If your heart beats red and blue, with a Kryptonian “S” someplace in the middle, and ten seasons of Smallville on the CW network just weren’t enough, then get ready, because another season is soaring faster than a speeding bullet, right at you! Well. Kind of. Let’s just say you’ll have to read season 11, rather than sit around and watch it.

TV Guide blasted the terrific news for Smallville fans. Hunky actor Tom Welling was accustomed to drawing inspirations to play Clark Kent from the comics. Now his likeness will appear in a comic book. What an honor!

Chloe Sullivan did promise Clark in season 10 that there would “always be more adventures for another day.” She was right. On April 13th, DC Comics will deliver Smallville Season 11 in digital format and later on in print.

The story will begin for eager readers six months after the defeated of Darkseid. “It’s Clark’s first year as Superman,” says writer Bryan Q. Miller, who also worked as a writer on the TV series. Things will seem pretty sweet for Clark, who continues to work at the Daily Planet and save the world in his spare time. That is, until Lex Luthor makes his comic book come back! Worst of all is, Lex finally knows Clark’s secret. The comic will consist of at least 12 chapters.

The Amazing Spider-Man comes to theaters on July 3rd. To say I was initially worried about this reboot coming too soon, and with a new lead actor, to boot, is an understatement. But instead of being the same old thing, this picture looks pretty sharp. You may agree after you scope out this fresh and quite official new trailer.

It helps that the character of Peter Parker is a bit of a nerd. He’s always been that way in the numerous incarnations of Spider-Man, but where Tobey Maguire was more of the loveable awkward guy with smarts, Andrew Garfield, who has a baby-face to begin with, personifies more the science nerd. But, not only is Parker smart, but he seems to be tangled in an intelligent web of intrigue as well. It appears to be an intelligent enough of a web to have me ready to give this comic book movie more of a chance to snuggle into a spot in my Marvel Comics loving heart.

We’ve got Denis Leary as not only a tough-to-talk-to father of Parker’s love interest, Gwen Stacy, but as also a high ranking cop who thinks Spider-Man is a menace who is in over his head. That’s a nice dynamic, but Parker’s foe is also The Lizard, a character born of science. The shots we see of this enemy look very cool; dare I say, much sharper than Sandman in the last Tobey Maguire film.

The last puzzle piece that make the film feel more interesting is the dynamic about Parker’s parents not being in the picture. There’s a mystery there and this time around, the wall crawler may actually investigate. When we have more details, of course, so will you!

We have reached a sort of middle: the sixth part of The Kindly One’s thirteen parts. Thirteen, of course, being an odd number does not split evenly in two. Fans of Part 7 might find it more comfortably middle-ish, being for all intents and purposes the beginning of the second half, while fans of Part 6 might argue fervently and ferociously that their part is really the middle because it’s the end of the first half. Fans of Part 8 might then dispute the fans of Part 7 for the title of Beginning of the Second Half, invoking all sorts of ancient statutes requiring that second halves be shorter than first halves if the halves are not equal halves. 

So there you halve it: the halves and halve-nots.

Perhaps you’d rather I write about the half-time show at the Superbowl. My entire family watched it, most of my friends watched it, but I did not. Instead, I watched, for the umpteenth time, Fritz Lang’s marvelous movie The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, the second of three or the third of four films Lang made about the eponymous übermenschy crime lord. Its exact number within Lang’s Mabuse sequence depends on how you count the two parts of Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler, which were made together but originally released as separate films. Most people consider The Testament of Dr. Mabuse to be the second of three. And thus, it is the middle of the trilogy.

Speaking of trilogies, in Part 6 of The Kindly Ones, everything seems to come in threes.

What do all the threes (that is, half of six) mean? I could venture guesses and throw darts toward obvious answers, but there’s no need yet, here in the middle of things. Just note they’re there. (“There” is an anagram of “three”.)

In the middle of this middle-ish (not middling!) story sits another story, a tale told by one of the three old women, a tale told to her by her mother. Consumed with curiosity, I broke my own rules and looked up a reference, wondering if this story-within-the-story that felt so much like an old folktale was something Neil Gaiman had come up with himself, or, as all the best writers do, appropriated from elsewhere. It’s apparently a variation on a story in The Penguin Book of English Folk Tales, a book that I don’t happen to have, nor does my local library, so for now I’m going to have to continue on in ignorant bliss.

This middle chapter is a kind of pause, a tangent, a bit of a breather. The art is not by Marc Hempel, who has done the very distinctive and stylized work that makes up the majority of The Kindly Ones, but rather by Glyn Dillon, Charles Vess, and Dean Ornston. The story of Rose is depicted in a fairly traditional comic book style, similar to when we first met her in The Doll’s House. The story told to Rose, though — the folktale in the middle of the chapter — is in a wholly different style, more like an illustrated book, as befits it.

A chapter with, then, a good claim on being in the middle of The Kindly Ones stands distinct from the chapters around it in both its content and form; and in the middle of this chapter stands a story that is distinct in content and form from the rest of the story around it.

Stories within stories, forms within forms. We ought to be used to this now in The Sandman, but I’m a sucker for it all, these labyrinths of nested dolls.

