Editor’s Note: Shotgun Reviews writer Lan Pitts was so inspired by the Joker homages in last week’s The Office episode that he sent over a post on the cultural impact of Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight.

by Lan Pitts

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery and the most recent episode of NBC’s hit show The Office proves that even more. Creed, Kevin and Dwight all dressed as Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker for their Halloween-themed episode which aired this past Thursday night. Though it was only in the first three to four minutes, it confirmed that Ledger’s performance and the styling of comic’s all-time greatest villain has achieved pop culture icon status. I worked at a Halloween specialty store this year for some extra cash, and it seemed I was giving out make-up advice on how to do the perfect Joker every other hour. And yes, I was one of those people.

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Here’s a look at some of the loot I brought home from the Alternative Press Expo this weekend:

–Rob Osborne of Sunset City and 1000 Steps To World Domination fame has a series that’s been under my radar called The Nearly Infamous Zango. So far three issues have come out from Rob’s self-publishing imprint, Absolute Tyrant. It’s a comedy about a super villain who isn’t quite so super, and features a bunch of characters with awesome names like Deacon Dredd and R.I.P. Van Freako.

–Gina Gagliano gave me a mini-comic that First Second editorial director Mark Siegel created, titled A Brief History of First Second. She also told me the name of the book that Faith Erin Hicks is doing for the imprint, which I have subsequently forgotten (I was lucky I remembered where I parked). Faith talks about how she got the assignment here.

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Powells.com has a six-page preview from Chip Kidd’s Bat-Manga! book. “Originally published in 1966, at the height of the first worldwide Batman craze, and written and illustrated by manga legend Jiro Kuwata, these adventures were never collected in Japan, and had never been translated into English,” the site writes. Go check’em out.

Cartoonist Roger Langridge shares some comic strips from Nickelodeon Magazine, featuring Spongebob Squarepants reimagined as several different comic strips, like Terry & the Pirates and Peanuts (above).

Via Drawn

Sunday lived up to its name, as yesterday’s rain was gone and my drive from just south of San Jose to San Francisco was much more pleasant today. I made it to the city in record time, and to the San Francisco Concourse just a few minutes before the doors opened for the Alternative Press Expo, which wrapped up today.

So yesterday I declared Kramer’s Ergot 7 the book of the show, but after today I may have to rethink that (or, at the very least, call it a tie). The Totoro Forest Project Book, which benefits the Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s Totoro Forest Foundation, was a big seller at the show.

It features a collection of artwork from a whole bunch of artists, and even at $45 a pop they moved more than 100 copies at the show. In fact, if I recall correctly, they sold 100 copies on Saturday and were moving briskly through the 40 remaining copies on Sunday when I visited the table. They auctioned off all the original artwork a few weeks ago, with great success. You can see some of the artwork from it on their blog; the artwork above was a thank you created by Miyazaki himself.

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Not even the pouring rain or a post-Halloween hangover could keep people away from the Alternative Press Expo yesterday, as the San Francisco Concourse filled up with more than 300 exhibitors and a ton of people. Some rain even made it into the building … the AiT/Planet Lar table had a small sign that said “Yes, we know” next to the water that was collecting on their table (only one copy of Holmes received any water damage) and Jennifer de Guzman said she had water drip down the back of her shirt at the SLG booth.

Judging by the crowds around the Buenaventura Press table yesterday, I’d say this is probably the book of the show:

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Ochre Ellipse by Jonas Madden-Conner won the 2008 Isotope Award for Excellence in Mini-Comics. The book was also nominated for an Ignatz Award earlier this year.

For more information on the book and its creator, check out his blog.

Via Johanna, one of this year’s judges in the competition

Dennis Hopeless and Kevin Mellon, who created the comic GearHead for Arcana, are doing the second project AiT/Planet Lar are announcing this weekend — a graphic novel that was going to be called Cupid.

“We’ll have to change it because of the TV show that’s coming,” said Larry Young, AiT/Planet Lar publisher, referring to the resurrection of the Rob Thomas-produced Cupid TV show. Plans are for the book to be available early next year.

