TVGuide has apparently cast a spell: “Weivretni — annataz!”

The mag has an interview up with Serinda Swan, who will be playing Zatanna in this week’s episode of Smallville. A highlight:

TVGuide.com: Smallville fans can be very discerning, yet when you were cast, I saw barely any squawking. It was by and large, “She’s perfect.”
Swan: And I was so happy for that. A lot of the stuff I’ve done hasn’t come out yet, so there was some, “She looks the part, but can she act?” That put a lot of pressure on me to make sure I nailed the character. So when I did go in [for the audition], I actually spoke [Zatanna's spells] backwards. I reversed the sound, put it on my iPod and listened to it right before I had to say my lines, so that when the comic book enthusiasts reverse it on their computers — which I know they’ll do — it’s actually intelligible.

So get your recorders and sound software at the ready — Zatanna hits Smallville tonight.

Oh yeah, baby, it’s everywhere. And well, out little corner of the internet wouldn’t be complete without it. So, if you’re the one person that hasn’t had this linked to you via twitter, facebook, email, IM, and on your regular RSS feeds yet today, here you go, in all it’s YouTube-y glory, the first trailer for the movie adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s awesome children’s book: Where the Wild Things Are. Bathe in its awesomeness. NOW!

This just in from the Hero Initiative:

The creator-friendly nonprofit has announced a new deal for the Emerald City Comicon: for $1, you can buy one of four Hero badges (as seen below).

Then, wear the badges, and you’ll be eligible to win a Hero prize package that’s worth $135!

Now, what if you don’t win this time? Keep the badges — based on this post, Hero might be checking for badges at more cons than this…

Seattle readers, you’re in for a treat!

Love & Rockets co-creator Jaime Hernandez and Usagi Yojimbo’s Stan Sakai will be hitting the Fantagraphics Store in the Rainy City on April 4th!

The duo will be signing as well as showing off an exhibition of their work. In addition, special guest Paul Hornschemeier will be signing copies of his new hardcover, Mother Come Home.

The event will take place from 6-9pm and is free.

The comics I read really need to spread out some. Also, the new Vertigo series that I am patiently waiting for need to come out already! I’m sitting here, money in hand, ready and willing to buy comics, and there’s just nothing on my list.

You are needed here, readers. What am I missing? Is Jack of Fables better than it used to be? Should I keep up with Madame Xanadu? Some hidden gem you love?

Lots of genre-related film news from Variety and the Hollywood Reporter…

• Tom Hanks (whose other genre credits include Road to Perdition) has signed on for the developing film “Major Matt Mason,” a vintage Mattel Action Figure. An interesting little bit of toy history, Mason was created in 1966, in anticipation for the first manned moon missions!

• Harry Potter producer David Heyman is working with Warner Bros. on an action/adventure film called Methuselah. What currently sounds like Highlander meets the Bible, this movie is about the bad-ass heroics of a man who’s lived for 1,000 years.

• Battle: Los Angeles, a film about an alien invasion on Tinseltown, has gotten Scott Silver as a new writer. Our very own Harvey Dent, Aaron Eckhart, is slated to star in the film! Silver wrote Mod Squad and 8 Mile, as well as the sci-fi pitch Samson.

An excellent source of free time destruction: Quotesoncomics.com provides a steady stream of, um, quotes about comics. Just click “Give me another random quote!” over and over and then wonder where the hour went.

Not this again: The Independent on that stupid British legal effort that “will make it illegal to own any picture of children participating in sexual activities, or present whilst sexual activity took place.”

Stop the presses!: Warner Brothers will continue to release PG-13 rated superhero movies, the rating they and every studio assigns to 99% of all superhero movies. This is bad news for fans hoping that the upcoming Green Lantern movie would feature a full frontal Hal Jordan shower scene, or that if they ever do get around to making a Wonder Woman movie, it would include a scene of the Amazing Amazon smoking a cigarette topless in bed.

“If there is one thing the director of The Hobbit cannot be without while based in Wellington…”: It’s drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. No? I guess not. Guillermo del Toro may be busy making a live-action version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s least boring book, but he still finds time for comics, reports The Dominion Post of New Zealand, which I believe is in the southern hemisphere of Middle Earth.

Forget Watchmen, look what they’re doing to Dragonball!: School Library Journal on Dragonball Evolution, its manga origins and Viz’s plans for film tie-ins. The movie doesn’t sound/look very good, does it?

“I know he works in mysterious ways, but if I worked that mysteriously, I’d get fired”: Here’s a brief interview with New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff  by The Boston Globe’s religion reporter on the subject of Jews in New Yorker cartoons.

By Filip Sablik

This week is yet another busy one here at TC HQ, so rather than one long form entry I thought I’d jot down a few scattered thoughts. Particularly since I’m already a week behind my normal Blog@Newsarama schedule.