Today I was delighted to learn, for instance, that when planning his early film Der var engang (Once Upon a Time), the great Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer wanted to try to keep costs down by building all the sets within each other: the largest set would be built first, then the next-largest inside it, and so on, until the smallest and most intimate set was built last. The plan fell apart when some of the actors had changes in their schedules, but it is nonetheless a lovely concept for a movie that is the story of a princess in a kingdom called Illyria.

It is a movie that is incomplete, and likely will remain incomplete forever. Nitrate film disintegrates if not stored in cool and dry conditions, safe from air. It also explodes. The oldest movies are like self-destructing messages in Mission: Impossible, or bombs, or books in the library of Alexandria. Most of what was ever filmed is gone. (Perhaps Dream’s library also has a media wing, a place where all those lost old movies live.)

Part 6 offers echoes with its nests. It’s full of panels that hark back. The last pages take us all the way back to the first Sandman story. 

The first Sandman feels so far away to me now. 

The people we were when we read that first issue no longer exist. But they leave traces. Like memories and stories and middle things, our past reading experiences nest inside us. They haunt each new word we read and shadow even the youngest stories.

And I expect that, like old nitrate film, those past stories are just waiting to explode.

<—Go back and read Sandman Meditations: The Kindly Ones part 5

Move on to Sandman Meditations:  The Kindly Ones part 7—>

When I say the Super Bowl’s Avengers movie spot is the best teaser we’ve gotten so far for the Marvel film, I’m not exaggerating. Let me put it to you this way. Imagine a battle torn New York City Street. The camera does an arc around a group of people standing in circle, facing outward, ready to face whatever may come…together. Those individuals in the circle? They happen to be Black Widow, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye and The Hulk.

Get ready, because you don’t have to just imagine it any longer. You can see it, even if you missed the Super Bowl, because its today’s choice video offering.

Who are the bad guys? On close inspection to this teaser, visual details are still hard to come by, but Nick Fury says the heroes are outnumbered and later on, in a casual face-off against Tony Stark, Loki, that devious half-brother of Thor, tells Stark he has an army. Stark’s too cool response? “We have a Hulk.” Come on, that’s Marvel gold, ladies and gents. I can’t wait until May.

You may want to watch this one twice. Go ahead. I don’t blame you. This Marvel girl got chills again. Also on Boomtron look for the headline concerning two of our Avengers, Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo. They’ll be sharing the screen out of costume as well. And come May 4th, when Joss Whedon’s Avengers assemble on the big screen in IMAX 3D and Real D 3D, don’t forget to look for Stan “The Man” Lee’s signature cameo. It ought to be a good one!

To many The Avengers film will be the super bowl of all Marvel Comics movies. It marks the first time that stars of individually successful franchises will team up to play a bunch of larger than life heroes all in a unified storyline. So, what happens when the movie clashes with the real Super Bowl? You’re about to find out.

One of the coolest things about the Super Bowl are the commercials and today you can get an advanced look at The Avenger’s Super Bowl XLVI commercial. We should have hired some cheerleaders to do a little number before you hit play, but do watch anyway. We’ll add pompoms next time.

The commercial is a pretty short one. In fact, it is probably the shortest clip ever to still give me chills. I make mine Marvel and presumably always will. When the city is threatened, our heroes will have to unite for our protection. It did give me a little shiver, and that’s a great sign for director Joss Whedon.

The big question we still have is this: Who are the villains!? In the video you see multiple and massive, fiery explosions coming from strange flying vehicles that are too fast to really hone in on. Of course we know Loki will show his face, but there’s not much more detail than that. I’m good with it. I like to be surprised!

Yes, 2012 will reveal The Avengers as they assemble on the big screen, thanks to director, Joss Whedon. Another fabulous Marvel Comics team will also be getting together once again sometime in the future. They are the X-Men. More specifically, they are the team’s First Class, and today’s news is they’ll get to keep their director.

I first read the joyous news in a Michael Fassbender interview. The exciting actor, who is the franchise’s younger version of Magneto, said there would eventually be a First Class sequel. Now the President of 20th Century Fox Production gets re-upped, and sets her sights on the heroic picture, offering us some more details on the reunion.

Her name is Emma Watts, and according to the good news over at Deadline, she has freshly signed on to continue her job until 2015. Instead of breaking into cartwheels and back flips, it appears one of her first items of business was to get Matthew Vaughn to ink a deal to return to direct the blockbuster’s sequel.

Simon Kinberg is currently writing the script for the as of yet untitled sequel and Bryan Singer will return to produce the picture. Super heroes are a big business for 20th Century Fox and thanks to Josh Trank’s great work in his thriller called Chronicle, as we reported right here on Boomtron, he is being considered to helm a reboot or sequel to The Fantastic Four. Looks like Fox will continue to make theirs Marvel.

A new tagline for The Amazing Spider-Man, Sony’s upcoming comic book movie revamp, suggests “the untold story begins”. For most of us, the Andrew Garfield action spectacular will debut July 3rd. If that isn’t quite soon enough for you, then get a load of today’s news. Select cities will get preview opportunities. We aren’t talking about seeing sequences from the film a few days or even a few weeks early. Try a few months early!

Yes, the studio is delivering unheard of special preview screenings of footage from Marc Webb‘s upcoming Spider-Man reboot in a matter of weeks! You can see this footage on February 6th, if you happen to live in Berlin, London, L.A., Madrid, Mexico City, Moscow, NYC, Paris, Rio, Rome, Seoul, Sydney or Tokyo. Just visit the website for the juicy details.