Young said they will have paper copies of the first chapter at the AiT booth at APE in San Francisco this weekend, but you can check it out online right here.

Hopeless, by the way, is also working with Mike Norton on a new series called The Answer.

APE starts today, and already we’ve got not one but two pieces of news for you. AiT/Planet Lar main man Larry Young has two projects he’s officially announcing at the show, the first being Dodge and Twist by Tony Lee and Paul Peart-Smith.

The book is a sequel of sorts to the Charles Dickens classic Oliver Twist, with young Oliver all grown up. You can check out an unedited advanced PDF of the first 19 pages right here.

To close out the day, here are 13 fun & frightening links — some comic related, some not — to enjoy …

• Splash Page has a preview of Dark Horse Comics’ upcoming Creepy archive.

• Great Caesar’s Post has been running horror posts for the past couple of weeks, including Iron Man pumpkins and Hellboy stories.

• The Beat has the complete “Teratoid Cystoma” from Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack Volume 1 as a Halloween treat.

• Bruce Springsteen has a free song about the Jersey Devil up on his site for Halloween.

• World record zombie walk.

• Check out one of the special features from the upcoming Hellboy II DVD release.

• Marvel.com talks to various creators about terrifying moments in comics.

• Character Design looks at various characters from Nightmare Before Christmas.

• Neil Gaiman shows the one-sheet poster for the upcoming adaptation of his book Coraline.

• They Crawl By Night!

• Freddy Krueger, registered offender.

• I’ve had this nightmare before.

• And finally, Halloween is a good time to check out Necessary Monsters if you haven’t yet.

Happy Halloween!

The Alternative Press Expo, or APE, kicks off at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the Concourse in San Francisco. It runs until 7 p.m. Saturday and from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.

For more info on APE, check out the official website, as well as my two previous posts on publisher and creator plans here and here. And if you need directions, go here.

And now, more info from publishers and creators on what they’ll be doing and have on hand this weekend …

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Jon Adams posts some info on his plans, which includes a new Truth Serum collection:

We’ll be attending the Alternative Press Expo this weekend (Nov. 1st-2nd). Please stop by our table, where we’ll have a number of items offered in exchange for your money. (Anyone’s money, really.) Debuting at the show will be a limited edition collection of the weekly Truth Serum strip, produced exclusively for APE. It’s a full-color, 48-page book, wrapped with a bellyband.

Also at the show will be Bear Trap, a full-color, 24-page miniature comic. Best of all, it will only be one dollar. A dollar! That’s less than the cost of a bus ride. And most bus rides probably aren’t as much fun. Sometimes they are though. Like this one time on the 22 when there was a woman with feces all over her pants. That was a type of fun.

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Overall last night’s episode of The Office was kind of lame, but the opening sequence was great. The characters on the show dressed up for Halloween, with Creed, Kevin and Dwight all showing up as The Joker. If you’d like to see it for yourself, you can check it out for free over on NBC.com.

That’s Creed up top; check out Kevin and Dwight after the jump …

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Eisner winner Chuck BB is working on a comic starring the rock band Hinder for Devil’s Due Publishing.

“The band’s ability to tell stories in their songs makes this a good marriage,” Stephen Christy of Devil’s Due Publishing told USA Today. “It doesn’t hurt that there’s always a ton of hot girls hanging around them.” No release date for the book was given.

Becky Cloonan announces that she’ll have a story up on the Dark Horse Presents MySpace site this November called “I See The Devil In My Sleep.” She says it’s an “eight page tale of lurid grimness, written and drawn by yours truly with colors by the gruesome Dave Stewart.” Can’t wait.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, who won a Pulitzer in 2007 for the Tony Award-winning Rabbit Hole, is in final negotiations to work on the script for Spider-Man 4.

Hopefully this will be good news for fans who weren’t impressed with the third movie of the franchise; The Hollywood Reporter says, “The choice of scribe also signals that that filmmakers are intent to focus on character, something that critics said got lost in the third installment.”

