I have been meaning to talk about this, but I wanted video to show the sheer awesome that is…

905 people dressed in all sorts of fandom dancing to “Thriller”. The video was sent to Guinness headquarters for review.

I sadly did not get to participate on this and kicking myself for missing out.

Ever since the Vertigo panel at NYCC, I’ve been waiting impatiently for The Unwritten, Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s new Vertigo series.

Carey, in his Newsarama interview, said:

Emotionally, it’s the appeal of going back to the wellspring – the source of the Nile. We all have stories that colonise and inhabit bits of our minds, and there’s a kind of magic in turning our vision inwards to look at them directly. Conceptually, it’s like making a story that’s a moebius strip, angling away from the fictional reality and then feeding back into it from an unexpected angle. A very post-modern thing, to use that loaded phrase, but if it’s done right it can be both fun and revelatory.

This month’s Bang! Tango came with a preview of The Unwritten in the back, and ratcheted my excitement up another notch–I haven’t been this stoked for a new series since I first read about DMZ.

The Unwritten promises to be metafiction in the best way–a story about a story. The tagline on the cover of the preview is “Stories are the only things worth dying for,” and it gave me chills.

The story starts off in a fan convention much like the comic-cons we all love, with Peter Gross’s beautiful art rendering Tom Taylor an attractive, uncomfortable-looking man easily thrown off his game by his own inner discomfort. Taylor isn’t a writer or an artist–he’s a character. More specifically, he’s the real person upon whom his father based a series of books oddly similar to the Harry Potter books.

The meta starts with a reference to Harry Potter and similarities to The Books of Magic–on which Peter Gross worked. It quickly twists back in another direction, though, with a question from the crowd implying that Taylor is actually a fictional character. With just a few words, we’re out of the familiar world of cons and questioning the rules of the world Carey and Gross have pulled us into, wondering where we’re going next.

The preview doesn’t offer much more than that, but what it does give is more than enough of a teaser for me to be salivating for next month’s #1. I’ve called Mike Carey the heir apparent to Neil Gaiman several times, and like Sandman and many other works, this will be a story about stories, about the nature of fiction and characters. You hear writers talk time and again about their characters having their own ideas, and this takes that conceit another step. What if enough investment into a character actually brings them to life?

We’ve seen these ideas before, but the layers present just in these few pages had me wondering which new directions Carey and Gross might find. The literature geek in me thrills to the promise of a trip through various works of fiction, and the comics nerd loves the insider references as well as the potential for great art.

Yes, I’m on a bit of a Gaiman kick right now. It always seems to happen around the holidays, or anytime I’m doing a bit of reflecting. These days most of that reflecting is on a time, ten years ago, when I was a teenage goth girl just moving away from my parents for the first time, alone in a big, dangerous, scary city that felt more like home than any place has since (though oddly every time I hop a train into NYC I get that coming-home feeling, like the city itself is welcoming me back with open arms).

The Sandman was one of the pieces of art that held my hand through those days, and I’ll always be grateful to Neil Gaiman for writing it, and to myriad wonderful artists for illustrating it.

Also, his New Year’s wishes are about the best ones I can think of. So while I sit here listening to the Smiths’ “There is a light that never goes out,” with a huge teen vampire novel sitting next to me waiting to be devoured, I share them with you. Because I wish them for you, too. Even those of you who hate me.

…I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be,  be wise, and that you will always be kind.

Read Neil’s Blog. Which he calls a journal, because he is classier than me.

Since Corey tossed out his name as a potential Jesse Custer, I’ve had James Franco on the brain. I’m quite a fan of Mr. Franco–looking forward to seeing him in Milk, with Sean Penn, and have even sat through some of his less-stellar movies. (Yes, I watched Annapolis. He was boxing! It was hot!)

But we all really know and love him as Harry in the Spider-Man movies. We know he dove right into the part, willing to go to all sorts of nasty places and yet still keep us on his side. So I totally agree with Corey that he’d be an excellent Jesse. He has the range, the style, the looks, and the ability to take a comic book role seriously.

I picked up the newest issue of Black Book magazine with Franco on the cover and discovered that not only is he a babe, but he’s also a brain. He’s working on two master’s degrees, simultaneously, one at NYU in film direction, and one at Columbia in creative writing. Slacker.

But the quote in the interview that really made me melt was Franco talking about writing poetry after Heath Ledger’s death.

“Somebody wrote me that Heath had died, and it really upset me. It was weird, because it seemed like a lot of incredible people died in the past year…It was really adding up. So I wrote something about it, that I actually read at the Hammer Museum in L.A…I’m so shy talking about it, because in print it sounds like, ‘Oh, James Franco likes poetry!’ “

It’s a total cliche for girls to get gooey over guys who write poetry, but I don’t care. Add that to a guy who collects degrees like some movie stars collect girlfriends, can play a stoner so well that it gets him a Golden Globe nomination, and gave maybe the most nuanced portrayal of a comic book villain we’ve seen onscreen. Oh yeah, and he kisses Sean Penn? Love.

So please, James Franco, make my geek-girl dreams come true and pursue the role of Jesse Custer in the purported Preacher movie. I’ll love you forever.

I was at a bar last night with some classmates to celebrate the end of the semester. One of the guys looked at me and said, “You know, I always wanted to know what a girl who reads comics looks like.”

There’s no deep, dark secret to what girls who read comics look like. We look like all sorts of things, and are quite often quite cute. (/ego.) But more important, I think, is what girls who read comics LIKE. Aside from comics, of course.

I’m a self-proclaimed nerd girl (nrrd grrl) and I get geeked out about many, many things, from classic film noir to Shakespeare’s language to the perfect rock song to, of course, good comics. And lots of comics folks are into many other things, too.

So “Talk Nerdy to Me” will be a sort of regular feature for me. I’ll post it when I feel like it, but what I aim to do is give you all a bit of insight into things that give me geek-gasms. I’m pulling quotes from comics folks or related pop-culturey types that made me go “oooh” and get a wee bit of a brain-crush.

Because we all know brain-crushes are the best kind.

I make no promises that anything I say in this column will help you pick up nerd girls (or guys). And I hope no one will be offended by the use of the word “nerd.” I mean it in only the best way. For real.

Anyway! To the point, woman!

This episode of “Talk Nerdy To Me” comes from the Annotations in the back of Phonogram: The Singles Club #1. Phonogram is a comic for people who get as excited about music as they do about new comics. And it’s excellent.

So. The backmatter for Phonogram contains many things, including a rundown on the musical references for the issue. I’m going to make you buy the comic yourselves, but I am going to quote the annotation on Nick Cave, a longstanding geek-crush of mine.

Cave, Nick: Okay, more seriously: One of the towering figures in leftfield popular music of the last thirty years. From the Birthday Party, through the sinful Southern Gothic of his early work with the Bad Seeds, to the spiritual versus romantic transcendence of albums like The Boatman’s Call, that’s a hell of a body of work. And there’s still another fifteen or so years after that. Still-he does have a tendency to off a lot of ladies. She Who Bleeds… references, in order, “She’s Hit” by the Birthday Party, “From Her to Eternity,” “The Mercy Seat” and the whole of Murder Ballads. Her “revenge” Comment is referencing things like his PJ Harvey duet “Henry Lee” when PJ gets to do the slaying.

Nick Cave explication plus comics plus feminist deconstruction? It’s triple-layer bliss. Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, and guest artist Laurenn McCubbin: I kind of love you.

Plus, the comic is about as much sheer  joy as can be packed into sequential format. Go buy it already.