We have also scored an official film synopsis at last, thanks to AintItCoolNews.

It suggests that we should prepare to see a “different side of the Peter Parker story”. Do you think the picture can actually deliver?

“…The new film stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Campbell Scott, Irrfan Khan, with Martin Sheen and Sally Field. The film is directed by Marc Webb from a screenplay written by James Vanderbilt, based on the Marvel Comic Book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Laura Ziskin, Avi Arad, and Matt Tolmach are producing the film in association with Marvel Entertainment for Columbia Pictures, which will open in theaters everywhere in 3D on July 3, 2012.”

It follows Peter Parker, of course, “an outcast high schooler who was abandoned by his parents as a boy, leaving him to be raised by his Uncle Ben (Sheen) and Aunt May (Field). Like most teenagers, Peter is trying to figure out who he is and how he got to be the person he is today. Peter is also finding his way with his first high school crush, Gwen Stacy (Stone), and together, they struggle with love, commitment, and secrets. As Peter discovers a mysterious briefcase that belonged to his father, he begins a quest to understand his parents’ disappearance – leading him directly to Oscorp and the lab of Dr. Curt Connors (Ifans), his father’s former partner. As Spider-Man is set on a collision course with Connors’ alter-ego, The Lizard, Peter will make life-altering choices to use his powers and shape his destiny to become a hero.”

Here’s to hoping more films unleash similar opportunities. Remember that The Dark Knight Rises will include a prologue and some IMAX ticket holders got a sneak peek of it in a similar promo idea.

Hello all, this is just a quick pointer to a personal blog, Dun Moch, that I wanted up for awhile and updated regularly before I mentioned it here , but it’s pretty much comics, tv, film, and art  but personal commentary off the books. Some of it’s long form and some of it is very hit-and-run, but I’d appreciate anyone who has interest in awesome things to check it out. A little something for everyone over there, like non-spoiler thoughts on the upcoming ABC’s The River (one of the show creators contacted me about the post – very cool!) which will be  the best thing on TV  (though Downton Abbey will be battling!), from must read comics like Brandon Graham’s King City (pictured above) or Rick Remender and Jerome Opena’s mutant return to glory Uncanny X-Force, or for some heads from my generation, the DVD documentary, G.I .Joe Code Name Blast Off.

As of late I’ve been counting down by Best of 2011 (which is still in-process) but that’s shuffled in with daily thoughts that come across my noggin. It’s also may be educational and perhaps even  life changing.  Probably not, but what I’m saying is that there is a chance. Give it a follow and you may change the world!

Many good films go full circle with their plot lines. They end where they began. For instance, who can forget when The Matrix ended at the Heart O’ The City Hotel, with Neo being shot in the hall? When the film opens, Trinity is kicking major butt within one of the old rooms. Likewise, many fans have wondered if Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy would finish off with some input from the villain Ra’s al Ghul. If anyone knows, it would be actor, Liam Neeson.

The action star, soon to appear in the man versus beast survival epic, The Grey, was recently quoted on the topic of Batman 3 via ShowBizSpy. And speaking of spies, Neeson proves he can be just as secretive as the best of them.

“I can tell you nothing about Dark Knight Rises, seriously,” says a quite eloquent Neeson. The project is so hush-hush, that even though Neeson was on the set of The Dark Knight Rises for about an hour and a half, Nolan offered Neeson very little about plot or anything else. So, being in the movie, doesn’t even guarantee an inside track, but, hey, now we know Ra’s will appear in some fashion or another. I just hope it isn’t for a flashback. Maybe he’ll pop up to say “I told you so…”

In the comics, and in my current obsession, Batman: Arkham City, Ra’s is an immortal, bent on annihilating most of humanity to start over in a better world. His daughter, Talia, is said to be one of the only women Batman has ever truly loved. In Batman Begins, however, Neeson’s Ra’s is the seemingly more mortal head of the League of Shadows. He mentors Bruce Wayne under the identity of Henri Ducard. They part ways when Bruce refuses to take a life.

Batman has Catwoman and Talia. Spider-Man has Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson. Superman has Lois Lane and Lana Lang. Now we have learned that both those “L” ladies will make it to the big screen for Zack Snyder’s film, Superman: Man of Steel.

When you discover who will portray a young Lana Lang on the big screen you may start to wonder, as I did, if part of Man of Steel would include Spuerman’s childhood on the Kent farm. The actress’s name is Jadin Gould and she is a teenager. Her acting credits include Battle: Los Angeles, The Mentalist and Chuck.

According to SlashFilm, Gould will play Lana in at least one flashback of Clark’s younger years, growing up in Smallville. In fact, actor Dylan Sprayberry will play the young Man of Steel.

I am just now noticing that Lex Luthor is also a double “L” moniker. Interesting. As for Lois Lane, the reporter and main love interest for our Kryptonian, she’s acted in the upcoming movie by Amy Adams. Superman himself, is of course, Immortals actor Henry Cavill. The picture is expected in theaters on June 14, 2013, with Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe, Christopher Meloni, Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Costner and Diane Lane.

