Comics

Do successful comic book movies create new comics readers? As the "Watchmen Principle" demonstrates, when a movie is based on a finite graphic novel or series, the answer is yes. When it is based on an ongoing 50 year saga the results are not so clear. CBR's Greg Hatcher chanced upon a display of bagged comics at his CostCo which showed that Marvel had put together a product that seemed to be aimed at people who liked THOR and wanted to know where to go next: A photo-cover of hunky Chris Hemsworth as Thor graced the front of the package and an assortment of alluring titles lurked beneath.

Indie comics legend Steve Lafler is back with his best known creation, the raffish, brutal DOG BOY. The strip will appear at CO2 Comics starting tomorrow.

WARNING: EXTREMELY NERDY MAC CONTENT -- proceed at your own risk. As you know, I've been complaining about computer problems for a few months now, with tedious frequency -- but not as tedious as seeing a spinning beach ball is to me. Basically, every morning when I started up my iMac to get to work on The Beat it would take anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour for the beachball to stop spinning and all the programs to start responding. Unbearable, right? You bet!

By now you have all seen the above image, which swept through social media yesterday with the tagline "Macho Man prevented the Rapture." In a world seemingly without order, connecting the senseless (and very sad) death of Randy "Macho Man" Savage, and the impending Rapture predicting by Harold Camping (inexplicably still alive) would seem to give us some joy. But where did it come from? Such viral images come and go so quickly on the internet, we thought it would be informative to see what we could come up with as an origin story.

From Michael DeForge at WHAT THINGS DO.

KRAMERS ERGOT #8: THE TRAILER from Dan Nadel on Vimeo. Great news! Sammy Harkham, editor of the seminal art comix anthology KRAMERS ERGOT, has announced...

DC is releasing all kinds of FLASHPOINT world information today on the Source blog, and first up is an actual map of the new FLASHPOINT world, with a zombiefied Alaska, and Ape-led Africa (um...) and the Black Adam protectorate of Arabia. It was designed by writer Rex Ogle and artist Freddie E. Williams II, and shows the effect of a world without its greatest superheroes, a war-torn landscape of primal conflicts.

The countdown to THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, the highly anticipated third entry in Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy, kicked off today with a new new site, which thus far contains ominous chanting. The site was linked to via a Twitter account, @TheFireRises, which sends you to a page where you can upload your Twitter or Facebook avatar to help collate a collage of an image of Tom Hardy as Bane, one of the villains in the movie.

Filmmaker Maria Cabardo has posted a really poignant video of Jeffrey Catherine Jones talking about dying, and her acceptance of it. I know the word poignant is overused, but it truly applies here -- the content is sad, but it is also peaceful and in the end comforting.

-The Norse God continued to bring the hammer down at the North American Box Office for the second weekend in a row, contradicting...

It's funny how something that has been around forever can still get a blog boost -- as we reported yesterday, some 6500 pages of ELFQUEST comics are online, to read, for FREE -- but they have been up for more than two years. Our post got Boing Boinged, and Richard Pini, WARP graphics co-everything, wrote in to answer some questions in that thread, especially complaints about the Flash interface (one wag posted a link to the complete Elfquest on a bit torrent site.)

First, thanks for putting this "old news" back in the news.