If there’s a chance to meet Stan Lee, hey, I’m going to grab it. And, anyone out there in a position to make that happen, you can take that as a really big hint. I’m like anyone else going to San Diego Comic-Con when it comes to something like that. Actually, there is one way to maybe meet Stan but let’s move on.

This is a calm before the storm. My partner, the cartoonist, Jennifer Daydreamer, and I are very excited about going to SDCC on many levels: as creators, as fans, and even as gawkers. Well, maybe I should speak for myself but there’s sure to be a lot of gawking and, if you can’t do that at SDCC, where can you?

I’ve been flooded with oh so many options. And it’s still, as I say, the calm before the storm. I let myself get caught up with everything down to reports of giant squid invading the waters off San Diego. Shouldn’t they have done that last year for Watchmen? Bad joke, I know. Well, you can’t control the forces of nature anymore than you can control the forces of marketing. Some things I’m pretty sure I’ll pass on like a chance to levitate a ball supposedly by mind control. I’ll probably pass on any games too although I might take a look just to be fair.

Mostly, I see myself coming to this from a somewhat bookish outlook. I’ll zero in on the more offbeat, the more literary and art-related. But I’ll be open to just about anything too and keep in mind that a lot of stuff defies easy labels. For example, I’m totally with Sarah on the merits of Phonogram and I’m totally with Lan on the merits of Blackest Night. And I’m totally in tune with the undeniable: Twilight. That alone is a force to be reckoned with. Which reminds me, I will need to be sure I have ear plugs handy for fans screaming their bloody heads off.

So, if you feel like it, let me know what you look forward to this year at SDCC, whether or not you’re actually going. And remember, you can catch live TV coverage of SDCC on Saturday from our friends over at G4.

Posy Simmonds’s critically-acclaimed, Eisner-nominated comic Tamara Drewe will be turned into a movie by director Stephen Frears, The Guardian reports.

The director of The Queen and The Grifters is reported to have cast former Bond girl and St Trinian’s graduate Gemma Arterton as the title character, a newspaper columnist whose recent nose job transforms her into a seductive flirt, to the chagrin of the quiet village’s womenfolk. Tamsin Greig and Roger Allam are also said to be attached to the project.

Simmonds’s strip ran in the Guardian’s Review section between September 2005 and October 2007 before being collected in a graphic novel. The tragicomic story was inspired by a piece of classic fiction – Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd; likewise her earlier serialised cartoon, Gemma Bovery, took Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as its template.

Frears’ most recent project was also based on a popular work of French literature: Colette’s Chéri novels, which he turned into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend.

Frears was nominated for an Oscar for The Queen and The Grifters and has shown admirable range as a director. Just another indication, I suppose, that the words “comic book movie” don’t have to be synonymous with “big dumb blockbuster,” but can also be linked to “serious film with art-house creds.” If The Dark Knight didn’t completely kill those stereotypes, perhaps a Tamara Drewe movie will put another nail in their coffin.

Devil’s Due President Josh Blaylock and Kingdom Comics mastermind Christian Beranek, along with a bevy of talent ranging from hip hop to game design, have formed a league of their own, establishing a “ComiCulture” company called PopCult.

“Anyone who has been in comics for the past decade can see how the love for the medium has grown and expanded into other media,” Blaylock said in a written statement. “But it’s more than just that – it’s a lifestyle that affects fashion, music, films – it’s a culture all its own now, and unlike a decade ago, it’s suddenly ‘cool.’”

Current PopCult members are: Devil’s Due president Josh Blaylock, Chicago-based toy guru Shawnimal, author and game writer R.H. Stavis, hip hop artist Murs, and film producer/comic creator Christian Beranek.

PopCult’s philosophy talks about tying together hip-hop, design, and art within the context of comics. According to a release from the new company, PopCult will be working to guide businesses toward capitalizing on the comic demographic, while simultaneously orchestrating in-store events by day and performances by night in its PopCultour. (Get it?)

Those attending the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con would serve themselves well to check out a party happening over that weekend. Fresh off a website overhaul, pop culture headmistress (and longtime Newsarama supporter) Whitney Matheson is hosting her Pop Candy Comic-Con Meetup. Held poolside at the Hilton San Diego Bayside (next to the convention center), most anything Ms. Matheson arranges promises to be a fun, sexy time.

Go to this link for details on this gathering Saturday, July 25th!

Valerie D’Orazio makes some excellent points over at her blog.

Truly, my heart weeps for those fanboys inconvenienced by 1,000s of Robert Pattinson fans. It is so unfair. And they’re “not even really supposed to be there,” right?