Given how complex the narrative of The Kindly Ones is revealing itself to be, I would be a fool to pretend to be able to come to any conclusions about it yet, or even to pretend to any knowledge of quite what is happening beyond the immediate events of each chapter. This is by far the most difficult of the Sandman volumes to proceed through in an issue-by-issue way; every time I reach the end of a chapter, I groan with the effort of restraining myself from turning the page. While such restraint fulfills the goals of this experiment in reading, and somewhat mimics the experience of the original readers who had to wait between issues of the comic, it’s still unavoidably frustrating.

I wonder if there are readers for whom seriality is itself an attraction. I don’t mean the products and effects of seriality — the rich complexities of plot and character available to a story developed over multiple episodes — but the episodic, can’t-wait-for-next-time suspense that a serial form creates. If, by some shrinking of a time-space continuum, we could preserve all aspects of serial stories and yet make them completely available from Day 1, would we enjoy them as much, or perhaps even more, than we do when they are parceled out in pieces? Is such stories serial structure and distribution a pleasure in addition to the other pleasures of an extended, complex story?

Audiences have all sorts of different preferences, but, personally, I would not be bothered by a world where every story is available in a complete form. But then, I’m the sort of person who reads the last chapter of mystery novels first and seeks out full summaries of movies before watching them, so I’m a bit a weirdo.

Technology has reduced the fragmented seriality of the mediascape. During my childhood and adolescence, for instance, if we missed an episode of a particular TV show, we’d have to hope to see it during a re-run, and re-runs weren’t always easy to find. This heightened the need for episodes to be self-contained, and shows with long narrative arcs (e.g. Babylon 5) were few and far between. Now many shows can be saved on Tivo or are quickly available online after they are first aired (or at least available within a few months on DVD) and so new narrative complexities are possible. What might have been made, at best, as a five-part mini-series before can now stretch to five seasons (e.g. The Wire).

While I prefer this environment to the one of my youth, I’m not blind to some of the losses in a world of plenty. Scarcity can create community. For instance, I had to rely on a friend to videotape Babylon 5 episodes for me, and we would typically watch four or five of them together when I went to visit him every few months. The wait in between was excruciating, but there was a social aspect to our viewing that made the experience of watching the show far more fulfilling than it would have been otherwise. The difficulty of seeing the shows added to their aura.

I wonder if  The Sandman had a similar sort of aura when it was being published one issue at a time. If you missed an issue, you couldn’t just go online and order it (at least in the beginning). You would need to rely on friends or visit a comic shop or write to the publisher. In between issues, you had time to re-read the old ones and to get into discussions with anybody else you could find who shared your interest in the series. Once you did find them, such people would be like a lost sibling found; in the days before most people had access to the internet, discovering like-minded fans of geeky (or, as I prefer to think of it, esoteric) stuff could be hard or even impossible, depending on where you lived. Then when you did find them, they might be hygienically challenged, politically reactionary, paranoid, delusional, and desperately proud of every factoid in their memory — but they still shared your passion, they were still part of the family, and so the pleasure of their company usually outweighed whatever quirks or obnoxious qualities they possessed. On the internet, they’re no longer quite so rare or special, and so they just become a crazy fascist conspiracy theorist who is WRONG.

There are new sorts of community and sociality in the internet age, though, and so I wouldn’t trade the days of yore for the days of now. There is always some loss with change, otherwise it isn’t change.

Before I collapse into a puddle of reckless generalizations, though, let’s look at some of the specifics of this chapter of The Kindly Ones. One of the elements of the story that I haven’t yet had a chance to comment on is the many parallel tales it tells. That’s a particularly challenging task for a serial story, especially one limited to the size and frequency of a comic book, because there’s always a chance that readers could completely lose track of at least one plot thread or character arc. One of the ways The Kindly Ones works to avoid such confusion is by returning to characters we haven’t seen for a while but who are, nonetheless, familiar. Most of the characters are from A Doll’s House, and one of the ways readers could have gotten through the wait between issues when The Kindly Ones first appeared was by going back to reread that story.

More importantly, each issue is structured to give us a glimpse of many, if not all, of the storylines that will, I assume, eventually converge.

For instance, the fifth part of The Kindly Ones gives us bits of the stories of Lyta, Rose, the (new) Corinthian, Nuala, Carla, and Loki. Rose and Carla’s stories begin separately and then come together on page 18, then Carla and Loki spend the last few pages of the chapter together, with Carla apparently burned up in the final panels. The moments with the Corinthian in the Dreaming and Nuala in Faerie make up the middle of the chapter (six pages total), while a brief moment with Lyta makes the first three pages a sort of prologue leading into a touching five-page section with Rose visiting Zelda, who is dying of AIDS. The section in which Carla visits the police station, returns home to have a photograph of Daniel burst into flames in her hand, and talks with Rose about the “weird shit” of life also covers five pages. Lyta’s sections, scattered through the chapter, add up to five pages.

The symmetry and balance of the narrative structure alleviates some of the confusion inherent in a story accrued from multiple threads. Additionally, some of the threads have a sense of completeness to them: Rose’s visit to the hospice to see Zelda is a full incident, and Carla’s ending, though mysterious, still seems to be some sort of an end (albeit one of those ends that is also a beginning). Lyta’s quest for revenge continues as it has for a little while now, the Corinthian’s story is just beginning, and Nuala’s story continues, but feels particularly beguiling because we don’t yet have any idea how she will connect with the other stories.