Lindsay-Abaire is currently working on the movie adaptation of Rabbit Hole, which will star Nicole Kidman.

Someone dust off Robbie the Robot — The Hollywood Reporter reports that Thor and upcoming Brave & the Bold writer J. Michael Straczynski is working on the screenplay for a remake of Forbidden Planet for Warner Bros. Joel Silver is producing.

Per the trade:

Warners picked up the project on the down-low earlier this year. As late as last year, it was set up at DreamWorks with David Twohy attached to direct. Prior to that, New Line had it. James Cameron, Nelson Gidding and Stirling Silliphant have been associated with the remake over the years.

Released in 1956, “Planet” told the tale of an expedition sent from Earth to check on a colony of scientists on a far-off planet. They find two members, a man who has found alien technology that doubled his intellect, Dr. Morbius, and his daughter, both of whom have managed to survive an unseen monster roaming the planet.

Straczynski, who created Babylon 5, also wrote Changeling, which is in theaters now.

• Splash Page has a full eight-page story from BOOM!’s Zombie Tales book, written by Oscar nominated screenplay writer Kim Krizan with art by Jon Reed.

• Quote the Man: Nevermore.

• Seven plain old creepy movies.

• Letterer Todd Klein shares a creepy poem.

• Artist Evan Dorkin’s Milk & Cheese get into the spirit of the season. Kind of.

• Comics creator J. Bone shows how he crafted his Fly costume.

• P. Craig Russell and Tim Bradstreet are working on a comic adaptation of Clive Barker’s Age of Desire. Here’s a preview.

• And finally, via Jeff Smith, Graham Annable’s Joy to the Weird:

The Will Eisner Spirit of Comic Retailing-winning Brave New World Comics will host an art show starting this Saturday:

This Saturday, November 1, at 7pm, in the Gallery Loft of Brave New World Comics on Lyons Avenue in Newhall, California, a new kind of gallery show will be opening.

“When you tell people that you have an art gallery in your pop culture store, they tend to have a certain kind of art in mind. Usually involving capes and tights,” says Portlyn, Brave New World Comics proprietress of pretty proportions. “But this time around, we wanted to give artists a chance to speak their mind on the election season, our sitting elected officials, and the issues that face them.”

Out of that desire, the NO THIRD TERM Gallery Show was born. Featuring the works of Llyn Hunter and Matt Silady, NO THIRD TERM has also been opened up to the artistic public to make their voices heard. “Nothing’s more democratic than our First Amendment rights and we’re looking forward to seeing how the artists of our community use that right, and this show, to speak up,” Portlyn went on to say.

The opening on Saturday, November 1st will feature the works of these artists and an all American theme

Variety reports that Paramount has optioned Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery, a webcomic written by Dave Roman that was collected by SLG Publishing a couple of years ago.

According to the trade:

Thor Freudenthal (”Hotel for Dogs”) is attached to direct, and Evan Spiliotopoulos is writing the script.

Pic marks the first acquisition for Adam Goodman since transitioning from DreamWorks, where he shepherded “Hotel for Dogs.”

Graphic novel’s title character turns 16 and inherits from her grandfather an estate and an ability to see and communicate with the dead.

Actually that’s kind of a weak description; I prefer the one on SLG’s site:

Agnes Quill is the story of a teenage detective, the haunted city she lives in, the strange cases she solves, and the ghosts who help, hinder, or just plain annoy her. Set in Legerdemain a congested, fog-filled, cobblestone-paved Victorian city built around a cemetery the size of Central Park Agnes adventures include confrontations with trapped spirits, cursed souls, possessed relatives, disappearing pets, decapitated scientists, ambitious zombies, and a mess of other supernatural oddities. Written by Dave Roman, and featuring stories illustrated by Jason Ho, Jen Wang, Jeff Zornow, and Eisner nominee, Raina Telgemeier.

Following up on my post from earlier this week about the Alternative Press Expo, here’s another round-up of various exhibitors who will attend the show. If you’re exhibiting, drop me an email before Friday and I’ll do one more post before the show this weekend.

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