Television

As I tweeted the other day,. I am now definitely HOOKED ON STRIP SEARCH, the Penny Arcade produced reality show about cartoonists. We've now seen the first challenge and the first elimination (both above) and in case you are wondering THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

STRIP SEARCH, the reality show about a house full of cartoonists competing for $15K and a year of "being embedded" at Penny Arcade, debuted earlier this week. You can watch the first episode above and the second episode is now up as well. The show is produced by the Penny Arcade crew, with Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins as judges. (They ran a half million dollar Kickstarter to fund the show last year) 12 cartoonists -- six male, six female, are flown to a house in Seattle to compete for the prize, in the classic format. The 12, chosen from a thousand entrants, are mostly webcomickers, but more on that in a bit.

Just why is The Walking Dead the most popular cable show of all time? It's gory, unrelentingly grim and even the most likable characters act out of brutal self-preservation. There are no feel good moments, only increasingly distant memories of what it was like to feel good. (When a Tom Waits song, which closed last week's episode, qualifies as a gentle lullaby, you know things have gotten tough.) I guess all of this explains why it's a guilty pleasure: soap opera with the threat of a horrific death at any given moment.

AMC's The Walking Dead continues to be an unstoppable ratings juggernaut — last night's premiere of season 3.5 debuted with even higher ratings than the full season premiere in October:

News reports are circulating that the Siegel and Shuster heirs have asked the lower court to dismiss DC's copyright lawsuits. What actually happened is...

If you somehow didn’t know it already, then this is breaking news for you: this year marks the 50th anniversary of the longest running...

In case you missed last night's PBS documentary on Superheroes, you can watch it above—or at this link if the embed isn't working. The program includes Wizard World all-star festival of folks like Lou Ferrigno, Burt Ward, Adam West and Lynda Carter talking about playing superheroes. They are all veteran charmers, and when we have a spare 53 minutes, we plan on watching the whole thing. A supporting webpage has background and stills—such as the above one of Julie Newmar as Catwoman—and some extra videos.

Pilot season is upon us in Hollywood, and Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt's acclaimed THE SIXTH GUN has gotten a pilot order at NBC with Carlton Cuse (Lost) on board to produce.

Following almost as much life-or-death drama behind the scenes as in the zombie-haunted woods of Georgia, The Walking Dead has named a new show runner, Scott Gimple, who takes over with season four from Glen Mazzara, who departed under strained circumstance sat the end of last month. Gimple served as Mazarra's #2 guy for most of the last season, so he's already been in the mix.

We didn't watch last night's hilarious "Women go to a comics shop" episode of Big Bang Theory, but Scott Johnson did so we wouldn't have to and the results sound quite ghastly:

As one of the fruits of their huge Kickstarter campaign, the Penny Arcade folks have made Strip Search! which may finally be the comics competition TV show people have been expecting/dreading for a while. While the above link is a bit light on details, basically a bunch of webcomickers are thrown into a Seattle house and compete to draw the best comics. The contestants:

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1 http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1 Spoilers, I said, spoilers! As you may recall, in the last episode of the first half of the Walking Dead's third season ALL HELL...