This one chapter, then, doesn’t have its own narrative beginning, middle, and end, but it contains beginnings, middles, and ends. Though the structure can be frustrating if, like me, you are halting yourself from reading the entire book all at once, it is also (paradoxically) satisfying because each part is so carefully balanced.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to resist turning the page.

<—Go back and read Sandman Meditations: The Kindly Ones part 4

Move on to Sandman Meditations:  The Kindly Ones part 6—>

Which super heroic member of The Avengers film is your favorite so far? Is it the bad boy millionaire, Tony Stark? Is it the patriotic boyscout, Captain America? Could it be Thor, with his wild blond tresses? I know! It’s The Black Widow, as portrayed by Scarlett Johansson. Well, if that’s true, then wait till you see the actress’s new magazine cover. She’s in character, too, and carrying a loaded weapon.

She is a super spy and an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., she’ll be assembling along with Joss Whedon’s other Avengers, her real name is Natasha Romanoff and today we have a look at The Black Widow’s new cover for Empire magazine. In true comic book fashion, there are other, colorful, collectible covers for the issue, which hits newsstands on January 26th. They feature the guys, better known as Iron Man, Cap, and Thor.

Other characters may not get their own covers, but I have to mention them just the same. Samuel L. Jackson reprises his role as Nick Fury. Mark Ruffalo is The Hulk. Jeremy Renner is Clint Barton, a.k.a Hawkeye. And you’ll remember Thor’s half-brother, Loki, as acted by Tom Hiddleston.

I also hear How I Met Your Mother femme, Cobie Smulders, will play a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.

The Avengers hits on May 4th and I hope it hits hard! By the by, this issue of Empire looks like a must-see. There are pieces covering Skyfall, The Hunger Games, and the new chapter of Bourne.

A crazy-popular comic book is about to get the big screen treatment with a little help from a Greek and a Shopaholic. This means Bone will one day come to a theater near you. P. J. Hogan is the director of such films as Muriel’s Wedding, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and Confessions of a Shopaholic. Yes, he’s the Shopaholic I was speaking of, and he has just won the gig of directing the upcoming comic book adaptation.

According to THR, Bone, with it’s easily recognizable white characters and red title font, is a cult-favorite from creator Jeff Smith. Smith’s current series is called RASL, but in Bone, three cousins from the Bone family find themselves in a strange land. The cousins are small, bald, rounded caricatures with human features. In the Valley, where they wind up, other animal-like creatures hunt the cousins. A girl named Thorn and her grandmother help the trio and they discover the Valley is now the domain of wicked entity known as the Lord of the Locusts.

Where does our Greek come in? Well, another Smith, Patrick Sean Smith, creator of the ABC Family show Greek, will write the Bone adaptation script. Dan Lin of Lin Pictures and Animal Logic are producing and want to go into production in Australia, home of Animal Logic, the animation studio behind Happy Feet 2 and Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.

The CW has been busy scooping up as many new pilots as possible, including a Sex and the City prequel, an adaptation of DC Comics’ Green Arrow and a modern take on Beauty and the Beast. Add those to the already in development Cult and you have four pilots already! If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the CW is looking to keep their options open in case they need to cancel a handful of their current series.

EW.com reports the Sex and the City prequel will follow a young Carrie Bradshaw in the 80s. This will be called The Carrie Diaries and is based on the novels by Candace Bushnell. Carrie will be “asking her first questions about love, sex, friendship and family, while exploring the worlds of high school and Manhattan.” Amy Harris, who worked on Sex and the City, wrote the pilot. The series will be executive produced by Bushnell, Len Goldstein, Jason Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. Schwartz and Savage are already busy working on Gossip Girl, which might mean GG is on its last season.

The Green Arrow adaptation will simply be called Arrow, which I think is a mistake. How will anyone recognize what its about? It would be like calling a Wonder Woman series “Wonder.” As for the Beauty and the Beast pilot, it will be a “modern day romantic love story with a procedural twist.” It’s hard to imagine what that twist might be, but I have to admit it has my attention more than anything else mentioned so far. The CW has a lot going on right now. I’d keep my eye on this network if I were you.

AMC has begun the endless process of teasing us over upcoming episode of The Walking Dead. After being on a very long break in the middle of its second season, The Walking Dead will return Sunday, February 12, and though we’re still a month(ish) away we already have a new promo to drool over. This one will have fans talking for quite sometime until that midseason premiere finally airs. You can watch it down below, but beware: you could end up confused beyond your wildest imagination.

Hershel and Rick find themselves in a bar, where Hershel has made himself familiar with the available alcohol. Rick pleads with Hershel, telling him they need to set aside whatever beliefs they have, religious or otherwise, and think about what is best for the group. There’s a little blip in the video, and suddenly two men enter the bar. At first I assumed it would be Shane and someone else, but the one guy is on the chubby side, which doesn’t fit any of the current survivors. Then one of them, I’m assuming the skinny guy, remarks that he’s surprised to see they’re alive. But is he talking to Rick or Hershel, or perhaps both?

Are you as confused as I was? From the sound of the guy’s voice and their silhouettes, I don’t recognize them. Rick and his crew haven’t run into these two specifically before, but they did meet a large gang, the Vatos. It’s possible these two belong to that crew. It’s also possible these are people we’ve never met, but Hershel is familiar with them. I’m sure fans will speculate for weeks about their identities. We’ll have to see what happens when “Nebraska” airs in February.

