Yahoo! Movies has another new poster for Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen, which will open on March 6, 2009.

After the firing on Sunday of Heroes co-executive producers Jeph Loeb and Jesse Alexander, EW.com reports that Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller is open to rejoining the series.

That should please those Heroes fans who’ve been clamoring for Fuller to return to the show he helped to write and produce during its first season. The bad news, however, is that Fuller’s comeback is contingent upon ABC’s cancellation of Pushing Daisies, which seems more and more likely.

“I am exclusive to Daisies through the delivery of the 13th episode of our 13-episode order, which will be mid-January,” Fuller tells EW’s Hollywood Insider. “If Daisies isn’t picked up by then, I will definitely be going back to play with my friends at Heroes.”

As EW notes, Fuller wrote just one episode for the show’s freshman season. But that episode, titled “Company Man,” is considered among the best.

The website reports it’s unlikely Loeb and Alexander, who oversaw day-to-day production of the show, will be replaced this season.

Fuller also created cult-favorite shows Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls, and worked as a writer on Star Trek: Deep Space Nineand as a writer and producer on Star Trek: Voyager.

You’re unlikely to find a more awesome video on YouTube this week ever. It’s an a capella medley of John Williams movie themes — Jurassic Park, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, et al — with lyrics devoted solely to Star Wars. Plus, it involves a mean Mark Hamill imitation.

I love the Internet.

(Bless you, Topless Robot)

The judges have been announced for the 2009 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. The five-person panel selects the nominees, who are then voted on by eligible members of the comics industry.

The 2009 judges are:

• Amanda Emmert, owner of Muse Comics & Games in Missoula, Mont., and communications coordinator for ComicsPRO

• Mike Pawuk, teen-services public librarian for the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Parma, Ohio

• John Shableski, a sales manager for Diamond Book Distributors

• Ben Towle, cartoonist, educator and creator of Midnight Sun

• Andrew Wheeler, comics reviewer, blogger and former senior editor of the Science Fiction Book Club

According to one source, that report last week about Sam Mendes directing an adaptation of Preacher was a bit premature.

The source? Mendes himself.

“I’d love to make Preacher,” he tells Empire. “But there’s no script.”

“This is a typical Variety announcement,” Mendes continued. “‘Mendes to direct Preacher’ -– I wish! Basically they should have written, ‘Mendes in development with Preacher’. What I’m doing is, I’ve gotta find a script. I’ve just got to get it written.”

Mendes, who directed Road to Perdition and American Beauty, is excited about the movie, which is based on the Vertigo series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

“It’s brilliant,” he said, “it’s an incredible twisted vision.”

On the heels of a pair of high-profile firings from NBC’s Heroes comes news that Ubisoft is dropping plans for a video game based on the once red-hot TV series.

“The rights to the Heroes video game have reverted back to NBC Universal,” a Ubisoft spokesperson told MTV’s Multiplayer blog. “Ubisoft will no longer produce a video game based on the TV series.”

The game had been announced in July 2007, when the show was riding high after a well-received first season. But that was before producers dropped the ball with Season 2 — it was, perhaps thankfully, shortened by the writers’ strike — and NBC canceled the planned Heroes: Origins spinoff series.

According to Variety, Heroes is averaging 10.4 million viewers, a drop of 21 percent. Still, it’s NBC’s highest-performing scripted series.

MySpace has the latest Watchmen production video, which features Zack Snyder, Malin Akerman and Carla Gugino discussing both versions of Silk Spectre.

Watchmen opens on March 6.

Update: As the video is causing problems with some visitors’ browsers, I’ve moved it to after the break.

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Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are in early negotiations to remake Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge film Oldboy, based on the manga series by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi.

Variety reports the movie will be produced by DreamWorks and distributed by Universal Pictures.

In the award-winning South Korean film, and the source manga, a man is kidnapped and held in prison for years with only a television and the voices of his jailers for company. One day he’s sedated, stuffed into a trunk and then dumped in a park. When he awakes he sets out to discover who destroyed his life so he can take revenge.

If negotiations work out, Smith would play the kidnapped man.

The original manga was serialized from 1996 to 1998 in Japan’s Weekly Manga Action. All eight volumes have been released in North America by Dark Horse.

The Hollywood Reporter has word that Sylvain White is in final negotiations with Warner Bros. to direct The Losers, based on the Vertigo series by Andy Diggle and Jock.

White is at least the third director attached to the feature, after Tim Story (Fantastic Four) and Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom). Berg and James Vanderbilt (The Rundown) both have taken stabs at the script.

Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment will develop and finance the project, which is set to begin production early next year. According to Variety, Warner Bros. will distribute the movie “in a scenario similar to that for the recent release of Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla.”