[snip]
Where was this whining when people were going freakin nuts over “Watchmen?” Or when I couldn’t even get through the fanboy phalanx to meet up with friends because of the Hellboy roadblock?

Fandom and conventions are big enough for EVERYBODY. And instead of complaining about “Twilight” fans, maybe somebody should figure out how to get these legions of fangirls to buy more comics.

Seriously. The headline she links–”Female Fans Prepare to Trample Men“–is hilariously ironic because it reflects perfectly the fear in so many articles. The implication that ZOMG WOMEN ATTACK is just so darn Freudian it’s hard for me to unpack it without giggling.

I’m a female fangirl. I have been for years. And I’ve absolutely been trampled at cons–and punk rock shows, and even sporting events, all areas with typical male fan bases that certainly didn’t seem to think anything shocking about being in a room with hundreds of boys and a few girls.

I came to comics through a subculture that, if it had existed back in the day, would certainly have embraced Twilight. As a somewhat overeducated adult, I read the books and saw the movie and thoroughly enjoyed both, if occasionally with the very adult pleasure of laughing at all the wrong moments. I both defend the right to have something like Twilight that is so unabashedly girly that it inspires tons of squealing girls to unload at Comic-Con just for its panel, and despise the tendency to split fandom into two worlds: the comics are for boys, the sparkly vampires are for girls.

Leaving out for a moment the teenage boy sitting next to me at a subway stop reading New Moon on his iPhone (yes, I can recognize the story from a glimpse over his shoulder. What?), why the heck can’t we admit that comic cons were packed full of people fighting for seats before Twilight was thought of, that Hollywood has been trying to find ways to tap into the zealous–and zealously consumerist, willing to buy tons of movie-related merch–comic con audience for a good while now, and that the only thing different when it’s Twilight is that the fans are teenage girls (and their moms, the fear of whom brings up a whole other level of Freudian analysis that I’m REALLY not qualified to do).

So really. Do these guys need to keep Comic-Con a He-Man Woman Hater’s Club that badly, or can they learn to embrace the girls and cross that invisible line between Twilight fans and comic fans? Because who knows, maybe if they dropped the defensive act and realized that more girls in their fandom does not mean less stuff for them, that pop culture is not a finite commodity, maybe more girls WOULD buy comics. And far from that being a problem, it would create more money for comics creators, and thus…MORE COMICS FOR ALL. Win-win.

Variety just sent out the breaking news that actor Ryan Reynolds last seen in Wolverine: Origins as Deadpool will play the title roll in the upcoming Green Lantern feature film.   Reynolds beat out “The Hangover” star Bradley Cooper, singer Justin Timberlake and Jared Leto.

You can read the full story here.

I’m particularly happy that it’s Friday this week–I’ve got an exciting weekend planned. To kick things off right, though, here are some stories from around the web.

Splash Page is speculating about Twitter rumors that Nathan Fillion and Rainn Wilson had a meeting with DC Comics.

Daryl Cagle‘s been posting videos from the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists Convention. This one’s an interview with Mikhaela Reid and Jen Sorenson, two female editorial cartoonists.

More dirt on the terrible idea know as The Crow remake, which maybe isn’t so much a remake? Um, what?

To celebrate the release of The Nobody, Jeff Lemire has some lovely art and linkage over at Standard Attrition.

Since Neil Gaiman is off to accept his Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book today, check out video of him reading from the book on his tour.

Finally, if you have a spare $20,000 or so, you can get a second-tier Twilight star at your party. No Robert Pattinson or Kristen Stewart, sadly.

Joss Whedon might not be directing a new Buffy movie, but he will be directing the season 2 premiere of Dollhouse.
From Chicago Now:

Fox is pushing back the second season premiere of Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse” by one week this fall. The premiere now will air at 8 p.m. Sept. 25, the network announced Wednesday.

It’ll probably be worth the wait: series creator Joss Whedon will write and direct the episode.

You know you’re thrilled.

Also, there will be a Dollhouse panel at San Diego Comic Con where attendees can see the episode, and attend a Q&A with Whedon and series star and co-producer Eliza Dushku.

This is a “remix” of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Edward Cullen from Twilight. And yep, it’s pretty funny. It plays the overwrought, overdramatic bits of Twilight up against the snarky, sarcastic Buffy we all love.

Yet I am a bit irritated by the constant comparison of Buffy to Twilight as if Buffy was perfect and Bella Swan just a horrendous corruption of all feminist ideals. Was I the only one who remembers the part where Buffy slept with not one, but two vampires who also stalked her, hovered outside her bedroom while she slept, and in one instance, tried to rape her?