There seem to be two super heroic films in the future of one Josh Trank. One of those is a sequel to The Fantastic Four. Bet you didn’t see that coming.

I’ve literally never heard the name Josh Trank before, but if the climate stays the same, the director could be a major player when it comes to big blockbusters. According to Variety, the young man got his start by writing and directing episodes of Spike TV’s miniseries The Kill Point and from there worked as an editor and co-producer of Robert Siegel’s independent film Big Fan.

One hop and a skip later, and Trank is about to release the film, Chronicle, coming out super bowl weekend. Where as most super hero movies follow the hero, Chronicle is something darker. It unfolds as a bunch of teenagers realize they have superpowers. They use them to play tricks on people to start, but it isn’t long before they are using their abilities for evil. The intent is to make a very gritty, very real feeling movie, almost a documentary.

If Chronicle makes it’s mark at the box office, Trank may just get another turn in the genre, this time, behind the lens of a Fantastic Four sequel. No word yet on whether the actors we know as Human Torch, The Thing, Mr. Fantastic, and Sue would return to their roles. One of those actors has gone on to become Captain America, after all. 20th Century Fox is quite simply in the super hero business to stay, however. They still have plans to launch a sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a Deadpool spin-off, and possibly a brand new Daredevil flick. Yikes.

Deadpool: He’s the greatest thing to come out of the Weapon X program since Wolverine. So, will the merc with a mouth get his own movie already or what?

You know someone who might have the 411 on your favorite jokster? How about Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld? That’s right, artist Rob Liefeld and writer Fabian Nicieza thought up Wade Wilson way back in 1991. Today the artist is in the news become rumors are circling that he has already laid eyes on some of the preliminary footage from the live action Deadpool movie.

In fact, Liefeld recently spoke to fans at a comic con in Arizona.

See, when last we got an update on the project, which is technically a spin-off from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, where a pre-Green Lantern Ryan Reynolds acted as the mercenary, the good word was the movie would definitely be happening and it would NOT, repeat NOT be following the events of the Wolverine flick. It would stand on it’s own.

Well, according to the Liefeld interview, which you can check out, below, not only is the movie still happening, but it’s going to be glorious, based on the clip he has seen. Liefeld says Deadpool is easily recognizable in the clip he saw. He has a Katana in one hand, a gun in the other, he’s “shooting people’s faces off” and doing it in his signature hilarious style. The artist likened the project to the “first R-rated X-Men movie” ever. He spoke of plenty other geek goodness as well.

Prepare yourselves for some live action goodness, Image comics fans. In the news this week, director Marcus Nispel has his eyes on a Hack/Slash adaptation.

Nispel is best known for directing action and horror. He delivered the Conan the Barbarian reboot last summer. Now Relativity has hired him to bring Hack/Slash to the big screen.

The dark comic book follows Cassie Hack. She’s kind of like the one girl who survives it all at the end of your typical horror movie, except in an anything but typical move, she dedicates her life to killing killers afterward. Along with her trusty sidekick, Vlad, a big guy who wears a gas mask, they hunt and kill monsters. These monsters are called slashers. A typical slasher might remind you of Friday the 13th‘s Jason Voorhees or A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s Freddy Krueger.

Cassie, a dark-haired beauty, is often scantily clad, but none-the-less violent for it. She’s a little bit Goth and one of her love interests is a gal she rescued from some slashers who is often known as Georgia Peaches.

According to THR, Alexandra Milchan, Adrian Askarieh and Daniel Alter will produce the adaptation.

Nispel is also the mind behind that 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Are you looking forward to this one? Who would you cast as Cassie?

Batman, also known as The Detective, has a wide variety of foes to keep the good people of Gotham City safe from. In general, these villains tend to fall within one of two categories. Either they are intellectual, forcing The Detective to flex his mental muscle, or they are physical, pushing Batman to the limit when it comes to gadgetry, strength, endurance, agility, and improvisation. Bane is a physical villain. He is all brawn, a born brawler. And for your viewing pleasure, we have new close ups of the man who might break the bat. Don’t get too close now.

Batman is also featured in these great new shots that come compliments of Entertainment Weekly and the Comic Book Movie special preview of their content. You’ll get even more baty goodness if you pick up this week’s print edition of the EW magazine. Christian Bale’s Dark Knight is gracing the cover.

In media news this week, thanks to his new picture, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a very suave Gary Oldman sneaks into these pics portraying the long suffering Commissioner Jim Gordon.

The film being promoted is, of course, Christopher Nolan’s third super hero epic, The Dark Knight Rises. We have seen very few shots of Catwoman, another villain to be featured in the sequel that’s due out this summer, but all in all there hasn’t been anything we have seen yet that really distinguishes her from other incarnations of Selina Kyle. It could be that Nolan is just going to surprise us, that he’s still keeping his kitten’s details under wraps. That being said, Nolan’s version of Bane is already looking very interesting.

Tom Hardy will bring Bane to life. He seems to be a terrorist in the trailers. I have to commend the way Nolan has reinvented Bane as one part Hannibal Lecter and two parts Goliath. Or perhaps the biblical giant isn’t the right comparison to use. Bane is often depicted as comically humungous, but so far, in what has been revealed in film promos, Tom Hardy’s Bane appears very human. He is buff, there is no question. He is intimidating for sure, but he’s also very realistic. That may make him the scariest Bane we have ever seen. I dare say that I think Heath Ledger would have approved of the Dark Knight Rises‘ Bane.

Holy money clips, Batman! Did you know tickets for the July 19th IMAX premier of The Dark Knight Rises are already on sale? We are six months out! Eat your heart out Twihards! Bathards are making you all look bad! And that’s not the biggest news, my friends. Some of those tickets for the July midnight showings are already sold out!

Christopher Nolan must be feeling pretty good right now. His trilogy, in my book, is proving to be the King of all comic book adaptations. It was EW that delivered the news of Fandango’s advance Dark Knight tickets being available for purchase for screenings at a theater in Los Angeles, one in San Francisco, and one New York. But upon closer inspection, intrepid movie lovers can see the New York IMAX screening is already sold out. Woops. The other two theaters hitting their sold-out status could follow very soon.

In fact, Fandango told EW that movie tickets don’t usually go on sale so far in advance. In recent history, tickets for James Cameron’s phenomenal Avatar sold at four months in advance. Right now, Dark Knight Rises has it beat. Also an anomaly was the decision by Warner Bros. not to make some big official announcement about the fact that advance tickets were on sale. This tactic only furthers the “stealthy” theme of the sequel’s marketing campaign. As it is, you would have to be somewhat of an extreme fan to have learned about the sale. This could be exactly what Dark Knight‘s people had in mind. In a way, that is very cool. So, I’m thinking it would be a good plan to pay extra careful attention in your area, just in case some advance ticket sales swoop in.

Jaimie Alexander is one tough cookie. The shapely actress has played Jessi on the Kyle XY series and Tunie Peyton on Nurse Jackie, but she’s probably most easily recognizable as Sif, the Marvel Comics warrior of Asgard. So, the question remains, is she, and her super hero alter ego, coming back to the big screen any time soon?

The easy answer is this: Yes. In fact, MTV recently sat down for a one on one interview with the actress. Check out the video below. She was there primarily to discuss her new picture, titled, Loosies, where she co-stars opposite Twilight Saga hottie and fellow Nurse Jackie actor Peter Facinelli. So, she’s already got a new film coming to theaters. But will Sif appear in Thor 2?

Alexander is hopeful. As a comic book nerd, she really wants to reprise her role and has been involved in preliminary negotiations. In fact, the big idea floating around is to give Sif a meatier role in the Thor sequel. Rock on!

Here is what else we know about Thor 2. The Game of Thrones creative mind, Alan Taylor, is set to direct the next film and Saving Private Ryan scribe Robert Rodat has been hired to take a second look at the existing script written by Don Payne. Now that sounds exciting!

As for Joss Whedon’s much anticipated Avengers movie, it doesn’t look like Sif will take part in that big meeting of the heroes. You never know, however. They could still sneak her in. We do know, that Loki actor Tom Hiddleston, will appear in both The Avengers and in Thor 2.

Harry’s Law is fulfilling the dreams of many fanboys out there because the preview for this week’s episode features Smallville’s Erica Durance fighting crime as DC Comics heroine, Wonder Woman. Unfortunately, her tactics don’t meet with a whole lot of approval in the world outside of comic books.

If you watched Smallville while it was still on the air, you might have seen Erica Durance’s Lois Lane dress up in a make-shift Wonder Woman outfit. It wasn’t bad but she’s in the real deal this time; well, real in the sense that it looks like the same outfit that was going to be used in the Wonder Woman TV pilot that got cancelled before it had a chance to air.

In the trailer below, a man sits in a courtroom talking about how he was viciously attacked by the defendant, a young woman named Annie Bilson who was abused in the past. Poor Annie’s trauma caused her to sort of lose it mentally so she transformed herself into the iconic comic character so she could hand out her own form of justice. During the flashback scene that shows Durance in all her Wonder Woman glory, it’s obvious that this particular Amazon princess doesn’t take crap from anyone.

When Carla comes to visit Rose in the fourth chapter of The Kindly Ones, Rose is getting ready to videotape an episode of the sitcom Roseanne. She tells Carla that she is hoping to write something about three sitcoms in particular: Roseanne, The Addams Family, and Bewitched. This information comes as she and Carla discuss, among other things, the difficulties and weirdnesses of families. (And from A Doll’s House we might remember that Rose knows a thing or two about weird families.)

The Addams Family and Bewitched both played on ABC and aired their first episodes on consecutive days in 1964. (Their fates were different, though, as The Addams Family only lasted until 1966, while Bewitchedcontinued until 1972.) Roseanne also played on ABC, but twenty-four years later, premiering in 1988 and running until 1997.

One of these things is not like the other. While all the shows were comedies, the two older ones were both full of magic and monsters, and generally devoid of “serious issues”. Roseanne was exactly the opposite, an attempt to create a realistic show within the confines of the sitcom format. Its storylines presented problems of class, gender, and sexuality, including the introduction of gay characters. It presented the difficulties of family life in ways the earlier shows would never have considered.

The Addams Family and Bewitched are fantasy worlds and fantasy families, but Roseanne was, for its time, one of the most realistic shows on tv.

While it is often misleading to reduce people to their fantasies and entertainments, Rose’s interest in these particular shows seems to me quite meaningful. Perhaps they speak to her feelings about her experiences and the worlds she has seen, the history she has known. They certainly echo, sometimes in mirror-image, the challenges faced by Rose, Lyta, and many other characters throughout The Sandman: how do we reconcile the immediate, mortal world with the worlds of dreams and myths and magics that shadow it?

Rose and Carla’s conversation comes right after we have seen Lyta in between both worlds. It’s an extraordinary sequence in its art and the suggestiveness of its writing: Lyta talking to people along the path she travels toward revenge, with each encounter ending in the city and giving us, the readers privileged to a distance Lyta is not allowed, at least a bit of uncertainty: is she dreaming, deluded, insane? And what would that mean, given all we know of dreams and delusion from The Sandman?

There’s nothing funny about Lyta’s plight, and so the sitcoms stand in an inverse relationship to her experience. Their monsters and magics are funny, and even the most dire problems of the most realistic family can be played for laughs. Lyta and Rose don’t live in such a world, though they may yearn to. Rose can watch that world on her tv, she can preserve it on videotapes, she can write essays about it to try to determine its deepest signs, suggestions, and significance. But The Addams Family, Bewitched, and even Roseanne are all fantasy worlds. Fantasy fantasy worlds, not real fantasy worlds like the realms of the Endless. Television worlds are manufactured, deliberated, produced — they don’t live in a mythosphere of human dreaming, they aren’t ancient, terrifying, wise, bewildering.

Or are they? 

People have made the case that television and movies and comic books are our contemporary myths, that popular mass culture provides our societies with the sort of sustenance provided to ancient societies by their stories. I am not experienced enough with myths and legends, either themselves or their histories, to venture an opinion on whether this is so, but certainly we cannot deny the effect of all the various media on our imaginations. From childhood on, we dream through Bugs Bunny and Harry Potter, we visit the shrine of Disneyworld, we chronicle the legendary exploits of celebrities through tabloids and TMZ.

Neil Gaiman is especially aware of this, as not only The Sandman but many of his writings, especially American Gods, show. What becomes of old gods, old beliefs, old myths? Where do they go when no-one is left to believe in them, when they are forgotten?

I’m not sure if that’s the direction The Sandman is taking, but its mélange of comic book culture and thousands of years of human belief and storytelling implies the question. 

What happens when all our dreams get copyrighted? When belief is little more than an accumulation of Twitter stats? Should Dream get a Facebook page?

The Dream King

Created new Corinthian. w00t! It’s good to be the king!
Well, maybe not.

Although Mervyn Pumpkinhead might be really amusing on Twitter. But he gets into enough trouble as it is.

All the social media in the world won’t save Lyta, though. I fear for the path she’s on, and the Furies she will encounter.

But that will all have to wait for later.

Right now, I need to go find out more about Kanye West and Kim Kardashian…

<—Go back and read Sandman Meditations: The Kindly Ones part 3

Move on to Sandman Meditations:  The Kindly Ones part 5—>

You remind me of the babe. And because of that, I’m going to offer you the most exciting update in Labyrinth film news since the picture finally came to Blu-ray format. You see, the cult classic fantasy flick from 1986 is getting a print prequel. Yep. Get ready to learn the mysterious origins of Jareth, the Goblin King.

Just how did Jareth get connected to the Labyrinth in the first place? That’s what the minds behind a new graphic novel have to answer. According to EW, the comic publisher Archaia has about 12 months to make the origin graphic novel a reality.

In the film, David Bowie is Jareth, the big-haired Goblin King, who answers a young girl’s secret desire to be spirited away from her mundane existence. The girl is Sarah, acted by Jennifer Connelly. Sarah is transported into the Labyrinth, which she must solve if she wants to get her baby brother back from Jareth and his goblin hoard.

In this prequel piece, Sarah won’t be involved. Instead fans will learn of Jareth’s first encounter with the Labyrinth. It is also revealed that writers plan to somehow integrate some of the infectious song lyrics you know and love from the film, into the new graphic novel.

Another surprise is that the graphic novel has “likeness approval”. That means they have special permission to draw Jareth looking like a young David Bowie. I like that! You can hope to get your hands on a copy of the finished product sometime this year.

The web-shooters and familiar red-and-blue tights are nowhere to be seen in the latest promo images out for The Amazing Spider-Man, but the pics still provide a great look at Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in character as Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy.

Okay, these new images from Comic Book Movie might be a little tame after some of the previous pics that showed Spidey doing his web-slinging and wall-crawling thing but there are plenty of Andrew Garfield fans out there that actually enjoy seeing the man behind the mask. I personally don’t know who any of these people are but I have to admit that Garfield seems to exude more boyish charm than Tobey Maguire, or maybe it’s just that Maguire tainted his image in my mind with that weird dark version of Peter Parker he did in Spider-Man 3.

Of course, Emma Stone has her fans too and it’s easy to see why because she even looks cute during a funeral when the weather is bad. Sometimes, it’s easy to wonder what casting directors are thinking when certain people are chosen for certain roles, but Emma Stone is perfect for the role of Gwen Stacy, fitting the look so well that you might think the comic version of Gwen was modeled after Emma.

The Amazing Spider-Man swings into theaters on July 3.