Fox Going the Millar Route.

-  Marvel Comics and Fox have hired Mark Millar to oversee the next batch of comic properties to the big screen.  I think “creative consultant” is the official term.  Fox owns the rights to things like X-Men (and therefor Deadpool, which may or may not get off the ground), Fantastic Four, Daredevil.  Any of you who have read Mark Millar probably know how big of a risk this is.  The guy is a terrible not a very good writer.  His characters and plots and tropes kind-of reek of adolescent worldviews that do nothing but downgrade the iconic characters who’s mouths he shoves the words of a 15 year old boy.  Which is of course fine when it’s his creator-owned stuff.  But Kick-Ass the film only succeeded because it was funny and didn’t take itself that seriously.  Kick-Ass the comic is far more serious.  And it’s kind-of a pile of shit to be honest about it.  Of course, that link up there goes to an Examiner article where they think this is a good idea, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.  I wonder if they’ve read any Mark Millar.

-  Topless Robot: The Seven Greatest Drunks In Nerddom.

-  Really excellent, academic write up on Alan Moore’s From Hell, and why it stands apart from the rest of his work.

In subject matter, history, and art style, From Hell stands apart from other works written by Alan Moore, but that hasn’t made it obscure, rather notorious. If its Jack the Ripper subject matter was less well-known in the popular imagination, perhaps it would have been viewed as a more “indie” work like Snakes and Ladders or The Birth Caul as adapted by Campbell. The work itself deserves to be notorious for a host of reasons, but within the context of both Moore’s life, and Eddie Campbell’s, who illustrated it, it stands as a megalith that changed the direction of their future output.

-  Interview with Pulitzer Prize winning author David Shipler, who is concerned with things like centralized power, liberty, and imperialism.  Or… he’s what you would call a real conservative.

We’re still in this period of deviation from our fundamental constitutional protections. It’s going to be a very difficult period to end and I think there are several reasons. One is that there will be no obvious or dramatic signing ceremony that will end terrorism. The violations are done mostly in secret, therefore we will need a thorough exposure, a truth and reconciliation commission, a Church Committee, which did an excellent job of documenting the abuses by government agencies led by the FBI, including military intelligence, the IRS, the NSA, and others from the ’50s to the ’70s. Violations are not currently seen as a systemic failure, although they are in fact the product of systemic failures.

-  Go and play around with this “Society of 12″ website.  It’s intriguing.

-  Hey, here’s this(!):

-Sonny

Outer Space Nazi Buddha.

Possibly news article title of the year:

-  Nazi Buddha ‘Came From Outer Space’. Which isn’t the official title I guess; it’s just the one to get you to click on the link.  It works.  Turns out this ancient Buddha statue, discovered in the 1930′s via a Nazi organized archeological dig, was carved some 1000 years ago out of a meteorite that crashed to the Earth’s surface some 15,000 years ago.  This has Indiana Jones written all over it.

Also from the BBC:

-  Hubble Telescope Captures One of the Most Extraordinary Views of Universe to Date.  The image comes from a result of astronomers pointing the Hubble towards a very specific patch of sky for around 22 days.  Letting in 500-ish hours of light to the scope.  It captured around 5,500 separate galaxies, including the farthest it saw, UDFy-38135539.  Just to give you an idea, that galaxy is over 13 BILLION light years away.  Which is of course so mind-blowing it is almost incomprehensible…

-  Hey I made a new remix!  It got a little dark… yeeeaaaahhh sorry about that:

Just to give you an idea of how different it is, here’s the original:

-  Mikey Mictlan of Doomtree has a new album out.  And he’s offering it up for FREE (but give him a few bucks, eh):

-  Enemies of the Internet:

-Sonny

Sigils of Dredd.

-  Holy shitballs, hello!  I got back from Europe last week and have been sort-of slowly getting back into my life in MN.  But that’s not the whole story.  Another part of it is I thought after dedicating myself to a almost hour-long album for around 10 months I would take some time off of making music.  This is not the case, as I’ve got a whole slew of new beats in the pipeline already, and a remix project that’s a whole boatload of fun to boot.  Long story short: I’M ADDICTED to it.  Anyways…

-  8 Epic Heroes Who Committed Mass Murder at IO9, apparently in honor of Judge Dredd and the new film version.  Supposedly the movie is a faithful to the original 2000AD strip, and John Wagner (creator) endorsed it.  I’m guessing this is true, considering Karl Urban (who was probably initially hired at least partially for his looks) does NOT take the helmet off through the entire run time.  But this article is getting it wrong in a sense: Dredd is not a hero.  He’s a fascist who’s so dedicated to law and order he puts that ahead of the people he supposedly serves.  Like Rorschach (also very much so not a hero).

-  I’m on Twitter.  I have been since the Spring(?).  Twitter’s cool because you don’t get all these damn graphic memes that have become a staple of Facebook.  eCards stand as notoriously annoying.  If someone posts a picture, you’ve got to click to see it.  Also, you don’t get these rambling rants that drift into nowhere fast.  My feed consists mostly of comic book artists and writers, and musicians.  It works.

-  More great news for Warren Ellis while I was away:  he’s been signed to write his first non-fiction book!  The book will be based on a very interesting talk he gave at something called Cognitive Cities Conference in Berlin last year.  It has to do with the “haunting of what hasn’t happened yet” as it relates to futurism and science fiction.  Here’s the original talk:

[http://vimeo.com/22943908]

He’s also written an awesome piece for VICE (he’s now a regular writer there) about “the death of fun” in politics:

I actually find myself weirdly nostalgic for the authentic monsters of politics. Even the sly, hollow hustling of Tony Blair would be preferable to the callow bafflement of Nick Clegg, the unnaturally shiny forehead and beta-male posturing of David Cameron, and the… well, whatever Ed Miliband is. There’s Vince Cable, whom lots of people seem to like the idea of, but his presence, unfortunately, is that of Gravedigger #2 in one of the less successful Hammer Horror films.

-  Finally, a little magical sigil from Deviant Art.  Not sure what it means, but I am fascinated by this stuff for some reason.

-Sonny