ll get you started.

A Home in the Mall

Last month, artist Michael Townsend was busted when security guards found that he had been living inside an apartment he and a few friends built inside the mall in Providence, Rhode Island. I remember seeing the story and thinking that it was interesting. Last night my sister tipped me off to a piece that The Story had done on Townsend, and it’s incredible. You can listen to it on their website or subscribe to the podcast.

UC Berkeley Marching Band Does Game Themes

I am, of course, legally required to link to this.

Creation Museum Tour

Wonderful writeup about a visit to the new Creation Museum. I have to admit, it sounds like a pretty entertaining place. You kind of have to admire the guts it takes to present all that stuff as if fact.

Writers' Strike Grid

LA Times has a handy grid that explains how many episodes of various TV shows have been written, providing some guidance on how long new episodes will air before the writer’s strike impacts them. More info on Twitter.

All-Star Superman and The Golden Apples of the Sun

Great essay: On Allusion: All-Star Superman and The Golden Apples of the Sun.

Philip Corbett on Grammar

Q&A with Philip B. Corbett of The New York Times about style and grammar.

Solar Decathalon

New York Times’ David Pogue has a fascinating post up about the Solar Decathalon, a semi-annual competition to design homes that run entirely on solar power, that was exhibited this year on the National Mall in DC (and which I totally would have attended had I known about). There’s more info on the official page and there are some nice shots on Flickr.

New Joss Whedon Series: Dollhouse

Variety and Entertainment Weekly report that Joss Whedon will develop a series called Dollhouse for Fox that, barring a writer’s strike, will go into production next year for the fall season. Seven episodes will be produced initially, starring Eliza Dushku in a concept that’s pure Philip K. Dick:

Dollhouse follows a top-secret world of people programmed with different personalities, abilities and memories depending on their mission.

After each assignment—which can be physical, romantic or even illegal—the characters have their memories wiped clean, and are sent back to a lab (dubbed the “Dollhouse”).

It’s odd to me though that he’s working with Fox again after the Firefly debacle.

Update: E! has a Q&A, and of course Whedonesque is flipping out.

Whedon’s also directing tonight’s episode of The Office.