Culture

You had us at dinosaur, Dustin Harbin. And with "colored by Sam Bosma and Kali Ciesemier" you chained us up and threw away the key.

I don't know who Richard Famous is -- a gay British man who makes little-watched YouTube videos -- but what he has to say about "the brokeback pose" and how hyper-sexualization depowers female comics characters is pretty dead on.

Was it worth braving the crowds? Are comics the center of attention at NYCC? How good was a $5 hot dog taste? And what does I.M. Pei have to do with it anyway? This is it -- the one you've been waiting for!

An iconic — and, they say, ironic — Roy Lichetnstein painting based on a drawing by William Overgard is expected to sell for $35-45 million at a Christie's auction. In 1988 the painting sold for $2.1 million, but a recent Lichtenstein sale for $42.6 million suggest the market for his work has expanded a bit more. The painting has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now that the second season of THE WALKING DEAD is a smash hit , just in case you missed 'em here are six AMC=produced webisodes showing how various zombies got to be cut in half and so on. WARNING: high squeam factor.

BY JEN VAUGHN - This Friday, 'Marvel' will face the ghost of Jack Kirby when professor and attorney Oliver Goodenough squares off against creator rights advocate and cartoonist Steve Bissette.

Bluewater and their comics bios get the most press of any comics, but not many sales that show up on Diamond's charts. However, all the press has enabled a team-up with Simon and Schuster for Killing GERONIMO: THE HUNT FOR OSAMA BIN LADEN, a comics-styled take on how the Al Qaeda leader was hunted down by US troops. A previous comics version was published by IDW, CODEWORD GERONIMO. Bluewater's version will be written by Jerome Maida and Darren G. Davis with art by James Boulton.

It's going to take a while to get the images and sounds — and smells — of New York Comic Con out of our head, and images such as the above — a bevy of gender-swapped Doctor Whos composed of cosplay superstars — will show you why. There were SO many costumed people at the the show this year. The ratio of costumes to lookieloos was incredibly high. So yeah, if it was spectacle you wanted, you got it, including the topless woman with the fake mustache who was hanging outside the Javits on Sunday. "Yeah, they were talking about her all the way back to Macy's," a photographer told me. Since Macy's is five blocks crosstown from the Javits, this is the equivalent of light speed communication in New York terms.

This is a little premature, but we might be looking at Sesame Street comics in the not-too-distant future.  APE Entertainment, which does have some...

Special Ops Beat Correspondent Torsten has already been on the floor for NYCC set-up and filed the following report:

GeekChicDaily, the daily nerd news email, is launching an edition for New York, and also teaming with the Tokyopop brand for a special edition spotlighting Japanese culture trends and news. The New York edition will cover the Big Apple's lively offerings in geek culture, following localized versions for LA and a national edition. GeekChicDaily also added Microsoft's Mich Mathews to its board of directors.

In a better world, I would not have learned of Joe Simon's 98th birthday today via Facebook at 8 PM.