Nerdlebrity News

We're sure this has been around forever, but we just saw it at ArtPatient.

Hit records and stellar nerdlebirty status aren't always enough to steer a retail ship through the shoals of hard business realities. System of a Down's drummer John Dolmayan apparently learned that the hard way, as this sale for Torpedo Comics shows. The online retailers inventory and even domain name are being auctioned off to pay creditors.

If you read ONE local paper story about a comic-con/nerdlerbrity fest/back issue bonanza, it should be this one by Micaela Hood in the Miami Herald on this weekend's Supercon, because it nicely captures the peaceful intermingling of the fans in their homemade costumes, the dealers selling stickers, and the aging stars with nowhere else to go. As "Comic-Con" has become a brand name for an entrainment event where you can expect all this and MORE, the various strata of con-world must learn to live with one another. Just what IS going through Richard "Shaft" Roundtree's mind, anyway?

We didn't get a chance to cover Wizard World Philly this year, although Mike Manley promises his usual Babymen update, however as you can see from the above, as wrestler Lisa Marie Varon tweeted, it was a great chance for nerdlebrities to hang out.

Well, well, it looks like things are shaping up for Joss Whedon's AVENGERS movie , as Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) ahs joined the cast as Hawkeye. So far we have RDJ as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Cap, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, ScarJo as The Black Widow, and Don Cheadle as War Machine. That's a hefty and costly lineup of stars, but thrifty Marvel is asking the actors to take pay cuts and otherwise watching the budget very, very closely, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

x17 has photos and video of Robert Downey Jr. stopping in at Meltdown to buy some comics, probably as research for an upcoming role, one would expect. Given that Downey's Iron Man won't be appearing in either CAPTAIN AMERICA or THOR, but is being saved for the all-star Avengers team-up, it's a pretty good bet that the comics he's picking up are Avengers related. As Jim McCann noted via Twitter, that included a Hawkeye-Mockingbird miniseries.

With Comic-Con's rise in the popular imaginaion over the last decade, we've heard many folks mutter over the years "I need to write a screenplay about Comic-con!" If you have been working on such a script, it is time to quietly set it aside and start working on that oil spill comedy you had been pondering. In keeping with the times, Comic-Con will be the subject of a geekumentary by Morgan Spurlock (Super-Size Me) following the fan's journey of seven con attendees. But Spurlock's not going it alone, because that would be too much for any man.

We can't POSSIBLY be the first person to point this out...are we???? While the SCOTT PILGRIM trailer briefly supplanting Justin Bieber as the most important topic on earth has been noted, Bieber's uncanny resemblance to an animated manga character has not -- or at least not on comic book message boards.

§ If you're wondering wondering what happened to the Pepper-kisses-Iron Man's-helmet scene from the IRON MAN 2 trailer that was nowhere to be found in the movie, Gavok's Iron Man 2: The Deleted Scenes has a lot of answers by comparing the novelization of the movie (based on an early version of the screenplay) to the finished version: The most obvious removal is the scene of Pepper kissing Tony’s helmet and throwing it out the aircraft as he tells her, “You complete me!” ...Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help but think that the combination of that scene would have led to a big wave of racial awkwardness if left unchanged. ...In a comic book store, if you're focusing primarily on periodical comics, and that's still a significant portion of everybody's business, every single week you're getting somewhere between 60 and 100 comics that aren't interchangeable the way chocolate ice cream is with another ice cream. ...A few images from the Conan set in Bulgaria have leaked out , and apparently ancient CImmeria has been dressed to look like Camden, New Jersey. § A New Zealand newspaper takes umbrage at the way J.

Cartoonist/reality star Nick Simmons issued a statement yesterday regarding being caught redhanded lifting images from Bleach and other very well known manga: “Like most...

UPDATE: A few places are reporting that the "Nick Simmons" who showed up at a Facebook page called Calling for legal action against Nick...

§ Michael Fleming has a juicy item on proposed Captain America casting, with a bunch of candidates and word of director Joe Johnston clashing...