Buffy gets a pass because mostly she kicks vampire ass and in the end she doesn’t need any of the men. However, I very much doubt if you can scratch a Buffy fan and find someone who doesn’t get a bit emotional about Buffy and Angel. Forbidden love is as much a part of the Buffy mythos as Twilight–in fact, I describe Twilight to people as “The Buffy and Angel part of Buffy, without most of the sarcasm and action.”

But you know, the reason a lot of girls don’t want to call themselves feminists is because they think it means they have to hate men, or fit some certain vision of a “strong woman” that maybe they don’t want to fit. What if they’re quiet and bookish, like Bella Swan, not coordinated enough to fight vampires?

I’m not saying that Twilight is a perfect vision of the romance I think girls should aspire to–it’s not. But it’s fiction. The romance in Love in the Time of Cholera or Lolita or Beloved isn’t one that I want teenage girls aspiring to, either, yet I think those are all wonderful works of literature that should be widely read. And Buffy? Well, the human parts of Buffy are the ones that really kept us with her for seven seasons, not the perfect ass-kicking sarcasm machine. That would’ve gotten old, fast.

It’s almost time to go buy comics, but in the meantime I bring you linkage from across the Internets on a variety of different things.

From Splash Page, Grant Morrison talks comics with Percy Carey, otherwise known as MF Grimm, the writer of Sentences.

Comics Worth Reading has a nice review of Patsy Walker: Hellcat that makes me want to read it.

Also from Splash Page, Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming are confirmed as part of the cast of “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark,” the upcoming Broadway musical directed by Julie Taymor. I don’t know about you, but between the casting, the subject matter, and the direction, this is shaping up to be a must-see for me.

Laura Hudson at Comics Alliance puts together the top 5 Michael Jackson moments in comics.

Laura Lee Gulledge answers some questions for The Big Feminist BUT.

I’ve been more affected by Michael Jackson’s death than I thought I would be, so I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a few days. Mostly about pop stars and iconography and the image vs. the person–what do we mourn when we mourn a dead celebrity? In Heath Ledger’s case, it was so obviously the work he had left to do, but in Jackson’s case, it seemed fairly likely that he’d never make any music again, that his music was completely overshadowed by his court cases and plastic surgeries. Yet people have still been publicly mourning.

Daryl Cagle, cartoonist extraordinaire, wrote about Michael Jackson and editorial cartoonists, and his sadness was clearly only that he didn’t have an easy target for cartoons anymore.

Michael Jackson was God’s gift to editorial cartoonists. Now that the gift has been “returned to sender” the cartoonists are mourning the loss of one of their most evergreen gags.

Yet this cartoon, that I saw this morning, really seems to sum up all the feelings about Jackson.

Do you remember, indeed. Before the accusations and the surgeries and the baby-dangling, when it was just about the music.

G4 and Lucasfilms will be teaming up for an unprecedented live airing from the San Diego Comic Con!

The Star Wars Spectacular! will film at 2pm on July 25th, as a live airing of the main Lucasfilm panel from SDCC. In addition, Olivia Munn and Kevin Pereira of Attack of the Show will meet up with Lucasfilm’s Steve Sansweet as well as voice talent from the Clone Wars television show, to give their own insider insight.

Never-before-seen footage will be shown, and there will be a live table reading of a new Clone Wars script. Furthermore, Lucasfilms will also unveil Star Wars Stories, which asks Jedi lovers everywhere to tell their movie memories and other tales of fandom, to help contribute to the company’s historical archive.

You can upload your stories here (or if you’re at the con, find Lucasfilm’s camera crew) — otherwise, make sure to set your TiVo, as G4 will be hitting the convention from 4-7pm!

Comics Nexus has just unveiled the latest of Neill Cameron’s A-Z of Awesomeness series, which has some pretty hilarious comic-related alphabetery (see what I did there? I made up a word, and it rocked).

That’s not to say that this is the best letter — they’re all equally the best. Well, the Inebriated Iron Man (for the Letter “I,” or as some lazy people type, the lower-case L) is sick and wrong, but also funny. As is Hagar’s actions to Hello Kitty. As is the Letter J.

[A tip of the hat to Manolis Vamvounis for introducing me to this debauchery]

Don’t worry, it’s not another variant cover, I swear!

John Hodgman, writer, voice actor and professional nerd, gave a great speech over the weekend at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, in which he grills President Obama over Superman, Conan and Dune.

Whether or not you agree with the man’s politics, it’s a very funny look over the 100 Year War between Jocks and Nerds, and how we nerds have struck back from the icy planet of Hoth. (I won’t lie, though, Hodgman totally schooled me in Dune trivia — and I read that series cover to cover!)