Topic 1: I had an interesting conversation recently where the conversation of what the correct price point for digital comics is. Should it be the same as the printed comic so as to not disadvantage brick and mortar comic retailers? Follow the iTunes model of 99¢ per issue? Or is it free? The person I was having the conversation with made a very compelling argument for the 99¢ price point citing research, which indicates that 99¢ is the threshold of what most people consider “not real money”. In other words, at under a dollar most people don’t even think about it as a buying decision, it’s just an impulse. In the end on a store like iTunes they may spend $5-6 in less than $1 increments. Conversely if you gave them the same items grouped together at $5 you’d have fewer people purchase it. Interesting stuff! Personally I suspect the only correct price point for the internet is FREE. The real question for most publishers is how to effectively monetize what we do while giving away our bread and butter for free. That and how to do it without hurting our retail partners in the direct market.

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The library is a great place for readers to discover comics, and it’s a great place for comics readers to check out things that they want to try without spending their hard-earned cash. I’m looking at comics that I find in the New York Public Library system.

Let’s start with an admission: I’d like to read more manga. I really would. It’s become such an inescapable part of the comics dialogue, a hugely important part of how future generations of cartoonists are going to approach comics, that I really feel we here at Newsarama should give it more bandwidth. It’s just that, for me personally, it’s really hard to commit to sticking to an 18 or 26 or 46-volume series. Most of my manga experiences have been a good start, followed by some thematic repetition, which leads to me inevitably taking the series for granted and spending my limited dollars elsewhere. (And lest you think the flaw is with manga, I’m the same with long-running American series – see my unfinished runs on Transmet, 100 Bullets, Y, etc.)

So a friend recommended Solanin, and he thankfully mentioned that this particular manga volume is self-contained, one-and-done, a stand-alone chunk of teen ennui and struggles with the inevitability of adulthood. Thankfully, because Solanin is really, really good comics. I can totally see why the kids love the manga when I read a book like this (actually, I can totally see why kids love the manga in general).

Writer and artist Inio Asano does a superb job exploring the mindset of five young adults, fresh out of school (well, four of them are), as they try to figure out where their dreams, relationships and ambitions fit into the “real world” of bills, rent and 9-to-5. With one couple as the central focus, and three other characters each getting a fair share of the narrative focus, Asano provides plenty of perspectives on the slippery quality of “the rest of your life.” Jobs, relationships and hobbies all seem to intersect in confusing jumbles that leave the characters indecisive about which string to pursue.

Using understated tragedy and spirited triumphs, Asano keeps the story moving quickly and prevents the daily turmoil from becoming turgid.  The characters’ voices are all crafted strongly and clearly, and the art is striking and clear.  For manga fans of readers looking to familiarize themselves with manga, finding a copy of Solanin at the local library is likely to be a treasure.

No surprise that Statler and Waldorf, the two Muppets who sit in the back and make fun of the efforts of the other Muppets are a comics bloggers favorites, is it? The crudely drawn comic book in their crudely drawn hands is, of course, The Muppet Show #1, the first issue of Boom’s four-part miniseries by Roger Langridge. It’s really quite something, and I’d recommend anyone interested in comics as a medium at least give it a flip-through this week, regardless of your feelings about the original Muppet show, if only to see how Langridge takes live-action television puppets into comics (I’ll have an actual, formal review this weekend).

If Muppets, Langridge and the ways different media can present aspects of one another don’t do anything for you, well, I’m sure there are plenty of other comics coming out this week. Let’s take a look at some of the more noteworthy, shall we?

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It seems that I joke about things on this blog and they magically happen. In the DC solicitations for June, you’ll find this little bit of information:

DMZ #42
Written by Brian Wood
Art by Ryan Kelly
Cover by John Paul Leon
You’ve seen them countless times in the pages of DMZ. Violent killers – anonymous and silent – behind gas masks and heavy clothing. Always the vanguard of death and destruction. But who are they and where do they come from? What would cause a man or woman, even in a warzone, to completely surrender themselves to oblivion? “No Future” is a 3-part story probing an infamous DMZ death cult housed in the city’s tallest building.
On sale June 10 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • MATURE READERS

Yeah, that’s right, Ryan Kelly is drawing a DMZ arc.  I asked for it back in January and look what happens. Thrilled, though. Kelly’s New York backgrounds in The New York Four were just insanely gorgeous, and I can’t wait to see what he’ll do with the broken-down cityscapes of the DMZ. Plus, as we’ve seen on three separate books now, Kelly and Wood just get each other and their work together has been across-the-board excellent.

Now, can I get Gaiman to do another Sandman story?  (I mean, if it worked before…)

As promised (I hope), this should be my last offering related to the recent WATCHMEN release.

In a GQ issue with a little something for everyone (trying to make it in the publishing biz with Lenny Dykstra sounds more awful than any horror story I’ve caught in recent years about the comics industry), the April 2009 issue of GQ has a feature entitled “The 20 Graphic Novels You Should Read (After “Watchmen”).”

The men in tights are kept to a minimum (Batman doesn’t even get a mention that I’m aware of, save for citing Ed Brubaker — Superman and Madman earn high marks one time each), and it’s a respectable look at how comics aren’t just kids stuff, a noble venture by a magazine geared to get male consumers everywhere to buy $300 Hugo Boss t-shirts.

Of course 20 items isn’t even going to scratch the surface, but what additional suggestions would YOU make to a mainstream publication like GQ?

If you like what’s you’ve read so far totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

Looking pretty big, by the looks of this rough color test by Ben Caldwell, who will be drawing the Wonder Woman feature in the oversized comic weekly. Check it:

[Via Purge Theory, Caldwell's blog.]

An interesting story via mighty Michael Lorah and Yahoo! News…

So in Thailand this week, the fire department was called after an autistic boy, scared about his first day of school, stood out on a third-floor balcony. Distrusting of the teachers, the boy refused to budge.

And that’s when Spider-Man saved the day.

Fireman Sonchai Yoosabai apparently has a Spider-Man and Ultraman suit on hand to liven up school fire drills, according to the story. After he made a quick-change to his webbed threads, the boy immediately stood up and went into his hero’s arms.

Say it with me now… awwwwwww.

Proof that I spend too much time on YouTube: courtesy of RyGeor, this may be the most terrifying Batman villain yet.

I know I laughed. 60 percent of the time, his crimes work every time.

Robert Crumb reportedly has inked the last page to his interpretation of The Book of Genesis due out by W. W. Norton this fall and going by the title, Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis. In fact, he’s completed every last bit: the cover, the intro, the commentary and a map that begins the 201 page book. We’ve gotten only a few glimpses of this project. The best is in connection with Phoebe Glockner’s photo comic report from the Angoulême comics festival in 2005 from which the above photo is taken.

The following quote from Crumb is well worth looking back on too. Art critic Robert Hughes interviewed Crumb for Time in 2005 and, after admiring Crumb for having the same distaste for Andy Warhol, gets the master to focus in what it was like to see God, so to speak:

HUGHES: Is God going to look like Mr. Natural?

CRUMB: Nah. He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.

What can I say? The man gives good quote. This time, it’s from an interview rather than a Phonogram issue.

“I could make – say – the Buzzcock’s “Spiral Scratch” be a God, in that it’s a record which was as much as a movement (begetting the postpunk indie scene in Britain), and movements are just ideas with their radical activist clothes on.“

The whole interview is lovely–especially for a music geek like me. It’s at a modern pagan magazine, and as such discusses the magic in Phonogram from a more serious perspective.  But from both ends, it’s an excellent read. Gillen takes the magic in music very seriously, and the interviewer isn’t interested in pushing paganism on readers, just in pulling apart the comic.

The above quote resonated with the activist in me as well as the music junkie. I like the thought of ideas taking shape out of a record or a thought, taking physical form, having power.  Like the line from V for Vendetta, “Ideas are bulletproof.”

Whether the idea is something as simple and neat as a pop single or as huge and expansive as the social justice movements of the 60s, ideas do have power.

Read the whole interview. It’s good stuff.

Courtesy of A Distant Soil, Image Comics’ Shadowline line has continued with its child-friendly programming with Stagger Lee’s Derek McCulloch and Evil and Malice Save the World’s Jimmie Robinson’s T. RUNT, a story about, well, a smallish Tyrannosaurus.

Here’s the preview images:

For the record, I totally wanna be Magnus.

While DC Comics released the first six issues of Young Liars as a trade paperback, and will do the same, presumably, with 7-12, the end of the first year of David Lapham’s stunning, bizarre, violent and clever title is clearly the end of the first MAJOR arc, and this month’s #13, then, is the beginning of something important and a great jumping-on point for new readers. As such, I’ll say very little here…!

Blog@Newsarama: So this has been touted as a good jumping-on point. I’m sure the first thing that new readers will wonder when they realize that our hero’s name is Danny, is…why is she calling him Johnny?

David Lapham: I think any time you come to the beginning of a new arc it should be a good jumping on point.  In truth, I try and make every issue a jumping on point in terms of that issue.  Meaning, presenting a complete story that stands on its own as well as fits with the others.  Sometimes we have a cliffhanger, but, still there’s always a complete thought in there.

This issue kicks off the third arc, though, and it’s a particularly good jumping in point, because it resets a new dynamic for the characters.  Danny is trapped in a small town with no memory of what came before.  He has to discover what is going on, so the reader can go right along with him.

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