The original version of The Losers — a team of World War II fighting men — first appeared in 1969. Previously each of the characters had starred in his own military-adventure series. In 2003, Diggle and Jock updated the concept for DC’s Vertigo imprint, casting new characters as a team of special forces operatives who declare war on the CIA after their handler tries to assassinate them.

The new series ran for 32 issues, from August 2003 to March 2006.

White, who directed Stomp the Yard, is set to helm Castlevania and the adaptation of Frank Miller’s Ronin.

Gregory Noveck will oversee The Losers for DC Comics, and Matt Reilly for Warner Bros.

A fan site for Alexz Johnson has confirmed the Canadian pop singer and actress will play Saturn Girl in an upcoming episode of Smallville, written by Geoff Johns.

The episode, titled “Legion,” also features Cosmic Boy and Lightning Lad. The three come from a future where Clark is the greatest hero.

“Legion” is scheduled to air on Nov. 27 on The CW.

The 22-year-old Johnson starred in Instant Star, and had a minor role in Final Destination 3.

I feel a little out of the loop: Apparently, the website Wonder-Who.com popped up last week announcing Transformers star Megan Fox as Wonder Woman in the long-planned Warner Bos. movie.

However, despite what some fans and online writers believe, or hope, the website is a fake.

Never mind that Wonder Woman has been in development hell for the past seven years and that, despite countless fits and starts, no significant progress has been made on the project. Never mind the pedestrian Photoshop work.

The definitive sign the website is fake, Graeme McMillan points out, is the inclusion of the logo for Legendary Pictures: Producer Joel Silver (Silver Pictures and Dark Castle Entertainment) has had an iron grip on the Wonder Woman rights since 2001.

Less than 48 hours after a historic election, comics creators and commentators ponder what a Barack Obama presidency will mean to America … and to comics:

• At MTV’s Splash Page, Laura Hudson rounds up comments from a slew of comics notables, including Incredible Hercules writer Fred Van Lente, K Chronicles cartoonist Keith Knight, Love & Rockets creator Jaime Hernandez and DMZ and Northlanders writer Brian Wood.

“Real-life politics has played a huge role in my work, from the Rudy Giuliani ‘Quality Of Life’ regime in the ’90s to the W. Bush legacy of war, torture, illegal politics, occupation and terrorism,” Wood tells Hudson. “But this morning it was impossible to get up after a long night watching election news and put myself into the necessary pessimist headspace to work on the latest DMZ script.”

• Blogger Sean Kleefeld thinks a sense of optimism may seep into the works of creators. However, “that’s about all an Obama presidency is going to lend to comics, I figure. He can’t wave his hand and suddenly have 200,000 more people head off to their LCS every week. He can’t suddenly make paper and/or printing costs diminish to pass savings on to readers. Even the suggested economic stimulus package won’t have that dramatic an impact on comic sales since people are still spending more on food and gas.”

• Blogger Valerie D’Orazio briefly looks at how the national mood during President Bush’s two terms were reflected in comic-book storylines.

• The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna calls on fellow cartoonist to hone their caricatures of President-Elect Obama.

• Dan Goldman, who’s also interviewed in that Splash Page piece, unveils the final cover art (above) for 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail. The “sociopolitical-document-in-comics,” by Mike Crowley and Goldman, is available for pre-order. It’s due in stores in January.

This may belong under the heading “rumor mill,” but horror site Bloody Disgusting reports it has confirmed that Mandate Pictures is working on a sequel to last year’s adaptation of 30 Days of Night.

The website previously had published rumors of “very early talks” about a follow-up back in May.

According to the new report, Steve Niles and Ben Ketai are listed as co-writers; however, that could change. Niles, of course, is the co-creator of the 30 Days of Night comic-book franchise. Ketai wrote the two webseries movie tie-ins, Blood Trails and Dust to Dust.

Judging from the brief article at Bloody Disgusting, the movie will follow the plot of Dark Days, the 2003 miniseries by Niles and Ben Templesmith in which Stella Olemaun rededicates her life to wiping out vampires.

Lionsgate has released 20 new images from Frank Miller’s adaptation of The Spirit, which opens on Dec. 25.

You can see all of them at MovieWeb.

• Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons talks about catching Alan Moore’s typos, the miniseries’ colors, the movie adaptation, and audience reaction to seeing a naked Dr. Manhattan on the big screen: “He’s somebody who, by the force of his will, has reconstructed his body, so you’re not looking really at a naked man; you’re looking at a model of a naked man. I know that’s a rather fine distinction.” [Vulture]

• Cairo and Air writer G. Willow Wilson discusses those titles, superheroes, the Standard Attrition message board and group blog, and guerilla marketing. [Heavy Ink]

• The Dresden Files author Jim Butcher chats about bringing wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden to comics. [Sci Fi Wire]

• Best-selling author Stephenie Meyer rattles off some of the inspirations for her insanely popular Twilight vampire epic. Who would’ve guessed X-Men cartoons and and the Iron Man movie would be on the list alongside Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables? [EW.com]

• Ned Beauman celebrates Garth Ennis’ reinvention of Marvel’s Punisher. [Guardian]

• FEARnet profiles Devil’s Due Publishing, focusing on the company’s horror titles. [FEARnet]

A 19-year-old British man now may have the longest name in the world, and certainly the nerdiest.

George Garratt of Glastonbury last week changed his name to “Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined.”

Confirming the dangers of the Internet, The Telegraph reports he did so using an online service that charges $20. Whatever happened to teens just downloading porn?

“I wanted to be unique,” Captain Fantastic told the newspaper. “I decided upon a theme of superheroes.”

He was about to say more, but he was beaten up by a passing busload of schoolchildren.

Heidi MacDonald reports that news and commentary website ComicMix is scaling back, ending its editorial columns and leaving just online comics and pop-culture news.

Launched in February 2007, ComicMix was founded by former DC Comics editor Mike Gold, writer Glenn Hauman and Weblogs co-founder Brian Alvey. Eight months later, the site added webcomics.

In September, ComicMix announced it would offer print-on-demand collections of some those comics at Baltimore Comic-Con. However, Johanna Draper Carlson notes those volumes “didn’t come near to selling out at the one convention they were offered.”

In the comments section of his final column on Monday, Gold noted that, “the columns didn’t reach as big an audience as some of us had hoped for. Really, it’s that simple. We need to put our attention elsewhere.”

Other columnists included Denny O’Neil, Elayne Riggs, John Ostrander, Michael Davis, Martha Thomases, Michael H. Price, Ric Meyers.

Todd Allen, author of The Economics of Webcomics and a columnist for Comic Book Resources, questions the source of ComicMix’s revenue: “No ads, no merchandise, no collected edition. Those are standard revenue streams and without any of them (100 print copies in Baltimore doesn’t count), I cannot call ComicMix serious about monetizing their comics.”

If it’s November, it must be time for the best-of-the-year lists to begin, right? I’m convinced that Best-of Season eventually will start sometime around May.

Amazon.com and Publishers Weekly lead the charge, each with fairly diverse lists.

Amazon ranks its selections, and divides them into Editors’ Picks and Customer Favorites, with Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 1 (Dark Horse) topping the former, and Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (Amulet Books) leading the latter.

The unranked Publishers Weekly list includes Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie’s Aya of Yop City (Drawn & Quarterly), the Sammy Harkham-edited Kramers Ergot 7 (Buenaventura Press) and Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk (Viz Media).

The full lists can be seen at the links.

As if victories in the Electoral College and popular vote weren’t enough, Sen. President-Elect Barack Obama also has won the battle of the biographical comic books.

ICv2.com reports that sales of IDW Publishing’s Presidential Material: Barack Obama handily defeated those of John McCain by 59 percent to 41 percent. That’s a wider margin than the popular vote, which now stands at 52 percent to 46 percent. (Final results from Missouri and North Carolina haven’t been included in that tally.)

According to the website, the sales figures are based on copies sold to direct-market retailers, not actual sales to customers.

The biographical comics still can be ordered through IDW’s Presidential Material website.

Ah, Election Day, when a citizenry whose collective brain has been scrambled by 24-hour news channels and poll-tracking websites finally stumbles, zombie-like, into the voting booth.

What’s that have to do with this week’s comics shipping list? Nothing, really. But as “Can’t Wait for Wednesday” is a couple of hours late, I’m pointing to the election as an excuse.

If you’re not as election-obsessed as I am, your attention may be turned to what titles are hitting comics shops tomorrow.

From DC Comics, we’ll see the final volumes of New Teen Titans Archives and The Absolute Sandman, as well as Final Crisis: Resist and the first issue of The Sandman: The Dream Hunters adaptation. Marvel rolls out the Daredevil & Captain America: Dead on Arrival and Wolverine: Chop Shop one-shots, and the first issue of the big Ultimatum event. Dark Horse, meanwhile, collects Dean Motter’s Mister X sci-fi saga.

Elsewhere, IDW Publishing releases Kevin Colden’s Xeric-winning Fishtown, Macmillan publishes the autobiographical Alan’s War, and … Chris Mautner recommends porn. Really.

To see what other titles Chris and I think are worth mentioning, just keep reading. As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.

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