[Via Entertainment Weekly]

Yahoo! News has reported that Michael Bay is done with the Transformers franchise.

Here’s the quote that really stood out/surprised me/made me wonder if he’s ever seen any of his own movies: “I need to do something totally divergent, something without any explosions.” The dateline for this article is June 18, so this is not an April Fool’s gag.

He added that if the Transformers franchise goes to a third film, they’ll have to find another director.

“It’s easy to go shoot an art movie in a winery in the South of France,” Bay said. “But people have no idea how hard it is to create something like Transformers. They (the critics) review me before they’ve even seen the movie.”

TONIGHT: Kevin O’Neill at Forbidden Planet New York at 6:00. The artist behind The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, among many other books, will be appearing and signing books. Get in line!

Joelle Jones has some more of her gorgeous Endless drawings on her blog. Someone hire this girl to do a Delirium comic, stat. She also has a Blankets tribute and a gorgeous bit of Craig Thompson’s art as well.

Splash Page has more on Ryan Reynolds’ work on the upcoming Deadpool movie. Alas, no pictures…

You’ll probably want to skip straight to this one, because Warren Ellis has a color page from Planetary #27. Yes, it’s really going to happen.

Finally, I bring you a thought-provoking essay on the lack of black supervillains, at Comics Waiting Room. (via When Fangirls Attack)

So while I was making some epic cross-state drives this weekend, I came across a new product: Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms.

I sadly purchased a pack. And after eating one, I pretty much felt just like this:

Which, after seeing this ad in Entertainment Weekly, then sets me up for an easy joke about wanting to punch this guy in the nuts.*

[Thanks to SlashFilm for the ad news]

*(Either almonds or peanuts, of course.)

Yeah, you read that right.

Topless Robot has posted a link about that most geeky of purchases: a Star Trek coffin. So when you do go to the Final Frontier, your family (if you have one) will remember all the times you dressed up as a Klingon and attacked the cat with your bat’leth.

And don’t worry, if you’re setting phasers to “cremate”: there’s also a Star Trek urn, too.

If you’re interested in going out in — well, I can’t exactly call it “style” — check out Eternal Image for pricing details. And be prepared for your mother to disown you.

Maybe his illustration for the cover to The Lord of the Flies is permanently etched in your memory. Or perhaps you know him from his work with Neil Gaiman in The Sandman: Endless Nights. Barron Storey has been around for quite awhile creating amazing art and now it’s time for a retrospective.

Life After Black: The Visual Journals of Barron Storey is on display at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators. Covering a span of 30 years, the exhibit covers a selection of Storey’s 143 journals. The show runs from June 10 through July 31, 2009.

These journals provide a unique opportunity to see original work from a graphic narrative unfolding over many years. As Barron Storey puts it, “I do them for me but they are for you too. It’s the illustrator in me. They’ve been seen by a lot of people in my travels, but never like this.”

Barron Storey will be in attendance on June 12 for the opening reception. And he will deliver a lecture at the Society of Illustrators on June 16 at 6:30pm. In conjunction with the exhibit the Society has partnered with Materials For The Arts to provide journal making workshops on June 8 and June 15.

This exhibit features original art and journals as seen in the book, Life After Black and The Marat/Sade Journals. Work from “Despair” in The Sandman: Endless Nights will also be on display.

Barron Storey’s work has appeared in Time, National Geographic, The Saturday Review and his work is permanently on display at the National Air and Space Museum, The American Museum of Natural History and the National Portrait Gallery. He continues to inspire others as an illustrator, graphic novelist and noted educator. His work has influenced many artists in comics including Bill Sinkiewicz and Dave McKean.

David Carradine, best known for his work in Kung Fu and Kill Bill, was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room today. He was 72.

Initial reports from Fox News state have stated that Carradine was found hanging in his hotel room using cords from the curtains.

According to his agent, Carradine was staying at the hotel since Tuesday, but failed to attend a dinner with the cast and crew on Wednesday. Police reports from around 10 a.m. this morning state that Carradine had been dead for at least 12 hours.

Carradine was a jack-of-all-trades in the Hollywood set, working not just as an Academy Award-nominated actor (as Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory), but as a writer (Kung Fu: The Legend Continues), composer (Kill Bill: Vol. 2), editor (Americana), voice actor (for the video game Saints Row), and even directed a few episodes of Lizzie McGuire.

For those who don’t know him, here’s a nice little clip from Kill Bill, Vol. 2, in which Carradine played the titular Bill, in which he, perhaps fittingly for this site, discusses comic book dualities: