Quick Notice and Holiday Wishes

Dorkland will be shutting down for the holidays in a couple of days. Thursday I will be heading off to visit the family and in an uncharacteristically non-geeky manner I won't be taking my computer with me.

So, there might be the occasional post whenever I hope online but nothing too dramatic.

I hope that everyone has a great time with their respective holidays. :)

Smallville's Chloe Sullivan to Join Comic Cast

I liked the character of Chloe in Smallville, well at least while I was still interested in watching the show. Is this a good idea? Who knows. At least it isn't being done as a retcon, with Clark suddenly having a long-lost friend from Smallville showing up and having to be explained.

Of course I haven't regularly followed a Superman title in a number of years (I think my picking up the current LoSH story in Action has to be the first time in at least five years).

Longtime Smallville viewers get a treat on March 12th. That’s when Superman #674 hits the streets, and Chloe Sullivan hits Metropolis. For years, the intrepid young reporter has been a favorite of viewers, and though hints had been dropped about her arrival in the DCU, she never materialized. Now, she’s finally joining up with the Man of Steel’s supporting cast in the comics. From the outset, Superman Editor Matt Idelson points the finger at series writer Kurt Busiek for bringing Chloe on board – 'This was all Kurt’s idea, and it’s something we’d first talked about a couple of years ago.'

Dark Knight Trailer

Snow

And The Snow Starts..., originally uploaded by Cleveland Desolation.

Well, it looks like we might be getting plenty of snow out of this.

Dark Knight Poster

Machine Girl Trailer

NSFW

Hell Comes to Fangoria

Hell came to FANGORIA last Wednesday when a massive fire that swept through a warehouse in Oregon, IL destroyed our supply of back issues used to fulfill mail and on-line orders. Also consumed by the flames were copies of STARLOG, STAR TREK and our dozens of past movie tie-in magazines. As a result, we are unfortunately no longer able to process back-issue orders for any of our past titles—so collectors, hold onto the ones you’ve got!

The NeoPulp Manifesto

I found this through a link at Warren Ellis' new web community, and thought that it might be of potential interest to readers (I'm looking at you Jonny...yeah, right through the internet):

NeoPulp is not a new style of writing. It is a fusion of several well-tenured styles of writing.

NeoPulp draws liberally from the fantastic stories of this and previous centuries, a melange of mythology and popular culture (take a bit of Godzilla, a bit of Paradise Lost, some giant robots, the sexual tension of a romance novel and the Bhagavad-Gita and mix them all together), and adds to this a “literary” understanding of characters’ motivations and emotional needs.

NeoPulp embraces the clichés of pulp writing: the naïve superscience of B-movies, the nefarious underworld criminal mastermind, the lone sheriff against a town of outlaws, the young woman torn between love for a mysterious stranger and respect for her fiancée, and the mad god bent on destruction, and examines them closely in an attempt to find - or try - something novel: a subversion, an inversion, a juxtaposition, a statement about the human condition.

NeoPulp is born of a love and admiration for the flawed nature of pulp culture; it is not an exercise in poking fun at the plot and character shortcomings that are endemic to pulp. Such things are obvious and have been done to death. Rather, NeoPulp attempts to create a real and sympathetic portrait of these bizarre and self-contradictory characters and situations.

NeoPulp fuses the legacy of romantic, realist, post-modern and modernist writing with popular culture entities such as B-movies, comics, television, pop music and airport novels.

NeoPulp places realistically-defined characters into fantastic situations. It avoids the two-dimensional characterisation of pulp fiction while embracing every aspect of its subject material.

I think there's some merit to what he's saying, and some application to his thoughts but I do think that he's taking things a little bit too seriously in the way that post-modernists/pop culturalists tend to do. I think that a big part of what makes "Pulp" pulp is its inability to take things at a surface value, to not accept the seriousness of a situation. Perhaps a fusion of these ideas with Borges ideas on fantasy (if you haven't read his Book of Fantasy I just don't know you).

I guess, at the root, I worry about the whimsy being drained out of things; that sense of wonder that makes pulp what it is. But still, there are some good ideas that can be extracted and put to use.

Gregorian - Heroes

Just wait, it's worth it.

No! by Thomas Hood

No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no 't'other side this way'--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--
No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
'No go' by land or ocean--
No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!