Breaking News

After setting the internet on fire with the release of advance promotional pics of the Watchmen cast members in costume, the studio finally relented to frequent demand and released the long-anticipated first pic of Doctor Manhattan!







(Seriously NSFW.)















(I don't want you to get fired.)















Click here for the EXCLUSIVE pic!

In all seriousness, I am laughing my ass off at how many people are getting excited about these pics. I mean, I love Watchmen to death, and I'll probably even see the movie - but what are we, twelve? Do we need Hollywood to make a movie out of our favorite book in order to endow some "legitimacy" onto our inferiority complexes? I can't wait until we see the Watchmen toys - invariably, there will be toys. If you've actually read Watchmen, you know that the book itself is well-inoculated against the kind of extra-textual corruption provided by big-budget merchandising extravaganzas. The book has an entire section devoted to how silly and dangerous merchandising is, for God's sake.

It's not enough to say that Hollywood is missing the point, because they always miss the point, it's their job to miss the point. They don't make money if they don't miss the point. But it's nonetheless funny that they have missed the point, by creating a big commercialized tent-pole film starring a megalomaniacal supervillain who manipulates the commercial-saturated mass-media to achieve his ends. You can argue that movie adaptations of V For Vendetta and From Hell are travesties - in both cases, they were - but for Watchmen, the existence of the movie, however bad it may be, actually does add something to the book, in a metatextual sort-of way. When I pass the Watchmen toys lined up in the toy store (or Newbury Comics, assuming the movie is rated R or a hard PG-13 and the toys are only aimed at older collectors), I will smile when I think of Adrian Veidt perusing the tear-sheets for the little plastic Rorschach with his Action Grappling Hook accessory.

Even Alan Moore would crack a smile over that little irony...

Proof That Cyclops Is A Skrull,
or That Ed Brubaker Is Lazy



Hmmm, perhaps he doesn't he doesn't remember the year he spent living in a giant Celestial ship situated in Manhattan harbor? The one Apocalypse used as a base for a few thousand years?



Yeah, the one in the background there.

Later, the Celestial ship was pulled from earth by the Celestials for some reason or another relating to some kind of outer-space shenanigans which I really don't remember very well, except for the fact that Cyclops most certainly got well acquainted with the Celestials.



One of them even tried to step on him:



But he got his own back, later, even succeeding in blasting Arishem the Judge's arm off:







How many people in the universe can say they've blown a limb off a Celestial? I guess when you've lived as action-packed a life as Cyclops, stuff like that just doesn't rate remembering.

So, yeah.

Whatever did happen to Rich Buckler, anyway?

EDIT:HOLY SHIT, this is apparently what happened to Rich Buckler. I have to say this is one of the oddest, if not the oddest, post-comics statements I've ever seen from anyone. Spend some time looking around the site and you'll see what I mean...

The Vision of Piers the Plowman
Part One

Ugh\

OK, remember how I said I was going to post? Well, then I ran head first into the Week From Hell. However, since I feel bad about leaving you all with nothing, I'll give you some one-or-two-sentence NERD thoughts you can take up in the comments, if you wish:

Do you think DC is using the much-maligned Countdown series as a way to clear the decks of a number of dead-end and unpopular plot threads before Final Crisis hits? If yes, was this the plan all along or did they switch plans once they saw how unpopular all the Countdown-related actually were?

She-Hulk: Peter David is capable of writing good, fun comics when he wants to, but his first arc on this series is poor enough to bring into doubt the question of whether the series will last long enough to get to a second Peter David story arc.

Shooter on the Legion: still cooking with butane, but three issues in the lack of interesting villains is starting to be felt. Admittedly, this is a weakness of a lot of Legion stories, but that doesn't make it Ok...

Am I the only one who thinks that Grant Morrison's Batman is simply not very good?

Idea: some Skrull agents are so deep they may not even know themselves that they are actually Skrulls - the ultimate sleeper. Would allow them to have their cake and eat it to in regards to Iron Man - as well as enabling agents to pass muster with psychics.

Another idea: they haven't come out and explicitly said the X-Men won't be involved in the Skrull business, and given how much the X-books suffered from being on far the periphery of Civil War, I imagine they are thinking long and hard about how to tie the mutant books closer to this upcoming event. With that said, if any X-Man is a Skrull, my money is on Cyclops.

Call me a sucker, but I'm enjoying Geoff Johns' Legion story in Action. I guess I just really love the Legion.

Wow

I was gonna post some more Howard stuff, honest, but then I found this...